More of our conversation with UNC historian Robert Allen on his own movie-going experience:
Q: What are your own memories of “going to the show?”
A: “My earliest memories with movies were going to the Webb Theatre or the Temple Theatre in downtown Gastonia, N.C., in the 1950s, and what I recall is my mother dropping me and my two younger sisters off at some point on a Saturday morning. … But I can’t remember the first time I ever saw a movie from beginning to end, because my mother would just drop us off whenever she could get us there, and she picked us up at some point a couple of hours later. The movies themselves were less important to me than the experience of movie-going and the social dimensions of that experience.”
Q: What's the inspiration for your online project, "Going to the Show?":
A: “That’s what mother called it — ‘we used to go to the show.’ Since then, I’ve heard other folks of my mother’s generation talk of movies as ‘going to the show.’ I have a diary of a woman from 1934 [that I acquired] through a librarian in Alamance County. This is her grandmother who kept a little pocket diary, and every year she wrote down what she did every day. She was working at Cannon Mills and was an avid movie-goer so she would write down in this tiny diary, ‘went to the show,’ or ‘went to the show and saw James Cagney.’ But frequently it wasn’t even the title of the movie, it was just ‘went to the show in Concord last week.’ And I also like the idea of ‘show’ rather than movies because it captures the multi-dimensional nature of the experience of movie-going.”
Q: What's your favorite novel on the movie-going experience?
A: Walker Percy’s The MovieGoer (1960), winner of a National Book Award.
