Old fans who've always been at the movies

[Monte Davis]

>From the last page of GR: 

The screen is a dim page spread before us, white and silent. The film has
broken, or a projector bulb has burned out. It was difficult even for us,
old fans who've always been at the movies (haven't we?) to tell which before
the darkness swept in..

... the pointed tip of the Rocket, falling nearly a mile per second,
absolutely and forever without sound, reaches its last unmeasurable gap
above the roof of this old theatre, the last delta-t...

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf
Of Joseph Tracy
Sent: Wednesday, May 29, 2013 10:39 AM
To: P-list List
Subject: Re: Old fans who've always been at the movies

Have we? Care to elaborate a bit?  
On May 29, 2013, at 8:58 AM, Monte Davis wrote:

> (Haven't we?)
>  
> Antwerp, 1944:
>  
> "Nearly twelve hundred seats were filled in the Rex Cinema on bustling
Avenue De Keyser for the Friday afternoon matinee on December 15. [for] a
classic Western: The Plainsman, a Cecil B. De Mille melodrama starring Gary
Cooper as Wild Bill Hickok and Jean Arthur as Calamity Jane.
>  
> "At 3:20 p.m., just after Gary Cooper learned of Custer's death at the
Little Bighorn, a searing white light flashed across the auditorium as a V-2
- unheard and unseen, launched from a new site in Holland - blew through the
roof. Recovery teams ultimately retrieved 567 bodies, more than half of them
Allied soldiers, Navy gun crews,  and merchant mariners..."
>  
> Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe,
1944-1945