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"Come Sunday night, chances are you can find the masses at the Flicks... Faced with a choice between the library and the movies, studs, dollies, libbers, and freaks have been increasingly opting for [the movies]...."-The Stanford Daily, 1973 (Hummer)
"We want to establish a film program of quality. One that is equivalent to the quality of our football team, for example."-University of Tennessee-Knoxville Vice Chancellor Walter J. Herndon, 1971 ("Clarence")
Introduction
In the 1960s and early 1970s, over 2,000 students each week paid pocket change to attend Stanford University's Sunday Flicks. There, they typically watched a feature and cartoon shorts-but more important, they screamed, whistled, belched, blew air horns, and offered obscene running commentary on the films, which ranged from Ben-Hur (Wyler 1959) and A Hard Day's Night (Lester 1964) to The Miracle Worker (Perm 1962) and The Virgin Spring (Bergman 1960). Dating to the late 1930s, the Flicks were widely recognized as the campus's "most important social event" (Briscoe 6; Lecraw). At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, moviegoing options were so numerous that one observer called the campus's largest venue a cinephile's "Shangri-La" (Alvarez 8). MovieTime, the campus's most high-profile film series-just one of dozens-counted 31,000 admissions in the fall 1973 semester alone. In the years prior, it had doubled its offerings to accommodate "the ever-growing number of campus film buffs" (Null; "Collector" 10). This flowering of film activities on college and university campuses in the 1960s took place alongside an explosion in the student population-from about 3.5 million in 1960 to 7.5 million in 1970-and a concomitant expansion of campus facilities and services (along with the establishment of many new universities) (Kerr 121). That the mass social activity of moviegoing became such a key part of campus life during this era-in which higher education in the U.S. was expanded and remade-should be no surprise.
Even so, it is the art theater that has long been celebrated as the site of foreign, repertory, and other "alternative" film exhibition in the U.S. in the two decades following World War II. It is here, the standard history recounts, where Baby Boomer audiences were exposed to new kinds of movies-and where they caught a cinephilia that would influence film studies, criticism, production, and other spheres of film...