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HAROLD AND MAUDE find new life at The Westgate · MUBI Podcast

• 0:04
  Heads up. This episode contains spoilers and descriptions of fictional self-harm.
• 0:11
  Stockton is a mid-sized city in central California.
• 0:15
  A humble place. Gen-Xers like me might know it mainly as the birthplace of the band Pavement.
• 0:20
  And back in 1974, a producer named Charles Mulvehill found himself there working on a movie.
• 0:26
  Yeah, 1974, I was producing a film called Bound for Glory, in Stockton, California.
• 0:33
  And it was after we had filmed it was at night and walking down the street I noticed a showing of a film that I'd worked on years before.
• 0:46
  It was surprising for me to see that film played in a theater.
• 0:51
  I didn't know that it had even been re-released.
• 0:54
  So I stumbled in and was shocked to see that there were quite a few people.
• 1:01
  They looked hippie-ish.
• 1:02
  I mean, you know, they just had, you had that vibe.
• 1:05
  But there must have been 40 or 50 people, you know, in the theater.
• 1:09
  And it was a weeknight.
• 1:11
  Which was even more surprising.
• 1:14
  Charles took a seat in the back.
• 1:15
  The lights went down.
• 1:19
  And they were totally into the film.
• 1:23
  They got all the nuances and laughed, and were moved at the right moments.
• 1:27
  And it was my really my kind of my first inkling that the movie might be around.
• 1:35
  But I can't say I was smart enough to think that it was going to be around for 50 years! The movie was called Harold and Maude.
• 1:47
  Charles was shocked by the Stockton audience's reaction because when the film was first released, it was a box office disaster.
• 1:54
  And yeah, he couldn't have possibly fathomed it was now on its way to immortality.
• 1:58
  Thanks to another humble theater in another humble town nearly 2000 miles away.
• 2:16
  I'm Rico Gagliano, and welcome back to the MUBI podcast.
• 2:19
  MUBI is the best way, outside a theater, to see beautiful, hand-picked cinema.
• 2:24
  On this show, we tell you the stories behind beautiful cinema.
• 2:27
  This is season two.
• 2:28
  We're calling it Only in Theaters.
• 2:30
  Every week we tell you the story of a single cinema that made history.
• 2:34
  And the one we're talking about today has to be one of the unlikeliest.
• 2:38
  It really struggled for the first 40 years.
• 2:42
  That's Randy Green, a former worker at the Westgate, a floundering second run theater in a Midwest suburb that somehow turned an odd movie about a May-December romance into one of the most beloved cult flicks of the 20th century.
• 2:56
  Just from the beginning, I couldn't stop laughing.
• 2:59
  And I still can't stop laughing.
• 3:01
  And I think of all these different scenes.
• 3:03
  Well, we had to see it again.
• 3:05
  And again and again.
• 3:08
  The 50 year saga of Harold and Maude and the Westgate.
• 3:12
  Ticket please.
• 3:16
  Enjoy the show.
• 3:23
  This is a story that seems like it could have only been dreamed up in Hollywood, but it happened in a neighborhood that's kind of the spiritual opposite of Hollywood.
• 3:30
  Morningside, part of a suburb just outside of Minneapolis.
• 3:33
  Morningside is a neighborhood in the suburb of Edina, but if you walk around Morningside, it doesn't necessarily feel like the rest of Edina.
• 3:43
  Andy Sturdevant is a local journalist.
• 3:45
  He wrote about the Westgate in the online paper MinnPost.
• 3:48
  Edina has a reputation for being a very prosperous suburb.
• 3:54
  There's actually a neighborhood called the Country Club District, because it was built on an old country club.
• 3:59
  And you walk through it and it feels like you're walking through a country club.
• 4:01
  - They're just owning it.
• 4:01
  - Yeah, exactly.
• 4:04
  Morningside doesn't feel like that.
• 4:05
  Morningside feels a lot more like these commercial intersections that have, you know, diners and dry cleaners and just these types of businesses that everyday people patronize.
• 4:16
  In fact, if you walk around a lot of the businesses will self-identify as Morningside Businesses.
• 4:22
  Edina can be kind of a dirty word- in the Twin Cities.
• 4:24
  - Yes.
• 4:26
  So we don't want to be conflated with those cake eaters.
• 4:28
  Yeah. Don't want me in with those cake eaters.
• 4:30
  And back in the day, you could define the difference between the two places by their two neighborhood theaters, both built in the thirties.
• 4:37
  And located six blocks away from each other.
• 4:40
  The Edina and the Westgate.
• 4:43
  Yeah. I mean, the Edina's definitely the one with the big, beautiful marquee.
• 4:47
  And it's right near a neighborhood called 50th and France, you know, so named because it's 50th Street and France Avenue.
• 4:53
  You know, the relative fanciness of the name France tips you off a little bit is the kind of place where you go see a movie and then you knock over to like a diamond store.
• 5:00
  And, you know, buy some, I don't know, maybe furs and stuff like that.
• 5:03
  It's like the Cannes of Minnesota.
• 5:05
  It's like the Cannes of the Southwest Metro. Yeah, exactly.
• 5:09
  So, you know, if you've got your classic like snobs versus slobs thing going on, then yeah, the Westgate is definitely the more downmarket of the two.
• 5:17
  Which didn't matter at all to one Morningside local, a guy named Randy Green, who grew up loving not just movies, but movie theaters.
