James Hynes

I am just beginning my fourteenth year in Austin, Texas, and that means I’ve been looking forward all year to my fourteenth summer of movies at the Paramount Theater, a grand old restored movie palace in downtown Austin, on Congress Avenue a few blocks from the state capitol. Every summer it shows an entertaining (if slightly predictable) schedule of old movies, two or three of them every weekend. It's one of the few places in America where you can see great old widescreen epics, Golden Age black and white classics, and vintage horror and sci fi films on the big screen, the way God and David O. Selznick intended. And since it is a grand old movie palace, the best seats are up in balcony, or the mezzanine. It's where I saw a gorgeous 70mm print of The Wild Bunch, and saw The Apartment and The Guns of Navarone for the first time on a big screen, after years of seeing them only on video and DVD. The mezzanine seats are generally the most coveted ones in the house, but depending on how early you get there, and depending on how popular the movie is, you can usually find one. It's a little bit of old-fashioned movie-going pleasure that has been determined on the old-fashioned, all-American principle of first come, first served.

Until now. When my companion and I arrived to see Casablanca this weekend and raced up to the balcony, we were informed by a polite volunteer usher in a red cummerbund that the central section of the mezzanine—where the best seats are—is no longer available to ordinary schmoes like us with a ticket. No, now those seats are “premium seating,” said Mr. Cummerbund, available only to members of the Paramount's new "Film Fan Club" who cough up an extra $35 per season per person, or $50 a couple.

Now I realize that as injustices go, either foreign or domestic, premium seating at the Paramount is pretty far down the list. The Paramount is run by a non-profit (I think), and I realize that the folks who run non-profit cultural institutions need to come up with inventive ways to pay its bills, and sometimes those efforts involve snob appeal. And I’ll even admit that I could probably scrape together the 35 bucks. But, all that said, the new policy burns me up, and the reason has to do with more than just going to the movies. As a semi-bohemian novelist and a (barely) middle-class guy, I’ve had no choice but to sit by helplessly over the last few years and watch as the city I’ve come to love is sold off, piece by piece, to the highest bidder. My neighborhood in South Austin is being eaten alive by developers, as handsome little fifty-year-old bungalows are being sold, demolished, and replaced with immense, gaudy, po-mo fortresses with tiny little windows. The best land along the river is being given over to even gaudier condo towers. And as a semi-bohemian, semi-middle-class white liberal whose neighborhood is only now being gentrified, I can only imagine how the folks in East Austin feel; they've already been dealing with this shit for years.

But, until this weekend, in a town that is becoming even more segregated by money than it was before, one of the last reliably democratic pleasures in Austin was going to see movies every summer at the Paramount, where somebody who can barely afford a ticket could sit knee to knee in the mezzanine with somebody who can afford to buy the theater. I’ve loved the conversations I’ve had up there with complete strangers, I’ve loved seeing the 70mm print of Lawrence of Arabia they show at the end of every summer, I’ve loved the icy air conditioning. But now, apparently, I have to pay for the privilege of sitting where, for the past thirteen years, I used to sit for free. As I say, it's not much of an injustice, and not even that much of a hardship, but it's pretty goddamn emblematic of how Austin is changing for the worse. As I watched Casablanca from the ground floor, underneath the swells in the good seats, I had plenty of time to contemplate the fact that now the Paramount Theater is like too many other places in Austin, where the people with money get the best view, and the rest of us sit in their shadow.