How my film addiction started - and no, I'm not seeking help

When did you start getting into film seriously? I think I was practically born a movie nerd. My mother introduced me to James Whale’s Frankenstein when I was five. Before that, among my earliest memories was the rerelease of Pinocchio, Jason and the Argonauts (both at the Village Theater in Houston). And I remember the utter terror of those goddamn flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz as it played on a small black and white set on our enclosed back porch.

As a kidding the single digits, I came to be in awe of these giant dreams projected on screens or in the little box where I’d also see Johnny Quest, The Flinstones, I Love Lucy and the Ed Sullivan Show. But movies were special. They were long-form stories and far more engaging. I had to pay attention. Cartoons were usually short and to the point. Variety shows allowed for zoning out or dialing in as the situation merited. But movies? This was a different world, a different way of telling stories.

Horror, or rather, monster movies got me first and I made sure to beg for a copy of Famous Monsters of Filmland whenever my mother and I were at a newsstand. 

Eventually, I discovered other genres; comedy - the Bowery Boys/East Side Kids, Abbott and Costello, Martin and Lewis. I wouldn’t be introduced to the Marx Brothers and Chaplin until I was twelve or so. Westerns, of course. Even silent movies (thanks again to my mother for introducing me to Fairbanks as Zorro!) Eventually, I’d discover everything else.

I was never bored, either. My sister, baby-sitting one night polopped me down in the Alabama Thester to watch Tammy and the Doctor. I was entranced. Heck, I remember seeing Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows and The Trouble with Angels in the theater and being both completely fascinated with the stories but also how they were told It dimly occurred to me that movies were the result ofchoicest. Someone chose to write this story, someone chose these actors, someone chose to put cameras here to shoot the actors from this perspective, and so on.

Around the time I was thirteen or fourteen, Roy Bonario was holding Saturday morning double features at his store Roy’s Memory Shop. By now, I’d been to a couple of comic conventions and meetings at the Houston Comic Collectors Association where chapters of serials, short films, and so on. At Roy’s, we got veritable film history courses. Everything from Republic Serials to Warner Brothers gangster films to early cartoons and more. Roy Bonario was a walking encyclopedia of film lore and before long, I was buying every resource I could find on serials, Bogart, Cagney, and genre films. 

As I go older, I found other approaches to the medium from Europe and Japan. Houston’s local PBS channel played the Janus film collection, including, yes, 8 1/2, Godard’s Contempt, Bergman’s Summer with Monica, and more. There was a density to these pictures that of course, I didn’t understand; but I responded to the abstraction, to the studied set-ups, the compositions of different shots, the elliptical dialog that I really didn’t get. 

By the time I was in high school, my peers were likewise enamored of the medium, but I was so impressed by what I learned about film, the directors, the actors, all of it. I don’t know when I first read Kael, but she was the gateway drug, then I found Peter Harcourt’s Six European Directors and Andrew Sarris’s Interviews with Film Directors.. I picked up Premiere Magazine, Film comment, Variety, and just about every other film journal I could find.

Over ether ensuing years. Cinema has provided a space for learning languages, navigating cultures, and has influenced my art and even provided a kind of aesthetic domain of a lived philosophy. Most of all, it’s a lot of fun. Sure, I take movies seriously, but there’s a great deal of joy in teasing apart themes, turning over dialog (lousy and great), relishing or ribbing performances, and frankly, just watching someone else’s dream come alive and sharing it in the collective head space of a theater.