Salon‘s Matt Zoller Seitz has asked an array of film writers and filmmakers to share their greatest (most vivid, transporting, surprising, impassioned, absurd) moviegoing memories. Or, as the subhead puts it, “the sights, sounds and feelings that have stayed long after the lights came up.”

I’m one of about 14 or 15 contributors. (My story is about a calamitous Manhattan screening of North by Nothwest that happened about…good God, 30 years ago.) The articles are short, nicely edited, illustrated. It seems extra cool that under each movie title the where and when (i.e., which theatre and in what town/city the special experience happened in, and the year) are provided.

Here’s mine:

“In 1980 or ’81 I attended a weekend showing of Alfred Hitchcock‘s 1959 thriller North by Northwest at the Regency, an Upper West Side rep house owned by Dan Talbot. It was a late-afternoon screening, which to me indicated that a fair number of hard-core Hitchcockians were in attendance.

“Sometime around the end of the 20th Century Limited train scenes and the crop-duster sequence, the projectionist skipped a reel. Thirteen or 14 minutes’ worth bypassed!

“Silence, at first. And then whistles, claps, hoots, ‘Yo!’

“The dumb-shit projectionist (whom I instantly envisioned as being a cousin of Pete, the Akim Tamiroff-resembling Greek diner owner played by John Belushi in an old SNL skit) wasn’t responding.

“All at once three or four of us got up and walked into the lobby and bounded up the stairs to the projection booth. Knock-knock, bang-bang…hey, man! Which the projectionist completely ignored. He was scared, we later realized, and had called the manager. But our blood was up. Skipping an entire reel of North by Northwest was an outrage…hey! Bang-bang, boom-boom, ‘Canary bird, will ya get outta the bathroom?’

“Finally the manager responded, but like a riot policeman. He ran up to the projection booth door and turned toward us, panicked expression, back proverbially arched. ‘Get back! Get back!’ His eyes and tone of voice were exactly like those of Marcel Bozzuffi, the French assassin in The French Connection who tried to shoot Gene Hackman and was later cornered on a moving subway train by MTA cops.

“Why did the Regency projectionist (aka ‘Pete’) and the manager go into Defcon 1 mode? Why didn’t they simply smile and raise their hands and say, ‘Okay, we get it, guys…we made a mistake…we’ll fix it right away’? That would have shut us up immediately. Instead were treated as raucous invaders rather than justifiably motivated film buffs, and so we the people got angrier than we should have.

“There’s a lesson in civic relations here, but particularly one for theater owners. That lesson is ‘film buffs are always right.’ If they say the sound is muffled or weak, it probably is. Don’t debate it — fix it!

“The next day I got a call from someone in Talbot’s office. I was the bad guy, in their view. I had caused the problem.

“Well…but of course!”

Here’s another good one, about a 1996 viewing of Striptease at a Mahattan Cineplex Odeon, written by Daniel McKleinfeld:

“The most memorable movie-theater moments usually happen during bad movies, not good ones. There’s something about watching a truly wretched flick that bonds the audience together like a platoon slogging through an infested jungle. Back in the ’90s, the best place to do such slogging was the Cineplex Odeon, the last second-run house in NYC, where movies got one last chance to hobble across the stage before collapsing into the video racks. And it was there that I had the most powerful moment of personal validation ever to take place in a movie theater.

“Tickets to the Cineplex Odeon were $2, a price that encouraged teens on cheap dates, and marginally employed artists. So competition was fierce to be the most entertaining thing in the room, not excluding that thing on-screen. But for a while, the Demi Moore vehicle Striptease had us all struck dumb — the crazy shifts in tone, the tacky costumes, Ving Rhames’ Samuel-Jackson-on-codeine act — there was just nothing to say.

“But then, about a third of the way through, the movie steps out of the strip club. We have a long scene laying out the details of our heroine’s custody battle. Moore, refusing to let a little girl see her mom crumble, sends her daughter to play on the beach. The camera pushes slooooowly toward Moore’s radiant face, a single tear welling up in her eye. We cut to the little girl, gaily skipping across the beach as the sun sets. We push in toward Moore’s welling tear ducts. Closer…closer…the tear begins to fall.