• 5:26
  I don't know. I've ever since I was a little kid.
• 5:29
  Man, I used to when I went to movies as a little kid, I used to go in and sit down early before, you know, before anyone else got there almost.
• 5:37
  But I'd turn around, and I'd watch the ushers, I turn around, look at the projection booth.
• 5:41
  I could see the guy going in the little windows up there, moving around, getting things ready.
• 5:43
  The popcorn pops and all, you know, all the smells and the people coming in.
• 5:49
  All excited about seeing the movie.
• 5:51
  I like that feeling. That was kind of, it was fun.
• 5:53
  And the place he got his fix was the Westgate.
• 5:56
  When I was a kid, it was the sixties, so for me it was more the adventure action movies, the Dirty Dozen,Keep your mouth shut.And your eyes open.You're on guard duty, maggot! Bridge Over the River Kwai.
• 6:10
  What have I done? Those kind of things I would watch.
• 6:14
  So it probably didn't surprise anybody.
• 6:16
  When age 19, Randy took a gig as assistant manager at the Westgate, despite its condition.
• 6:22
  Well, I hadn't changed much since it opened.
• 6:24
  It was, had never been remodeled.
• 6:24
  By the time I was there, it was clean enough, but it was not well kept up.
• 6:32
  Had a new set of seats that were put in in the sixties, but they were used from a different theater that the company remodeled.
• 6:38
  So the seats were newer, better than the original seats, but they were still pretty used.
• 6:42
  Yeah. I'm remembering the kind of spongy seats in the small theaters that I used to attend when I was little.
• 6:49
  - They were kind of like...
• 6:49
  - Oh yeah.
• 6:50
  Seats themselves were kind of angled down, so you always had to slouch in some way.
• 6:53
  Yeah, some of those were, yeah...
• 6:55
  Some were angled down. That's right.
• 6:56
  Of course, he could understand why the owners had to cut corners.
• 6:59
  For decades, the Westgate had been a minor second run theater.
• 7:03
  If it was lucky.
• 7:04
  That never was a big moneymaker.
• 7:06
  Because the Edina always got the bigger movies after they had their big downtown premieres.
• 7:10
  And the Westgate got the leftovers from that.
• 7:13
  It really struggled for the first 40 years.
• 7:18
  And to be fair, back then the Westgate wasn't alone.
• 7:23
  At this time, there were, you know, small one screen theaters that, you know, were built in the 1920s and the 1930s and had been hit really hard by television, you know, in the fifties.
• 7:36
  And so a lot of them were starting to close, and a lot of the one screen theaters in the various neighborhoods had converted to a pornographic format.
• 7:43
  And so there was really a need for these smaller neighborhood theaters to think of interesting and innovative ways to get people in the door.
• 7:53
  And in 1970, at first, it seems almost by accident, the Westgate did exactly that.
• 7:59
  Yeah, the booker put out a movie, Mel Brooks movie called The Twelve Chairs.
• 8:04
  Ja, ja, ja!Ja, ja, ja!Ja, ja, ja! The Twelve Chairs is Brooks' second, probably least known, movie.
• 8:16
  It's about a bunch of connivers trying to find diamonds hidden in one of, yes, twelve chairs.
• 8:20
  Among the pursuers, a religious nut played by a young Dom DeLuise.
• 8:24
  God sees! God sees all!Why do you think he gave me the strength to climbstraight up a mountain wall and deny the same to you?There must be some reason.Yah-dee-tah-tah! The film is weird for the time.
• 8:37
  A mash up of slapstick and artyness that critics called uneven and audiences therefore mostly ignored.
• 8:43
  But not at the Westgate.
• 8:46
  Now, movies typically played the Westgate for one week, maybe two weeks, because they always got them after the downtown premiere.
• 8:52
  Sometimes even a third run after the other neighborhood theaters had run it.
• 8:57
  But they put in the Twelve Chairs by Mel Brooks, and it played for an incredible 12 weeks.
• 9:04
  People keep coming back over and over to see it, that's really unheard of at the theater to have that movie last that long.
• 9:11
  Interesting.
• 9:15
  So after the Twelve Chairs, the Westgate went for another film in the same odd vein.
• 9:20
  Director Carl Reiner's 1971 black comedy...
• 9:23
  Called Where's Poppa?
• 9:25
  Will you move?Not tonight, Sidney.Get away from that door, or I'm going to choke your child.Come on, get away from the door. Where's Poppa it had the same thing happened to it.
• 9:35
  It played horribly when the first opened up.
• 9:37
  And they put it in the Westgate and it played for 36 weeks.
• 9:42
  It was a cult thing, people just coming back and back to see it.
• 9:45
  Why'd these movies work at the Westgate, when they'd failed everywhere else?
• 9:49
  That'll always be a mystery.
• 9:51
  Maybe because admission at the Westgate was cheap, so easier for adventurous folks to take a risk.
• 9:56
  And then it snowballed.
• 9:57
  Word of mouth, I think, was the biggest thing.
• 10:00
  They put in these quirky comedies.
• 10:02
  They booked them exclusive.
• 10:03
  So that was the only theater in town that could play it. And that people would come to see it and they'd go, "This is the greatest thing I've seen in ages." And they tell their friends and then they'd come back.
• 10:11
  Whatever, the Westgate had found its angle and its audience.
• 10:15
  Yeah, I think they correctly sussed out that there was an appetite for less mainstream offerings.
