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The World’s Greatest Movie Theater
Yes, theater. Not cinema.
Setting: My hometown, Laconia, New Hampshire. A mill town.
A mill town is a New England town built in the nineteenth century to take advantage of river power. The fast-moving waters powered turbines that made everything move in textile plants. These towns are characterized by huge brick buildings, scenic beauty, and economic depression. The industry of these towns once clothed the entire world. After the mills shut down, they were often centers of light industry. But when I was a kid in the 80s, they served as tourist getaways. If they were lucky. Our town wasn’t lucky.
My town. 1982. For me and my buddies, our town. Factories that still made shoes and wooden toys. Old, boarded-up mills that we knew how to infiltrate. Rat-infested tunnels for channeling river water under the city to the various mills. Cheap wooden apartment building slums made for French Canadian immigrant millworkers, now rotting around their ancestors. Warrens of backyards connected via broken fences. Row houses with shared basements, so that if you knew how to get into one cellar, you could pop up into your friend’s kitchen, where his mom would just be smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee with her friends. Passages through stone and brick walls into which kids could disappear if the pigs showed up.
The Winnipesaukee River went through the town, and there were three railroad trestles and one foot bridge from which we jumped into it on summer days. A depot of rusting trains, including a crane car and a couple engines - all the door locks cut away by teenagers, or windows broken so you could get in. Abandoned workshops, windows busted, partially burned down, surrounded by rusting trucks. Two dozen boys running, jumping, and crawling through old lathes and piles of scrap metal, blasting away at each other with sub-machine guns made from old chair legs as we practiced fighting Russian paratroopers who would be landing after the nukes blew everything up.
This sounds kinda terrible. It wasn’t. It was awesome.
Downtown Laconia had a theater, which had been turned into a cinema. “The Colonial.” The place had been built in the vaudeville era. It was decorated by Italian artists. Like, professional Italians from Italy, who went back to Italy after they built a bunch of theaters. Maybe that’s why they called it ‘The Colonial,’ because this town was in the middle of a real wilderness, back then. There was stuff in there we never saw anywhere else. Floors and walls of marble and terrazzo, balconies, opera boxes, and a massive stage. There were massive crystal chandeliers. The place had all kinds of carved, gilded wood, and a massive hand-painted ceiling, like a cheap version of the Sistine Chapel. My stepdad told a story about how his dad had actually seen an elephant on the stage there, once.
But vaudeville died even as the theater was being built, and it was easy to convert the place into a huge one-screen cinema. It was excellent: The screen had to be a hundred feet wide, and as I recall, the sound was good. I only heard regular movie sound, but the orchestra pit was still there, and the first films had been scored with live musicians.
For a boy bold enough to explore, this theater was incredible. I recall each twist and turn of it: The dark, narrow halls to the opera boxes, the hidden, pre-code stairways and passageways that led down behind the stage to the old dressing and staging areas. The curtains, perpetually rolled back on the sides of the stage to reveal the cinema screen, were massive red velvet pillars. Arabesque brass gas lamps were still attached to the walls.
For decades, the Colonial was the only cinema for dozens of miles. Then in the late 60s, the town made a miracle mile, which included a four-screen multiplex. The Colonial followed the demise of most downtowns, whose shops couldn’t compete with K-Marts, whose lunch counters couldn’t beat the combo of McDonald’s and Burger King, whose parking was cramped compared to the acres of asphalt fields on the edge of town. The town also suffered federal urban renewal. Its effort to modernize the downtown area was welcome, but they just turned it into a generic, steel-and-concrete economic dead zone. The feds almost managed to bulldoze the Colonial and our historic mills, but local efforts saved them.
The Colonial could only show one movie at a time. So, they had to pick winners. But that’s not easy. Sometimes they’d end up with a movie so unpopular that they would just let people watch it for free, and hoped that concession sales would keep them afloat. These films were usually attended by people like me and my family, who were so broke we couldn’t even afford to buy candy to sneak into the cinema, even if our consciences would let us. I went and saw ‘The Last Unicorn’ there that way on New Year’s Day, 1981.
The last film I saw on that giant screen was E.T. We were the only family there. In the scene in which the alien was revealed, my little sister was so freaked out that she ran away and hid in an opera box until my stepdad found her.
Then, the Colonial closed, and underwent renovations. At the time, the building was owned by a family that was locally infamous for their slums and sketchy businesses. They were the heirs of a founding member of the town, but they weren’t counted as upper class. They were working - borderline criminal - class, which is what I was, and still am. Like most such people, they had good survival instincts, which they transferred to The Colonial.
They transformed the former vaudeville theater into a multiplex. Not with four screens, like those jerks on the miracle mile, but FIVE screens. They renamed the place the “Colonial Five-Star Cinemas.” (But we always called it ‘the theater.’) In essence, they framed a multiplex of two large, and three small cinemas, within the existing brick building. They incorporated existing architecture like stairwells, passageways, the main seating areas, balcony, and the opera boxes, into the new architecture. It had the most bizarre seating arrangements you can imagine, and packed in as many people as the fire chief would allow. Seats at the front of the cinemas were so close to the screen that you had to look straight up at the screen. So close that you could feel the heat, and it was almost too bright. If you were over five feet tall, you had to sit with your legs sideways, if you couldn’t put them up over the seat in front of you.
My dad brought me to the first film I saw there, in 1982, when I was eight, which was called ‘Time Rider,’ about a motorcycle stunt rider who gets accidentally sent back to the Wild West by a government experiment.
