I worked at Everybody’s Pizza 1978-1979 before heading off to college. On the afternoon of the Emory Village fire I was at Pryor Tire, about a block West of Boulevard and what is now Freedom Parkway. While they were putting two new tires on my Toyota SR5, I asked if I could climb the spiral staircase to the roof of the building and check out the view of the Atl skyline. From up there I could see a wide plume of black smoke which I thought was closer to Ponce De Leon. About 30 minutes later I was helping Everybody’s staff push heavy Blodgett Pizza ovens away from the endangered side of the building, praying the small service alley on the side of our building would save our jobs, which is what happened. The fire raged most of the night, and dazed firemen wandered in for free pizza and coffee, trying to catch their breath between fire and Winter. The next morning the ruins of Emory Village were made all the more surreal festooned with huge, exploding sprays of ice stalagtites sparkling in the early light. Kids poked steaming lumps of black ice in search of unlikely surviving lps. Besides the theatre, the fire took The Emory Bookstore, a relative cultural mecca in it’s day (featuring a neat large poster of Middle-Earth). Thousands of fluttering pages from literary classics littered the intersection for days. We also lost a sandwich shop called Steverino’s, another called Dogwood’s, a pre-Turtles record store (Crickets?-where evidently the typically difficult music snob behind the counter was REM’s Peter Buck), and possibly Ed Green’s breakfast joint, but I think that had already burned out prior to the blaze. Good ‘Ol Days across the street, featuring sandwiches cooked in flower pots, was spared. Defining adolescent/teen film moments for me at Emory included Animal House, 2001/A Space Odyssey, Harold and Maude and Yellow Submarine.
Atlanta had a lot of neat little theatres in the seventies. The Plaza was still a porn theatre with a hole in the back wall, but my highschool pals and I were constantly talking MARTA to midnight shows at the Silver Screen for “The Valley Obscured By Clouds” and “Rainbow Bridge”, to The Screening Room for “How I Won the War”, “Clockwork Orange” and “Rocky Horror”, to the Film Forum for “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” and “Easy Rider”, to the Rialto for “Blackula” and any Bruce Lee, Garden Place for “Alice’s Restaurant” and “Cuckoo’s Nest”. (Your memories may vary.)
In the 80’s I lived at the Rhodes and saw every Bergman, Pasolini, Felini, Cassavetes, Wenders, Herzog, Renoir, Schlondorf, Truffaut, Bunuel, Cocteau, Fassbinder, Godard, Almodovar, etc., they showed. Usually 2 films by a director, changing daily. Now, those were the days!
I worked at Everybody’s Pizza 1978-1979 before heading off to college. On the afternoon of the Emory Village fire I was at Pryor Tire, about a block West of Boulevard and what is now Freedom Parkway. While they were putting two new tires on my Toyota SR5, I asked if I could climb the spiral staircase to the roof of the building and check out the view of the Atl skyline. From up there I could see a wide plume of black smoke which I thought was closer to Ponce De Leon. About 30 minutes later I was helping Everybody’s staff push heavy Blodgett Pizza ovens away from the endangered side of the building, praying the small service alley on the side of our building would save our jobs, which is what happened. The fire raged most of the night, and dazed firemen wandered in for free pizza and coffee, trying to catch their breath between fire and Winter. The next morning the ruins of Emory Village were made all the more surreal festooned with huge, exploding sprays of ice stalagtites sparkling in the early light. Kids poked steaming lumps of black ice in search of unlikely surviving lps. Besides the theatre, the fire took The Emory Bookstore, a relative cultural mecca in it’s day (featuring a neat large poster of Middle-Earth). Thousands of fluttering pages from literary classics littered the intersection for days. We also lost a sandwich shop called Steverino’s, another called Dogwood’s, a pre-Turtles record store (Crickets?-where evidently the typically difficult music snob behind the counter was REM’s Peter Buck), and possibly Ed Green’s breakfast joint, but I think that had already burned out prior to the blaze. Good ‘Ol Days across the street, featuring sandwiches cooked in flower pots, was spared. Defining adolescent/teen film moments for me at Emory included Animal House, 2001/A Space Odyssey, Harold and Maude and Yellow Submarine.
Atlanta had a lot of neat little theatres in the seventies. The Plaza was still a porn theatre with a hole in the back wall, but my highschool pals and I were constantly talking MARTA to midnight shows at the Silver Screen for “The Valley Obscured By Clouds” and “Rainbow Bridge”, to The Screening Room for “How I Won the War”, “Clockwork Orange” and “Rocky Horror”, to the Film Forum for “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” and “Easy Rider”, to the Rialto for “Blackula” and any Bruce Lee, Garden Place for “Alice’s Restaurant” and “Cuckoo’s Nest”. (Your memories may vary.)
In the 80’s I lived at the Rhodes and saw every Bergman, Pasolini, Felini, Cassavetes, Wenders, Herzog, Renoir, Schlondorf, Truffaut, Bunuel, Cocteau, Fassbinder, Godard, Almodovar, etc., they showed. Usually 2 films by a director, changing daily. Now, those were the days!