Phoenix Theatre at Great Northern Mall

I don’t know what a panic attack feels like, but at the beginning of last year I believe I came my closest to having one. I was in Cincinnati working on a Barry Levinson mobster movie with Robert DeNiro that still hasn’t come out. One weekend I figured I’d go out to catch a movie, so I went to the AMC theater just south of the river in Newport, Kentucky, the same theater that I went to seven years prior while working on a different mobster movie starring John Travolta. Back then I was embarrassingly seeing Suicide Squad by myself—this time I was meeting with a friend to see M3GAN.

I couldn’t find parking anywhere. The theater was situated in the middle of Newport on the Levee, a big outdoor shopping hub on the Ohio River, where seven years ago I was shocked to find how much I enjoyed its riverside Hooters. Back then I was crashing with an old skater friend from high school in a balmy warehouse loft in the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood before the encroaching gentrification had shooed the hookers away. I was dating a comedian who lived in Chicago and the skater-infested loft made it difficult for me to find time for our usual relationship-saving phone sex, my backed up pipes surely contributing to my surprise appreciation of Hooters (but that chicken sandwich really was great). However, at the beginning of last year I was dating a different woman and crashing with a different friend. Phone sex wasn’t happening at his apartment either, but at that point in our relationship it wasn’t happening anywhere, phone or otherwise. This riverside commercial district was the sort of “outdoor mall” that had been the turn-of-the-millenium death knell for so many of my much-preferred indoor shopping malls with their Hot Topics and Sbarros and teenage goths. Urban Outfitters and Trader Joe’s and bipedal business degrees in polos were the way here. Stubbornly, I refused to pay to park in a garage, so I drove further out until I found street parking. It was a long walk to the theater. I began to stress about meeting my friend and making the showing in time. Coordinating theater seats with a friend in the era of assigned recliner theater seating is a consistent bitch, best resolved by ordering online in advance, which involves one party paying for all of the tickets and the additional “service” fee. Whose service we are paying for, I’m not sure, because it’s not a cashier at the box office, and it’s not any easier at all, especially since someone then has to pay back the purchaser for covering their ticket, which usually devolves into running down a list of competing payment apps to find the one in common between the two parties—Do you have Zelle? No. Venmo? No. Okay, how about... Arriving at separate times, getting into the theater with my friend was a needless hassle, and that coupled with the parking fiasco had left me on edge going into the movie.

The preamble of advertisements and self-aggrandizing that comes before the feature presentation in a movie theater can be something I get an ironic kick out of. I’m not talking about previews, but all the shit that comes before the previews—the entertainment “news” explosion-view advertisements that showcase all the tasteless EPK interviews of directors praising their actors and actors stating how much they love their characters. They all smile, no one says anything interesting. I’m reminded of how annoying these interviews are when they intrude on the schedule of an actual shoot day as the C-Team EPK crew pesters the AD staff to get time with the talent in front of their backdrop. These press kit segments are pieced into larger sequences in the theatrical foreplay, part of a pregame show called something like “The Twenty” or “Noovie” and hosted by Maria Menounos. Mixed in we will see CGI M&Ms be silly and Coca-Cola will unite families and find world peace. It all rankles me, as I have come to believe that I have something of a sensitivity to advertising, an allergic reaction like Case Poward of William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, though she specifically had reactions to bad advertising, as evidenced by the panic attacks she would have from seeing the Michelin Man. I, on the other hand, hate just about everything in advertisements except for a clean, tasteful display of information, free from loud attempts at humor or manipulations of emotion. The perfect advertisement is as follows: “This burger costs this much and you can buy it here. End.” But in the movie theater, after enough repeat viewings, these preamble ads begin to have a bit of a Pavlovian effect. I am, after all, there to see a movie, something that I very much love to do. So as the anticipation builds, I learn how to gauge how close I am to the main event. As the M&M’s break the fourth wall on a fake movie trailer that hasn’t yet realized that Don LaFontaine voice overs have been parodied out of relevance, or Maria Menounos recaps all of the shit she just showed us, I start to salivate, knowing that the main event is nearing ever closer. While the Coca-Cola student film intros have made me want to cringe into oblivion, vocalizing that sense of second-hand embarrassment to my friends in the theater instead turns it into an inside joke, with return trips to the theater now accompanied by ironically enthusiastic quote-alongs to these most cringe-inducing moments.

