Iraq cinema manager flashes back to the boom times

BAGHDAD — A passerby lingers over a poster of a scantily clad woman but then keeps on walking past the penitentiary-style metal bars of the Atlas movie theater. Back when Saadoun Street was bustling, the pictures of a man nibbling on a woman's neck would bring in the crowds. But now trash blows by and a bald man in a booth with matching metal bars fights off boredom waiting to sell the stacks of tickets.

Inside, the Atlas' manager, Saad Hashim, sits behind a desk, his wall decorated with the smiling face of a Syrian pop singer. He talks on the phone with his fist thrust out and his glasses perched on his creased forehead.

The white-haired Hashim has managed movie houses for 39 years, since he was 16 and needed a job to put himself through school. At times, he had harbored dreams of becoming a cinematographer, but that never panned out. (He says it was because he was a Shiite Muslim living in Saddam Hussein's Sunni-led Iraq.)

Whatever the reasons, the movies still enthrall him.

"When I watch a film I like, I forget everything around me. . . . I'm not ready to stop watching it to do any kind of work . . . or to talk to somebody!" Hashim says.

He talks proudly of the old moviegoers. "They were educated people: officers, officials from government offices, students," he says. Families and "important figures in society" would book reservations by phone, he says. He paid extra attention to them and was always on call. When they arrived, Hashim would send an usher to escort them in. But he always insisted that they hand in any weapons for safekeeping because pistols were banned from the theater.

Today, hours move slowly at work. He speaks dismissively of those who come to his theater now; they only want to see films that might show a hint of a woman's flesh, he says.

"They are uneducated people. They know nothing about cinema. They don't care for a film's theme. They want to pass the time and see some shots of women's bodies," Hashim says.

He remembers when crowds would line up at the ticket window. It didn't matter if the movie was old, which was all he could get back in the 1990s, when the Baghdad film industry was hobbled by international sanctions.

Hashim brought films that would run for a month, and could be held over if they proved popular -- anything from "Rambo" to a romantic comedy or Bollywood films from India. Hashim would organize an advertising campaign. He would send young men walking or driving down streets shouting about the movie. " 'Sasco' is the best film," his hawkers once cried about a Bollywood film popular with Baghdadis in the late 1970s.