My Movie Theater: Isaac Fitzgerald

My Movie Theater is a new series from Dirt x MUBI. Over the next few months, our favorites writers will pay tribute to their hometown theaters. My Movie Theater hits inboxes every other Tuesday! 🍿

Isaac Fitzgerald on sneaking in concessions, shoplifting DVDs, and recreating the experience at home.

Growing up in Boston, Massachusetts, my family didn’t have a television. Part philosophical stand—à la John Prine’s “Spanish Pipedream”—part financial prudence, ours was a home of books and prayer. But we were also a household of rule bending and rationalization. Some of my favorite childhood memories are my father coming home from work, a devilish glint in his bright blue eyes. 

“Who wants to go to the movies?” 

I would leap up from the floor and run to him.

“Do I know anybody who wants to go to the movies? Anybody at all?”

“Me! Me! Me!” I would cry out.

“I don’t know,” my father would say, looking all around. “I can’t hear anyone. Maybe nobody wants to go to the movies!”

“No! Me! I do! I’m right here!”

After he’d had his fun my father would whisk me up, wrapping my jacket around me, and we’d walk for blocks and blocks into the Back Bay and over to the Copley Place shopping center, where we’d take in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, or Batman Returns (my father unprepared for the numerous questions I’d have about Michelle Pfieffer’s Catwoman), or Dick Tracy (same questions, but this time about Madonna’s Breathless Mahoney). 

We also didn’t keep many sugary treats at my house, but on our walk my father would always stop at a corner store and pick up a pack of M&M’s or Reese's Pieces to sneak into the movie theater. He’d press his fingers to his lips as we walked in, slyly slipping the package out of his pocket—just enough so I could see it—and winking at me as the usher took our tickets, the whole trip a mischievous adventure. 

Not long after, my parents fulfilled other lyrics from John Prine’s “Spanish Pipedream.” We moved out to the country—North Central, Massachusetts, to be exact. The nearest movie theater was now an hour's drive from our rural home, but the local parents did their best—often piling kids into rusted-out station wagons or old vans and driving us to the movies by the carload for special occasions and birthday celebrations. One summer I saw Independence Day a total of six times, as it was every birthday-haver’s pick that season.

As we got older, we would drive ourselves in old hand-me-down trucks and beat-to-shit hatchbacks. My buddy Conner and I would smoke weed and—much like my father all those years ago in Boston—sneak in our own concessions. But, unlike with my father, gone was the subtle, single pack of assorted dragées. A new Walmart had just been built a few towns over, where we would go, barely trying to hide our shoplifting—every employee there being a friend, or a friend of a friend, or a family member of a friend—a small town community of rebels against the large corporate entity that just blew into town. Nobody working there seemed to mind, especially if we stuck to the discount aisles. 

We would enter the theater with our oversized jackets and wide, loose jeans stuffed with off-brand candy bars and Pringles-shaped—but not Pringles brand—potato chips, along with Sam’s Cola soda, Dr. Thunder, and lemon lime Twist Up. 

One time, our friend Shane snuck in an entire rotisserie chicken. That was the peak of our movie theater feasting—as close to bringing in actual silverware and starched white tablecloths as we were going to get. But, as is true of all great moments, not long after the peak comes the breaking point—the crash that leads to the end of an era. For Conner and I, that came while watching The Sixth Sense, during which our unopened, three-liter bottle of Mountain Lightning slipped from my Army surplus coat sleeve. We were sitting in the back row. I remember thinking, I’d never really noticed how steep the incline of the theater was before. 

The bottle hit the ground and rolled, gaining momentum and bouncing off seat legs and—from the “What the fuck”s heard throughout the theater—the other patrons’ feet. Finally, as the bottle neared the front of the theater, the seal on the cap cracked open, a pressurized stream of off-brand Mountain Dew shooting out in all directions. There was yelling, more cursing, and the movie projector stuttered to a stop. The staff shot polaroids of me and Conner and hung them in the ticket booth. We were officially banned, and were robbed on the movie’s twist ending.

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It made no difference, though—the banning, not the spoiling of The Sixth Sense. Like I said, we rarely got to the actual movie theaters, even before we were cineplex outlaws. The trip was far, and gas money didn’t grow on trees, nor was gas available for easy shoplifting at Walmart. But soon, a new invention was. DVDs. Easy to break open, once you figured out how, which our friend Derrick had—teaching us to slice open the cellophane wrapping with our pocket knives and then to crack open the clear, plastic security case, sliding the discs into our pants pockets and tossing the excess packaging in the restroom trash bins. We would walk out of the Walmart slowly, keeping an eye out for security guards that might follow us into the parking lot, and get into our cars with care, so that the disc didn’t break when our jean pockets tightened against our thighs. 

Conner lived in a ramshackle home in the middle of the woods, and we had turned his family’s living room into a single-screen picture house. We would host screenings, our own movie theater surrounded by forest—there wasn’t another light for miles—cooking our own popcorn on the stove along with melting butter, which we would mix together in a brown paper shopping bag, sprinkling on salt and sometimes a light pepper, or other seasoning—another trick I learned from my father, but yet again taken to the extreme, as we would make bagfuls and bagfuls of the stuff. Conner’s ma never bothered us, because she usually went to bed early—though, occasionally, if she liked the film, she would stay up and smoke weed with us while we put more kernels on the stove. 

There, in Conner’s darkened living room, we would watch movies that made us laugh, and sometimes even cry. The only time I saw Conner cry was there, watching the flashing images on the flat-screen television his mother could barely afford. Even now, I have a hard time crying whenever I’m not watching a film. I only saw my father cry twice, once was when I came home after getting my front tooth knocked out in a fight. The other time was while watching, well, a movie title that I won’t name here out of courtesy to him. But what a powerful thing, to see your father moved to tears by someone else’s dream. 

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