1941 Los Angeles, California
Robert Zukin
1941
Los Angeles, California
Interviewed on February 22, 2021
by Austin Tuan
First movie I can remember seeing, we lived in a suburb of Los Angeles called Brentwood, and there was a little town called Westwood right near us. Actually, our next-door neighbor was Tyrone Power, and Clark Gable was right up the street. In Westwood was a movie theater called the Village Theater. The theater had seats like an airplane, they had fancy first class seats and cheaper economy ones too. When I was 8 or 10, around that age, they would have a Saturday matinee there. I remember we really didn’t care much about what the movie was, they would have a cartoon or two, or a drama series. One cartoon that became an obsession for us kids was Superman. It was a series, so every week, you had to be there to see the next in the series. All of us would go every week, our parents would take us down there to see the next one.
I remember in high school in the 1940s, we used to go into Hollywood to see movies all the time because a lot of the first-run movies where there. We would drive to Grauman’s Chinese, which was a famous theater, the Pantages, we used to go there with our dates on the weekends, or sometimes with a group of friends, or a lot of the times as a double date. The Grauman Theater, it had this Oriental theme to the architecture and decorations on both the outside and the inside. I don’t think they’ve changed it much since then, I haven’t been in a long, long time but I think it still looks the same today! It was pretty fancy as I remember, the theaters back then were more decorated than they are today. There sometimes was a kind of theme, like the Chinese theater, and I remember they often had a candy stand in the lobby where we’d go to buy something before we got in. In Pantages, there were very comfortable seats in the theater, they had loges and regular seats, and they also had double seats. We liked that when we had dates.
I also used to love Doris Day movies. She was a great actress and singer. We also watched a lot of musicals, like ones with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. He was a great, great dancer, she was too. Movies back then were simply more entertaining. There were a lot more movies like musicals or comedies, people like Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. I like to see a good actor, somebody like Betty Davis or Humphrey Bogart. They were actors. A movie like Casablanca, I’ve watched that half a dozen times. Or the African Queen, that was Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, another great actress. It was basically just the two of them on this boat, on a river. She was a nun, he had this little chug-chug boat, and they were trying to escape something… I forget now. I must’ve watched that movie when I was in the Navy.
I loved the acting and the entertainment. It was just terrific; they don’t make movies like that nowadays. Today—I don’t go to movies anymore, I can’t stand them—they either have to make a big message, or they’re full of CGI effects and things like that. There’s no acting in it, they’re just done by computers. To me, it’s kind of a waste of talent.
