1956 Little Rock, Arkansas

Peter Umoff
Born 1950
First movie memories from Little Rock, Arkansas
Interviewed by Camille Umoff 1/21/18

What’s the first movie I ever saw? Oh, wow. That’s a hard one. We always went to the movies as a kid. And, of course, I saw all the Disney movies when they first came out. No question about it, I definitely grew up with the movies.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is the first movie I can remember seeing. I remember it had a big impact on me. It was fun to watch. My favorite part of the movie was the seven dwarfs and the song, “Heigh Ho, Heigh Ho.” The color, the sound, the music, the excitement. I think I liked Dopey best.

Snow White was really all about the overall experience. It was the tension between the guy trying to save Snow White versus the evil step mother or the evil witch throwing these obstacles in his way. And he would do the heroic thing. What appealed to me was the conflict between good and evil. It was black and white in those days. There was good and there was evil, and the good always triumphed over evil. I liked that.

I can remember going to the movie theater from around the time I was six. Back in those days, all the movies had a Saturday matinee and we would go to the Saturday matinee a lot. All the kids would be at the theater on Saturday for the matinee. My favorite was the serials. They had a serial each week. The one I liked the most and remember the most was “The Claw.” I really liked those cliffhangers. The hero in peril would miraculously be saved. That had a lasting impact on me. He would be hanging by one finger from a cliff or knocked out in some
room and the gas would be leaking into the room. The next week you’d see how he got out of that. He would make his escape and be back after the bad guys.

Usually I’d go to the movies with my brother, Steve, and maybe my sister, Alexis. Our parents would drop us off and pick us up. We moved around a lot. When we lived on an air force base, we could walk or we’d ride our bikes. There was a lot of bike riding back then. Usually, though, it was just me and Steve. It was absolutely bonding for us. The movies were very important to our relationship. We always talked about movies and music. Part of what I always loved
about movies was the music.

A movie cost ten cents. There was a concession stand, but, for me, popcorn and soda were not really part of the experience. We didn’t really do that. My parents didn’t give us extra money for food, and I never really liked popcorn. We would buy candy. Pom Poms and Milk Duds. And Steve always liked Junior Mints. There weren’t hundreds of kinds of candy like there are now. There were maybe a dozen kinds.

My most intense movie-watching time was probably college. In college, there was this revival of movies from the thirties and forties. They started bringing back all these movies and showing them in theaters. That’s really when I became most knowledgeable about and interested in the movies from the Golden Era of Hollywood. Every weekend we’d go see the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, Hitchcock. Seeing those movies in a movie theater was much more impactful, as you can imagine. That really cemented my love for the movies.

Throughout my childhood, though, I loved the westerns and the serials. Hopalong Cassidy and Roy Rodgers and all those guys. How I view the world is due in large part to the movies of my childhood and the ethics of those movies. I have this view of the world in which good should prevail. You don’t put up with the bullies. Even in gangster movies, the gangster would be redeemed by the end. The movies taught a lot of the simple lessons of the time. Good and evil, self-reliance, responsibility, loyalty, reliability, self-sacrifice. My son, Cooper, says that’s why I’m so weird. The times are too complicated now. The lessons have been lost.