The first movie I remember seeing in the movie theatre was Red Dawn. As a child it scared the shit out of me. Maybe seeing kids shot at point range by invading paratroopers looked way too real for a six year old. Over time I would fall in love with movies. Mostly I would see movies on TV edited or worse dubbed with phrases like “Forget you” replacing “Fuck you” and interrupted by commercials. John Hughes and Cameron Crowe would influence my childhood and adolescence often to my detriment. Today I still love the rom coms of the eighties even though the “nice guy” trope has become toxic in modern culture.

I remember the first blockbuster in my teens. It was a game changer seeing Michael Keaton play Batman against Jack Nicholson’s Joker. Today we rave about Heath Ledger in the Dark Knight but the Tim Burton Joker was the first step away from the campy Cesar Romero of the Batman TV show. Of course this wasn’t the first blockbuster. Indiana Jones and the Stars Wars franchise preceded Batman but this was the first time I got to experience the hype we experience every year through Marvel and the new Star Wars franchise. Around this time Video stores were popping up everywhere. As a kid I would go up the street and rent movies like When Harry Met Sally, maybe I was a hopeless romantic. There were goofy comedies and slasher flicks that would also catch my attention. Before that video store closed I rented Clerks also coincidentally the last day I was working at the first convenience store I worked at (there would be many more).

Clerks was the movie that made it look possible to make a movie. It was filmed in black and white, no famous actors in a convenience store. By this age I had wanted to be a screenwriter not knowing all it entailed. After watching my first Kevin Smith movie I’d write from time to time cliche’ ridden ideas with a heavy influence from John Hughes. Today I’m still trying.

So Blockbuster takes over the video store/ dvd rental landscape. For a while I worked at one. A friend and coworker would use our free rentals and we’d pass a blunt and watch. Not knowing at the time that ten minutes was the way screenplays were also judged on. If the movie sucked in the first ten minutes we knew it couldn’t be redeemed. Just the same way if a screenplay doesn’t work in the first ten pages it goes into the paper shredder. Somehow I missed what would become my favorite movie until years later.

True Romance, written by Quentin Tarantino and directed by Ridley Scott somehow slipped through the radar. It was released in the early nineties. The dialogue and gratuitous blood splatter that became Tarantino trademarks was a few years ahead of its time. I would find it in the 2000s watching Showtime late at night. Its a love story with drug smuggling and Mexican stand offs with cops and bad guys. If ever there were movies to influence my creativity in my twenties and thirties they were American Pie, True Romance and Clerks. That’s me in a nutshell. As I read screenwriting books I discovered new films at least to me. I’d go way back to Citizen Kane and back before talkies.

So every Monday I’m going to post about a movie I love. This is quite random. Sometimes it’ll be dumb as Freddy Got Fingered and other days The Godfather. If I can get people to turn off the reboot of a reboot and watch Duck Soup then my work is done.