• 10:22
  You know, you could go to the Edina and you could go see The Poseidon Adventure, or whatever, you know, dumb, big blockbuster.
• 10:29
  It trickled out from downtown, you know, a couple of weeks ago.
• 10:31
  Or you'd go to the Westgate and you could see something that was maybe kind of smaller scale and kind of weird.
• 10:36
  And you probably knew that there would be a bunch of other weirdos there, too.
• 10:40
  To sate the weirdos now the Westgate was on the hunt for more of these movies.
• 10:44
  And far away in Hollywood the perfect pick, the Queen Mother of eccentric comedies...
• 10:51
  was about to be born.
• 10:56
  You met Charles Mulvehill at the beginning of this episode.
• 10:58
  His association with that movie had begun a few years earlier in the late sixties.
• 11:03
  Back then, he was a low ranking worker at a film production outfit called The The Mirisch Company, where he fell in with a legendary character.
• 11:09
  During this period, I met Hal Ashby.
• 11:12
  He was currently going through a divorce and he was living in the office where he was editing.
• 11:18
  So, you know, we struck up a friendship.
• 11:22
  Well, we struck up a friendship.
• 11:23
  I mean, I used to go to the office of he was staying and he was a prolific smoker of marijuana.
• 11:29
  So I'd go say hello and we'd commiserate, and get stoned.
• 11:34
  Charles new smoking buddy would go on to direct classics like Being There and Coming Home.
• 11:38
  But at the time he was an Oscar winning editor about to direct his debut film.
• 11:42
  And so I worked with them closely on the post-production of of a film, The Landlord.
• 11:48
  And it was around that time that, that he got the script for Harold and Maude.
• 11:56
  Harold and Maude was written by an unknown, named Colin Higgins, who got his big break when he handed the script to a Hollywood big shot, whose pool he'd been cleaning.
• 12:04
  It's the story of a 20 year old so bored with life, he's obsessed with death.
• 12:09
  He even drives a hearse.
• 12:11
  When his socialite mom tries to hook him up on dates with girls...
• 12:14
  I have here, Harold, the form sent outby the National Computer Dating Service.They screen out the fat and the ugly. He fakes outrageous suicides to drive the girls away.
• 12:24
  Then he meets an elderly woman at a funeral.
• 12:28
  What is your name?Harold. Harold Chasen.Oh, how do you do?I'm Dame Majorie Chardin, but you can call me Maude. Maude was the world's oldest teenybopper.
• 12:39
  She had a zest for life.
• 12:42
  And was generous in passing what she knew on.
• 12:46
  We shall have to meet again.- Ah, tell me, do you dance?
• 12:48
  - Pardon me?Do you sing and dance? Er, no?
• 12:55
  No, I thought not.
• 12:57
  Harold and Maude fall in love, make love, society disapproves, Harold tells society to shove it.
• 13:04
  And then on Maude's 80th birthday, just when all seems idyllic.
• 13:08
  What? Well, I'll just say Harold has to deal with actual death.
• 13:14
  And somehow...
• 13:15
  That leads to a hopeful ending.
• 13:20
  Paramount Studios put Harold and Maude into production with Ashby directing, Mulvehill producing and starring the venerable Ruth Gordon as Maude, and a newbie named Bud Cort as Harold.
• 13:30
  Now, Paramount chief Bob Evans was getting a rep for taking risks, but he and the studio had few illusions about what they had on their hands with this movie.
• 13:38
  Yeah, in our Hal's film, it was meant to be a small budget human interest story that they were promoting.
• 13:44
  That is, until...
• 13:46
  we took it out and we previewed it.
• 13:49
  And mind you, I mean, I think that even within the company, there was some skepticism, you know, about the subject matter and how was Hal going to pull it off, basically.
• 13:59
  And we had a screening and I mean, it was a blowout.
• 14:03
  I mean, people loved that film.
• 14:05
  In fact, the...
• 14:07
  The Head of Distribution after the screening said this preview is as good as a Jerry Lewis preview.
• 14:15
  And that was because evidently Jerry Lewis previews, they were just blowouts.
• 14:22
  I mean, people loved them.
• 14:24
  And so this was the best preview that they...
• 14:26
  I mean, they were really excited.
• 14:28
  So consequently, based on those previews, they opened it in Westwood at the Village Theater.
• 14:34
  Yeah, in Los Angeles, which is huge.
• 14:35
  Which is a big barn.
• 14:37
  I mean, it was it was huge.
• 14:39
  And the Coronet Theater in New York.
• 14:42
  Also, also huge.
• 14:43
  - These are like major first run theaters.
• 14:43
  - Yeah.
• 14:45
  And very prestigious houses.
• 14:47
  I mean, you know, big blockbuster films go there.
• 14:49
  Now this is for a movie, by the way, that you just told me was originally intended to be this kind of small human interest story.
• 14:55
  Normally, you would not open that kind of film this way.
• 14:57
  Yeah, little, little art house film.
• 15:00
  But because of response from the previews was as good as it was.
• 15:04
  You know, they got really excited.
• 15:05
  They thought, wow, we can capitalize on it.
• 15:08
  But that was not how it went down.
• 15:13
  We thought that the film would do well.
• 15:16
  And certainly thought that it would qualify for Academy Award consideration.
• 15:21
  That's Charles Glenn.
• 15:22
  He was Global Head of Marketing for Paramount, and he remembers the film came out December 71, prime Oscar season.
