In the Dark in New Mexico
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The path to the Kiva from my house in summertime snaked through the dense overgrowth along the Gallinas River. A 10-year-old boy growing up in the frontier town of Las Vegas, N.M., knows no fear as he battles imaginary Godzillas and Mothras on the banks of the Gallinas to win his reward of four hours of B-movie paradise.
The Kiva Theatre on Bridge Street nurtured my earliest flights of imagination and terror out of Las Vegas; Vincent Price and Peter Cushing more often than not were my babysitters inside the dark, cool movie house. A box of milk duds and my best friend Richie were to be my companions for the wondrous and unknown adventures of the afternoon. As the lights dimmed on the fading red velvet seats, the colored lights of the glass Art Deco wall sconces bathed the Kiva's auditorium in soft shades of red and violet. We sank deeper in our seats and waited anxiously for the first flashes of light on the giant white screen. Every kid in New Mexico knows similar odysseys and misadventures and secret romances made magically manifest in the flickering light of hometown cinemas.
Within a scant 100 years, movie houses became a sacred building type in our society, perhaps only eclipsed by churches, chapels and other religious buildings as places where hearts and souls can mingle with the angels. Of course, the collective commingling of emotions created by the movies in a cinema produces the magic we so crave and cherish. A town without a good movie house cannot be a great town.
Look around the landscape of New Mexico, search for those great palaces of celluloid culture and discover for yourself. Fortunately, several magnificent New Mexico theatres survive in all their architectural glory, offering the full movie experience of fantasy architecture, big screen, enhanced sound, buttered popcorn, and a crowd of your friends and neighbors. In the golden days, you got even more - cartoons, serials, wacky contests and giveaways. We've lost the glitter in the shuffle of progress.
It seems inconceivable to us to enjoy modern life without the fantasy of moving pictures, yet movies are only a brief montage on the screen of human history. The West was already won before Mr. Edison came along. The amazing legends of the Western frontier, however, quickly became some of the earliest movie "features."
Thomas Edison produced the first silent motion picture,
Record of a Sneeze, in 1894, and within two years, a motion picture theatre called the Vitascope Hall had opened in New Orleans. Not long thereafter, the booming New Mexican city of Albuquerque welcomed the movie industry with gleeful enthusiasm.
