FILM
Son of Kong
/ Benjamin Strong
01.15.06
Of the scenes dominating my earliest memories, the most indelible played originally in two Denver theaters.
The first of these theaters wasn't actually a performance space, but a kitchen in a house on Humboldt Street, where, when my father arrived home from work, a necktie barely loosened yet from his tree trunk neck, a marriage unraveled in yells. Unhappy families, we can infer from Tolstoy, will each dissolve in their own fucked-up style. This was my parents’.
The second place was a refuge from the first, the Cooper Theatre two miles away on S. Colorado Blvd. A low, stumpy silo painted a majestic shade of rust, the building sat along the road knowingly, like a fat Buddha to whom I paid matinee-rate homage on those afternoons when my mother needed to get away from that house. The panoramic Super Cinerama screen inside had a pronounced curvature, engineered to join images from three synchronized projectors. When the Cooper opened its doors in 1961 this screen was the biggest in the country—38 feet high, 105 feet wide. The Cooper wasn’t just immense, it was plush. A Saturday night destination for a booming cattle town’s kings. A place to bring their families (or possibly, to take their mistresses, a luxury both my father and his father indulged). For the occupants of 814 seats, the parking lot could accommodate as many as 400 cars. Between shows, drapes matching the hue and corrugated surface of the exterior hung across the screen, and on either side of the floor were these swank, open-air smoking lounges from which a dame and her Lucky Strike could still see the feature. Later when I took up cigarettes, I imagined myself reclined along these shallow sofas, a bitchy wit in a Wilde play installed at his divan. Because of the Cooper, I’ve made a lifelong wastrel’s practice of avoiding responsibilities or bad decisions or poorly selected girlfriends—of being for 120 minutes elsewhere—by hiding in the dark.
It does not seem possible that this inviolable orange tin can—razed in 1994, usurped by a Barnes and Noble—is gone. It had seemed as constant as a battlement wall erected to keep out a beast. And it was at the Cooper in December 1976, no more than a week before my mother filed for divorce and my father moved out, that she took me to see a movie in which just such a wall comes down.
The first of these theaters wasn't actually a performance space, but a kitchen in a house on Humboldt Street, where, when my father arrived home from work, a necktie barely loosened yet from his tree trunk neck, a marriage unraveled in yells. Unhappy families, we can infer from Tolstoy, will each dissolve in their own fucked-up style. This was my parents’.
The second place was a refuge from the first, the Cooper Theatre two miles away on S. Colorado Blvd. A low, stumpy silo painted a majestic shade of rust, the building sat along the road knowingly, like a fat Buddha to whom I paid matinee-rate homage on those afternoons when my mother needed to get away from that house. The panoramic Super Cinerama screen inside had a pronounced curvature, engineered to join images from three synchronized projectors. When the Cooper opened its doors in 1961 this screen was the biggest in the country—38 feet high, 105 feet wide. The Cooper wasn’t just immense, it was plush. A Saturday night destination for a booming cattle town’s kings. A place to bring their families (or possibly, to take their mistresses, a luxury both my father and his father indulged). For the occupants of 814 seats, the parking lot could accommodate as many as 400 cars. Between shows, drapes matching the hue and corrugated surface of the exterior hung across the screen, and on either side of the floor were these swank, open-air smoking lounges from which a dame and her Lucky Strike could still see the feature. Later when I took up cigarettes, I imagined myself reclined along these shallow sofas, a bitchy wit in a Wilde play installed at his divan. Because of the Cooper, I’ve made a lifelong wastrel’s practice of avoiding responsibilities or bad decisions or poorly selected girlfriends—of being for 120 minutes elsewhere—by hiding in the dark.
It does not seem possible that this inviolable orange tin can—razed in 1994, usurped by a Barnes and Noble—is gone. It had seemed as constant as a battlement wall erected to keep out a beast. And it was at the Cooper in December 1976, no more than a week before my mother filed for divorce and my father moved out, that she took me to see a movie in which just such a wall comes down.