• 15:29
  And I think that that was part of the thinking that if it got nominations, that those things could be merchandised in print ads on television commercials and radio commercials to help establish an audience.
• 15:42
  And that did not happen.
• 15:43
  In fact, according to Charles Mulvehill, quite the opposite.
• 15:47
  Well, I'll tell you how badly it bombed.
• 15:49
  The manager of the Coronet Theater loved the film.
• 15:53
  And he, you know, would hire people with sandwich boards to go to the other theaters offering if they didn't like Harold and Maude that he would give them their money back.
• 16:04
  And they still wouldn't go.
• 16:06
  And a week after it had opened, Bob Evans called Hal and said, "Well, onto the next one." Except it was pretty quickly apparent that that would be easier said than done.
• 16:18
  We were getting lots of scripts, you know, for Hal to consider directing.
• 16:22
  There were lots of possible projects coming in and then the film got released and it was as though someone had taken an ax to the phone cable.
• 16:32
  I mean, it stopped.
• 16:34
  I mean, it stopped dead.
• 16:37
  How could this have been?
• 16:39
  Maybe the competition?
• 16:40
  The same month Dirty Harry hit-opened along with Sean Connery's return as James Bond in Diamonds are Forever.
• 16:46
  Or maybe it was the reviews.
• 16:48
  Oh, the critical response! Well, the first review that I read was in Variety, and the opening was: Harold and Maude is as funny as a burning orphanage.
• 17:00
  And generally the reviews stank.
• 17:04
  But Andy Sturdevant says not everywhere.
• 17:07
  Like in Minneapolis at this time, you have Don Morrison, who was maybe the most, you know, had the biggest kind of personality of all the movie critics.
• 17:16
  And so he really championed this movie like he loved it.
• 17:20
  The thing that he wrote about it was he called it "A glorious addition to a class of movies that I might as well admit I love simply because they are!" Other local critics dug it, too, and still, even in Minneapolis, Harold and Maude opened and closed.
• 17:35
  And Charles Mulvehill thinks he knows the ultimate reason why.
• 17:38
  When people ask you"What is Harold and Maude about?" And you say, "Well, it's about this 20 year old kid that meets an 80 year old woman, and she teaches him the way of life and they have sex." Anybody that you say that to just goes away.
• 17:53
  I mean, you can see their eyes flutter and they're gone.
• 17:56
  I mean, you've just lost them.
• 17:58
  In other words, it wasn't the kind of flick a blockbuster style release was going to help.
• 18:03
  It needed to be seen by a very special audience who'd love it because of the weird plot and who'd tell others to go see it despite the weird plot.
• 18:11
  And there was a theater just outside of Minneapolis that had a lock on that kind of audience.
• 18:16
  The Westgate settles in for a long relationship with Harold and Maude.
• 18:21
  Coming up in just a minute, stay with us.
• 18:33
  MUBI is a curated streaming service showing exceptional films from around the globe.
• 18:37
  All of them hand-picked by real people who really know movies.
• 18:41
  And with a new film debuting on the platform every single day, there's always something new to discover.
• 18:47
  So on this season of the podcast, we are talking about history making experiences that were only possible in movie theaters.
• 18:53
  Hopefully it inspires you to love and support your local cinema that much more.
• 18:57
  And we've got a new thing going that can help you do exactly that.
• 19:01
  It is called MUBI Go.
• 19:03
  And when you sign up you get a free movie ticket every week to see a hand-selected film in theaters.
• 19:09
  Previous picks include award winning films like Drive My Car, The Lost Daughter, Cha-Cha Real Smooth and The Power of the Dog.
• 19:16
  MUBI Go is now available in the UK, New York and Los Angeles, and it is coming to more U.S. cities soon.
• 19:21
  To learn more, check out MUBI.com/go Also, if you're going to be in Los Angeles, we have something very special for you this week to celebrate our new season.
• 19:31
  We are partnering with the American Cinematheque to present a screening of the new 4K restoration of Harold and Maude.
• 19:38
  This Saturday, July 15th, at L.A.'s Los Feliz Theater.
• 19:42
  Amy Nicholson of the movie podcast Unspooled will join me for an in-person pre-screening discussion about the movie and about this very show that you're listening to right now.
• 19:51
  For more details, check out the American Cinematheque's website.
• 19:54
  I hope to meet many of you there in person.
• 19:57
  And finally, after you finish listening to me, you can stream some of the films that we have featured on the podcast.
• 20:04
  All you got to do is subscribe to MUBI at MUBI.com and look for the collection called Featured on the MUBI Podcast that is on the Now Showing page.
• 20:12
  As always, you can find all the links you need in the show notes of this episode.
• 20:17
  Speaking of which, back to it.
• 20:23
  All right, so it's March 1972 and three months after Harold and Maude's bomb of a first run, it's about to open at the Westgate.
• 20:32
  And according to Andy Sturdevant, that timing was perfect.
• 20:37
  March in Minneapolis is miserable.
• 20:39
  Like it's still winter.
• 20:41
  Like it's still winter for six more weeks.
• 20:43
  Like there is not a lot going on that touches the human soul in a way that really makes you feel optimistic about the possibilities of life.
• 20:52
  And so I really I think there's probably something to the fact that you've got this dark, weird little movie opening in the dregs of winter in this, you know, kind of far flung neighborhood theater that caters specifically to weirdos, to outsiders, to oddballs.
• 21:07
  And yeah, like that seems like a perfect recipe for it to become, you know, "A Thing." And it was right off the bat.
