I vaguely recall mostly obvious ones, like when the (name forgotten movie with runaway train headed toward station) film broke one second before the train actually hits the station at 60mph and some wiseguy says "well THAT was a train wreck", or in Mollie Brown, same deal – the ship is sinking and the film breaks and some wiseguy (the same?) says "Damn! She still ain't sunk!"
At a weekday midnight movie in ATX in the 80s. Can’t remember what we were there to see, but this second-run theatre was notorious for lots of pre-show trailers. One of ‘em this night was for a macho fly-boy fast jet spectacle (Top Gun? Were there others?). It went on and on, with almost no dialogue but plenty of noise. My friend busted out his best vocal imitation of a fighter plane (which cannot be rendered in text). Soon enough someone else followed suit. Within 30 seconds, everyone in the theater -- which was sparsely people but big and cavernous and echo-y) -- was free-styling their interpretations of loud military planes accelerating.
The best way to see one of the 70s/80s nerd films was in Manhattan's 86th Street Orpheum with the youth screaming and yelling where appropriate. I no kidding miss it.
But earlier: Cornell; "Deep Throat". First sex scene (oops, forgot a trigger warning; there) is a woman on whom cunnilingus I mean an oral sex act is being performed.
Dialogue is that midway through, the recipient says to the man performing the act words to the effect "Mind if I smoke?".
In response, a young woman in the (very large of course) audience shouts at the scream words to the effect "If you can smoke during that, you're better than me". Which, you know, is the best way to see porn I mean erotica.
A midnight showing of "Pink Flamingos" at the University Of Rochester, sometime in very early '90's. I was better than ten years out of any college, but what the hell. I had some uninitiated out of town visitors, and it was good, cheap fun.
The audience had a large contingent of frat dude-bros, who had plenty to say for the first ten or fifteen minutes. Finally, a large young African American lady yelled, "You guys can shut the fuck up! This isn't Rocky Horror!" And they did, but the best was yet to come.
When Divine and Crackers put a curse on the Marbles' via furniture licking, they become aroused. Divine says something along the lines of "Oh Crackers, I'm going to give you the best gift a mother can give her son." As oral gratification ensues, the frat boys were pole-axed. Suddenly, it wasn't a movie any more. Divine wasn't a drag queen. Freud and Oedipus were loose in the theater, and the frat boys started screaming like nine-year-olds at a horror picture.
"OH GOD, NO! NO!!"
And this magical moment became my most treasured movie memory.
May 12, 2023·edited May 12, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso
No more audience paticipation? My ex-wife & I attended "Drag Me to Hell," a 2009 Sam Raimi joint that was verging on meh-okay-I-guess. We were at a big AMC multiplex in Cherry Hill. The theater was decently full, as it was opening weekend. During the climactic scenes, one of a group of younger Black women, who had been enjoying the energy throughout and laughing & gasping audibly, shouts out, "This shit is DEEEEEP!" during the final sequence, which made even my ex-wife, very much the prototype Karen, laugh.
It made me miss those old days, when cult classics & fourth-run low-budget flicks would come to our University Film Series, all to the tune of college-age wiseacres cracking wise & rolling beer bottles down the floor towards the screen.
May 12, 2023·edited May 12, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso
Porn chic - recommended by Travis Bickle.
I don't have a comparable story. I have an adjacent story.
I worked as a manufacturer's rep for a company that installed lighting displays in Home Centers. There were 50 reps Nationwide. When I started everybody did their expenses out of pocket. They cut the checks weekly and if you kept up with your expense reports it was a good system. There were problems though and people bitched.( if you don't turn in an expense report you won't get an expense check. I've been fighting that battle all my life. Guy calls up and says "I didn't get an expense check" chances are he probably didn't turn in an expense report).
So the company went out and arranged for everyone to have an American Express card. When the first statements came in 49 out of 50 reps charged in porn films to their hotel rooms.
That was quite a conference call. I felt pretty virtuous because I didn't do it. Mostly because I figured I'd probably get caught.
I was on a conference call a few years later in the same business but with my own company. It was a nationwide rollout and they were probably 75 people on the conference call. We're going along talking about light fixtures. When suddenly we hear somebody say in a thick Northeastern accent, (New York? New Jersey?)
