NORTH CAROLINA
- Asheville — UA’s Beaucatcher 7
- Charlotte — Carmike’s Park Terrace Triplex
- Charlotte — Carmike’s University Place 6
- Charlotte — Consolidated’s Arboretum 10
- Charlotte — GCC’s Tower Place 8
- Greensboro — Cinemark’s Brassfield 10
- Greensboro — Janus’ Terrace 6*
- Raleigh — Carmike’s Six Forks Station 6
- Raleigh — GCC’s Pleasant Valley 7
- Raleigh — UA’s Mission Valley 5*
- Wilmington — Carmike’s Cinema 6
OHIO
- Akron — GCC’s Chapel Hill Mall 4
- Canton — GCC’s Canton Centre 8
- Cincinnati — National Amusements’ Showcase Cincinnati 12*
- Cleveland Heights — NTC’s Severance 8 *
- Euclid — Lakeshore’s Lakeshore 7
- Hilliard — Cinemark’s Mill Run 12
- Jackson — Belden Village 6
- Mentor — GCC’s Erie Commons 8
- Parma — GCC’s Parmatown 5
- Rocky River — GCC’s Westgate Mall 6
- Solon — Regal’s Solon Commons 10
- Toledo — National Amusements’ Showcase 5*
OKLAHOMA
- Oklahoma City — GCC’s Crossroads 8
- Oklahoma City — GCC’s Penn Square Mall 8*
- Tulsa — Cinemark’s Movies 8
ONTARIO
- Brampton — Cineplex Odeon’s 410 & 7 Centre 4
- Etobicoke — Cineplex Odeon’s Sherway 9
- Etobicoke — Cineplex Odeon’s Woodbine Centre 6
- Gloucester — Cineplex Odeon’s Orleans Town Centre 6
- Hamilton — Cineplex Odeon’s Centre Mall 8
- Kitchener — Cineplex Odeon’s HylandLindsay — Rivers’ Century
- Mississauga — Cineplex Odeon’s Erin Mills Town Centre 5
- North York — Cineplex Odeon’s Fairview 6
- North York — Cineplex Odeon’s Madison 5
- Ottawa — Cineplex Odeon’s St. Laurent 5
- Ottawa — Cineplex Odeon’s Somerset
- Ottawa — Cineplex Odeon’s Westgate Triplex
- Toronto — Cineplex Odeon’s Eaton Centre 18
- Toronto — Cineplex Odeon’s Varsity Twin*
- Toronto — Cineplex Odeon’s York Twin
- Vaughan — Cineplex Odeon’s Promenade 6
OREGON
- Portland — Act III’s Eastgate Triplex
- Portland — Act III’s Lloyd 10*
- The Dalles — Humphrey’s Cascade Twin
PENNSYLVANIA
- Bala Cynwood — Bala
- Harmar — Mulone’s Harmar 6
- Huntingdon Valley — Regal’s Huntingdon Valley 14
- King of Prussia — UA’s King & Queen 6
- Langhorne — UA’s Oxford Valley Mall 10
- Monroeville — National Amusements’ Showcase East 10
- Montgomeryville — AMC’s 309 Cinema 9
- Philadelphia — GCC’s Northeast 4
- Philadelphia — UA’s Riverview Plaza 11*
- Philadelphia — UA’s Sam’s Place Twin*
- Pittsburgh — Mulone’s Waterworks 10
- Upper Darby — UA’s 69th Street 9
QUEBEC
- Brossard — Cineplex Odeon’s Brossard Triplex*
- Dorval — Famous Players’ Dorval 4
- Drummondville — Drummondville**
- Joliette — RGFM’s Joliette Triplex**
- Laval — Cineplex Odeon’s Carrefour Laval 6*
- Laval — Cineplex Odeon’s Laval Centre 2000 Twin**
- Longueuil — Cineplex Odeon’s Longueuil Twin**
- Montreal — Cineplex Odeon’s Berri 5**
- Montreal — Cineplex Odeon’s Cote-des-Neiges 7*
- Montreal — Cineplex Odeon’s Le Faubourg 4
- Pointe-Claire — Cineplex Odeon’s Pointe-Claire 6
- Quebec City — Cineplex Odeon’s Place Charest 8*/**
- Repentigny — Cine Enterprise’s Plaza Repentigny 6**
- St-Basile — Cine Enterprise’s St-Basile 7**
- Ste-Hyacinthe — Ste-Hyacinthe**
- St-Jean — St-Jean**
- St-Jerome — St-Jerome**
- St-Leonard — Guzzo’s Astre 4
- St-Leonard — Guzzo/Cineplex Odeon’s Langelier 6
- St-Leonard — Guzzo/Cineplex Odeon’s Langelier 6**
- Ste-Therese — Guzzo’s Plaza Ste-Therese 8**
- Terrebonne — Guzzo’s Terrebonne 8**
SOUTH CAROLINA
- Columbia — Carmike’s Cinema 10
- Columbia — Litchfield’s Richland Fashion Mall 6
- Greenville — UA’s Bijou 8*
- Murrells Inlet — Litchfield’s Inlet Square 7
- North Charleston — GCC’s Northwoods Mall 8
TENNESSEE
- Antioch — Camike’s Bell Forge 10
