How I Discovered...Movies!

I once told a one time date that English/Literature is my wife but Film is the girl next door I fantasize about.

The metaphor comes from my unfortunate lack of initiative in shooting films by myself. As my friend Kevin says, "If you wanna, you're gonna." My initiative is put forth towards writing, primarily, yet now I start to seriously work on screenplays for my love of film deserves vindication. 

It's hard to say that one discovers movies. Movies are always there. It's as if one is saying "I discovered dirt." Movies, books, and music are the triangle of pop culture. My love for each one of those angles of pop culture is explicitly vivid, whether in serious practice or hobby. Yet I discovered movies as a major part of my life very late, relatively speaking.

Much like most people's regard for each angle of pop culture is casual, so were my family's and therefore mine. My parents barely took us to see movies. I was lucky to see "Toy Story" and "Aladdin" in their original release, but I didn't see "Jurassic Park" or "Men in Black" (though I did see "Baby Geniuses"). Part of this was because in our rural community we only had one cinema and it eventually closed when I was 8. We didn't watch a lot of movies while at the house. We barely even read. I really didn't read seriously until I was in 9th grade (which is for the next post in the "How I Discovered..."). Our family...was a tv family.

Slowly I started edging out of that tv family status. It started with music but I tried to sprinkle books in there. Looking back I thought myself an astute reader. I wasn't. I didn't finish books. I didn't get a lot of accelerated reader points. If I read it was history (which isn't bad necessarily) and I still read history nonfiction yet my interest in writing seemed muted.

All of this was in middle school. Now that I am a substitute teacher I see how typical I actually was. My penchant for sports trivia and other trivial literature via The Bathroom Reader, for instance, is echoed in the 5th and 6th grade interest in reading the Guinness Book of World Records. Like many I found an interest in comic books validated by having a really cool local comic book store nearby (in Toccoa). This may not seem relevant to the topic at hand but this part is important, I feel, as a prologue to my love of story. That's really what I'm about, telling stories or figuring out how to tell a story. Comic books served the role of getting me to read a bit more and to introduce stories.

I always viewed movies as stories. I always viewed movies as a higher form of storytelling and it was through this interest of conceiving stories, story ideas, that got me into cinema. My gateway: The Godfather.

Middle schoolers are often not serious about anything unless their parents encourage them or help them. Mine didn't. I started guitar and thought it seriously until I got into football and thought I was going to play for the Chicago Bears, but that waned as I fell apart from football culture that never left me feeling as though I belonged. 

With satellite tv I had been indulging in AMC, finding myself interested in the manly sort of films a la "Bullitt" and so forth. AMC had shown a commercial for "The Godfather" to come on Monday. For some reason it was in my dreams, probably because I had seen the ad so often. I decided to watch it. On a Monday I went into my parents' bedroom, starting at 8PM and because of commercial breaks didn't stop until 12AM. This broken up, long version of "The Godfather" made me realize this was something special. At the age of 13 I had never seen anything like this and in my cognitive level I could fully understand the characters. The Corleones' Shakespearean saga, the details of their family, the lighting was staggering for me. This was a higher form of storytelling. I wanted more. 

I started sitting in front of AMC and TCM, with a little bit of IFC just watching movies. I went online and tried to find movie titles. I found AFI's list and started with that, trying to watch movies from that list. The two movies that kept me in this interest were "Annie Hall" and "2001: A Space Odyssey." I understood "Annie Hall" and felt it was beyond what I had really seen up to that time. "2001," which would become my favorite film of all time, was a bit over my head (I was 14) but I understood enough of it to be mesmerized. This became a magnificent obsession.

Using DVR I would record TCM movies like "Bonnie & Clyde," "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," and I'd go to Clarkesville Video to rent the VHS copies of the AFI List (as they had arranged a case full of them). 

This was 2003 and for the most part my movie going experience had been home viewing, but I was restless. I wanted to move onto the cinema.

That year I saw 6 movies.

Most of which wasn't wonderful. In 2003, several great films came out like "Lost in Translation," "The Return of the King," "Finding Nemo," "Kill Bill," and I didn't see any of them. I did see "Pirates of the Caribbean" and "X-Men 2." I also saw "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" remake, "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," and "Daredevil." Something needed to give. Going through Entertainment Weekly's Fall Movie Preview via my friend's 6 free issue subscription I read about all these movies I wanted to see. 

What really stung was how I never got to see any of "The Lord of the Rings" movies. At the time I felt these were my generation's movies, our "Star Wars," and I missed out. I was hell bent and determined to see as many movies as I could. This meant I had to give up my comic book habit, but I started on the path of seeing in or around 30 movies every year, which has continued to this point for the most part. Having a new cinema open literally down the street from me also helped. 

My poor parents had to often subject themselves to rated R movies in sacrifice for me, and not the usual horror fest rated R movies. It's amazing how many art films are rated R purely for profanity and didn't have any nudity or violence. My dad sat with me through "Syriana" and my mom endured "Munich" and "The Constant Gardener." I think they wanted "Saw 2" more. I did force my parents to some films I'd never recommend taking parents to. My dad took me to "Team America: World Police" and had his mouth hanging open throughout the entire movie. My mom and my sister took me to see "Closer." During the online sex scene...it was awkward. 

