Growing up in Dhahran in the 1950s without television and
barely radio the movies were everything. Our only link with the outside world.
Three movies a week with a rerun on Thursday, as kids we’d go to pretty much
anything that was playing. Even if the feature was some unfathomable drama
about thwarted love, boundless ambition or existential trauma in 1950s America , we’d
go just for the pre-show filler.
Atlanta
is burning, Scarlett and Rhett are yammering away and BANG! High on the left
wall a cracker ball explodes with a sharp snap and a great flash that
illuminates the darkness. Now this is interesting. Vivian Leigh embraces Clark
Gable and three more cracker balls go off. The movie stops, the lights go up,
the teenagers in the back are startled, and one of the guys from Recreation,
probably Desai, strides down the aisle. At about the empty eighth row he finds
half a dozen coat-hanger sling shots on the floor. In the tenth row a bunch of
sub-teenagers grin back and the show goes on.
There would always be two cartoons. Glorious
big screen, lovingly made animated stories, the likes of which today’s children
will never see. Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, the incredibly violent Tom and Jerry
or Woody Woodpecker, another particularly vicious character whose antics
couldn’t be shown these days without a PG-13 restriction. Once in a while Mr.
Magoo or Droopy would wander across the screen as marvelously clueless as we
were. In the later years we had the pleasure of watching the Road Runner duel
Wiley Coyote on the big screen.
For some strange masochistic reason, probably at the behest
of those fine mothers who busily devised methods to get us out of the house,
Aramco started a cartoon matinee once a week during our trimester vacations. It
was sight to behold, every Monday morning at ten the theater would screen two
hours of only cartoons to a house full of kids. I’m fairly certain that most of
the Recreation staff called in sick that day and those that didn’t regretted
it. The cartoons were gathered from a hundred features and spliced together by
some patient Qatifi film editor. They also had cartoons that we had never seen
before like Heckle and Jekyll, Froghorn Leghorn, Chilly Willy and even Crusader
Rabbit.
There are 250 children twitching in the theater, the lights
go off and we are all swept into Looney Tunes: Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Elmer
Fudd and the whole gang. The Tasmanian Devil makes a rare appearance and then
the film snaps. It’s dark and someone starts stomping their feet, everyone
begins stomping their feet and the few remaining Recreation workers that
couldn’t get the day off decide to barricade themselves in the projection
booth. Finally, the cartoons resume and we’ve completely forgotten about the
hiatus.
At the regular screenings, the newsreels were almost as
fascinating as the cartoons. Somehow Aramco arranged to have an almost current
supply of newsreels about the great, mostly, incomprehensible events of the day
– striking coal miners in the UK, various politicians in dozens of countries
shaking hands one week and declaring war on each other the next. We had not the
slightest idea of what they were talking about. But hurricanes, floods, earthquakes
and train wrecks made an instant impression, stories about the celebrities of
the time Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, James Dean gave us the slightest glimpse of a
distant culture that we sensed we should know better than we did.
As a young movie goer you were really out of luck if the
pre-show trailers featured one of those travelogues by James Fitzpatrick - the
only man who could make Mr. Rogers sound like Don Rickles on espresso. In each
episode he would travel to some exotic location, shoot footage in a garish
Technicolor that would make a Hawaiian post card look demure and then punish
the audience with clichéd narrative and a voice that would make paint look
quick. It’s too bad because he had some great footage, but almost everyone in
the audience couldn’t wait until his signature sign off – goodbye in the
language of his country that week. Adios, Ma’salaamah, Adieu, Aloha, etc., and
not a moment too soon.
Then the feature would start on that beautiful, big screen
and all of us, adults and kids, would step into a world so far away from
Dhahran that you couldn’t measure it. The most current Hollywood
hits were at least eight months old by the time they made it to Dhahran and
that was considered fantastic. Interspersed were films that nobody ever heard
of and nobody would again. Through the end of the 1950s most movies were in
black and white, something that my own children can barely imagine, but the
stories captured our starved imaginations like bread.
