Original subtitles

[film whirring]

Downloaded from YTS.MX

[pencil scratching]

Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX

[tape machine whirring]

[upbeat music]

- [Richard] 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?

- [Richard] 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.

[melancholic music]

[bomb exploding loudly]

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.

[light music]

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.

[dramatic music]

How did it happen?

In what lab was this movie monster created?

[dramatic music]

[King Kong growling]

[Fay Wray screaming]

"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?"

[dramatic music]

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

this handwritten screed of a young little film nerd.

What could he have thought reading it?

What did I say?

That article is missing, but my memories of the film remain.

New York City was where Kong was taken

and it was where I lived and it made a huge impression.

I thought for sure that what happened in

that movie happened in real life.

Later in 1976, they remade "King Kong" with Jeff Bridges

and Jessica Lange.

The World Trade Center replaced the Empire State Building.

I was 11 and saw it with my dad again.

I thought I was good, but I was adamant that it wasn't

as good as the original,

adamant as only an 11-year-old could be.

My father truly loved movies.

And I loved my dad, so it's not strange

that I followed his heart

towards the flickering images in the darkness.

He was a man of big ego and style.

My dad was a loving man,

but mysterious too with various names and various jobs,

many of them illegal.

He was a small time loan shark, a gambler,

an antiques trader who was always looking for an edge.

Stained envelopes with money were slipped under our door

when I was growing up.

Phone calls from strange men asking for Jack,

even though my dad's name was Bob, were regular occurrences.

My dad scrambled by, survived, provided.

My parents and I lived a nice middle class life

though I never knew what really went into it.

I grew up in a rent- controlled apartment.

My mom and dad rarely ate out,

but we would go away for the summers

and I never wanted for anything.

It was a life of privilege,

even if that privilege I now know was flimsy,

built on dreams and cons.

[light music]

My father collected antique toys and old books,

mostly on art or boxing or the history of the movies,

but most of all my dad was an artist,

a sculptor, a collagist.

He lived an artist's life

though he never sold any of his work.

He was a true individual, a true New Yorker,

who slept till noon most days, ate onions like apples,

read voraciously, under tipped famously,

could be rough and rude, but warm and charming too.

He told me that when he was a boy,

the movies were an escape from his tough father.

He'd sneak off with his cousin, Leonard,

to the Museum of Modern Art

and watch old films that screened there.

My dad would tell me about those films,

describe his favorites.

Later as an adult,

I put my dad in a few of my small indie films.

He wasn't an actor, but he was a natural.

He was so happy seeing

how the process of a movie actually went,

how the art form he loved was crafted.

I had him play a bartender in both films,

even though my dad rarely drank

and he didn't really frequent bars.

It just seemed right for him.

Bars were full of characters

and my father certainly was one.

When he died of cancer at age 73,

I dedicated the film I was directing, the black comedy,

"The Matador," with Pierce Brosnan, to him.

The end card said, "For my dad, who loved movies."

The second movie that I remember seeing was

at a school friend's birthday party.

It was in a private screening room in a midtown

Manhattan office building.

The film was "Willy Wonka,"

and it filled my 6-year-old heart with joy.

The colors, the songs, the kids in it,

the candy, the winning ticket.

[kids shrieking]

- Little surprises around every corner,

but nothing dangerous.

- [Richard] I remember being delighted by Willy.

He was kind and then mean and then kind again.

That was important to me.

Did I yet know that it was an actor playing that part,

that Willy Wonka wasn't a real man,

that it was in fact Gene Wilder,

a person I would go on to adore in "The Producers"

and "Blazing Saddles,"

and "The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother,"

a movie that made me laugh so hard I couldn't breathe?

Gene Wilder was such a brilliant performer.

He had the warmest eyes.

It seemed like my parents

and I would go to the movies all the time.

It was just what we did as a family.

Cartoons, musicals.

One of my favorites was "The Adventures of Robin Hood,"

that I first saw at a revival theater

on the Upper West side near where I lived.

My mother had always joked

that my father purposely cultivated an Errol Flynn vibe.

I didn't know what that meant until they took me to see it.

Watching Errol Flynn in that film was like looking at my dad

up on the screen,

only he was sword fighting and saving Maid Marian

and hanging with his friends in Sherwood Forest.

I fell in love with the movie,

with the idea of my father as the hero.

Later, it was on TV,

and while we only had a black- and-white Zenith television,

in my mind, I always saw the film

and the beautiful color I watched it in originally.

The Sheriff of Nottingham was played by Basil Rathbone,

such a great name, who had played Sherlock Holmes

and I'd see those films on TV too.