I tried to find ways to discover new movies. Until a couple of years ago "Allmovie" was my resource. I made a list of genres that I considered my favorites like "Martial Arts," "Film Noir," and "Science Fiction" for instance, and used allmovie to list movies to watch. I would check them off as I watched them. I eventually got a six week subscription for Entertainment Weekly and I would take out ads for movies to put on my doors and walls. I did the same with the AJC's movie section which was actually quite nice with Eleanor Gillespie writing (and being a noted critic too) as well as the Ask Alan Smithee column which I would post on my walls as well. 

During this year, sophomore year of high school, I went to my first film festival: the Cine-Macabre film festival in Gainesville, GA to see the East Coast premiere of "The Toolbox Murders" from director Tobe Hooper. I also took Journalism in high school where I started writing articles about movies and became a movie critic, "Sin City" being my first (heavily censored) review. 

This was also around the time we discovered Netflix. I'd use video stores but as this was rural Georgia it was primarily chains like Movie Gallery and Video Warehouse. I was a member of both stores but their selections varied. I was wanting to immerse myself into the canon of world/art films and their selection was sparse. Most of the art film canon was on Criterion Collections. These video stores didn't have Criterion Collection DVD's because as wonderful as their packaging was they were stupid expensive and consequently inaccessible. The only way to get them was to order them on Amazon but they were $35 or $40 which seemed outrageous at the time. I remember the first time I saw Vision Video in Athens, GA I about shit my pants at all the Criterions they had. The relative inaccessibility of the Criterions led me to check out the art/world films available at Movie Gallery and Video Warehouse which meant Miramax films. Say what you will about the Weinsteins but I have a special nostalgia for the European and Asian films that Miramax would put out because you could find them at a video store. 

Every now and then a foreign film would come on IFC, which is how I discovered Almodovar, but Netflix (getting back to that paragraph) was the real discovery in some respect. The library of endless DVD's available via Netflix was breathless. I no longer had to order old VHS copies of Janus films. I could rent Criterion Collections and I did, starting off with (the actually disappointing) "The Night Porter." Many of my favorite films were first viewed through Netflix rentals, like The Three Colors Trilogy among others. 

I started charting my favorite film directors like the Coens, Tarantino, Louis Malle, Martin Scorsese, Wong Kar-Wai, Luis Bunuel. My then and still favorite is Stanley Kubrick. I remember early on in this process watching "Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures" and using that as a springboard to watch every one of his films (which I have done except "Fear and Desire"). I also started discovering countries who had a disproportionate amount of films I liked: Germany, Japan, Mexico (and South America) and tried to find directors from those countries. Even now I'll still go through phases where I'll really get into French films or Chinese films and really there's no one culture I prefer as much I just relish in the language of cinema. 

Because I was writing film reviews I started reading film criticism heavily. I found Roger Ebert's "Great Movies" and read it, taking mental notes pretty much. I started to find critics I heavily agreed with like A.O. Scott of The New York Times, which remains my primary film critic. If A.O. Scott likes it, I'll probably try and see it. Stephen Holden and Mahnola Dargis too. If I was in Buford I'd pick up copies of "The New York Times" on Friday just to read their reviews, because the Starbucks in Buford sold them.  

The apex of this was 2007 where all of this was swirling, where I had a car and a job and was starting college. I saw 42 films that year, including two of my favorites, "Pan's Labyrinth" and "Children of Men" (2006 leftovers) as well as all that is wonderful like "There Will Be Blood" and "No Country for Old Men." I took Introduction to Film with Tom Sauret who remains one of the great professors I ever had as well.

Ultimately, my film passion waned in college as I became immersed into poetry as well as theatre, as well as my lethargy. Unfortunately, my film love never translated into initiative to make movies. I didn't know shit about cameras, about equipment. I took some film courses but I was mediocre and this was because I didn't do this outside of class. I had to drop some film classes because of class and major conflicts. I took Video Production in high school, editing on iMovie and using Canon's. The work I did was ok, but I wish I maxed out on that.

Now, however, I take advantage of any chance I get to work on a film, whether doing low level work or not. For awhile I worked as an extra just to see how the process worked, asking film crew members about what they did. They all told me if I wanted to work I had to get in with IATSE. I decided to make my own films and I have shot stuff and make the Clarkesville Library promo, but now I am hell bent to write scripts. I can write and I love movies, so this is why scripts are for me. 

My goal is to have at least one short, just a short, shown at a major film festival by the time I'm 30. If I don't do that, then I'll continue at it but I'll see about the prospects of getting a Ph.D in Film Studies and be the next David Bordwell. I owe my high school, 14 year pudgy self watching "The Godfather" that. I owe it to him, that kid who would write down ideas on a scratch paper and hide it out of embarrassment, some fulfillment.