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Exclusive Interview with “uncut” A NIGHT AT THE OPERA discoverer Thomas Racz

August 10th, 2008 by Scott Marks

I was in seventh grade when I first met the Marx Brothers proper. There were You Bet Your Life reruns and fuzzy memories of The Incredible Jewel Robbery, but it wasn’t until that fateful gathering of the Boone Booster Club that I first witnessed my first Marx Bros. feature.

The Booster Club was a perk for students attending Daniel Boone elementary school in Chicago’s West Rogers Park neighborhood. One Tuesday morning a month we were allowed to dispense with our studies and watch a real movie, not one of those crappy science documentaries, on school time.

The person responsible for curating the series should have been taken out and shot at sunrise. Instead of screening The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T or the original Babes in Toyland, they exposed impressionable minds to the insipid remake of the latter in addition to Blackbeard’s Ghost (another live-action Disney hellhole), the feature length version of Journey to the Beginning of Time (which worked better in 5 minute installments on Garfield Goose and Friends) and two episodes of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. spliced together to form a feature. There was a Martin and Lewis film, but the clueless booker chose Taurog over Tashlin.

Classrooms full of kids congregated in the school’s assembly hall where uniform focus was unheard of, the sound system was just slightly better than a subway train and the tattered window shades allowed more light to come in than the Sistine Chapel. In spite of all of the hardships cast upon this budding young cinephile, the 107 minutes spent watching A Day at the Races was the single greatest learning experience in eight years of public school education.

As if preordained, WBKB-TV scheduled a 1 am screening of Races later that weekend and I pleaded with my parents that since it wasn’t a “school night” to let me stay up way past my bedtime. My mother, generally the softer touch of the pair, wanted nothing to do with the idea. My father actually stepped up to the plate and, after hearing my appeal, uncharacteristically ruled in my favor. He assured my mother that “the kid will be asleep ten minutes after it starts and we’ll never hear about it again.”

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