Star Wars Trilogy Coming To A Theater Not Far, Far Away
As a spectacular summer alternative to “Netflix and chill,” the Alamo Drafthouse is showing a triple feature of the original Star Wars trilogy at the Kings Theater this Sunday, featuring 20th anniversary editions of Star Wars: A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi.
Henri Mazza, VP of special events for Alamo Drafthouse, told DPC that the Kings Theater is a crucial player in the upcoming triple feature. “The environment that you are in is such a large part of the whole experience, watching these amazing iconic films being surrounded by other fans,” he said. For their limited number of screenings across across the country, the Alamo partnered with beautiful movie palaces like the Kings Theater.
“It’s not just the size of the screen and the volume of the sound around you,” Mazza said. “It’s seeing it in a room filled with 3,000 fans. There’s just nothing like the energy that you have there. Somebody starts cheering as soon as the fanfare music comes on, or people start clapping and realizing the that Death Star is no more. It’s like a concert for movie fans.”
With the backdrop of the Kings Theater, the Alamo hopes to deliver a special movie marathon experience. “These movies don’t get to be shown on the big screen very often,” Mazza pointed out, “I’m not aware of a trilogy marathon screening on a big screen like this since the special edition came out in ‘97.”
Fans are being encouraged to don costumes — but not to grumble over the special edition controversy. This version features the CGI effects that made some purists unhappy, and director George Lucas’ new frames to the confrontation between Han Solo and bounty hunter Greedo in the Mos Eisley cantina.
Many members of the Empire Saber Guild, a “Star Wars costumed charity performance group that specializes in lightsaber stage choreography,” insist that the changes spoiled the narrative. Kevin Cobb, who performs as Jedi Nivec Boc and SIth Darth Fury said that, despite the revisions, “I KNOW Han shot first… End of story.”
Despite a petition demanding restoration of the “Han Shot First” version of the story, Lucas no longer makes the original cuts of the films available for screening. That’s disappointing for Diánna Martin, who appears at Saber Guild events as Darth D’elirium. “I would rather see the originals, especially since they are harder to come by nowadays,” Martin said.
But both Cobb and Martin are vying for tickets to the marathon screening this Sunday. The director’s changes to the original version aren’t enough to keep fans away from the spectacle at the Kings Theater.
The Alamo Drafthouse chain is its own legendary theater, founded in Austin, Texas in 1997, the same year as the the special edition trilogy release. The Alamo is known for its theater food and beverage service, and also for insisting on strict adherence to movie etiquette. The chain has even created a hilarious PSA that proudly features an angry voice mail recorded by a patron who was ejected for texting during a screening.
The Alamo plans to open its first New York City theater in Brooklyn at 445 Gold Street (near Metro Tech) in the next month or two, Mazza said. “We wanted to begin entertaining people [in Brooklyn] as much as we could. We had a series of outdoor screenings in Fort Greene Park earlier this summer and [the Star Wars trilogy at the Kings Theater] was a natural expansion of that.”
The screening is a great chance to share Star Wars with the whole family. “There’s a generation of people that haven’t seen it. And you’ve got people getting to revisit seeing it on the big screen when they were kids, and those people have kids now and get to share that experience with them,” Mazza said.
Check out the Star Wars Marathon screening is on Sunday, August 7 beginning at 2pm at the Kings Theater, at 1027 Flatbush Avenue between Tilden & Duryea Streets. Tickets start at $55, and can be purchases online or at the Kings Theater box office.