Judging from the haste of most moviegoers to leave a cinema after the final scene of a film, I doubt many people are aware of this, but here goes:

Filmmakers today are putting more and more detail, color, and action onto the screen while the end credits roll. Some reveal the fate of minor characters left behind early in the story. Others offer hilarious out-takes. Historical films often match photos of the actors with portraits of actual characters they play.

Dustin Hoffman’s Quartet, a huge success with the Screening Room’s elderly patrons, matched photos of its aging cast to photos of themselves in their prime. Often we have patrons return to see a film a second time. Quartet drew second viewings for its credits.

Saving Mr. Banks went a step further. In addition to Tom Hanks matched with Walt Disney and Emma Thompson matched with P.L. Travers, it ran the 50-year-old audiotape of Disney and Travers bickering—just as we heard Hanks and Thompson—over the making of Mary Poppins.

The few who stayed got a good laugh when the tape, spinning on screen, ran out before the argument was resolved.

And there are now many end credits that link a film to issues and causes of the day, as Dallas Buyers Club did with AIDS awareness and prevention.

As I write, there’s something uncanny about showing a film titled Nebraska during the heat of debate over the Keystone XL Pipeline. I say “showing” rather than “watching” because I’m a projectionist who sees a film numerous times, always through the credits.

Most everyone is gone by the time “shot on location” comes on screen, and so there’s no chance that the list of Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota and Nebraska might impress itself as the proposed pipeline’s route. Much less as the last laugh in a hilarious modern-day parable about chasing the illusion of wealth, a pointedly black-and-white comic antidote to the all-so-serious No Country for Old Men.

Not a great loss considering that most moviegoers are out to get away from news of the day, many may not have seen—or read—No Country, and there’s certainly not much more in common in the two films than the title of one and main character of the other.

What is regrettable is that audiences miss the film’s music.

I’ve long thought that there should be one more Oscar tacked on to those for Best Soundtrack and Best Song. End credits give us the theme heard throughout a film, developed just as themes are in symphonies and concerti, in rock-and-roll instrumentals heard more in concert than on disc, in jazz clubs, and in all kinds of folk, bluegrass, and ethnic venues.

First noted this years ago when people paused at the door—delaying others trying to leave—to watch me pumping my knees and elbows in the projector’s booth to the music of Shipping News. Years later it was A Prairie Home Companion rolling credits to a sizzling jazz romp with the Guy Noir Theme, the Guys All-Star Shoe Band showing what 30-plus years of jamming on a live radio show can produce.

Music for the closing credits of Nebraska is in that class. Nothing to dance to nor anything to sizzle, this is a plaintive, reflective mix of acoustic guitar, accordion, and trumpet, as slow and sumptuous as your favorite family meal, as satisfying as memories that reach through generations, with hints of both Mexican and East European flavors as accordion and trumpet probe temperatures and tastes, and the strumming guitar sustains an appetite for more.

With the new digital technology I am no longer confined to the booth and can stand—or dance—in the back of the theater to hear all this. It’s tempting to urge people to stop and stay to hear it, but the music that ends Nebraska—right through its four-state route to the singular illusion of wealth—is too gorgeous, too pure for me to pipe up in any way or for any reason. If they won’t hear it themselves, what is my voice worth?

An Oscar for Best Music with Credits might help. One for Best Credits, now an obvious need, would cover it.

History never lies easily. Theaters come and go. In Colonial times in Newburyport there were rows of alehouses that served as the theaters of their day. Back then the water wasn’t always safe to drink. That’s how apple cider came to be consumed in large quantities. That’s where the general public went for entertainments, men, women and children, the society at large would pack the alehouses for what today we would call “face time.”

As the water became more potable and alcohol was seen as the scourge of the masses alehouses lost their luster. More proper theaters came to be in vogue. Restaurants were self-defined as not mere alehouses but respites for relief.

Fast forward a few centuries and vaudeville was born. Theaters were grand palaces where singing, tapping, comedy and music were to be found. The mass of society flocked to these places to find what was seldom called “art.” Theaters were in fact often seen as a waste of time, a plague on proper behavior, orchestrated by denizens of immorality. Performance art was no art at all.

