I started the week as if things weren't so different, yet.
Monday, before the kids were awake, I wrote about an excellent new Kelly Reichardt film opening today, "First Cow," which you should see at some point. On Monday Reichardt hadn't yet canceled her travel plans to promote her film in Chicago, because of coronavirus concerns. They are our national concerns now. Once it got to Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, people took it seriously.
I caught a 2:30 p.m. matinee of "West Side Story" at the Music Box Theatre, part of the theater's sixth 70 Millimeter Film Festival. The crowd was older. I shook hands with one of the employees, then immediately thought twice about the wisdom of the handshake. That same day Donald Trump said of the coronavirus: "It's not our country's fault."
Tuesday night at the IMAX Navy Pier theater: Vin Diesel, "Bloodshot." Half-full. Later I wondered: Was going to a movie, with a crowd, with a virus loose, the best call? The middling attendance made social distancing easy. Still, I didn't wipe down my arm rests with anything.
The next day our family ate out, after some deliberation, at a packed restaurant a few blocks from the house. Everything I heard on the NPR program "1A" earlier that day, about how the Manhattan restaurant business was cratering, didn't match up. Was Chicago being stupid? Were we?
Thursday, the dominos fell. Seemingly half or more of America's diversionary activity postponed or canceled or put up a "Closed For Now" sign, from the NCAA tournaments to Ebertfest to Disney's "Mulan" to Disneyland to Disney World, to the whole of the Broadway theater economy. Time moved very quickly. By Friday, Broadway and film producer Scott Rudin's initial, mid-pandemic Broadway ticket-discounting plan sounded pretty craven. "My partners and I," he told the Hollywood Reporter Tuesday, "want the buildings full _ even, and especially, during this crisis."
As drama critic Charles McNulty wrote in the Los Angeles Times: "Apparently, the show must go on even if it kills us."
Whether the show should go on _ the plays, the concerts, the games, the movies _ became the question Thursday. The movie component was merely one among countless sectors of the American entertainment industry reeling from the coronavirus presence. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot followed other states' and cities' lead Thursday and announced a ban on events drawing 1,000 or more people.
With screenings, concerts and performances in venues accommodating between 250 and 999 patrons, those should be off the table, too, Lightfoot said, though it wasn't an outright ban, merely something she would "strongly encourage."
'IT'S THE PARANOIA EVERYONE'S FEELING RIGHT NOW'
Meantime, movie theaters across the nation reassured customers that heavy-duty cleaning and disinfecting measures were in place. "Our janitor is using this super-intense bathroom cleaner, wiping everything down. Everything," said Music Box general manager Ryan Oestereich Thursday. Between every screening, he said, theater staff will be cleaning the auditorium. No more glassware in the bar in the adjoining Music Box lounge, he said; for now, they've switched to disposable plastic cups and glasses.
"I hear your paranoia," he told me. "It's the paranoia everyone's feeling right now."
This has been a fine few days to get to know the podcast "This Week in Virology," hosted by Vincent Racaniello, Columbia University Higgins Professor of Microbiology & Immunology. Racaniello has no use for entertainment as usual.
"I think they should cancel everything," he said Thursday. "I would not go to anything for the next month, probably. I'm not even taking the subway now. The virus is here. I'd stay out of bars, restaurants. It's going to hurt business but it's needed to cut down on the spread."
I told Racaniello that in a Tribune question-and-answer column with a suburban Chicago infectious diseases specialist, the doctor said: "There's no real medical reason not to travel domestically."
Racaniello's response: "He is wrong."
This also has been a sobering week to read up on the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic, which claimed somewhere between 500,000 and 700,000 lives in the U.S. alone. Theaters of all kinds, for varying durations, closed their doors, then reopened, then (some of them) closed again when the pandemic's second wave hit.
