It's funny the things you remember like they happened yesterday but actually happened dozens of years ago. Such is the case with all the circumstances surrounding the three different days I went to see NoDS. The most exciting was certainly August 6th, most probably because I was going to see new DS for the first time in almost 4 months and the cancellation of the daytime show had been so devastating. But I have no less clearer memories of August 25th. In fact, my memories of the 25th actually start on the 24th because that was the day the ad announcing NoDS was finally going to open at the Durfee Theatre appeared in the newspaper. Given my friend's sister had seen the trailer there back in July and the film had opened in so many other places on the 4th, as August went on, we couldn't help but wonder if NoDS wasn't even going to open at the Durfee! But at last it was going to. And it was funny that my friend and I saw the ad at the same time because we were together when we checked the newspaper that day. Immediately we began making plans to see NoDS the next day. Being a Wednesday, though, our parents were all going to be working, so we were going to have to take the bus downtown because the theater was four miles from both our houses. But taking the bus downtown wasn't anything new to us because we took the bus downtown nearly every Saturday, checked out the stores, then took another bus to a nearby mall to check out those stores and meet other friends. Needless to say, we planned to be at the theater for the very first showing at 1pm and to remain at the theater to see NoDS multiple times, which is something that was possible to do back then (we'd done the same when hoDS had originally opened at the Durfee).
We always met up downtown at the local record store where we always bought our favorite 45s of the day. And as I arrived at the store first and needed to kill time, I picked up Paul and Linda McCartney's
Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey. (And I'm sure I must have driven my mother insane whenever she was around when I played it because I loved it so much that I played it OFTEN. Although I also often played the only other 45 I'd bought that summer, The Raiders'
Indian Reservation - and I like to think both records went to #1 on Billboard magazine's Top 100 Singles Chart because I bought them during the week they peaked - though obviously it really took a lot more than my copies to reach #1 - but I digress...)
Now, even though we'd already seen NoDS, it was no less exciting that we were going to see it again - and not just simply for the film itself but especially because, unlike some other drive-ins in the area, the Ponta Drive-in's snack bar didn't display promotional materials for the films they showed. On the other hand, the Durfee Theatre showcased just about everything you could think of for the films they showed. This post is going to focus only on the outside of the theater.
And so to better picture what I'm going to be talking about, here's a photo of the outside of the Durfee Theatre (a photo that was taken slightly more than a week after the 25th and which I've scanned from a book about the losses of magnificent structures due to the addled '70s notion that progress is worth the loss of anything, but maybe more on that some other day):
As you can see on either side facing the street were glass cases in which the Durfee displayed the main attraction's Insert Cards. Adjacent to those cases but at an angle toward the entrance were glass cases in which the main attraction's 1 Sheet was displayed. And above the entrance was normally where banners for the associate attraction were displayed. All that meant that what was displayed outside the theater for NoDS was two copies of these -
(Click
here for a 1092X1000 version)
- and I'm pretty sure that the hoDS banner was the same design as the ad the Ponta had used for hoDS in the newspaper ad I'd shared back in Reply #1 -
And as I was preparing the materials for this post I couldn't help but think that if our 15-year-old selves had been experiencing all this in this day and age and not in '71, my friend and I would have surely had our cell phones in hand taking all sorts of selfies outside the theater to share on social media. But back in '71 the idea of having even an instamatic camera with us and snapping photos outside the theater was completely a foreign concept. I can only imagine what the other patrons that day would have thought of us if we had done that. Though part of me almost wishes that we had.
Next up in the saga: what was to be discovered after entering the theater and while ascending the slope of the outer lobby...