ASCII by Jason Scott

Some time ago, I talked about a theater on the way out, in an entry called The Little Theater. I talked about how they didn’t own their property, didn’t have a lobby to speak of, had basically taken the idea they were a utility and then turned around and demanded a million dollars from the world so they could go on. It was quite a negative entry, and I had no proof my opinions were relevant.

Let me correct all that by telling you about The Big Picture.

While travelling through Vermont to do a couple of interviews for GET LAMP, I found myself with a little extra time. I drove around the countryside near Waitsfield, Vermont (near the Mad River) and saw that there was a movie theater near the main road. I drove down to investigate, just to see what sort of place it might be, and what sort of stuff they might be showing.

The Big Picture might look kind of like a weird house out in the middle of a field near a lot, but coming closer, you start to see the interesting way it was built; hints of art deco, pretty lighting, and a functioning clock telling you of the next showings. Its marquee is clean, bright, and distinct. It invites you in.

Once inside, however, you’re in for a real treat.

Some modern theaters might have a dingy, anaemic lobby that wants nothing more than to shuffle you past a selection of overpriced candy to get into the film box, or provide a gymnasium-sized impersonal box covered with ads for whoever paid the big nickel that week. But The Big Picture has an expansive, windowed lobby that offers not only ice cream, candy and soda, but has an entire sit-down bar and restaurant coated in beautiful hardwoods and soft lighting worthy of a classy bookstore. Before you even decide to walk down the hallway to one of the two actual theaters, you’ve already got a variety of activities you could do, whether it be to have a pre-film meal or enjoy a couple of drinks while talking with your friends in the comfortable leather couches and chairs.

I don’t drink, but I’m not the average person, and the average person would definitely love a place that lets you enjoy a good beer or wine and some snacks before making your way into the plush theatres for your films. Some might think this is all window dressing, but it’s not. It sets the stage for enjoying a film, and enjoying the company of others. You could come down early, have a meal, talk with friends or make new ones, and then make your way leisurely into the screens and enjoy a good show. In a world fighting rooms with big screen TVs, this is a heady defense against them; providing a place that’s worth not being alone in. Oh there’s free Internet.

Of course, this is all secondary to content, and what the theatre might have to show. This past weekend was “Movie Lover’s Week” and I took a shot of what was in store.

Delicatessen! !Enter the Dragon! Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown! Thai Chi Master! Run Lola Run!
Kung Fu Hustle! The Eel! The Drunken Master! Karate Kid! The Gods Must be Crazy! If you can’t find something in the lineup that played across just the last weekend, tell me where to send the flowers, because you died.

Just browsing the website for this theatre shows the care that’s gone into putting stuff together. Not only are there specials for “dinner and a movie”, but you have the choice of brunches, and a special kids/parents night out on Wednesdays. But what’s this? A speaker?

I had struck up a conversation with the owner, a real great lady, and she showed me the two theaters. One of them had a lot (and I mean a lot) of space up front, more than adequate for someone to put on a sock hop or a game of dodgeball. She said they’d had bands, presenters, and a whole other range of activities in there. Glancing at the website, you can see the forthcoming appearance of Scott Ritter, who was a UN Weapons Inspector from 1991-1998. Yes, in person. At this theatre.

If I was a kid living in the surrounding area of Waitsfield, Vermont, it’d all be here: mom taking me to great movies in the middle of the week, and me seeing cooler and cooler stuff with all my friends, hanging down at the Big Picture as I got older, watching all these great movies I’d never heard of, and maybe when I got to a certain age, even being brought or going myself to hear a speaker talking about something of world import, right here in my town of about 6,000. Not a bad childhood at all.

I spent some time talking with the owner, who owns the land and the building (hooray) and told me about the effort put into making the place great. The events, the arranging, the billion little details in keeping a concern like this going. The surrounding area isn’t heavily populated, but she’d renovated the place to be what a modern theatre should be: a destination, not just a way-station on the way to somewhere else. Truly a charming (and smart) lady.

If you live within a hundred miles of this place, it’s worth the trip, a full day you could spend enjoying yourself and seeing movies in a way they’re meant to be seen.

It can be done. A theatre in the modern age of plasma and THX in the home can survive, thrive, and give you something you can’t get 20 feet from your bathroom. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I hope I see it in Waitsfield (and many other places) for decades to come.

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I suppose if you’d held me down in my early teens, I’d have happily called myself a “Phone Phreak”. However, a lot of that was because if you scoped around the world of BBSes and Textfiles at the time, people who called themselves Phone Phreaks had the coolest attitude, textfiles, and history. While “Hackers” were of great programming skill and able to use computers in neat ways, and “Crackers” had the coding skills to break copy protection, Phone Phreaks could point back nearly a hundred years to this incredible phone system and rumors of people who could float among the wires and do amazing stuff. The whole Phreaking art seemed to project a sense of tradition, skill and honor that, to a 13-year-old, was pretty amazing stuff. A bonus for myself was that textfiles showing up on bulletin boards were always the best read if they were about Phone Phreaking. Textfiles.com is jam-packed with phreaking textfiles of all stripe that I tracked down throughout the country, files that promised the world and occasionally even delivered. I saw in these files people brilliant enough to look up to. I totally bought in.

