Greetings, programs!  My name is Kevin (my friends call me “Mac”) and I’m a native of Venice Beach, CA. When I was born my folks lived on the Canals. How Venice can you get? If you know the area, I grew up on streets such as Grand Canal, Stanford (near Lincoln and Washington), Amaroso, and Rose Ave (the “nice” side, across from Penmar Golf Course). From a fairly early age there were several constants in my life. They included the canals, Venice/Santa Monica/MDR beaches, Venice and Santa Monica Pier, bike rides to the Marina harbor, and of course The Fox Venice Theater.

A little history…

The Fox Venice was established on its Lincoln Blvd location in 1951, from what I understand after the original location on the Boardwalk burned down. I of course wasn’t even born yet when it was opened. Far from it. But one of my earliest memories of being at the movies was at the Fox, watching Planet of the Apes with my dad (who had worked on the film). I had to be quite young; Fox was not yet a revival theater, so Apes must have recently been released. In the early 70’s it became what was called a “repertory cinema” and to me, this started the true salad days of the movie house.

According to Rol Murrow, president of Cumberland Mountain Theatres, “We changed the program almost every day and ran films from the entire history of film, premiered many experimental and alternative films, and ran a program of live music and plays, until we sold the business to Landmark Theaters in 1979.” 

Yep, that’s right. Almost impossibly, Fox ran TWO movies every night of the week (when special events and weeklong specific festivals were not going on). 

Though as I said I had been to the theater as a kid a handful of times (until the age of 13 or so, my mom liked to take us to theaters in Santa Monica mostly), my truly epic time of movie watching started early in Venice High School around the age of 14 or 15, when a football teammate who worked at Fox Venice started selling me tickets he had swiped. I mean, A LOT of tickets. He’d sell me a couple dozen tickets at a time for like 5 bucks (Fox was pretty cheap, like under 5 bucks for two films, but this was still a hell of a deal). Thus began a two or three year period where I went to the theater constantly. I didn’t hurt that around that time we moved no less than a block and a half away from the place!  Rarely did a week go by where I didn’t go on at least two nights. That’s a lot of movies. I mostly relished Sci Fi, and being able to see a lot of these films that rarely got shown on TV really fueled the Science Fiction fanboy I was already becoming. But I saw a lot of other stuff too. Thrillers, dramas, historic costumers. Some “sexy” stuff too. Yeah, I saw a hell of a lot of R-rated films between the ages of 15 and 17. Some even earlier than that (I’ll get around to talking about seeing the infamous Japanese demi-porno “In the Realm of the Senses” when I was about 12 or 13 in a later post).

So this gets me around to why I started this blog. Firstly, I’ve heard lately that there are recent attempts to revive the Fox Theater. See, in the late 80’s the place was shut down due to asbestos issues (yikes). Eventually, a developer cleaned the place up and turned it into what it remains today, a small and somewhat cheesy mini-mall (I will admit that over the years I have shopped there, for backpacks and watch batteries and such). 

Mostly kiosk type affairs along the lines of the outdoor booths along the Venice boardwalk. What it became was kind of sad (though probably better than just being torn down for a Big Lots location). Not that I would necessarily even go to it if it became a theater again, but it’s cheery to think it can get back to what it once was to some degree. And hell, with Venice slowly creeping into a higher income residential area, it might end up being a real happening place (with 18 dollar tickets, cocktails, and reclining seats ;)).

So, my posts will mostly cover a single film I saw for the first time at The Fox. An excuse to talk about these old movies that shaped me into the Sci Fi/Fantasy/Cinema fanboy I am today. I would be remiss to not mention the blog I recently discovered (having heard about it on Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast, an audio source for old movie love) called http://every70smovie.blogspot.com/

It was reading there that inspired me to think about these old movies, most of which were indeed from the Disco Decade and many of which I saw at the fox. I will only be posting about movies I have seen there. Hence, the title of this blog. Nifty, right? Cheers and happy reading!