Write It on the Little Slip and Hold It Up

The kid ahead of me in line is explaining his badge tier to a woman who did not ask, and he's holding the lanyard the way people hold a boarding pass for a flight they paid too much for. "It's not the top one," he says, "but it's the one that matters." Behind me someone is on speakerphone with a babysitter. A food truck idles on the far side of the lot like a getaway car.

It's Thursday, September 17, on South Lamar, and Fantastic Fest is back. It opens today and runs through the 24th, with dozens of world premieres on the schedule. A week of horror, kung fu, and things from countries whose films usually reach me three years late on a streaming service that buries them under a reality show about yachts.

I love this festival. I need that on the record before I start complaining about everything around it, because I am about to complain about everything around it.

The Parking Lot Is the Prologue

The South Lamar Alamo sits in a corridor that has been condo-fied so thoroughly the street looks like a 3D rendering someone forgot to finish texturing. Every building has the same reclaimed-wood fascia and a ground-floor tenant selling something cold-pressed. Getting into the lot is a negotiation. Getting out is a sequel nobody greenlit.

I circled twice, watched a Range Rover take a spot with the confidence of a man who has never been towed, and finally parked behind a building whose leasing banner promised "Cinematic Living." I stood there a minute trying to work out what that means. Popcorn ceilings? A third act where the rent goes up?

Then I walked over and joined the line, which is where my brain left without me.

Colorado Street, Roughly the Late Nineties

The original Alamo was downtown on Colorado Street, back when "downtown" meant you could still find a parking spot if you were patient and a little unethical. I remember it the way you remember a friend's first apartment. I don't remember the floor plan. I remember the smell.

It smelled like fryer oil, spilled beer, and the inside of an air conditioner that had seen things. The floor had a grip to it. You didn't walk to your seat so much as negotiate with the concrete one step at a time. Your sneakers made a little kiss sound on the way out.

The tables were narrow rails bolted in front of the seats, and you wrote your order on a slip of paper and stuck it up so a server could swoop in low, like a stagehand, and grab it without blocking the screen. I always thought that was the most civilized idea anyone in Texas ever had. A whole room full of people agreeing to shut up and pass notes like we were in detention for loving movies too much.

My memory insists the chairs were mismatched. My memory also insists I was charming in 1998, so take it with a grain of salt.

What I can tell you with confidence is how it felt to walk out onto Colorado after a midnight show. The street was nearly empty. The heat had backed off to merely rude. A bat or two went by overhead, and you could hear a bar band two blocks over losing a fight with a cover of "Statesboro Blues." You'd stand on the sidewalk with three people you'd just met, arguing about whether the ending was stupid or brilliant, and nobody checked a phone, because the phones of that era could only tell you that you had one voicemail and it was your mother.

The rent on that stretch of downtown, back then, was apparently something a person who wanted to show kung fu movies and sell pitchers could manage. That's the real artifact. Not the chairs. The math.

Back in Line

"Are you a badge or a ticket?" a volunteer asks me. She's cheerful and wearing a headset, and she is the only person here doing an honest day's work.

"Ticket," I say, and I feel the class system settle on my shoulders like a damp towel.

To be clear, I don't blame the volunteers, the programmers, or the kid with the lanyard. The kid with the lanyard is twenty-four and has saved up for this, and in thirty years he'll be standing in some line telling a stranger about the time he saw a Finnish werewolf movie before anyone else on Earth. Good for him. I hope the werewolf's great.

What gets me is the scaffolding around the joy. The theater chain that started with rails bolted to a downtown floor is now owned by a movie studio, and Sony bought it in 2024. That's no scandal. It's just what happens in a town where every scrappy thing gets either bought or demolished, and at least getting bought means you still have a roof. But you can feel the new weight on the place. There's a sense that somewhere in a conference room in another time zone, a slide titled Experiential Loyalty Drivers has my milkshake on it.

What the Old Place Taught Me

The downtown Alamo didn't feel curated. It felt inflicted, in the best way. Somebody in that building wanted you to see a strange thing, and they'd sort out the business model later, or never. You'd show up for a double feature you'd never heard of because the flyer had a drawing of a skeleton on a motorcycle, and you'd leave changed, or at least sticky.

Fantastic Fest still has that energy in its bones, and that's why I keep coming. When the lights go down on South Lamar and a room full of strangers gasps at the same moment, the building disappears. The leasing banner disappears. The Range Rover disappears, along with, with any luck, its towing exemption. For ninety minutes it's Colorado Street again: dark, loud with silence, everybody facing the same direction.

Then the lights come up and you're in a mixed-use development.

The Slip

They still do the paper ordering. I wrote "queso, iced tea, no ice — sorry" on mine, because I'm old and the ice hurts my teeth, and I stuck it up and watched the server glide in low exactly like they used to, quiet as a cat burglar. It was the purest moment of my week. A tradition that survived the move, the decades, the acquisition, and the cinematic living.

The queso was good. It also cost about what my share of a 1998 pitcher did, plus a parking ticket I hadn't gotten yet, plus whatever "experiential" means on a menu.

I paid it. Of course I paid it. The movie was a Korean revenge thriller in which a man fights forty people in a hallway with a frozen fish, and I would have paid in blood.

A Modest Proposal for the Next Week

If you're going this week, here is my unsolicited advice, from someone who has been sitting in these chairs since before the chairs matched:

• Go to one movie you know nothing about. Pick it by the poster, by the country, or by the title being longer than eight words.
• Talk to a stranger on the sidewalk afterward. The sidewalk is the only part of South Lamar that hasn't been rebranded, mostly because nobody has figured out how to monetize it yet.
• Write something nice on your order slip. The server has been running in a crouch for six hours.
• Don't tell anybody your badge tier. Nobody asked. I promise you nobody asked.

Somewhere on Colorado Street there's a building that used to smell like fryer oil and possibility. These days it probably smells like a co-working space's citrus diffuser and a lease renewal. I walked past it once a few years back and stood on the sidewalk waiting to feel something, and what I felt was a valet asking whether I was checking in.

I was not. I was checking out, at 12:40 in the morning, arguing about an ending, about twenty-five years ago.