• 21:16
  It opened on a Wednesday, I worked on Thursday.
• 21:17
  And when I came into work on Thursday the people at work the night before saying, "This is crazy!" The place filled up during the middle of the week and this is the middle of March, which, you know, normally is not that big a business there.
• 21:30
  And there was just this energy and it was all young people, mostly young people in their twenties and the early thirties.
• 21:36
  What did you think of it when you saw it?
• 21:37
  I thought it was very good.
• 21:38
  People used to ask me what how you survived seeing the movie, the same thing for so long.
• 21:44
  And I said, "It's actually a very good movie." I'm going to hold off telling you how long the movie eventually played at the Westgate, but for now, let's say long enough that Randy got to know the movie by heart.
• 21:53
  I have very special parts that I like to watch.
• 21:56
  So I was busy in the office doing something and I heard that part coming up.
• 21:59
  I'd go down to the auditorium and watch my special parts.
• 22:02
  Which were your favorite parts?
• 22:03
  Well, he does that series of suicides.
• 22:08
  And when he, when Bud Cort set himself on fire...
• 22:11
  Harold is out in the garden Candy, but he'll be here in a moment.Shall we sit down? Yeah, there's a scene where Harold's mom has arranged a blind date with this girl named Candy. While the two women chat through the window we see Harold douse himself with gasoline and strike a match.
• 22:26
  And that date that his mother's arranged for him is looking out the window at Harold, going up in flames.
• 22:35
  Harold! At which point Harold still actually alive, suddenly appears at Candy's side.
• 22:41
  Yes dear, here is Harold now. Harold, Candy. And Candy runs from Harold in horror.
• 22:46
  And just as one of Cat Stevens legendary soundtrack tunes kicks in...
• 22:51
  He looks at the camera, and kind of nods at the audience, and, "Yeah, you see what I'm doing?" We're in on the joke that he's doing, which I think was the one of the funniest things in the world.
• 23:02
  It's interesting, right?
• 23:02
  I mean, in a way, that's what maybe the attraction of that movie was to the audience, is that they were in on the joke.
• 23:09
  They were young people that were in on something that the rest of the world had decided was not funny, right?
• 23:15
  Oh, yeah, definitely.
• 23:16
  ♪ I think I see the light♪ Coming to me But over time, word got out to the unhip world.
• 23:25
  We rarely went to the Westgate, it had unusual movies, and we usually just went to just usual movies.
• 23:31
  Marian Cracraft was 40 at the time. A housewife whose husband thought the very idea of Harold and Maude was...
• 23:38
  Distasteful. That's what I'm thinking he thought.
• 23:40
  Because of the ages between Harold and Maude.
• 23:43
  But I had a friend who already was into unusual movies, and she kept telling us about the Twelve Chairs and Harold and Maude.
• 23:51
  And eventually I went to Harold and Maude.
• 23:54
  Tell me your, you know, memories of seeing it for the first time.
• 23:57
  All right. Oh, actually, I was watching some of it again today, but my first memory of it is Harold hanging himself.
• 24:05
  So he was hanging in there in the air and this rope was squeaking and in comes his mother.
• 24:15
  Saying...
• 24:16
  I suppose you think that's very funny, Harold. Now get...
• 24:20
  Come on, we're going to have dinner at 8:00.
• 24:22
  And do try and be a little more vivacious. So that's...
• 24:26
  That's my first memory of Harold.
• 24:29
  It sounds like you were pretty delighted right away.
• 24:32
  Oh, yeah. From the beginning, I couldn't stop laughing.
• 24:35
  And I still can't stop laughing.
• 24:37
  And I think of all these different scenes.
• 24:39
  Well, we had to see it again.
• 24:41
  She was not alone.
• 24:43
  And as Harold and Maude's run stretched from weeks into months...
• 24:46
  Local arts writers realized something big was afoot.
• 24:49
  When the movie started gaining momentum, it became one of these topics that the newspapers could return to time and time again.
• 24:56
  I think I did a rough count and there was at least 20 stories written about the Harold and Maude phenomenon at the Westgate.
• 25:06
  Now, if that sounds like overkill, you got to understand, the very concept of a cult film was sort of new.
• 25:12
  The Rocky Horror Picture Show wouldn't hit theaters until years later, 1975.
• 25:17
  And even as late as 79, critic Gene Siskel had to explain the idea to his TV viewers.
• 25:22
  In the movie business there's a peculiar creature known as the cult film.Films that aren't necessarily hits when they're first released,but eventually they find an audience, and it's typically young people. So yeah, in 71, Harold and Maude's run was headline material.
• 25:36
  That media was television, newspapers were all over the place, like asking about the movie and how it survived so long.
• 25:43
  And that's actually when other theaters around the country start checking"What's going on with you guys?
• 25:47
  How come you held this movie so long?" One of those theaters was Detroit's Studio North, which saw what was happening at the Westgate and decided to book Harold for itself.
• 25:56
  Apparently, you know, when it opened again in Detroit, the ads in the newspaper said "Harold and Maude had Minneapolis rolling in the aisles!" Which is perhaps one of the great movie pull-quotes of of all time.
• 26:09
  The movie played Detroit for 72 weeks.
• 26:12
  Other theaters caught on and drew devoted audiences, but none of them topped the Westgate.
• 26:17
  At the 95th week Harold and Maude beat the record for the longest running movie in Minnesota.