“And I yell: ‘MORE STRIPPING!’

“At that very instant, smash-cut to rhinestone-covered ta-tas, flouncing across the stage at the Eager Beaver.

“I at once respond: ‘THANK YOU!’ And the crowd goes wild.

“I may never be that cool again.”

A friend has read an early draft of Terrence Malick‘s Tree of Life script “and here’s what I can tell you, other than that it’s wonderful,” he writes. “Of course, there is a very good chance that the finished film will look nothing like this, given Malick’s track record. But it really does appear to have borrowed not just a page, but several whole chapters from 2001: A Space Odyssey‘s book.

“The bulk of the script takes place in the 50s, as has been reported. The protagonist is Jack, the oldest of three brothers in a Texas family with more than a passing resemblance to the Malick family itself, as he learns about the ways of the world. The film starts off with the death of one of the brothers, the family in despair, then settles on the grown Jack (Sean Penn), depressed, in the modern world.

“Then, it basically goes somewhat Koyaanisqatsi on us, showing the despair of our world, of urbanity, etc. The idea being that Jack’s despair is mirrored all around him, in man’s alienation from the infinite. Or as the script puts if, ‘The supreme misery…to find oneself abandoned to the busy dance of things which pass away.’

“All that, however, is basically prologue. As Jack searches for some kind of reconnection to the world, the film flashes back to the beginning of time. We see the creation of galaxies: ‘The growth of the cosmos, the great epic of evolution, from the Big Bang through the long ages of geological time, down to the present day,” it reads. The language here is absolutely beautiful — half philosophy, half science, all poetry — and we’ll see how it works in the film, how much of it actually winds up in there, how much time it takes.

“But the dinosaurs are a very small part of it in the script, like half a page. We see them appear, then we see them wiped out, then we see the mammals begin to emerge.

“And then, we see Jack’s childhood, his first discovery of the world, his connection to his parents, the arrival of his brothers, and their coming of age. The stuff with the family is wonderful, but it’s not very plot driven, small little moments built on small little moments. The kind of thing only Malick can pull off. This is the bulk of the script itself, 100 pages or so out of 126.

“The third part of the film flashes forward, and we see the death of the universe. This is again in the mode of those early scenes that showed us the creation of the galaxy and of human life. We see the Earth grow hotter and then die, basically. We see the galaxy die, but then we see new ones come about, and we see the visual manifestation of the Multiverse theory.

“Again, so much of this is conveyed through such powerful language that it’s hard not to come away from the script powerfully moved. The idea is not that the worries and cares of humans are smaller than a tiny speck of sand, but that we’re part of some vast process, that ‘the same power which burns in the stars and nebulae burns equally in us.”

“To what extent it will be realized on screen, and how much time it will probably take, remains to be seen.”

96% of Kirk Douglas‘s activities in Paths of Glory involve standing around and talking. Every now and then he strolls or sits or walks up stairs, but mostly he stands and talks. Strategy, protocol, orders, arguments for the accused. He spends 4% of the film leading the charge against the German “Ant Hill”and getting dirt and dust on his face. I nonetheless accept Criterion’s decision to exploit this 4% to sell their upcoming DVD/Bluray of Stanley Kubrick‘s 1957 film.

“I apologize for not being entirely honest with you. I apologize for not revealing my true feelings. I apologize, sir, for not telling you sooner that you’re a degenerate, sadistic old man. And you can go to hell before I apologize to you now or ever again!”

Videogum‘s Gabe is my kinda guy. A serious Comic-Con hater who knows how to explain why any reasonable person might feel the same way. Here‘s half of his 7.22 posting called “Comic-Con is Humanly Impossible.”

“It’s difficult to fully capture the scale of this shit show. And I don’t mean to be a wet blanket, or to harp on a broken record about a dead horse, but Comic-Con is a shit show.

