1962 New York, New York

Steve Blum
Born in 1952
New York, NY
Interviewed on 2/5/24
By Victoria Chung

Victoria: The main essence of this project is basically retelling the experience of the first movie you remember seeing. What was your experience like?

Steve: Sure. I can remember better the experience of going to the theater than I do as to what the first movie was. I grew up entirely on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in a very nice area. When I was growing up, there was a wonderful art deco theater called the Trans Lux 85th, and indeed it was just south of 85th St on Madison Ave., which is one block from Central Park. Beautiful theater. I was born in 1952, so to put this into perspective, my earliest memories of going to the theater were in the 1960s. I think when you’re eight years old, you don’t appreciate how gorgeous theaters were then. Of course, they were all one screen. That of itself brought a certain elegance to it. It wasn’t like the people who worked at the theater were attending to fourteen different movies. It felt special, partly because of the elegant setting.

Steve: I know that I would’ve gone with my parents. The theater was about a half mile away from where we lived at the time. And for me, some of the special aspects of it—and this won’t surprise you at all for an eight-year-old kid—was having popcorn or Hershey’s chocolate bars or something that I might not have all the time at home. That of course is still part of the experience of going to the movies, except now you pay twenty times as much. By the way, chocolate bars at that time were just graduating from costing a nickel to costing a dime, just to give you a sense of how long ago that was.

Steve: This next part does involve what was on the screen. Almost always in the earliest two or three times I went, there were still newsreels. So even though television had already been around for a number of years, not every household had a television in 1960. Newsreels were still happening, and indeed they were black and white. They tended to be one or two news items, somewhat analogous in a very weird way to certain podcasts that you can listen to now, like the end of The New York Times’ podcast The Daily.

Steve: I have to say there are some other things about going to the movies early. It was very immersive. In some ways, the opposite of being outdoors. I was growing up a block or two from Central Park, and I would go outdoors and play and everything would be three dimensional. But then I would go to the theater and everything would be the equivalent of virtual reality—you could forget everything else and just focus on what was on the screen.

Steve: Some of the earliest films I probably saw were My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, and How the West Was Won, which was a complete, utter embellishment about how America moved west, with every star known to man in that movie. So, you tended to forget everything else if you were focused on the fantasy of a family that could all sing perfectly.

Steve: But one of the things that sticks with me actually happened a few years later. So between my mother and father, my father was the one who acted with his heart more than his head, and my mother acted more with her head than her heart. They were both wonderful people and role models for me in their own way. I remember going to one of the early Beatles movies with my mother, fully expecting that she wouldn’t get it. By this time, I was thirteen years old, and it was the same theater. And she thought it was hilarious! I thought it was so cool that my mother could get that, because I don’t think they got the music that the Beatles were coming out with at that point. But she got that the movie was satirical and funny, and she probably got it better than I did. I was just enjoying the stars.

Victoria: Does the theater still exist today, or has it been changed into anything?

Steve: Yeah, I’m glad you ask. I sort of buried the lede there, as they say. The theater sadly was demolished. It would never have been demolished today, with the rules about landmark protections. It was torn down in the late 60s or 70s.

Victoria: Wow, so this is really a theater from your childhood and not necessarily somewhere you can return.

Steve: Correct. There were other theaters in the neighborhood, far more than there are now…. There was one a few blocks away that was a part of the RKO chain. That was huge compared to the one I had just talked about. Trans Lux was art deco, it was elegant, but it was not large, and the RKO was enormous. You can actually imagine vaudeville happening on a massive screen, and there were fancy box seats that are no longer used but were up high. Eventually, that got cut into two or three screens, but that too is gone. A lot of theaters are gone in Manhattan now.

Victoria: Yeah. My brother went to school in Manhattan and lived there for a while, and something I noticed was how difficult it was to find physical movie theaters. It sounds really interesting but also sad that there were so many unique theaters like the Trans Lux. Even now when we’re doing our film screenings for class in HQ, it feels nice to have that community of people you are experiencing many different movies with—especially for silent films, where you could really hear people’s reactions.

Steve: Exactly. When I talk about the immersive aspect of it for anybody, but especially for a young kid, I can make analogies to the world today. It’s kind of like virtual reality. The newsreel was kind of the warmup for the movie. Nowadays, the warmup for the movie is these trailers, and sometimes you see twelve or thirteen. I find them interesting actually, and in some ways I probably would have preferred them to the newsreels when I was eight years old.

Victoria: Would you say the newsreels were more so focused on the parents bringing their kids?

Steve: Yep. And a couple of other early memories, things that I know were different from today—there’s always been interaction in some subtle way among the people in the theater. And we all know that. There’s some magic to being at a movie together. If you go to movies today, you’ll find that the theaters are sometimes entirely empty. I’ve been to movies where two or three of us were the only ones in the theater. And yes, it’s interesting to see a film on the big screen, but the magic of interacting with people has transitioned through the years.

