Goodness, The Strand! Went there many, many, many times in the early 70s, and there began a lifelong love of cinema. Yes, saw On Any Sunday and Rocky Horror. Also many others I haven’t seen exhibited anywhere since: Things like Candy & Putney Swope. Used to be able to smoke there. Many joints of the lowest quality Mexican grass only added to the experience.
When considering “Zardoz,” just remember the derivation of the name… wiZARD of OZ. If that kind of clever in your scifi wows you, well then you’ll probably like this ‘er, “film.”
I was introduced to Mithras by my mother when I was barely a teenager. Mom had offbeat tastes in all the arts, and the broad range of books I found there, nestled in their exotic home, made a fertile medium in which my own tastes were free to grow and change.
Later, as an older teen the Unicorn became a regular part of the circuit my friends and I adopted as our afterhours routine. I remember a period of years where the theatre ran a days long movie marathon around New Years. As those days passed we would soon find ourselves inhabiting an unending twilight of altered perception, fueled by the disregard for night and day, combined with the on again / off again hours of film, interspersed with periods away from the theatre to sharpen the experience with a dose of whatever the laboratory was serving that day. Heady.
Many films remembered as if through a veil, such as Far From the Madding Crowd, seen at what must have been 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, followed by Death in Venice. I also vividly remember the climax of a New Years eve showing of Bullitt, when immediately after having shot dead a security guard, the bad guy is caught between two sets of glass doors exiting the airport baggage claim. One set was blocked by the body of the dead guard, in front of the other was McQueen, pistol drawn. Exactly in the quiet moment between McQueen’s fatal gunshot to the bad guy, and the first bystander scream in the movie, the real life clock ticked over to midnight and the theatre erupted into shouts of “Happy New Year!†The timing was uncanny, and unlikely to have come about through sheer coincidence.
It’s all ancient history now, but lives on in the DNA of all of us who were lucky enough to have passed through those spaces then. Thanks for remembering. And a big thanks to Harold Leigh and Harold Darling for giving so much to us all.
Goodness, The Strand! Went there many, many, many times in the early 70s, and there began a lifelong love of cinema. Yes, saw On Any Sunday and Rocky Horror. Also many others I haven’t seen exhibited anywhere since: Things like Candy & Putney Swope. Used to be able to smoke there. Many joints of the lowest quality Mexican grass only added to the experience.
When considering “Zardoz,” just remember the derivation of the name… wiZARD of OZ. If that kind of clever in your scifi wows you, well then you’ll probably like this ‘er, “film.”
I was introduced to Mithras by my mother when I was barely a teenager. Mom had offbeat tastes in all the arts, and the broad range of books I found there, nestled in their exotic home, made a fertile medium in which my own tastes were free to grow and change.
Later, as an older teen the Unicorn became a regular part of the circuit my friends and I adopted as our afterhours routine. I remember a period of years where the theatre ran a days long movie marathon around New Years. As those days passed we would soon find ourselves inhabiting an unending twilight of altered perception, fueled by the disregard for night and day, combined with the on again / off again hours of film, interspersed with periods away from the theatre to sharpen the experience with a dose of whatever the laboratory was serving that day. Heady.
Many films remembered as if through a veil, such as Far From the Madding Crowd, seen at what must have been 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, followed by Death in Venice. I also vividly remember the climax of a New Years eve showing of Bullitt, when immediately after having shot dead a security guard, the bad guy is caught between two sets of glass doors exiting the airport baggage claim. One set was blocked by the body of the dead guard, in front of the other was McQueen, pistol drawn. Exactly in the quiet moment between McQueen’s fatal gunshot to the bad guy, and the first bystander scream in the movie, the real life clock ticked over to midnight and the theatre erupted into shouts of “Happy New Year!†The timing was uncanny, and unlikely to have come about through sheer coincidence.
It’s all ancient history now, but lives on in the DNA of all of us who were lucky enough to have passed through those spaces then. Thanks for remembering. And a big thanks to Harold Leigh and Harold Darling for giving so much to us all.