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| Actually, he's still Rebus. |
Rea claims his earliest childhood memory is a moving image of a dog running -- a yellow dog chasing a car. Hence, he decided long ago that's reason enough for him to have a cartoon dog as a sidekick. Anyway, that's about as close as we're going to get to explaining how this narration gig came my way.
To set the stage for Rea's remembrances about the Biograph Theatre, he's starting out with a short subject of a sort. He calls it "The Big Stretch."
It's an almost funny account of an early experience for Rea in the role of a performance artist. Of having a following, however briefly. In a circuitous way, it tells of his exposure to a good lesson on the nature of cool.
Following Rea's junior high school anecdote, the Biograph-focused material served up will hopefully provide the reader with some insight into how a certain era passed in Richmond's Fan District. Style-wise in that neighborhood, orbiting around Virginia Commonwealth University, it was from the hippies to the punks. In years, it was approximately 1969-through-'84.
To be sure, the 1970s was the best-ever decade for repertory cinemas. During the 1980s and 1990s many such movie houses went dark, coast-to-coast.
Speaking of style, one thing is for sure, some of the events covered in the Biograph Times stories could only have happened in the '70s. Number One on that list has to be the Devil Prank ... more about that later.
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The Big Stretch
by F.T. Rea
The prototype was assembled during a lull in seventh grade shop class. After tying some 15 rubber bands together to make a chain, a collaborator held one end of the silly looking contraption as I stepped back to stretch it out for a test. Aiming as best I could, looking along the taut line of connected rubber bands, I let go.
The whole thing gathered itself and shot past the holder. The released tip struck a target, or maybe it was near it, several feet beyond the holder. It worked! While the satisfaction I felt was a rush, the encouragement from the boys who witnessed that launching was glorious.
Through a pleasant sequence of trial-and-error experiments, it wasn't long before I figured out how to best maximize distance and accuracy. Once guys across the schoolroom were getting popped with the bitter end of my brainchild, dubbed the Stretch, the spitballs that routinely flew around such rooms in 1961 at Albert H. Hill Junior High were strictly old news. The next two days of playing with the new sensation of the seventh grade had the effect of transforming me into the leader of a crew, of a sort.
A couple of days later, uncharacteristically, I appeared on the schoolyard an hour before the first bell. Inside a brown paper bag I had was an updated version of my invention. This one was some 60 links long. Of course, it's name was the Big Stretch.
Only trusted henchmen had seen it in its test runs. No one else at school had seen it and naturally, I was only too happy to change that. Once the mind-boggling range of the Big Stretch was demonstrated on the schoolyard, boys were shoving one another, trying to be next in line to act as the holder.
With this new version, early on, most of the time I did the shooting. As the rubber-band wonder whizzed by the holder, it made such a splendid noise that just standing close by was something to talk about. On the asphalt playground, adjacent to the yellow brick school building, each flight was a crowd-pleaser.
The Big Stretch went on to make an appearance at an afternoon football game, where its experienced operators established to the delight of the crowd that cheerleaders doing their routines on the sideline could be zapped on their bouncing butts from 25 yards away with impunity. In my junior high school in 1961 not much could have been cooler than that.
After a couple of days of demonstrations around the neighborhood and at Willow Lawn shopping center, I decided to significantly lengthen the chain of rubber bands. However, the new version, about 100 rubber bands long, was neither as accurate or powerful as the previous model had been. My theory was that it was just too damn heavy for its own good.
A day or so later came the morning a couple of beefy ninth-grade football players insisted on taking a single turn as shooter and holder of the new Big Stretch. OK. Then they demanded a second turn. I said, "No."
Surrounded by seventh-grade devotees of the Big Stretch, I stood my ground, "No!"
But my fair-weather entourage proved to be useless in a pinch. Faced with no good options, I fled with my claim-to-fame in hand. In short order I was cornered and pounded until the determined thieves got the loot they wanted.