“We showed up this morning at what we considered to be a perfectly reasonable time, and it turned out that it was not reasonable at all. A reasonable time to wait in line for six hours to watch ten minutes of a movie that is going to come out in eight months is 6 am. You can see Harry Knowles wheel himself into Hall H against the backdrop of the rising sun. Of course, Knowles has the last laugh, because he was sitting front and center for the preview of Megamind. He probably no longer even sees this Matrix: just a bright string of green numbers: ‘There is no line.’

“There is no wifi service at Comic-Con, and very spotty cell phone service. Bear in mind for whom this conference is intended. In 2010, having no wifi and spotty cell phone service already seems like the plot to Before Night Falls, but at a convention for nerds and blogs?

“The truth is that you are an adult, and you would love to see sneak previews of things if it didn’t require stretching the limits of human patience and discomfort. But an hour later the man will come out and reveal to you, which in your heart you knew all along, that not a single person left the hall after the Megamind panel, and they are all staying for the Tron panel, and so now the line you are in is officially the line for the Salt panel, which begins in another two hours. At which point you realize that there are three more days of this shit.

“What I’m trying to get at is that it seems fully possible for one to spend one’s life in an infinite Comic-Con line with no determinable outcome. You will be like Seido in Inception, getting noodles in your old-man beard, wondering whether shooting yourself in the head would fix anything.

“What [Comic-Con] is about is shoving endless promotional materials for uninspired and/or unnecessary nonsense into increasingly large branded gift bags. If you would like to know how it feels to be at Comic-Con it feels like you are a door, and people won’t stop shoving fliers under you. A door saddled with oversized garbage bags.”

This kind of thing plus numerous ventings of hostility toward celebrity paparazzi makes Sean Penn a better-than-okay guy in my book.

At a recent Mexican press conference for The Last Airbender, director M. Night Shyamalan recently defended himself against charges from a questioner that “he’s lost it and is a sell-out,” according to this Popeater account.

A wild-card vision came to me late last night, just before nodding off. The only way Terrence Malick can save The Tree of Life from embarassment and possible ruin is to deep-six the dinosaur sequence. How do I know that embarassment and possible ruin are likely or even possible scenarios for this much-dithered-over film, which may or may not be released in 2010? I don’t. I haven’t the first clue about how Malick’s dinos integrate with the whole. Nada, nothing. It may turn out that The Tree of Life will be seen as a work of genius because of the dinosaur sequence.

But I’ve always suspected on some deep, murky, primordial level that mixing a time-flipping personal drama (i.e., Sean Penn‘s screwed-up older guy looking back at his dysfunctional family travails with Brad Pitt as his dad) with some kind of dinosaur sequence was a nutball idea that just couldn’t work. And I’m just thinking that if — if, I say — Malick is having dinosaur difficulties that perhaps he needs to man up and cut bait and just drop the whole thing and make The Tree of Life into a straight personal/psychological weight-of-the-world drama and let it go at that.

In other words Malick may need to follow in the footsteps of James L. Brooks when he decided that I’ll Do Anything , which he filmed as a musical, didn’t work in that mode and that he needed to remove all the songs. What a painful decision that must have been, and what a shame that the musical version never saw the light of day.

I got started on this jag when I completely cracked up after reading the following section from Scott Feinberg‘s assessment of The Tree Of Life: “The story, from what little we know about it, is set in the 1950s Midwest and focuses on a character during both his happy childhood and his troubled adulthood; the sad events and experiences that brought about the change; and his quest to regain meaning in his life. Somehow or other, dinosaurs come into play, according to a visual effects artist who worked on the film and apparently didn’t get the gag-order memo from Malick.”

“Somehow or other”….exactly!

Is the red rage effect — Danny Trejo‘s character literally becoming Hellboy red — a trailer-only effect or part of the film? It’s mildly cool, I’ll grant that, but also a way for director Robert Rodriguez to say “you get what we’re doing, right? We’re fucking around and don’t care all that much so why not throw in a comic-book-styled visual signature thing?”

