CineSea 28 in Pictures

[Steve Klare]

I saw that "Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad" myself!

-I was tempted too, but I have to watch my storage space!

CineSea is actually a good kid-environment; they get to see a whole bunch of different adults hanging out together and generally getting along very well. I've never been sorry when I brought my own son.

I think bringing families lets them into our "world" so they appreciate it more. Just maybe makes it more "our thing" than just "Dad's thing"! The biggest rap on someone else's pastimes is when they become isolating. This way, the others get to share in it.

[Steve Klare]

Saturday Night Show (Reel #2 of 2)

So now we’ve had dinner: maybe out to a restaurant, maybe taking advantage of the kitchenette in our hotel rooms: one way or another we are fed and contented and ready for Saturday Night show at 7:30.

This show's beginning was one of the first steps in the evolution of CineSea. CineSea The Original had no group film shows of any kind and the Big Screen did not first make a stand until CineSea 4, two years later. The question that has lead to so much growth from there on is “It’s standing there anyway, what else can we do with it?”

The rules for Saturday are simple: nothing over 20 minutes and nothing inappropriate for the youngest eyes and ears in the room. Anybody that brings films is guaranteed at least one will be shown.

There’s this idea called “Projectionists Discretion” that means whoever spends a couple of hours standing there threading, lighting, focusing, rewinding and returning to correct owners gets to call the tune when weaving some kind of a spontaneous show out of maybe 15 reels of film in three gauges, picking and choosing from at least twice as many! (-just seems fair!)

Unless they bring just one film, nobody ever gets everything they bring on screen, and maybe that’s for the best: it means that the pool of films the projectionists choose from is too deep. The day I sit there and see every last reel I brought up on screen, I will start to worry!

CineSea lurks in the background when we watch films at home. Last night we were watching a Bugs and Daffy (“DUCK SEATHHON!!!...FIRE!!!”) and we agreed that the Rabbit and the Duck were worthy of Saturday Night Show and should get their chance in October.

(-The Disney film I have about Electrical Safety?….errr…NO!)

So We Begin:
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Shorty and Doug made the opening greeting.

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Now, the entertainment isn’t always film and it never has been. We’ve had CineSea-ests share their talents with us for years. We’ve had songs, skits and a few film-talks as well. This time, Kevin and Shorty gave us some minutes of Abbott and Costello.
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Mike is a prodigious collector of Bollywood films, and these always liven up the room!

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Based on his visits to Blackpool, Shorty brought us their tradition of a film auction: some posters, several lots of films and a couple of projectors too. This helped raise some funds for the incidental expenses that always occur.

The various conventions around the world are better off when we learn from each other this way. The idea of an Eastern US convention itself wasn’t directly inspired by the British conventions, but it’s fair to say the motivation to raise them from years of dormancy was inspired by what we saw from the UK in places like this forum! Before Wildwood was ever suggested as a destination, I saw what was going on across the Pond and thought “I’d go to that!”.
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We got to see the construction and debut of the new RKO Plaza theater in Schenectady, New York in 1931! This is only a memory since it was torn down in the 1960s.
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The youngest in the room got to laugh at Rowan and Martin probably for the first time in their generation! It’s healthy to bring our kids to this, maybe if nothing else so they can learn that there was life, society, and culture even before the internet! (-didn't even try to explain "Sock it to me!".)
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Stooges? Why Soitenly!

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Perhaps a little spillover from Thursday Night Theme?

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-and now for Sports: Babe Ruth himself stopped by and taught us some baseball.

This show always runs late. Often midnight comes and goes and we are still chugging. One dimension of this is that CineSea as we know it could never happen at the peak of the Season, since we are doing spectacular damage to official quiet hours! Being that we are basically 100% of the guests at our two ends of the Season, certain allowances are made. In July, the suite one floor upstairs from us would have a decent-sized family trying to sleep and they just might mind our soundtracks!

-but the last reel of the evening comes anyway, and the crowd quietly shuffles for the door, maybe glad we don’t need to drive home! That cold air out on the walkways our room doors are on is often quite brisk, and Wildwood that late is dark and quiet at the ends of the season. (-an excellent time and mood to get a good night's sleep!)

Next: Sunday (-and the End!)