"The Hound of the Baskervilles,"

"Terror by Night."

I borrowed a pipe of my father's and a hat from my mother

and played Sherlock Holmes in my bedroom mirror.

I did a lot of shows in that mirror.

My first plays, my first stories, my first movies,

playing all the parts using wigs and disguises.

I'd watch Abbott and Costello movies on Sunday morning TV.

I'd watch the Marx Brothers and "The Thief of Baghdad,"

and "Gunga Din," and "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,"

and "The Wizard of Oz."

I still remember being six or seven

and going upstairs to my friend Amy Seplin's apartment

on the 11th floor to rewatch "The Wizard of Oz" with her

and getting so scared by the flying monkeys

and the Wicked Witch that I ran back to my parents.

My mother was waiting for me on the fifth floor

with the front door opened.

My mom knew that the only way I could watch

those scary scenes was with her protectively by my side.

My mother, Arpy, that's A-R-P-Y, it's Armenian,

I'm half-Armenian,

went to the Fashion Institute of Technology,

and worked for a small design house before I was born.

She quit that job to raise me though she still did

the most beautiful fashion sketches when I was growing up.

Clearly her heart was still in that world,

even if her dream had been deferred.

"Vogue" magazine and "Women's Wear Daily" used

to be delivered to our apartment,

and my mother was always stylish and beautiful,

and I still remember the various silk scarves she'd wear.

She was bright and kind and adored me and my father.

My mom's friend, Hannah,

said that my mom would've died a virgin

if she hadn't met my dad.

I'm not sure about that, but she loved him enormously

and put up with

and even embraced his various eccentricities.

He opened a world for her

that she clearly wanted to explore.

Wake up at 4AM so we could drive two hours

and be the first people at some strange flea market

my father wanted to go to in New Jersey.

No problem.

Wait in the car when my father broke

into some abandoned building in the Bronx to look

for twisted scrap metal for his sculptures.

Yep, we did that too.

If my mother had a problem with any of it,

I certainly didn't know.

This was the life they made for each other.

She was the one who took me to ice skating lessons

and birthday parties in school.

She was the one waiting for me

when I came home terrified from watching "Wizard of Oz."

He was the one who, most cinematically,

while giving my mother driving lessons one Sunday afternoon,

saw a purse snatching in progress,

yelled at my mom to step on the gas.

[car roaring]

And chased the muggers two blocks.

[dramatic music]

Until my dad, this Upper West Side Popeye Doyle wannabe,

stopped them by using his black eyeglass case as a mock gun.

[tires screeching]

- [Actor] Hold it!

- [Richard] This happened.

I was in the backseat of the car when it did.

Terrified and thrilled at the same time

as the muggers dropped the purse,

somehow believing that my dad's eyeglass case was a weapon

and that all undercover police cars are supposed

to have a terrified 10-year-old kid in the backseat.

It should be noted that my mother kept her calm

behind the wheel the whole chase,

like Roy Scheider's character in "The French Connection."

She was a partner you wanted to have.

[screaming]

There are three significant

moments at the movies

that scared the shit

out of me in my youth.

The first one happened when I was around seven.

My parents and I were staying

at the Mohonk Mountain House Hotel,

which would remind me of the hotel in "The Shining,"

and they were showing a movie

in their grand ballroom one night and we all went.

It was the 1964 film, "Wait Until Dark," with Audrey Hepburn

as a blind woman being terrorized by criminals.

I remember nothing about that movie except for one moment

where Audrey Hepburn comes into her dark apartment.

[suspenseful music] [Audrey Hepburn screams]

The fear I felt, the scream I gave,

the feeling in the pit of my stomach, the tears.

To say that I was scared shitless would be

an understatement.

I was scarred, permanently altered.

Yet it did not deter me.

If my parents wanted to show me a movie, any movie,

I would go.

No complaints.

My father had many movie books

and we'd sit in the living room,

the smell of his sweat and cigar smoke filling my lungs,

and flip through them,

going deep after an old film we'd have seen.

He'd show me pictures of other movies with the same actors,

explain the plots of films made by the same director.

I became obsessed by Fritz Lang

before I saw a frame of "Metropolis."

I knew almost every Hitchcock cameo

and could name almost every single one of his films.

I might've been the only little kid who knew

who Edward Everett Horton was and my obsession

with that wonderful 1930 supporting performer

started a lifelong love of character actors.

My father curated everything.

It was through him that I learned

to find pleasure in old black-and-white movies,

in Edward G. Robinson and Barbara Stanwyck,

and Sydney Greenstreet,

in films that were famous and films that were lost in time.

