This coming Wednesday, November 7, will mark two anniversaries: 55 years since the Cinerama Dome movie theater in Hollywood opened for business and 55 years since It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World had its premiere screening there. That night, it was filled with celebrities, many of whom were in the movie. This Wednesday night, it will be filled with…well, people like me who love the movie. (Only three cast members are still alive and I would not expect any of them to be present. Well, maybe Barrie Chase…)
This is not a plug to sell tickets for the evening since it's sold out. I just wanted to post something that isn't about the election. The first time I saw that movie — and I saw it in that building — it was the day after one of our greatest national tragedies…the murder of President John F. Kennedy. I'm hoping I will not see it this time the day after another national tragedy.
Notice how I was unable to avoid mentioning the election for an entire paragraph.
I love this film and don't care that some people don't…except that some people are really nasty about not liking it, like somehow they're angry that some of us do. I love perceptive film reviews and discussion but have grown tired of gratuitous insults, not just about movies but about everything. Part of my fondness for this film has to do with affection for its cast and part of it has to do with what it meant to me in 1963. A film does not have to inspire everyone to inspire some people and a movie that inspires some people has value even if you weren't one of those people. I've been left pretty cold and unentertained by every film or TV show that had both the words "Star" and "Trek" in their titles but if they bring joy to others, great.
I'm taking my friend Amber who has a good excuse for not seeing Mad World back in the sixties or seventies…or even the eighties. She wasn't born yet. She knows of some performers in the film — Don Knotts, the Stooges, Jerry Lewis (I think) and maybe one or two others — but this will be the first time she's ever had the opportunity to see Sid Caesar and Phil Silvers and Milton Berle and many others in their natural habitat: With an audience. Yeah, you can hunt them down on YouTube but (a) she hasn't because she had no reason to and (b) they're not that wonderful in grainy black-and-white on chopped-up clips in a little window and watched all alone.
I've held off showing the film to her in my den. Better that her introduction to it and those wonderful performers will be on a big screen with what I'm told will be a wonderful, restored print, and that we'll be in the middle of a warm, enthusiastic live crowd. I'm looking forward to that even more than I'm looking forward to seeing this film for the seventy-nine-quadrillionth time.
If you're there and you see us, please say hello. Those of us who love this film are old friends, even if we've never met.