1946 Atlanta, Georgia

Eleanor Lawson
Born in 1940
Interviewed on February 14, 2021
First Movie Memory in Atlanta, GA
Interviewed by Morgan Lawson

          Well, I actually lived next door to a movie theater in Lawrenceville, Georgia until I turned six years old. Movies were free if you were under the age of six, so my parents would let me walk next door by myself and watch a movie. This was the 1940s; everyone let kids do that type of thing. I remember going every week on Saturdays because that is when they had a double feature film. I really liked the Westerns back then. I would get a five-cent bag of popcorn or maybe a five-cent snickers bar. I think the movie might have been five cents as well if you were older than six. I am not sure because my parents never went to that movie theater with us kids. They would sometimes go at night when adult movies were played.

I do not remember actually watching a movie at the Lawrenceville movie theater, but I know I saw several Western movies, Tarzan, Roy Rogers, and serial shows that would have new episodes come out every Saturday. Before the movies, there would be a short film on national news at the time. This was the 40s, so the war was on everyone’s minds. The movie theater is where my family got news of the war.

Now the first movie I remember seeing was at the age of six or seven when I went to the big Fox Theater in Atlanta, Georgia. This is the only time I remember my whole family going to see a movie together. It was on a Sunday, and this was different because my small theater in Lawrenceville was not open on Sundays. We usually had church on Sundays. I had to wear my Sunday dress that day, and we took a day-trip traveling down to Atlanta to watch Song of the South because back then the highway was just a two-lane road. I think this movie is banned now, but everyone liked it at the time. This was the first time I had to stand in line to enter into a movie theater. I waited with mother and father outside the theater. I was excited because Song of the South would be played on a screen much bigger than the one in Lawrenceville. This movie was also in color, which was significant because most of the movies I watched had been in black and white.

The Fox Theater had the largest screen I had ever seen! They used film and shone light through the film to play the movie. Black people were to sit upstairs, and white people sat downstairs. I remember that Uncle Remus was a Black man who told stories about a rabbit who was always getting into trouble. I just thought they were wonderful stories. I never knew anything bad was going on. I was only six or seven, but I think everyone enjoyed the movie. You can’t see it now. I think it was banned because of how Black people were depicted.

I don’t remember the exact scenes of the movie, but I know it didn’t have foul language because it was a family movie. I actually don’t think adult movies could have foul language at the time. There were strict moral codes on all movies back then. People could ban movies if they broke these moral codes on foul language and sexual scenes. There were so many of these codes. One code I remember was that no movie could show a man and a woman with a single bed even if it was a married couple. If the movie did show a bedroom scene, there would always be two twin beds instead of one big bed. What a funny time!

I think the codes might’ve gotten looser in the 1950s or 60s. I did not watch as many movies as a young adult. Movies were more for kids. The reason I remember Song of the South so well is because it was one of the only times I remember us four kids going somewhere with my mother and father. I never really saw my parents. They had work, and we had a nanny. Back in the day, that is what a lot of people did. Parents weren’t as hands-on as they are now.