And I was the perfect student,

asking question after question,

hanging on my father's every word,

his every piece of film lore,

and it wasn't only older movies that I was seeing.

As I grew up, my parents started taking me to new releases.

"Murder on the Orient Express, "Paper Moon."

- Crazy!

- [Richard] "The Sting."

"Young Frankenstein."

[Frankenstein monster grunting]

- Let me out, let me out of here.

Get me the hell out of here.

- [Richard] But only after my father took me

to see the 1935 James Whale film, "Bride of Frankenstein,"

downtown at the Theatre 80 St. Marks.

He wanted me ready to get all the jokes in Mel Brooks' film.

The Theatre 80 was soon

to become my favorite revival theater in the city.

It was a small cinema where the projector was actually

behind the screen

and the Art Deco concession bar was a thing of beauty.

For years, I would always get an extra sense of excitement

if I knew we were going to see a movie there.

It was downtown, slightly scary and foreign to me,

as if we were transported to another Manhattan.

At nine, I remember going with my mom and dad

to the ornate and majestic Ziegfeld Theatre in Midtown

to see the "Towering Inferno."

Two studios had competing fire in big building movies

based on two different books,

and they decided to combine the projects

into one mega all-star multi studio.

Paul Newman and OJ Simpson

and Fred Astaire in the same movie movie.

I was too young to notice the cardboard acting.

Too young to know that Paul Newman

and Steve McQueen fought over billing,

and contractually had to have an equal number of lines.

I just thought it was thrilling.

I was so taken with it that I actually read one of the books

that was based on and at that point in my life,

I barely read anything.

It was the beginning of my seeking books or articles

or albums or posters of the movies I saw.

If I loved it, I wanted more.

"Earthquake" was another all-star disaster movie,

and it was advertised as being in Sensurround,

which was supposed to make you feel like you were really

in an earthquake.

That was enough for me to drag my father to it.

I remember getting to the movie theater early

and checking under the seats.

I was sure that each chair was wired

to shake like a 7.0 big one.

Unfortunately, that wasn't the case.

Sensurround was just

low frequency noises on the soundtrack.

Still, the movie exceeded my expectations.

I had never been to Los Angeles,

but I loved seeing it destroyed.

At the end of the film, my father told me

that the drunk at the bar in the movie,

who was so wasted that he wasn't phased by the earthquake,

was a cameo by an actor named Walter Matthau.

I didn't know who that was,

but I was about to find out.

Going to "The Bad News Bears" with my childhood friend,

Mark Gregory Peters,

was the first movie I can remember seeing

without my parents.

I had just turned 11.

And as Mark and I headed to the Paramount Movie Theatre,

I held onto my ticket money tightly.

This was New York City in 1976.

The streets were dangerous

and we all weren't Charles Bronson.

People got mugged on a regular basis.

I did at least.

"The Bad News Bears" seemed like it was made just for us.

It made us laugh and was outrageous and rude,

and we were so happy we didn't see it with our parents.

[motorbike crashing]

The swearing.

- Hey, Yankees!

You can take your apology out of your trophy

and shove it straight up your ass!

- [Richard] The sheer off coloredness of it.

- [Coach Morris] Timmy Lopez.

- Lupus. - Lupus.

- 'Cause that booger-eating spaz makes me wanna puke.

- [Richard] Can you imagine a studio movie made today

where a character is named Lupus?

- Hey, my uniform's too small.

- Ah, shut up.

- [Richard] I love Walter Matthau in it.

His grumpiness with just a hint of sweetness.

I thought he was so funny.

- Still here.

- [Richard] Soon after I would see Matthau on TV

in the movie, "The Taking of Pelham 123."

They showed that film constantly.

It felt like it was on every Saturday,

and that was okay with me because I loved it.

I still do.

It was such a tense New York City thriller,

gritty and grimy.

If you wanna know what living

in the city in the mid-'70s was like, this movie is it.

- Hey!

- Now you listen to me, you dumb son of a bitch.

- [Richard] Each part of the plot works like clockwork

with a funny and wise Matthau

and a perfectly menacing Robert Shaw,

who I remembered from "The Sting,"

and David Shire's intense music and the ending.

I still think it might be the best movie ending ever.

A train and its passengers has been hijacked for ransom.

One of the criminals has a terrible cold,

and every time he sneezes over the radio

to the transit cop played by Matthau,

Matthau says.

- Gesundheit.

[man sneezes]

Gesundheit.

- [Richard] At the end,

after almost all the criminals are caught or dead,

Matthau and another cop, Jerry Stiller,

are looking for disgruntled ex-subway employees

who they suspect might be the last missing criminal.

