Jim Kershner: It’s hard to get too excited about DVD night

My wife Carol and I were watching a movie (“Knocked Up,” I am only moderately embarrassed to admit) when the thought occurred to me:

A time-traveler from the 1930s would never believe this.

The movie is not what would baffle him, although he might find “Knocked Up” to be slightly cruder than “It Happened One Night.” What would baffle him would be the way we were watching the movie.

We were sitting on our couch, watching a DVD, occasionally hitting the pause button whenever we needed to get up and let the dog out. Say what you want about the relative merits of “Knocked Up,” but one thing was certain: Viewing it was not an “event.”

The contrast seemed particularly startling because I was fresh from researching the history of the Fox Theater. In the 1930s, at a grand movie palace like the Fox, a movie was part of a spectacular evening of entertainment. People dressed up for it.

Let me put it this way: An evening at the movies required an emcee.

That’s right, the evening began with an emcee (who doubled as conductor) leading a full, live orchestra in a jaunty overture. Then the emcee introduced a Laurel and Hardy short or two. Then he introduced a succession of vaudeville acts – that’s right, live comedians, jugglers, yodelers and harmonica players.

Only after all of that did the emcee introduce the actual movie, at which point the lights would dim and the well-dressed crowd would settle in for a little bit of Janet Gaynor romance. From what I can gather, the crowd may not have even been allowed to eat popcorn; many fancy theaters banned it until years later. Too loud and messy.

Of course, the movie-going experience didn’t exactly start out that way.

It all began with the kinetoscope, a kind of movie-viewing machine in the 1890s. You’d go to a Kinetoscope Parlor, stick a coin in a contraption, put your eyes to a peephole and watch a scintillating couple of minutes of trains chugging into stations or waves crashing on a beach. Hey, the plot wasn’t much, but the pictures moved.

Then came the nickelodeons, which were usually empty stores with a bunch of chairs lined up in front of a screen. A piano player banged away in the corner while people watched “The Great Train Robbery.” The ambiance was Early Cigar Store, but people didn’t care because now the pictures were telling a story. And it only cost a nickel.

Then, around 1912, movies had become such a big business that they moved out of nickelodeons and started taking over established theaters, ones that had been previously used for stage dramas and vaudeville shows. Now, going to a movie was no longer considered the equivalent of going to a carnival side-show. Everybody started going to movies; even respectable people.

After talkies arrived in 1927, the movies became America’s preferred form of entertainment, leading to movie palaces like the Fox. When a particularly high-class movie came out, such as “Lost Horizon” in 1937, the Fox sold tickets on a reserved-seat-only basis, as if it were the Royal Shakespeare Company on tour.

That was the peak. The movie-going experience came slowly back to earth over the next few decades. The emcee disappeared, and so did the live acts, replaced by the double feature. Every theater started selling popcorn.

Then came the drive-in movie, the 3-D movie and Smell-O-Vision, desperate attempts to pump up attendance after a new competitor, television, arrived on the scene. This is when we discovered that what we really liked was sitting at home watching movies in our pajamas.

Then came the age of the VCR, in which we could not only watch movies on TV, but watch them 800 times and pause then whenever we wanted. The result: Millions of pre-teens could now memorize every line of “Grease.”

Movie theaters still existed of course, but they were becoming increasingly multiplexed and chopped into pieces. Where viewers were once ushered into cavernous barns, they were now herded into stalls.

Finally, we have the age of the DVD and its natural partner, Netflix. The DVD is what allowed Carol and me to catch the comedy stylings of “Knocked Up” on our TV. With only a modest capital outlay, we could also have watched it on an iPod, on a portable DVD player or even in the car.

Movie theaters still exist, of course, and have actually experienced a renaissance. They have become plusher and more pleasant than in the dreary days of the long, narrow multiplex tunnel. We still like to go to the theater, especially when there’s a new movie starring either George Clooney or an animated rat. But there’s no emcee anymore, no live juggling before the film. Just a parade of ads.

So usually we just rent a DVD from Netflix. It feels kind of sad, in a way.

I guess it beats squinting into a Kinetoscope, but not by much.