$12.50

Yes. $12.50 for a movie ticket in New York City. No!

I’m back to second grade for the rest of the school year at Grace Church School, where I taught for four years. One of the teachers suddenly quit and I received a phone call on the day I was leaving for Paris and asked to return for the remainder of the school year. I accepted. Before this happened, I had a rather unstructured life. I did have my morning routine of prayers, meditation, occasionally working out or doing yoga, and then writing for the remainder of the day, but other than that, the day was mine to create as I pleased. After I accepted the tenure my life has become one of having a definitive schedule. I wake up around six in the morning to get downtown for eight.

Before returning to teaching, one of the luxuries of not working a 9-5 job was having the opportunity to see a movie at 2:10 on a Tuesday afternoon. That’s what F. and I did several months ago. The movie: Revolutionary Road; a stunningly bleak, unsettlingly gorgeous film that no straight married couple should see. Devastating. I mean it. If you’re married, do NOT see this film. If you're straight and single and you have dreams of marriage, don't see it. Along that same vein of advice, it’s also the date movie from the depths of hell that will ruin any possibilities of an amorous post-movie interlude. I wouldn’t doubt if couples have run screaming from theaters across the country. Gay folk can watch it and just shake their heads because we don’t have to deal with issues that raise their pernicious heads in the film.

But I don’t want to write about the movie. I want to write about my indignation at the fact that when I walked into the theater a year ago, I paid eleven dollars and now I’m paying one-fifty more. It’s not that I can’t afford the extra levy on my movie experience. I can. It’s not a problem. I’ve got the extra one-fifty, and I don’t want to sound like a curmudgeon, like an old man saying, “It ain’t like it used to be,” but it truly is the principle of the fact that our economy is in an ignoble slump from which not many economists see a light at the end of the proverbial tunnel and the theaters have just jacked up the prices. Maybe movie reel rentals have gone up for the theaters. I don’t know. Perhaps I’m not well-informed enough to make this judgment, but I do, so lest I digress….

Movies used to be the dissemination and salvation of culture to the masses. Not everyone could afford a Broadway play, a ticket to Carnegie Hall or the Met Opera, but most could pay the ten bucks to screen the newest popcorn extravaganza from Hollywood. No more. That time has ceased to be and I feel insulted and betrayed.

With my out-of-date student ID, which nobody at the box office every checks, I can buy a ticket for a world class performance at Carnegie Hall for $10. Even without the ID, on any performance night I could buy a ticket in the bleachers for $20. And what about the Met Opera? Family Circle tickets can start at $25, rush tickets sometimes come in at $20. Pretty soon it’ll be cheaper to go to Carnegie and the Met than a night out at the movies.

During her childhood in Glassboro, NJ, my mom lived at the movies on weekends during the school year, and then four days a week during the summertime. She remembered paying twenty-five cents for double features, which included cartoons, serials, and newsreels of world events. At that time she remembered seeing black and white footage of the Germans marching on Paris. This was in the late 30s and 1940s, before the advent of television. What a divine time at the cinema. When my mom was still kicking and I visited home, we turned on the television to the American Movie Classics channel, and nine times out of ten, whether it was a B-film from the factory studio system or an A-list picture, she would say, “Oh, I remember that one.”

A long time ago, movies were for the masses. Now, it seems, they’re becoming more elitist. Historically, besides revenue, democracy was endemic to the idea of movies, especially during my mom's era of the Great Depression and WWII when the poor and the rich shared each cinematic experience equitably. There was no assigned seating. The poorest tramp with a dime could walk into a theater and sit in the fifth row next to a Rockefeller and enjoy the same bombastic delight of a Busby Berkley musical as the next fella.

If this inimitably sublime art form, this celluloid manifestation of dreams, becomes elitist, then what’s left?

Suppose you’re a family with three children. That’s two adults, three kids, some popcorn and a few sodas. You’ve just blown sixty bucks on a Saturday afternoon when you could have waited two months for the movie to come out on DVD, made your own popcorn, and bought a 2-liter bottle of Coke for under ten bucks.

If Julia Roberts and Tom Cruise would take $10 million instead of their $20+million paychecks, then maybe the studios wouldn’t up their film rentals to the theaters, which would then bring down the ticket cost. I don’t know for sure. I’m not a cinematic economist, but I do know that theaters make their money on concessions, and if people stop going to the theater, or have to pay more for the experience, then they’re less likely to buy that four-dollar diminutive bag of popcorn and a three-fifty coke that sells for a buck twenty-five on the street.

Yes, I’ll still go to the movies. I do love the experience. The big screen always evinces a bubbly childhood excitement inside of me. I simply want to feel like I’m not being taken advantage of. Until then, like a seemingly cantankerous old fool, I say, “May the box office suffer, may Hollywood stars take a paycut for the good of the many who pay to watch their schlock, and may the kind people of this country sit at home and wait for the DVD special edition of the latest movie fare.”