A Lifetime at the Movies

In retrospect, it may not have been the wisest of choices, but I spent my life at the movies. I loved the movies. Science fiction, horror, drama, rom-com, kid flick – I didn’t really matter what it was, but put me in a dark room with a glowing screen and I was happy.

If I was looking to blame anyone for this, there would be two people at the front of the line. The first would be my dad. My parents divorced when I was twelve or thirteen and, like a lot of dad’s in his position, my dad wasn’t really sure what to do with my sister and me on his designated weekend. At the time he was living in a crappy little apartment next to the Santa Monica pier. If you know the area, you know that if you start at the pier and drive down Santa Monica Blvd for a couple of miles, and then turn left on Westwood Blvd you wind up in Westwood Village, which, in the 1980s, was one historic movie theater after another.

So my sister and I, we spent a lot of our Dad weekends at the movies. But then he moved to New Hampshire and the Dad weekends ceased.

Filling the movie gap was my friend’s mom. One of my best friend’s in junior high and high school had really interesting parents. From an outsider’s perspective, they were about as opposite as two people could be. His dad was tall and thin and never really said much. If you saw him around the house, he was typically watching sports. But his mom was short and kinda round, would chat up a storm, and she loved the movies. She seemed to want to see anything and everything that came out. But my friend’s dad wasn’t a movie fan at all. He liked sports. So if she wanted to see a movie, she’d go alone. And she did. She’d see the first matinee of whatever movie came out that Friday, and, on her way in, buy tickets to the first show after school for her son and his friends. So she’d see the movie, whatever it was, then pick us all up after school and drive us back to the theater so we could see it. I saw a lot of movies on the day they were released largely thanks to Scott’s mom. It’s a habit that stayed with me.

And then there were my college roommates. Best Thanksgiving I recall was the one where we all elected not to go home, and instead rented stacks of movies and spent the weekend watching them all.

Like I said, I spent my life at the movies. So in trying to provide a summary of my life, it occurred to me I could do it with some help from the movies I saw. I can’t say I saw all these in the year they were released, or even that these were necessarily my favorites, but at some point and in some way they were important to me. And oddly enough, strung together like this, it’s not an entirely inaccurate perspective on my life – or even of my generation.

Making this made me both happy and sad. I hope watching it produces only the former…