The bullies fooled around for a while trying to hit their buddies with it. Eventually, several rubber bands broke and the Big Stretch was literally pulled to pieces and scattered. By then my nose had stopped bleeding, so I gathered what remained of my dignity and decided to shrug off the whole affair, as best I could.
For whatever reasons, I chose not to make another version of the Big Stretch. I don't remember thinking about it. A few days later a couple of other kids copied it, and showed it off, but nobody seemed to care. Just as abruptly as it had gotten underway, the connected-rubber-band craze simply ran out of gas at Hill School. It wasn't cool, anymore.
So, it was over. At that same time, 1961, the slang meaning of “cool” still had an underground cachet. I thought beatniks were cool. The same went for certain musicians and baseball players. Still, I would hardly have known how to convincingly say why.
Since then I've come to understand that the concept of cool is said to have seeped out of the early bebop scene in Manhattan in the ‘40s. Well, that may be so, but to me the same delightful sense of spontaneity and understated defiance seems abundantly evident in forms of expression that predate the Dizzy Gillespie/Thelonious Monk era at Minton’s, on 118th Street.
Anyway, wasn’t that Round Table scene at the Algonquin Hotel, back in the ‘20s, something akin to cool? If Dorothy Parker's word-smithing wasn’t cool, what the hell was?
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If Dorothy Parker's word-smithing wasn’t cool, what the hell was? |
And, in the decades that preceded the advent of bebop jazz, surely modern art -- with its cubism, surrealism, suprematism and so forth -- was laying down some of the rules for what became known as cool.
Cool’s zenith as a style had probably been passed by 1961, about the time I was becoming enamored with the Beats, via national magazines. Looking back on that time now I have to think that widespread exposure and cool didn't mix. Significantly, cool -- with its ability to be flippant and profound in the same gesture -- rose and fell without the encouragement of the ruling class.
Underdogs invented cool out of thin air. It was a style that was beyond what money could buy. The artful grasping of a moment’s unique truth was cool every time.
However, just as the one-time-only perfect notes blown in a jam session can’t be duplicated, authentic cool was difficult to harness; even more difficult to mass-produce. By the ‘70s, the mobs of hippies attuned to stadium rock ‘n’ roll shrugged nothing off. Cool was probably too subtle for them to appreciate. The expression subsequently lost its moorings and dissolved into the soup of mainstream vernacular.
Eventually, in targeting self-absorbed baby boomers as a market, Madison Avenue promoted everything under the sun -- including schmaltz, and worse -- as cool. The Disco craze ignored cool. Punk Rockers searched for it in all the wrong places, then caught a mean buzz and gave up. By the mid-'80s nihilism was masquerading as cool ... then it just stopped mattering.
Since then, when people say, “ku-wul,” usually it's to express their ordinary approval of routine things. Which underlines the lesson that time tends to stretch slang expressions thin, as they are assimilated.
At Hill School, the process of becoming cool, then popular, then routine, literally pulled the Big Stretch to pieces. Once the edgy, experimental aspect of it was over, it had become just another gimmick. Its coolness was kaput.
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| Rebus returning from Key West in 1991. |
“Have a good time,” was my first line on a Biograph Theatre midnight show handbill. By the end of the initial year of operation that same advice had become established as the Biograph's slogan, and I was onboard as that movie theater's official spokesdog.
For example, if the viewer sees a line drawing of an open eye, then a plus sign, then the letter “C” and another plus sign, followed by the letter “U,” there's a message in that. Decoded, that simple rebus puzzle means, “I see you.”
Naturally, I told him to put more funny stuff in these stories, but Rea rarely listens to me these days. Mistake. Now he appears to see himself as more of a writer than a cartoonist. Another mistake?
However, when I pause to remember life in that building, rather that being in the middle of a crowd, I frequently picture being at my desk in the second floor office. Maybe reading about old films in a catalog. Behind a locked door, surrounded by stacks of movie-related paper -- box office records, one-sheets, pressbooks, trade magazines, etc.
-- All rights reserved by the artist/writer, F.T. Rea.