• 26:22
  Like in the history of the state? What held the record before that?
• 26:25
  It was The Sound of Music.
• 26:27
  Back in 1965, it played on one of the downtown theaters here for 95 weeks.
• 26:32
  So Harold and Maude beat The Sound of Music.
• 26:36
  And still it kept playing.
• 26:38
  It was enough to make even Charles Glenn 2000 miles away at Paramount Studios marketing office, sit up and take notice.
• 26:45
  I remember discussing it with staff of ours and not knowing why.
• 26:49
  Why would people continue to populate the Westgate Theater, Minneapolis for years?
• 26:56
  And where would they draw an audience from?
• 26:58
  And then how do you fill those seats up and how do you, how do you fill it up?
• 27:00
  365 days, three times?
• 27:04
  I mean, it's extraordinary. And it...
• 27:07
  But-but-but there it was.
• 27:09
  It's a great thing to be a place where something goes right. And for two years at the Westgate Theater things have gone right for Harold and Maude.
• 27:19
  Probably the peak of this whole saga happened in March 1974, when Ruth Gordon herself appeared at the Westgate to celebrate the film's second anniversary.
• 27:28
  She'd also stopped by for the first anniversary, actually, but this time she brought along Bud Cort.
• 27:33
  There's nothing anybody can say.So thank you all for believing in the film. That night the audience definitely included some true believers.
• 27:42
  There was a young man who he held the record for having seen it the most times.
• 27:46
  I think he saw it over 200 times.
• 27:48
  And apparently he struck up a friendship with Ruth Gordon and they had a correspondence that lasted for a couple of years after that.
• 27:54
  So when she's talking about the wonderfulness of life and these amazing things that happened, you know, it's not just lip service.
• 28:01
  Like there were actually these wonderful connections that were coming out of this phenomenon.
• 28:06
  Well, it's a great thing to be a place where things go right,because I believe they're meant to.But a lot of times they don't.And so when they don't,we gotta remember a time like tonight when they do go right. Meanwhile, just outside, some locals had gathered who weren't in a celebratory mood.
• 28:27
  Yeah, there was...
• 28:28
  On the second anniversary as the audience started coming, the line started forming outside the theater door.
• 28:34
  We noticed these people coming up with pickets in their hands.
• 28:37
  There's a photo of these people that ran in a local paper.
• 28:43
  Their picket signs read "Our plea to Westgate: Your neighbors want variety!" And "Why must the show go on and on and on?" And it was it was people in the neighborhood that were demanding new movies because they were sick of Harold and Maude showing for two years.
• 28:56
  Their picket signs read "Our plea to Westgate: And, you know, with the distance of time, it's hard to tell, like how tongue in cheek it is or isn't.
• 29:02
  Their picket signs read "Our plea to Westgate: You know, irony doesn't travel well across decades, but it certainly seems to have stemmed from some, you know, actual deep seated frustration.
• 29:12
  Their picket signs read "Our plea to Westgate: Oh, no. They wanted a new movie.
• 29:14
  Their picket signs read "Our plea to Westgate: The protesters wanted a different movie.
• 29:16
  Their picket signs read "Our plea to Westgate: They were tired of that movie being there, and they wanted a change.
• 29:19
  Their picket signs read "Our plea to Westgate: So it was sincere. It wasn't like some ironic demonstration.
• 29:22
  Their picket signs read "Our plea to Westgate: No, no, no. It was sincere.
• 29:26
  Their picket signs read "Our plea to Westgate: - I mean...
• 29:26
  Their picket signs read "Our plea to Westgate: - Very sincere.
• 29:28
  Their picket signs read "Our plea to Westgate: But can I ask why?
• 29:29
  Their picket signs read "Our plea to Westgate: I mean, like, there's another theater just a few blocks away. The Edina.
• 29:32
  Their picket signs read "Our plea to Westgate: Yeah, but that didn't have the right kind of movies.
• 29:34
  Their picket signs read "Our plea to Westgate: That had regular run-of-the-mill movies.
• 29:37
  Their picket signs read "Our plea to Westgate: I see. It was, so it was people who were kind of like, you guys are the only game in town that's playing interesting movies.
• 29:44
  Their picket signs read "Our plea to Westgate: Bring us another interesting movie.
• 29:45
  Their picket signs read "Our plea to Westgate: Yeah.
• 29:48
  Their picket signs read "Our plea to Westgate: Well, soon enough, they got their wish.
• 29:51
  Their picket signs read "Our plea to Westgate: At the second anniversary, it was a different feeling afterwards.
• 29:56
  Their picket signs read "Our plea to Westgate: They had two shows that night.
• 29:57
  Their picket signs read "Our plea to Westgate: Both shows were very busy and very full.
• 29:59
  Their picket signs read "Our plea to Westgate: But the next few weeks after that, it just felt different.
• 30:03
  Their picket signs read "Our plea to Westgate: You could see the energy was running out.
• 30:05
  Their picket signs read "Our plea to Westgate: And see that was in March when they had the second anniversary.
• 30:09
  Their picket signs read "Our plea to Westgate: And then in May is when they pulled it.
• 30:11
  Their picket signs read "Our plea to Westgate: Were you sad at all?
• 30:13
  Their picket signs read "Our plea to Westgate: Yeah, it was funny.
• 30:15
  Their picket signs read "Our plea to Westgate: It was funny to be kind of sad about it.
