Keeping a Really, Really Close Eye on the TV

One of the most peculiar movie-watching experiences I’ve had took place when I was in college, somewhere between three to 30 years ago. My very last semester was over, I’d more or less passed my finals, and I was packing my things to move out of my apartment. My apartment was slightly smaller than a hole in the wall, the rooms -- living area, bathroom and bedroom -- only accessible by dancing the grapevine. The offset that was deemed “the kitchen” by the assertive landlord had likely been conceived by an M.C. Escher fan, a convoluted, seemingly impossible design in which opening the refrigerator door would result in your left elbow banging against the right side of your head.

Despite the apartment’s miniscule size, packing everything up was a grueling task. I was only there for two years, but I never discarded anything, shoving all my papers and notes into drawers and inside the closet and underneath furniture. I could have been a participant on a spin-off of the A&E show, Hoarders: The College Years. On my final evening, anticipating a ride the following morning (with a stipulation that everything be ready for stockpiling the car), I realized that I was nowhere close to finishing. I decided to forego sleep and work through the night and early morning hours.

The problem with that plan was my eyesight. I see no greater than 20/400, which means that any person or object in my line of sight is nothing more than a blur. If my vision couldn’t be corrected, I would be legally blind. I’ve worn contact lenses for years, but back then, I didn’t have a pair of glasses for backup, at least nothing with a strong enough prescription. You can wear many contacts overnight, but my contact lenses in college were not the overnight variety, so I had to remove them and keep them out for about four hours. Consequently I worked blindly, in the literal sense. It was all a blur, but by this point, I was perusing stacks of papers and throwing away most of it. I was relatively safe. Walking outside to run up and down dilapidated, somewhat misshapen steps and launch a hefty trash bag over a railing when I could barely see a foot in front of me, now that was fairly stupid.
I had turned on the TV for noise, not because I couldn’t work in quiet but because I was trying to drown out my neighbor’s perpetually thumping bass. Then, at three o’clock in the morning, a station started running Orson Welles’ 1946 movie, The Stranger. Orson behind the camera. Orson in front of the camera. Edward G. Robinson and Loretta Young. That sounded good to me. Unfortunately, even sitting on a park bench with scratchy butt comforters (aka the couch) and leaning close, I was still only seeing an illuminated gray. So I knelt in front of the television, as if in prayer, the TV an altar. I planted my face mere inches away from the screen to watch Edward accuse Orson of being a Nazi and participating in war crimes. My eyes watered frequently, not so much from the dramatic engagement as from my ill-advised proximity to the TV and the cathode ray tube searing my corneas. During commercials, I would stretch my legs with a series of grapvines around the apartment, like a drunken Electric Slide (although, let’s be honest, anyone who dances that looks drunk). I also performed some blinking exercises and kept looking at my hands to verify that I could still see something. I think it’s a testament to the movie’s preeminence, that I would willingly suffer through all of that just to watch it.

By the morning, I was fully prepared for my departure with my contact lenses amending my poor vision once again. I loaded my driver’s car with no help and only requested a stop at a gas station, where I proceeded to fill an industrial-sized mug with strong coffee. I’m an avid fan of Orson Welles and his movies. While The Stranger may not be his best, I have fond memories of it, as I will always remember the first time I saw it. My eyes were glued to the TV, or at least they would have been, had I not already packed the glue. I’ve watched The Stranger since then and was happy to see that it was just as good, even when you aren’t in the TV’s personal space.

Ante Meridiem Theatre: Late Night Movie Watching Requires Stealth and Elasticity

Ante Meridiem Theatre is a place to focus on movies that used to crop up on television late at night into the early morning hours. This month, I thought I’d stick with the theme of Movie-Watching Memories and share with you the things that can happen when you stay up past your bedroom for a movie.

In my youth, a wide range of movies was not exactly at my disposal. The premium movie channels – HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, The Movie Channel (shockingly, only one of each) – were available to rich folk. Not that my family was poor. Let’s just say that my brother and I’s G.I. Joes didn’t convene at the coveted USS Flagg Aircraft Carrier but instead engaged in battle at the Barbie Dream Condo – though its three floors and elevator access made it ideal for snipers. But those guys who had the USS Flagg were the same ones watching HBO every night while I stayed at home and held a tape recorder up to a radio, waiting for the guitar solo before sneezing so I wouldn’t forever wonder what the lead singer was actually saying in the second verse.

