Film Geek

- This is a story about a boy,

his dad, and the movies.

This is the story of my cinema-fueled youth

in New York City.

My name is Richard Shepard.

I grew up in the 1970s and early '80s.

Back then, the city streets were dirty and tough.

The subway's dangerous.

It was a time of crime and grime and psycho killers

and Reggie Jackson.

And the birth of punk and the birth of hip hop.

It was a golden time.

New York was my home,

and even though the city could be an intimidating

and steaming cesspool of anger and edge,

it was all I knew and I felt like I owned it.

And movies were a large part of that ownership.

Maybe the biggest part.

I was surrounded by film.

I surrendered to it.

I went to the movies, made Super 8 movies,

collected movie posters and soundtracks, read movie books,

became obsessed by movie reviews and movie advertisements

and movie trailers.

I loved movie theaters and the smell of popcorn

and the smell of mildew and Lysol

because many of those theaters were old and fading

and full of weird New Yorkers getting lost in the dark.

I escaped into the movies.

They became a lifeline to me,

a punk rock cinematic mosh pit out of the ordinary.

The egomaniacal film director floating down

from the sky in "The Stuntman."

The Playboy bunnies escaping the rowdy soldiers

in "Apocalypse Now."

The sexy girl rollerskating

through the giant loft in "Diva."

The baby that was really a doll,

that was really a bomb in "Marathon Man."

I remember it all.

It's strange.

So many memories of my youth have started to fade,

but when it comes to the films I saw back then,

my memory is agile, fresh.

And it's not just the famous movies,

it's all the films I went to then.

The horror films, the foreign films,

the second-rate dramas, and exploitation pictures.

How is that?

Why do the films stick when so much else fades?

This was before streaming, before cable, before Blu-Ray.

There was regular commercial TV, of course.

And VHS and Betamax if you were fancy,

but if you really wanted to see a movie,

you went to the theater, you went at an appointed hour,

you went with people who meant something to you.

You sat in the dark

and let the stories take you where they might.

And because of that, each outing to a movie was an event,

something you remembered.

Even the shitty movies, even "Cujo," even "Death Wish II,"

even "Friday the 13th Part III," in 3D,

which I saw at the Loew's Orpheum on East 86th Street,

and when one of the characters stretched her arms

straight to the 3D camera,

offering another character a joint,

my entire audience reached out their hands to get a toke.

This is a story of the movies in my youth,

the years before I went off to college,

of the films I saw

and the experiences I had watching them.

It's also a story of a movie-crazed New York City,

and it's also a story about my father,

a loving, but often mysterious man

who had no discernible job,

went by three or four different names,

had an incredible connection

and fascination with the city's underbelly

and whose love of movies helped foster my own cinematic DNA.

Like the story structure of many of the movies my dad

and I saw when I was a kid,

let me start at the ending.

Not the ending ending, but close enough.

Obviously, the scene takes place at a movie theater,

the Cinema Studios 1 on the Upper West Side.

It's my senior year in high school

and the film playing there is "Winter Kills,"

starring Jeff Bridges and John Huston.

My father and I hadn't heard much about it

other than it was star studded.

It was supposed to be good,

and it was a conspiracy movie, which sounded fun.

A conspiracy.

A conspiracy?

- By this point in high school,

I rarely went to the movies with my parents.

I had friends and girlfriends

and it just wasn't something we did that often anymore.

But my dad was excited about this film

and even though I probably would've preferred to see it

with my buddies, I went with him instead.

I could tell that it meant something to him

to have this experience with me back at the movies

where we had spent so much time together as I grew up.

Little did we know what was in store for us.

"Winter Kills" was truly a bonkers film.

Funny, surreal, and deep.

It blew my 17-year-old movie-addled brain

splat against the back wall of the theater.

It was a brilliant take on the Kennedy assassination.

It was also an uncommonly compelling love story

and the darkest family saga you could fucking imagine.

In the finale, John Huston desperately clings

onto a giant American flag

50 floors above a Manhattan street.

I mean, what's not to love?

And love it, I did.

I was hooked on the film.

I love the twisty complex story, the way it looked.

The beauty of Belinda Bauer as a mysterious woman

who may or may not be fucking with Jeff Bridges' heart.

Mostly I love the surreal touches,

how every time a smiling lady on a bicycle rode by,

something very bad happened.

The movie was thrilling and hysterical

and a real cinematic high

because the director danced on a razor blade of tones

and wildly pulled it off.

I quickly needed to know everything about this filmmaker.

I found out his name was William Richert.

I learned that he rented a house in Malibu on the same block

as Jeff Bridges so he could get to know him as a neighbor,

and then he sprung his script on him.

He told John Huston Elizabeth Taylor was attached

before she was and told Elizabeth Taylor

that John Huston was attached before he was,

and he somehow got both of them to be in the movie.

It had taken Richert years to get this movie made.

When "Winter Kills" was finally released,

the film was dumped.

And soon after, the producer got murdered by the mob.

Richert was now bankrolling a re-release himself.

The story of the life of the movie was almost as intriguing

as the movie, and the movie was fucking intriguing.

I was jacked up by "Winter Kills."

Walking home with my father that cold Saturday in January,

I couldn't stop talking about it.

I was full of questions and critiques and insights.

I wanted to talk about the batshit crazy script,

the indelible score, whether Belinda Bauer would marry me.

I was in a film fanatic frenzy.

My father lit up a cigar and smiled at me on the street.

He was smiling because he finally understood me.

He finally understood

why I was failing nearly all my classes,

why I was constantly cutting school to go to the movies,

why my college admissions counselor worried

I wouldn't get into any school.

He finally understood why I could just

as easily go nuts over horrible films

like "Forced Vengeance" or "Faces of Death,"

as I could over great ones like "Winter Kills."

I wasn't just a movie lover like he was.

I was a true movie geek.

Good, bad or indifferent,

if it was projected against a screen, I devoured it.

My father understood that his passion

for great movies transferred to me, had been altered,

genetically mutated, so that I connected deeply

to all movies, everything to do with movies.

I had become the Frankenstein monster

to my father's Dr. Frankenstein.

How did it happen?

In what lab was this movie monster created?

"King Kong" was the first film I remember seeing.

I was five or six and I was captivated,

lost completely in that exotic black-and-white world.

The whole thing, the tattered map,

the strange island, the giant ape, the dinosaurs,

this woman's scared by the beast, but also taken with him.

"Why did they ship this ape from the island?"

I asked my father.

"Why did they torture him?

Why did they kill him?"

I saw it at a theater that I only went to once,

somewhere on the east side of Manhattan.

I remember they served hamburgers

and soda when you watched the film.

I remember loving being there with my dad

and I remember my father and I went for hot chocolate

at Rumpelmayer's on Central Park South after the film.

And I remember it as a perfect day.

The 1933 "King Kong" captured my imagination in a way

that it still does to this day.

I watched the film religiously as a child

whenever it was on TV.

I even wrote an article about it when I was nine,

about seeing the movie so many times.

I tried to get it published in a magazine.

I can only imagine the editor's face seeing