They come to Martin Balsam's shitty apartment.

He's got a share of the ransom money on the bed

and thinks he's gotten away with the crime.

There's a knock at the door.

He nervously hides the money in the stove

and lets the cops in.

Things are tense.

- Where were you, say, afternoon, Mr. Longman?

- Right here.

- [Richard] But they eventually leave.

As the door is closing,

a relieved Balsam suddenly sneezes.

[man sneezes] - Gesundheit.

[door thuds]

[door creaks]

[upbeat music]

- [Richard] Very few movie endings are that satisfying.

Maybe the original "Planet of the Apes,"

maybe "The Third Man," maybe "The Godfather."

Maybe.

[upbeat music]

It was about this time that I started noticing

that my father wasn't quite like everyone else's.

He didn't seem to care much about rules or decorum

or even laws.

One day, my mother couldn't get a reservation

for their friends and us to a popular restaurant,

so my father called

and pretended to be Henry Kissinger's assistant,

calling from the White House

and said that Dr. Kissinger's important guests

from overseas needed to get a table,

and like Peter Sellers's in "Dr. Strangelove."

- Mr. President.

- [Richard] My father then spoke in a thick German accent

at the best table in the place for the rest of the evening.

Another day, he came home

with a giant 1940s Coca-Cola advertising sign

that he collected in the middle of the night

from the side of an old building.

The fact that the building was

a working New Jersey diner was never discussed.

Many of the old movies my father

and I watched together were

about lovable rogues and rascals.

It all seemed so normal to me, almost familiar,

but weren't parents supposed to be different?

Weren't they supposed to follow rules, decorum, and laws?

My dad didn't carry a gun like Bogart,

but I wouldn't have been surprised if he had.

Was I embarrassed by any of this?

Honestly, no.

That would change, but at this point in my life,

I was too in love with my father to care.

He was different, sure,

but in my eyes, he could do no wrong.

Mark Gregory's parents, Adrienne and Tony Peters,

had a small vacation cottage in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania,

and during the summers,

I would sometimes go up there with them.

One of my favorite parts of going was

that there was a drive-in nearby

that showed exploitation pictures,

and we could see the screen from his dad's convertible

when we would go into town to get ice cream.

It seemed like we'd always pass at the perfect moment,

a woman's prison battle, a brutal decapitation.

[glass shattering]

A fist flying ninja fight.

Needless to say, we wanted ice cream

every night of every weekend we were there.

Soon after the drive-in started showing porno films,

which I guess is something that happened

in the '70s in America.

Anyway, one night as we were going

to get our chocolate chip mint ice cream cones,

we passed the theater and there, on the big outdoor screen,

I saw my first blowjob.

It was only for like five seconds, 120 frames of scratchy,

blurred erection and lips, but it seared into my body

and soul like a dirty cinematic tattoo.

Obviously, Mark's parents were not pleased,

and the ice cream trips ended soon after.

A few years later, I was at summer camp.

It was a baseball archery swimming sort of day camp,

bug juice and tether ball,

but my favorite part was whenever it rained,

they would pull out this creaky old 16-millimeter projector,

pack us into this damp, rickety wood building,

and show us a movie,

or at least as much of a movie as was necessary

to weather the rainstorm.

They had a few stock films.

"The Sound of Music" always bored me,

but sometimes if it was gonna be days of rain,

they'd rent a 16-millimeter print of a recent film.

One wet afternoon,

they decided to show us the action movie, "Breakout,"

starring Charles Bronson, Robert Duvall,

and Bronson's wife, Jill Ireland,

who I recognized from an episode of "Star Trek,"

a show which I was obsessed with.

Here I am as Mr. Spock for Halloween.

The braces are a nice touch.

I wish I could go back in time

and try to understand the mindset of the camp director

who thought that showing a bunch of boys age 8 to 13,

a brutal prison escape movie was a good idea.

Reel after reel,

we saw scenes of excessive violence and tawdry melodrama.

It was fantastic, like some brutally exploitive,

sweaty gift from the movie gods.

[plane roaring]

Finally, in a sequence where a hooker undresses

and we see her naked rear end,

the camp counselors came to their senses

and the projector was abruptly and rudely turned off.

[projector stops whirring]

We sat in darkness.

The only noise being the sound of the rain pouring down

on the roof outside

and the disappointed sighs of every kid in the place.

Was "Breakout" a good movie?

Did it contribute to my cinematic education?

I don't know, but to remember a film 40 plus years on,

to revere it is something.

It has to be something.