"Jesus you still on
that phone call?"
" Yeah this asshole just goes on and on- I can't understand half of what he's saying- those North Carolina guys all talk like they got a big dick in their mouth"
Smooth as hell ' the guy in charge of the call says" Now y'all want to make sure you got your phones on mute"
When I was 17 I saw Roman Polanski's "Macbeth" in Mexico (in English, with Spanish subtitles), and was startled by the high level and enthusiasm of audience participation, which included throwing the occasional empty beer bottle at the screen. It was a delightful contrast to the subject matter.
P.S. "Very much a woman's picture, relating directly to a woman's urgent needs and steeped in every woman's sexual fantasies."
Matinee audience, mostly kids, at the original "Village of the Damned". Townspeople are seen bringing food to the evil children, who then come out of the house with obvious menace on their mind. Kid in the theater calls out "Food musta been beans!" The audience cracks up.
May 12, 2023·edited May 12, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso
I was not in porn theatres often—the smell, getting propositioned, the price, the low-quality or plain offensive product—but one time sticks-out* in my memory:
It was some Times Square place, and though it was the early 1980s, it was showing a {Porn Chic}-era film, not "[…] Miss Aggie" (so I fear that plate shrimpless), and it was about five minutes in and no sex yet. The bums (it sounded like) in the front row started chanting 'Shut up and fuck!'. I don't remember how long it went on, I think they lost interest after a minute.
However, the version I'll make-up has them doing it until some sex starts, at which point there's a bit of silence until a gruff but measured voice from the front adds a polite 'Thank-you.'.
May 12, 2023·edited May 12, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso
I have two.
When "The Exorcist" first came out, there were all sorts of stories going around about how it was so scary people were throwing up in the theater. So the lights have dimmed, the trailers are over, and everybody's waiting tensely for the movie to start. In my recollection, the screen is entirely dark, and the first titles come on in red. The first title said "The Exorcist," and in the back of the theatre someone faked this really loud throwing-up noise. Broke up the entire theatre, and broke the tension too.
The other was when a friend and I went to a Bad Movie Festival at the Nuart Theater in Los Angeles, and they were showing, among other things, a bunch of Ed Wood films. (This was before he became an icon.) In the middle of "Glen or Glenda," there's a scene totally unrelated to the plot which is just a soft-porn seduction and undressing. There's this music in the background that we thought was a Hungarian dance (although later I found it was the dance of the Nubian slaves from Verdi's Aida). The audience was really getting into it, and started clapping on the strong beats like you do with those dances, and at the end of every musical line shouting "Hey!" Everyone joined in. It was a riot.
Not in-theater, but something that developed as a semi-permanent catch-phrase:
Went to see "Debbie Does Dallas," which was quite the scandalous X-rated movie when it came out. So much hoopla, so much screeching by the morals crowd over this over-the-top indecent film. My friend and I were looking forward to seeing this epic of porn.
Well, we sat through this thing and it was dreadful. Even as porn, it was terrible. At one point, the football coach appears wearing a complete football uniform. He opens the fly of the pants, there's a jump-cut to Debbie and her friend and they exclaim "Oh! Mr. Greenfield!" . . . and the camera cuts back to the coach who now has an obviously fake penis poking out of his pants. (Like, shiny hard plastic and, had it been real, would have been attached to his body about an inch below his navel.)
For the next three years, whenever one of us came across something even slightly disappointing, we'd say "Oh! Mr. Greenfield!" Call it participation after the fact.
Okay, I was a sophomore a long time ago at college far, far away (actually I still live in the same city). The film club (Mac Cinema they were called) would show movies in one of the lecture halls, usually a foreign (usually a French one) or an old classic. On one such occasion the flick was “Wuthering Heights”. My girlfriend loved this movie and was totally immersed in the plot and the emotional content therein, and was sobbing along with the action. Some asshole in the audience was making fun of the characters, as he wasn’t feeling the waves of pathos like my GF. He persisted in his loud ridicule until I felt like he was going too far with it. I shouted at the dude “SHUT THE HELL UP!” Not original or clever or funny at all, but the audience clapped and cheered. He shut the hell up. My woman friend was grateful for it, but, sadly, we broke up after the end of the semester. But we’ll always have “Wuthering Heights!”