So I got the lineman’s “butt-set” and ripped apart a few telephones and did some wiring around the house, and fancied myself one of this tribe. But, at best, I was less a phone phreak than a Phreak Tourist, a near-the-edges guy who was good at observing and collecting but not much else. This always worked in my favor because I never seemed to be out to “get” something or gain some sort of upper hand on my contemporaries: I just wanted to gather stuff and collect it and then give it to others. I therefore got to be near a lot of neat things, even if I myself wasn’t the neat thing in question, or the creator of the neat thing.

On the other hand, my friends and associates were always doing neat things, using phones, computers, ham radio, and even cars and guns. I met some amazing folks who weren’t afraid to stick a hand deep into some wired box of death or yank on power supplies until a blue spark signalled they were heading in the right direction. I was lucky to know them, and they lived the dreams I dreamed.

As a Phreak Tourist, it was easy to boil Phreaking down to the most obvious two talismans that recognized the efforts of the art: telephone conferences and free phone calls. In an era where a telephone call 20 miles from your home could be a sizeable financial burden to a home if it sustained for hours, it was inevitable that I and many others who intended to spend days online would find any way to reduce crushing costs for our phone calls. This was done using something we euphemistically called “codes” or “phone codes” but which in fact mostly were cases of calling alternate long distance phone carriers and typing in false calling card numbers until they worked. If this sounds vaguely illegal, take out the “vaguely” part. And if it sounds difficult, it wasn’t. As astounding as it might be in the eye of the modern user of telecommunications, some of the alternate long distance companies had calling card numbers a mere 4 or 5 digits long. Teenagers come in two main flavors: disinterested and scarily intense, and a scarily intense teenager could slice through a 4 or even 5-digit code set like a hot knife through cellophane.

I have very strong memories of lying in bed, in the dark, with a telephone under my right hand, my head on a pillow with a telephone handset pressed against my head. I could easily dial without looking at the buttons, not unlike a blind person, and I could remember simple sets of numbers. It was trivial, therefore, to be able to spend those hours after one might drift off to sleep instead tapping away at a touch-tone keypad, blowing through the access number and then typing in a phone number and a code, and then waiting in that distant dark space to see if the phone would ring. To this day I can remember the telephone number of my favorite BBS, Sherwood Forest II: 914-357-1519. I haven’t been on Sherwood Forest II in over twenty years. I’d dial, and wait to hear if I got through, then mentally file the working code and move on. What phone company could have honestly expected that level of interest and drive from suburban youth? (They did, eventually, catch on.)

Meanwhile, the conferences were the other lifeblood. As exciting as it was to speak on the telephone, nothing ever outdid the mass of information, socializing and joy of a multi-party conversation between like-minded folks… or even non-like-minded folks. The difference between a two-party call and a telephone conference was like the difference between a Sno-cone and skiing. And the best part was how sometimes the conference would come to you, unannounced, just you picking up your ringing phone and a dozen people would call out your name and drag you into the never-ending conversation.

In today’s age of SIP, Asterisk and Skype, telephone conferences are still going on, but they’re numbingly simple to achieve. It’s an ancilliary part of the process that you can make them happen, and you instead can focus on the good stuff, like adding the right people or choosing a good time or theme to drive the call. I was recently interviewed by two teenagers via Skype for their hacker radio program; we spoke together from three different states, and one of my interviewers had to bargain with his mom to let him finish recording the show before he continued his Bar Mitzvah practice. This is quite a leap from a time I knew where being able to conduct a phone conference was on the same level of reverence as being able to fly a helicopter.

There were several ways to generate a phone conference, ranging from using a PBX system at an office to do so (very rare), connecting to a “telephone bridge” where a switching system might have a conference set up and people could call in (just a few, traded like gold), or, in many cases, calling into a company called Alliance Teleconference, which used 700 numbers you dialed that then made you a “moderator”. As a moderator, you could then call in a bunch of other folks, and talk to someone you just dialed before adding them to the big mix. Moderators would often dial a second phone line in their house so they could avoid missing any part of the “con call”.

While the other methods were spotty (no access to a PBX, phone bridges guarded intensely and for good reason), Alliance Teleconference was dependable; after all, it was a business. And, because it was a business, it was intensely expensive. The charges, as were told to me, were something on the range of a dollar a minute per line, plus long distance charges. Mull that for a moment. A one hour telephone call between you and your five buddies discussing your plans for the weekend was something in the range of $300, plus long distance if some of your buddies were a ways away. That’s scary money, especially if you’re at an age where you’ve never actually held three hundred dollars of currency in your hand at the same time in your life.

The two options presented were to wait and grow old enough to afford this, or steal it. And waiting is boring.