Turn to a channel not in your dish package today, and you’ll just see a message telling you to upgrade. With basic cable, you saw snow, but sometimes, just beyond the snow, you could see movement. People. More specifically, actors. Acting out a movie. Crank the volume, and you could hear crackling voices reciting lines. The snow on the HBO channel we didn’t get was unrelenting. Nothing but snow. But on the other channels, all bunched together in sequence, films were often slightly visible and barely audible.

The quality of the movie pushing through the static varied. Cinemax would be nearly perfect one night and unwatchable the next. Sometimes a film on The Movie Channel couldn’t be seen on one TV but was drive-in quality on another. The television in the basement was the best, which was fitting since my mock bedroom was there – “mock” because the basement and my bedroom were all one room, separated by a desk and a bureau and a gun cabinet that acted as my closet but turned away from the community side of the room for, you know, privacy and what not. But one fateful night, at around two o’clock in the morning, the movie I was attempting to watch wasn’t very clear. I decided to risk checking the TVs on the first floor.

On the top floor, my stepfather, mother, sister and brother slept. When it was this late, watching anything on the TV in the TV room (my stepfather’s TV) was a little like juggling knives in the dark. You’d have to stand and listen by the stairs for any creaking to allot yourself ample time for fleeing. Fortunately, the stairs to the basement were adjacent to the TV room. On this particular night, however, the TV room TV was no better than the basement one. So I opted for the TV in the dining room, an ironic location as we were never allowed to watch TV while eating. The movie was Stripped to Kill (1987), which, of course, I had to see because I’d already seen Stripped to Kill II (aka Live Girls/1989), and I wanted to see if the first film would help the second film make more sense. As it turns out, they’re only related by title.

It was a cold night, and I was wrapped in a blanket, sitting uncomfortably in a wooden chair and watching a tiny television resting on a countertop, all atop two cabinets, like a faux desk. The good news: The movie looked amazing, like I’d bought a pristine VHS copy. The bad news: The dining room was farther away from the basement stairs than the TV room, and I didn’t realize that I hadn’t mapped out an escape route until I heard someone creaking down the stairs.

I quickly turned off the TV and ducked into the cubbyhole under the countertop. I pulled the chair as closely as I could, sitting with my knees against my chest. My stepfather appeared from around the corner and walked into the dining room, thankfully not turning on any of the lights. He stood next to a huge window and surveyed the backyard. He was maybe five feet away from me, and I could smell his Old Spice. I pulled the blanket up to my nose and held my breath. Finally and mercifully, he walked away, headed for the restroom. I waited patiently, frozen like a derelict statue. He finished his business and headed past the dining room and in the direction of the stairs, but I still couldn’t move, convinced that he’d seen me and was waiting around the corner. When my knees started cramping, I slowly pushed the chair away, crawled out from my nook, and half-jogged to the basement, not a stepfather in sight. I decided to catch the film some other time.

At the time, it was an unsettling experience. It didn’t prevent me from taking first-floor trips for marginally visible movies, but the dining room did become a quarantine zone. Years later, I saw Stripped to Kill in its entirety, and let me say: It’s no Stripped to Kill II.

Memories of Anastasia Romanov and "West Side Story"

Our month of movie-watching memories continues with a guest post by classic film blogger Jessica Pickens. You can read more reviews by Jessica at her blog Comet Over Hollywood.

I’ve always had a slightly obsessive nature when it came to movies I really liked. This tendency first surfaced in the third grade when my family went to see the animated film Anastasia. It is a cartoon about what could have happened to Russian princess Anastasia Romanov after the massacre of the royal family in 1918. I was hooked by the mysterious story and remember floating home that day in November 1997.

I listened to my cassette tape soundtrack every day, collected Anastasia memorabilia, became interested in Russian history and somehow thought that I could be the lost princess Anastasia--in short I drove my family crazy.

This Romanov obsession continued on and off until the seventh grade. In high school I introduced the movie to a boyfriend who wanted to watch it nearly every time we hung out. After this I got really tired of watching the movie.

We take this stroll down memory lane to 1997 as a prelude to what happened when I was 14 years old. In the summer of 2002 I had become more interested in classic film and was devouring Doris Day and Audrey Hepburn films.