• 30:17
  Their picket signs read "Our plea to Westgate: But one of the funny thing that happened is that the end of April
• 30:21
  they put a notice in the paper: Last week.
• 30:24
  they put a notice in the paper: It just boomed.
• 30:26
  they put a notice in the paper: They started filling the theater up again.
• 30:28
  they put a notice in the paper: And so after that, one week to go.
• 30:30
  they put a notice in the paper: Okay. Held over one more week.
• 30:32
  they put a notice in the paper: And, you know, I think people are coming back for that one more chance to see it at the theater.
• 30:37
  they put a notice in the paper: They did that about four weeks.
• 30:38
  they put a notice in the paper: And then finally they said they had to pull it.
• 30:40
  they put a notice in the paper: At the end of the last screening, the audience gave it a standing ovation.
• 30:44
  they put a notice in the paper: Douglas Strand, the guy who'd seen the 200 times, was quoted in the Minneapolis Star Tribune"It's the end of an era." He said.
• 30:52
  they put a notice in the paper: I feel kind of empty inside.
• 30:58
  they put a notice in the paper: But just as Harold and Maude was fading out at the Westgate, elsewhere, it was getting a whole new life.
• 31:03
  they put a notice in the paper: I'm John Hersker and I'm the host of Flashback Cinema, which is a weekly program of classic movies in theaters across the country.
• 31:11
  they put a notice in the paper: John Hersker also worked in Paramount Pictures distribution for a while, but back in the seventies, he was manager of an art house called the Bryn Mawr Theater in Philadelphia.
• 31:20
  they put a notice in the paper: So Harold and Maude first played at the Bryn Mawr Theater in 1974.
• 31:24
  they put a notice in the paper: And their showing of the film was part of a kind of reissue that Paramount Pictures did in 1974.
• 31:32
  they put a notice in the paper: Yeah, the studio re-released the film and publicly chalked it up to theaters like the Westgate.
• 31:38
  they put a notice in the paper: Paramount launches the film in New York and Los Angeles and in other cities with a very interesting and innovative marketing campaign, with newspaper ads full of text, no images, just full of copy, explaining sort of the history of Harold and Maude up to that point, which was really kind of extraordinary.
• 31:56
  they put a notice in the paper: Describing how the film had been successful in the Midwest.
• 32:00
  they put a notice in the paper: And sort of tweaking the noses of Los Angelenos and New Yorkers who might view their cities as being a little more advanced when it came to discovering films.
• 32:10
  they put a notice in the paper: And so the Paramount marketing team comes up with this ad, says,"What is it, the Midwest knows that New York doesn't?" So it's kind of like you think you're so great New York and L.A. But guess what?
• 32:19
  they put a notice in the paper: You weren't in on this fad.
• 32:21
  they put a notice in the paper: Well, exactly.
• 32:21
  they put a notice in the paper: And it paid off the Allston Theater in Boston opened the picture in May of 74, which they didn't know at the time, they were starting a 92 week run of the movie.
• 32:32
  they put a notice in the paper: Oh my God! And the Bryn Mawr Theater, well it was kind of a mainstay.
• 32:36
  they put a notice in the paper: We were single screen theater when we had an opening weekend schedule and nothing to play.
• 32:40
  they put a notice in the paper: You put in Harold and Maude.
• 32:41
  they put a notice in the paper: You do several thousand dollars worth of business.
• 32:44
  they put a notice in the paper: There's a great story that Ruth Gordon told in an interview she gave in 1983 that she had received a check in the mail from Paramount Pictures for $50,000.
• 32:55
  they put a notice in the paper: And she said, "I thought it was a mistake.
• 32:57
  they put a notice in the paper: I thought it was a sweepstakes. You know, like a Reader's Digest sweepstakes or something." She said, because I never could have imagined the movie would go into profit.
• 33:07
  they put a notice in the paper: And Bruce Gordon certainly knew that it had developed a cult following because she'd been to the Westgate Theater, but she probably thought that was some isolated thing and didn't realize this was something that was happening all over the country.
• 33:22
  they put a notice in the paper: But meanwhile, at the Westgate, Randy Green says Harold and Maude turned out to be a tough act to follow.
• 33:27
  they put a notice in the paper: Yeah, they tried.
• 33:29
  they put a notice in the paper: They brought in a foreign film called One Tall...
• 33:32
  they put a notice in the paper: The Tall Blond Man with One Red Shoe.
• 33:36
  they put a notice in the paper: It's actually A Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe A French comedy about a hapless musician who's unwittingly mistaken for a super spy.
• 33:47
  they put a notice in the paper: It was supposed to be a quirky comedy kind of thing.
• 33:49
  they put a notice in the paper: It didn't do that well.
• 33:51
  they put a notice in the paper: And then they try one called the Queen of Hearts and it's about an insane asylum in Europe during World War Two.
• 33:58
  they put a notice in the paper: And again, it was one of those things that was kind of quirky, kind of different.
• 34:02
  they put a notice in the paper: But it just never took off.
• 34:03
  they put a notice in the paper: And after that, they kind of pretty much gave up.
• 34:06
  they put a notice in the paper: The multiplexes were really spreading around town, and people just quit coming.
• 34:10
  they put a notice in the paper: They eventually closed in 1977.
• 34:12
  they put a notice in the paper: They closed it up for good.
• 34:14
  they put a notice in the paper: They turned the building into a dry cleaning place.
• 34:18
  they put a notice in the paper: And it just was...