There are subtle and not so subtle ways that’s changed. In early years, nobody ever solicited for anything, like a coat drive or collecting spare change for some good cause. And that began to happen later. I don’t think that happens now, but there was an intermediate period where you began to have that kind of interaction. Now of course there are other types of interactions that happen at movie theaters. There’s a blending between the eating experience and the viewing experience.

Victoria: Yeah, I’m thinking of the Bow Tie Criterion Cinema here that closed a few months ago. The last movie I saw there was the fourth installment of John Wick, and the theater was really empty, even for a Friday night. And even when I saw Spider-Man: No Way Home, most theaters were packed and impossible to get a seat, but at Bow Tie we could get tickets up front even though it was opening night.

Steve: It broke my heart that that theater’s gone. I guess the economics just didn’t work, but it’s so sad that a city as great as New Haven lacks a theater. There were two theaters here back when I was a student. I was a student at Yale, and there was one exactly where the Apple store is. I saw a bunch of movies there when I was a student. And it lasted quite a while…it was there until the 1990s.

Victoria: I can definitely see it being a theater. And in terms of the movies that you do remember seeing, we’re learning a lot about how films speak to the time period that’s going on. So films in the 20s tried diverting the audience from the perils of the Great Depression or portraying the war. I was wondering what themes, if any, you saw in these early movies?

Steve: Bearing in mind that they were heavily filtered by what my parents would take me to—and by the way, my father was a great fan of Charlie Chaplin movies. He truly was one of the greatest actors of all time. To your point earlier, he could take the toughest of times and find sadness and happiness and joy and humanity. But going back to your question, I’m not sure I could categorize them. I believe that a lot of the movies I saw were an attempt to take a musical and make it into a movie.

Steve: Nevertheless, that’s something that sticks in my mind, is that it was just a two-dimensional version of a musical. And it was great, and then you started to migrate away from that. Certainly the comedy Beatles movies of the 1960s were completely different. And I keep thinking of the Beatles because of course they bridged so many different eras, but Yellow Submarine was a complete mindblower.

Steve: By the way, we shouldn’t leave animation out of this. Some of the early movies I would’ve seen would’ve been the Disney movies. I think animation was moving ahead and emerging as an important genre. Then in my teens and Yale years, you had already graduated to movies that had gotten tougher or had invaded your emotions and senses more, and it caused you to think about hard things. A really severe example is a movie I probably didn’t see until well after it came out called On the Beach. I’m a sci-fi buff, and this was one of the first serious books written about the consequences of what would have been an atomic war in the northern hemisphere. And it was talking about the gradual death of the Australian civilization, and a movie was made about that. That’s an example of a dark theme. And of course, you have…hm, why am I blanking on the name of the movie? Well you have Seven Days in May, The Manchurian Candidate, and a third one that came out in the span of one year. Very, very dark movies. But these weren’t the first movies I saw. When I was first seeing movies, I think I mostly saw feel-good, two-dimensional versions of musicals.

Victoria: That definitely makes sense considering you were eight years old at the time.

Steve: Dr. Strangelove! That was the third one in that trilogy, and they all came out around the same time. Another one that came out around the same time was Fail Safe. A lot of these have to do with doomsday scenarios. These are examples of going very frontally at things that had been no-nos before.

Victoria: Yeah, I remember I took a class last semester where we saw Dr. Strangelove, and I remember it weirded me out but in the best way possible.

Steve: Yep, it was a brilliant movie. There’s a hilarious scene—oh, remind us, we should come back to…what’s the name of the movie producer who did Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein? But in Dr. Strangelove, there’s a scene where Peter Sellers needs to get a payphone to call the White House and tell them what’s going on in the military base in Alaska, and he doesn’t have a dime. And there’s an army officer there, and he wants the sergeant to shoot the Pepsi machine so money will come out. I just thought the stacked amount of ridiculousness—and [laughing] then the sergeant says to him, “You’re gonna have to answer to the Pepsi company if I shoot this machine.” Meanwhile, the world is about to end because of an atomic war!

Steve: Anyway, I’m sorry I couldn’t give you more on what the actual first movie I remember seeing was.

Victoria: No, not at all! I don’t think I know the first movie I remember seeing either. But it’s been really interesting to listen to you talk about your movie going experiences and to think of the theater architecturally and as a community rather than just commercial buildings like Cinemarks or AMCs.

Steve: Yeah. And one other thing I hope you think about is the very fact that the earliest memories of theaters probably involve one’s parents because one is so young. You migrate from the movie going experience of your earliest experience to your teen years and then older, you’re actually migrating away from a certain family element that happens when you go to movies. So all of this is filtered in a very interesting way, because I had the comfort of being with my parents for those early movies.

Steve: My sixth sense is that most people who have this assignment and write about it understandably write about the theater experience, but be thinking about who you’re with when you’re doing it and how that might affect how you think about it.

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Steve Blum is the Senior Director of Strategic Initiatives (Association of Yale Alumni) and alum of the interviewer’s residential college Branford.