1957 Chicago, Illinois

Michael Cunningham
1952
Chicago, Illinois
Interviewed on 2/11/2022
by Gwen Nighswander

The first movie I remember seeing, I’m sure, was Walt Disney’s Fantasia, and I would have been five years old, it would have been in Chicago, at five I would have been taken by my parents. It was already kind of an old movie even then. I was enchanted by it, my parents had to convince me that we really couldn’t stay and see it again. And then, many years later we took a friend of ours who was five years old, this was maybe twenty years ago, and there I was seeing the same Fantasia again with another five year old, and what I was most struck by was the degree to which my own ongoing sense of beauty comes from Fantasia.

Because yes, there are dancing hippos, but there are also–now it’s been a while since I’ve seen it–there’s all this color, that Disney Technicolor, fairies flitting around changing seasons, the Night on Bald Mountain sequence, which was my first experience of terror, which I also enjoyed. I wasn’t so terrified as to be traumatized, but I was frightened, you know what I mean. It really formed the basis of a lasting set of aesthetics for me; my ongoing sense of what is beautiful, what is magical, what is enchanting, really stems from Walt Disney and that movie in particular.

It would have been in Chicago, where we lived then, my sister would have been home with a babysitter. It was in downtown Chicago, we would have driven in. It was one of those sort of grand movie palaces that don’t exist anymore. If we’re talking about an early sense of beauty and grandeur, that probably started for me when we walked into the theater, it was all gilded and grand and had a concession stand, which I remember as 30 feet long and 100 feet high. If you’re very fortunate, it is that childhood experience of wonder and transport the likes of which I had never imagined. Yeah, yeah, driving downtown, walking into this immense theater that was all collonades and cherubim and seraphim, just all of it.

I was five, I really loved those dancing hippos and the alligators. That was, I think, my favorite at the time, but I think what stayed with me more, I do remember this, there’s the Night at Bald Mountain sequence, with the terrible demon rising out of the mountain, but then it fades to monks, I think they were monks, and it becomes very early morning, and pastoral, and that may not have been my favorite part, but it is the part I remember most later, that feeling of something frightening becoming something spiritual.

I can tell you there was a probably now extinct candy named Dots, they were little chewy fruit drops, I vaguely remember flirting with Good and Plenty but it seemed too adult, licorice and all, but I was big into Dots, that too seemed magical, we didn’t have them at home.