Slowly theatrical work began to be viewed more charitably, later as art-in-person. Yet vaudeville had its decline as the new medium of moving pictures captured the public’s fancy. There was a new force let loose called “electricity.” With electricity came movies. Movies were mechanical, reproducible and so much easier to present. The era of vaudeville died and the movie age was born.

Newburyport had its own string of movie palaces. The Sovereign Bank on Port Plaza, Talbots on Green Street and the Vanguard/Fuel Health Club on the corner of Titcomb and Merrimac Streets were all giant movie houses. Then came a tiny operation called the Screening Room.

As theaters were often suspect as bringing immorality to the public so the Screening Room’s future founders were abjectly rebuffed in their first attempts to start a film program. The first effort to open an art film series at the Tax Payers Hall on Plum Island was met by a citizen’s petition to deny the enterprise a license.

The founders blame themselves for not communicating correctly. Words used included “art” and “adult.” The good folk of the Island heard the word “porno” in their minds. The would-be theatrical impressarios really meant that the films they were suggesting would be of mature quality. Again, the word “mature” set off alarms.

There ensued a raucous town meeting at Town Hall in Newbury, Spring of 1977 where the petition of denial was presented and no words of explanation were accepted. The effort was shown the door, emphatically.

Little did anyone realize that the presenters were sincere. Little did anyone realize that porno was soon enough to creep into their homes in the dark of technological night. In the early 80s the VCR and video was introduced. Porno became a home-based industry. “Dirty” movie theaters, the fear of the populace, disappeared. Yet the scourge of porno exploded. It just went home where it infects us all at the touch of a remote.

Next on the list of ridiculous ideas was a first film series opening July 4 of all dates in 1977 at the old DAV Hall near the State Street traffic circle. That’s now a manufacturing facility of some kind. There we ran a double bill with a short subject and a live performance. It was way too long and flopped miserably.

Undaunted the wannabe theater founders rented a dilapidated Greyhound bus garage on Harris Street and applied for a zoning variance to open a movie house. The variance and assorted licenses were granted but the money wasn’t there. Two years went by and nothing happened. The situation seemed quixotic at best but doomed to fail.

Yet possessed of resilience or just plain stubbornness these movie freaks carried on. An angel of sorts was found in the now-defunct YMCA Civic Center. That YMCA was unusual in that it had predated the YMCA organization. It was one of the last remaining original Ys in the country. It opened as part of the original Y movement, before the Y became an organization. As such it operated independently of the national Y entity. As such it could host a movie series without permission from anybody.

So began a series that prospered for two years, running over 500 screenings of films foreign and domestic and a full slate of children’s programs. That gave credence and creditability to the opening of a real art house movie theater that came to be known as the Screening Room.

The year after the Screening Room opened the YMCA burned down. It later became the new addition to the Newburyport Public Library.

Today the Screening Room is often casually referred to as an “institution.” Bear in mind the DAV Hall, the YMCA and the old Greyhound Bus station were all once thought to be institutions, all in living memory, all far mightier and substantial operations than the storefront theater. Yet all gone today.

Technology today represents a new hurdle to continued operations. It has been widely reported that all movie theaters must soon install digital projection equipment. The very word “film” is soon to become a generic term, a quaint relic of language like “dialing the phone. “

While this is true that digital projection is an absolute necessity, it is also so that the very same technological leaps that keep people at home to watch movies will impact on attendance no matter what equipment is used.

The future of small theatres and cinemas in smaller communities is dependent on guerrilla thinking. The American revolutionaries of 1776 were guerilla fighters. They wouldn’t face the well-armed, professional British Red Coats directly. That would have led them to slaughter. Instead they hid in brambles, hit and ran, disappeared into the night, never showed their faces.

So the small entertainment field needs to be agile. The occasional larger title, the niche markets, puppet shows, small concerts, meetings, classes, interesting foods, all can contribute to a growing concern.

Will the day come in the next century when people are so blasé about images on screens, holographs, the ability of the tone deaf to project perfect pitch, the weak to garner great strength, the old to perform as young, genetic advances making us all seem super human? So super that super becomes ordinary and not particularly interesting?

Will that be the point where, as in the days of the Colonial alehouse and the vaudevillian stage the average citizen will want to get out of the house and enjoy entertainment with other people? If there were a way to see that, then maybe places like the Screening Room would be common, packed with, dare I say it, people?

Next Time, Stay for the Credits

History of Screening Room 09/19/13