Like many New Orleanians, I spent Ash Wednesday hung over at church. For most people, that would mean getting your forehead smeared with ashes at St. Louis Cathedral (often while still wearing tattered remnants of a Mardi Gras costume), but for me it meant taking off work to cool down at The Movies. I made a rare trip out to the AMC Palaces of the suburbs for a discordant double feature of Scarlet & Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, easing a mild headache by enjoying junk food & soda in the dark. It was a restorative experience, as always, but it was also a reminder of how much more pleasant & casual of a ritual it is to visit independent theaters like The Prytania & The Broad closer to home. In particular, the AMC pre-show is especially uncomfortable & draining if you’re not used to visiting that chain on a regular basis and forget that it’s custom to deliberately show up late. Before the trailers begin, you’re bombarded with advertisements hosted by Maria Menounos, who only occasionally pops in to reframe the experience as a trivia game instead of a bigger, louder TV ad break. Then, at the announced start time, the actual previews begin, and they’re also bookended with TV-style advertisements for products like Coca-Cola, M&Ms, and luxury cars. That thirty-minute(!) trailer package then concludes with additional advertisements for AMC itself (an experience you’ve already purchased and are seated for), including the infamous Nicole Kidman “We come to this place for magic” commercial which has now been chopped up and streamlined to the point of total incoherence. The entire experience is exhausting and, seemingly, designed to be avoided rather than engaged with. I can’t believe I did it twice in one day. It’s possible my hangover wasn’t even a result of the previous day’s partying; it was at least partly an AMC A-List branded headache.

I had completely forgotten about my Ash Wednesday pre-show woes until my next discordant double feature experience a few weeks later, when I caught two classic movies at two independent theaters in New Orleans proper. I spent a recent Sunday morning watching Sidney Lumet’s 1976 classic Network in The Prytania’s Classic Movies series, then hopped over to Zeitgeist in Arabi for an afternoon screening of Harold Lloyd’s 1923 career-maker Safety Last!, presented with live piano accompaniment. Those two movies have very little to say about each other in their themes or methods, despite both being riotously funny comedies from the American studio system. If they share a common theme, it’s about rat-race Capitalism. Network posits itself as a vicious blow in the great war between cinema & television for mass media supremacy, then openly acknowledges that the distinction between the two mediums ultimately doesn’t matter because it’s all just corporate sludge anyway. The pursuit of profits in its fictional TV broadcast newsrooms quickly leads to manic, lethal decision making that gets people killed — live, on-air, for ratings. For its part, Safety Last! asks “Why climb the corporate ladder when you can just climb the corporation itself?” In an effort to earn enough money to marry his small-town sweetheart, Harold Lloyd climbs the department store that employs him as a sales clerk to drum up publicity for sales, nearly killing himself in the process — for our delight & entertainment. You know what, maybe they aren’t so different after all. They’re both New York City stories about violent publicity stunts, and both of their most iconic moments (Network‘s “I’m mad as Hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” monologue and Safety Lasts!‘s death-defying climb up the side of a skyscraper) are decorated with ticking clocks. Not for nothing, they’re also two widely revered classics, so I have less to report about how great they are than I do about how they were presented.

Most of the Prytania Classic Movies I’ve attended recently have been preceded by a classic cartoon. There are no trailers or TV commercials in the pre-roll, just a brief in-person intro from the series’ programmer, followed by classic shorts of Popeye & Bugs Bunny doing bits. It’s wonderful, as it’s just about as close as you’ll ever get to experiencing the pre-show packages of Old Hollywood. Their presentation of Network indulged a slight deviation from the usual format, as they substituted the Looney Tunes short for a different kind of old-system pre-show: the newsreel. Network was preceded by an old MGM short titled “Beautiful Banff and Lake Louise,” produced for the studio’s TravelTalks travelogue series. There’s no apparent reason why that exact TravelTalks short was chosen out of the hundreds that MGM produced from the 1930s through the 1950s, as it transports the viewers in the theater to the Canadian Rockies, thousands of miles away from Network‘s NYC skyscrapers. However, it did serve as sharp contrast against the more contemporary version of news coverage that Network depicts, as well as the more contemporary movie-studio culture that got Network greenlit. The inciting incident of Network is the firing of an alcoholic TV news anchor (Peter Finch), who quickly becomes famous by threatening to kill himself on air and declaring that all TV news is “bullshit.” You won’t find a more exemplary example of vintage news-reporting bullshit than TravelTalks, which is functionally an advertisement for distant vacation resorts while pretending to offer the public documentary footage of Nature. It’s especially jarring to hear the short’s narrator boast about the gorgeous Canadian vistas which had been unseen by “the white race” until recent years, previously guarded from intruders by indigenous “Indian” combatants but now available to serve as a postcard backdrop for your next hotel stay. As a piece of filmmaking, it’s as boring and artless as the AMC pre-show commercials of today, but it was also a useful snapshot of the world Network later attempted to shake up with its more cynical, radical politics.

