I expect to see ticket sales continue to fall until theaters start blocking the cell signal. Apparently people aren’t able to go for two hours without texting someone. I enjoy the movie experience except more and more the experience is ruined by those inconsiderate clods that must use their phone in some way. My favorite was the time a guy pulled out his laptop and tuned into his stock trading app FOR THE WHOLE MOVIE. Management was aware and did nothing. No reason to pay extra for that kind of experience.

In the first place, you have your facts twisty. Movie theaters were one of the first commercial applications of air conditioning, starting in the 1920’s. By 1970 or so, in the South, air conditioning became fairly ubiquitous in nearly all aspects of life, including both home and automobile air conditioners, and at most a decade later in the rest of the country. Even if people did not air-condition their whole houses, they would have room air-conditioners in one or two rooms, and retreat to those rooms in hot weather.

See: Raymond Arsenault, “The End of the Long Hot Summer: The Air Conditioner and Southern Culture,” _The Journal of Southern History_, v. L, No. 4, November 1984, pp. 597-628.

Arsenault was, I believe, a professor of History at the University of Florida. There are textual references to people staying home and watching television, now that they had home air conditioning, rather than going to the public movie theater to cool down.

Now, here is a contemporary source from the drive-in movie era:

Larry Siegel and George Woodbridge (illustrator), “The Mad Drive-In Movie Primer,” pp. 39-41, in the _Mad Magazine Super Special_, #30 (_A 100-page Mad Look at Hollywood over the Years_), Spring 1980. Which I gather was originally published in Mad #89 (September 1964)

Obviously, you could not see a drive-in movie in the daytime. By the time it got dark enough to see a movie, the temperature would have fallen, except for a few of the hottest days in the year. The energy reference Siegel and Woodbridge provide is one of cold– running the engine to stay warm on a winter night. Some of the other themes introduced are children in pajamas in the back seat (supposedly asleep, but not actually (*)), the concession stand (“feeding time at the zoo”), and the drive-in as a place to go with one’s partner in adultery. An automobile was a kind of perambulating porch, part of the semi-private space attached to a house, but capable of going places. It was also a chromium codpiece, but that was another story.

(*) I live near a college football stadium, and the parking lots hereabouts are used for football parking– and tailgate parties. So if I walk to the store, it is often through the middle of a tailgate party. One football Saturday, I was walking past a large SUV. A bed had been made up in the back, out of sleeping bags. A little girl was curled up in the bed, and she announced, to all the world, and definitely to all of the parking lot, in a voice of a certain large assurance, “that when she was five, she had to take a nap!” So now we are six, it seems.

To understand drive-ins, both movies and restaurants, see if you can find a copy of the movie American Graffiti, George Lucas’s personal nostalgia film. The whole point of a drive-in was to display your wheels, as an assertion of your identity.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069704/

What happened to end the drive-in was that automobiles ceased to be objects of quite the same enthusiasm which they had once been. Now we have drive-throughs. Drive-throughs are conceptually devoted to what, in the middle ages, was called secret eating, that is, eating by stealth, with the intention to refuse to share, the opposite of food as communion. More pragmatically, you drive into the drive-through at a fast-foot restaurant, get your order, park in the parking lot, and eat behind the wheel, because you don’t think you would like the people inside, and you would prefer to avoid their company.

———————————-

I think you have to ask yourself whether a movie is a kind of book, or a theatrical performance. I’ve gone for the book model. I expect to be able to buy a book outright for a modest sum, to keep it on the shelf indefinitely, to bookmark it, reread parts and skim over parts; and to sell or give it away if I see fit. One does not read the same book as every one else, at the exact same time. One maintains a certain emotional distance from a book, a state of mind of having an argument with the author, and it is perfectly reasonable to read a book while writing a critique of it. I transport my expectations to films. If that is unacceptable to the movie industry, my reaction is simply to read more books instead of watching movies. And no, I don’t think one has to watch a movie on a big-screen television. A computer screen does just fine. I think that when the movie studios get hungry enough, they will do the sensible thing, and put ten old movies on a single DVD, in MPEG-4 encoding, and sell the DVD at a paperback book price.

A successful theatrical performance has a communal quality, like a church service. It asserts the we-ness of the audience. It asserts that something is so important that everyone needs to listen to it. The state of mind of the audience is receptive, rather than analytic. If you take William Shakespeare’s audience, the youngest member were the London apprentices, destined for the more highly skilled trades, and the students at the Inns of Court, the national law school. They were young men who were in active training for the most responsible positions in society, graduate students in our terms. Shakespeare was offering them an explanation of how their world worked. A film-maker like John Ford was able to recapture something of this, but he lived in a different age from ours.