1957 Brooklyn, New York

Name: Joseph B. Solodow
Birth Year: 1946
First Movie Memory: Brooklyn, NY
Interviewed on September 9th, 2019
by Samir Al-Ali

I grew up in Brooklyn, which is densely populated, for one thing. And, I mean, the movies were big, so I’d be surprised if anyone from any part of Brooklyn was very far from a movie––certainly I wasn’t. This theatre was on Rogers Avenue and it might’ve been a 10 minute walk. I don’t remember the name of the theatre––it might’ve been the Rogers Ave Theatre, but I’m not sure. And there weren’t ushers, from what I remember. It must’ve been in the 50s.

I remember seeing The King and I. I didn’t go to the movies much when I was a kid. Once in a while I would go with my friends on a Saturday afternoon. My father never went to the movies, my mother went occasionally.. so I didn’t grow up in a world where particular movies were important. But I remember seeing The King and I […], it was one of the early movies that I saw. [I don’t remember when I saw it], but if we could figure out when it came out and add a year to it, that would maybe give it to us [editorial note: 1956 + 1 = 1957, must have been 10-11 years old]. It was a Broadway show first, it was a musical.

I remember the plot, I remember certain linguistic details (which doesn’t surprise you) [editorial note: Prof. Solodow is one of my favorite Latin professors at Yale!], I remember the King played by Yul Brinner (he regularly would say “et cetera et cetera et cetera”) and there was the clash of cultures: Anna was a 19th century English woman, and the King was somebody’s fantasy of an oriental potentate––despotic but capable of beneficent decisions sometimes. And a gigantic family. She schools like 20 of his children, and he has like 15 wives. I saw the movie not too many years ago again, and I completely forgot the ending, which is that the King goes into battle and she helps out in some way––completely forgot that but it must have been there when I first saw it.

The [movie theatre] screen was enormous. When I was a kid TV screens were maybe this big (*reckons with hands*), maybe a foot across, so by contrast with that, movie screens were enormous. They didn’t have back then what we have now, sort of “boutique theatres”; theatres were grand buildings and the screen was enormous, although there was no stereo back then, so the sound was always very loud and impressive. The King and I was in color; it was in the 50s that color came in as a regular feature of movies. There were earlier colored movies like The Wizard of Oz and parts of Gone With the Wind. So it was color, I remember that.

I don’t remember any smells; my mother didn’t like popcorn any more than I did, but we ate Jujyfruits––I remember that very exactly (*chuckles*). It was just the two of us; I have a slightly younger brother but he wasn’t there, and my father never went to the movies, he wasn’t interested. 

As I said already, theatres were big! Well, you’ve been in such theatres, even if they’re not the norm anymore, there are still a few around.