[man screaming] [suspenseful music]

Soon after my summer of "Breakout,"

I went with my parents

to the Tower East Theatre on 71st Street

and Third Avenue to see a film

on the opposite end of the cinematic spectrum,

one of the greatest movies ever,

Alan Pakula's "All The President's Men,"

about the true story of Woodward and Bernstein,

and the Nixon Watergate scandal.

I had never seen a like that with that intensity.

- [Dahlberg] I know I shouldn't be telling you this.

I gave it to Mr. Stans.

- I beg your pardon?

- [Dahlberg] I gave it to Stans.

- Maurice Stans?

The head of finance for Nixon?

- [Dahlberg] Yes, in Washington.

- [Richard] I didn't understand everything

or maybe barely anything,

but I understood enough.

I got that it was good, that it was deep,

that it was about something.

At dinner at a restaurant after,

I sat and listened to how adults actually talked

about movies. Passionate, intelligent film lovers,

arguing, cajoling, going deep.

Occasionally, I would ask a question,

but mostly I just listened.

Later, I would re-watch the film

and get lost in the details.

The brilliant acting and writing,

the eerie wide shots, the scary conspiracy,

in the bright light of day

and the dark shadows of parking garages full of secrets.

If asked, I usually say that "The Godfather II" is

the greatest American movie ever made,

but "All The President's Men" is right up there.

I knew it even then.

Soon after, I saw "Rocky"

at the Loew's 86th Street movie theater,

which was across the park from where I lived.

What a movie going experience.

Hard to imagine it now where we watch movies on our couch,

but there was an entire packed audience filled

with mostly adults cheering at the screen,

cheering at every punch.

My parents were cheering.

To this day,

I think it's one of the most perfect screenplays

ever filmed.

Written quickly, legend has it, in three days

by Sylvester Stallone,

who was struggling mightily at the time,

appearing in porn movies to pay the rent.

One of those X-rated films was released

as "The Italian Stallion" after Rocky became a hit.

- I've been hired by Stallion Releasing Company

to supervise the editing of this new X-rated film,

"The Italian Stallion,"

with Sylvester Stallone in the starring role as Stud.

- [Richard] Stallone turned down big money

to sell his script for "Rocky,"

so he could star in the film himself.

He knew it was his shot.

The movie was made down and dirty in 20 days

by the director John G. Avildsen,

who happened to live in the same building

where I eventually lost my virginity on East 89th Street,

a useless fact stuck in my head for four decades.

With "Rocky," Avildsen and Stallone created something

that was emotional and intricate,

thrilling and uplifting.

The training scenes were great, gritty, and tough,

but I also connected to the smaller quieter moments,

the awkward date with Talia Shire at the ice skating rink,

the sad, desperate moment

where Burgess Meredith's Mickey begs

to be brought back into the fold.

- I got all this knowledge.

I got it up here, now I want to give it to you.

I want to give you this knowledge.

I want to take care of you.

I wanna make sure that all this shit

that happened to me doesn't happen to you.

- [Richard] I loved the movie and I love my father

because he loved boxing and boxing films

and it meant everything that he connected

to the film as much as I did.

It was amazing that they ended the film

with "Rocky" losing the fight. - [Talia Shire] Rocky!

- [Richard] When the 1980s came,

Rocky couldn't lose a fight again,

but 1976 was a different time.

- Rocky!

- Adrian! - Rocky!

I love you!

- I love you.

[upbeat music]

- [Richard] He could lose, but go the distance,

which was a different,

more important kind of winning.

That landed with me.

- "Rocky."

- [Richard] When "Rocky" won best picture,

I cheered at the TV.

I was ecstatic.

It was as if I had won the Oscar.

I barely noticed

that "Rocky" had beaten "All The President's Men."

[door thuds]

[dramatic music]

In May of 1977, I saw "Star Wars" for the first time.

Like many kids of that era,

that two hours changed my life.

I remember it perfectly.

I could tell you where I was sitting in the theater,

second to last row because it was packed

and we got there too late for better seats.

Like seeing "Blue Velvet" for the first time a decade later

or "Breaking the Waves" a decade after that,

or "There Will Be Blood" a decade after that.

I left the theater transformed.

My previous cinematic worldview, shredded and left for dead.

- No!

- [Richard] I was jacked up and messed up and invigorated

deeply erotically passionately in love with

that movie, with all movies.

My dreams of playing third base

for the New York Mets were put on hold.

My attention shifted.

I would make movies. I would tell stories.

[dramatic music]

For my sixth grade graduation, I asked my parents

for a Super 8 camera as a present.

This was a game changer, a life changer.

With my Super 8 camera and projector

and a million film ideas up my sleeve,

I was chomping at the bit to start making my own movies.

