Crucially, I think 1972 shows us the importance of single screen cinemas. Because multiplexes did not really exist, each film from this gigantic list of movies was playing at its own, individual cinema. The marquee would be covered in promotional material for that one specific movie. At that time, there were dozens upon dozens of theaters all over New York City, and the vast majority of them have since shuttered, either taken over by office buildings and shops or demolished entirely. Single screen movie theaters, in their own little way, truly made the movie you were about to see an event. The entire building you were walking into was in service of showing one movie (or sometimes two, if it was a double bill). You could walk down the street and see buildings dedicated to a bunch of different films. Now, only one single screen cinema exists in New York City: The Paris Theater (now operated by Netflix). That level of focus on one picture is now entirely gone. If you are going to see a movie in a multiplex or on streaming, any movie you watch will be sandwiched between multiple other movies. It feels more like an icon on a screen at that point, rather than something unique you are about to experience.

Single screen theaters also encourage a diversification of the kind of films being made. One might think a multiplex would do this, as you have six, ten, or twenty different screens in one place to show various movies. That may have been true at their inception, but now the multiplexes are increasingly being filled with the same kind of movies, where each one just has a different color spandex suit in it. If you wanted to go see a romantic comedy, you would go to one theater. If you wanted to see an action film, you would go to another. Each theater needed something of its own to stay alive, and if you were just showing a slight variation of something at another theater, you would not be able to carve out your own identity as a theater.

But March 24, 1972 also shows the importance of variety. Look back on all the titles I have mentioned in this piece. Any mood you are in could be accommodated by one of the dozens of films available to you. This day had an unusually high amount of classics, but even if they were just simply decent pictures, the genres, tones, and styles vary wildly among them. Open up your Fandango or other cinema app and see how many straight up comedies are available to go see in a theater right now. At my local theater, there isn’t a single one. Essentially, there are action and horror movies. That’s it. Streaming admittedly opens up the playing field, but it is so easy to scroll past so many of those films without a second thought. In 1972, the playing field for different genres was pretty even. Now, a few types of movies “deserve” a big screen, and the others don’t.