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is “not a perfect movie — the ending is rushed, and the serialized graphic novel doesn’t lend itself well to a three-act structure,” Cinemablend‘s Katey Rich reports from Comic-Con. “[And] it probably won’t fly with older critics” — cranky-heads burdened with cinematic standards, she means — “[because] it’s too shallow, too silly, too obsessed with pop culture references to mean anything on its own. But I suspect anyone young enough to grow up with video games will feel an instant connection.

“Lucky for [director] Edgar Wright and Universal, that young audience makes up most moviegoers. If the Con audience tells their friends, and their friends tell theirs, Scott Pilgrim — flaws and all — might stand a chance at becoming a generational milestone. People outside of the insular world of Comic-Con just need to be willing to take the risk.”

Indeed — the mantra and meme of all Comic-Cons now and forever is “insular.” That insularity is welcome to itself, of course, and accessible to all comers, but what kind of thumbs-up review (which this is) basically says “see this movie as long as you’re willing to man up and take a risk, which you won’t actually regard as a risk if you’re young enough and wear shorts and dorky-looking sneakers with no socks and have had your narrative vistas defined by video games and graphic novels”?

“What the world needs now is insularity…that’s one thing that’s good for you and for me.” — Jackie DeShannon, “What The World Needs Now Is Insularity,” lyrics by Hal David, music by Burt Bacharach.

Does anyone care about anything going on at Comic-Con? Like, at all? Scott Pilgrim vs. The Shallowness? Okay, a new Tron Legacy trailer with a de-aged Jeff Bridges — fine. And a forthcoming Brad Pitt zombie movie called World War Z…great. Seven minutes of Machete previewed by Robert Rodriguez. It’s all toilet water. Just a Big Geek trailer-watch, walkaround, drink-in and schmoozathon.

I wish I could think of something else that will help to disparage and/or de-value Comic-Con, which I regard as Command Central for the end-of-the-world deconstruction, infantilization and general mongrelization of movies, including the absolute total ruination of action scenes. In my dreams I am part of an Apocalypse Now helicopter attack on Comic-Con, coming in from the sea to the strains of Richard Wagner and strafing the geeks. Eat death, you whiskered fat-asses with your man shorts and ugly-ass corporate T-shirts!

There was a “bad,” muddy-looking trailer for Stone that I posted briefly and then took down. Now the good one is up. I have to be upfront and say I really don’t like Norton’s corn rows. But there’s something about Milla Jovovich this time out, so maybe. DeNiro will be okay, but he’s diluted his brand to such a degree that his prescence no longer moves me.

Salt numbers have bumped up sharply over the last couple of days. Unaided awareness, particularly, has risen 10 points to 19 — a very good number. Aided awareness is 84, definite interest 40, first choice 13 (presumably rising to 17 or 18 by tomorrow or Friday). Older and younger females are almost as gung-ho as 25-plus males. Younger Eloi males appear to be the weak link.

Either way the basic indicators suggest that moviegoers are too scattered and ADD to focus on films until the final week, and that’s why Salt is finally kicking in now.

Distracted iPhone-Obsessed Lazy Brain: “Whadaya wanna see Friday, Marty?” Scattered Lame-o: “I dunno. What do you wanna see, Beano?” Distracted iPhone-Obsessed Lazy Brain: “I dunno. Seen Inception, gotta see Salt, I guess. Nothing else around. Angie runnin’ around barefoot, little pedicured piggy feet.” Scattered Lame-o: “Annie comin’?” Distracted iPhone-Obsessed Lazy Brain: “Aahh, she’s going with her girlfriends on Saturday. I’m stag tonight.” Scattered Lame-o: “This isn’t some kinda spy relationship chick flick thing, is it?” Distracted iPhone-Obsessed Lazy-Brain: “I dunno. Don’t think so.” (Throws down half a can of Diet Coke, belches.)