La La Land to us, ‘That’s all, folks’
“Can a wife’s love withstand the torments of lifelong sacrifice,” blazed the movie advertisement for “Courage.” “Will loyalty to a husband, imprisoned for life, last when there are others who offer love?”
Meanwhile, the Main Theater in Uniontown offered “The Invisible Power,” the cinematic story of “a man and his wife hunted and terrorized by police detectives.”
The ad in the newspaper for “The Invisible Power” states, “No lover of the photo-play should miss this unusual picture.”
Snicker if you will, but this was the best of Hollywood (well, OK, maybe not THE best), and if you and a date were stepping out on the evening of Dec. 5, 1921, you were probably looking forward to taking in either “Courage” or “The Invisible Power.”
At least you could. Fast forward 100 years, to Dec. 5, 2021. Look up what’s playing on a movie screen tonight in Uniontown or, for that matter, in all of Fayette County. Do you know what you’ll find? Nothing.
For the first time in over a century – a century! – Hollywood has abandoned us. We are a cultural desert, at least as far as new, splashy Hollywood movies are concerned.
AMC, which commands more screens worldwide than any other outfit (8,043 as of November 2020), shuttered the county’s last six first-run movie screens at the Uniontown Mall in July.
Standing on the sidewalk peering through the locked glass doors of the (former) theater last Wednesday afternoon, a passerby spied the letters A-M-C propped against a lobby wall. Everything inside looked forlorn.
Posted outside on single sheets of paper were two notices with the exact same wording: “Theater closed. AMC Classic Uniontown has permanently closed.”
I suspect there are few if any villains here. AMC was pushed to the wall by the COVID-19 pandemic. The worldwide pathogen forced the theater owner to close down every one of its properties in March 2020. What was supposed to last six to 12 weeks went on for months. The result was near-bankruptcy for AMC.
Then the Los Angeles Times reported in late January that the company had managed to raise $917 million in fresh cash. AMC chief Adam Aron told the newspaper, “We are very optimistic about the future of movie-going once the pandemic is somewhat behind us and once new movie titles are released again.”
Aron said his company had been “burning through cash.” Now, he continued, it had enough to survive, at least for the short term.
Apparently it was not enough to keep the movie doors open in Uniontown.
One problem almost assuredly was the impact the pandemic had on movie-making itself. Hollywood went into a production lockdown, and major movies that were already in the can faced months of delayed release.
For instance, studio execs postponed time and again the much anticipated James Bond thriller, “No Time To Die,” starring, for the last time as Agent 007, Daniel Craig.
It almost seemed as if this version of Bond – James Bond – would never emerge from its hiding place during the pandemic.
Needless to say, “No Time To Die” never made it to Uniontown when it was released in October, unlike its many predecessors, beginning with “Dr. No” in 1963.
Ten or so years earlier the impressively long mobile home featured in the Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz movie comedy, “The Long Trailer,” was parked on a Uniontown city street where it was gawked at by fans of both the movie and the nation’s then No. 1 TV show “I Love Lucy,” starring the aforementioned Mr. and Mrs. Arnaz.
Through the years the movies helped connect Uniontown and Fayette County to the wider world. The tinsel of celluloid make-believe was both real and culturally important.
To have Jimmy Cagney performing on a screen near you in the ’30s, or Astaire and Rogers, Hope and Crosby, Bogart and Bacall in the ’40s, Audrey Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor in the ’50s, Eastwood and Newman in the ’60s, and so forth and so on, was not nothing.
MGM re-released “Gone With The Wind” in 1969, on its 30th anniversary. Women watching from a seat in State Theater sighed audibly at the first sighting of Clark Gable on screen. (Trust me, I was there.)
It must have been doubling thrilling the first time around.
“Casablanca” is marvelous on TV or streaming. To have traveled just blocks from home to see it on a big screen in a plush, darkened theater in 1942 surely made it even better.
Now, those days are done, the opportunities lost. So long, Hollywood, from all of us in Uniontown.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.