Movie Nights

 I didn't have time to get this posted last week... "better late than never" as we used to say. 

My granddaughter planned a movie night for us last weekend. She had detailed ideas of what movie we could watch, what snacks we could have, who would be invited... she knows how to plan a party! After she had talked me through the whole deal, she said "well, Grammie, should we just have it at our house? That would be easier." 😁 (Considering we don't have a screen in our living room, that sounded good to me.) 

But the movie night with grandchildren got me reminiscing about watching movies at my grandparents' house when I was growing up. I don't know how common it was in the 70s, but I was fortunate enough to have a grandpa with an 8mm reel-to-reel movie projector. (I tried to find a photo of one like it online but couldn't find the style he had.) At family gatherings -especially Christmas- we cousins would watch movies that would wind from one reel to the other in front of a bright light that projected the pictures onto a screen. Walt Disney's  Three for Breakfast  and an Abbott & Costello Racecar Driver movie were our favorites. I would've sworn they were longer than 7 minutes, but I'm sure we made them last longer by playing the reels backwards and forward at key moments. Like in the Laurel & Hardy movie where he would trip, but we'd play it backwards to make him un-trip. Several times over before we let the story go on. 

I remember at first Grandpa always ran the projector, but as the grandsons got old enough, they were entrusted with running it. If the winding mechanism was glitching, the film would stall in front of that hot light, which would quickly start to burn the film strip. If the film burned, it was ruined. So I recall being stressed about keeping the film running, and all the grandsons knew how to shut it off quickly and someone would go get grandpa. After the film was finished playing, the end of it would flap until the winding mechanism was turned off. And then we had to rewind it onto the reel so it would be ready to play the next time. There were no sound effects; we created our own. Some of the movies predated color film even. It was a very different experience from what my grandchildren have now. Kids these days don't know the hilarity of running film strips backwards. Or the simplicity and purity of 1940s film plots. Back when there was no gender confusion or purple hair or foul language in films, no hidden twisted psychology. I'm fairly sure we had the better deal.