First, of course,

I obviously needed my own film production company.

Couldn't do it without a film production company.

I named it Guiar Pelicula Motion Picture Company,

which I thought was Spanish for Shepard Movies,

but it wasn't.

Also Shepard Movies Motion Picture Company wasn't

exactly the cleverest of production names.

My Aunt Hannah got me some company T-shirts

as a graduation gift

and Mark Gregory's dad made me a mug

that put my name in the company of some great directors.

I immediately started making little films, action pictures,

mysteries, comedies, using my friends as actors,

my toy chest as a prop department.

I tried animation.

I tried disaster films.

Here you can see New York gets submerged in a flood.

While making "A Test to Fail," a mafia movie,

I had my friend Peter Schwartz strangle the bad guy,

played with great menace by my father, to death.

[cheerful music]

Later, his body was thrown out the window.

That was actually my favorite stuffed animal

and it accidentally landed on the awning of my building

where we had to bribe our super, Mr. Martinez,

to retrieve it.

For a war film, I made with my friend, Simon Stark,

we took turns operating the camera and acting.

I played a Nazi guard and he played an escaped prisoner.

I'm still not sure what his neighbors

in the Jewish enclave of Scarsdale, New York,

thought of the two of us running

around with fake blood and fake guns.

I do know we were extremely lucky

that the giant exploding swastika fire we set,

with lighter fluid in his backyard

for our incredible finale

where the Nazi dies, didn't burn the entire street down.

The fact was I was hooked.

Christmas couldn't come fast enough

so I could get a film splicer and editing system.

- [Paul Stewart] Well, Charles?

- [Richard] My birthday brought a sound Super 8 camera.

- Merry Christmas.

- [Richard] It was all I was thinking about.

- Rosebud.

- [Richard] Of course, my grades suffered.

There were tutors, panic.

I had to switch schools.

- But I was going into Tosche Station

to pick up some power converters.

- You can waste time with your friends

when your chores are done.

Now come on, get to it.

- [Richard] My mother worried about me,

but my dad seemed to understand.

If his own father had tried to quash his creative instincts,

my dad made sure to encourage mine, at least up to a point,

and that point was his wallet.

All my movie making ambitions were expensive

and my parents were quickly losing interest

in being my personal film financier,

so I resorted to other methods to get my movies made,

subterfuge and crime.

When one day,

a roll of my Super 8 film got developed incorrectly,

they gave me a free roll of film to make up for it.

Using this knowledge

and blaming the lack of receipt on my parents,

I went from camera store

to camera store throughout the city lying about

how they up fucked my movie when they developed it,

and getting free rolls of film in return.

Later in high school, I got the kids in my class

to bake cookies and brownies

and I would do bake sales on Lexington Avenue

to raise money for my movies.

I was a hustler even then,

and that's because I was a scab-filled street junkie.

I was addicted to movies, to watching them, to making them.

I constantly needed a fix.

I subscribed to "American Film" magazine,

read every issue cover to cover.

I bought every book I could get my hands on.

"The Making of 2001," "Halliwell's Film Guide,"

and "The Movie Brats,"

which discussed how many of my directorial heroes had gone

to film school.

I made a mental note.

Filmmaking ignited something in me.

It engulfed me and held me in its sway now

for more than 40 years.

Why?

Who was this 13-year-old boy that had to make films?

It brought me joy, I know that, instantaneous joy,

but lots of things at that age brought me joy.

It was more than that.

I think there was this sense of satisfaction

with my filmmaking, of completion, of success.

With every bad grade and worse report card,

I still had this thing that made me feel important

and worth something.

I had success instead of failure

and I fucking breathed it in.

♪ My anxiety ♪

♪ It's always the same ♪

- [Richard] At a certain point, as I got older,

my father basically stopped taking me to movies

he didn't wanna watch himself.

If I wanted to see, "Love At First Bite"

with "Bad News Bears in Japan," or "Meteor."

- That meteor's five miles wide

and it's definitely gonna hit us!

- [Richard] I could go with my friends or with my mom,

but my dad was done slumming it with me.

This was a blow, a wake up call to a new reality.

Going to the movies with my parents, both my parents,

was what I was used to.

No matter what the film,

we went as a family.

That my father would just walk away from

that was staggering.

He was my movie teacher, my hero.

How could he do this to me?

The fact was he no longer saw me as a little kid.

He no longer felt that he needed to coddle me,

especially when it came to the movies.

From now on, if I wanted to go to films with my dad,

it had to be tagging along to the movies

that he wanted to see, movies made for adults.

