SENT WEDNESDAY, MARCH 3, 1999
BY ALEX MARSHALL
My wife and two friends and I were lured out of our secure neighborhood of Ghent recently by the promise of seeing “Rushmore,” the latest Bill Murray movie. The closest theater was Greenbrier Cinema 13, so we climbed into a car and made our way down the interstate to the wilds of Chesapeake.
The cinema we chose is one of the big new movie complexes in Hampton Roads. Its innovation is not only stadium seating on some screens, but to package what is basically an entire amusement park around its 13 auditoriums. You enter this big box behind a strip shopping center and find yourself ushered into a gymnasium-size hall. Its two floors hold not only long rows of elaborate video games, but bumper cars, laser tag, miniature golf, skeeball and more — all amid waterfalls flowing over fake stone.
We wandered around this complex like small town rubes visiting the big city. We were dazed by the lights, floored into dumb silence by this enormous new retail life form. We wandered around docilely, letting the escalators and the hordes carry us to and fro. The place was packed with families and adolescents.
And we had fun. We shot people on the video screen. We planted our feet on a virtual-reality skateboard, and banked around a high-thrills coarse on a screen in front of us. We thought about playing laser tag but the line was too long.
The developers’ innovation was to realize that you could capture a movie goer for more than the allotted two hours. Rather than just shake them out of popcorn money, you could get a family to drop additional bucks for bumper cars or pinball. Instead of wandering around the mall after a movie, they would wander around here. (The mall probably isn’t happy about that.)
It was an example of how the suburbs are still on the cutting edge of emerging urban life forms. Love ’em or hate ’em, the suburbs are still the place that new ways of living, working, shopping and recreating are born, driven by the more unstable combination of roads, subdivisions and virgin or semi-virgin land. Driven by dog-eat-dog competition, Malls turn into Big Box Stores into Movie-Palace Entertainment Complexes. You never know what’s going to pop up next.
Greenbrier 13, for example, sat in front of a Pentagon-sized complex holding some sort of Sentara research or office facility. How strange! A big box office, behind a big box movie palace, behind a long strip shopping center, all three adjacent but not connected except for parking lots.
Other aspects of the Movie Palace startled me. The crowd was roughly half African-American or other minorities. It was a far more diverse crowd than the people who sat at the outdoor cafe tables on Colley Avenue. I had written stories years ago about how the newer suburbs, including Greenbrier, were the most integrated neighborhoods in Hampton Roads. But it was still startling to compare this diverse suburban world with the largely white world of Ghent. My urban neighborhood was more diverse in some ways than Greenbrier, but less so in others, including racially.
Secondly, I contemplated what this entertainment complex meant to the urban fortunes of Hampton Roads. Ideally, I would have preferred all this energy and life to be downtown. If Hampton Roads had grown inward rather than outward over the last few decades, that could have happened.
From a long term perspective, Greenbrier 13 troubled me. It was clearly not built to last. All the fancy lights and equipment were housed in what was basically a giant toolshed. In five or 10 years, developers could move on, leaving an empty tin box to be disposed of.
The placement of the complex had that chaotic, random feel so common to the suburbs. Despite its size, the cinema was actually quite difficult to find. It’s hidden behind the strip shopping center, with no sign out front on Greenbrier parkway.
But whatever its drawbacks, for now it was darn interesting.
We liked the movie Rushmore. Afterward, we made our way back home, leaving the bracing winds of suburban change, heading back to the calm, more predictable harbor, of the city.