Navied Mahdavian
speaker
218 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Jun 2025
Navied Mahdavian’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Some people came on dates, some people came alone, everybody had popcorn. And as I stood, I thought about how some people even took selfies of themselves with the tickets underneath the glow of the marquee, which was now on illuminating Main Street. And so the movie's starting, and I lean into the curtains, because even if I can't watch it, I at least want to listen to it and enjoy it.
And I hear the words from the movie, "'There's a gangbang social tonight.'" And so I'm grasping the curtains, and I should say at this point, it's an important part of the story, that I actually didn't have a chance to watch the movie before showing it.
So by the time Robert Pattinson was masturbating a quarter of the way through the film, I was laying horizontally on the ground, the carpeting pressed against my cheek, and I could actually hear audible groans coming from the theater at this point, but that just may have been the sound of Robert Pattinson achieving completion.
So after the movie, needless to say, I raced into the lobby and I tried as much as I could not to make eye contact with anyone as they shuffled out of the theater, their eyes wide, their cowboy hats pressed tightly against their chest. And I really believed if I just don't move, if I stand perfectly still, maybe nobody will be able to see me.
Kind of like that scene with the T-Rex in Jurassic Park. Not a super auspicious start. A question we got a lot after that was, are you going to show new movies? These were new movies, just indie movies that nobody had heard of. We couldn't show big-budget films because we couldn't afford to, but that's not why we had opened the theater in the first place. That's not what we wanted to do.
We really believed if we show good movies, we can earn the community's trust, our community's trust, even if we were showing subtitled documentaries about whale hunting in the Faroe Islands. If you build it, they will come, became our mantra. But no one came. Night after night, I'd flip the switch on in the theater and it would reveal maybe one, maybe two people in the auditorium.
And so, we relented. We showed John Wayne. And everybody came, they really loved John Wayne, and I remember getting swept up in the excitement, and I decided that this time I'll sit in the theater with everyone.
We showed the movie The Quiet Man, which if you haven't seen, it's a classic story, boy moves back to Ireland, boy meets girl, boy meets girl's brother, boy fights girl's brother, and in the end everyone is happy and friends for life. It's a movie I've seen many times, and I've enjoyed it every time I've seen it.
But watching it that night, in that town, in that theater, the screen framed by the silhouettes of cowboy hats, watching John Wayne physically drag and shove Maureen O'Hara the five miles back from the train station, it felt different. And I'm a fan of John Ford, and I actually love John Wayne, and it is just a movie.
But it has this idealized past that masks misogyny, deeply conservative values, and it felt just like the town itself. And they came, and they laughed, and they saw themselves reflected back. But I didn't. Even after showing John Wayne in Star Wars and other fan favorites, things didn't really improve for the theater.
And a lot of my conversations with Emily at the time turned to the question of, should we even be doing something that nobody wants? And it didn't help that the theater was impossible in the winter to keep warm. And I joke that we can maybe buy our one customer one big coat.
And so most nights I spent by myself in the theater drawing cartoons bundled up in my big coat, the sound from the movie playing to an empty auditorium. And on one of these lonely nights, this older cowboy walks in, someone we had affectionately nicknamed Racist Dave.
Racist Dave walks in and he asks for his nightly popcorn, and as I'm buttering his popcorn, he sits down and he told me a little bit about the history of the place that I didn't know. For example, underneath the movie theater had once been a gambling hall, and across the street above the bar had been a brothel until like the 1960s. Again, cowboy country.
And as I hand Racist Dave back his popcorn, he says almost to himself, "'Lots of history in this place.'" And that word stayed with me, history. It was easy to feel nostalgic in the theater, right? The art deco marquee outside, it evoked simpler times. And I wondered, maybe that's what brought Emily and me there in the first place, this sense of nostalgia, this desire for something simpler.
And it also occurred to me that maybe racist Dave and I had more in common than I had previously thought, apart from the casual racism. But I now know that nothing is ever that simple. In 2019, our daughter Eliko was born, and Emily and I made the tough decision to leave our small town and move back to the big city.
As much as we had tried to become members of the community, sometimes something just isn't a fit, like a vegetarian joining a local hunting club, which I also have a funny story about. On our last trips into town, Emily continued to linger outside of the theater, but the theater felt different. It felt smaller now.
And for a while, the community actually, they kept the marquee on, but the smell of popcorn was gone. After we closed the theater for good, we learned that back in the old days, when film was still shown on print, reels were smuggled in from this wealthy town over the mountain, and that allowed our town to watch movies without licensing them, so for free.
In its entire history, the theater had never been viable, which was fitting and also kind of romantic. And looking back, I think that maybe that's what it takes to be an artist, to be a dreamer and a risk taker and a little naive. But you have to try something to see if it works. And if it doesn't, well, you get out of Dodge and you try again. Thank you.
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