This bizarre multiplex was a maze into which you could disappear. Adding to its convoluted design was the hidden fact that the owners, recognizing the historical significance of the place, had built the multiplex around the original features so that it could possibly be restored in the future. This is why the center top small cinema box was dominated by a crystal chandelier that seemed to span the ceiling.
But, my buddies and I found access to the secret spots. This gave us the opportunity to evade the ushers, so that we could see multiple movies in one day. We also knew how to open the emergency exit door and not set off the alarm. You just needed a piece of steel to hold over the magnetic sensor when the door was moved. (This was tribal knowledge passed down from teenagers.) This is how we learned that quarters aren’t made of steel, because we once tried to use one instead of a knife blade, and nearly pissed our pants when the alarm bell rang.
With its transformation into a multiplex, the Colonial gained a new lease on life. And I became a teenager. I started seeing my town as less of an anarchic paradise, and with jaded eyes, more like a suffocating, boring blight on the landscape. My mom and stepdad moved just out of the town to a location they thought would be better for bringing up kids. A broken down farm they wanted to rehab. But for me, the new location was a lifeless rural slave labor camp, and the new school was the same as the old, except I had no friends. So I spent most of my time in the town. My dad lived there, and if I wasn’t at his house, he assumed I was with my mom. If I wasn’t at her house, she assumed I was with my dad. I could do whatever I wanted. And that was often watching movies at the Colonial.
Its shady owners had a habit of hiring shady people. They paid them under the table, or through discounted rent. These were my people. I usually knew them or their younger siblings. They got so used to me that they didn’t even care if I watched multiple movies without paying. I didn’t have to hide from the ushers anymore. When I was fifteen, I made friends with the projectionist. I had found some pot one day at the beach in the early morning. Perhaps an eighth. I didn’t do drugs - I was fully indoctrinated in D.A.R.E. But almost all the adults I knew smoked pot. So I gave it to him. And he gave me access to premiers. We would screen the new movies as soon as they came in. He had good taste in film and lived in an apartment above the cinema. His life was basically smoking pot and running movies. I miss him.
It felt like I lived at the cinema. I would go into the place on a bright, sunny day, walking up the incline in the foyer to watch a matinee at one in the afternoon. I’d spend years in outer space, in the jungles of Vietnam, on the streets of Europe. Then, I’d walk back down the foyer at close to midnight, finding that six inches of snow had fallen. It felt like I was returning to earth. Then, I’d decide where I wanted to lay my head that night, while thinking about all the places I’d been.
I saw hundreds of films in that cinema. Most, I forgot I even saw, until I see them featured here on X, on accounts like @dannydrinkswine. But many were unforgettable. And when I watch them now, 35 years later, I can’t believe how perfect they are. I also can’t believe how dark and hard they are. How dark and hard we were. The idea of showing Stone’s ‘Platoon’ to my 12-year-old gives me serious pause. But I saw it three times when I was his age.
As the few years between boyhood and adulthood passed, I went to the cinema less and less with friends, and more and more with dates. My familiarity with the staff and the cinema made me feel like a big wheel. And if it was a first date, after the movie I’d give her a tour of the whole place, which even had a secret spot so weird and creepy few people in town knew it existed - a sub-cellar that led to the ancient canal running beneath the city. But, the girls I dated didn’t think this was too creepy or weird. We were poor kids. This was just fun.
My girlfriends and dates… They were like me. They lived in apartments with doors that wouldn’t latch because they’d been kicked in by drunk dads. Happy and bright eyed when I came to pull them from a house packed with annoying rugrats and siblings. Skinny and unashamed of poverty. Now, well, most are grandmas raising their grandkids. They work at gas stations or Wal-Mart. Their butts are a yard wide, and they don’t like to show their teeth when they smile. But they know me, so they do. And I do, too, despite having busted teeth. We know each other. To me, they’re still as they were. kind enough to hang out with a lanky geek obsessed with films. Precious cherubims, leaning against me in an empty cinema, watching a film time forgot, our legs cast over the next row of seats, or curled up on my lap.
When I think about all the films I saw alone, they usually meant more to me than the ones I saw with friends. But going with friends was more fun. I still have one friend in town that I go see films with. But, not at the Colonial. We go to the eight-screen multiplex on the miracle mile that replaced the old four-screen one.
(This friend is the kind of guy you can talk with during a movie, and it only makes the movie better. A couple years ago we watched, ‘Dune, Part One.’ After Paul mercs Jarvis, Chani gives him a look in a close-up, and then slides herself across a rock to greet him. My buddy’s comment: “That stillsuit just got a whole lot moister.”)
The last film I saw at the Colonial was ‘The Jungle Book,’ starring Jason Lee, in 1994. I was home on leave from the Marines. My date was a six-foot tall redhead who liked wearing heels. When I got out of the service, in 1997, the Colonial’s multiplex days were already finished. The building had roof leaks and structure problems, and the city was fining them for safety issues. Someone - I’m not sure who - somehow tried to continue making a buck there by turning one of the larger cinemas within it into some kind of restaurant theater, and showing classics off of DVDs, with a digital projector. There was a massive blue tarp suspended from the ceiling to shed rainwater away from the patrons tables. That went about as well as you might imagine, and the place was shuttered in 2000.
Now, that multiplex within the building is completely gone. The town, which now looks approximately a hundred times better than it did in the 80s, invested millions into the Colonial, and fully restored it to its 1924 glory. They have theater companies perform there. But they also show classic movies, though the screen is a much smaller one. I took my kids there to watch a double feature of Ghostbusters, and Ghostbusters 2.
We watched it from the opera seats. And then, there was basically no one sticking around for Ghostbusters 2. So, I let them run all over the place, and watched them having fun exploring.
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