ZapTown

Movies were a small but important part of life when we moved out of Indianapolis for a brief foray into the Greenfield corn country. The Seven Voyages of Sinbad, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Rear Window, Godzilla King of the Monsters, were all recent memories. With the move to Greenfield where my father explored a brief career as a door to door salesman, that kind of dried up.

But then in the Fall of 1960, the Indiana Theater opened up after its remodeling for the grand unveiling of their Cinerama screen.

Cinerama had been around since the early 1950s, screening mainly travelogues, much the way the current IMAX megaformat process has. The process involved three 35 mm projectors, each showing a separate, synchronized panel that made up a whole panorama. The Indiana, to generate some buzz, opened the facility to Cub Scout troops all over the state for a free screening.

I was the Beetle Bailey of Cub Scouts, languishing in Bobcat for the extent of my career, which didn’t stop me from being envious of little Petie (not his real name, but he seemed like a Petie, if you know what I mean) who joined the scouts and took advantage of his advanced age to get an automatic promotion to Wolf.

The concept of behavioral problems was still many decades in the future, but Petie’s late enlistment in the Scouts was one of his mother’s last, desperate attempts to get the poor kid on the straight and narrow, before he dropped off the emotional precipice that is adolescence. Petie had some problems with bullying, with stealing, disobedience, and any other trouble that an eleven year old kid living next to a cornfield could think of. I should have been more charitable, but when you’re nine, that’s hard to do.

So, Petie, Bobby, Alan, my brother and I piled into a car for the two-hour trip to downtown Indiana, all attired in our crisp, blue uniforms and strangely foppish yellow scarves and little CSA beanies. The trip was a hard one with small bladders and en route, we stopped for gas and candy.

In the chaos of young boys running back and forth in a small, understaffed gas station, Petie took the opportunity to fill his pockets with an assortment of candy items, which he was kind enough to share with us. I condemned the act, but helped eat it anyway. The station attendant, if he noticed, would tell his friends about how the Cub Scouts came in and ripped him off. Petie was admonished by our parental escorts, but we didn’t turn around. It was a long drive to downtown, and we had to hurry.

A full decade before the multiplexes began invading the suburbs, the downtown movie palaces—the Circle, Loew’s, the Indiana—had a magic about them that few theaters today can match. For one thing, they were freaking big; at its peak, with the balcony section intact, the Indiana seated 3000, and for this, the place was full of blue-suited Cubbies.

For a kid, it was like entering some kind of baroque Superdome, with the ornate tile ceilings and original sculptures. Being late, we ended up in the balcony, but that was okay. I’m trying to remember if Petie committed any other deviant acts that day; it certainly would have been tempting to drop stuff on the unsuspecting Scouts in the mezzanine…

And the screen, or screens. The biggest Cinerama screens wrapped around in 140 degrees; the biggest screen was in the Denver Cooper, which measured a whopping 105 by 35 feet! The Indiana’s screen was a more modest 67 X 25, and curved at a still impressive 120 degrees, which was plenty enough to fill the field of vision from any seat in the house. This first screening was of the original This is Cinerama feature, a series of brief pastiches strung together to fill up two hours. First up was a roller coaster ride; that stomach lurching demo was like something I had never seen, and really, haven’t since.

The process wasn’t perfect; at the juncture between the panels, there was an occasional blurring of the image, but otherwise, dazzling to the eyes and ears accustomed to small black and white TVs.

A few months later, buoyed by a rebounding economy, my father found work in the tool and die trade, and we moved back to the Big City suburbs. I lost track of Petie. Not everyone gets an automatic promotion to Bear; I hope that it was a life-changing development.

The theater went on to screen a small selection of high concept movies, such as How the West was Won, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad World, and others. I only saw one more movie at the Indiana. But it was a good one….

NEXT: 2001: A Space Odyssey