1958 Albuquerque, New Mexico

Daniel Ortega
1952
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Interviewed on February 3rd, 2023
By Carmen Ortega

The first movie I saw was The Day the Earth Stood Still, I was probably six or seven watching with my siblings on our black and white television set. I remember it being a very frightening experience because it showed a flying saucer landing on earth with a humanoid figure descending from it, not necessarily in a threatening way, but walking slowly. The earthlings were freaked out because, well, of course they were! I was just spellbound by the idea of a flying saucer. As I recall, the humanoid spoke Latin, which was also memorable to me because when I first started going to church it was in Latin, not English.

At the time, I didn’t understand what the movie was about except that it scared the hell out of me. But when I read about the film in later years, I understood that there were some cold war themes. The main message was that this ‘being’ from another world was issuing a warning to humankind about the danger of nuclear war and blowing each other up. This was the 1950s, so the message was ‘be careful, you’re going to destroy yourselves if you don’t watch out!’

One of my most memorable movie theater experiences was in middle school, when St. Charles Catholic school went on a field trip to one. It was a whole operation, with school buses and herding cats to get everybody on the bus. We saw a movie called The Bible, because of course, we were in Catholic school. It illustrated various scenes from the Bible, and I remember everyone’s wide eyes, mine included, when there was a segment about Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. All the little kids got riled up when we saw Adam’s butt as they walked in the garden. Then they decided it was time for an apple, and all hell broke loose!

Knowing the nuns, they were probably shushing us. I mean, talk about The Day the Earth Stood Still and the ETs, we weren’t sure what planet the nuns were from. They wore these medieval habits and clothing that covered them from head to toe, and these big wooden rosaries that hung from their belts. They just didn’t look like they were from this planet. It was bizarre to see these frightening figures in the classroom and in the halls of St. Charles.

We saw The Bible at the Sunshine Theater in downtown Albuquerque, which was in the same building where my father had his first law office. It was built in the 1930s or 40s. One of my impressions about going to that theater with my entire school was just the large scale of movie theaters from that era. If you go to an older movie theater like Sunshine, it can have hundreds of seats, compared to the smaller theaters we go to now at the mall. The Sunshine Theater is still there and is now used as a music performance venue. I also remember the concessions because that’s always been the way for movie theaters to make a ton of money, and without a doubt my favorite snack was buttery movie theater popcorn.