by Billy Russell, Staff Writer

1999

I was 13 years old at the end of 1999.  I grew up in the country.  A small, high desert town that consisted of a Circle K, a video store, a grocery store, a hardware store, and a post office.  These days, there’s also a Dollar General and a Dairy Queen, but those came later.

Anything you needed to do, you would need to venture to one of the nearby cities, which were, at a minimum, 45 minutes away.  My hometown was positioned at a higher elevation than any of the nearby cities, so if you ever had to make the trek, everyone called it, “Going down the hill.”  Going down the hill was our small-town colloquialism for having to run an errand, go grocery shopping, anything that would require us bumpkins going to the big city.

My brother was taking community college classes so that he could get his gen-ed requirements over, cheaply, before transferring to a university.  He could pay for these classes out of pocket and not have to worry about taking on additional debt when he didn’t need to.  He was also in the process of saving up for a car of his own, while the family pretty much operated on one vehicle.  This posed some logistical issues.

My dad would use the car during the day for work, get home, then hand off the car to my mom and my brother.  My mom and my brother would go down the hill together, she’d drop him off at school, then kill time for several hours while he took a class, sometimes two, and head back home together.

My mom asked me if I could accompany her on these nights so she wouldn’t have to kill this time alone.

I was used to long rides.  I had a long ride home taking the school bus, which already took about an hour because my town was so spread out.  I was one of the last stops.  I would do my homework on the bus, get home, eat quickly, jump in the car with my mom and my brother, then head down the hill, drop my brother off, then spend a couple hours with my mom at the easiest place in the world to kill time: The movies.

The drive to, and the drive home, was a twisty one.  The road seemed to be carved arbitrarily.  Sharp turns and curves seemed to exist solely to maximize carsickness and nausea.  Stretches that could have been straight instead snaked a winding path, if only to elongate the journey.   

I wish I could say this is where I’d learned to love movies, but in truth, that had come much earlier.  My mom used to manage the local, small-town video store, and my love affair with movies had started when I was really young.  But now I was older and I was really beginning to form my own tastes.  I knew what I liked, but I didn’t quite know why yet.  I could tell you what I did like, and what I didn’t, but I was still in the process of greedily gobbling up every movie I could get my hands on.  And 1999 was an amazing year for that.  I chatted with friends I’d made at art camp (yeah, that’s right, I went to art camp) on AOL Instant Messenger and debated whether or not the ending of Magnolia was brilliant or stupid.  

My mom and I saw just about every major theatrical release in the theater that year.  We went to a dollar theater that was on the verge of going out of business—and, in fact, did go out of business just a couple years after.  Struggling with filling the seats and selling snacks, this dollar theater was actually a $.50 theater.  For just two quarters each, she and I could watch Toy Story 2, The Phantom Menace, Sleepy Hollow, End of Days, The Mummy, Three Kings, The Sixth Sense, The Matrix and Double Jeopardy.  A couple times we went to a non-dollar-theater.  I remember seeing American Beauty at a first-run, because it was touted as being the front-runner to win Best Picture at the Oscars.  

We also saw a Kim Bassinger movie called I Dreamed of Africa, which these days would be made straight for Netflix.  But in 1999 it was given the full theatrical release treatment.

After the movie, sometimes we’d grab a bite to eat, sometimes not.  But we’d always talk about the movie.  I was a thirteen-year-old kid, so my mom and I rarely sat together, because I’d be embarrassed, being a dumbass teenager and everything.  But after the movie was over, we’d reconvene, walk out the lobby, talking about what we’d just seen, then talk about it on our way to get my brother, and maybe talk about it some more on the ride home, the three of us.

I always felt a little guilty not sitting next to my mom, even if I had the excuse that I was a bratty teenager, but if I’m honest, I’m thankful I saw a few rows down when we watched American Beauty together.  I’m kinder to that movie than most contemporary critics seem to be, but I was glad I wasn’t right next to my mom during one of Kevin Spacey’s masturbation scenes.  Or his pursuit to fuck an underage girl.  

Someone once theorized that the year 1999 was loaded to the brim with great films because there was the belief at the back of everyone’s minds, no matter how irrational, even if we realized and recognized the irrationality of it, that the world could end once the Year 2000 arrived.  We could all be dead in some stupid, prophesized Armageddon, so why not take a chance and greenlight every great movie whose screenplay was just gathering dust at some studio?

Beyond what I saw with my mom at the discount theater, over the summer I’d gone and seen South Park and Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me with a friend.  We wanted to see The Blair Witch Project but his brother had seen it and swore it made him motion sick, the most popular criticism for that movie, beyond that it was boring, or that nothing happened.  

When I was a kid, when my mom was managing the video store, she sat me down in front of a lot of movies, and she’d ask me questions, to see what I knew.  I remember this exchange.

My mom asked me, “Who directed Beetlejuice?”

And I’d say, “Tim Burton.”

“Who starred in it?”

“Michael Keaton.”

“What other movies did they make together?”

“Batman and Batman Returns.”

Tim Burton was the first director whose name I was aware of.  Before Spielberg, before Hitchcock, before I knew what a director really did, I knew who Tim Burton was, and I knew his specialty was dark, gothic movies.  The first movie I ever saw of his on the big screen was Sleepy Hollow, with my mom, on one of our movie nights.  To this day, I still say it’s one of his best.  I don’t know if it actually is, or if I have too much nostalgia tied up in it.  All I know is that I bust it out every couple years for Halloween, and the winter of 1999 is always on the top of my mind.

