Wizard Of Oz (film)

“The transition from sepia to Technicolor is one of the…”

The amber drains out of Kansas, the door opens onto color, and even though you have seen it more times than you can count, on a real screen with a room full of strangers it lands like the first time. Everybody knows that shot. Almost nobody has watched it happen with a full house around them.

Here is the part that gets you: the theater is older than the film. A movie house from 1936 showing a picture from 1939, which means the room and the movie were built by the same decade, and Somewhere Over the Rainbow fills a space that already existed before it was written. The green face, the tornado, the slippers, all of it in a desert town that finally cools off after dark.

Plaza Theatre on South Palm Canyon Drive, an evening show, tickets through Ticketmaster. You know how the song sounds. Go find out what a room does to it.