"I've just been out to see a movie with one of my daughters," historian and author Catharine Arnold told me Thursday, on the phone from Nottingham, England. Her 2018 book "Pandemic 1918" carries the subtitle "Eyewitness Accounts from the Greatest Medical Holocaust in Modern History." She is 60 and has a chronic bronchial condition that makes breathing difficult. She recently canceled a speaking engagement in Texas.
At the movies in Nottingham Thursday, she said, she couldn't help but be impressed by the crowd's "resilience and stoicism" in the face of the coronavirus concerns regarding public gathering and social distancing. COVID-19, she cautioned, has some parallels to the so-called "Spanish flu" pandemic. The other day Trump referred to COVID-19 as a "foreign virus." We love Othering these things.
"This one basically targets the older population, and the infirm," she said. "I'm not saying that's good. But we know what we're dealing with at the moment."
Still, Arnold said: "I'm not the kind of person who scares easily and I think this is frightening. This will change the way we live our lives publicly for several months to come at the minimum. I don't think we'll be going to films, or seeing friends, or going out to eat the same way." She said she was already entertaining second thoughts about going to the cinema Thursday.
That same day, Chicago-based ShowPlace ICON Theatres president Tony Kerasotes tried to reassure customers. "We have closed specific seats throughout each auditorium to increase the distance between each group of guests," he wrote to customers, regarding "this time of increased concern surrounding the coronavirus."
'THEATRICAL EXHIBITION IS FRAGILE'
Another matter of increased concerns for the exhibitors: Beyond "Trolls: World Tour" in early April, there are no new releases scheduled. "A Quiet Place Part II," the new James Bond film "No Time to Die," "Mulan" and many others have been postponed until later this year or, in the case of Universal's "Fast and Furious 9," April 2021.
We are now living in our own sequel to "A Quiet Place," with a viral antagonist and without Emily Blunt.
"There is a connection to be made to 1918," argued author and University of Central Florida associate film professor Gary D. Rhodes. He wrote "The Perils of Moviegoing in America: 1896-1950," a compelling account of fires, stickups, anarchist bombings, poor ventilation and communicable diseases coloring the darker chapters of film exhibition.
"In 1918 nobody knew how to respond to the influenza (pandemic) or how long it would last," Rhodes said. No two cities or states implemented regulations regarding the opening or closing of theaters the same way, or at the same time. In New York City, bucking most trends, city officials allowed theaters of all kinds to stay open through the worst of the 1918-early 1919 pandemic.
Yet the death toll in New York "wasn't any worse than any other city's death toll," Rhodes told me. "Though that may have been pure coincidence." Later than most cities, Chicago closed its theaters that same month. The movie industry lost an estimated $40 million in revenue nationally by February 1919. That's nearly $623 million in 2020 dollars.
World War I-weary audiences wondered if the movies, then silent, were dead and gone. Some are wondering the same now, at least in the traditional brick-and-mortar multiplex world. Will our collective moviegoing experience convert to moviestaying only? How soon?
In a related development, recently postponed film festivals range far and widely, from the massive Austin, Texas, mainstay South by Southwest to the regional boutique favorite Ebertfest, held (though not this year) at the Virginia Theatre in Champaign, Ill. The local Chicago Critics Film Festival, held annually at the Music Box, announced postponement Friday.
On Monday, longtime critic and festival programmer Robert Koehler tweeted: "Film festivals must now stop being public events. They must shift to online access and viewing. This requires some infrastructure work, but it can be done. Tell me that I'm wrong."
Rhodes, for one, doesn't see the coronavirus as the end of traditional moviegoing. "Theatrical exhibition is fragile," he said, "and has been for a long time. This thing is going to be tough on so many industries. But people are not going to stop congregating. I mean, they will for a limited time _ that's what happened in 1918 and early 1919 _ but that's temporary. I find it difficult to believe that theaters will ever disappear entirely."
The movie business, like so much of American life, changed so quickly a century ago, Rhodes said. "The loss of life was horrific, and fear was everywhere," Rhodes said. "And yet the film industry rebounded, along with the rest of the country."
