1968, Wilton, Connecticut

Julia Adams

1957

Wilton, Connecticut and Ticonderoga, New York 

Interviewed on January 29, 2023

by Cynthia Lin

Well, so I thought about this question, and let me describe a little bit why I was confused with the memory. I was born in 1957, and my family had a small black and white TV for many years. And I watched some things – very small – on that TV that were more like watching a film. Those were things like JFK’s funeral procession when I was five or six. Other things like that were like the first walk on the moon, which I watched when I was eleven or twelve at Girl’s Scout Camp when they got us up in the middle of the night to watch on a tiny black TV – it was like watching a movie, right? And, things sort of of that ilk – they were these collective shared enormous political or cultural events: “I Have a Dream” speech, Martin Luther King. So, they weren’t like family viewing. They were being viewed by hundreds and millions of people simultaneously. So I think that’s why they are almost encoded as early movies in my head. 

So then to think about movies. There was, for me, a stark division between the first movies I saw on that little black and white TV, at home, which were things like Bambi by Walt Disney and the movies I saw in the movie theaters, which were enormous events. And I couldn’t – and here’s the question to myself – one movie that I remember very clearly was a huge event was Lawrence of Arabia. That was released when I was five. The David Lean movie. Enormous technicolor, which I’m sure you’ve either seen or will see in film class. But I’m sure I didn’t see it at age five. I’m sure I saw it as a re-release when I was still quite young – because we went as a family. But I’m sure I wasn’t five – a three hour movie! 

So, that part was a little fuzzy, but it became very clear to me that there was a whole set of virtually simultaneous films that made an enormous impression on me that all came out in 1968. So I would have been ten or eleven. And those were movies like 2001 of Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick films – which was an enormous visual experience – Romeo and Juliet – currently in the news again because of the lawsuit by the then teenage actors about their alleged exploitation. Some enormous technicolor-esque wide screen productions, Disney and Disney-esque like films like Oliver, based on Oliver Twist, Charlies Dickens, and Gigi and they all came out – roughly – in 1968. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, yes, quite a few. So I think that was when my movie going life really exploded. And movies that must have been earlier, movies like Mary Poppins, Bambi, all of these wonderful kids-oriented films, I would have seen on that black and white TV. And there was such an enormous difference between those tiny black and white experiences and the full theater, technicolor glory of those films of that era. 

The theater was not decorated. I grew up in Connecticut, so it was a small town theater but with a large screen. I’ve certainly been to many wonderfully decorated theaters in cities I’ve lived around the world and those add an extra layer of joy to the experience, but our local movie theater was humbler. In fact, I also went in the summers to movie showings in upstate New York – Ticonderoga, New York – the theater’s long closed, population’s too small now and in a bid to remain solvent, the theater opened up a second theater, but you could hear the other movie going on while you were watching the movie you were watching. Still wonderful to go to the movies, but somewhat complicated under those conditions. [Laughter.] You know, you’re watching a quiet romantic comedy and you hear explosions. 

I think it varied depending on the film. I certainly did not understand the two movies that made the biggest impact on me and those were certainly the Kubrick 2001 – which no reviewers understood at the time anyway – the beginning especially was, you know … now rendered, quoted in so many films since both seriously and amusingly. For example, Clueless, where the rising cellphone is likened to the monolith in the 2001. And Romeo and Juliet, which I could understand the outlines of the story, but the language was directly Shakespearan, so I was less familiar with, but it absolutely inculcated a lifelong love of Shakespeare in me, so it was hugely influential. Movies matter. 

I think one difference there, that you’re raising, is that it’s so different now – you imagine that every single American that owns a phone will have made some kind of movie, however brief, whereas when I was a child, the very very few adults who had and knew how to use or work a “movie cameras” – like family movie cameras – that was such a rarity. And it elicited movies that tended to perform. So, you know, it was just a completely different space. 

And even the era of experimental American film that I would go see. When I was in New York City after college, I would go sometimes to see some experimental film series and so on. And some of those were pretty odd, like Andy Warhol’s 24 hour film of the donut hole. [Laughter.] Oh, there’s one I’ve been dying to see, but I haven’t seen it yet. It’s this movie called The Clock, which is a fairly recent one and it tracks – I guess it covers an entire 24 hour period and as you watch the film, it is always the time with which you’re watching the film, and it’s intercut with shots at keypoints or many points of watches and clocks exactly marking the moment with which you are watching it in the 24 hours. Yeah, it’s supposed to be wonderful. 

I think that when I was younger and there were these rare pilgrimages – I had a pretty large family, I was the oldest, so it involved complicated mobilizations, with really young children, to go to the movies. And also finding something that everyone could go to, which included parents, kids, kids of widely different tastes, etc … so those films, those films tended to be, you know, the democratizing e.g. Disney films or movies a little later like It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and the Inspector Clouseau films and so on – these were family outings. 

Then I entered junior high school. That ‘68 year – that was the hinge point between childhood and adolescence, and those were typically outings with friends. Which we all enormously enjoyed. And then of course it got into all the complexities about movie ratings and whether you could go to the film and if you needed to bring an adult – but then there were some movies where you wouldn’t want your parents to go with you. For example, Bonnie and Clyde. And that became for many people, an area of unease in their high school years. 

