Closing The Guild

Chapter 19
Closing The Guild

Having failed over the next year to make up the deficit from the Screening Room misadventure, Movie, Inc., temporarily closed The Guild until finances improved. Here I think we need to give the owner some credit. Maybe he did have a heart after all. Any business owner looking for profits would have dumped The Guild. I got the impression that he could not bear to do that. He wanted to keep it, loss or no loss.

The last show before the temporary closure was Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000, and I saw the last showing, on Thursday, 4 August 1977. Mr. RRE had just miraculously gotten a union job at the Hiland. How? He had no daddy or uncle to sponsor him in. How did he manage, especially in 1977, when the business was dying and when projectionists were being swatted away like flies? Somehow, at the same time, he was permitted to finish out his last few days as a non-union projectionist at The Guild. Bizarre. He offered his old coworkers free passes to the Hiland to see Orca, the Killer Minnow, as he called it. After the movie, the assistant manager (I can’t remember which one after all these years), without my asking, decided to drive me to my mother’s place, which wasn’t far away at all, about a mile and a half. But, hey, it was dark and Central Avenue could be pretty dicey after sunset, especially for a teen walking alone. When Mr. RRE saw me get into the manager’s car, he bellowed out: “My Lord! The wonderful services that The Guild is now offering to its patrons!” I got to my mother’s place, still in ecstasy over Jonah, which I thought was one of the loveliest things I had ever seen. I so desperately wanted to see it again, right away, but, of course, I couldn’t. I bought the VHS a few decades later and enthusiastically invited a friend over to see it with me, only to discover that it no longer did anything for me. Actually, I found it embarrassingly bad. Well, Miou-Miou was a dreamy delight, and she sang a nice bouncy little song. Other than that, ouch!

One weekday night (it was unusual for me to attend on a weekday night) I was watching a double feature and suddenly the sound died. The projectionist (was it Lonnie?) then stopped the film. It seemed to me that the exciter bulb had burned out. I waited patiently, along with everybody else, for a minute or two, and finally I decided to stretch my legs. That’s when I saw the projectionist and the new manager walking straight towards me, with the manager motioning to me with his finger to go up to the booth and help. They were clueless. I pulled the exciter assembly from Projector #1 and plopped it into Projector #2, and that got the show on the road again immediately. Then I was stumped. I had never replaced an exciter bulb and I spent what was probably fifteen minutes, but which felt like fifteen hours, trying to get that bloody thing out of its assembly. The bulb had burned out right at the beginning of a reel, and when it was time for the next reel, I told the projectionist, “Blow the change-over!” He stopped the film at the end of the reel, I plopped the exciter assembly right back into Projector #1, and he started the next reel. We were off-screen only for maybe ten seconds. I kept monkeying with the assembly and even managed to break the dead bulb, before I noticed the release on the bottom of the assembly. Duh! I replaced the bulb with a new one. Now, please remember, that’s a simple operation and I thought that any paid projectionist would know how to do that. Nope. The projectionist and the manager were deeply impressed by what they thought was my skill. That impressed them? Okay. Whatever.

For four decades, I have been trying to remember which double feature I had attempted to attend that night. Now that I have the schedules in hand again, I decided to browse through them to jog my memory. The problem is that I did not even make an attempt to attend any of those films! I have looked through the list multiple times, slowly, to see which films I would have wanted to see, and not one of them rings true. The only one that would be even a remote possibility is The Bride Wore Black, but, as I watch the preview online, it rings no bells. None. If I were to be sworn to give my memories in a court of law, I would have to say that I have never seen The Bride Wore Black (apart from a minute or two on TV, a few years later) and had no particular interest in seeing it, at least not in those years. Yet that is the only possibility, because, at the time, I had some mild interest in Truffaut, who wrote/directed the film. The show was on 2 or 3 November 1977, which was about the right time. I had pegged the incident right around November 1977. The Bride Wore Black was doubled with Persona, which I have never seen (apart from a few minutes on TV, decades later). Yet Persona was the 7:15 show, while The Bride Wore Black was the 9:00 show. Maybe I walked in only for the 9:00 show? How unlikely! How unlike me! None of this accords with my memories, but, then, nothing else in the schedule accords with my memories, either. This is absolutely my worst lapse of memory in this entire essay. I do not know how to account for this.