How ‘The Blob’ transformed one town

‘A gem like this can transform a community’
Phoenixville, once home to an enormous steel mill, seems an unlikely place for a modern entertainment pilgrimage, but hundreds of “Blob” fans can’t be wrong.

The town may have been idyllic in the movie, but a decade ago Phoenixville’s main drag was dragging. The mill had closed, putting 2,000 people out of work. Storefronts were shuttered. There were problems with drug dealers and prostitutes. The Colonial was operating, but barely. “Those were really rough times,” says Mayor Leo Scoda.

Then Mary Foote came along.

Foote, a community organizer, noticed that the Colonial was for sale. Its previous owners hadn’t done much with it, which wasn’t a bad thing: The theater hadn’t been split into cramped “twins” like so many of its small-town counterparts.

Foote led a nonprofit consortium called the Association for the Colonial Theater, which bought the property and began restoring it. The focus was drawing entertainment to Phoenixville; the blob didn’t figure in until later.

“A gem like this can transform a community,” says Foote, sitting in her office on the theater’s second floor. In the background, the movie’s jaunty theme song, “Beware of the Blob,” plays in a continuous loop. But, Foote allows, “There’s gotta be a lot of stuff — not just a blob.”

Slowly, around the theater, downtown began to come back. New restaurants like Molly Maguire’s opened (it donates to the theater $1 of each $8.95 “Colonial BLT” it sells), as did a gourmet cafe and places like Phoenix Karate, which teaches martial arts to kids.

When McQueen walked these streets in front of Shorty Yeaworth’s camera, he moved through a Phoenixville that was the picture-perfect 1950s movie small town. It felt much farther from a big city than it really is. Today, as Phoenixville resurges, it is taking on that feeling again — a 2008 twist on Eisenhower-era America, surprisingly, and ironically, authentic.

Modeling one’s self after film can be thorny; real history can get lost. But it’s hard to find a downside in Phoenixville. The chain of custody is pretty basic. Theater came back. Community leveraged blob. Business resurged. Downtown got safer. Everybody’s happy.

Even now, almost a decade into Blobfest, a bemusement remains about the enthusiasm generated by the alien-visitation tale filmed the summer before Sputnik was launched.

“I take the ride. But do I get it? No,” Foote acknowledges. “The volunteers who work all year, half of them don’t get it. They say, ‘Why do they come?”’

Karin Williams, who does PR for the Phoenixville Chamber of Commerce, echoes many along Bridge Street when she assesses the whole affair: A community identifiable by something purely pop-cultural isn’t a bad thing amid the static of the 21st century.

“It puts our little town out there,” she says. “It’s something that Phoenixville can own.”

As American as the Empire State Building
If you’re one of the lucky few, the man will let you reach into the can and actually touch the blob. It’s sticky. It smells like flypaper. It oozes. Pull your fingers away — SQUIRSH — and a perfect set of prints are left behind.

Some wonder if the blob was intended as an allegory. Think about it: It’s the 1950s, and an enormous red mass is overrunning and suffocating the idyll of Main Street America.

Yeaworth’s son and others scoff. But there’s another take from a new DVD edition of “The Blob”: Film historian Bruce Kawin suggests the creature is a “hungry mass — comparable to if not incarnating the growing consumerism of 1950s America.” For moviegoers in 1958, he says, “their complacent desire to stuff themselves with goods and good times had shown itself to be a monster.”

We are consumers above all, and now more than ever we buy good times. Viewed through this prism, is Phoenixville’s Blobtown persona that far removed from, say, Universal Studios Hollywood? One, built for fantasy, became a tourist attraction; one, built for the real world, was used once for fantasy and became a tourist attraction.

Blobfest is the real and the movie, America and Hollywood, all at once. And that fits the modern American identity.

Our ancestors stamped monuments to themselves onto the physical landscape — the Lincoln Memorial, the Empire State Building, the Grand Coulee Dam, the Interstate Highway System. These days, some of our most cherished monuments are less solid — the stories we bring to life in movies, TV shows, videogames.

So we flock to Walt Disney World as eagerly as to Washington, D.C., to Universal Studios Hollywood as ravenously as to the Grand Canyon. We buy flex passes to places that re-create the experience of big-screen storytelling before our eyes. And some of us even traverse the landscape looking for movie sites so we can submerge themselves in the cool waters of entertainment.

Dave Perillo, the artist, has scoured the land for his favorite film locales. He’s walked the streets of San Francisco to find Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” seen the L.A. bowling alley from “The Big Lebowski,” tracked down the corners of coastal New Jersey that Kevin Smith used in “Clerks.” At each, he revels in the sheer movieness of it all — as do enough Americans to create a market for gazetteers of fantasy like “The Worldwide Guide to Movie Locations.”

And in the era of the war on terror, for one moment on one evening in Phoenixville, the fear of attack by outsiders becomes just another thrill. Modern entertainment pilgrims get to run out of a theater and into the night, screaming as though their lives depended on it and having fun all the while.

Going to the movies is no longer enough; we must climb in and consume them, wherever that journey leads. Even to Phoenixville. And so many years later, in the very town it tried to consume, the blob has met its match: a roving band of 21st-century American consumers, weaned on entertainment, who are hungrier than it ever was.

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