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Photo: K. Ganesan

Poor patronage Cinema hall converted into a parking lot

Once inside, when you begin to adjust your eyes in the dark to locate a seat, the nail hits you — that row after row of seats were, in fact, waiting for you with a vacant look.

Whatever happened to our crowded cinema halls, once the bastion of the fittest, perseverant and fanatical of us “brutes with bidis, Romeos in search of their ladies, fresh from college girls carrying books and sulking women with crying babies in hips.”

Cinema halls were the places where you clapped hard for MGRs and Sivajis during stunts, cursed Nambiars and Ashokans with a tight fist during the scheming scenes, sobbed silently for ill-fated Sharada or deserted Kannamba and laughed aloud over Nagesh’s antics — shamelessly and in groups, of six-seats-together families or cost-sharing friends.

You did not mind even though you sweated like a pig inside and co-existed for three hours with those bite-a-minute bugs. Did you ever hear anybody complain? Never.

Forget the punch lines of recent times. Those days, if you just let your aunt, she would instantly unreel scene-by-scene, with emotion, gesticulation, anguish et al, the whole three-hour-drama in one breath without intermission. And the wide-eyed audience, after all this, would still be biding for its time to “experience” it all first-hand. How silly we were!

The times have come to such a pass now that, during intermission if you glance at the handful of cycles and motorcycles in the corner of a wide open parking lot, you may just mistake them to be of the theatre staff. The urine-smelling corridors are devoid of people and smoke. If you jump up the class, nobody will care or even notice.

But not so long ago whenever a new theatre opened, it would become the talk of the town. Any worthy grown-up would rattle with pride names of theatres in his city and the type of films they show. Yes, the type. If “A” could stand for anonymous authors or adult content in the realm of books, it is “M” in the case of explicit movies “Malayalam or men” only. The same set of people “from professors to rickshaw-pullers — religiously follow this not-so-small circuit and exchange “bits of info - the long and short of it.”

Those were the times when the audience would share a good laugh over a loud comment, mostly from the front rows, that would help in maintaining the alert of the rest of the crowd through the film, moreso when it had the sagging moments.

Madurai had always been famous for its loud comments in theatres, coming as they were at appropriate times. Some of these comments could be understood only by the locals, like the mimicking of late-night hawker’s unusual selling pitch – “Cementu thotti” and “paruththi paal.” The most common ones are: “kanavu kanni K.P. Sundarambalukku” will start one and others will join in shouting “jey’ in unison; angry ones will mouth the Tamil-equivalent of those four-letter words (in Madurai, there are many who start by swearing and end up singing a nice couplet) et al gesticulating towards the projection room targeting the operator.

Many comments were instantaneous and some lewd too: all the front rows shooing away ducks entering and blocking a good view of wily Soman outraging the modesty of innocent Seema in a lakeside hut; or saying “hands up” to Bo Derek coming out of a bathroom clutching a towel with both hands to answer the doorbell.

And there were whistles all the time — long and impatient ones demanding the operator to start the movie; shrill ones in excitement during stunts and steamy scenes; catcalls during overacting and lengthy dialogues. Whistling was part and parcel of cinemas so much so that one actually missed it in snobbish Mount Road theatres in Chennai.

But where have all the whistlers gone?

All these and more made movie-going experience pleasurable, the hardships of cost, travel and hard-to-get tickets notwithstanding - which no cheap DVD or home theatre will ever give.

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