Goodfellas, the Alamo Drafthouse, and the Moviegoing Experience

Movies

People have been calling time of death on movie theaters for years, and several big events in the last decade have exacerbated those predictions. The rise of streaming was the big one, with Netflix and its progeny offering your choice of films and shows for a monthly fee that is, at least here in New York, cheaper than a single movie ticket. Video on Demand presents an attractive alternative as well; even if it’s closer to the ticket price, you don’t have to leave home or buy expensive food, and if some friends come over or you have a family, the cost is minimized for several people.

Then, the COVID lockdowns and regulations forced theaters to close and movie studios to find creative ways around a traditional release. Warner Bros. and Disney began releasing movies on HBO Max and Disney+ simultaneously with their theatrical premieres, and while they’ve mostly stopped doing day-and-date streaming, the windows between a film’s theatrical run and its streaming debut have gotten much shorter. Disney isn’t even bothering with theaters for some of their movies, particularly Pixar. There are trailers for films that end with “Exclusively in movie theaters” to differentiate them from something you can catch on HBO in a couple of weeks.

There’s ample evidence against the impending demise of movie theaters, though. Top Gun: Maverick and Spider-Man: No Way Home have found massive success and demonstrated that people still want to go to the movies; they’d just like to see something they might actually enjoy. And while the lockdowns were raging, drive-in theaters experienced a resurgence, and they were a big hit. (Unfortunately, they seem to be disappearing once again now that regular theaters are up and running without mask mandates, at least in this area.) And those drive-ins were showing the classics, which were routinely outperforming newer fare, albeit with COVID caveats. In other words, if you entertain them, they will come.

But there’s another wrinkle to this, and one that an anecdotal experience I had yesterday reaffirmed for me. Seeing a movie in a theater is just different from watching it at home, and it has nothing to do with the experience of seeing something new. A theater is a different vibe, something that can’t be replicated no matter how tricked-out your sound system is or what kind of OLED TV you’ve got. The theater casts a spell on you, draws you into whatever story you’re watching (assuming it’s good), and pulls you in for suspense, triumph, heartbreak, joy, and whatever else the art unfolding before you wants you to feel. But here’s the real kicker: it can even do that with something you’ve already seen.

This weekend, the beloved-by-cinephiles Alamo Drafthouse finally opened its long-awaited Staten Island location. (Getting into the tumultuous journey to the theater opening could fill up a whole article on its own, but suffice it to say, New York was being New York and throwing hurdle after hurdle at people trying to open an honest business.) I’d been waiting for this for years, especially as this new Drafthouse is easily within walking distance from where I live. And over the weekend, they showed one of my favorite movies: Goodfellas. So, I made it my inaugural film at my new local theater, and I got an even better experience than I’d expected precisely because I was at a theater.

The crowd reacted to Goodfellas the way they might to a new movie. They gasped, they laughed, and there were moments of palpable nervous silence, where everyone was waiting in fear of what some of these violent gangsters would do next. For example, probably the most famous scene in Goodfellas is Joe Pesci’s “Funny how?” conversation with the recently departed Ray Liotta. It’s an incredible piece of acting that establishes the unpredictability of Pesci’s character, Tommy DeVito. Throughout the movie, Tommy can be funny and good-natured with his friends but in an instant can become a ruthless psychopath, one that horrifies even his Mafia cohorts. If you’ve never seen it, here’s the scene:

In every part of this scene, the audience reacted the same way the nervous gangsters at Tommy’s table did. You could feel the tension as Tommy indicated with an increasing menace that he would kill Liotta’s Henry Hill, and that last held breath before everyone breaks into laughter was replicated to a T. Now, this is Staten Island; I guarantee you that everyone in that theater had seen Goodfellas many times before yesterday, as I had. But here they were, ensnared by this masterpiece as if it were completely new to them. And part of why I know it was legit is because I had the same feeling. My heart stopped as Tommy continued to question Henry, and even though I knew what would happen in the back of my mind, I wondered if he would snap and kill his friend for paying him an unappreciated compliment.

Other scenes elicited this type of response as well: Tommy’s shooting of Spider; Jimmy Conway’s possible murder setup of Henry’s wife Karen; the gradual killing of Billy Bats, including the dinner sequence at Tommy’s mother’s house (you should have heard the gasps at “I didn’t mean to get blood on your floor”); almost any time Paul Sorvino stared someone down. (My God, what a loss his death was today.) That is not only the magic of movies but the magic of movie theaters. Proponents of theatergoing call it a “communal experience,” and this is exactly why. There is no living room setting, no home theater rig that can do this to an audience. But a movie theater can. And if people can be this transported by something old, imagine what a genuinely great new movie can do to them.

I’m convinced that movie theaters will never go away because, aside from the monetary necessity they present to movie studios, people simply won’t let them. We need (good) movies, and movies need theaters. If too much of the new stuff sucks, I can see even the larger chains like Regal and AMC taking a page from Alamo Drafthouse and arthouse theaters and showing more classics. They currently have those Fathom Events showings, but that’s once a month; I’m talking weekly features. If the new isn’t cutting it, bring back the old. If nothing else, it’ll remind people why they love going to the movies.