The matinee was coming to a gruesome ending on the screen, but in the seats casual conversation mixed with a salvo of ringtones, several of which resulted in long phone calls. Dozens of patrons wandered in and out of the auditorium. One man stopped in the aisle to stretch, his puffer jacket emitting loud polyester swishes with every move.
These are the rhythms of Hollywood Classic, an independent movie theater in Seoul that has a dedicated clientele.
“It’s a sanctuary for people in their 60s and older — somewhere you can just sit and pass the time,” said Kim Woo-bon, 81, who was sitting in the middle section. “Everybody knows about this place.”
For the cinephiles, it is a place to catch long-forgotten flicks on the big screen. For the nostalgia-seekers, the lobby is a well-furnished museum of life in postwar South Korea, filled with everything from vintage rice cookers to old children’s textbooks. But most just come to hang out.
“A lot of people just come and sleep in their seats because they have nowhere better to be,” said Mr. Kim, a retired foreman. “Then they wake up and watch for a bit and then doze off again.”
The theater’s target audience is rapidly growing. Years of falling fertility rates have turned South Korea into one of the fastest-aging societies in the world. Last year, for the first time in the country’s history, citizens in their 70s outnumbered those in their 20s.
But older residents have scant options for leisure, said Hyeri Shin, a professor of gerontology at Kyung Hee University in Seoul.
“There is growing demand among older South Koreans for different forms of recreation, but their choices are still limited to simple activities like ‘resting’ or ‘going for a walk,’” she said.
Moviegoing, in particular, is a young person’s game: Just 0.8 percent of South Koreans 65 or older go out to watch movies, according to a recent government survey.
The Hollywood Classic, which first opened in 1969, was in its heyday a buzzing venue for the era’s young and hip. Its claim to fame then was its elevator, a rarity in the country at the time.
The emergence of multiplex franchises in the 1990s turned the theater into an offbeat attraction for a few years. In 2009, Kim Eun-ju, a snappy, no-nonsense movie buff who has spent the better part of her career rehabilitating and running historic theaters in Seoul, took over its daily operations.
“It was in some ways an investment into my own future,” said Ms. Kim, 50, who eventually bought the theater. “To prevent my older years from becoming barren and desolate.”
Many of the theater’s current patrons came of age before South Korea became an economic juggernaut, and remember moviegoing as a luxury. The theater, which has two screens with around 300 seats each, mostly plays a mix of studio era classics like “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Rio Bravo” and Korean films, both modern and old.
While the theater sells hundreds of tickets every day, Ms. Kim said it loses money every year. She said that she sold her home to keep it afloat.
One reason is that the price of admission has been frozen at 2,000 won (around $1.40) since the theater’s relaunch in 2009. Those tickets work like an all-day pass: Customers can watch both of the day’s offerings as many times as they want.
But raising the price is out of the question, Ms. Kim said. Affordability is an important part of the theater’s proposition, considering that about four in every 10 South Koreans over the age of 65 live in poverty, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Many do not even have to shell out to get to the theater, as subway rides are free for that age group, offering another way to pass the time.
Kim Young-sook is a volunteer who sits between the entrance to the screens and marks tickets with a red crayon. Most of Hollywood Classic’s patrons, she said, come alone.
“We get a lot of regulars who come several times a week and have their own routines,” she said. “They come and watch the same movie over and over again.”
Researchers have found that older South Koreans experience high degrees of social isolation.
One in four Seoul residents over the age of 64 said they feared dying a “lonely death” — a term for solitary deaths that go undiscovered for long periods of time — according to a recent survey by the city. South Koreans in their 70s and 80s are the most likely demographic to die by suicide.
Mr. Kim, the retired foreman, considers himself one of the fortunate ones:He lives with his wife, and is in regular contact with his children and grandchildren. And he plays table tennis.
Even so, he said, it is easy to feel adrift at his age.
For decades, he barreled toward a purpose, first as a soldier in the army, which he left in the 1980s after reaching the rank of major, then as a foreman-for-hire hopping between construction projects involving South Korean companies in Saudi Arabia, Libya and Pakistan. Such experiences, he said, left him with solitary habits and a sense of romance about life.
These days, he finds that purpose in everyday things, like counting his daily steps on his Samsung Health app, which he flicked open to display the previous week’s high: 12,880. And about two or three times a week, those steps bring him to the Hollywood Classic.
When he finds movies, like the Korean melodrama “Do as You Want,” which ends in a stabbing, are too slow for his taste, he ducks out midway to grab a coffee in the lobby. But others are so riveting that he ends up wanting to watch them over and over, like David Lean’s “The Bridge on the River Kwai.”
“They did a great job making that one,” he said.
On Mondays, the otherwise tranquil theater rumbles to life, thanks to a live concert featuring trot, a genre of melancholy pop music popular with older South Koreans, characterized by sequined costumes and catchy, two-beat melodies.
On a recent afternoon, Cho Min-seon led her three friends into the lobby coffee shop after the day’s show, which had featured a ballad about a sad life beautifully lived, a saxophone performance and covers of 1940s hits. They had liked the performances enough but, seated in one of the back rows, had been sandwiched between several gentlemen with body odor.
“It was unbearable,” said Ms. Cho, 76. Her friends nodded along sympathetically.
Ms. Kim, the owner, has done what she can to mitigate these kinds of conflicts, including replacing the fabric seats with synthetic leather, which is easier to clean. But for cases deemed excessive, or those involving even the slightest whiff of alcohol, entry is refused.
Ultimately, she said, she is running a movie theater, “not a hotel.” That is another reason she insists on an admission fee, however small: It establishes order, a code of conduct.
She herself wants to age with dignity. And to be exiled from these social bonds, like the rules in a movie theater, would be its own form of humiliation.
“I would want to be able to stand tall, pay my fair share and live as a person of culture,” she said. “To have that self-worth is more important than anything.”
The post With Cheap Tickets and Lax Etiquette, a Theater Builds an Older Fan Base appeared first on New York Times.
