Show Biz Kids

Most Tuesdays, I walk a few miles from my apartment in Pasadena down into the main commercial strip of the city, through leafy streets and blankly hostile highway overpasses, to my local chain movie theater, the Regal Paseo. The Paseo is one of those theaters that has, for whatever reason, angered the gods of commerce and is thereby cursed to remain oddly empty despite a prime location on a busy pedestrian street in a prosperous suburb of the global center of the entertainment industry. And so, as I walk through the cavernous lobby, where sometimes no ticket taker can be bothered to appear, past the brimming popcorn machines and into a half-full-at-best auditorium, and as I slide discreetly into my back row solo seat to watch Black Bag or Sinners or The Amateur, I often find myself considering the decline and fall of the American film.