![]() ![]() The further I get away from being even close to the youngest person in the room, the more I make a real effort to not romanticize the ways of the past just because I happened to experience them. No one will sneak into either of the films on Friday. And just moments ago, while writing this very essay, I discovered that on July 20-the day before Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer make their much-anticipated premieres in theaters across the country-my beloved Regal Jewel will fatefully take its last breath. Twenty-some-odd years later and at least a decade since I’ve run a scam on any Regal theater, let alone a Cinemark or an AMC (may Nicole Kidman have mercy on our souls), a duo of movies has come along to, apparently, redefine the double feature entirely. Double features were about one thing, and one thing only: watching multiple movies by way of misdemeanor petty theft. You weren’t even really hanging out with your friends, because you had to choose your double-feature compatriots wisely: Anyone too comfortable with rebellion could blow your cover, and anyone too terrified of breaking the rules could ruin your fun. When you were double-featuring, you weren’t getting popcorn. You stayed put because The Movies™ were the event-they were the only event for a certain generation of young people looking to watch Bruce Almighty and The Lizzie McGuire Movie on an afternoon when Prime Video was just a twinkle in Jeff Bezos’s eye. There’s a lot of TV out there. We want to help: Every week, we’ll tell you the best and most urgent shows to stream so you can stay on top of the ever-expanding heap of Peak TV.Īnd so, once your initial ticket had been ripped, you were in for a penny ($5), in for a pound (loitering around the bathrooms until your next chosen feature started). ![]() Plus, there was that amazing auxiliary hour of worrying about getting caught, doing some internal virtue-bargaining to convince yourself that this is an OK thing to do because you’re a child and don’t have any money, pretending to look at your watch and wonder where your friends are because it’s 2002 and you don’t have a cellphone, and logistically coordinating the perfect movie times in order to miss just enough of your illegally obtained second movie to escape suspicion but not so much that you couldn’t eventually understand that Bruce Willis was a ghost the whole time. It meant you were arriving at the theater, paying for one movie, and then sneaking into the second movie because two hours of entertainment is good, but four hours of entertainment is better. First of all, who had arcade money? But more specifically, a double feature required an immense amount of planning and focus from a brain that spent the last nine months trying to learn algebra. Inside the Regal Jewel was a neon-lit arcade called “Detourz” and a concession counter called “TREATYME,” but they played no part in a double feature. Typically, that was two movies, more popularly known as: the double feature. When I was 13, you could still see a movie for $5, which meant that if you were slick enough and already had a loose enough moral relationship with capitalism … you could see as many movies as you wanted for $5. ![]() This building is where I spent my summer days when it was too hot to be outside and too boring to be inside and when I was too underfunded to be anywhere else. (Indeed, its gorgeous views of the highway do evoke both royalty and Rodeo Drive.) The Regal Jewel’s interior aesthetic could only be described as “Trapper Keeper,” but spiritually, its four walls and the entertainment held within were something more like freedom. Not a school or a church or, say, a rec center where I could have theoretically played sports, but a Regal Jewel cinema that is somehow also called a Hollywood Theater. Atop a stretch of glittering Texas asphalt hot enough to grill a steak stands the building where I spent most of my adolescence. ![]()
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