Burnin’ Down the House – Part III

Okay, so after two long digressions, we’re finally (almost) here.

Come with me back to Thursday, December 14, 1978. To appreciate my actions, you have to realize that I’ve been reading Superman comics since I was three. I taught myself to read with them, so when the prospect of a serious big-screen Superman movie presented itself, there was no way I was going to miss it. Now, remember, we’d finally the summer blockbuster era, so I expected long lines. While nowadays, a movie like that would open with a midnight show kicking off opening day, the first show then then was scheduled for something like 8:00 am Friday morning. Anticipating those long lines, I drove up to Hollywood, expecting to sit or stand in line at the Chinese Theatre all night.

Well, imagine my surprise to get to Hollywood and find – no lines. I had three choices: drive back home and come back extra early the next morning, sit on Hollywood Boulevard all night by myself, or pull off to a residential street and spend the night sleeping in my car. Being young and stupid, I chose the last, waking every couple of hours to drive by the theatre and make sure that a line wasn’t forming. (Spoiler alert: it wasn’t.)

It was about this crowded.

The sun rose around 7 a.m., so I decided enough was enough and drove to the theatre, parked in the lot behind the Max Factor building across the street (soon to play a major part in this narrative), and bought my ticket. Long story short (too late!): I loved the movie then and still do. Sure, it has plot holes and problems a-plenty, but the strengths – and Christopher Reeve’s performance – outweigh the weaknesses.

Fast forward to what must be Sunday, January 7th. My sister is home for the holiday. I’ve caught a cold and don’t feel great, but she decides she wants to see Superman. I don’t feel well enough to drive (and despite what a lousy driver my sister has always been, when you go somewhere with her, she drives), so she gets behind the wheel, I get in the passenger seat, and up the freeway to Hollywood we fly.

Now, my sister being who she was, she decides that the best way to handle not only the drive, but the movie as well, is to smoke a joint on the way there. I, being sick, pass (and never really did like smoking dope; it mainly gave me a sore throat). We get to the theatre, park in the Max Factor lot, buy tickets for the last show of the evening (10 p.m.?), and see the movie. We have a great time, leave the theatre, and head for the car.

This is where the fun starts.

We get to the car, and, in her altered state, she can’t find the keys. We look in the car, and, because of the darkness of the garage, can’t really see inside, but can tell they’re not in the ignition. After a discussion of a few moments, she thinks she might have dropped them on the floor of the theatre. We go back to the Chinese, and find that, in the time it’s taken to walk across Hollywood Blvd. twice and discuss losing the keys, the theatre’s been locked up as tight as a nun’s knees. The staff had disappeared like they’d been abducted by a UFO.

 Crickets, tumbleweeds, and us

We marched back to the car. Still no sign of the keys. Back to the theatre. We started pounding on doors, hoping that, despite the way it looked, someone might be there. No answer.

I got the idea to start prowling around, hopeful that maybe there might be some way inside. In those days, the Chinese was, more or less, a free-standing building, with parking lots on both sides, so the auditorium doors were right out in the open. (In the decades since, those areas have been developed and there are buildings on both sides.) I tried a couple of the exterior doors, and lo and behold, one was ajar and we were able to slip into the lobby.

It was mostly dark inside, but illuminated enough that we could find our way around. The auditorium itself, though, was as black as Dick Cheney’s heart. I wondered if there was any way to turn on the house lights, so poking around behind the concessions stand, I found a circuit breaker box. I started flipping switches, hoping that one of them might illuminate the theatre, but nothing happened. Lobby lights went on and off, and I have no doubt the front of the building lit up like a pinball machine, but nothing in the auditorium. (I ended up figuring the house lights must have been controlled from the projection booth.)

What to do? We knew – or, at least, suspected – that those keys were in the house somewhere. I was suddenly hit with an idea. I knew generally where we’d sat, and would know specifically because there’d been a sticky Coke patch on the floor. Since we hadn’t thought to bring a flashlight, there was only one solution.

Taking my sister’s lighter (remember the joint?), I found a giveaway newspaper in the lobby, trod gingerly into the auditorium, using the poor illumination the lighter provided. When I got to the approximate location of our seats, I rolled up the newspaper and lit it like a torch. Like an angry villager, I waved it around until I found the Coke slick and verified that the keys weren’t there.

Did you look -there-?

By this time, the flames were getting pretty close to my hand, so I blew out the torch, dropped it, and stamped it out to the best of my ability. Resignedly, we left the theatre and figured that, since the keys were nowhere else, they had to be in the car.

In the forecourt of the Chinese were payphones, so we called AAA and told them that we were locked out of the car. We were told that a tow truck would be there presently, and, in one of those once-in-a-lifetime miracles, not only was a truck there in less than five minutes, it was followed almost immediately by a second truck.

