The movies returned to the Plaza Theatre, and what a return it was.
You can measure the success statistically — more than 29,600 people attended 65 screenings, nine lectures and one concert over a 10-day period (11 days if you include a public open house and a sponsors-only screening to kick it off Aug. 14) that concluded Sunday.
You can also measure it in terms of the sheer quality of the festival, dubbed “The Movies Return” to honor the fact that it has been 34 years since the historic movie palace showed its last first-run movie.
The festival reeled off a who’s who and what’s what of classic and contemporary cinema, with films by the likes of Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, George Cukor and George Stevens filling up the the 2,100-seat theater and the 180-seat Philanthropy Theatre. Top draws included “The Wizard of Oz” (with more than 3,000 attending two screenings), “Casablanca” (nearly 2,500 at two screenings), “Singin’ in the Rain,” “The Exorcist,” “Giant” and a concert of movie music.
Local filmmaker Zach Passero’s horror flick “Waked Lake” played to a packed house at the Philanthropy, which also showcased shorts by local directors.
I measure the success of this festival by the very palpable buzz it generated — a positive vibe that permeated the air all six times I attended events there.
My first visit was Aug. 16 for a matinee of “Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein.” I was surprised by the turnout — more than 800 people on a Sunday afternoon to see a mediocre 60-year-old movie — and the good vibrations. Everybody, it seemed, was beaming, ogling the theater, applauding everything from the “Western Skies” light show that preceded all the movies in the main theater to the opening of the curtains.
My 20-year-old son Keith, who aspires to be a filmmaker himself, was my constant companion after that. We attended the “Giant” screening and Q&A with cast member Robert Nichols on Wednesday, soaking up its very timely examinations of racism, sexism and classism, not to mention Nichols’ candid asides, calling James Dean “an oddball” and Rock Hudson “bland.”
We returned for the symphonic concert on Thursday. While the program got a little dull at times, you couldn’t help but get caught up in the infectious enthusiasm of guest conductor John Scott. The gracious, white-haired maestro of the Hollywood Symphony Orchestra brought smiles to the audience and the members of the El Paso Symphony.
The only real glitch we ran into was Friday’s 9:30 p.m. show of Kubrick’s 1964 Cold War classic “Dr. Strangelove,” which started about 20 minutes late. But even then, the total festival experience — the warm-up music on the theater’s Wurlitzer organ, the kind of hokey/kind of cool “Western Skies” light show and Kubrick’s still-edgy comedy — made up for it.
We finished the weekend with a Saturday matinee of “Mad Max 2” in the Philanthropy and Sunday’s festival-closing screening of Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” a little dated but still mind-boggling 40 years later.
Organizers Charles “Chuck” Horak, Eric Pearson and the El Paso Community Foundation really deserve a lot of credit for their tireless efforts (they put on 16-hour days) to pull off an event that bridged social and economic barriers.
It’ll be a tough act to follow, but Pearson said there will be a sequel and maybe even a film event there this Christmas. “We’ve decided we’d like to do something next year,” he said Monday. “There will be film programming throughout the year ... at some level.”
The movies returned in a big way last week. Let’s hope they return again.
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