The Lunch Movie

I lived in Shaker Heights, OH, a little east of Cleveland, from 1983 to 1987. While I am saddened that the single-screen palace that was once The Colony Theater has been divided into the 6-screen Shaker Square Cinemas, my glass is raised to Shaker Sq. Cinemas for carrying on the spirit of The Colony by hosting the 34th Cleveland International Film Festival.

My introduction to The Colony was BLUE THUNDER, which I had already seen, but had not heard until I came to Cleveland. My bones rattled when Roy Scheider fired Blue Thunder’s 20mm electric cannon. Five years before the advent of THX, the Colony could blast you through the back wall of the theater with crystal clear explosive sound. The Colony was equally pristine for quieter movies; in NEVER CRY WOLF, I could distinguish the howl of a lone wolf in one corner of the balcony, while the wind swirled through the theater. If I had been blindfolded when I saw AMADEUS, I would have believed that I was hearing a live orchestra. The acoustics of The Colony made me aware of film as an aural medium, not only a visual one.

My friend Stefan and I had a nerd-tastic evening at The Colony, hosted by film critic and historian Leonard Maltin. I’d mistaken an article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer to say that he would be giving a lecture on classical music in movies. Turns out that lecture was at Case Western University. Stefan and I got to The Colony and realized we would be seeing Leonard Maltin discussing classical music specifically in cartoons! We got to experience a great collection of Looney Toons and Merry Melodies on a giant screen, in between which Mr. Maltin explained how “Kill da wabbit, KILL DA WABBIT” was one of the pop culture experiences through which many Americans were first exposed to classical music without even realizing it.

Aside from Leonard Maltin, I also saw Harry Anderson take a break from NIGHT COURT and get back to his stand-up comic and magician roots at The Colony. Mr. Anderson indicated my brother Ed and me in the 2nd row as “the reason we won’t have as much fun tonight as we could in a comedy club: kids coming down to see the TV guy.” Everything I knew about comedy clubs at that point came from HBO specials. It was very unexpected and very cool to see that Anderson was not a standard joke-teller or one-liner guy, but a carny-style story teller who used his magic as props. Despite being called out, still a damn funny show, thanks Harry!

Ed and I had our fair share of epic movie experiences at The Colony too: THE RIGHT STUFF, RED DAWN, Giorgio Moroder’s unfairly maligned 80′s-drenched revision of METROPOLIS, and a midnight marathon of STAR TREK: The Motion Picture, The Wrath Of Khan and The Search For Spock. While Ed and I had seen beat-up prints of old movies shown in high school auditoriums, public libraries and even a few revival houses, we had never seen a restored print re-released and looking as sharp as possible until The Colony showed …

… no, I only wish I got to see NAPOLEON. Cool ad though, huh? But we did get to see Universal’s 1983-84 re-release of a slate of Hitchcock classics, including ROPE, REAR WINDOW and THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY. This was a wonderful education for a Hitchcock fan who had only seen pan-n-scan versions on TV, not only to see Hitch’s editing rhythm uninterrupted by commercials, but also his shot composition and balance of vibrant Technicolor with deep shadows. Some movies simply demand a big screen, and The Colony was the biggest in town.

Among the current movies that have come to be regarded as ’80′s classics, I saw THE COLOR PURPLE with my Mom, THE UNTOUCHABLES with my Dad, BROADCAST NEWS with Leslie, BLUE VELVET with Rob and Gary and THE PRINCESS BRIDE with Lisa. It is not easy to pick one favorite moment from all of the experiences I had at The Colony, but it just might be from April 1985:

A group of exchange students from Germany visited my high school. I was taking German at the time; my teacher asked anyone in our class who did not have a German student staying with them to volunteer as a sort of back-up host. She asked us to show a German kid around town so that their Cleveland experience would not solely be through the eyes of their host family. I hung out with a guy named Jens. He told me that all the German kids wanted to see POLICE ACADEMY 2, so he and I went to see that at the Southgate Mall. Toward the end of Jens’s stay, The Colony showed the 229min cut of ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA. Ed and my Dad and I had already seen the 139min cut, coincidentally at Southgate, and had enjoyed the shorter version contrary to most critics at the time.

Jens knew who Robert DeNiro was, and had heard of Sergio Leone, but had never seen a gangster film before. Any gangster film. Not SCARFACE, not THE GODFATHER, it was a blank canvass to him. The longer version of ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA thankfully included an intermission. I did not expect it to contain all the chronological leaps forward and back that were nowhere in the shorter version. While I was engrossed in the puzzle that Leone’s cut represented, I apologized to Jens, afraid that it might be boring the hell out of a guy who’d only been learning English for 3 or 4 years. I was surprised and so happy when Jens said he really liked the movie too! He admitted that there were often parts where he didn’t know what the hell was going on, but that it was such an unusual world to him that he was completely drawn in. When the movie was over, Jens found that it had answered most of his questions from during the intermission.