That spring my dad introduced me to West Side Story, because he thought I would enjoy the musical version of a modern Romeo and Juliet. He later said he created a monster--my West Side Story obsession would rival my previous Anastasia craze.

I remember watching the movie awestruck. I thought the dances were amazing (and even tried to learn some) and the music was better than any other musical I had ever seen, though it bugged me that Natalie Wood's singing voice was very obviously dubbed by vocalist Marnie Nixon.

Richard Beymer as Tony was extremely attractive to me and it was weird seeing Russ Tamblyn playing a rough gang member when I was used to seeing him as sweet Gideon in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.

Above all, the thing that struck me the most was the ending. I knew it was a story based off Romeo and Juliet but somehow I hoped it had a happy ending, Tony's death was a real shock to me.

When the movie ended that night in March 2003, I wondered why Maria had lived and Tony had died. If she had died, maybe they could've been happy in the after-life. Now Maria has to live with her grief.

I understand now how much more powerful it is that Maria lives rather than dies. I think it makes her character stronger and proves more of a point with the racism theme that the film covers.

My obsession with West Side Story irritated my family--loving a three hour tear jerker can be tiring for your mother--but it opened up a lot of doors in the classic film world. It is why I have seen 432 musicals to date and it encouraged me to start seeing other classic films.

I think part of me was looking for another movie that was as moving as West Side Story--daring all other classic films to have the same impact on me.

While Anastasia was the first movie that I really loved, West Side Story made more of an impression on my life and interests.

Feel Free to Spoil the Ending

I’m sure it’s happened to anyone who’s an avid fan of movies. You’re watching something, and then suddenly you’re not. An hour or so into the movie, and it ends, but much earlier than intended. Maybe you’re at the theatre, and the film falls off the reel. Or you’re at home, and a thunderstorm knocks out the dish. Or you’ve rented a DVD, and the previous renter got his grubby hands all over the playing side and thought the best thing to do would be to clean it with his raggedy shirt, and the movie’s final thirty minutes are pixelated garbage because the disc looks as if it’s been scrubbed with sandpaper.

These days, it’s easier to find another copy of a movie, and if you’re desperate, you can peruse the full synopsis on Wikipedia. But way back whenever, it took a little more effort. You’d have to find someone who’d seen the entire film and beg them for a breakdown of the parts you’d missed. But chances are that person would be another movie buff and would refuse to reveal anything, not wanting to “ruin” it for you, regardless of how many times you screamed, “Ruin it! Ruin it!” in their face. The only remaining option would be to wait for a return trip to the theatre, wait for your local video store to replace its dreadful copy, wait for the movie to crop up on TV someday. A whole bunch of waiting. And then maybe some dinner, followed by more waiting.

The first time I can remember missing a rather significant chunk of a movie was when my siblings and I stayed with our aunt and uncle. My uncle pushed a VHS copy of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) into a VCR. I was only 10 years old and had never seen it. The movie opens with a spooky drive to the cemetery as Johnny and Barbra visit their father’s grave. My sister wondered aloud why Johnny was putting on black leather gloves, and the potential reasons seemed feverishly endless. Johnny deliberately scares his sister: “They’re coming to get you, Barbra!” And suddenly a man appears, but he’s really a ghoul, and he attacks Johnny, and Johnny hits his head on a tombstone, and is he dead? No time to check, as Barbra runs to the car, locks herself inside, but oh, no! She doesn’t have the keys, Johnny does, and seriously, is he dead? The ghoul smashes the car window, and Barbra shifts into neutral, and the car starts rolling to prospective safety, and it looks as if she’s made her escape, but the car hits a tree, and she has to jump out, and --

Snow. My uncle had stopped the movie. For the longest time, I thought he’d cut it off because it was terrifying my sister, but I learned much later that he feared my mother’s reaction if he’d shown us a zombie movie. But I’m not sure he realized what he’d actually done. I didn’t see Night of the Living Dead until I was in my teens, so for years, my curiosity was relentless: What happened to Barbra? Did she get away? Was she turned into a ghoul? And seriously! Is Johnny dead?!

