Seaside cinema kicks off tonight with ‘The Muppets’
Family flicks to screen each Thursday
The Asbury Park boardwalk is about to host yet another attraction, with weekly movies on the beach starting tonight.
Shore Flicks will screen a movie at the Second Avenue beach in front of Langosta Lounge every Thursday until the end of August, starting 30 minutes after sundown. Spectators are invited to bring their own chairs and blankets to enjoy the show. Movies will also be visible from the boardwalk.
TJ Brustiwicz started Shore Flicks in 2007 when he saw a need for an outdoor movie company in the area — especially because outdoor movie-watching started in New Jersey with the nation’s first drive-in opening in Camden in 1933, he said.
“It’s kind of a unique New Jersey experience, so it seemed like the perfect thing to have here at the shore,” he said. Shore Flicks’ first season in 2008 commemorated the drive-in’s 75th anniversary.
Previously, municipal parks and recreation departments paid Shore Flicks to provide outdoor movie screenings. When recreation budgets began to dwindle in most municipalities, Brustiwicz came up with a new business model. Now, movies are paid for by sponsors.
Screenings are free to the public, and Shore Flicks holds a food drive at every event, dividing each night’s canned proceeds between four area food banks. They also collect donations for other area nonprofit organizations at each event. Also, instead of trailers, moviegoers will see a slideshow about the history of cinema before each movie and a short film called “Kindness Boomerang,” which is about acts of kindness and “paying it forward,” Brustiwicz said.
Shore Flicks screened a film in Asbury Park last year over Labor Day Weekend with Move For Hunger, Brustiwicz said. They decided after that to join with the Asbury Park Film Initiative to screen movies this year.
The movies shown will never have a rating higher than PG-13, and are a mix of classics, recent classics and newer films, Brustiwicz said. Movies are cancelled in the event of rain. The movies screened in Asbury Park this summer are as follows:
• July 26: “The Muppets”
• Aug. 2: “Chicken Run”
• Aug. 9: “The Incredibles”
• Aug. 16: “School of Rock”
• Aug. 23: “Jaws”
• Aug. 30: “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”
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[Photo of screening in Spring Lake courtesy of Shore Flicks]
