1955 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Vera Wells

Born in 1944

First Movie Memory from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, population 680,000

Interviewed on 1/22/19

By Kaiwen Wu

The first movie that I remember seeing in a movie theater, and it may not be the first one that I actually saw, was East of Eden. The one with James Dean, who was kind of a cult figure. For a short brief time, he made three movies that probably don’t belong to a more classical Hollywood scene. I saw a lot of movies that had more classical Hollywood flavor, like the ones with Bette Davis, like All about Eve. But I saw those movies on television, in black and white, late at night, because I wasn’t even born when Bette Davis was in her heyday. I was really young to be seeing James Dean, about 10 or 11 years old, because I was born on the last day of 1944. East of Eden came out the same year as Rebel without a Cause. The following year, it was Giant. By the time Giant was on the movie screens, he was already dead from a car crash. He was known for those three movies. I saw all three in the movie theater.

East of Eden was based upon a John Steinbeck novel. It had similar dynamics as the story of Cain and Abel from the Bible, about the competitiveness between two brothers. The father was really religious and was always favoring the Abel character. The Cain character, the James Dean character, who I think in the movie was called Cal, was always trying to impress his father. He might not have killed his brother, but his brother ended up going off to war. Cal found out that their mother was actually not dead, and was at the time running a house of prostitution in the city not too far away. In bitter and anger with his father, he took his brother to see what their mother was like. The brother got drunk and went off to the war, where I think he died. It’s really this negative story where he was this rebellious guy that everyone loved. I can’t remember all the details. But it was East of Eden, Rebel without a cause, and Giant, where he was the rebel, again, on this large Texas ranch where he discovered oil and became an oil baron. Those three movies were pivotal in terms of my love of movies, and I loved movies.

That was before you had the CDs and everything, and you had to go to the movie theaters to see movies. It was a big deal to buy special tickets and go see the movies. They sometimes showed the movies in two parts, so you’d have an intermission, so you could go buy more popcorn. I remember the intermission being a special deal for movies like Ben-Hur, the Ten Commandments, the big kind of movies.

I used to read movie magazines. My mother was a beautician, and in her reading room where people waited to get their hair done, she had magazines. She had the Life magazine, Ebony magazine, and Look magazine. She also had the equivalent of People magazine before there was a People magazine. A movie or entertainment magazine. I remember reading about East of Eden, and I remember reading about James Dean in the movie magazine. I was interested in popular culture, the television, the movies and all that, and I asked my mom to go see him.

I must have gone with my mother to this movie. My mother loved movies too, and it was a nice opportunity to bond with her in the movies. The tickets were about one or two dollars. Not a lot of people went to the movies back then, it was not as if we went every week. I don’t think I went to a lot of movies in the beginning. I may have gone more often in high school. My mother was really good at finances, because she didn’t grow up having a lot of money. She knew how to budget, she also knew that she had a kid who loved movies and television. Going to the movies was a reasonable luxury. We probably went an evening after she got off work or on a Sunday afternoon. These were not movies that were considered children’s movies, not cartoons. So I was one of the few kids in the audience.

The theater was in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. It was called the Regent Theater, and it’s in the east liberty section of Pittsburgh, which was near where my mother’s business was. I can picture it even now. It was convenient. That was the main theater I went to around that time. It is not there now. It was not a movie palace, it was just a basic good theater, with moderate size, and was well kept. It was not when I saw Ben-Hur or West Side Story, where we went downtown to a much larger and fancier theater that actually had a balcony and fancy technologies like the Cinemascope, I believe that’s what it was called, and the technicolor, all that stuff. I don’t remember there being ushers in the Regent theater. There were ticket takers, and also people working behind the concession stands, with fresh popcorn and twizzlers. I liked fresh popcorn. Not buttered, but plain. And I liked strawberry licorice twizzlers. There were people who made sure the venue was cleaned between screenings. They had a little broom and dustpan to make sure everything was taken care of.

After the movie, I was so enamored with the story that I bought a program book. It was a special magazine, paperback, with pictures of the actors, and probably the creative team telling you more about the story, how it was written. I would also follow the award ceremonies to see if the movies I loved would win awards.