I fell
in love with film at a very early age and quickly
found myself loving the artwork (the posters, lobby
cards and soundtrack covers) of the films as much as
the films themselves. This probably started when I
was in third grade and loved the album covers for the
soundtracks of "Cabaret" and "A
Clockwork Orange" so much (when I had at the
time no other knowledge of the films) in the racks of
the Renton Public Library that I checked them out and
then found the music to be completely enchanting,
enthralling and mysterious. "A Clockwork
Orange" I was attracted to on many different
levels: the music, the stylized art of the movie
poster, the unusual title, the font...but seeing that
I was in third grade I had no clue what the film was
actually about. Nevertheless I searched out the
one-sheet movie poster for it and put it on the wall
in my bedroom. I'm amazed that my parents let me put
up a poster in my room (when I was seven!) with a
tagline that read "Being the adventures of a
young man whose principal interests are rape,
ultra-violence and Beethoven." They never said a
word about it.
Even though I
had the movie poster and the soundtrack for "A Clockwork
Orange" in third grade, I didn't actually read the book
until sixth grade (and soon found out that I was still too
far ahead of my peers) and didn't finally see the film until
I think I was a sophomore in high school, this being before
VCRs when you had to wait for a vintage film to come to the
local repertory theatre.
Anyway, "A Clockwork
Orange" notwithstanding because I didn't
actually see it until I was a teenager, I must admit
that the first film I ever loved was
"Earthquake," when I saw it as a
nine-year-old and went back four other times to see
it before it left the Renton Village Cinema where it
was playing "in Sensurround." Yes, my first
appreciation of a moral dilemma was when Charlton
Heston (trying to save his wife from being sucked
down into the sewers of disaster-stricken Los
Angeles) had to choose between the lovely, young
Genevieve Bujold reaching down to help and his
alcoholic harpy wife Ava Gardner flailing around in
muck. Of course, his decision didn't bother me half
as much as the fact that Lorne Greene (58) played Ava
Gardner's(52) father and Heston's (50) father-in-law.
I decided to try and find
that movie poster too.
When
"The Towering Inferno" was released the
following year, 1974, an unusual thing happened. Even
though I was initially excited about it because it
was another disaster film, I came out of the film
having not only an appreciation of being able to tell
a story with intricately woven character threads, but
I also fell in love with the concept of architecture.
I quickly set to work on building a skyscraper with
my Lego's (I also had a sub-obsession with Bell
helicopters after seeing the film and bought myself a
toy one of those as well). To this day I have a
fascination with architecture that I can trace back
to this film. If I'd had a better mind for math and
engineering I would have been an architect, but I've
found as a writer that I'm always drawn to texts
where something interesting is done with the
"architecture" of the text (e.g. James
Joyce, William Faulkner, Italo Calvino, Alasdair
Gray). I soon had this poster on my bedroom wall,
too.
And then I saw "American
Graffiti," which was the first film that really
reached me on every level there was: artistically,
emotionally, stylistically, musically. In fact when I
saw the re-release in 1975 when I was 11 years old,
the soundtrack became the first real album I ever
owned. I played it over and over again, ostensibly
because the music was so exotic compared to what was
being played on the radio at the time. What better
crash course in popular music history could an 11
year old have? I soon found myself checking out books
on Fats Domino and Buddy Holly out of the school
library and, once again, found no one else I could
discuss my interests with. Before I knew it I was
bugging the manager of the Lewis & Clark Theatre
for six months to give me the one-sheet movie poster;
which he finally did when its run was over. No matter
how much I love the "Star Wars" films, I
still to this day think that "American
Graffiti" is a much better film than all of them
put together.
Suddenly
film meant much more to me than it ever had, which I didn't
think could happen because it already meant a lot to me. And
it wasn't until years later that I realized the bountiful
time I was growing up in and developing a love for film. I
personally think that from 1967 to 1982 was the golden age of
cinema in the United States and perhaps for the rest of the
world too, because it was during these years that the inmates
were running the asylum, as it were. The directors, actors,
writers and producers making films during these years were
more experimental than there had ever been a precedent for.
It
seemed like every week another masterpiece was being
released in these years. I remember sneaking into "Taxi
Driver" when I was 12 (after I had paid the
money to see "All The President's Men." Six
of one, half dozen of the other, eh?); cutting class
to catch "Apocalypse Now" on opening day
when I was 15 at the old Town theatre on 6th and
Pine; taking the good ol' 107 and 142 from downtown
Renton to downtown Seattle to catch films on the
weekend before I knew how to drive; when I was 16
missing a screening of the Sex Pistols film "The
Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle" cancelled at the
last minute because it had been stopped at customs;
seeing Citizen Kane on Thanksgiving when I was 17 at
the drafty, old, brick Rosebud theatre in Pioneer
Square;
sitting on my own in the
Renton Village Cinema every weekend when I was a kid and
getting to hear "Swingin' Safari" by Billy Vaughn
as I waited for the Disney movies to start.
Of course, when I bought my
first VCR when I was at Western Washington U, that was it.
The following year, 1985/86, I was the Film Programmer for the whole campus,
where I tried to bring as varied a selection of films as
possible.
My crowning achievement was bringing all 13 and a half hours
of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's "Berlin
Alexanderplatz" to Bellingham, only the fourth city (at
the time) to screen it. I also brought everything from
"Lawrence of Arabia" to "Spinal Tap";
Kenneth Anger's "Magick Lantern Cycle" to Pabst's
"3 Penny Opera"; Cocteau's "Orpheus," and
Victor Erice's Spanish film from 1974 "Spirit of the
Beehive," a film I loved so much I walked right back in
and saw the 9:00 showing after the 6:30 showing was over. A
beautiful film, I have my own copy of it on videotape now,
and I still think it's the most accurate depiction of
childhood I've ever seen, let alone all the OTHER layers the
film works on with the myth of Frankenstein, the reign of
Francisco Franco and the state of Spain itself.
I think this is a
tremendously exciting time for film because thanks to the
stylistic and budgetary ice-breaking of directors like
Matthew Harrison, major studios are realizing that
masterpieces can indeed be made for only spit and Kleenex. If
anyone has any questions, suggestions or ideas of how to make
the film section stronger, please don't hesitate to email me
at: malcolm(at)towerofbabel.com.