My best friend and I attended a showing of "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" in the fall of 1982, when we were both 17. During the dream scene where Phoebe Cates takes off her bikini top and starts walking toward Judge Reinhold, a guy in the audience yelled "Yeah, unleash them babies!" 😜
May 12, 2023·edited May 12, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso
Nothing like seeing a film with a science error in at a science school. We watched the film of "Slaughterhouse Five" at Caltech, and when the Tralfamadorians explained 'We are invisible because we are in The Fourth Dimension.' the entire auditorium erupted in laughter.
(I assume they were invisible because of a low budget largely eaten-up by war scenes. See also: Montana Wildhack, and 'The Cheapest Special Effect'.)
I was partially responsible for "Plan 9 from Outer Space" 's showing there; the audience chanted 'Day! ' and 'Night!' with each change of sky.
I know we’re doing movies but my favorite audience participation spectacle happened in a little medieval village called Verges in Catalonia. Every Holy Thursday they put on a Passion Play in the town square followed by a Danse de La Mort. The actors are locals, and the whole thing doesn’t get going until late, 11 pm +, when everyone -- audience and players -- is good and drunk. I don’t speak the language, but it wasn’t necessary to ascertain the heckling was brutal. They especially went after the guy playing Jesus, who had a hard job, dragging that cross thru the crowd, trying to remember his lines, and summoning the appropriate emotions, whilst hammered. The jeering appeared to be part of the tradition, and I will no longer have my Passion Plays any other way.
I dated a girl for a while in my early 2os who just loved movies. We would buy matinee tickets at the mall multiplex and then sneak into two or three more features. At the tail end of one of these marathons we were seated toward the back of the theater watching Eyes Wide Shut. We heard a few people sneak in and sit down in the last row right behind us during the masked orgy scene. Then at the dramatic unmasking moment, one of the people behind me whisper-shouted in a thick Mexican accent, “Ai! Tom Cruise!?” We both lost it. To this day, when I see him pop up on screen, I want to say “Ai! Tom Cruise!?”
Well I laughed too, reading it.
I vaguely recall mostly obvious ones, like when the (name forgotten movie with runaway train headed toward station) film broke one second before the train actually hits the station at 60mph and some wiseguy says "well THAT was a train wreck", or in Mollie Brown, same deal – the ship is sinking and the film breaks and some wiseguy (the same?) says "Damn! She still ain't sunk!"
At a weekday midnight movie in ATX in the 80s. Can’t remember what we were there to see, but this second-run theatre was notorious for lots of pre-show trailers. One of ‘em this night was for a macho fly-boy fast jet spectacle (Top Gun? Were there others?). It went on and on, with almost no dialogue but plenty of noise. My friend busted out his best vocal imitation of a fighter plane (which cannot be rendered in text). Soon enough someone else followed suit. Within 30 seconds, everyone in the theater -- which was sparsely people but big and cavernous and echo-y) -- was free-styling their interpretations of loud military planes accelerating.
The best way to see one of the 70s/80s nerd films was in Manhattan's 86th Street Orpheum with the youth screaming and yelling where appropriate. I no kidding miss it.
But earlier: Cornell; "Deep Throat". First sex scene (oops, forgot a trigger warning; there) is a woman on whom cunnilingus I mean an oral sex act is being performed.
Dialogue is that midway through, the recipient says to the man performing the act words to the effect "Mind if I smoke?".
In response, a young woman in the (very large of course) audience shouts at the scream words to the effect "If you can smoke during that, you're better than me". Which, you know, is the best way to see porn I mean erotica.
A midnight showing of "Pink Flamingos" at the University Of Rochester, sometime in very early '90's. I was better than ten years out of any college, but what the hell. I had some uninitiated out of town visitors, and it was good, cheap fun.
The audience had a large contingent of frat dude-bros, who had plenty to say for the first ten or fifteen minutes. Finally, a large young African American lady yelled, "You guys can shut the fuck up! This isn't Rocky Horror!" And they did, but the best was yet to come.
