1951 Denver, Colorado

Darryl Williams
Born 1938
Denver, Colorado
Interviewed on September 19, 2019
by Ciara Lally

Oh, my childhood movie-watching experience was really divided into several different categories of how I got there. Every Saturday morning when I was little, my mother would give me a dime and I would walk about four blocks to the Barnum* Theatre. It was actually a very, very tiny theater. I would walk there every Saturday to watch a cartoon and to watch a serial, which was something like Buck Rogers or somebody in the jungle. There would be a different one screening each week. But it was a serial, and it would go on for six or more weeks to make sure you would come back to the theater and watch. And there was almost always a cowboy flick with Gene Autry or Roy Rogers. The theater cost nine cents, so with my ten cents, I’d have one penny left. I could go to this tiny, little store next to the theater and I could buy a penny candy. Sometimes, I had an extra nickel, and then I could buy a popcorn. So that’s one way that I went to the movies.

My parents, especially my father, loved the movies. We would go just about every weekend night or Friday night, something like that. We would get in his car and drive to a theater a little farther than the Barnum Theatre. We would go the Federal Theatre or the Egyptian Theatre, which was not nearly as fancy as the Egyptian Theatre in L.A., but that was the idea. It was decorated in Egyptian stuff. And we would go and watch the movies. It was always the same. It was a double feature. They would play the best movie first, and then there would be a B-movie, and then they would play the best movie again. So you could go to the early movie or the late movie, but you would always see both pictures, along with a newsreel and the trailers, although they were very different in those days. So we would watch two movies, and there, there was a regular popcorn stand, so we would get a treat.

Then sometimes, my aunt or my mother or both would take me all the way across town to the Aladdin Theatre, which was a much fancier theater away from the downtown that was decorated like Arabian Nights. It always had first-run movies, so they would take me there for movies that they thought I would especially like. That’s where I saw movies like Bambi and Pinocchio—which I remember being scared to death by—and Dumbo.

When we moved to Lakewood, there was a brand-new theater called the Lakewood Theatre which was much, much bigger and much more elegant than the Barnum Theatre. I would go there every Saturday, and again, they had cartoons. The Lakewood Theatre was great, actually, because they had all the essential movies there. The other thing that the Lakewood Theatre had on its Saturday matinee was a talent show that you could enter. So I decided to enter that show one Saturday, and I sang a song unaccompanied. I won the amateur contest.

One movie that I remember that was so scary—and I’ve seen it since then—was The Thing from Another World. I was about thirteen when I saw that, and that was at the Lakewood Theatre. I walked maybe five blocks to the theater and watched it with a friend. It was frightening. It was about this Thing** from outer space that crashed into the arctic. There were scientists doing research at a research station, and The Thing from outer space crashed into the ice. And of course, the space ship froze, but The Thing got out. It attacked and killed everybody. James Arness was The Thing, and I remember being horrified by it and very scared. After the movie, I remember having to walk by myself through a very heavy snowstorm that came up while I was at the theater. There was this movie in my mind, and I had to walk through the snowstorm, so that was scary. I’ve seen that movie since then. Since I’ve seen it again, it’s a comedy.

*The Barnum Theatre was officially named the Comet Theatre, but was popularly known as the Barnum Theatre by those who lived there.

**“Thing” and “The Thing” are capitalized here as they were in the film.

Sources:

The Barnum/Comet Theatre: http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/50499/photos/169433

The Egyptian Theatre (later renamed the Holiday Theatre): http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/24411/photos/147591

The Federal Theatre: http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/24241/photos/144782

The Aladdin Theatre: http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/19047/photos/157703

The Lakewood Theatre: http://www.colfaxavenue.org/2016/09/the-lakewood-theater.html