Most phone codes didn’t work with the Alliance Teleconference; they just didn’t recognize “0-700” as a valid area code, which was the first part of Alliance’s telephone number. The easiest way to do it was to find a cheese box.

A cheese box, or more accurately the need for one, dates to before call forwarding was an available option on telephone lines. Now, you can tell the phone system that any calls to your number should be immediately forwarded elsewhere. Usually you’re charged for this, but it’s not so bad and it just reflects the fact that you’re making the equivalent of two phone calls. In the analog switch days, people who wanted to be reached 24 hours a day but didn’t have a very expensive mobile phone, bought a cheese box. More often called a “call forwarder”, it would, when turned on, answer the phone, and immediately call a second number on a second phone line and connect the two. In this way, you could be “on call” 24 hours a day even if you actually went home at night. This was popular with plumbers, doctors, dentists, and other such firms.

You, the aforementioned scarily intense teenager, needed only to call these places, one by one, and then not say anything when the sleepy capitalist answered the phone. If you stayed on until after they hung up, you would get the dial tone of the second telephone line. At that point, the world was your oyster, or at least, the world was your victim’s oyster but you were getting the pearl. (It was best to do this from a payphone, just to be sure it worked right, as you might have only gotten your own dial tone, with hilarious results).

Really, you could then call any number, but you got the most bang for your buck by calling in an Alliance Teleconference and that’s what all the people I know did. Phone numbers would be called, people quizzed, and ultimately you would suck in 10 or 20 people into a conference. The conference would then rage for hours, people joining and dropping, until the rays of sunlight peeking into your room meant the telephone owner was going to head into work and you’d better get the hell off the line.

(Bear in mind that occasionally Alliance Teleconference would catch on that something odd was going on; I can recall one particular teleconference where an Alliance Operator bounced into our conference and said, loudly, “SORRY BOYS, THE PARTY’S OVER”, and then proceeded to knock us off, one by one, off the line. I especially recalled this because we began trying to bargain with the operator, trying to charm her into letting us continue to rack hundreds of dollars in charges. As people were knocked off, we’d wail and keen over it: “Oh God, Oh God, they got Seth. SETH!! SETH!!”)

After the deed was done, at the end of the month, the reckoning would happen. A bill would be generated, and sent out to the owner of that cheese-box enabled phone line. This bill would be, as you can now infer, usually in the range of a few thousand dollars. I am sure you could power a battleship from the amount of anger this would generate. After a frantic call (or calls) to Alliance Teleconference, the victim would get the charge stricken, and, as far as anyone would likely be concerned, the story was over.

I mention all this to tell you of the time someone didn’t consider the story over.

We had a very special telephone line in the house; one which was used as part of the Guardian System, where my father would call into the mainframe at IBM, and then it would hang up and call the special telephone line back. This provided the whole transaction with much better security than simply user-password. This line was paid for by IBM. As a result, the line was listed as IBM. In fact, if you did a reverse lookup on it, all it was listed as in terms of name and address was “IBM, Armonk, NY”. I didn’t live in Armonk. I certainly wasn’t IBM.

This was my other phone line besides the BBS telephone line and our regular phone line. It was the easiest way to call me all hours of the day and night, because it only rang in my room. (It was downstairs as well, in Dad’s study, but I had an extension with a ringing phone in my room.) This was the number I was called on for a teleconference that lasted for about eight hours. Like all other similar conferences, I had a fantastic time, and at the end of it, hung up and went about my business.

A month later, I got a phone call on my line. I answer the phone “hello” generally, and did so in this case. Lucky me.

The woman who called turned out to be one of the owners of a security company (one of those places that sells burglar alarms and a service to answer the phone and call the police when necessary). She had gotten a many thousands-of-dollars bill for a teleconference. She was the owner of the cheese box. She was very pissed, but not in a way that manifested itself in screaming. Instead, she and I began a little conversation.

Because of the situation with the telephone, all she knew was that I was “IBM, Armonk NY”. Listening to me over the phone, she knew I was likely a young male. And that was it. She was calling to ask me about the teleconference.

Naturally, I played stupid. Obsidian block stupid. Broken TV stupid. And cheerful. That cheerful, playful tone one takes when they feel they have total immunity and impunity. I think this amused her, even as she was trying to discern who exactly I was and what my deal was.

We danced, the two of us, in a way I have rarely ever danced since. Pursuer and pursued, where Pursued held all the cards and Pursuer held a big-ass whopping phone bill. She, pointing out how I must certainly know who called me, as I was the first number called in the teleconference and I had stayed on the longest. Me, saying I got phone calls all the time and I never really could figure out who all these crazy kids were.

Twenty years on, I can still remember the dance.

“So, what else do you do besides answer expensive phone calls?”

“Oh, this and that. Read, hang out at school.”

“Oh! What school would that be?”

“Ah! Ah! Just a school like any other, no need to name it, it’s so minor.”

and so on.