- Bartlett — Malco’s Bartlett 10
- Chattanooga — Regal’s Hamilton Place Mall 17
- Cordova — Malco’s Germantown Parkway 9
- Goodlettsville — Carmike’s Rivergate 8
- Knoxville — Regal’s Downtown West 8
- Knoxville — Regal’s East Towne Mall 7
- Memphis — Malco’s Winchester Court 8*
- Nashville — AMC’s Fountain Square 14
- Nashville — Carmike’s Lion’s Head 5
TEXAS
- Abilene — UA’s Mall of Abilene 10
- Addison — GCC’s Prestonwood 4
- Amarillo — Cineplex Odeon’s Western Square Twin
- Arlington — GCC’s Arlington Park 8
- Austin — GCC’s Highland 10*
- Austin — Presidio’s Arbor 7*
- Austin — Presidio’s Westgate 8
- Bedford — GCC’s Central Park 8
- Corpus Christi — UA’s Cine 6
- Dallas — GCC’s Northpark West Twin*
- Garland — Cinemark’s Hollywood USA 15
- Grand Prairie — Cinemark’s Movies 16
- Houston — AMC’s Town & Country 10*
- Houston — Cineplex Odeon’s River Oaks Plaza 12*
- Houston — Cineplex Odeon’s Sharpstown Center 8*
- Houston — Cineplex Odeon’s Spectrum 9*
- Houston — GCC’s Meyerland Plaza 8*
- Houston — GCC’s West Oaks Central 6
- Houston — GCC’s Willowbrook Mall 6
- Irving — GCC’s Irving Mall Triplex*
- Lake Jackson — Lake Twin
- Lewisville — Cinemark’s Vista Ridge Mall 12
- Lubbock — Cinemark’s Movies 12
- Mesquite — GCC’s Town East 5*
- New Braunfels — Lone Star’s Walnut 6
- North Richland Hills — GCC’s North Hills 7
- Odessa — UA’s Northpark 6
- Plano — UA’s Berkeley Square 8*
- Richardson — GCC’s Richardson 6
- San Antonio — Santikos’ Galaxy 14*
- San Marcos — Lone Star’s Cinema 5
- Texas City — Cinemark’s Mall of the Mainland 12
- Webster — GCC’s Point NASA 6
UTAH
- Holladay — Cineplex Odeon’s Holladay Center 6
- Layton — Cinemark’s Tinseltown USA 10
- Magna — Reel 5
- Salt Lake City — Cineplex Odeon’s Trolley Corners Triplex
- Sandy — Cinemark’s Sandy Movies 9
- South Salt Lake — Syufy’s Century 9*
- Taylorsville — Cineplex Odeon’s Midvalley 6
VIRGINIA
- Alexandria — National Amusements’ Mt. Vernon Multiplex 10*
- Bon Air — UA’s Chesterfield Town Center 9
- Charlottesville — Carmike’s Cinema 6
- Chesapeake — Cinemark’s Chesapeake Square Mall 10
- Fairfax — UA’s Fair Oaks 6*
- Merrifield — National Amusements’ Arlington Blvd./Lee Highway Multiplex 14
- Reston — National Amusements’ Town Center 11*
- Springfield — GCC’s Springfield Mall 10*
- Vienna — Cineplex Odeon’s Fairfax Square 8*
- Virginia Beach — UA’s KempsRiver Crossing 7
WASHINGTON
- Bellevue — Act III’s Crossroads 8
- Bellevue — Cineplex Odeon’s John Danz
- Federal Way — GCC’s Gateway Center 8
- Lynnwood — Act III’s Alderwood 7*
- Seattle — Cineplex Odeon’s Cinerama*
- Seattle — Cineplex Odeon’s Northgate
- Tacoma — Cineplex Odeon’s Tacoma Mall Twin
- Tukwila — Cineplex Odeon’s Southcenter
WEST VIRGINIA
- Charleston — UA’s Kanawha Mall 9
WISCONSIN
- Janesville — Rock 9
- Madison — Carmike’s University Square 4
- Manitowoc — W-T’s Strand 6*
- Milwaukee — Marcus’ Northtown 8*
- Milwaukee — Marcus’ Skyway 6
- Waukesha — Marcus’ Westown 10*
- West Bend — W-T’s West Bend Triplex*
WYOMING
- Jackson Hole — Movieworks 4
THE Q&A
Steven Awalt is a Digital Content Producer at Amblin Partners and the author of Steven Spielberg and Duel: The Making of a Film Career (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014; paperback, 2016). A film historian and noted Spielberg authority, Awalt was the editor of SpielbergFilms.com from 2001 to 2009 and appeared as an interview subject in the 2007 Jaws documentary, The Shark is Still Working. He is currently working on Steven Spielberg and The Sugarland Express.
