The Early Show
I became a movie nut mainly because when I was growing up, in the primitive 1970's, we did not have cable. We got two channels on our TV that came in clearly [NBC and CBS], and ABC came in fuzzy, at best.
I always did my homework at school, or in front of the TV. When I got home in the third grade, I got hooked on a soap opera - The Secret Storm. I became a fanatic. I had to see it. It was like my grandmother and The Edge of Night - I can still hear the ominous theme music - I HAD to have my soap every day! When my mother found out about this little addiction, she was appalled. She made me quit cold turkey. It was rough.
I went through a lof of Charles Chips potato chips and cookies to get over the withdrawal symptoms.
I discovered I didn't much like game shows, except $10,000 Pyramid and Hollywood Squares. Those were both on mid afternoon.
I discovered in 4th grade that one of our local TV stations had a show on at 4 every day called The Early Show. They showed old movies. I watched Elvis movies, Abbot and Costello, The Marx Brothers, Beach Blanket movies with Frankie and Annette, classic westerns, old Bette Davis films - everything. I don't recall ever turning on the movie and thinking "I don't want to watch that" and doing something banal, like playing outside. Nope, no matter how bad the movie was, or how obscure, I was there, lying on the floor, dangerously close to the huge console TV. I kept this habit all through middle school, and right up through high school, until I got my first job, the summer before my senior year.
I didn't realize until much later that this gave me a bizarre education.
I learned about the bible from watching The Ten Commandments, and Ben Hur. I learned about Vincent Van Gogh from an old movie with Kirk Douglas, Lust for Life. I learned about the Civil War from Gone With The Wind. And on and on.
Then I went to college. The first weekend I came home, I learned my parents were going through the Empty Nest Syndrome. My father had bought a VCR - a huge monstrosity, like a giant tape recorder. To keep my mother from griping about that extravagance, he bought her a brand new Amana Microwave oven [why did I hear the voice of the guy from The Price is Right as I typed that?!!]. My father borrowed a bunch of movies from a friend at work, and we watched movies all weekend - Gone With the Wind, South Pacific, etc. I don't remember all of them. I was ticked that he waited until I left home to buy a VCR!
However, what a thrill it was to watch a movie without commercials! Without going to a theatre! WOW! Today's generation cannot imagine the excitement of being able to do that.
My freshman year in college, I audited a course in Alfred Hitchcock movies. I had seen a lot of them already. It was fascinating. I learned that people actually STUDY movies, in a scholarly way, and throw around big words like "semiotics" and "mise en scene" and other obscure stuff. It was a whole other language.
It was right around this time that Mel Brooks came out with the movie High Anxiety, a great spoof of Hitchcock movies. If you've never seen that, get it, if you know anything about Hitchcock. I nearly wet my pants laughing the first time I saw that film.
The next year, I transferred to the University of Georgia, and majored in Drama. I was actually able to take film classes, for credit! More discussions of Serious Films. I learned something startling. I did NOT like most of the classic films - The Battleship Potemkin, Night for Day, Jules et Jim, The Rules of the Game, anything by Ingmar Berman. YUCKO! I had to drink a lot of coffee sometimes to stay awake in there. Just to be perverse, I wrote term papers about films I knew the professor thought were stupid, like On Golden Pond, and Ordinary People. He always had to grudgingly give me at least a B on the papers, because I could write well, but it galled him. He was a film snob.
The professor was also an indie filmmaker. He made a film that had a lot of shots of chickens pecking at corn, and then a violent chicken death scene. It was all allegorical. I was floored that anyone would actually give him money to make that film.
BTW - if you are a film scholar you never say "movie." How bourgeoise! How ignorant! No, you say "film" and "genre." It helped that I had studied French in High School and could pronounce everything correctly, even if I had a hard time with the concepts.
The only "serious" moviemaker I found that I really liked was Federico Fellini. His films had a sense of humor. The film Amarcord was a particular favorite. [It's full of nudity and NOT suitable for small children!]
At UGA, I joined the University Union Cinematic Arts Division, primarily because they brought all the movies to campus and I could have a say in what movies were brought in, and I could see them for FREE. What a deal. Saved my a lot of $$.
I was singlehandedly responsible for a fabulous weekend ever year called the Bad Film Festival. We brought in old films that were very very bad, but in a funny, campy way, like Plan 9 from Outer Space, and Glen or Glenda. We dressed up in bad 1950's costumes. All bad movies, all causing a lot of laughter.
Around this time I started my first annual Oscar Night Party. I invited everyone I knew and served potato chips and M&M's and other fancy party food, and we sat around and made fun of the tacky dresses and stupid production numbers, and drank a lot of cheap beer and wine. Good fun.
When I finished college, I kept my enthusiasm for movies, and went to the movies a lot - yeah you heard right, I saw MOVIES! I ate POPCORN! I actually sometimes LIKE movies in which a lot of things BLOW UP! I am not moved to tears by dead chickens.
When I got my first apartment, I actually inherited my father's VCR. He had bought a sleek new one that weighed less than 50 lbs. I got the old one and my grandmother's old TV. I thought I was COOL. I found I could check out movies at the public library near my office for $1 each. Sometimes I would watch movies all weekend, holed up with plenty of microwave popcorn, beer, and cigarettes. It took me a while to make friends after I moved back to Knoxvegas - all my school friends from high school were living elsewhere. And I didn't get out much.
After my first year of being a paralegal, I turned down my father's offer to send me to law school, and went back to college for an M.A. in Creative Writing. There was a magazine publisher in town I wanted to work for, and my Drama degree got me nowhere. Unfortunately, after I finished my master's, they still wouldn't hire me. I was bummed. [However, when the outfit closed down not long after I left Knoxville, I was glad I hadn't gotten a job there]. I wrote a lot of poetry. I should've majored in film studies, but the only thing to do then was either go to LA or get a Ph.D. and teach. Neither appealed to me.
Sometime in the mid 1990's, after I moved to Atlanta, I got my first used computer, [a 486! Wow!] and started writing screenplays. Really bad screenplays, with good stories. I wrote 3 full-length feature films, and joined the Atlanta Screenwriters Group. I actually was a finalist in the 2004 Perfect Pitch contest, pitching my screenplay The Theory of Hip Movement. It was about a neurotic single woman in her 30's who went through a lot of really bad dates before hooking up with Mr. Right. She was a baseball fanatic, and loved the music of Marvin Gaye. [Yeah, she was based on me, duh...]
All my screenplays are in a drawer and I would still love to see one of them produced one day, but I never got an agent and it's not something I'm actively pursuing right now. I find being a mama much more challenging and fun.
So now, the current phase of my film fanaticism. I watch 3-6 movies every week, 99% of the time with my kids. They are learning about American culture through the movies. We see old movies, new ones - everything except horror movies and what I consider Bad Movies [that's a whole other post]. Watching with my kids is great fun.
Writing about movies is one of my favorite things to do. Thanks for reading.
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