Dave Wood

You may remember the popular book from years back titled “Bowling Alone,” In which the author bemoaned the waning interest in social activities like PTA, card clubs and bowling. Another social “good” is watching movies in a crowd.

I’ve always figured that the best way to see a movie is in a crowd. Don’t most movie-goers get a charge out of the “roar of the crown and the mutual intake of breath when something exciting is on the screen?

That supposition led to the catastrophe that I’m about to describe. Last week I aimed to entertain you with a story from the days when I partook of the joys of FreeShow in the mini-metropolis of Pigeon Falls back in the 1940s.

In the 70s Ruth and I spent summers back in Whitehall, where we passed many hours remembering the good old days with pals like Gale “Goebbels” Gabriel and Vern “Worm” Olson and “John “Bergie” Berg.

The Dam was still there and so was Whitehall Hill. But the Pix Theatre, where we spent countless evenings soaking up double features and bushels of Bit O’Honeys? Gone.

Gale, you may remember, was a prominent philanthropist and, more modestly, sponsored programs at the high school. So, we thought, why don’t we chip in and create a free show at the bandstand just like Pigeon used to?  So Gale and I raised the flag and no one saluted. 

But surely, we thought, Mike Beighley, the school principal would be glad for us to use the wonderful auditorium for the project.

I threw my heart into this Free Show project. The plan was to show a free movie a month that had its roots in Wisconsin’s rich contribution to film history.

Our little “foundation” purchased nine films to be shown at the auditorium. We’d begin with “Our Vines Have Tender Grapes,” a wonderful movie set on a southern Wisconsin farm, starring Edward G. Robinson (yes, I know he’s from Hungary, not Herbster); have patience Gentle Reader, for playing his wife was stern-faced Agnes Moorehead who just happened to begin her career in Vernon County!

Next in line was “Double Indemnity,” the mystery thriller in which the villain is played by normally nice guy Fred MacMurray, who turned out to be a loyal Beaver Dam High School alum.  I remember watching the hero’s neighbor’s new dairy barn burn down (including new watering cups for each cow) to oohs and uff-das from the Pix’s dairy-oriented audience.

Perhaps the most famous director in American film history was Orson Welles (“Citizen Kane,” in which he played the title character. Welles was from Kenosha and directed one of the great and tragically mishandled American stories of a Midwestern family’s decline, “The Magnificent Ambersons,” which starred Agnes Moorehead of (Vernon County again!) and Badger architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s granddaughter Anne Baxter.

For real Wisconsin history, we tossed in Badger novelist Edna Ferber, whose rousing novel “Come and Get IT!” became the basis for a movie about logging in Wisconsin which featured actual newsreel footage about the industry.   

Have I mentioned I composed program notes on each film and duplicated reams of copies anticipating that hundreds of local folks would read them when they flocked to the high school auditorium, warning them that that Hollywood bigshots had messed with Orson Welles’ “Ambersons” while he was a vacationing in Europe, by chopping off the final reel, in order to give his classic a happy ending! I also took issue with Walter Brenna’s Norwegian dialect despite his otherwise stellar performance in the logging movement.

We also ordered “Inherit the Wind,” because it featured Spencer Tracy of Milwaukee as Clarence Darrow and Frederic March of Racine as William Jennings Bryan.

We printed up 200 programs for the first showing, and despite coverage in the Whitehall Times, our well-meaning project opened on a chilly winter night, and we were left with 199 of them.  The only person who showed up happened to be my sister-in-law, Celina. I guess I’ll loan her the discs, so she can see the film where most people these days choose to—in the comfort and peace of their own living rooms. They don’t know what they’re missing!