Mike Matessino is a soundtrack producer and film music historian. He produced and annotated The John Williams Jurassic Park Soundtrack Collection for La-La Land Records as well as remastered soundtracks for Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1941, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, Empire of the Sun and A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Other Spielberg/Amblin soundtrack projects include Poltergeist, Twilight Zone: The Movie, Gremlins, Innerspace, The Goonies, Joe vs. The Volcano and the Back to the Future Trilogy.
Joseph McBride is a professor in the Cinema Department at San Francisco State University and the author of twenty books, including biographies of John Ford, Frank Capra, and Steven Spielberg. Steven Spielberg: A Biography (first published in 1997 by Simon & Schuster) is available in second and third editions. McBride’s new book, the critical study How Did Lubitsch Do It?, is now available from Columbia University Press (enter the promo code “cup30” for a 30% discount).
The interviews were conducted separately and have been edited into a “roundtable” conversation format.
Michael Coate (The Digital Bits): How do you think Jurassic Park should be remembered on its 25th anniversary?
Steven Awalt: Above all, Jurassic Park should be remembered as a truly fun, exciting, scary popcorn entertainment. Seeing the film in theaters in the summer of 1993 was one of those landmark moviegoing memories — for myself, and I can only assume for others. It’s a film that plays gangbusters with a crowd, like many of Steven Spielberg’s big crowd-pleasers including Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. With summer now upon us, and the film marking its 25th anniversary this year, it’s the perfect time to revisit it on the biggest screen with the best sound and the largest crowd of friends or fellow moviegoers you can find.
Mike Matessino: Jurassic Park should be remembered as the groundbreaking Steven Spielberg blockbuster that it still is. It’s a movie that holds up and that young people today are still engaged by, and the fact that the franchise is continuing with the Jurassic World movies, which builds on the legacy of the original, makes it still relevant.
Joseph McBride: In film history, Jurassic Park is most significant for being the first film to use extensive CGI (computer-generated imagery) and for doing it so effectively, thanks to Industrial Light & Magic, to help bring dinosaurs convincingly to life on the big screen, along with animatronic creatures built by Stan Winston and his team. Some people pooh-poohed this as a minor technical feat, but paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould saw it differently. He wrote in the New York Review of Books that although the film’s dinosaur revivification premise amounted to “heaping impossibility upon impossibility,” Steven Spielberg and his special-effects wizards deserve great credit for conjuring up believable images of long-extinct creatures: “Intellectuals too often either pay no attention to such technical wizardry or, even worse, actually disdain special effects with such dismissive epithets as ’merely mechanical.’ I find such small-minded parochialism outrageous. Nothing can be more complex than a living organism, with all the fractal geometry of its form and behavior…. The use of technology to render accurate and believable animals therefore becomes one of the greatest all-time challenges to human ingenuity.” The public agreed — Jurassic Park became an enormous boxoffice sensation, even if its numbers have since been surpassed. And another remarkable fact is that Spielberg released it in the same year as he did Schindler’s List, his great film about the Holocaust. The two are, of course, almost diametrically opposite in their approaches, although there are some underlying themes in common, but they reflect the two sides that have always coexisted in Spielberg’s complex artistic personality. He has long intermingled dramas with “entertainments,” as Graham Greene called his lighter works, though of course those can be as good as an author’s more ostensibly serious works. I am glad Spielberg doesn’t neglect either side of his personality.
Schindler’s List was widely embraced by reviewers who mistakenly thought it was his first “serious, adult” film, but in fact he had been making such films for decades, going back to his early television work such as his moving Par for the Course episode of The Psychiatrist series in 1971 and his first film made as a U.S. studio theatrical feature release, his unnervingly dark, while also seriocomic, road movie The Sugarland Express (1974). But it was an astonishing achievement to make both Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List in one year, and Spielberg had to supervise the completion of the visual effects for Jurassic Park by satellite hookup to California at night while directing Schindler’s List on location in Poland. He admitted recently that was extremely difficult for him emotionally, and that it made him angry to have to do so, but working with imaginary dinosaurs probably was something of a release from the almost unbearable strain of making his shattering film about the reality of the Holocaust.