We talked for an hour before she wished me well and hung up. A week later, she called again, seeing if my parent would pick up, or I’d slip up. Again we danced, discussed her security company, about what they did, how the stuff they did serviced the local area. She’d mention a place and see if I reacted to it, giving her a hint of where I was. She’d mention nearby schools, nearby highways, see what I thought.

Sometime during this, she got persistent enough that one of the more well-off people involved in the teleconference anonymously sent the security company some money. Not all of it, but enough that it offset the efforts of getting the charges wiped a bit. I know this because she called me and talked to me about it. Her and me, old buddies, just passing the time… without me ever giving my name.

All in all, it was about a half-dozen times she called before she disappeared forever.

Victorious, I forgot about the security company and the nice but dogged lady who called me. I continued to run my BBS, was on conferences, graduated from high school and ultimately started college.

On my holiday back, my dad told me a letter was waiting for me. It was addressed to me, at my home address, with no return address.

Inside was her business card, and nothing else.

I’ve never laughed so hard or enjoyed losing a game as I did that day.

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I’ve been mostly concentrating on the now, on the stuff I’m scanning and the work on the documentaries. Fun, but I think people liked it more when I addressed history and wrote essays. To get back to that, I will be adding three essays about phones. One will be called SECURITY, one called THE OFFICE, and one called VOICEMAIL. You’ll like them if you liked the previous stuff, and otherwise you can wait until I talk about my films again.

I decided to try something fun, and so I now have a myspace account. Come be my friend. Or whatever passes for friends on there.

I have some reputation among a number of people for being this non-stop machine of doing stuff, and yes, I’ve been up to things, but not all of them are really essay-worthy, just the usual efforts of travel, interviewing, and archiving. I’ll be sure to update about those as they come to fruition, shortly.

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Without wasting everyone’s time by doing a “weblog” entry that in fact is just a “go here” entry, let me keep it short and sweet about this site:

http://www.rt2.us

This is a webpage regarding a long-ago BBS/Modem-Based site called “The Houston Freelancin’ Roundtable”. You can read up about what it is, browse old printouts, see old photos, check out the history, and then finally log onto an emulator running a version of the system. A lot of work has been put into this. If every major online entity from the 1980s put this much work into trying to keep the feel and let people visit a living museum, I’d be a happy fellow indeed.

Check it out.

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I made a nice little addition to DIGITIZE.TEXTFILES.COM: The 1980 Coleco Catalog.

If you don’t remember getting a Coleco catalog in the mail at some point, don’t be worried. This particular catalog went out specifically to stores or purchasers for chains. It’s directed toward people who buy by the box or the truckload, and so the tone of the catalog is how the items you buy will be supported by a television advertising campaign, and the main measurement is how big the boxes are so that you know how many you can stack in your shelves.

Beyond that, of course, all the toys in this catalog are presented as exquisitely as possible, with close-zoomed photos, and small framed shots that try to emulate the television commercial.

For a lot of people, the electronic games will hold specific interest, although I supposed the Rock n’ Roll Stroller might invoke a memory or two. More likely, though, there’s a lot of people who remember things like the Electronic Quarterback or the Lil Genius.

One particularly notable toy is Quiz Wiz, which was essentially a paper-based quiz machine that had all of the answers stored on a chip. Therefore,. it had a very large library that covered a ton of subjects, including Major Leage Baseball and the People’s Almanac, I remember a lot of Quiz Wiz commercials.

But I think the most interesting case of me having a different look at things with an adult’s eye would be the Slide-a-Boggans, which are nicely wrapped up in a pretty box and have a nice brand name and all… but they’re plastic sheets! Thick plastic sheets! And if you check out the price list, you can see they were wholesaling at between $1.20 and $1.90 based on which of the models you wanted, either big plastic sheet or bigger plastic sheet. So imagine what the markup must have been for a stamped-out piece of plastic with a box around it. What a racket!

I picked up this catalog along with the 1981 catalog (which is much larger, but still predating the Colecovision) at the MIT flea market. For the first tme in memory, I actually had to haggle with the guy over it, because he wanted $10. No way! I paid $5, which was still too much, but I felt good knowing it’s be all over the world within a short time. And here we are.

Coleco went bankrupt in 1988, and was bought out by Hasbro in 1989. It had been founded in 1932 by Maurice Greenberg, and his son Leonard announced at the beginning of this catalog that Coleco would be “The One” for product, promotion and delivery. At this point, in 1980, they probably thought they were at the top of the world.

Isn’t life and scanning grand.

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Isn’t that how it always is? I am going to be in London for a week doing interviews for my documentary and also speaking at a convention (about Wikipedia, this time), and I realize the time I’m going exactly matches a real incredible chiptune festival in New York City:

BLIPFESTIVAL.ORG

This is fly-to-NY-and-rent-a-hotel worthy. Days upon days of top-notch 8-bit, chiptune and electronic artists performing in one big show. This truly breaks my heart I will miss this.