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In the first illustration above, that's me as I appeared in a Richmond Times-Dispatch OpEd piece that Rea wrote about the Charlie Hebdo murders in France in January of 2015. If I look vaguely familiar, but you can't place why, you may have seen one of my breakthrough appearances in comic strips published in the Commonwealth Times’ special all-comics issues of Fan Free Funnieback in 1973. Or maybe you saw me on any number of posters promoting rock ‘n‘ roll shows, or various other events down through the years.
First at the Biograph, then afterward in countless projects, I’ve worked for the guy who wrote the stories that follow my foreword comments here. F.T. Rea, who goes by Terry, likes to say he keeps me around because I’m a lucky charm.
Well, I know Rea is a little superstitious. Still, I think it has more to do with real charm. Although his memory is getting more fuzzy every day, Rea is still smart enough to know that most folks have always liked me better than they liked him.
Naturally, I told him to put more funny stuff in these stories, but Rea rarely listens to me these days. Mistake. Now he appears to see himself as more of a writer than a cartoonist. Another mistake?
Regarding his landing at the Biograph, since the mid-1960s Rea had felt drawn to the beer-fueled, bohemian nightlife atmosphere on West Grace Street. While the theater was being built, in 1971, a few of his friends were already working at businesses in that neighborhood.
So, given the opportunity, Rea was delighted to parachute into what he saw as Richmond's coolest after-dark scene. Becoming the Biograph's first manager was truly a lucky break, because show biz has always appealed to him more than real life.
And, now it seems I've been installed as the color commentator for an art house cinema's memoir. Have a good time.
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The Intro to Part One
by F.T. Rea
In the fall of 1971 the chance to become the Biograph Theatre's first manager was offered to me. That opportunity appeared some five weeks before my 24th birthday. Since I had never wanted any job as much as I did that one, without hesitation, I accepted.
Soon the role fit like a glove. Promoting the Biograph and guiding it through whatever troubles came along gradually blossomed into an all overshadowing mission. Eventually, the job became who I was.
Naturally, some events -- opening nights for certain first-run movies and a few of the most noteworthy parties -- stand out, owing in part to the yarns such lively happenings spawned. Which means, in some cases my memories of a particular occasion may depend somewhat on how I've crafted the story in telling it over the years, or heard it told by others. Nonetheless, for this project, I'll try my best to steer clear from disseminating fake history.
About three-and-a-half months after being told I'd won the competition for the manager job, on February 12, 1972, Richmond's Biograph opened for business at 814 West Grace Street. My bosses in D.C. called our style of operation “repertory cinema.”
Which, to us, meant a curated mix – a smorgasbord of worthwhile old, new, domestic and foreign flicks. No doubt, dreaming up perfect double features has to have been one of the coolest job duties, ever.
Maybe writing a radio commercial. Or perhaps sitting at my drawing table, designing a six-week program of feature attractions, or a handbill for a midnight show. Alone, after hours, with an open can of beer nearby and WRFK-FM on the radio. Secure in my role.
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Why write a memoir for a movie theater?
First of all, to create a record of how it was to manage such a niche cinema in the golden age for repertory cinemas. Secondly, with this assemblage of stories, I hope to create a context to facilitate a deeper appreciation of that long-gone era.
Nestled up to VCU, the Biograph was part of an edgy art and music scene in the Fan District, situated in the heart of Richmond. What did we who were part of that scene think we were doing, back then? And, now what do we think we actually did?
So, I hope reading these words will prompt others who were part of that creative class scene in those days to consider those two questions -- age-old questions each generation eventually faces. In my book, putting what we genuinely believe to be a moment's truth in our art, in our arrangement of words, helps to preserve the role of truth, itself, in our culture.
Which I see as a good thing. In the last 26 years of being connected to the Internet, l have read plenty of laughably untrue stuff about that aforementioned Fan-centered art and music scene, and the Biograph, in particular. Which means, if I can help set the record straight on a few things, before my time expires, I am glad to do my part. Damn glad.
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