[helicopters whirring]

That's how I ended up going with my father

to see a certain movie that would change my life forever.

It was a Saturday afternoon in the spring of 1980.

We went to the New Yorker Theatre

on 89th Street and Broadway,

which was only a few blocks from my home.

The New Yorker was a great Upper West Side institution.

I loved it there.

Never more so than

when I saw the film my dad took me to that day.

Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now."

"Apocalypse Now" was the first movie

that made me truly understand what a director did.

The images and sequences that Coppola

and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro created together are

embedded in cinema history and in my history.

I love the use of color, the music, and sound design.

The helicopter dissolving into a fan.

I loved Han Solo playing a small supporting part

in awkward glasses.

I love Francis Ford Coppola's cameo.

- Don't look at the camera.

Just go by like you're fighting, like you're fighting!

Don't look at the camera!

It's for television, just go through!

- [Richard] I love Martin Sheen's voice,

the beautiful way his narration was recorded.

- [Martin Sheen] How many people had I already killed?

There were those six that I knew about for sure.

Close enough to blow their last breath in my face.

- [Richard] With "Apocalypse Now" I finally understood

for the first time that one person working

with many people had driven all these things to the screen,

had dreamt it and made it happen,

had directed the movie to existence.

I was so obsessed about the film that I went

to Jerry Ohlinger's Movie Materials shop

on West Third Street

and bought the film's poster with the great art by Bob Peak.

It hung on my wall for years.

I bought notes, Eleanor Coppola's book

about the making of her husband's film,

and I read it religiously, trying to soak it in,

trying to learn what it would be like

to make something so brilliant.

"The teeth in my soul have cavities,"

she quotes Francis Coppola saying.

I still remember circling that one.

I bought the record, a double album with dialogue and music

and narration from the film.

I attached many extension cords to my portable record player

and brought it out to the backyard of our vacation rental

and listened all summer long.

I memorized the entirety of Michael Herr's narration

for the film.

- [Richard and Michael] Saigon. Shit.

I'm still only in Saigon.

- [Richard] "Every time I think I'm gonna wake up

back in the jungle."

- Are you an assassin?

- I'm a soldier.

[brooding music]

- You are neither.

[brooding music]

You're an errand boy

sent by grocery clerks to collect a bill.

- [Richard] "Apocalypse Now" changed the way I saw movies.

It opened my mind, blew away my expectations.

I was never the same.

[brooding music]

Westport, Connecticut is where I obsessively listened to

that "Apocalypse Now" soundtrack album

and as far back as I remember,

summers were spent up there.

Other than weekends,

my dad mostly stayed in the city to work,

so it was usually just me and my mom,

and that was fine by me.

She was great movie going company

and many a warm summer night of my youth

was spent getting lost together

in whatever film was playing at the local movie theater.

Oh, the summers were a glorious time.

My mom and I went to see almost every movie I wanted.

From "Meatballs" to "Uptown Saturday Night,"

if it played in Westport, we were there.

A few years before "Apocalypse Now," when I was 10,

I begged and begged my mother to take me to "Jaws."

It was all anyone was talking about

in the summer of 1975.

My mother finally relented

and we saw it at the Fine Arts Theatre in Westport.

[screaming]

It was there that the second

of the three biggest scares

that a movie happened to me.

Not when the head pops out of the sunken boat,

though that was terrifying.

Not when the boy was attacked at the beach

after everyone finally went back in the water.

No, it was when Roy Scheider was casually throwing chum

into the ocean. - I can go slow ahead.

Come on down and chum some of this shit.

[water splashing]

- [Richard] Holy shit, that scared the hell out of me.

My mother, of course, instantly regretted the decision

to take me to "Jaws"

as I was totally terrified by the movie.

- Did you hear your father?

Out of the water now!

- [Richard] Though I loved it.

And subsequently, like much of America that summer,

I refused to go into the water.

That didn't stop me from buying "The Jaws Log,"

a book by one of the film screenwriters.

It was a true behind- the-scenes story

and I ate up each delicious page.

I felt like I was almost a member of the film's crew

and even as a 10 year old,

that's desperately where I wanted to be.

[water splashing] [screaming]

I was terrified by the movie, but wildly inspired by it.

My sweet mother,

what she must have thought after taking me to "Jaws."

She's lost to dementia now, barely remembering me,

but I still have so many questions for her,

so many movie memories that only she and I shared.

[melancholic music]

[brooding music]

- [Narrator] It's the biggest, it's the best, it's Bond.

- [Richard] After the summer of "Jaws,"

my mother and I had better Westport movie success

with the "James Bond" films.

