Six to Go

Going to the movies still makes me think of fried longhorn cheese and boiled ham sandwiches. My love affair with motion pictures began when I started primary school. All my summer vacations were spent on my grandparents farm, no matter where my career military father was stationed.

Saturday was shopping day for my grandmother and she needed at least 5 hours in town to get all the errands done. One of her most important stops was a trip to the butcher shop where she bought the makings for the those ham and cheese sandwiches. On weekdays at noon, she fried them with butter in a cast iron skillet for everyone taking a break from their chores. Ice cold, fresh milk from that morning capped off a hard-to-beat midday treat..

On the trip to town, what safer place in those days was there to park me for several hours than the Bijou Theater watching movies while she was shopping. I loved it. With a box of jujubes, a barrel of popcorn and good front seat in the balcony, I was set for the day. Although there were plenty of double features, I could watch the same movie two or three times, finding my favorite character and memorizing the dialogue. It just seemed natural.

I was hooked in no time. I really got interested by middle school and that's when I began to pay attention to the Academy Awards, By high school, I had a system and some rules. First of all, I had to see all the Best Film nominees, then Best and Supporting Actor and then Best Director.  I've added Best Song, Best Foreign Film and, now, just for my good friend Laszlo, I make sure I've seen all the Best Cinematography nominees.

With the Academy expanding the categories, especially Best Picture, it makes for quite a few movies to see. Another of my latter day rules is that I have to see the movies in a theater on a big screen.  DVDs are for "touch-up" watching where I'm focusing on a particular scene, character or bit of dialogue that I particularly like  When a film is good, there is no limit to the number of times I can watch it. I've already seen this year's "The Revenant" four times just to watch the amazingly scary grizzly bear scene.

In recent years, the proof of the pudding comes at my friend Laszlo's Academy Award party. You have to dress like a character from one of the nominated films and bring a covered dish. We vote on every category and we've had some 100% winners and several ties. Laszlo is an amazing film-maker, Academy-nominated and multiple Emmy-winning, he's opened so much about the film world to me. He and his now-departed Hungarian compatriots, who escaped together during the revolution there, all became giants in the Hollywood film industry. I've been fortunate to sit beside him in the executive producer and writer's chair on 8 documentary projects over the past three decades. I feel like I've earned a degree in film-making and it's made me love film even more.

Since I started my journey through film land, I've roughly calculated watching more than 3,000 films (not counting multiple-viewings). Film transports me to other worlds. Travelling, as I always have in my job, allows me to fill those empty evenings with a trip to someplace I've never been.  I have six films left to complete this year's list before the Red Carpet is rolled out on Sunday afternoon. With Jane strolling the beaches of Carmel-by-the-Sea with her girlfriends, I'll be able to grab my #1 big popcorn and drink and do some back-to-back watching this weekend to reach my goal.  I can almost smell the ham and cheese sandwich sizzling in the skillet already.

Too close for comfort...

It's one of those stories that never goes away.  Every February, there comes a mention of the kidnapping of Patty Hearst. It was a moment in time near the end of the Vietnam War that summed up the frustration and anger that had built up during that futile conflict. Even my career military father, then working for the government as a civilian, was at his wits end trying to figure a way out to no avail.

Three of the Hearst kidnappers were in school with us at Indiana University. Bill and Emily Harris and Angela Atwood found each other in California being drawn into the movement known as the Symbionese Liberation Army. Bill was a close friend of mine from high school who I helped coax into attending IU. Angela Atwood, or  Angel as we knew her, was a sorority sister of my wife Jane and sang in a campus band that I sometimes played with and managed for local gigs.

Bill and Emily and Angel were more like the rest of us at the time than you could imagine. We were all away from home, each beginning to find our way into the next part of our lives. Bill dropped out of school, joined the Marines and went to Vietnam. When he returned, he had indeed moved on but, unfortunately, the war sent him into a very dark place.

In the fall before the kidnapping, I spent some time with Bill at a campus outing and I could see the effects of his Vietnam tour beginning to bubble to the surface. He was very outspoken about the government and the affable personality that I had known from years earlier had been consumed by distress and negative emotions.

When the names of those associated with the kidnapping, who died in a house fire and shootout with the police, were released,  I had to listen twice to believe that Angel was one of those who was killed. And then in almost the same breath came the names of Bill and Emily Harris, who had escaped the fire with Patty. I simply could not believe what I was hearing. It just couldn't be THE Bill Harris...MY Bill Harris.  But it was.

The story goes on for decades. Initially, there were FBI phone taps, mail being opened and inspected, interviews with friends and family and regular check-ins with the agents in charge.Even midnight face-to-face encounters seeking refuge with some of us who were close to him. Then, two years later, Bill and Emily and Patty were captured.. There were trials and hearings and jail sentences all around. Pieces and parts of the story continue to resurface on a regular basis, even into the new millennium.

I wrote to Bill in prison during his first incarceration. His mental state at that time was still somewhere in the outland and clearly hard to track. Today, he is circulating amongst our old cohort from time to time, living now in Hawaii and seemingly doing fine.

The feelings and emotions that were in the heads of young people then were treading a very fine line. It was clearly too close for comfort. Our country is walking a line like that again today. And it's the young people who are a force to be reckoned with.  I hope we can get our priorities in focus and find our way down the right road. We are setting the stage for years to come..