I was most affected by a premature ending with Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964). I’d recently discovered the British auteur and was on a massive run of Hitch films. I saw that Marnie was going to be on TV, and for whatever reason, I had to ask my sister to set the VCR for me. There I sat, following along with Marnie’s thievery and the wavering relationship between Marnie and James Bond… or, well, Sean Connery’s character. Then Marnie’s riding horseback, and her horse is wild, and it hurdles a stone wall, collapsing from an injury. Marnie is horrified, and she retrieves a pistol and returns to her fallen steed. Hitch’s camera is aimed at her hand as she lifts the revolver, hammer cocked and --

Static, image clearing, two ladies on a talk show. My sister, unaware of the film’s running time (about 130 minutes, probably two and a half hours on TV), set the VCR for only two hours. I shuffled through a few choice words but had no way of learning how the movie ended. Years later, my uncle, perhaps to redeem himself for the Night of the Living Dead incident, showed me the last 30 minutes or so. And here’s the clincher: the image of Marnie holding the gun is the image that’s been seared onto my brain, and, worst of all, I’ve forgotten the ending.

Instances like that have happened since and will likely happen again. But every shoddy DVD can be replaced by another. Every disappearing dish signal can be vetoed by a few YouTube clips. Every busy schedule can be ridiculed by a DVR full of things to watch at your own convenience. So now if you miss a movie’s ending, you need not worry. You’ll find the ending somewhere. You may have to wait, but only for a few hours or days, not years. It’s a persistent speculation, running the possibilities through your head: What was the ending like? I mean, just imagine. You’re totally invested, you don’t know how everything will wind up, and then suddenly --

In the Summer of '79: Hot Nights in a Cool Theater with Friends

Terry B.--film buff, celebrity autograph collector, and one of the BEMAD guys--shares a memory from his college days. 

Movie patrons want to escape. They fortify themselves with popcorn, sodas, and candy. They settle in their seats waiting to be entertained and to watch a story unfold. Or, they might also just be trying to exchange a hot summer night for a cool, dark place to hang out without breaking the bank.

The Princess Theatre in downtown Bloomington, Indiana, was the place for all this in the summer of 1979.

It was when I spent my first summer at school, sharing an apartment with three other guys, and trying to find a job. If you’ve ever spent a summer in central Indiana, you know how hot and humid the weather can be. Being poor, we couldn’t afford to run the air conditioner in the apartment so nights spent in the University library were more to stay comfortable than to read and study.

But at least one evening a week, I made a trip to the Princess with my best friend. For $1, you got admission for movies that change every week. For $1 more, you could get popcorn and a soda. Favorite seat: main section, second row, second seat in. Be enveloped by that screen for two hours, kicked back in your chair, legs up over the row in front of you. Totally engrossed.

*sigh*

The movie fare that summer was intense. The moments I remember best included first marveling, then being bored, by the long shots of the redesigned USS Enterprise in beginning of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Samantha Eggar licking clean one of her “children” in David Cronenberg’s The Brood. David Warner fighting killer bats in Nightwing. And Season Hubley helping a confused George C. Scott search for his runaway daughter in Paul Schrader’s dark Hardcore.

Of course, it wasn’t necessarily the movie that mattered. It was great to stay cool, forget a job search for a while, and enjoy some time in the company of cinematic friends. And, of course, visit my favorite movie palace, one of thousands across the country, each with patrons who love them.

The Princess Theatre was built in 1892 and was often renovated to compete with newer theatres. It competed with several local opera and vaudeville houses before becoming a fulltime movie theatre in 1936. The exotic glazed relief terra cotta tile façade of the Princess Theatre was redesigned in 1923 and the auditorium doubled in size, in the hope of making it competitive with the recently built Indiana Theatre, a few blocks away. My favorite movie theater is now gone, killed in 1985 by the falling roof of its extended auditorium. The façade remains. So do my memories.

That was the summer of 1979 in Bloomington, Indiana.

A Life in (Front of) Movies

All this month, the Cafe will celebrate "movie-watching memories." Today's guest post is by Michael Nazarewycz who writes several personal blogs about films from all eras. Click here to check out Michael's blogs. Michael is also an Editorial Contributor at www.ManILoveFilms.com. His daily method of communication with his fellow film-lovers is via Twitter @ScribeHard.

James Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life.

My first-ever favorite actor was Jimmy Stewart. I’ll get to why later.

Jimmy Stewart—he of It’s A Wonderful Life and The Philadelphia Story and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and more classics than I have italics—was once quoted by Peter Bogdanovich as having said the following:

"An’ that’s the thing—that’s the great thing about the movies…After you learn—and if you’re good and Gawd helps ya and you’re lucky enough to have a personality that comes across—then what you’re doing is…you’re giving people little…little, tiny pieces of time…that they never forget.”

