We’re gonna need a bigger screen: forty years after JAWS redefined the summer movie, it’s safe to go back in the Count Basie (formerly Carlton) Theatre to catch an anniversary screening, first in a series of seasonal blockbuster film events.
Under its earlier incarnation as the Carlton, the Count Basie Theatre entertained generations of Red Bank area locals with first-run (later second-run) product from the Hollywood glitterdome, projected on a screen that laid claim to being the biggest in Monmouth County.
While these days the films are just one component of the Count’s cultural menu, the big screen remains — and beginning this Wednesday, June 24, the Basie hosts the first in a free series of “Summer Blockbusters” classics.
It’s a fairly eclectic collection that ranges from family-friendly vintage musicals to blood-drenched Tarantinos — to the thriller that started the whole modern summer-blockbuster industry as we know it. What else but Jaws, the 1975 phenomenon that put director Steven Spielberg on the map; spawned a whole fishy franchise (Middletown’s own Billy Van Zandt would have a featured role in the 1977 sequel), and drew inspiration from a real-life 1916 shark attack near Matawan. The game-changer that celebrates its 40th anniversary this summer screens free of charge at 7 pm, in the first of a slate sponsored by the Count Basie Theatre Cinema Society.
The series picks up on the afternoon of Tuesday, July 14 with a “Seniors Matinee” double feature, offering up Judy Garland and Margaret O’Brien in Meet Me in St. Louis — the MGM classic Americana that gave us “The Trolley Song” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” — at 1 pm. It’s followed at 4 pm with another goodie from the MGM vaults: High Society, with Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Grace Kelly and Louis Armstrong hobnobbing in the Hamptons with a set of Cole Porter songs both silly (“Well Did You Evah”) and sublime (“True Love”).
Later that evening on July 14, the series celebrates the release of Go Set a Watchman, the breathlessly anticipated “new” novel by Harper Lee, author of the monumental American classic To Kill a Mockingbird. The first book published by Lee in 55 years (it’s a sequel to Mockingbird that was actually written prior to that novel), Watchman will be available for sale in the Basie’s lobby, courtesy of Fair Haven’s River Road Books — while inside the auditorium, the 1962 film version of To Kill a Mockingbird presents Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch (and Robert Duvall in his screen debut as Boo Radley) at 7 pm.
The summer series wraps on Tuesday July 21, with a “grindhouse”-style twi-nighter spotlighting the first two features from indie writer-director Quentin Tarantino: the violent and darkly comic deconstructed caper film Reservoir Dogs (6:30 pm), and the Oscar winning rulebook-breaker Pulp Fiction (8:30 pm). Admission to all Summer Blockbuster events is absolutely free of charge, but tickets are required, and can be picked up at the Basie box office or reserved in advance here.
