My Rough Theatre

My rough theatre was a theatre I used to frequent when I was a young lad around the age of 16 or so, which was very long ago indeed. The theatre was called Northpoint Movie Theater, I think. Honestly, I believe that was the name of it. I do not recall it having any more official name associating it with a big string of movie theater chains. This is also probably why it ended up failing. Nonetheless, Northpoint Movie Theater was in an area called, surprise surprise, Northpoint, which was not far from a town called Dundalk outside of Baltimore City in Baltimore County (Dundalk is to Baltimore as what New Jersey is to America, though that's another story for another time, and I really have nothing against Jersey). The theater was a second run theater which means that it played movies after the really nice swanky joints were done with it, and after the print had been disheveled and dilapidated containing hundreds of bad splices from each projectionist who came before. Wilmington does not have any second run theaters around here. When they were mentioned last week in one of Professor Berliner's lectures, most everyone had a glaze in their eyes as to what he was speaking of. It's also worth noting that he said that they were all gone and that video replaced the second run theater, but some are still thriving in my home town.

Anyway, the theater had been around as long as I could remember, but the only two movies I am sure that I have seen there as a child are Major League and Ghostbusters 2. Both of these were with a friend and his father from across the street though looking back, he was obviously not the greatest parental figure as we would have both been about 8 when the R-rated Major League came out. Still, one day, and I don't remember it exactly, my buddy Derek and I were looking for something to do. Movies were an obvious option and for some reason we ventured over to Northpoint Movies to catch a flick that I can not even recall the name of anymore.

That was where it all started, and it did not stop until they eventually closed their doors permanently. The experience there was great. Surprisingly, it was not a dirty theater, though that was probably due to the fact that no one else frequented it, so there was no need for the meticulous cleaning of it. I know that my buddy and I were the only two in the screening for almost every flick that we saw there. I actually prefer to be alone or with people I can trust to never talk at all. I take my film viewing very serious, and despite loving going to the movies, I completely despise seeing a movie with any sizeable amount of people.

Anyway, the cinema itself was just kind of old. It was probably outdated by about ten or fifteen years by the time I made it my own, and one thing I do remember was that certain screens had a few blotches on them from what I can only assume was an unruly customer who threw their tasty beverage at it in disgust over a film he saw who knows how long ago. The price of the theater when I started going was either $1.50 or $1.75, and this was in the late 90's. It may have reached the steep amount of two bucks before it closed up. Nevertheless, it was a theater that my friend and I could call our own for a while, and some of the flicks I saw there were The Newton Boys, The Replacement Killers, and Firestorm starring former football player Howie Long as a skydiving fireman (yes, this film exists, and it was a wide release from 20th Century Fox). But now it's all gone. Torn down in the name of consumerism. A Wal-Mart now resides there, but somewhere underneath that corporate icon of a store must still lie a fragment or two of the old Northpoint Theater. Maybe a speck of foam from one of the ratty cushions or even a piece of hardened gum from beneath one of the seats. Yeah. No doubt about it, a part of it is still there.