MATINEE
IT'S SHOWTIME!
DIRECTOR JOE DANTE DISCUSSES M ATINEE, HIS AFFECTIONATE LOVE LETTER TO MOVIE-GOING, ATOMIC MONSTERS AND B-MOVIE KING WILLIAM CASTLE
WORDS: OLIVER PFEIFFER
WHEN I WAS A KID, IT was very common to have a Saturday matinee – the purpose of which was to indoctrinate children into the act of going to the movies so they would grow up and become moviegoers,” Joe Dante tells SFX. It’s a pastime he celebrated in his nostalgic 1993 fantasy satire Matinee.
“On Saturdays, they would run 10 cartoons, a serial chapter and two features. They would run Tarzan movies, Westerns, old horror pictures – anything that was suitable for kids. It was a wonderful tradition, and I think my generation really became movie fans because of the Saturday matinee.”
After directing the self-aware sequel to his original classic Gremlins, Dante, along with his regular writing partner Michael Finnell, shopped around the story. Set in 1962, it went through an interesting gestation period.
“[It started out] more of a kind of fantasy about a bunch of people who are grown up and all assemble at this movie theatre they used to go to all the time, which is going under the wrecking ball,” he reveals. “They reminisce about how they thought the theatre was haunted and that the projectionist was a vampire – it was a very far-afield version of this story. The only thing that was true to both versions was the presence of Mant!”
The “ant-man” movie featured within the world of Matinee was Dante’s take on a ’50s creature feature about atomically mutated monsters, in the tradition of films like Tarantula and The Deadly Mantis. “We cheated a little on Mant! because by 1962 they really weren’t making that kind of movie any more, but it seemed the perfect vehicle for what we were trying to say,” the director continues.