Second Run

I remember quite clearly, the months in my life where I made a conscious effort to search out knowledge instead of simply ingesting what was laid before me. I was a 19 year old in Orange County, a place that will wrap your soul in tract housing, smog and highway noise and convert it to something as innate and somehow tragic as asphalt. I was trying to figure myself out, trying to figure out what I stood for or if I stood for anything. It was a frightening and thrilling time of questioning my methods, my beliefs, my sexuality, my habits...

I was pulled in by the underground romanticism of the banned and forbidden, automatically drawn to Henry Miller and Kurt Vonnegut, but it was that nutty William S. Burroughs that found me a door I hadn't noticed before, opened it and pushed me through with rough, but loving hands.

It was about this same time that my eyes were being opened to the idea that there were film makers out there that were using this art form as a *gasp* art form. And so began my love affair with second run movie houses.

I didn't have any film geek friends at the time, so on days off from school and work, I would often drive up to the center of Los Angeles, by myself, to this little run down theater, The New Beverly, that would show double features of films that hadn't run in many theaters, or hadn't run in a decade or more. I remember taking in a double feature of Barton Fink and Naked Lunch with clenched hands, a conspirator's smile on my face in that darkened room. I got to see Taxi Driver, Blue Velvet, Sunset Boulevard, Blade Runner... All on the big screen in this rundown little theater that seemed so far from home out there near Beverly and La Brea.

I would always feel an echo of that same thrill when I went to the rep houses in other places, like remembering that first kiss that just made you dizzy. There were all those little houses in San Francisco; The Bridge and The Four Star and The Roxy and The Lumiere and my beloved Red Vic. Places with this romantic, underground charm that the new theater complexes couldn't touch with their concession stand chicken fingers- it was like twisting and exhausting, wondrous sex with a partner who knew a trick or fourteen versus fucking a plastic doll.

And The Castro! For fuck's sake people, The Castro! One of those beautiful old movie palaces that still manages to stand and earn its rent by showing art films, silent movies, second runs... It's a bastion of all that's good.

Ahhh, I hope to never lose that feeling, that thrill, that seemingly small act of rebellion in watching or witnessing something not ordained by the masses, something that strikes such a resonant chord with that wide-eyed 19 year old, still alive and well in me somewhere.