I Remember Nothing by Nora Ephron Read Free Book Online Page B

thought about the food sold in movie theaters. So I dutifully attended the board meetings and was subjected to a series of PowerPoint presentations that were meant to validate the company’s then-policy of building costly, large cineplexes, most of them conveniently located right across the street from other costly, large cineplexes being built by rival theater companies.
    One day, about two years into my tenure, I was staying in Los Angeles, in a hotel, and I attended a Loews board meeting by telephone; it was so boring that I decided to put the call on hold and go get a manicure downstairs. When I got back to my room, only twenty minutes later, and picked up the receiver, everyone was screaming at one another. I didn’t want to admit that I had left the room—and by the way, no one had even noticed—so I listened for a while and realized that while I’d been out having my nails done, the company had gone bankrupt.
    This was a shock to me and to everyone else on the board. I never did find out why the news hadn’t been mentioned earlier in the board meeting, but that, of course, was one of the reasons everyone was screaming at one another: there were people on the board whose companies owned shares in Loews Corporation who had just found out that they’d lost hundreds of millions of dollars as a result of a bankruptcy no one had even had the courtesy to warn them about. It wasn’t even on the agenda!
    A few months later, a Canadian businessman bought Loews Theatres at a bargain-basement price and then sold it to AMC, which as far as I can tell has done nothing whatsoever to improve the food sold at the refreshment counter or anything else. I mean, it used to be so romantic to go to a movie—to sit in a great big theater that had a balcony, and boxes, and fabulous gilt trim on the walls, and a big red velvet curtain. Now we go to horrible unadorned gray rectangles where the sound bleeds in from the gray rectangle right next door. It’s sad.
    Anyway, the other night. We passed the shuttered refreshment counter, went into the theater, and sat down. The ads were already playing. There was a diet cola ad that was so in love with itself that it actually recommended going to a special Web site that explained how the ad had been made. There was an ad for buying tickets ahead of time online. Then, suddenly, the sound turned off and the screen went completely dark. Several minutes passed. The theater was three-quarters full, but no one moved. In some strange and inexplicable way, I felt responsible. I stood up and went two flights upstairs. A ticket taker had materialized and was now taking tickets. I told her that the system in Theater 7 had shut down. She looked at me blankly. I asked her if she would tell someone that the system had shut down. She said she would and went on taking tickets. After a couple of minutes, when the customers had all passed through, she yelled out, “Projection, isthere something wrong in Theater Seven?” I went back downstairs.
    The system started up again. A trailer began to play. I noticed that there was a large band of white light across the bottom of the screen, and that the images of the actors that were being projected were all cut off in the middle of their eyeballs.
    I left the theater and walked upstairs again. The ticket taker was still there, taking tickets. I asked her if she would ask the projectionist to reframe the movie. Once again she looked at me blankly, so I asked again. She promised she would. I waited until she walked off in the direction of the unseen projectionist. By the time I got back to my seat, the image on-screen had been reframed, although not perfectly, but by then I was too exhausted by my heroism to complain further.
    The movie began. It was out of sync, but hey, it was a good movie. And it was only
slightly
out of sync. Besides, there was a huge amount of cutting and action, so you could sort of live with its being out of sync. Then, in the last twenty