Monday, November 3, 2008

Non-Digital Marquees

On Thursday nights, you can walk across town and, if you're lucky, get to see cinema employees climbing ladders to change the movie titles on the non-digital marquees, announcing the Friday openings.





Dark silhouettes against bright marquee lights. Letters piled on the sidewalk or in bins. The sound of plastic and metal sliding across the rails.

Personally, I prefer three-dimensional black letters, like the ones at Cinema Village, to the plastic sheets at Loews Village 7, but I like them all better than fast-moving digitized text.

Village East, too, still has 3-D physical letters. Jackson Triplex isn't digital. Neither is Park Slope's Pavilion or Cobble Hill Cinemas. Tell us, where else can we still catch this vanishing piece of New York?



1 comment:

Kevin Walsh said...

The DIGITAL marquees are impossible to read. You can't really see them until you're up thisclose to the theater. Maybe that's why they replaced most of the real ones.

Well, that and they're too lazy to get a ladder and replace the letters, so they invented ones where button pushing replaces the ladder.

www.forgotten-ny.com