[Douglas Meltzer]

Thank you, Steve, for documenting all of this. Normally I would follow up your Saturday post with a list of other films that were shown however this time so much of it is a blur. Saturday was a busy night! I did show my Super 8mm print that I recently re-recorded into english of A Fistful of Dollars. I do recall an Our Gang short, a 400' French compilation of Disney animated musicals, the documentary (Blackhawk) City of the Golden Gate, a Walton 200 footer featuring Old Mother Riley, a Movietone newsreel from 1929, and a very pretty print of the Disney short Goliath II.







Shorty was a star (more than usual) on Saturday night. The auction wasn't planned. David printed up artwork on acrylic to donate to CineSea. Shorty suggested holding a Blackpool type auction. The items were placed on a table during the day and then people kindly added reels, films & projectors to be auctioned off that evening.
We broke up the auction into two 10 minute segments and it was a lot of fun, with some entertaining back and forth taking place. Thank you, Shorty and thank you, Blackpool!

[Steve Klare]

Sunday (-and the End!)

Time to head home once again!

-Back to regular life with its jobs and deadines, lawns to cut, bills to pay and the occasional dripping pipe down in the basement! (-put a bucket under it until the weekend!) What a great thing it is to have events like this to spice daily life up!

We go home to all sorts of different destinations. Personally, I go up the Garden State Parkway and pass through the maelstrom of local traffic that is Staten Island, Brooklyn and Queens. If I hit it at a deserted time, maybe three and a half hours door to door. -some busier times? -Five! (-once or twice SIX!) Others head to Cape May and ferry over to Lewes for Delaware, Maryland, Washington DC, Virginia and other points further south. Some head west for Pennsylvania, Ohio and sometimes places like Minnesota and Texas. One of us drives like 5 miles and he’s home! (-doesn’t even need to put any tunes on!) On the other hand, people with airline tickets are not at all rare, even including destinations on other continents.

The days that follow are a lot of unpacking: the list of things to bring and then bring home is impressive. If you bring a projector, bringing a spare bulb and gate brush are like making sure you have a spare tire (-better check THAT, too!). Then again, there is clothing, food and drinks. Some of us even arrive home with bikes hanging off the back! Driving to work the next day with them still dangling there is just not cool! (-even less the second, third and fourth days!)

It’s all got to be put right again.

Then there are the films brought from home: I have multiple stashes of films scattered throughout the house: different gauges, different reel sizes, different genres, ‘scope and flat: all hidden from view since at its core, it’s a family’s home and not a film library! For sanity I need to have some kind of system, or I’ll never find what I want to watch!

They all have to end up back where they started: no films laying on coffee tables or stacked up on staircases! (When you find them stacked with the dinner plates, it’s time to become a stamp collector!)

The new films from the weekend are another matter. I often compare them to Halloween candy: something to be enjoyed in the days after the Big Event! I brought home two features from the weekend a few years ago and couldn’t wait to see them both, so every night for about 5 days we watched a reel of each. It was a very patient, very gradual double-feature!

CineSea #28 is officially at an end.

The weekend is now officially over, but the conversations never end. There are texts and emails and phone calls and more than a few in-person get-togethers as opportunities allow. What’s also nice is the next one is never really that far down the road: twice a year was kind of a wise choice for that reason.

We had a great time and hope to have many more.

As I promised a couple of days ago, I’m posting the Group Photo.
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If you could put all of these together like a flip book and let the images flicker past, you’d certainly see some hair graying and thinning. Waistlines would shrink and grow and you’d see a number of little kids mature into young adults, but most of all you’d see a generally consistent group of people gradually gain in numbers and seem pretty pleased to be there.

-not a bad thing at all!

Bonus: What’s behind the Screen!
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Here’s something never seen here before. When the Big Screen and curtains are set up, they do a pretty respectable job hiding whatever lies behind. It’s too easy to imagine it’s a plain concrete wall and there is nothing interesting back there, but today we’re solving that mystery. If you take a look after the screen comes down, there are windows looking out at another hotel across the back-alley, windows like all the other exterior walls in the room. (It’s actually a nice, bright room until WE show up!) Then again there’s that huge, weird plastic plant! There are also all those chairs! Before the screen goes up, a decent fraction of them are unstacked and set up for the Crowd, but there are always several stacks that stay behind the screen all weekend. Between these stacks and fancy folk like us that bring our own chairs, there are plenty available!