We explained the situation to the driver, met him across the street at the garage, and with a flick of his wrist and his slim jim, the car door was opened, and, lo and behold, the keys were there on the floor of the driver’s side where my sister had dropped them.

We got in the car, started it, and drove away into the night. The entire trip home, though, I insisted on keeping the radio on KFWB, the all-news station, because I fully expected to hear a breaking news bulletin that the Chinese Theatre was engulfed in flames and that arson was suspected.

Obviously, it didn’t.

But that, at long last, is the story of how I nearly burned down Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.

Burnin’ Down the House – Part II

In our last thrilling chapter, I began to discuss how I nearly burned down Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood.

I was going to pick up by talking about waiting in line for movies. In these days of camping out days in advance to get into Hall H at the San Diego Comic-Con or to buy something useless on Black Friday, waiting for a few hours at a movie theatre may not seem novel, but in the ‘70s, it was. As I say, I was going to start with that, but I’m finding my memory isn’t what I think it is.

The first time I remember really waiting for a movie was either 1973 or 1974 for The Exorcist. My girlfriend at the time had read the book and really wanted to see it. In those pre-Jaws days, most big movies would open in limited release (like two or three theatres in the entire country) before moving on to smaller theatres. There were really only two places where every movie would play: Broadway and Times Square in New York and Westwood in Los Angeles. Now, of course, there are no movie theatres on Broadway or in Times Square (the multiplexes on 42^nd Street don’t count … ) and Westwood, which once had more than a dozen theatres, now has only a couple.

The Exorcist was playing at Mann’s National, so we drove to Westwood on what I remember as a nice spring Sunday, and discovered that, not only was the movie sold out (in an 1100-seat theatre!), the show after that was sold out (and the show after that might have been sold out). We bought tickets for the first available show and got in line for the next five hours, which entailed going down one block, around the corner, down another, around another corner, and going way down a third block (there may even have been another corner and another block). We had no books, no newspapers, and no smart phones to distract us, no nothin’ except standing in line, talking to people about how we couldn’t believe we were going to wait this long for some stupid movie and how the McDonald’s across the street had jacked up its prices to take advantage of its captive audience. It was a change they denied, but was verifiably true.

 Scene of the crime

(Now, I remember it as a warm late spring/early summer evening (as does my then-girlfriend) – and the same night that the LAPD and the FBI shot it out with the Symbionese Liberation Army to rescue Patty Hearst, but I don’t see how that could be, since that night was five months after the movie opened. The line was long, but not that long … )

As people came out of the theatre, they were either grossed out (these were more innocent times) or laughing (obviously high). The thing was, we had built a sort of temporary community in that line, with relationships, running jokes, and commentary, but that was broken up as soon as we hit the doors of the theatre. Ultimately, I thought (and think) the movie was pretty “meh.” It was okay, but more of a cultural phenomenon than a cinematic experience. My girlfriend, though, was so freaked out by it that she demanded that I take her copy of the book and get it out of her house (I still have it), and she got the willies when hearing “Tubular Bells,” the movie’s theme. Her mother got mad at me for taking her daughter to the movie, but then she was generally mad at me anyway.

 Careful!

My next experience with waiting for a movie was with Star Wars in 1977. Now, I had known about the movie well in advance, having gotten a poster for it the previous year at some comic convention. (I sold that poster sometime in the ‘80s for something like $100; now it goes for more than $2,000.) The first show wasn’t sold out, but after that, you couldn’t get near theatres that were showing it. It opened wide; really wide. It was beyond huge. 

The damn "Star Wars" poster

When the second movie opened in 1980, it was with a midnight show at the Egyptian on Hollywood Blvd. I got there at 11:00 am and waited in line all day with a bunch of other misfits. People would walk by and ask what we were waiting for. We told them “the new Star Wars movie,” and they would look at us with either pity, confusion, or terror (or some combination thereof). Can’t say as I blame them. (When the third movie opened in 1983, I gamed the system. This time, there was a benefit screening the evening before the official midnight opening. I paid $50 [!] for a ticket [it was a worthy cause; pediatric cancer or something] and, after the movie, went around the theatre and gathered up a stack of the souvenir programs that had been distributed, then drove to the Egyptian and sold them to the suckers in line for a dollar a pop, more than making up the price of my own ticket.)

I can’t believe I found an image of the program

As is my wont, though, I’ve spent words to get us to the point where I’m just on the verge of my attempted arson, so I shall leave you, gentle reader, on proverbial tenterhooks until the next time, when I promise you, I will include breaking and entering among my crimes.

Confession is good for the soul, after all …