Ford City General Cinema

Remember this? (You see? The Internet is actually good for something.)

I saw dozens of movies at Ford City Theaters, so I'll just hit the high points.



On November 8, 1975, my tenth birthday, my father took me to see Jaws. For those of you too young to remember, Jaws marked the beginning of the "blockbuster" movie (to the detriment of the film business, in my opinion, but that's another story). Anyway, this was the first movie I remember going to where every single seat was taken. My father, brother, and I sat in the last row. I still remember the collective scream from the audience when the bones of a corpse appear in one of the porthole windows.

I saw Star Wars here, too. Lines for Star Wars wrapped around the theater. Every show, hour after hour, week after week, month after month, was sold out. This was the first movie that people went to repeatedly -- five, six, fifteen times. The local news ran stories on how many times some people went to see it. Every time you drove by Ford City, you saw the lines. I wasn't one of the first to see it; I waited months, after the lines had begun to dwindle, if only a little bit. Hard to believe, but the same was true for Superman, which I also saw at Ford City.



I forced my mother to take me to see Steve Martin in The Jerk. It was Rated R; I needed a guardian. My mother, despite thinking it was "stupid" (her word, not mine), laughed the entire time. (She hated admitting that she actually enjoyed it, so I frequently teased her about it!) A highlight, though, was seeing the preview for Kubrick's The Shining: gallons of blood pour from a closed elevator, so much blood that furniture outside the elevator floats away. That was the entire preview, but man oh man, was it effective!

In high school, I reviewed movies for Reavis' newspaper, The Blueprint, and there were some days when I would go to Ford City Theaters for a matinee and then slip into another movie afterward. One day, I saw three movies in a row. If memory serves me correctly, two of the movies were Prince of the City and Southern Comfort; I can't remember the third. I justified sneaking in because, well, the candy and Cokes were so damned expensive.

In the '80s, I saw several forgettable movies at the less memorable Ford City East Theaters, though the one notable movie I saw there (probably a dozen times the month it was released) was Fast Times at Ridgemont High. I saw it so many times, I ran out of money. I had to stand in the parking lot and ask someone for a dime or quarter. Sad, folks. Very sad.



The very last movie I saw at the main Ford City Theater was a midnight showing of Rocky Horror Picture Show -- an appropriate end to an era (for me, at least). This was the fall of 1982. By spring of '83, I was working as an usher at Orland Square's movie theater (I know: I'm a traitor), and by the following fall, I had moved away.

Good times.