The Center Theater closed its doors in Little Rock in 1977. At the time, it was the last movie house on Main Street and the second-to-last theater downtown. Completed in 1949, the first film to screen there was the world premiere of Adventure in Baltimore starring Robert Young, Shirley Temple, and John Agar. It laid dormant for more than 30 years until it was demolished, leaving historic downtown, despite its multibillion-dollar revitalization, without a place to go to the movies.
I thought a lot about that circumstance when I began Movies in the Park in Little Rock nearly a decade ago. In the years since, Movies in the Park has served tens of thousands and, I hope, continues to make a positive impact on the life of the city. But for film culture to thrive there must be more than that.
Naturally, I found it to be wonderful news that Ron Robinson Theater has opened in the Arcade Building on President Clinton Avenue in Little Rock. While it will not operate as a traditional movie theater, the Central Arkansas Library System built it with a mind to showcase new films. Its state-of-the art digital projection ensures that it can compete for first run features as other small theaters across the United States struggle with the expensive transition from 35mm.
In that regard, it is fitting that it will be the permanent home of the burgeoning Little Rock Film Festival, giving the festival founders an opportunity to expand programming and court new work being done by many of the world’s foremost filmmakers, established and unknown, year-round.
And it is a place where we can be reminded of Arkansas’ film history and its substantial influence on American cinema.
That influence began in 1903 when Edwin S. Porter directed The Great Train Robbery. While it is not the first silent film ever made, it is generally considered to be the first film to incorporate camera movement, on-location shooting, cross-cutting and editing. The film was 10 minutes long and changed the ways movies were made. One of its lead actors, Max Aronson, who became known in the movies as Broncho Billy Anderson, was born in Little Rock and lived in Pine Bluff.
Mr. Aronson’s boyhood friend, Freeman Harrison Owens, became the first person to successfully synchronize sound on film, and by doing so revolutionized the talking motion picture. At the time of Owens’ death it is believed that he had more than 11,000 inventions and 200 patents in photography and cinematography to his credit.
I remain heartened that the first film Andy Griffith ever made, A Face in the Crowd, was shot in Piggott in 1956 by Elia Kazan, who had before made A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront with Marlon Brando and East of Eden with James Dean. The same is true for Hallelujah, one of the first major studio motion pictures to feature an all-African American cast, which was partially filmed in the cotton fields of eastern Arkansas in 1929.
Late last year, Martin Scorsese directed his narrative feature The Wolf of Wall Street, a haunting tale of the effects of excess in the age of capitalism. It is rapacious and brilliant, and may be, despite some sneering, the best work of Mr. Scorsese’s life. Few may recall, however, that Mr. Scorsese’s second film, Boxcar Bertha, was shot in Camden and tells the tale of two train robbers and lovers in the American South.
In his 1972 review, Howard Thompson of the New York Times wrote “… the whole thing has been beautifully directed by Martin Scorsese, who really comes into his own here.” The following year Mr. Scorsese directed his third film, Mean Streets, which opened to considerable acclaim and set the young director on an inimitable career path that now spans five decades.
My first memory of going to the movies was in 1984 to see Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. I was 6, and as I watched Sulu on screen I was not aware that the actor who played him, George Takei, had been forcibly transported from California to the Rohwer Relocation Center in Desha County, one of two Japanese internment camps built in Arkansas following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. He was 5 years old when he and his family arrived.
My childhood is spotted with moments at the Melba, a charming movie theater that opened in 1940 on Main Street in Batesville, my father’s hometown. When I was 10 my grandmother took me to see Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. I cannot imagine she cared for it, but I did, and my delight seemed to please her plenty. It turned out to be the last movie we saw together before she died in 1993 after a heroic battle with cancer. On lazy days, as I idly change channels and that film happens to come on, I remember her and that place. Certain things we hold onto tighter than others, I suppose.
News of the opening of Ron Robinson Theater conjured these memories and others. It also reminded me of something Pauline Kael, the legendary film critic at the New Yorker, wrote in For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies: “The romance of movies is not just in those stories and those people on the screen but in the adolescent dream of meeting others who feel as you do about what you’ve seen.”
Over the years I have been afforded the generosity of Ron’s friendship and the opportunity to learn a great deal, as meaningful friendships ought to provide. Ron has deep affection for movies and an encyclopedic understanding of film’s history and influence that make our sessions more of the teacher-student sort, although with generous doses of persiflage and booze.
That has been part of the fun, to be in the great company of someone like Ron whose zeal for film is woven into every fiber of his being. In that way, knowing that there is a place in Little Rock where artists can showcase their work and others may, as Ron has, learn to adore it is, to borrow from James L. Brooks’ Oscar-winning film, as good as it gets.
Blake Rutherford is vice president of The McLarty Companies. He lives in Little Rock and Philadelphia and can be reached at rutherford.blake@gmail.com .
Perspective, Pages 78 on 02/23/2014