• 34:20
  they put a notice in the paper: Well, I didn't go there for years.
• 34:23
  they put a notice in the paper: Because it just was, like, kind of sad?
• 34:24
  they put a notice in the paper: I think, well...
• 34:24
  they put a notice in the paper: Or mad! More mad than sad.
• 34:29
  they put a notice in the paper: What did they, what did they think they were doing, taking down that theater that we grew up with, basically.
• 34:35
  they put a notice in the paper: But then let me ask you, it sounds like you didn't really see that many movies there other than Harold and Maude.
• 34:39
  they put a notice in the paper: No, no, I didn't.
• 34:41
  they put a notice in the paper: So why were you so sad when it went away?
• 34:43
  they put a notice in the paper: Because it was part of the part of the neighborhood.
• 34:47
  they put a notice in the paper: It belonged.
• 34:48
  they put a notice in the paper: Yeah, I should say the Westgate had a public library in it.
• 34:51
  they put a notice in the paper: If you and your date got a window seat at the Classic Convention Grill Diner across the street, you'd look out at the Westgate marquee.
• 34:58
  they put a notice in the paper: Even if you weren't quite odd enough to see all the movies there.
• 35:02
  they put a notice in the paper: It was the neighborhood theater.
• 35:04
  they put a notice in the paper: And it was part of your life.
• 35:08
  they put a notice in the paper: Luckily, there were more where that came from.
• 35:10
  they put a notice in the paper: The Edina Theater is still there.
• 35:12
  they put a notice in the paper: The one of the six blocks south of us, the marquee is still there.
• 35:15
  they put a notice in the paper: The marquee is the same as it was that's still there.
• 35:17
  they put a notice in the paper: In fact, that closed up during the pandemic.
• 35:19
  they put a notice in the paper: And someone else is moving back in as a movie theater.
• 35:22
  they put a notice in the paper: Well, that's good, I mean, once again, Edina Theater wins.
• 35:26
  they put a notice in the paper: Yeah! Yeah... it wins again.
• 35:30
  they put a notice in the paper: But if Randy really wants to recapture the old days, there's another game in town.
• 35:33
  they put a notice in the paper: Called the Heights Theater.
• 35:35
  they put a notice in the paper: Reminds me a lot of the Westgate.
• 35:36
  they put a notice in the paper: It was, it's a neighborhood, little theater.
• 35:38
  they put a notice in the paper: It's run by a guy, the kind of guy that might have saved the Westgate if he had been around at that point.
• 35:43
  they put a notice in the paper: It opened in 1926.
• 35:45
  they put a notice in the paper: And so it's, he's got it restored, but he's got a pipe organ in there.
• 35:48
  they put a notice in the paper: He runs first run movies, but he also runs a lot of specials.
• 35:51
  they put a notice in the paper: And so I go up there and help him out with the specials.
• 35:53
  they put a notice in the paper: Doing what?
• 35:55
  they put a notice in the paper: Crowd control.
• 35:56
  they put a notice in the paper: Taking tickets, you know, just talking it with people.
• 35:59
  they put a notice in the paper: So I really... I get my movie theater experience there.
• 36:04
  they put a notice in the paper: Now, I get that same feeling when I walk in there and I say hi to everybody and I walk into the auditorium.
• 36:08
  they put a notice in the paper: I see all those empty seats.
• 36:10
  they put a notice in the paper: I go, "Yeah, we're going to fill this place up.
• 36:12
  they put a notice in the paper: It's going to be exciting." And that's the MUBI podcast for this week.
• 36:27
  they put a notice in the paper: Follow us to make sure you get a front row seat for more deep dives into great cinemas.
• 36:31
  they put a notice in the paper: Next week, in the gritty heart of eighties era London, a cavernous movie palace beckoned to Britain's subcultures.
• 36:38
  they put a notice in the paper: All night long.
• 36:39
  they put a notice in the paper: Two or three in the morning, you'd fall asleep for a while, and then you wake up, from some dream, and then there'd be something on screen and you wouldn't know what was your dream and what was on screen.
• 36:48
  they put a notice in the paper: The hallucinogenic tale of the Scala Cinema.
• 36:50
  they put a notice in the paper: Follow us so you don't miss it.
• 36:52
  they put a notice in the paper: Meanwhile, this episode was hosted, written and sound design by me, Rico Gagliano.
• 36:56
  they put a notice in the paper: Beth Schiff is our booking producer.
• 36:58
  they put a notice in the paper: Steven Colón mastered and engineered.
• 37:00
  they put a notice in the paper: Martin Austwick composed our original music.
• 37:00
  they put a notice in the paper: Thanks this week to Rachel Yang, Todd Melby, Joe Cracraft and the Edina Historical Society.
• 37:08
  they put a notice in the paper: The show is executive produced by me, along with Jon Barrenechea Efe Cakarel, Daniel Kasman and Michael Tacca, for MUBI.
• 37:15
  they put a notice in the paper: If you love the show, tell the world by leaving a five star review wherever you listen, it helps others find and love us too.
• 37:21
  they put a notice in the paper: Also, if you've got questions, comments or want to tell us some Harold and Maude trivia we failed to pack into this episode somehow, email us at podcast@MUBI.com And of course to stream the best in cinema, including some of the films we talk about on this very podcast, just head over to MUBI.com to start watching.
• 37:40
  they put a notice in the paper: Till next week, a Pepsi and some Twizzlers to use as a straw please.