When Divine and Crackers put a curse on the Marbles' via furniture licking, they become aroused. Divine says something along the lines of "Oh Crackers, I'm going to give you the best gift a mother can give her son." As oral gratification ensues, the frat boys were pole-axed. Suddenly, it wasn't a movie any more. Divine wasn't a drag queen. Freud and Oedipus were loose in the theater, and the frat boys started screaming like nine-year-olds at a horror picture.
"OH GOD, NO! NO!!"
And this magical moment became my most treasured movie memory.
No more audience paticipation? My ex-wife & I attended "Drag Me to Hell," a 2009 Sam Raimi joint that was verging on meh-okay-I-guess. We were at a big AMC multiplex in Cherry Hill. The theater was decently full, as it was opening weekend. During the climactic scenes, one of a group of younger Black women, who had been enjoying the energy throughout and laughing & gasping audibly, shouts out, "This shit is DEEEEEP!" during the final sequence, which made even my ex-wife, very much the prototype Karen, laugh.
It made me miss those old days, when cult classics & fourth-run low-budget flicks would come to our University Film Series, all to the tune of college-age wiseacres cracking wise & rolling beer bottles down the floor towards the screen.
Porn chic - recommended by Travis Bickle.
I don't have a comparable story. I have an adjacent story.
I worked as a manufacturer's rep for a company that installed lighting displays in Home Centers. There were 50 reps Nationwide. When I started everybody did their expenses out of pocket. They cut the checks weekly and if you kept up with your expense reports it was a good system. There were problems though and people bitched.( if you don't turn in an expense report you won't get an expense check. I've been fighting that battle all my life. Guy calls up and says "I didn't get an expense check" chances are he probably didn't turn in an expense report).
So the company went out and arranged for everyone to have an American Express card. When the first statements came in 49 out of 50 reps charged in porn films to their hotel rooms.
That was quite a conference call. I felt pretty virtuous because I didn't do it. Mostly because I figured I'd probably get caught.
I was on a conference call a few years later in the same business but with my own company. It was a nationwide rollout and they were probably 75 people on the conference call. We're going along talking about light fixtures. When suddenly we hear somebody say in a thick Northeastern accent, (New York? New Jersey?)
"Jesus you still on
that phone call?"
" Yeah this asshole just goes on and on- I can't understand half of what he's saying- those North Carolina guys all talk like they got a big dick in their mouth"
Smooth as hell ' the guy in charge of the call says" Now y'all want to make sure you got your phones on mute"
Then you hear a guy go
" Aw fuck."
When I was 17 I saw Roman Polanski's "Macbeth" in Mexico (in English, with Spanish subtitles), and was startled by the high level and enthusiasm of audience participation, which included throwing the occasional empty beer bottle at the screen. It was a delightful contrast to the subject matter.
P.S. "Very much a woman's picture, relating directly to a woman's urgent needs and steeped in every woman's sexual fantasies."
Gotta love that self-confidence.
Matinee audience, mostly kids, at the original "Village of the Damned". Townspeople are seen bringing food to the evil children, who then come out of the house with obvious menace on their mind. Kid in the theater calls out "Food musta been beans!" The audience cracks up.
I was not in porn theatres often—the smell, getting propositioned, the price, the low-quality or plain offensive product—but one time sticks-out* in my memory:
It was some Times Square place, and though it was the early 1980s, it was showing a {Porn Chic}-era film, not "[…] Miss Aggie" (so I fear that plate shrimpless), and it was about five minutes in and no sex yet. The bums (it sounded like) in the front row started chanting 'Shut up and fuck!'. I don't remember how long it went on, I think they lost interest after a minute.
However, the version I'll make-up has them doing it until some sex starts, at which point there's a bit of silence until a gruff but measured voice from the front adds a polite 'Thank-you.'.
*'You make the joke—Iʼm bitter.' —Crow T. Robot.
I have two.
When "The Exorcist" first came out, there were all sorts of stories going around about how it was so scary people were throwing up in the theater. So the lights have dimmed, the trailers are over, and everybody's waiting tensely for the movie to start. In my recollection, the screen is entirely dark, and the first titles come on in red. The first title said "The Exorcist," and in the back of the theatre someone faked this really loud throwing-up noise. Broke up the entire theatre, and broke the tension too.