So go in my place and have a great time. If you need me, I’ll be in London.

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Simon of Legaltorrents (and a bunch of other cool stuff) asked me if it was OK to put an episode of the BBS Documentary up on his website of cool crap to download. How could I say no, both by license and wish? The thing is licensed so that he could put it up without asking, and in fact he asked me to give him the best “rip” I could of it. So I did, along with a bonus promotional film at the end (about 60 seconds) asking people to buy the documentary.

The website is here: http://www.legaltorrents.com/

I guess if you were actually on the fence about whether to buy this documentary DVD set or not, you can go ahead and download that episode and get an idea of how it looks; of course, no director’s commentary, no subtitles, and no sense of well-being clutching the kick-ass packaging while you watch, but I bet a lot of people will get by.

It’s ARTSCENE, which covers the ANSI art scene of the 1990s. Check it out if you haven’t already.

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I got a mail just this week:

“So, I have a collection of a few hundred megs of MP3s of voice mailboxes run by hackers in 1990. Do you have any suggestions on who I should give them to or what to do with them?”

Why yes, I said. yes I do.

Only one or two directories are properly described right now, but I’m sure I’ll get to them all, and fix mistakes as they go. I try to get the proper nouns and handles in there, so that it shows up on search engines. That way original people who might be mentioned in the recordings can tell me they’re in there (if they want) and give more context.

These are basically hacked voice mailboxes from a week in early 1990, where the contributor called a bunch of them and recorded what came out. Some recordings are fuzzy, others distorted, and yet others utterly devoid of content, but they represent primary source material; here’s what voice mailbox hackers, kids trading codes and offering information sounded like. There’s a bunch of handles in there: Crowfly, AK-47, Phoneman, Scandal. A bunch of kids (you can hear the slang being used) just looking for the next free box, the next open system to leave a mark on.

This was all sixteen years ago. If these kids were 15 back then, they’re 31 now. I hope that some 30-something office worker idly types his old handle into Google, sees a green screen full of files, and then says those words that are music to my ears:

“Oh, shit!”

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As someone who is bathed in Bulletin Board System (BBS) history nearly every waking hour, I can sometimes feel like I’m the only one going completely out of his way to find narratives. It’s easy enough to copy together a bunch of floppy disks or scan a bunch of printouts but that’s not really the glue of what put the online world together and why it still holds a strong meaning for people who were there. As a result, I’m always seeking out people to tell their stories from a personal perspective, or at least take a good shot at putting together the human side of the whole BBS era for the sake of those who missed it. If I’m lucky, I stumble upon a few sites where people do a great job of cobbling together what they didn’t throw out from their teenage years. I might even find an extended story out on a website, spanning multiple pages.

With Rob O’Hara’s book Commodork: Sordid Tales from a BBS Junkie, I believe we have the world’s first BBS Memoir. Weighing in at around 160 pages, O’Hara covers his life from 1977 through to 2002, tracing the effect that Bulletin Boards, videogames, and computers have had on his life. Just 33 years old, it might seem strange for someone to write an autobiographical narrative so soon, but like a lot of youth who’ve grown up in the age of the home computer, O’Hara’s gotten a lot of living done in that short time.

This is a self-published book, or more accurately, an author-controlled book. It is currently distributed by Lulu.com, an on-demand printer that provides you with a very “book”-looking book that you would be hard-pressed to think didn’t come right off the shelves of the local chain bookstore. The only difference is there’s no professional editor jamming through the work before it gets to you. It’s easy to find flaws in a lack of slickness and flow in a self-published book, but also no real filtering out of “the good stuff”, either. So I think of this book as a real sweet homebrew creation, rough-hewn but full of heart, not unlike the boards it talks about.

Because of this, the first few dozen pages are choppy. O’Hara works his way around his memories to find his voice: He tries to explain what it is that drives a person to still keep a pile of Commodore 64s in his garage, or build a 20-machine arcade in his back yard (the author includes a picture of this great-looking playroom), or even to want to talk about this history in the first place. He covers it from different angles: the urge to be a collector, the nostalgic dad remembering his carefree days, and the computer guy with the cred built up from now-decades of experience with the machines. He also struggles, initially, with who the book is for: folks completely unaware of the history of the BBS and home computers of the 1980s, or other 30 and up computer geeks who want to take a joyride through a shared childhood? In doing so, he actually touches on some great thoughts on what attracts people to old pieces of plastic and microchips, and why things were so different for him.

A sixth of the way in, O’Hara dispenses with the helping hand, cracks his knuckles, and goes in whole hog. Instead of asking if anyone gets it, he assumes you’ve gotten this far because you want to know it, jams the wayback machine into full throttle, and plunges into the world of BBSing for a teenager in Oklahoma. Except, of course, it’s really every BBS kid’s childhood: The little bargains, the quiet victories, the betrayals, the triumphs.

