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.