The other was when a friend and I went to a Bad Movie Festival at the Nuart Theater in Los Angeles, and they were showing, among other things, a bunch of Ed Wood films. (This was before he became an icon.) In the middle of "Glen or Glenda," there's a scene totally unrelated to the plot which is just a soft-porn seduction and undressing. There's this music in the background that we thought was a Hungarian dance (although later I found it was the dance of the Nubian slaves from Verdi's Aida). The audience was really getting into it, and started clapping on the strong beats like you do with those dances, and at the end of every musical line shouting "Hey!" Everyone joined in. It was a riot.
Not in-theater, but something that developed as a semi-permanent catch-phrase:
Went to see "Debbie Does Dallas," which was quite the scandalous X-rated movie when it came out. So much hoopla, so much screeching by the morals crowd over this over-the-top indecent film. My friend and I were looking forward to seeing this epic of porn.
Well, we sat through this thing and it was dreadful. Even as porn, it was terrible. At one point, the football coach appears wearing a complete football uniform. He opens the fly of the pants, there's a jump-cut to Debbie and her friend and they exclaim "Oh! Mr. Greenfield!" . . . and the camera cuts back to the coach who now has an obviously fake penis poking out of his pants. (Like, shiny hard plastic and, had it been real, would have been attached to his body about an inch below his navel.)
For the next three years, whenever one of us came across something even slightly disappointing, we'd say "Oh! Mr. Greenfield!" Call it participation after the fact.
Okay, I was a sophomore a long time ago at college far, far away (actually I still live in the same city). The film club (Mac Cinema they were called) would show movies in one of the lecture halls, usually a foreign (usually a French one) or an old classic. On one such occasion the flick was “Wuthering Heights”. My girlfriend loved this movie and was totally immersed in the plot and the emotional content therein, and was sobbing along with the action. Some asshole in the audience was making fun of the characters, as he wasn’t feeling the waves of pathos like my GF. He persisted in his loud ridicule until I felt like he was going too far with it. I shouted at the dude “SHUT THE HELL UP!” Not original or clever or funny at all, but the audience clapped and cheered. He shut the hell up. My woman friend was grateful for it, but, sadly, we broke up after the end of the semester. But we’ll always have “Wuthering Heights!”
My best friend and I attended a showing of "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" in the fall of 1982, when we were both 17. During the dream scene where Phoebe Cates takes off her bikini top and starts walking toward Judge Reinhold, a guy in the audience yelled "Yeah, unleash them babies!" 😜
Nothing like seeing a film with a science error in at a science school. We watched the film of "Slaughterhouse Five" at Caltech, and when the Tralfamadorians explained 'We are invisible because we are in The Fourth Dimension.' the entire auditorium erupted in laughter.
(I assume they were invisible because of a low budget largely eaten-up by war scenes. See also: Montana Wildhack, and 'The Cheapest Special Effect'.)
I was partially responsible for "Plan 9 from Outer Space" 's showing there; the audience chanted 'Day! ' and 'Night!' with each change of sky.
I know we’re doing movies but my favorite audience participation spectacle happened in a little medieval village called Verges in Catalonia. Every Holy Thursday they put on a Passion Play in the town square followed by a Danse de La Mort. The actors are locals, and the whole thing doesn’t get going until late, 11 pm +, when everyone -- audience and players -- is good and drunk. I don’t speak the language, but it wasn’t necessary to ascertain the heckling was brutal. They especially went after the guy playing Jesus, who had a hard job, dragging that cross thru the crowd, trying to remember his lines, and summoning the appropriate emotions, whilst hammered. The jeering appeared to be part of the tradition, and I will no longer have my Passion Plays any other way.
I dated a girl for a while in my early 2os who just loved movies. We would buy matinee tickets at the mall multiplex and then sneak into two or three more features. At the tail end of one of these marathons we were seated toward the back of the theater watching Eyes Wide Shut. We heard a few people sneak in and sit down in the last row right behind us during the masked orgy scene. Then at the dramatic unmasking moment, one of the people behind me whisper-shouted in a thick Mexican accent, “Ai! Tom Cruise!?” We both lost it. To this day, when I see him pop up on screen, I want to say “Ai! Tom Cruise!?”