I won a pair of tickets to the Giants game on Thursday night in a drawing at work. No sports fan, I handed them over to Michael. In return, I got to go see a screening of Shadow of the Vampire at the Variety Club on Wednesday afternoon. The Variety Club is a small screening room on Market Street, in a dinky theater with a half-hearted lobby that includes a pocorn maker I have never seen used. It’s tucked away to one side on the first floor of one of the older high-rise buildings. There are rarely more than fifteen in the theater, mostly critics and people who work in film. While it has its advantages in that it’s intimate and quiet, I prefer a normal theater with an audience that can be counted on to react normally. Shadow of the Vampire has generated a lot of talk about Willem Dafoe’s performance as Max Schreck and I’d been looking forward to seeing it. Enjoyed most of it, but found it choppy and hard to follow most likely because — as I discovered when I read the synopsis in the press kit — an entire scene had been left out.

When Michael returned from the game on Thursday night he talked about it for half an hour, and I heard about it at work the next day. Both Michael and everyone at work described the same moment. When J.T. Snow hit his home run, the crowd watched in absolute silence as that white pill sailed through the air, only exploding into cheers when it disappeared into the stands. It’s a measure of how good the game was that Michael enjoyed it in spite of the Giants losing.

The Variety Club is in the Hobart Building, just around the corner from the place that would become such a huge part of my life — The Mechanics’ Institute. I may have walked past Mechanics’ that afternoon without so much as a second glance.

SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE is one of my favorite movies. Would like to know why a scene was omitted in a critics’ screening.