1954 New Haven, Connecticut
Sylvia Chun
1941
New Haven, CT
Interviewed on February 7, 2024
by Avery Long
Are you ready?
Uh huh.
What is the first movie that you remember seeing?
I guess I’ll say Gone with the Wind.
Fantastic. Do you remember roughly how old you were or when it was?
I can’t remember how old I was, but I probably was maybe 13 or 12…and you know Gone with the Wind, it was a long movie with Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh—I remember those two—and I remember going with my younger brother. It was such a long movie that there was an intermission, and my young brother Ernie got sick, so I had to leave at intermission and then see the rest of it at another time. I was, you know, not happy about that. But I remember it being very good and what was, you know, striking to me was not only Clark Gable, “Frankly my dear I don’t give a damn” or something he said in that that was a famous quote from that movie and Vivien Leigh and how beautiful she was, but also the stereotyping of black people. They were the slaves on the plantation.
Yeah…Gone with the Wind has not really stood up to the test of time.
Right.
So, I know you mentioned before that you had to cross a bridge to get to the theatre, could you just talk a bit more about how you got there and where you saw the movie?
Most of the movies that we saw, or that I saw as a youngster, were at the Pequot Theatre on Grand Avenue in Fair Haven, which is a part of New Haven, Connecticut, even though I lived in East Haven. We took a bus part of the way and then got off at the corner of One Street and Grand Ave. and then walked up Grand Avenue. to the theatre. And this was usually on a Saturday, a Saturday afternoon.
Do you remember, I guess aside from Gone with the Wind, how often you went to see movies?
Maybe once a week at the most, but usually on a Saturday. A Saturday afternoon.
And did you usually just got with your brothers or did you sometimes go with your parents?
Nope, always with the brothers.
Got it. Did the theatre have…I don’t know, what was the theatre like? Was there food, were there ushers, what was the experience?
I don’t remember, no food—oh, there might have been popcorn, but you know very minimal. But at the time we thought it was you know, we kind of thought it was the usual for a movie theatre, in my mind. There was popcorn, I don’t remember if I, I don’t remember buying popcorn, but probably there was popcorn, and maybe Coke or some other soft drinks, I don’t remember getting any of those though. It just looked to me kind of like theatres look now with…although now the seats are much nicer and more comfortable and bigger. But the arrangement was about the same, just a screen in front and all the seats behind with maybe two rows, so there’d be a center section and then two side sections.
Got it. Were there, you know, were there fights over who got what seat? Was (sic) there people trying to get the best seat in the house or did that not really matter?
No, it was probably not totally packed, not totally full, so it was, you know, easy to find a good seat—what we considered a good seat: not too far front and not too far back.
Makes sense. So you said that you went pretty often on Saturday afternoons, and Gone with the Wind was the first one, but are there any other movie that you remember sticking out in your mind?
You know, I kinda looked [some] up to jog my memory; I remember one movie that I really liked was Rear Window—
Oh I love that movie!
Yeah isn’t that a good movie! I liked I think it was Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly, I liked that movie, and I remember liking a lot North by Northwest.
We’re gonna watch that movie for this class that I’m taking.
OK yeah, Alfred Hitchcock, that was a good movie, Cary Grant. And I remember the movie Cleopatra with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.
I haven’t heard of that; well, actually no, the name does sound familiar, but I don’t know much more beyond that
I think they starred together in that movie and I think after that or during that they became linked romantically, and that caused…I don’t remember exactly, but it caused problems in their other life when they were with other people probably.
So I think that last thing I have is what did you like about going to see the movies, either Gone with the With or any movies back in the day?
Back in the day it was, don’t forget, there were few other choices. It was fun to, you know, it was a nice long period of time with one story and to just get engrossed in the story was so good. And being out, having some entertainment, that was good. Because other than that, because after a while we did get a TV, but the TV shows were mostly something like Ed Sullivan on a Sunday night with the family. And that was good, but it was like a movie.
I think that’s everything I have. Is there anything else that you think I should know or that you think is really striking about the movie you saw when you were younger? Or any actors or performers who have stuck with you to this day?
Yeah I guess just all those actors like Clark Gable and Rock Hudson, oh there’s another actor that my mom really liked called Alan Ladd and so he was probably a little, I don’t remember much about him but that my mother really liked him. So, she would talk about him a lot, and so when it came time to naming your father, who is Robert Alan, I named him Alan in honor of kind of my mother
I never knew that!
(Laughing) In honor of her love of Alan Ladd.
I had no idea.
I think of it now and it’s hilarious, but I did that.
And I guess I am too right, Avery Alan. Wow.
Yeah, and I that’s you too! You got it—
I just thought it was, you know, Alan cause my dad’s middle name was Alan, but I guess it all goes back to that actor.
Right so you have a little bit of honor to Alan Ladd by way of my mother’s love for that. My mother liked to, a lot of times at the movie theatre they would have these various contests. Not when I was young, but when my mother was a young woman. And one time, there was a contest in which you had to write something using the names of movies, and so my mother wrote, “Test pilot had something to sing about after happy landing on thin ice in London by night. Had diner at eight with Rosalie.” And then it went on and on, and she won the prize of maybe so many tickets to the movies by putting all those movie names—those are all movie names—and she put them all together and made a paragraph.
Wow.
Isn’t that cute?
That’s impressive. I don’t think I could do that with movies I know.
Exactly. So that’s all I have, I just remember…nothing to do with movies, but another, besides Ed Sullivan, we used to watch Dragnet on TV. [laughs]
There you go.
That’s it.
Thank you so much!
It was a pleasure!
The next day, over text:
Just another little addition to our interview yesterday: I forgot to mention that when I went to the movies, there was always a news reel before the actual movie played. Another thing I forgot is that there were a lot of Western cowboy movies that I saw. I don’t remember anything about them except I can remember the horses and the cowboys and Indians. I used to love The Long Ranger, but I think that was from listening to the episodes on the radio.
Three days later, over the phone:
The price of going to the movie when I was, you know, going to the movies was 25 cents, and then later on as I got older when it went up to 50 cents we were appalled.
Sylvia is my paternal grandmother.