2019

Twenty years later, I was 33.  I was married.  My wife and I moved to LA.  We were both from Southern California—she, from LA itself; I, from the weird, high desert town of Anza, CA.  I grew up close by, but separated by a series of mountain ranges and deserts, pushed inland, it felt like a world away.

Living in Los Angeles was something my wife and I had worked toward, for years.  Every strategic move was made in the pursuit of eventually relocating to LA.  A new position opened at my company, one that I could take to LA.  I applied for it, and I was accepted.  My wife was able to work remotely.  Everything felt destined, like it was meant to be this way.  It was all so perfect.

In hindsight, I regretted my decision almost immediately upon moving.  I moved from a house to a tiny apartment.  My house was so quiet.  It had a yard.  My apartment was loud and cramped.  I had no yard.  I had a shared balcony—and one time, when smoking a cigarette on it, a tweaker (who I later found out was living in the hollowed-out walls of the laundry room) threatened to kill me, because he believed I had stolen his NASCAR jacket.

But I don’t think I actually did regret it, not consciously, anyway, until later.  I was in a deep state of denial.  I wanted, so desperately, for it to work.  I was close to my very good friends.  I was close to my parents.  And I was in a city I’d dreamed of living in for years and years… but it just didn’t work.  My commute took hours out of my day.  Work itself drained me.  I could never rest and recover because I could never count on sleep.  I could never sleep in over the weekend, because more than once I’d be stirred awake by the sound of someone slapping their arm to shoot up under my window.  If it wasn’t that, drunk college kids would piss, burp and fart.  People would cackle or fight at 3 a.m. Wandering souls would weep as they went down my alley.  Jesus freaks would call up to me that Jesus loved me, and on the wrong day for this, my wife yelled back down, “Yeah, well, He hates you!”

Worst of all, I was drinking during this time. A lot. I could feel my sanity slipping.

I quit drinking only a few months into moving to LA, and I’ve been sober ever since.  My wife and I wound up finding refuge from our awful apartment in a way I’d remembered before: The movies.

We were members of AMC A-List at the time, and we saw as many movies as we could.  If we could stay out late enough, we could come home to have our shitty upstairs neighbors asleep and enjoy some hours of silence. Enjoy the silence of our apartment for a few hours?  This was possible. Sleep in? No.  At 4 a.m., like clockwork, he would don a pair of cowboy boots and tap dance on his cracker-thin hardwood floor and fill our bedroom with a cacophony of madness.  

Here’s the thing about LA: I may have mixed feelings about the city itself now, so many memories tinged with a feeling of bitterness and resentment, but I insist that it remains the finest city in the entire world for going to the movies. If there’s a new movie coming out, and you want to see it, chances are that you will be able to see it before everyone else, and for free. Advanced screenings are so common, the lines to attend them are rarely long. If you don’t catch this one, there’ll be another.  

LA, I believe, is the best place on earth to watch movies. There’s a respect in the audience.  No one treats it like their living room. No one will be texting. No one will have their feet up on the seat in front of them, with their shoes off.

Sometimes there are free screenings, for no other purpose than someone felt like having a free screening. The show Fosse/Verdon was on at the time, so we got to catch a double feature of Cabaret and All That Jazz at the Egyptian. It was at the Egyptian that we also saw Bubba Ho-Tep with director Don Coscarelli in attendance, signing autographs. At the Aero we saw Slums of Beverly Hills and Savages, both written and directed by Tamara Jenkins, for free.

I saw so many goddamn movies, I even saw Annabelle Comes Home, for no other reason that I couldn’t be home, so Annabelle had to do it for me. I thought it was cute, the lightest and the silliest of the Conjuring universe movies.  It almost felt like an episode of Goosebumps.

It’s hard to hone in on a favorite movie or movie-moment in 2019. In a year populated with such great trips to the movies, including seeing Once Upon a Time in Hollywood at Quentin Tarantino’s own theater, the New Beverly Cinema, with Guillermo Del Toro exiting the showing before us, taking pictures with fans, and not leaving until everyone was satisfied, it’s amazing that one’s not my favorite. When we went inside, Clu Gulager, one of my dad’s favorite actors, was in the audience.  

Even seeing Jurassic Park at the Hollywood Bowl, with a live symphony performing the score wasn’t my favorite.

No, my favorite evening at the movies was seeing a Katt Shea triple feature at the NewBev: Poison Ivy, Stripped to Kill and Streets.  I stayed for the whole damn thing and relished every minute of it.  Katt Shea was in attendance and between movies would stand up at her seat, face the audience, and tell stories about each film’s production history.  

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention being able to see Miracle Mile, a movie I’ve adored for ages, at UCLA’s Billy Wilder theater, where director Steve De Jarnatt signed my wife’s copy of the poster and even the VHS copy of the film.  

It was at the Billy Wilder Theater that we saw the much less fun other nuclear apocalypse movie Testament.  Lynne Littman, who directed the film, at the end even said, exasperated, “Jesus, that movie is relentless, isn’t it?” Billy Wilder Theater was one of my favorite hidden gems, tucked away in Westwood.  Tickets were almost always only $10 with the director of the film in attendance to give a Q&A.

I’ve lived in Tucson, AZ ever since my LA misadventure.  It’s been almost four years so far and I still feel odd how well life has gone.  My time in LA had conditioned me to expect the worst.  It was a traumatic time for me, but I’ll always fondly remember the movies, and the theaters.  So, so many theaters.  I saw Sunset Boulevard at a movie theater that was actually on Sunset Boulevard!  I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, mere feet away from Paramount Studios, wondering how much, if any, of the film had been shot there.

1999 and 2019, as two decades, and one millennium, closed.  I spent them at the movies with the people that I love.