The first morning that tickets were available online for the Warner Free Lecture Trust’s showing of “Little Women,” Harvard residents pounced on them like kids on a plate of after-school cookies. A hundred tickets went in the first nine minutes. All 343 tickets for the Jan. 10 event at the Maynard Fine Arts Theatre were snapped up within 48 hours.
“That was amazing for us on the board,” said Lisa Foley, chair of the Warner Free Lecture trustees, in a telephone conversation a few days after the movie showing.
A long time in the planning
Foley said trustee Shannon Molloy had first suggested the idea of a special showing for Harvard residents seven or eight months ago, and the board had agreed to it enthusiastically. “It was such a big event for our town,” Foley said of the filming last year, “this seemed like a natural extension of that.”
The trustees soon realized that a pre-release preview—before the film’s official Christmas opening—was simply too expensive and difficult to arrange. So Molloy began working with the Maynard cinema last September to rent its largest venue.
Arranging the event was a new experience for both partners. Foley said the Warner trustees had never done anything similar before. And most group events that the Fine Arts Theatre had hosted were birthday parties for which someone bought a block of tickets to an otherwise public screening.
To reserve the theater, the Warner trustees paid a basic price to guarantee at least 100 people would attend. For every ticket above that number, the trust paid a reduced ticket price of about $7.00—about two-thirds of the cinema’s regular price.
A packed house for the film
Booking the theater with the largest seating capacity proved to be the right choice, because last Friday’s event turned into a jam-packed celebration. The crowd was elbow to elbow inside the cinema. Drivers circled the Maynard public parking lot across the street, searching for scarce spaces.
Inside the theater Helen Batchelder and Richard Gersh, dressed in costumes of the 1800s, greeted people as they arrived. Both Batchelder and Gersh work as interpreters at Fruitlands Museum and also at the Old Manse in Concord, and both have done extensive research on the Alcott family. Batchelder said her portrayal was a blend of the character Jo March and the author Louisa May Alcott—a blurring that also takes place at times in the film. Likewise, Gersh spoke sometimes in the character of Bronson Alcott and sometimes as Mr. March.
Fifth-grader Katie Boutelle (left) learns a little history from Louisa May Alcott (Helen Batchelder) and Amos Bronson Alcott (Richard Gersh) before watching the Warner Free Lecture Trust’s screening of “Little Women” at the Maynard Fine Arts Theatre Friday, Jan. 10. (Photo by Jen Manell)
Knowing the theater would be full, many people arrived as soon as the doors opened in hopes of getting the best seats. That left plenty of time for consuming tubs of popcorn, extra-large sodas, and bags of candy big enough to give anyone a sugar high. (The refreshments were especially welcome to those who had not found time for dinner earlier.)
Through the photographic website SmugMug, Foley had purchased several photos taken by Harvard photographer Lisa Aciukewicz during the filming of “Little Women.” Foley had planned to mount the pictures on a display board in the lobby, she said. But the theater staff offered to project them on the big screen before the movie as a preview for the waiting audience.
When the lights at last went down and the film began to roll, chatter in the theater ceased. For this audience, the star of the show was not Saoirse Ronan as Jo March or Laura Dern as Marmee, but the town of Harvard itself. The audience broke into spontaneous applause at the recognition of each familiar place—Elm Street, the Unitarian Church, Town Hall, the Shaker Museum at Fruitlands (used as Meg’s house), and, of course, the General Store and its neighboring faux storefronts. For the next two hours, audience members scanned the background in scene after scene, looking for the hoop-skirted or bewhiskered figures of townspeople working as extras.
Both before and after the movie showing, many Harvard residents created souvenirs of the event at the selfie station in the theater lobby. There they could show themselves standing in front of the General Store and its “Little Women” neighbors, as if they were indeed back in the 19th century.
For those who still wanted more of the Alcott experience, author Anne Boyd Rioux is scheduled to give a talk titled “Little Women for a New Generation” at Fruitlands, Thursday, Jan. 16, based on her book “Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy.” Like the greeters in their period garb at the movie, this presentation is also a collaboration between the Warner Free Lecture Trust and Fruitlands, with funding from both. Not surprisingly, the Fruitlands website early this week showed the talk as sold out.
