“Fascinatical Fun to Fantastical Evil and Back Again to the Modern Cinema” by Lucky Goldberg

Modern Cinema is built on the strong foundation of Historical Cinema.  Imagine a time when the concept of a film was putting a camera on a tripod and shooting factory workers coming out of a large building for about 45 seconds!  This is actually a film portrayed in Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory In Lyon (La Sortie des Usines Lumière à Lyon, 1895) by the brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière.

Storytelling as I’m sure we can all agree, except for everyone who disagrees, goes back to the original Creator of the All, GOD.  Adam and Eve, all the animals and plants were all driven into a new existence by the Word of GOD.  In storytelling we convey a message of love to fear and all dimensions and perspective mutually inclusive, mutually elusive, to spectulatorically hypothetical, theoretical, enigmatical and just simple plain old folklore.   We want to hear these stories, we were born to hear these stories, we were made to hear and see the Truth and the Lies.  What a perfect conditional paradigm for our inquisitive and never-satiated curiosities and imaginations!

Good and Evil can be imprinted on our minds, as well as into our minds like anything else that we allow accessibility often without accountability.  Why the fascination with horror, zombies, battles, conquering, psychotic, glorious, death-defying and heroic? We might consider the concept that it’s not a normal occurrence in our daily lives – but we love or fear and all algorithms of the mixture of love and fear to the point of full blend to any derivation of mixtures.  The mere presence of even the slightest possibility – are we not subject to call in the cavalry sometimes for a change of the weather, or the breeze blowing differently, or an innuendo deeper perceived meaning of a word spoken both either a friend and alien or non-friend -how much more so than are we primed for Oscar-level to the mundanity of the vision-less yet self-titled filmmaker to allow ourselves the fun and fantasy to be titillated, scintillated, fascinated, horrificated and perhaps eternally permeated by the phenomena of film architected by huge creative teams of writers, producers, directors, cinematographers and visionaries to bean-counters or a kid with an iPhone?

The fantastic gripping and sometimes life-altering use of the power of suggestion is the key weapon for giant messagi stretched across beautiful new digital screens that rock and roll our hearts, minds and souls into a frenzy of what-if scenarios to omg realizations of grandeur!  You can be brought to your knees in a battle-clad Russell Crowe GLADIATOR war to the death and then whisked away to alien races by GREEN LANTERN, then submerged into espionage by Angelina Jolie in SALT, thrown to the wolves in TWILIGHT and saved for Eternal Life or damnation by Cecil B. Demille’s TEN COMMANDMENTS.  All in a days work in the magical world of Hollywood.   Whoever thought school would be at the whim and whimsy, the dollars and sense of the commercially driven artistic entertainment mogul/schoolteachers, the Presidents and Executives, pros and amateurs of the Hollywood and Independent Studios of the World!!!

How do you make it through all this visual and aural input?  What secret weapon can keep you coming to the experience over and over again for years?   What magical powers hypnotize your wallet to pay ever-increasing dollars to see the latest feature film and attend film festivals?   POPCORN.  Why popcorn?  Why not!   Popcorn in the silent era of films was nowhere to be found in the movie theater – rather it was relegated to the circus and other type of live shows.  Who would enjoy popcorn as the soundtrack of a silent film!  At five cents a bag when Al Jolson and other brought the first talkies to the screen, popcorn finally found it’s lifelong home.  Not to be caught sleeping, the theater owners relished the hot dog popularity of this new-fangled romance of it’s moviegoer to the ‘corn, hence a new industry grew into a cash-machine rivaling the entire gross income of several moons surrounding Jupiter.  Your instincts serve you well – you are not wrong – there is more than meets the eyes and ears in the movie experience – it’s your thirst for beverages alongside that addictive kernel of Kansasian cornfields.

Back in the silent era, popcorn wasn’t a fixture at all in theaters. It could be purchased at other places like the circus or stage shows, but the concession area of a theater lobby didn’t even exist. After all, no one wanted to hear munching and crunching during a silent film.

With the arrival of talking movies and the Great Depression, popcorn suddenly exploded, so to speak. Anybody could afford it with prices as low as five cents a bag, and vendors could get a space inside or outside a theater to give moviegoers a snack on their way into the theater.

$10 for 100 pounds of kernels to make over a 1000 bags back in the good old days and still a buttery flow of profit today.

Go see a movie – in your home, home theater, theater or on a space plane to Alpha Centauri – it’s all part of the magical movie experience we all love.

It’s as natural as breast-feeding to experience a movie.  After all, cinema is the cine of your mama too.  Cine ma.  Sin no ma.  Your mother is perfect after all – she gave birth to you and your love of Cinema.  But I digress – which is cause for another film and another story, at yet another time.

Lots of Love and Laughs in the Light of the Flickering Silver Screen from Lucky to you!

cinema (n.) 1899, “a movie hall,” from French cinéma, shortened from cinématographe “motion picture projector and camera,” coined 1890s by Lumiere brothers, who invented it, from Latinized form of Greek kinemat-, comb. form of kinema “movement,” from kinein “to move” (see cite) + graphein “to write” (see -graphy). Meaning “movies collectively, especially as an art form” recorded by 1914.  [Sources for etymology of cinema]