The happiest sign that inviting Jens was a good idea came when he asked me to recommend him a list of other gangster and Leone movies. We can usually remember the dawning moment where something changes our own artistic or cultural perspective. It is very rare to be able to be part of someone else’s dawning moment. I hope somewhere in Germany, Jens is writing a blog about gangster movies, and telling people about his first experience with the genre in a palace up the hill from Cleveland.

Between 1975 and 1977, I suspect I visited The Wildey Theater at least once a month. I saw some of the greatest movies of the 70′s there. When my older brother Ed was away at Boy Scout camp in 1976, I was thrilled to go out with my folks on a school night to see a re-release of THE STING. I also saw ROCKY, THE SPY WHO LOVED ME and yes, even STAR WARS. There was more to The Wildey than emerging cinema classics and glorious 1930′s art deco re-design of a turn of the century opera house. The first double-feature I ever saw was at The Wildey: FOOD OF THE GODS with EMPIRE OF THE ANTS, both written, produced and directed by drive-in master Bert I. Gordon. Ed spent his allowance from our weekly chores to take me to that show for my birthday.

In the days before STAR WARS, when it was rare for a movie to open on more than a couple hundred screens, we used to have a cool tradition of … I don’t know if anyone else has coined a phrase for it yet, but let’s call it Regional Cinema. With these regional movies, someone would raise a pocketful of money and shoot a movie, and then shuffle their one print around a few towns in their area. John Waters’ earliest efforts are good examples of this. Some movies, like the original versions of GONE IN 60 SECONDS and WALKING TALL, would catch the interest of a larger distributor who would crank out a few more prints and slowly role it out state by state.

Others, like RETURN TO BOGGY CREEK, would never escape the midwest, the same way Giallo movies would never escape 42nd Street and Hollywood Blvd. I recall KDNL, then a local UHF television station, airing commercials for RETURN TO BOGGY CREEK. The big selling point was “Featuring Dawn Wells from Gilligan’s Island!” ten years after Gilligan was off the air. Here’s how cool The Wildey Theater was: not only did I see RETURN TO BOGGY CREEK there, I also saw SASQUATCH: THE LEGEND OF BIGFOOT in the same year! For a seven year-old to have not one but two Bigfoot movies play in their town within one year, well … is it any wonder I ended up a nerd?

When my cousin Freddy and my aunt Connie visited from New York, my Dad took Freddy, Ed and me to see SINBAD & THE EYE OF THE TIGER. The film featured Ray Harryhausen animation and naked Jane Seymour, and the evening featured Freddy doing a goofy impression of Trog, one of Harryhausen’s monsters. Until this moment, movies had always been like church to me: sit there, shut up and enjoy it and allow others to enjoy it too. Freddy’s Trog impression made me laugh so hard that I wasn’t making sound and my ribs hurt. He introduced me that evening to the great Grindhouse tradition of “audience participation.” I’m not talking about muttering and giggling with your friends and annoying other paying folks, I’m talking about making a bad movie good (or a good movie great) with spot-on one-liners delivered loud enough to crack up the whole theater.

My family moved around a bunch of times, but ended up back in the St. Louis area in the early 90′s. I visited The Wildey in 1992, and found it boarded up, but with signs of potential restoration work under way.

I snapped a few pictures out front, then wandered down an alley between The Wildey and the Quality Meat Market, and climbed up an I-beam to reach the fire escape.

The door at the top of the fire escape was open, allowing me to sneak into the balcony. I took a few more pictures, but they were pretty blurry from the low light.

I stood and listened to the voices of elementary school friends for a bit before climbing back down the fire escape.

I went and peered through the glass doors out front … and a man inside waved to me! He came, opened the door, and asked if he could help me. I told him a little bit of what you have just read here. “Well, we’re just starting to get the

place cleaned up,” he said, “but you’re welcome to take a look-see if you like.”


I spent the next half hour meandering around and snapping the occasional picture where I thought the light beaming in from the balcony might be strong enough. I stood dead center in the seats an clapped a few times, but heard barely an echo. This nearly century old theater had cleaner acoustics than most modern multiplexes — and unlike a multiplex you’d damn sure never hear the movie next door drowning out your show at The Wildey. I’d like to tell you that I could still taste the popcorn or smell the cleaner that they used to sop up the Cokes we rugrats spilled, but that would be inaccurate. What came back to me was how many times I’d been scared and thrilled, heartbroken and tickled, amused and amazed in this hall.

As a child I had wanted to climb up on the stage. All those years later, I was able to feel the stage creak under my feet, before discovering there was a way down behind the stage — as a kid I’d never imagined there was anything back there!! Backstage I found remnants of what must have been dressing rooms from the opera days, and I found an old ticket booth. It was too dark to take pictures, so I touched everything I could reach, hoping for tactile memories to fill in where photos could not. Later I asked the man about the ticket booth. He was unsure how long the booth had been down there, but guessed it had been a long long time. I agreed with him, because I don’t ever recall there being an outside ticket booth. I only recall hoping I lived in Edwardsville long enough to work in the Wildey when I grew up.

I took the photo on top in the summer of 2008. If you want to know more about The Wildey Theater, they’ve made it easy and fun: http://www.wildeytheatre.com/index.html