(There’s a chair for YOU if you want!)
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CineSea Website

[Chip Gelmini]

Thank you Steve you did a great job documenting the entire event. I really hope to be part of it sometime again. 2019 October was a real blast for me when I came the first time. And I'm one of the travelers coming up from the Tampa area. Quite a bit further than if I was still on Cape Cod.....One has to drive so you can haul your goods home!

[Steve Klare]

Ah!

-so you were in the Class of Pre-Covid, then, Chip?! (What you missed!)

Fall 2019 (CineSea 20) was a pretty pivotal weekend. It was scheduled for the Ocean Holiday, but the family that owned OHMI sold it and the new owners cancelled our reservations so they could gut the place and begin renovations. We did a quick jump across the street and landed at the Shalimar.

It got even more interesting from there.

For all it mattered, the new owners may just as well have let us stay at Ocean Holiday that weekend. When we got to the Shalimar for the first time, OHMI was basically a shell of itself. Their project stalled at the point of demolition and today it looks exactly the same as it did that first Shalimar weekend four and a half years ago.

Of course we all remember what happened with the New Year, 2020. As a result, the State of New Jersey shut down public events beginning that winter. History shows that CineSea 21 was cancelled that April and moved to October 2020. That's not completely true, though. There actually was something which maybe we should call "CineSea 21(a)", which happened during what should have been Saturday Night Show. This was the only time CineSea was held on Zoom and we all hope it stays that way!

I had a "MiniSea" at home later that night: all films that had been on screen on various Saturday Nights over the years.

The Shalimar is by any rational measure a much nicer place for CineSea! The meeting room isn't really a garage like the old place was and it has "luxuries" like (you know...) heat. The floor is carpet and tile instead of concrete with parking curbs and yellow lines. The room is also on the same floor with something like 20 hotel rooms and is at the same end of the building as the elevator for better access to the entire rest of the place. It also has a nice kitchen with a stove and two refrigerators.

Now, personally, I miss the Ocean Holiday, entirely by irrational measures! I had a lot of great times there and kind of grew fond of the place. We'd be kind of foolish to go back to things as they were (if that was even possible...), but there's nothing like the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia!

[Melvin England]

[QUOTE=Steve Klare;

Of course we all remember what happened with the New Year, 2020. As a result, the State of New Jersey shut down public events beginning that winter. History shows that CineSea 21 was cancelled that April and moved to October 2020. That's not completely true, though. There actually was something which maybe we should call "CineSea 21(a)", which happened during what should have been Saturday Night Show. This was the only time CineSea was held on Zoom and we all hope it stays that way! [/QUOTE]



I wish I had known about this at the time, as would, I'm sure, a lot of us here across the pond. It would have been an excellent excuse for us Brits and others worldwide to have joined you for the first time as a complete fraternity enjoying the same event together.

[Steve Klare]

We've talked a few times that if CineSea and another film convention ever fell on the same day, we would have two laptops on Zoom set out on two tables in both conventions: -kind of a Portal through Space and Time without the "Time" part.

If you'd been on Zoom with us that night, you would not be finding us at our best, Melvin! Without benefit of the films and shows, that Zoom call was something less than the group going out to dinner: without the satisfaction of the restaurant meal and restricted to no more than one speaker at a time.

CineSea21(a)

-but it was the best we could do at the moment and a lot better than nothing!

(It was kind of like going to Disney World on Zoom!)

[Chip Gelmini]

Steve now you have me confused. I attended the weekend of October 2019 and had a really good time. That was before Covid......and yes it was at the Shalimar. I remember some one pointed out to me the former location under construction. One of the things I found on free time I really liked. A short walk to the ocean some kind of 1950's diner. Had a very good breakfast there one morning.

[Steve Klare]

Hi Chip,

I'm almost calling you lucky! You went to the very last CineSea before the World's Wheels fell off! Anything, anywhere, anybody got to enjoy that Fall had to be savored for a while: six months later everything was different and rarely better.

We were grateful for the Zoom call, and then we were grateful when we could get together in person again, and then we were grateful when the masks went away.

(It just took a while!)

The boardwalk is nice. Weather (and personnel) allowing, my son and I bring bikes and ride it end to end (and back).

[Chip Gelmini]

Thanks. Now I understand what you meant and I agree 100% the pandemic certainly put enthusiasm to do things on hold and it is amazing to think that even now we are still making progress coming out of it......