“I Assure You, We’re Open”: A Declaration of Principles

For a long time, “CINEMAS” was visible from the Garden State Parkway North, just at the point where the road meets the air.

The Driscoll Bridge spans the Raritan River near its mouth, in Raritan Bay. From the Jersey side, it connects Sayreville with Woodbridge Township and serves as one of a few bridges you have to cross to get into New York. If you were, like me, the partial progeny of Staten Islanders, maybe you spent many a weekend Island-bound to visit grandparents, nose snotting the backseat window in your desire to see the peculiar “AMBOY CINEMAS” marquee, familiar and foreign, increasingly dilapidated, increasingly alluring. The sign was affixed to a long and narrow white building positioned on the spit of land below the Driscoll. With kid-eyes (whose smudgy, speculative blinders still occasionally kick in even at age 33), the building looked impossible to access, marooned on an island whose sole inhabitant was, apparently, a movie theater.

The Amboy Cinemas opened on December 7th, 1979 in a historical moment when smaller theaters gave way to multiplexes. After the shock of Jaws (1975) upped the scale of film culture—and the ceiling for potential profits—the business of exhibition found itself in a race to catch up to maximalist opportunities. The Amboy Cinemas was erected on Sayreville ground that previously hosted a drive-in, and positioned as it was between New Jersey and New York, drew audiences from both states. My mother, one of the aforementioned Staten Islanders, saw E.T. the Extra Terrestrial (1982) at the theater at least three times, per her memory. The theater saw expansion to 8 screens in 1981, followed by 10 in 1982, and finally 14 in 1985. By 2005, the building would be closed due to floor sinkage, the bottom literally dropping out. You could catch that ghost cinema then only as a view from the bridge, shuttered and slowly sinking. In August of 2023, the building was unceremoniously demolished. Spirits get plastered over as the dead language of “development sites” runs rampant.

The loss of a theater represents the loss of possibilities. This is a quantifiable loss. It means there are fewer spaces for exhibition, fewer showtimes to share. It means there is less chance of encountering an idea or a person in the cool, dark space of transformation. The seventies bloom that produced Amboy and other such mass-accessible multi-screen theaters curdled into multiplex monopoly; to survey showtimes in New Jersey 2024 is to usually see the same two corporate chains showing the same five to eight (corporate) film options. Garden State Lantern is principally a space to do some of what Screen Slate does for NYC, what Philm Club does for Philly, and Vice City Cinema does for South Florida: provide an alternative set of possibilities for people looking to see a movie on a given day in New Jersey. There are spaces still working to exhibit film as an art. There are more that we don’t know about, I suspect, and more still if we include the ones that don’t exist yet. 

Another hope for this space is that it generates criticism to, around, and about New Jersey as a cinematic zone. In the introduction to his 2008 book, Hollywood on the Hudson, Richard Koszarski writes:

 “Indeed, outside of Los Angeles, there has been only one spot in the United States where continuous production activity (from the late nineteenth century), a fertile cultural and economic climate, a professional workforce, and an adequate technological infrastructure have combined to create both an indigenous local film style and a viable local film industry. This is the area around New York (in fact, within commuting distance of Times Square), which stretches from the Edison laboratory and Fort Lee studios in Northern New Jersey to the Thanhouser and D.W. Griffith studios in Westchester, and out beyond the Paramount Astoria studio and Brooklyn Vitaphone stages to the scattered rental facilities in eastern Queens and Long Island.” 

Koszarki’s book—along with its equally essential 2021 followup, “Keep ‘Em in the East”—details these terrains and traditions in exacting detail. Our hope is to speak with the same clarity of scholarship and heat of memory while including in our subject of inquiry the films and filmmakers both left behind by previous critical discourses or perhaps not yet afforded such scrutiny. There are people making and showing movies every day. And with hearty thanks and deference to the various institutions and numerous publications thinking about New York City, we will strive to focus our study on this side of the bridge.

Because to think about film’s history in New Jersey means squaring the medium’s status as that most modern art practice with Edison’s capitalist idealism. It necessitates seeing the camera’s equal formal potential as an author of subjugation or liberation, poles often at work in the same frame of Griffith’s work, much of it shot in New Jersey. The un-easy tendency in film’s writing of its history is reflected in the cinematic consciousnesses of Joe Dante and Ernest K. Dickerson, Frank Tashlin and Storm de Hirsch, all New Jersey-based filmmakers at one point, in some way. Kevin Smith and Frank Henenlotter see and saw in Jersey’s depressed and plastic sub- /urban spaces the possibility for formal vibration, usually via the bad tasting of society itself. This salted and swamped zone made Friday the 13th (1980) and Ponyboi (2019) and Jersey Drive (1995), all bone rips, death trap, and suicide rap. You’ve got to get out while you’re young: Pete and Pete was shot here, and I Saw the TV Glow (2024), too. Barbra on the train in “Don’t Rain on My Parade” was shot here. Possibilities, movement, tramps.

Outlets for the production of critical writing continue to shutter. “Start a blog” is as good a piece of advice as I’ve heard. The Garden State Lantern hopes to be such a bloggy zone. It will speculate and sag. And stretch. We’ll publish pieces about films and programs in the orbit of New Jersey, cultural objects made or exhibited here, or made by people connected to New Jersey. Or we’ll publish writing from New Jersey-based writers about non-New Jersey things. Inevitably we will cheat. This document cites Charles Foster Kane in its title, a surefire way to come up short of ideals. Constraints are good for determining arguments and identifying concepts. But spillage is useful for access, that thing we need most as people seeking to read and write thoughtfully about the moving image. The hope is to write about films and artists that exist outside of totalizing PR narratives and social media discourse. The hope will be to work with new, old, and in-between critics towards a film criticism that is malleable, rigorous, and playful. 

Koszarski goes on to frame the Hudson’s films:

“As a matter of convenience, I will usually refer to all of them as ‘New York’ films, even though many were outside the city and a significant number were located in New Jersey.” I balked when I first read this, if only because I took Richard’s film classes in an NJ university just off the bank of that fabled Raritan, because he currently works as Museum Curator at the Barrymore Film Center in Fort Lee. But the reasoning is essential: “The various state and local film commissions currently promoting production in New York and New Jersey may concentrate on the different advantages offered by each locality, but from our perspective (and that of the various local union locals) this is one large economic and cultural community, drawing much of its potential strength from this very diversity.”

This framing is a question of ecology, a matter of observing patterns and drawing lines between them like sovereign entities in a science textbook. Art and the labor that goes into its making are organisms impacted by terroir as much as grapes are. And when we write histories or criticisms of art, we are, consciously or otherwise, talking about the place-based factors that impact its making and who gets access to it. In its own small way, I hope Garden State Lantern makes living in New Jersey easier for people who care seriously about talking about art, even as the state of things locally, nationally, and beyond feels openly antagonistic to such care. Here are just a few more possibilities to encounter an image or sentence—and the people behind them—that shake loose a thought or a desire.“CINEMAS”, that sign from the bridge, is one of improbable plurality. It remains observable, even among the ruins.