Every major theater chain has its own stamp on these pre-preview preambles. At home I have mostly found myself at Regal, Cinemark, or the local Cleveland Cinemas. The theater just outside of Cincinnati was an AMC, a chain I apparently hadn’t been to in some time. Sweaty and anxious from the nerves of possibly being late to the movie and angry from the modern-day ticket-buying process, I finally made my way into our screening of M3GAN. I then, for the first time, sat through Nicole Kidman’s “We Make Movies Better” AMC theater intro. In it, Kidman, in a glittery pant suit, strolls through an AMC theater and monologues about the magic of the movies. Saccharine enough to make your teeth hurt, I couldn’t help but laugh, but also agreed with the sentiment on the surface, which only made things worse. “That indescribable feeling we get as the lights begin to dim…” Something real and important to me was being exploited before my eyes, cheapened and commodified. It brought me to the edge, as my sweating escalated to a rapid heartbeat and shallow breath. “Somehow, heartbreak feels good in a place like this.” The panic cranked up. I thought I was going to pass out. Nicole Kidman was killing me. I would never be able to cry in a movie theater again without her Australian accent unintentionally mocking me, meaning instead, to sell me something I had already purchased. I wondered what was wrong with me that I was responding this strongly. I wondered if I would ever be all right, if I was at all meant for this world. I felt my lungs caving in and the theater around me. I thought it would be for the best if they did. Anyone who could be this set off by a stupid Nicole Kidman advertisement would be better off dead in a world that wanted to fill every gas station pump monitor with a jabbering Mario Lopez.

It ended, and the movie began. It started with a parody of a commercial for a children’s toy, not unlike the sort of video I would have made in my sketch comedy days. It was cynical and gaudy and pitch perfect and it instantly brought me back from the edge. I was going to be OK.

The Nicole Kidman monologue prompted the most severe reaction I have ever had to an advertisement. It was unfortunate that it was part of a theatrical preamble. These gross, exploitative intros, accompanied with rising ticket prices and cumbersome ticket-buying processes have sullied one of my most sacred getaways. Thankfully, a new theater recently opened not far from the old nunnery I just purchased as my new home—Phoenix Theatres at Great Northern Mall.

The Bikeriders shot in Cincinnati just before the (still unreleased) DeNiro gangster movie I had been working on when I saw M3GAN. I didn’t work on it, but many of my friends did, and more than a few of them jumped over to the gangster movie after. It had a lot of positive buzz surrounding it from those who worked it, so I decided it would be the first movie I would see at the new Phoenix Theatre.

North Olmsted is a West Side suburb of Cleveland, and my hometown. While many of its defining staples from my childhood—Davey’s Comics, First Run Video, Marc’s Funtime Pizza Palace—have been gone for decades, one important institution continues to endure: Great Northern Mall. The indoor shopping mall stands proudly in defiance of the trendier outdoor hubs like Newport on the Levee that have crowded its kind out, including its soulless flipside in the younger neighboring suburb (and my other hometown) to the North, Westlake’s Crocker Park. The indoor mall was opened to the public in 1976, the same year that my childhood home in North Olmsted was built, along with many others that made up the winding, bicycle-friendly residential neighborhoods that housed young couples moving out from the city proper to start families. The 1980s saw many upgrades to the mall, and in 1988, I was born, the third child to my parents and the only one to not have lived in my parents’ previous home in the Old Brooklyn neighborhood of Cleveland. Their growing family and North Olmsted’s growing residential areas, along with its growing mall, had prompted their odyssey to the suburbs. In 1992, Great Northern Mall was remodeled, becoming what would be its defining form in my young mind.

