1940 Vineland, New Jersey

Charles Hill
1936
Vineland, New Jersey
Interviewed on September 17, 2019
by Anne Lu

     I saw my first movie when I was four, in a town about ten miles away from mine. It wasn’t that my town didn’t have theaters, but my father was a doctor in my hometown of 15,000 and did not want his patients to see him going to a movie. He and the other twenty or so “professionals” in the town—doctors, lawyers, and such—generally kept away from public entertainment, and he did not enjoy watching movies in the first place.

Despite all this, my parents took me to my first movie because it was a special occasion: the theater was showing Steamboat Willie. It was one of the first times an animated cartoon movie was being put on for children. It was also the first cartoon with a full soundtrack and the first appearance of Mickey Mouse—all in all, there had been nothing like it before. I did not know any of this at the time, but I added all this to my memory as I grew up and learned more. At the time, I just remember being amazed. I had never seen anything like it—the animated characters moving on the screen, the sound, everything. I didn’t know that Mickey Mouse would become an international icon; he was just a character moving on the screen. To four-year-old me, this movie was just a story about a steamboat captain and a big bully-character who got punished by the narrative. I hadn’t really begun to read yet and we did not have cartoon books in my home; of course, there were no screens everywhere like today.

As I grew up, more theaters opened. The problem back then was that there were no preexisting buildings to transform into theaters—the towns were so small that there were no city auditoriums or anything like that. Usually some rich businessman came and built one in the middle of town and they would be grand, beautiful things with chandeliers that they would turn up and down for the lights. The seats were all stuck together in a row, a lower-cost imitation of the grand opera houses in New York or Paris. There would be a doorman in a uniform with a hat in some military fashion and a couple of ladies who would guide you to your seat with flashlights—all part of the attempt to appear high-class and sophisticated. By the time I was in high school, there were three theaters in my town, and one of them would show cheaper cowboy movies that I would go watch with my uncle Bill. These weren’t the glamorous Hollywood Westerns, just cowboy movies with straight-up shooting. There must have been hundreds of this huge subgenre of film, which eventually became replaced by the Hollywood Westerns. No one talks about the old cowboy movies anymore.

I watched movies once in a while throughout college and law school, and eventually I went to Vietnam for the war. We had access to first-rate Hollywood movies, which we would check out one night, take with us back to the barracks, and return the next morning for another guy to check out. They would come in two huge reels and you would go back to your barracks and have to project it yourself onto a big sheet, with no staff or anything. These were fantastically made movies, but the reels were so big and every time I would have to rewind them and eventually I just thought, “I don’t really care if I don’t watch the second reel,” until it become enough of a deterrent that I just stopped watching movies. I was about 30 then, and I think I’ve watched about five movies since then.