In my youth, when I would typically go to the theater – one in Connecticut and one in upstate New York during the summers, there was a concession in the Connecticut theater, which was a much more upscale theater. One of the things that surprises me, looking back, is, of course, we all love popcorn and we all drank drinks, especially during Lawrence of Arabia – there was an enormous collective thirst, particularly in the desert scenes. I don’t remember being bothered by this huge collective eating, which now drives me crazy in the movies. And then the theater in upstate New York, you would bring your own if you wanted to eat something in the theater. Candy bars of that sort or you could go out afterwards. Popcorn was always my favorite. It was also a lot less expensive back then. I would think twice before ordering popcorn now. 

The Godfather – that was another one of those films that made a huge impact on me. I must have been older then… I was in high school. It was a shocking film at the time. The violence was shocking. I think in mass market movies, that was one of the first times they showed that much violence. 

1972. There were a whole series of mass market R-rated movies of that time that were extraordinarily violent. These were sort of director-imprinted movies – Sam Peckinpah styled movies. I never did see Straw Dogs, which created so much controversy when I was in high school. There was this explosion of post-Vietnam War or late Vietnam War films that were both tackling issues of violence but were also just influenced by the violence in the US and also in the US military. Films began to reflect that. 

I still haven’t recovered from seeing on that little black and white television Hitchcock’s Psycho. I watched it with my father – my mother wouldn’t watch it. It was absolutely terrifying. I would have been thirteen, I think? I understood the horror and the terror of it. And of course Hitchcock films it in the perspective of the murderer, and I don’t think I understood the techniques of the shots at the time. (But I only understood those later when I began reading film theory.) 

I experienced the shift towards the blockbusters in the industry. And that did involve titillating on-screen violence – Steven Spielberg’s Jaws was one of the key films that made that shift. On the other hand, you can say that the response to that were films that were made family friendly, and the principle blockbuster of that was Star Wars. And these were the same era in the ‘70s … ‘75? ‘77? At this point, I was a college student, but I would come home and take my younger sister out to the movies. And one sister, who’s developmentally disabled, so taking her to Star Wars I (now it’s IV, because of the prequels, right?) and how much she loved it. And that was PG! One of the difficult things about the Star Wars series is that it gets extraordinarily violent by the end, and then the parents have to tell their kids, “Well, you actually can’t see the next one!”

If we were going to watch a film collectively as a family, it had to be something broad based that could actually appeal to people years younger than yourself and also people who were of different cognitive abilities. And, the parents had to want to sit through it, too. So it was challenging! I think, though, that was part of Disney’s enormous success, that it was capable of making those kinds of movies, year in and year out. 

Well, Bambi was a tough one. Bambi’s really old. I believe it was made before I was born – 1942. So, of course, Bambi’s mother is slain in the beginning of the film, so the rest of the film is easier for children to deal with, but the beginning is really traumatic. And especially at that time. So not everybody is actually capable of watching Bambi. It’s a hard film. And Disney, you know, Disney often had to dispose of the mother figure so that children could have adventures. Either the mother is no longer alive in these films, or she is actually killed off, which is giving rise to both critiques and parodies of Disney for doing that. Film after film… 

My mother was careful about Bambi because it was hard for little kids to watch. At the same time, though, there were still movies on TV from the 1950s that were black and white – films that would be replayed on TV – that were quite scary. ‘50s horror movies. One example that would play in the afternoon – let’s say you were homesick – that no little kid could really watch without being absolutely terrified was The Blob. In the movie, there’s a meteorite that crashes in the night, and of course, the family goes out to look. What the? You can hear the horror movie tropes already. And then they hear something in the woods – I think it was the father. He pokes at it with a stick, and it leaps up onto his hand! And engulfs it! Shades of every horror film you’ve ever seen. But those tropes worked. They’re scary! I remember being terrified of this film. 

When we were growing up, my dad didn’t have so much time to go watch movies. He had two jobs – he was very busy. But, he did have a weak spot for the opera – my mother loved the theater – and they both really loved some of the crossover areas such as Rodgers and Hammerstein. I remember another big event in the family was watching the 1967 broadcast of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella. Which was also kind of a mass watching event, at least for middle America. And the music is just super wonderful for kids. 

And because you didn’t schedule these, since they were shown, say, once a year on Christmas Eve. So the family didn’t control the timing, of course. And that actually made them closer in a way to holidays. It became a family tradition, in a sense, which was shared. Now, we have more choice, and it’s also more privatized. And the sheer range of choice now is a bit intimidating. 

I think in my life the pandemic has been a big interruption. So I have only seen so few films since the beginning of the pandemic. I went with a group of Hopper students and Benjamin Franklin students to see Dune, when we rented out the Criterion – but that’s not an ordinary viewing experience! Avatar 2 – same genre. But now I don’t really go to the theater. So what’s happened to me is, embarrassingly, I’m now recapitulating the general problem. That is, part of the problem, of course, is that Americans are only trodding out to see these huge big budget, fairly down market populous films like Marvel, Avatar, Tom Cruise movies. And now that’s me! And then at home, I’m streaming the more intellectual, you know, Tár, but I feel a little guilty. Because the problem is they’re not able to… We’re losing the audiences for adult films, or have we already lost them? Can they be won back? For serious filmgoing? Because it’s a shame to only see these films on TV or streaming. But if the audience, which includes me, is not going to the theater unless they’re Marvel style, that’s a big problem. So I’m part of the problem now, not the solution. [Laugher.]