Somerville Theatre Crystal Ballroom Movie Trivia nights are a raucous two hours of competitive film fan fun for self-anointed cinephiles and trivia tricksters looking to flaunt deep stores of knowledge to attain factoid alpha status.
The nights, on the third Tuesday of the month, are hosted by Billy Thegenus, program and outreach coordinator at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline and Ian Brownell, co-owner of CSB Theaters (with longtime theater manager Ian Judge), which runs the Somerville Theatre.
The events have drawn 150-plus people – or 20-ish teams of five to six – to the Crystal Ballroom space. You can show up with your own, ready-to-roll crew or go freelance and hop on with a duo or trio needing a trivia turbo boost.
The format and range of questions asked is broad. The inaugural May gathering had an opening “Mission: Impossible” round, as “Final Reckoning” was opening the next week.
Brownell shared with me those eight questions, of which I got six right. Some were pretty easy: “Name the director of the first ‘Mission: Impossible.’” Others went deep and required more brain sifting: “M:I movies are action packed, but feature far less gunplay than a typical Hollywood blockbuster. Which M:I movie doesn’t feature a single shootout or gunfight?”
As in good repertory programming – something the Somerville Theatre folks know a little about – there are smartly picked themes and deft links. For that May throwdown, the clip round (10- to 20-second snippets shown on the Ballroom screen) was about “opening nights,” scenes portraying film and theater openings that teams were asked to identify. Among the snippets were “Citizen Kane” (surprisingly, the toughest of all to get), “The Tall Guy” and “That’s Entertainment.” Another round was to name the sophomore feature of now-famous directors from their obscure debut features. Titles included “Hard Eight,” “The Duellists,” “Eggshells” and “It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books.” Have fun googling, but the teams nailed it.
The evening also includes guest trivia masters, which Brownell said will be folks from the local cinema scene – those who run area festivals (hello IFFB!), university archives (the Harvard Film Archive) and independent art houses (The Brattle, The Coolidge) as well as filmmakers, journalists and authors. First up was the staff of The Brattle (creative director Ned Hinkle, executive director Ivy Moylan and staff) working with trivia pulled from their Reunion Weekend programming of films from 25, 50 and 75 years earlier. For the July go-round, which I participated in, Kristofer Jansen, co-curator of the ScreenBoston repertory site with Brownell, did a “Repertory Round-Up” pulling clips of films that played recently at The Brattle, Coolidge and Somerville theaters.
If folks were looking to pregame movie trivia night, knowing what’s playing at area independent theaters is a good way to go, said Brownell, who calls Boston one of the three greatest repertory cities in the country.
The funnest round of the night is what Brownell calls “Character Actor Theatre,” in which a solid B-lister gets their due in clips in which they exchange barbs with another actor in a scene. But that other actor is obscured with a jokey face-over and dubbed voice by Brownell, who has fun doing the animation and voice impressions. (It’s pretty impressive.) Your job is to name the film; you get a bonus if you name the obscured actor. Past character actors featured were Dick Miller, whose co-stars had Kermit the Frog’s face pasted over their own, and David Keith. For July’s trivia it was an ode to recently passed tough-guy actor Michael Madsen, with it seeming as though his co-stars in “Reservoir Dogs,” “Free Willy” and “Species” were none other than Alfred Hitchcock. (You can see the reel here.) Most bizarre was Hitch sporting big ’80s hair as Dolly Parton in “Straight Talk.”
The use of The Crystal Ballroom for movie trivia feels apt, as the space – after starting as a ballroom in 1914 – had long been two movies theaters. A 2020-2021 renovation decommissioned and dismantled them to return the space to a gathering spot and music venue with era appropriate decor. The ballroom has a crowd capacity of 525 standing and around 200 for seated affairs.
The Crystal Ballroom’s bar is open for trivia and can only make your movie mania madness all the more merry – and perhaps fierce. Food is available too: The popcorn, hot dogs and candy you can get in the lobby are there for the gobbling, and you can also get pizza.
Brownell hopes that as the event grows there will be earlier openings so folks can mingle. The format will likely change some. Brownell said he is exploring partnering with local restaurants to provide more culinary options at the event.
It’s a lot of labor and love that Brownell, Thegenus and scorekeeper and video screen DJ Harrison Simon pour into a given trivia night. The event is free with the bar till making it all possible.
“It’s all about it being appreciated by the audience we made it for,” Brownell said. “We’re about community building and local cinema. “It’s not so much about ‘our’ theater, but all of our great independent cinemas, festivals and film organizations in the Boston area.”
Asking the between-round bonus questions were Brownell’s CSP partner and theater manager, Judge, and Independent Film Festival Boston executive director Brian Tamm.
In July, I teamed up with a fellow area critic and cinema fanatic friend I met on the set of an independent film project some 18 years ago (the film never saw the light of day). Branding ourselves team “Triv or Let Die,” we faced off against better and wittier team names such as “Courtney Love Island,” “Norma Desmond’s Pool Boys” and the “Jack Rabbit Slims” and did pretty well, finishing near the top. One team of crackerjacks ran away with the evening’s crown early.
Winners at the end of a well-done mix of low-hanging fruit, brain teaser twists and the esoteric get their pick from an assortment of classics on Blu-ray and DVD and, more importantly, get bragging rights. (Bonus round rewards are movie and event passes.)
As I walked out into the stuffy summer night, the person in front of me shout-talking to the person next to them, said, “I’m a film nerd, and that was tough.” Read up, queue up, but more importantly, come back for the film fandom fun.
Crystal Ballroom Movie Trivia at 7 p.m. Tuesday (and the third Tuesday of every month) at the Crystal Ballroom, 55 Davis Square, Somerville. Free.
Cambridge writer Tom Meek’s reviews, essays, short stories and articles have appeared in WBUR’s The ARTery, The Boston Phoenix, The Boston Globe, The Rumpus, The Charleston City Paper and SLAB literary journal. Tom is also a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics and rides his bike everywhere.
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