Zeitgeist’s pre-show selection for Safety Last! was more of a no-brainer. To warm the audience up for Lloyd’s building-scaling antics, in-house pianist David Bradley also live-scored a previous short from the same Criterion disc titled “His Royal Slyness.” Instead of being set in modern NYC, “His Royal Slyness” takes place in the fictional European kingdom of Thermosa, where Lloyd’s vaudevillian antics upset the propriety of a royal court. Much like in Safety Last!, Lloyd woos his love interest by pretending to be above his station — in this case a noble prince instead of a department store bigwig. Antics ensue, but notably it’s the same kind of antics that followed in the feature presentation. Both films depict Lloyd mindlessly plucking at the accoutrement of a fellow bystander when nervous (flower petals in Safety Last!, war metals in “His Royal Slyness”), covering the heads of nuisances he doesn’t want to deal with (with a fabric sample in Safety Last! and a king’s robe in “His Royal Slyness”), and evading the capture of authorities through increasingly elaborate schemes (vengeful cops in Safety Last!, insurrectionist mobs in “His Royal Slyness”). In a better world where movie theaters didn’t have to constantly squeeze more pennies out of every aspect of the moviegoing experience just to keep the lights on, this would be the perfect formula for a pre-show package: a feature-relevant short film that expands the context of the main presentation for audiences who made it to their seats on time but still helpfully delays the show by a few minutes for anyone who happens to be running late. I only mention the running late bit because I caught a passing train and a raised bridge on my drive out to Arabi that afternoon, and it eased my mind knowing that even if I missed the start time, the listed pre-show short would ensure I wouldn’t miss a minute of Safety Last!.

Safety Last! is over a century old now, Network has been around for half that time, and both still kill with modern audiences. Even if you’re already familiar with their most iconic moments—the “Mad as hell!” speech and the clock hanging, respectively—the rest of the runtime around those moments still hits with full, fresh impact. Network was infinitely more heightened & insane that I imagined it would be, since the crazed-news-anchor-holds-a-TV-station-hostage premise I was familiar with only accounts for the first act, and things get exponentially out of control from there, presenting a major-studio escalation of Putney Swope. Safety Last! also has a strikingly modern anti-cop sentiment in its own heightened politics, with the hapless hero of the piece only put in danger because his best bud is being chased by a pig who can’t take a joke. Even without a live piano punctuating the room’s constant laughs & gasps, it would still be an electric communal experience. Some small part of that communality, I think, is attributable to the pre-show. Instead of being held hostage by a corporate ad package that buried us in our seats under a mountain of Coca-Cola slogans, we were all acclimating to the same wavelength with pre-feature mood-setters. Even the pre-show advertisements for concessions were more pleasant at the neighborhood spots, with The Prytania rolling its usual “Let’s all go to the lobby!” jingle and Zeitgeist pausing briefly for a snack-purchasing intermission between short & feature because that just happened to be the mood of the room. The pre-show is ultimately a small, trivial aspect of the movie-going experience, but I wouldn’t say it’s totally inconsequential. It can greatly affect the mood of the room, mostly by signaling the levels of hostility or solidarity theaters hold for their audience.

-Brandon Ledet