The heart and soul of the book actually are warez. Warez in the old sense, of newly-acquired one-off floppies of games, painstaking bargained for, traded, and spread out to gain fame and reputation. Throughout the book, it comes back to the warez, and O’Hara does an absolutely fantastic job of capturing the sense of power and expression that engulfs a teenager who has been able to use his skills or his patience to get his hand on a program that nobody else has and then turn around and use that slight lead to his advantage. The methods he uses are laid out in brilliant detail; one involves registering with bulletin boards in a city his family will be vacationing in shortly, allowing his far away “exotic” location to be verified by the system operator, and then traveling to that city and leeching them dry for a free local call.

O’Hara never lets it get dry and technical; it’s about people he met while trading software, the kind of people who he partied with, got into fights with, or loved. He’s not always nice and he’s not always the hero; what really rings true is how none of it feels pumped up or faked, dressed up as some inherently soul-searching activity where every moment in bristling with poignant meaning. That said, some of it rings very close to the heart indeed.

In fact, this book’s greatest effect may be the touchstone it provides for one’s own experiences. Even as Rob’s younger self is getting drunk at a BBS party and stumbling in panic from a perceived bust into the flatbed of a parked truck to sleep it off, I’m harkening back in my own mind to events that accompanied my BBSing that I’d forgotten wholly and totally. But I was there again, saving my own warez for the right moment, meeting my own soon-to-be-lifelong friends, making my own grievous mistakes. Anyone who used BBSes for any period of time will want to run to their keyboards and tell their own story; I see a lot of long e-mails in Mr. O’Hara’s future.

One small disclaimer: On page 14 of the edition of the book I have, Rob mentions my BBS Documentary, but just to say it’s not what he was aiming for with his book. And he’s right; we don’t step in each other’s territory and his book does what my film couldn’t; go front to end on one boy’s story to turning into a man online. And for that, I thank him, and I think a lot of others will too.

Is it for everyone? No way, but a book that takes on its subject so intensely shouldn’t be. If you or an older sibling or parent touched a plastic-and-metal home computer, sipped your bandwidth through a modem, or held a 5 1/4″ floppy disk in your bag to give to someone else, this book is your book. It might even be your memories, too.

It’s a good book and can be ordered through Lulu or directly from the author, who sells autographed copies.

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I loved the little theatre.

I don’t quite know when I first heard about it, but likely the name rattled around in my reading the free newspapers while I was in college. That’s how it often works: you see something playing there in an article next to the stuff about politics and bands, and then eventually a film name or genre would get your attention and you’d figure out where the heck the place was and if you could get there easily, since you were a college student.

I’m sure what got me to go was something involving animation or hong-kong action movies; after all, I was 19.

What struck me then about the little theatre was the location, nestled inside a city, the entrance off to the side down some stairs past a poster, almost as if you kind of had to know beforehand where it was. A modern multiplex has no problem getting your attention, since it’s often a big fucking box in a 20-acre blast radius of asphalt near a highway. Or it’s a glowing massive box along a street in a city with a sign letting you know that that film you hated just got a sequel. But the little theatre was cozy, almost demure about itself; no big lights, no massive sign, just you having to know. So when you went, as I went that first time, you felt like you’d discovered it and snuck in accordingly.

There were three theatres within 1500 feet of each other, but the other two were chains and the little theatre was “independent”. I had no idea what that meant other than they were showing some really neat, weird stuff. They printed their schedule on a crazy piece of paper going months into the future, and showing themes, “restored” and “new print” films that I’d never heard of, and a whole bunch of anime and action pictures.

As according with the nestled side entrance, the little theatre’s interior was also strange. The lobby wasn’t even a lobby; at best it was an ill-conceived room with a staircase and a snack bar; you couldn’t fit more than 10 people in that space and so you’d end up with lines going out the door or everyone shoved in there if it was cold. After going up the stiars, you’d end up in the main theatre, which was even more odd. It was a stage, in every way, the kind of barn-roof-like showhouse vaudeville most certainly must have thrived in, with a movie screen set back from the edge of the stage. There was even a balcony, although it was kind of odd up there and not many seats, like an afterthought desperate to sneak in another few people. It was funky, it was weird, and it played off-the-wall stuff. I was hooked and in love, and we had our little relationship.

I didn’t know who ran it and I honestly didn’t care. All I knew was that they would show several movies a day, often just for that day. Sometimes they were in theme to each other and sometimes not. You could buy a ticket for one show and sit around and see the next show. Without fail, I did. If it wasn’t a popular one, I could sit in the front row, the absolute front, rest my feet against the stage, and the screen would still be 20 feet back from me. It was, like I said, totally weird and I got a real habit for sitting up towards the front, which I still do and which drives my friends nuts. But it came from the little theatre, it’s little screen and my perfect position when I sat down and watched the movies.

And the movies I saw! Among the films I saw for the first time, on the little theatre’s screen, were Delicatessen, Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro, The Hunger, Casablanca, She’s Gotta Have It, The City of Lost Children, What Time Is It There?, Seven Samurai, and dozens and dozens and dozens of anime, hong-kong action, and arty films.

