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Your First Movie…


A fun game for movie aficionados can be trying to remember the first film that really got them turned on to the medium as something more than just a casual entertainment.

While most of us have enjoyed movies for longer than we can possibly remember, it’s surprising how often I’ll talk to someone who can remember exactly what film triggered a serious interest in film as something more than just entertainment.

There are so many ways to get exposed to movies, especially with the rise of so many home viewing formats, that it can be difficult to imagine just how or why a certain movie made you see the medium in a whole new way.

As a fan of silent film, and silent comedy in particular, it’s interesting to remember the first time I encountered these movies.

Peanuts on the floor and serials on the screen

During the 1980s, a restaurant chain called The Ground Round offered an interesting dining experience.

In addition to the meal, diners were treated to silent comedies run on a small screen in the center of the restaurant, complete with popcorn. I trace my interest in silent film to these little screenings. What’s really odd, though, is to think that an entire chain of restaurants devoted a space to a small projector and screen for these films.

Who knows where the prints came from?

I often wonder where they ended up after the restaurants did away this feature, replacing it in the early 1990s with a projector-screen television and videotapes of public domain cartoons.

Oddly, I can find very few references at all to these silent film shows at the Ground Round restaurants, other than a few random reminiscences from posters on various Internet message boards.

I’m frankly surprised more people don’t remember this chain, because their shows were so unique. I’ve heard of another restaurant, Shakey’s Pizza, which also used to show silent comedies as part of their dining experience. Interestingly, I used to eat at a Shakey’s every once in a while, but this particular one never showed any silent films.

While it’s probably the case that the rise of the home video market is largely responsible for the doing-away with screenings like this, it’s a shame that they’ve virtually disappeared (I don’t know of any Ground Round or Shakey’s Pizzas still running silent films), since it undoubtedly helped to introduce many future silent film buffs to these films for the first time.

Another unlikely venue through which I came across silent film was in a coin-operated version of Mutoscope machines, which I came across one summer while on vacation in Ocean City, Maryland.

The Mutoscope was a hand-cranked peepshow viewing device, made by the American Mutoscope and Biograph company, which offered an alternative to the Edison Kinetoscope.

However, while the Kinetoscope films ran on a loop, the Mutoscopes used a hand-cranked, “flipbook” method, which each frame of the film printed on a separate piece of paper which would appear in front of the viewer.

These particular machines that I encountered on the boardwalk (in a wax museum, of all places), were coin-operated, but used the flip-book method of presentation.

While I’ve since forgotten which films were shown in the two machines I came across (I’m not even sure the films had titles on them), I do recall one depicting a boxing match, and another film that seemed to be of a later vintage, because it featured multiple shots, and appeared to be just a scene from a longer film, depicting a character in Western gear shooting at a snake in the desert.

This film, printed on paper stock, appeared to be yellowed with age.

It’s certainly remarkable the kind of imprint that these images can leave on the mind, even after just seeing them once, more than fifteen years ago. It’s interesting to speculate where these machines came from, and – like the prints used at the Ground Round – what ever became of them after the wax museum in which they were located had closed down.

With the rise of online video services like Netflix, it will hopefully become easier for future movie buffs to come across an interesting title that they might not otherwise seek out, and take a chance on viewing it. Certainly, channels like TCM have done a huge service in this regard.

There’s something to be said for discovering a love of film in the most unexpected places.

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