1954 Dallas, Texas

Bill Moore

1941

Dallas, Texas

Interviewed on September 16, 2019

by Mary Callanan

It was always a big deal to go to the movies. I would go to the Majestic Theater in Dallas, which was the one closest to my house. I vividly remember walking a couple of blocks from my house, getting on a bus, and going to downtown Dallas to this particular movie theater. Oftentimes, I did this by myself. Why did I go by myself? I don’t know. Why did I go to that theater? I don’t know. One of the most important parts of the theater, besides the screening room itself, was the lobby. At the Majestic Theater, you would buy your ticket outside in a little ticket booth before you entered the theater through the lobby. The lobby was very spacious: there was a grand stairway, a concessions stand, and a manager’s office with a great big picture window that looked into the lobby. The concessions stand always had popcorn and Coca-Colas. There was a glass case in the counter that would have different candies in it. As for the manager’s office, I think it was just to let the public see that there was someone overseeing what was going on. 

Actually, I have a pretty funny story about that office. One time, my mother took one of my brothers, his friend, and me to the movies. They were older than I was, so when my mother and I went in to sit down together, they didn’t want to sit with a parent. They went and sat elsewhere. When the movie was over, my mother and I came into the lobby, and we glanced over to see a huge crowd around that huge picture window looking into the manager’s office. We worked our way through the crowd and got up to the window, and there are my brother and his friend in handcuffs and surrounded by about eight police officers. Meanwhile, my mother is looking in and seeing her son in handcuffs, but I can’t remember her exact reaction. As it turns out, my brother and his friend had gotten bored with the movie, and they had gone out of the lobby trying to figure out what time it was since they didn’t have my mother to tell time. They were going around looking into car windows because cars used to have big round clocks in the front. As they were looking into car windows, somebody assumed they were looking for a car to steal, so they called the police. The police handcuffed my brother and his friend, but they couldn’t find the key to the handcuffs. They had to call other officers to see if anyone could unlock their handcuffs. Someone finally got the handcuffs, and we were off. That was very much a movie experience; I don’t remember what movie it was, but, whatever it was, my brother and his friend didn’t find it very engaging.

The grand stairway in the lobby went up to a mezzanine which led to a balcony. It was kind of a big deal that there was a balcony at this theater. Back in my day, where I was growing up, that balcony was specifically for people of color, as were all of the theaters in Dallas. I think back to that now, and I’m amazed at how absolutely common and accepted that was. This was a segregated community, seeing as it was Dallas in the 1950s. 

Anyways, the first movie that comes to mind that I remember seeing, and it might have occurred way into my movie-watching career, was The Creature from the Black Lagoon. I was about thirteen or fourteen. It was one of the earliest scary movies. It opens with a couple out on a dock in some woods with a pond. The pond is kind of scuzzy and overgrown, and the couple is romancing in one way or another. As they turn and walk away, you see this big, clawed, webbed hand come up on the dock and then slide off. It was right by where their ankles were, and that’s your first image of this creature. I have that image very vividly in my mind. I can tell you what the camera angle was and the scenery. What I remember most about the movie is the creature itself. Looking back, it was so fake and silly; it was clearly a person dressed up in a silly costume, and yet, it was terrifyingly realistic. By today’s standards, you think of all of the things that are done with digital work and the realism of every imaginable thing. These old movies were absolutely primitive compared to today’s visual effects. In The Creature from the Black Lagoon, the creature is just some person in a costume. I remember it looked like a reptile of some sort, and it had some kind of gills on the throat. It was scaley, and it had something like a fin on the head and down the back. It was marine-like, but it was that claw that got me — just dragging back on the dock and slipping over the side. 

It wasn’t a gory movie. Rarely, back in those days, would you see anything graphically or specific like that. I think the scariest parts were nuanced and suggestive. You probably, unlike today, wouldn’t see a disemboweling of somebody. Scenes would just be suggestive, and they would scare the living daylights out of you. 

Most of the movies I saw were in black and white. There was sound, but the screen was still pretty small. One of the huge advances in cinema was Cinerama. Usually, when you went into the theater, there was a curtain where the screen was. When it was time to start, the curtain would part to the screen’s length, and the film would start. With Cinerama, the curtain would open to the familiar width, pause, then continue and the screen was wider than anyone had seen before. They really dramatized the opening of the curtains. There were also short-lived 3D movies. You would put on the red and blue glasses, and what a sensation it was! They would have movies that were specifically made to dramatize the 3D effect. If it were a cowboy movie, you would find yourself wincing or ducking when a tomahawk came your way. Things seemed to be coming way off of the screen and into the audience. It was really cool, so I’m not sure why it was short-lived. 

At the time, everything in the movies was whatever it was. As a child, everything seemed perfectly realistic, whether it was a detective story, a scary story, a musical, mystery, or whatever it was. You didn’t question what it was, it was just shown to you. If somebody were playing the role of a cowboy, then, in your mind, that was an honest-to-goodness cowboy. You didn’t, at that age, pay any attention to anyone actor or actress versus another. You didn’t go to see the movie because someone was in it since that wasn’t really the point. You went to have the movie experience.