So many times, I’d go to see a film, look around, and see old friends who I hadn’t seen much of in previous months. My city sucks for late night hanging out but at least we’d be able to say some kind words before and after and maybe spur ourselves into an event or dinner soon afterwards. It actually functioned as a meeting place.

I had a rotating group of friends (rotations measured in years) who would come with me or meet me at the little theatre and go there for anime night, or kung-fu night, or whatever. Sometimes it’d be a tough sell, as I explained that a movie had taken years to make or it would have puppet sex or it would have as it’s strongest feature that nobody in the film spoke a word. Sometimes people would bite, or sometimes it would be just me and the little theatre and the magic inside.

After I graduated, and as I went into my 30s, I stopped going to the llittle theatre as much, mostly because I had a demanding job, lived farther away from it, and generally didn’t check the schedule until it was too late to make it. I’d still get the phone calls from friends about something coming up and I’d make it, but I also had cable in my house (I hadn’t had it between the ages of 18 and 26) and I caught up on the different TV shows and rented movies and generally enjoyed myself that way. The little theatre, with its quirky bits and odd one-day-only shows sometimes got my attention and sometimes did not. I certainly didn’t avoid it, and didn’t feel weird coming to go in, but it was like going to any place you’d been at a lot and now not so much; you felt fine being there.. it just wasn’t a vital daily need or anything like that.

There was another movie house that I went to that was the closest to “competition” as far as I was concerned: the very grand old theater. The very grand old theatre had everything in spades: a lobby that represented a real lobby (although they had sold off part of it to another business, so it was still a little oddly shaped) and a main showing area that was absolutely goddamn breathtaking. I went to the grand old theater many times, although nowhere near as much as the little theatre. The grand old theatre, though, is where I saw a lot of other stuff for the first time: Laurence of Arabia in 70mm, Donnie Darko, Metropolis (with live music!), and so on. “Big ticket” stuff, in other words. The seats were nicer and the screen was set up so in fact I was happier in the 15th row than the first. The grand old theatre also did week runs (and midnight movies) instead of 2-a-day or 1-a-day, so I wouldn’t bump into buddies all that often but I was basically always guaranteed a seat.

So I was a movie-goer in the classic sense, including going to the big box theatres, but not all that often. I had a lot more interest in these time-tested classics than particularly heading down to the local multiplex and hoping beyond hope I wasn’t going to get hose-slapped with a piece of garbage dressed up in a pretty bow. I ended up going to a lot of films based on the director, and still do. Not a great reason, but generally a help.

But puppies become dogs and kittens become cats, and I bought a house and moved a little ways out of town and my internet connection got better and my home got a lot nicer. Where before I had no cable and an OK TV, now I had a big-screen and more DVDs than I could ever want and the ability to download all sorts of cool films whenever the mood struck me. The little theatre and the grand old theatre could get me, but it had to be something pretty darn special; I wasn’t just going to blow an evening out hoping the film wouldn’t be too painful to watch.

But again, the love affair was still there; I registered a domain and pointed it to the little theatre because their domain name absolutely blew and nobody would find it. My site had their logo and pointer to their site, and I watched college student after college student coming from a college domain click in, and click out. I figure it was something like 200-400 a month, looking for schedules and then going on. I was happy; even if I wasn’t always able to go, I helped a lot of people get to go anyway, helping the little theatre.

Sometime in here, I struck up a conversation with the current people running the little theatre. Just a little bit in e-mail; they had a list and they would solicit suggestions and I’d just go off on flowery tangental sermons about how great they were and how they could get even better and so on. I remember, quite clearly, asking some behind the scenes stuff, like if they owned their theatre, how they chose movies, what events they might have there in the future.

I also remember, quite clearly, being told that while they didn’t own the building, they had a really nice landlord with a really good deal and so there was no problem. I said I thought there was a minor problem with that, having seen too many cases of landlords selling out “landmark” businesses out from under themselves, ending the run. But the rest of the answers were helpful and bright, and I was happy to know “my” theatre was in understanding, caring hands.

So one day the letter came.

The letter explained that in fact the little theatre was not just under the gun, but it’d taken quite a few bullets and was now limping to the community’s doorstep for help. It turned out, you see, that the landlord was such a great landlord because he would let payments slip. The little theatre owed hundreds of thousands of dollars. Where I heard sunshine and light before, I now heard that it was in danger of closing. Poof. Almost to be gone and removed forever.

The theatre asked for everyone to please send in money. Any amount, any bit, to help keep it alive. They announced fundraising drives, and declared two massive milestones to be reached: a lot of money in a short period of time and a sort-of-lot of money to be reached within a year. If not, they warned, they would close their doors forever.

I felt bad for the little theatre but it was also like finding out an elderly friend had hip trouble: well, duh. The place they were at wasn’t the most accessible, the prices they charged were basically equivalent to first-run theatres, and to be honest, the lineups often didn’t appeal to me; they were often just the first-run “independent” movies, which by the last few years had basically degenerated to the movies that were made by the tiny studios run by the big studios. Hooray. When they pulled out a great one, it was great, but great wasn’t happening as much anymore.

