Glens Falls: Upstate Broadway
Adirondack Film Festival kicks off its sixth season
The Front Page
Morning Update
Friday, October 15, 2021
By Ken Tingley
If you are visiting from out of town for the Adirondack Film Festival, you might be surprised to learn what a bustling little metropolis the city of Glens Falls was a century ago. Even local residents might be surprised at the number of theaters situated all around downtown.
There was the Rialto on Warren Street not far from St. Mary’s Church.
The Paramount over on the corner of Ridge and Maple across from what is now the Queensbury Hotel.
The Empire on South Street.
And the Park, well, on Park Street.
There was once even an opera house.
Only the Park and Empire buildings remain and the Empire was gutted long ago for apartments, but it is still proudly labeled if looking high on the building.
It’s all laid out in a new exhibit at the Chapman Museum in downtown Glens Falls.
If you are visiting, check it out before you leave. It’s a cozy little museum just two blocks from South Street.
The exhibit chronicles the evolution of movie houses in Glens Falls from the Nickelodeon hey day, to the vaudeville theaters and movie palaces with silent, and then talking films.
Jillian Mulder, who has been curator at the Chapman for 14 years, says the genesis of the idea was more than a year ago when someone brought in some old negatives from inside the Paramount Theater. That led to a photograph inside the projection room at the Paramount Theater of Neil Creeden with his son Jack.
“This was a bit of a labor of love to put this exhibit together,” Mulder said Thursday while still putting the finishing touches on the exhibit. She collected old newspaper ads, posters and items from the several of the theaters, including a fan from the World in Motion Theater in Glens Falls.
It was a natural to pair the exhibit with the Adirondack Film Festival as it began its sixth season Thursday night.
There is even a section on the hey day of drive-in theaters around the region. There are only 400 drive-in movie theaters left in the country and just the Glen Drive-In on Route 9 in Queensbury locally.
Before leaving the exhibit, Jillian is hoping everyone will reenact a photo from the movie “Singing in the Rain.” There is a backdrop and umbrellas. I’m hoping every visitor will post their selfie of the scene with the hashtag #chapmansinginginrain
Glens Falls was always a working class town supported by the paper mills along the Hudson River. But it was also the hub of entertainment around the region as well.
Festival kicks off
With the Adirondack Film Festival selling both in-person and virtual access to the films this year, the big question was whether people would show up at the Wood Theater or just watch from home.
For the first film of the weekend, the Wood Theater was about half filled.
Language Lessons
The pandemic has forced film-makers to break new ground in how they make movies.
“Language Lessons” takes place entirely on Zoom with the characters’ development limited to their weekly Spanish lesson between student and teacher. In some ways, that makes their relationship more intense, mysterious and captivating.
It’s also pretty easy to fall in love with Mark Duplass and Natalie Morales in the title roles as they learn about each other and their very different lives.
It may ultimately lead to a new genre of film with an award for “Selfie cinematography.”
This is a movie with a heart as two people grow to care for each other in slow-moving platonic love.
The movie received the “Dramatic Audience Award” at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas and was released nationally on a limited basis in September.
The Adirondack Film Festival could not have chosen a better movie to kick off its festival. It was the best movie I had seen in a long, long time.
Times-Union profile
I had a nice chat with Times-Union reporter Donna Liquori a couple weeks back talking about retirement, the newspaper business and my book “The Last American Editor.”
It is online now and will appear in print in Sunday’s newspaper.
The books is available at the Chapman Museum downtown and gives you a collection of small-town stories you won’t be able to put down.
Tweet of the Day
Heading to campus now