Almost every opening night of every movie, no matter how
obscure, it was SRO for Dhahran’s adults. For us kids at a matinee, the place
wasn’t crowded, it was air-conditioned, you’d get your dose of cartoons and if
the movie bored you to death you could mess around with your friends in the
first four rows.
There was a strategy to obtaining the choicest seats in the
house – the middle of the front row. Clutching your crumpled riyal you’d get to
the theater early and wait at the head of the line. Then with ticket in hand
you’d scramble for the far door and race down the aisle. At that age it was
always a mystery to me why the teenagers would pass up prime seats in the front
and cluster in the upper right of the theater at the back – that’s no way to
watch Daffy Duck.
Anyway we would assemble like sparrows on a telephone line
across the first row and so on to the fourth. The show would start and so would
the running commentary, “Did you see that! Wow, look paratroopers over Malaysia . We saw
that in Rome on
our last local leave. Did you finish that paper for Mrs. Steinmetz? Quit
jabbing me with your elbow. I don’t like Gerald McBoing Boing cartoons. Amy
just got her shipment and tomorrow we can see her outfits. I’m sure that the creature
from the Black Lagoon could take down the Wolfman any day,” and on and on. And
if the movie mesmerized and spoke to us in any way, we became quiet and focused
our senses on the twenty foot tall images before us.
Of course not everyone was paying attention. The ten to thirteen
year old pre-adolescents were stuck between the front row and the elite
teenagers in the back. Voiceless, some of the young men affirmed their presence
by a most ingenious device. In Khobar they sold cracker balls. A pea-sized paper
fire cracker, you could throw it to the ground and get a bang and a spark, five
for a riyal. By a miraculous process that I’ve marveled about before, this
terrific invention the coat-hanger sling shot appeared out of thin air. By in-artfully
bending a piece of wire and stringing a couple of rubber bands to a cloth pouch,
any thirteen year old could have a perfectly serviceable cracker ball delivery system.
After the show all of us experience traumatic pupil dilation
as we step into the bright, bright sun light.
Next to the swimming pool the theater was my favorite place,
so I naturally had many experiences both at it and beneath it but the strangest
event occurred on my way to the movies. It was probably 1955 when some
enlightened benefactor of the human race in Aramco Recreation decided that the
theater needed a popcorn stand in front of the ticket office. It was going to
open on Wednesday afternoon. Propitiously that was also the opening of The Son
of Captain Blood or some similar low-budget pirate movie. I was so excited that
I went around with a rubber knife in my mouth for days before, which didn’t
work out so well as the lead-based paint on the knife inflamed the corners of
my mouth. A small price to pay.
So that afternoon two friends came over and with our riyal
and a half in hand we set out for Recreation one block away. What could
possibly go wrong?
Being kids we couldn’t just walk down the street, we had to
use the alley and look for discarded treasures on the way. We didn’t find any,
but we were charged up on dreams of popcorn and pirates. In the excitement, at
the end of the alley I proposed a foot race to the popcorn machine. Great idea.
We assumed the stance. Ready, Set, Go! And I raced out of the alley, into the
street, straight into the path of a stake-bodied truck carrying a dozen
gardeners. It was about six feet away from running me over, when in a sudden
bolt of inspiration I jumped as high as I could and went flying.
The next thing I knew I was sitting on the curb, about
twenty feet away from the truck, my glasses askew, watching the visibly-shaken Saudi
driver slowly walking up to me, contemplating his very short future. All the
gardeners made themselves scarce. Before he even got close to me, an Aramco
sedan pulled up and a young American jumped out and came running over. With the
truck driver hovering about nervously, he checked me out. There was no blood or
broken bones, I could see two fingers and aside from being whiter than a
freshly starched thobe I was okay.
He very kindly drove me back to my house and walked me up to
the door, opened it and then revealed that he was obviously a bachelor when he
said, “You better go in and tell your mother.”
I walked unsteadily down the hall to my parents’ room to
find my mother making the bed. She looked up and said, “Tim, why aren’t you at
the movies?”
“I got hit by a truck.”
In my later years as a parent I’ve often wondered why she
didn’t just strangle me at birth. It would have been so much easier.
Awesome! I have so many vivid memories of that theater. What I wouldn't give to go back just one more time...
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