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By Ray Hanania
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Technology has been a blessing and a curse for our society, especially in the making of movies.
Too often technology takes the place of great movie scripts and stories. While the CGI (computer generated images) sometimes can be astonishing, there is nothing like having a great story to provoke your imaginations into a memorable experience of sight and sound.
The movies from the beginning of the 20th century were simple, but well written. They relied on actors and great scripts. Great movie plots, actually.
Films from the 1950s and 1960s are my favorite. Black and white movies fueled imagination more than those in color.
Movies then were more about family experience. We watched big epic releases starring actors like Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne and Ronald Reagan.
The violence wasn’t graphic. It was implied. Again, you used your imagination.
I loved the big screen. My first memory of a movie was with friends watching the James Bond thriller Dr. No at a Loop theater in 1962.
I was only 9 and went with elementary school friends, as I have written in prior columns. The Jeffery Avenue bus only cost 12 cents from the Southeast Side. Afterwards, we’d go to Treasurer Island to play game machines, and eat at Wimpy’s near the Art Institute.
Those days, the movie experience was memorable. We had fun. We had imagination, and we had safety. I mean, can you imagine letting a 9-year-old take a CTA bus from the city’s outskirts to downtown?
But back then, the movies were not as destructive or ruinous as they can be today to the psyches and personalities of our youth.
It’s bad enough that today parents, who apparently don’t care about their children, allow them to hang out in the middle of the night with gangbangers, frequently holding their weapons and often ending up dead.
The drive-in theater was a great alternative experience for families. It was fun. It was comfortable. Being outside in the summer watching a great movie like the Western crime drama Rio Bravo in 1959, starring John Wayne, who by the way started in Hollywood movies in 1926.
As technology blossomed in the 1980s, movies began to change even more and the technology replaced the human talent for imagination. Movies started not only telling us stories but putting those stories to images that replaced our imagination.
Pretty soon, the emphasis moved from great stories and fabulous acting to stunning and wildly colorful graphics. Our minds began to go numb.
But isn’t that what is happening in our society today? Our minds are going numb from lack of real use.
I used to memorize hundreds of telephone numbers. Now, I just press a button or ask Siri to dial someone for me. I have no idea what the telephone numbers of my family and friends are.
I drive a car that tells me how to get to where I want to go, using satellite navigation and GPS. Chicagoland was built on the basis of a simple X and Y-axis graph. Streets started at zero and increased heading north or south. Even the east and west streets had names and number coordinates. So, if someone lived at 8900 S. Luella, and you knew that Luella was 2200 East, it was a simple means of finding it.
Suburban streets have turned that into spaghetti, mainly because suburban developers turned to imagination to make things appear to be better. They’re not. In many cases, suburban community streets were crafted to prevent “outsiders” from easily entering communities by accident or design. It was a part of the racial foundations of Chicago’s century-and-a-half of “evolution.”
Today, the big screen has been replaced by high resolution tiny screens. Most of the movies are computer generated and filled with amazing technology that we embrace in the context of sight and sound, but not in terms of brain power.
Entertainment has turned into mush.
Occasionally, a film comes out that piques our imaginations at the big screen. But even the movie experience has changed.
The Emagine and Marcus Theaters each not only offer comfortable cushioned seating using chairs that mimic the feeling of the firsthand managed recliners, the La-Z-Boy recliners, replaced with electrical buttons on the sides of your seat. (La-Z-Boy brand recliners were first invented in the 1920s and gradually improved until they were associated with “the grandparents.”)
The new movie theaters provide lots of food. Very expensive. The service ranges from convenience at Emagine Theatres — where movie employees bring the food to your seat — to the long waits with a buzzer at the counter for food at the Marcus Theaters.
I miss the old days. How about you?
Ray Hanania is a former Chicago City Hall reporter and award-winning columnist. Visit hanania.com for more opinion.