It was here where I first experienced a food court, complete with teriyaki free samples and a Sbarro. It was here where I was introduced to X-Men: The Arcade Game, surrounded by other electronic cabinets in the old arcade, here where I would wait in line to see a Santa Claus I very much believed in, here where I saw the incredibly expensive early stages of anime enter the western market on the shelves of Suncoast, here where I would rifle through girly posters in the rack at Spencer’s and get pubescent boners, here where I experimented with tight jeans in dressing rooms, here where I sneaked around in emergency exits and climbed on top of roofs, here where I planned a heist to steal Santa’s sac from the Christmas display after the mall was closed, here where my mother would drive me and my teenage friends to pick up our pre-ordered copies of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. The Newport on the Levees and Crocker Parks of the world do not offer the same fertile ground. There are no free samples or coin-operated machines, and they are inherently classist by design, meant only to cater to the upper-middle class and recruit the next generation of SUV-owning young professionals. The outdoor malls have no goths.

In my early memories of Great Northern Mall in the ‘90s, there was still a movie theater in the outdoor strip. I can remember seeing the ‘97 special edition Star Wars releases there and not much else, but I do remember being crestfallen when it closed. Westlake’s Crocker Park Regal theater became the go-to, and stayed that way for years. In 2013, a new Regal opened in Great Northern Mall, this time part of the indoor section, replacing the location of the old food court. I first saw Captain America: The Winter Soldier there, after having been an extra in it the summer prior in the very beginning of my movie career, and was surprised by how unpopular the theater appeared to be. The screening was strangely empty for such a high-profile release, and this would continue to be the way for the Regal theater’s life at Great Northern up until its close in 2022. Bad for them, but always incredible for me. Theaters had gone through a lot of changes in the 2000s. The advent of assigned seating, which seemed for whatever reason inextricably tied to the new “luxury” recliner seating, meant that impromptu movie outings were now slightly more difficult. Before, I could buy a ticket day-of, and as long as I arrived at the theater early, could still get an optimal seat. Now, seats were reserved in advance, so the best seats went to the people who planned the furthest ahead, which was not always my style. However, with no one going to the Great Northern Regal theater, I could still buy a spontaneous ticket day-of and secure a prime seat to myself. I could show up to the mall, buy a ticket, and kill some time until my showing by poking around the food court, getting some free samples, and browsing some swords at Cutter’s Corner. It was my secret favorite theater, and I was heartbroken, though not surprised, when it closed.

What did surprise me was the Phoenix that rose from its ashes. The Phoenix Theatre supplanted the exact space of the previous Regal and made every effort to outdo it. It replaced the seating with newer, cushier, heated seats, and upgraded the speakers with rich Dolby ATMOS sound. I could give a shit about the seats, and thought the heating was a stupid gimmick that would probably just make me feel like I peed my pants. Movie theaters have become too comfortable, too casual, and wrapped in a skin of make-believe “VIP luxury.” They have been trying to compete with the comfort of staying home and watching a movie, but they’re missing the point. There is a purpose and a ritual to “going out,” in which one must make oneself presentable and agree to be seen by neighbors and strangers and share in a mutual experience together. Public spaces should not coddle us in the private sweatpants comforts of naps and blowjobs the way our couches at home do. We should dress with some dignity and sit upright and be alert and attentive in these spaces, ever mindful of the shared experience. I was also skeptical of the promises of technological advancements in sound. But as I entered the theater lobby to see The Bikeriders, I was immediately met with promising indicators—a grand piano behind a velvet rope, auto-playing movie themes (classy), and, to my jaw-dropping shock and awe, a $10 ticket price. I was flabbergasted. In this day and age of ever-escalating ticket prices dwarfing perhaps all other categories of inflation, this new kid on the block was stepping up and saying, “We simply don’t have to charge as much as the other megaplexes.” Where Regal and AMC and Cinemark were steadily journeying north of $15 a ticket (in Cleveland), these guys were proving that it simply wasn’t necessary, and their screens were just as big and loud. OK. They had my attention.