God bless Jimmy Stewart.

And he was more right than he realized. Not only are the movies little tiny pieces of time that we never forget, the movies are little tiny pieces of time that we live through. When we watch movies, we aren’t just bearing witness to history, we’re making history of our own—through decisions and events and circumstances that take place as part of the overall moviegoing experience. In fact, many of us can probably construct a timeline of our lives using all of those Little Pieces.

My timeline begins in 1974, at the Route 202 Drive-in theater in West Chester, Pennsylvania. I’m in my jammies and in the back seat of a gigantic Ford Thunderbird (and really, were there any small Thunderbirds in the early '70s?). The night’s double feature begins with Herbie Rides Again. I fall asleep during intermission and never get to see what the grown-ups watch.

Crowds lined up for Star Wars.

Fast-forward to 1977 and the Eric Theater at Tri-State Mall in Claymont, Delaware. The film is Star Wars, and in all of my visits to that mall—whether to see a movie or to get a brand new pair of Buster Browns (from the Shoe Boat, of course)—I’ve never seen a line at the mall’s theater so long. It’s my first event movie before such a phrase even existed.

Now, sometimes the memories of childhood are like the closets of childhood: messy to the point that you know what you are looking for is there, but you simply can’t find it and really wish you could.

Montgomery and Loy in
Petticoat Fever.

The next few years of my life are joyfully cluttered with Little Pieces, including Saturday horror on Creature Double Feature; some new-fangled television system called “cable,” which has entire channels that show nothing but movies (perhaps you’ve heard of it); and the Million Dollar Movie, where I watch my first old movie (if you don’t include those annual, network prime-time airings of such greats as The Wizard of Oz and The Ten Commandments). It’s a forgettable 1936 effort called Petticoat Fever, starring Robert Montgomery and Myrna Loy. Only it isn’t forgettable. I remember it. Well, at least I remember having watched it. It has since played on TCM, and I’ve recorded it, but I’m too attached to the perfection of the memory of watching my first old movie to risk spoiling that memory’s perfection with the film’s potential mediocrity.

Now it’s 1982, and I’m an 8th-grader at Holy Rosary Catholic Elementary School. I’m in the auditorium for what will be the last time my friends wheel in a projector and play Free to Be, You and Me for the entire school. I’ve seen the thing a half-dozen times, but never with the weight of an era’s end hanging around my neck. I’m devastated to have to say goodbye to the babies one last time.

It’s 1984, and I watch my first ... hmm. Let’s just say that for as much as my memory fails me about Petticoat Fever, it fails me not when it comes to my first adult film. That night could be a column unto itself.

The Little Pieces Timeline continues to build and build, and behind every movie is a story of what happens around seeing the movie. And for every memory I share here, there are dozens I keep to myself not to horde them, but because I have to stop typing at some point. But please know I want to share them all.

An engagement ring
hiding place!

They range from the Little Piece about my first VHS purchase (Lethal Weapon) to the Little Piece about hiding my wife’s engagement ring under a VHS copy of the first movie we saw together in the theater (Sleepless in Seattle), to the Little Piece about working at a video store, to the Little Piece about being an online film critic, to the Little Piece about crying with my kids at the end of certain films.

To the Little Piece. To the Little Piece. To the Little Piece. Until finally I have a fully-developed (yet far from complete) Little Pieces Timeline that rests with this Little Piece right now, my revisitation with you of some of my Little Pieces of Time.

Which brings us back to Jimmy Stewart, and the promise I made in the open that I would explain why he was my first-ever favorite actor.

It’s the Little Piece about my grandfather.

At some point in that big messy closet of my memory, my grandfather introduced me to and schooled me on the music of the Big Bands of his youth; in particular, the sounds of Glenn Miller and His Orchestra. With that education came repeated viewings of The Glenn Miller Story, starring Jimmy Stewart. It was through Stewart as Miller that my grandfather and I began a movie-based bond that ended not when he died, but when he was buried.

The VHS cover for The
Glenn Miller Story.

You see, the Little Piece about my grandfather is not about watching the movie with him, but about the VHS copy of The Glenn Miller Story that I bought him one year for his birthday, that we would revisit on occasion, and that I placed in his casket the day he was buried.

