Growing up in a moderate sized central Texas town in the early 1980s, we had a grand total of two theaters from which to choose. Combined, they supplied us with a whopping six screens (which often shared at least one movie). One was in a mall well out of bike riding range of my house, the other a mere five miles away. As you can imagine, many rides were cajoled from parents and older siblings so we could experience the transcendent joy of seeing "Krull" on the big screen.
Just in time for high school, a brand new 6-screen Schulman theater opened up near downtown. It was situated right next to the (by then) defunct Skyway Twin Drive-In, which my friends and I would sneak into after dark, looking for (and sometimes finding) relics of B-movie glory.
The Schulman 6 was a real lifesaver for local kids who were in the habit of exhausting the other theaters' supply of movies in a single weekend (especially while the Manor East 3 was busy breaking the record for most consecutive weekends screening "The Man from Snowy River" (seriously, it played there for over two years). It not only doubled our community's total screen acreage, but by the time most of us were of driving age, it had become a regular date spot. Movies were something every area teenager had in common at the time, along with beer (the drinking age was still only 19, meaning most high schoolers could still fake out the local Stop 'n Rob clerks), a love of Austrian pop singer Falco, and working at McDonald's.
And you could only take a date to the cemetery so many times before she thought you were a little strange. Trust me on this.
I was certainly no stranger to the Schulman's joys, and saw just about every major studio release there in my day. There are a million stories in the naked cinema, but I'm choosing this particular tale because a) it comes first chronologically, and b) most of the others are just plain dumb.
It was 1986, and I was on a double date with my best friend, Sven (NOTE: this is obviously not his real name, but describing him in too much detail is inconsiderate both to him and to the fine citizens of Pennsylvania who allow him to live among them).
Anyway, Sven and I were squiring two lovely young ladies to a showing of "Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives." At least, I'm pretty sure it was "Part VI." It's the one where they're digging Jason up and Tommy Jarvis sticks a pole in his corpse, which is then struck by lightning, naturally bringing Jason back to life...it's really not important. What is important is that being the cheap bastards we were, Sven and I had neglected to take our dates to dinner. Eager to rectify this mistake (and hoping to salvage valuable post-movie makeout time), we decided to order pizza.
The pizza guy we called from the lobby pay phone seemed a mite befuddled, but took our order and agreed to deliver the pizza to the Schulman's lobby. Satisfied, we returned to our theater, basking in the accolades we received from our companions.
Mongol General: "Pete, what is best in life?"
Pete: "To order your pizza, see it delivered to you, and to hear the appreciation of the women."
About twenty minutes later (and not too engrossed in the machinations of one Jason Voorhees), Sven and I went to the lobby...only to be confronted by the terrible sight of the manager talking to a (justifiably) irritated pizza delivery guy. We approached, attempting to explain our situation. The manager (who looked eerily like Stephen King) was having none of it, insisting that outside food or drink was not allowed. We pleaded with him, for the sake of our rumbling stomachs and the potential of some heavy petting, to let us take it in. No dice. We were told to either leave the theater or put the pizza in our car and come back. The slam of his office door was a grim metaphor for the gate that was about to be shut against our raging hormones.
Sven and I realized there was nothing for it but to fetch the girls and go eat in the parking lot. And so it would have been had the girl working the concession stand, thoroughly amused by our predicament, not suggested a little stealth operation: Sven would take the pizza around the outside of the building to the external theater exit, and I would go back into the theater and open the door for him from inside. It was a hell of a plan, even if she did go to a rival high school. I could only imagine what other contraband (booze, hookers, WMD) had been smuggled in this manner.
We followed her instructions and brought the pizza into the theater to the cheers of the audience (all five of them, not counting our dates) who were no doubt relieved to see what I had been doing rustling around behind the film screen as I hunted for the door. So pleased were we with our success, we shared out the pizza with everyone there. Our dates were suitably impressed, and while I can't speak for Sven, I reaped the rewards of my labor in a more...personal manner later that night. We liked to imagine the manager finding the pizza box after the movie and shaking his fist at the sky, like Snoopy in his bullet-ridden Sopwith Camel, cursing our teenage ingenuity.
I know, I know, it wasn't technically our idea. But we told our dates it was, which is all that matters in the final analysis.
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I went on my last date at the Schulman in 1994. It had become a dollar cinema by then (driven to desperation by the opening of a Cinemark googleplex nearby, I guess), and the showing of "The Fugitive" we attended convinced me never to go to dollar movies again. Last I heard, it was being converted into classroom space for the local community college.
It's probably just as well. The manager I mentioned, who served as antagonist in my little story, was murdered in his office a few years after the Pizza Incident. That had a sobering effect. It won't suprise anyone to know that my friends and I had crossed paths with him on numerous occasions, usually by behaving in a manner common to groups of adolescent boys in a theater. As you can imagine, we made his job more difficult than it needed to be. Even so, he seemed to delight in making the lives of teenaged theater patrons miserable. We gave him no end of grief, but he threw it right back at us with gusto.
There was an article in a local paper that his ghost had been seen in and around the projection room in recent years. I hope he sticks around when the college's renovations are finished. I'd like to read a story in the near future about students who were going to class and inexplicably had their outside food or drink knocked out of their hands.