I walked into the theater and found my seat. It was comfortable and I fucked with the controls a little, even experimenting with the heat just to satisfy my curiosity, but settled in a default, fully-upright position as I knew I would. Others could enjoy the bells and whistles if they wanted to. There were some commercials running, but no branded in-house pre-show or C-list celebrity spokesperson, no desperate pleas to download a proprietary app and earn points or play along with AR asteroid-zapping mobile games. I couldn’t even tell you what soda company was backing their concession stand. Then, their unique take on the feature presentation kick-off started and it did not involve Nicole Kidman in a glittery pantsuit or a CGI rollercoaster. Instead, I sat before a photo slideshow of the renovation of the theater I sat in. Accompanied with intensely dramatic and mismatched music, the slideshow consisted entirely of unimpressive cellphone pics, all in portrait orientation: goofy twenty-somethings proudly working with power tools, the torn out seats of the previous theater, a before-and-after of the exterior signage. The pictures did not escalate beyond the mundane, but the music swelled and swelled with increasing cinematic drama. And god was it long. It had all the polish and presentation of a dead grandmother’s “in memoriam” video cut together by your silly 19-year-old cousin. I had a good laugh, and it triggered none of my commercially allergic sensitivities. In fact, I found it earnest, charming, and refreshingly not corporate. It was clearly put together with a lot of heart and pride, and the quality of the theater proved that they earned it.

The movie started. Immediately, it had a grit and a reality to it, a handmade feel that comes with many other Cincinnati films, a very clear sense that it was shot in real locations. Jodie Comer’s accent and performance were instantly captivating. Tom Hardy once again proved to be one of the most bizarre and mesmerizing leading men of our time, wholly unlikely and carrying his impossible mix of squirrelly, feminine, tough guy energy. Austin Butler smoldered and I suppose it was all he needed to do. And when the motorcycles roared, those speakers rattled every bone in my body. The Bikeriders may not have been the most high-intensity showcase of the theater’s sound system, but it was more than enough to let me know it was the real deal.

The following month, I went back to see Twisters, which came with all the blockbuster disaster spectacle to show what those speakers could really do, and it did not disappoint. I was working on my new movie gig for the summer, and many of the out-of-towners in my department had come from working on Twisters, along with a couple shipments of that movie’s beat up set dressing. Twisters is absolutely a movie—a straightforward, uncomplicated ride that celebrates rural America in a completely apolitical manner and succeeds entirely on Glen Powell’s undeniable, newly minted movie stardom. It was a perfect moviegoers’ movie for kicking off a summer, and I knew with absolute certainty that Phoenix Theatre in Great Northern Mall was my new number one theater of choice.

I knew now, the next time I went to a movie, I would not be going to an outdoor shopping hub's theater. I would not search for a new city's parking app on my phone so I could pay for street parking. I would not pay $19 at a Burntwood Tavern for my pre-movie meal. I would not buy my ticket on some theater chain's app ahead of time and still pay a convenience fee on top of a $15 ticket. No. I would take the short drive to Great Northern Mall, grab an easy parking spot and stroll on in. I'd look at the showtimes there in the box office and intuit what spoke to me. A 3:45 showing? Well, it's 2:30 now, sounds great. I'd buy my ticket with a ten dollar bill and stroll through the mall. I'd swing into the Japanese snack store and buy a canned Boss coffee (my favorite) from the cute Japanese girl. I'd meander into the food court and snack on a mango chicken sample and chew on the toothpick all the way up until showtime. I'd see a goth or two. I'd browse dress socks at a tuxedo shop. Some kiosk guy would ask me if he can shine my shoes even though I'd be wearing Chucks. And when it was time for the main event, there would be no Maria Menounos, no CGI M&Ms. No Nicole Kidman.