Between you and me, that’s a big Little Piece.

So, with one clever phrase, my first-ever favorite actor summarized my movie-going life in a way 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 words never could.

God bless Jimmy Stewart and his Little Pieces of Time.

Why "Halloween" Made Me Nauseous—It’s Not What You Think!

A BEMAD ad from the Indiana
Daily Student newspaper.

The only thing that can rival the joy of watching a movie with a few close friends is showing a movie to a few hundred strangers. Of course, these are very different experiences. One is about sharing one’s love of movies. The other is about putting on a show!

When I was a junior at Indiana University in the late 1970s, four friends and I formed an organization that showed movies to raise money for our dorm floor. Using the first letter of each of our last names, we called our group BEMAD Productions. BEMAD showed 16mm films at various locations on the Bloomington campus, charging from $1 to $1.50 per student. Our eclectic choice of films included: The Pink Panther; Start the Revolution Without Me; Fellini’s Casanova; Enter the Dragon; Horror of Dracula; and several of the James Bond films. Our biggest hit—prior to 1980—was a Halloween night showing of Night of the Living Dead.

Most show biz stories center on a tenacious rivalry and this one is no exception. The largest film-showing organization on campus was called the Union Board. It received funds from each student as part of a required “activity fee.” As a result, Union Board was well funded and could afford to show the most current 16mm film releases, which sometimes cost as much as $425 for a one-day rental (vs. 50% of the gross profits). BEMAD, which covered its own expenses, couldn’t compete with those exorbitant prices. Furthermore, Union Board got first dibs on current releases because it booked so many films with the 16mm rental companies.

However, things changed in the spring of 1980. Due to graduations, BEMAD’s active members had dwindled to three of us. We only showed films on an occasional basis and donated our profits to the Film Studies Office in the Comparative Literature Department. Terry, BEMAD’s “booker” extraordinaire, had cultivated strong relationships with several of the rental companies. So, one of them contacted Terry when John Carpenter’s Halloween was released on 16mm. Since Union Board’s schedule for the semester was already set, Halloween was available—but at a cost of $500 for a two-day rental vs. 50% of the profits.

The temptation to “scoop” Union Board was great, but the cost seemed prohibitive. We were particularly concerned with showing Halloween in March instead of October—especially since it had played theatrically for a long time at the Princess Theatre, Bloomington’s $1 movie house. That’s when the film company’s rep suggested that we just put the rental on a credit card. We wouldn’t have to pay anything upfront—and surely we’d make more than $500 to cover the cost. The only problem was that, as poor college students, we didn’t have a credit card.

I did, however, have my father’s credit card…which he gave me for use in an emergency. Didn’t the chance to be the first campus organization to show Halloween qualify as “an emergency”? Besides, I wouldn’t even have to tell Dad because the credit card wouldn’t be charged unless we failed to make $500—and that would never happen!

Everything went smoothly prior to the big night. We booked an auditorium in the Business Building. Advertised in the Indiana Daily Student newspaper. Put up 200 flyers all over campus. Procured two projectors. Got a roll of tickets and money for the till.

By 6:30 on Friday night, we were all set up and ready to reap in huge profits. Twenty minutes prior to the first show time—when patrons usually started to drift in—no one was there. At 6:50, I peered into the auditorium and counted about a dozen people. I sat down on the steps of the projection booth as a wave of nausea washed over me. I envisioned myself explaining to Dad how I had spent $500 on a movie rental using his credit card—and lost about $400! How could I have possibly placed myself in such a horrible, embarrassing situation?

And then…people started to arrive…in big bunches. By 7:05, the auditorium was full and John Carpenter’s eerie music was playing over the credits. We sold out almost every show at the 7, 9, and 11 PM showings on Friday and repeated the feat on Saturday. I don’t even remember how much we made, but it was more than enough to cover the full rental cost and allow for a generous donation to the Film Studies Office.

My friend Terry (right) told our Halloween
story to John Carpenter many years later.

I still keep in touch with three of my BEMAD pals. Often, when we start reminiscing, we ramble on for hours about the time we borrowed a coffin to promote Night of the Living Dead or the blizzard that provided a captive audience for The Creature from the Black Lagoon in 3D or the time the projectionist (me) watched the flick as the film unraveled on the floor instead of onto the take-up reel. Today, I can even reflect fondly on the night that Halloween made me nauseous.