But, I also figured, maybe I was just getting old and cynical. I idly checked up on the listing for the little theatre’s property. I saw that they had a landlord who owned a number of properties, and had for many years; a real old-school one. And the story, as I could piece together, was quite clear: they just didn’t always pay their bills, and finally the landlord wanted some friggin’ bucks.

My research didn’t stop there; I started looking into who was running the place, which I had never cared about, and also didn’t like what I saw. Not so much “film” people as chummy organizer types with recent college degrees and shared board seats on a variety of local “groups” which included an incestual selection of insiders across a number of arts-related themes. Small-town punkery in a city that thinks it’s world class. I had dimly theorized the motor under the hatch wasn’t all that pretty but here I now knew it was.

I’m actually being nice here; I started to write on some weblog comment areas about my concerns with the little theatre and its setups, and was contacted by the theatre’s management, asking me to please take what I was saying down, that it could potentially jinx a number of investments that were coming along. See, as it was explained to me, there were some real big money people who were willing to help the poor sickly little theatre, but they were waiting on all the plebes on the ground to donate their $10-$100 coinage to show there was even any interest in the endeavor. Once they saw this and a groundswell of love and caring for the little theatre, the big guns would come in and save the day. I found this distasteful and ugly, but I’d asked for it getting involved in the first place. I promised I would not use their name again. (And I haven’t, and you might notice I haven’t once even in this entry).

So I was on the fence about the little theatre. I knew that the time for movie houses being the center of all things was well closed, and that competition from other forms of entertainment that, seriously, are just as good and satisfying was eating a lot of the theatre’s lunch. There are a number of unique and forward-thinking things that a theatre can do. After all, it’s a box, and since time immemorial guys with boxes on streets and sidewalks have to figure out how to get people to pay to get into the box. Flashier outsides, cascades of advertisements, eye-catching events and heart-exciting appearances. It’s a business. Businesses have to do what they can do, or they get smeared.

I fell off the fence, late last year, when I read an article that had joined a dozen other articles about saving the theatre. The history! The special place it was! The need to survive to keep this jewel shiny. Typical stuff. But the real crux was the reasoning given by the manager for the dire situation the little theatre was in.

He blamed the reduction in foot traffic, the encroach of home entertainment, the ever-rising costs to do business, the razor-thin profit world of the independent theatre. All well and good, although of course I asked myself what giving them even more money would achieve, if they had no clear plan to make a sizeable profit to float the boat itself.

But then I read down further, and my love affair died.

He blamed 9/11.

Yes, that’s right, because two planes crashed into the World Trade Center in 2001, the little theatre was limping along near death in 2005 and might close in 2006. Audiences were depressed or started shying away from movie theatres, it was explained, and it was a heavy load that had caused a downturn in attendance.

Bull, Fucking. Shit.

People enjoy entertainment more when they’re feeling lost and lonely. They curl up and throw themselves into the great entertainment the creative people of the world present, whether it’s a book, a movie or a concert. The events might have more deep personal meanings, and songs about being torn apart or losing a loved one might have sudden echoes of new interpretations, but to imply that 9/11 was a mitigating and ongoing factor in the little theatre’s troubles, especially when the other independent theatres were doing just fine, thank you was the lowest of the low, the cornered rat squeaking out one last plea.

I washed my hands completely. I haven’t set foot back in the little theatre since.

The grand old theatre gets my cash, although again I don’t often go there, just like I don’t go out like I once did. I work with computers and when I’m not working with computers I’m travelling the world making my own movies. I learned how to float my own boat years ago; I don’t depend on handouts and assuming my debtors will never actually collect because I’m just that fucking cool and arty. The phrase is “head in the clouds but feet on the ground”. Take away the ground part, and you’re in free-fall.

I wish the little theatre well, and I might even attend a movie or two in the future there, assuming it’s truly a unique offering being made that is worth the effort to get out there and spend the money. But that goes for buying any product, really. Give me something worth coming to you for and I won’t care how dumb you’ve acted in the past with your business decisions. Movie houses are not temples. They’re not charities, they’re not altars requiring me to tithe my salary to to ensure a big white rectange stays on a wall in the building. They’re a business. A business with 100 years behind the industry, but still, a business. Adapt or die. Gas stations don’t wistfully recall the time they had electromechanical dials and the customers had to go to the staff to pay. They adapted, they became more efficient, they concentrated on having convenience stores attached to the gas station and ensuring that there was a reason to stick around and spend even more money. I’ve eaten at a lot of gas stations in the past decade.

Harsh? Maybe. Unnecessary, a kick while they’re down? Maybe. But they put themselves there. Aiming a gun at your own head and demanding money isn’t a hostage situation. It’s delayed suicide.

Goodbye, little theatre. I loved you.

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