We saw "The Spy Who Loved Me" and "Moonraker."

We saw "The Revenge of the Pink Panther"

and "The Pink Panther Strikes Again."

[glasses shattering]

One of my favorite films I saw

during the summertime was "Breaking Away,"

directed by Peter Yates and written by Steve Tesich.

My mother and I actually saw it twice in the summer of '79

as it played at the local theater from June to August

back when movies would play for months,

slowly finding their audience.

Seeing this film about four friends' endless summer days

and a bike race that changes their lives.

I instantly fell hard for it,

especially for the scenes of the friends hanging out.

They seem like real people, real buddies,

funny and competitive with each other.

- How'd you get to be so stupid, Cyril?

- I don't know.

Guess I have a dumb heredity or something.

What's your excuse, Michael?

[Michael laughs]

- [Richard] "Breaking Away" was the perfect summer movie.

It was light and funny, but also real and resonant.

[actor singing]

The kids in the movie were older than me

and definitely different, but I connected

to the way they talked and hung out and the dreams they had.

- How you doing, guys?

- Well, we're a little disturbed

by the developments in the Middle East,

but other than that.

[upbeat victory music] [audience cheering]

[upbeat music]

- [Richard] One of the oddest films I saw with my mom in

Connecticut was a PG version

of "Saturday Night Fever,"

which Paramount Pictures released

after the original R-rated version became a mega hit.

My mother had loved the movie

and played the soundtrack often,

but she wouldn't let me see it.

"Too inappropriate," she said.

This pissed me off to no end, but at 12,

with no car and stranded in our country house,

I had no choice but to brood

and endure everyone talking about a movie

I was unable to see.

Finally,

when this more family- friendly version was released,

I got to check out what all the commotion was about.

I liked it, I guess.

Sure, the dancing and music was cool,

but I knew I was missing something.

I was missing the good part

and not just the nudity in four letter words.

Later, when I saw the original R-rated cut on VHS

in 11th grade, I was blown away by what was cut out.

Instead of just a dance movie about a young guy

with big city dreams,

"Saturday Night Fever" was a dark,

yet honest look at flawed,

complex people with real troubles as well as real dreams.

Travolta was still deeply likable,

but he now existed in a world with hurt and anger

and death where a girl could be horribly assaulted

in the backseat of a car,

where pain was as much a factor as pleasure.

In other words, it was a classic '70s American movie.

The flaws were the point,

the humanity exposed by the truthfulness,

and it still had a killer soundtrack

and a perfect beautiful John Travolta.

One summer day, I was in a small Westport bookstore,

biding my time as my mother shopped

at the farm stand across the street.

Suddenly, she ran into the store,

all flush and frazzled, yanked my hand and said,

"Come with me," as if our house was on fire.

My mother quickly dragged me across the street

and shoved me into the farm stand

and right up next to a gentleman in sunglasses

checking out the peaches.

This is how I got to see Paul Newman up close and personal.

For years after, I would joke that my mother only used me

as a cute prop, a way in so she could smile flirtatiously

and bat her eyes at him,

but now I understand that she probably really did it for me,

as she always said, because my mother knew

how much I loved "The Sting" and "The Towering Inferno,"

and movies.

And she knew that seeing

a star like Paul Newman up close would stay with me.

I soon found out that New York City was great

for spotting movie stars

and running into them gave me a high.

I saw Sylvester Stallone and John Travolta walking together

in matching fur coats on the Upper West Side

as they were making "Staying Alive."

One day, my father made the mistake of telling me

that he had just spotted Roy Scheider browsing

at the New Yorker Bookstore,

which is above the New Yorker Theatre in my neighborhood.

This was serious film nerd news.

[suspenseful music]

I mean, here was the star of "Jaws"

at a bookstore only a few blocks from my apartment.

I vowed to run into him myself

and spent many, many hours roaming

the aisles of the place looking for him.

It never happened, of course,

though I did fall in love with the bookstore

during that time.

Trips there were always special.

My dad bought cigars at the indoor newsstand below it

and then we'd go up the narrow spiral staircase

to this massive, mysterious store above.

I can still remember the dusty smell of the place

and, of course, where the film section was.

If I saw my dad as Errol Flynn when I was a kid

and then Humphrey Bogart as I got older,

by the time I was 14, I became completely convinced

that he most resembled

the lunatic character Peter Falk played

in the perfectly bonkers comedy, "The In-Laws."

Falk played a slightly deranged,

though completely lovable CIA agent

who had a very hard time with the truth

and an even harder time staying out of trouble.

Like my dad, Falk in the movie had secret identities

and mysterious agendas.

My father wasn't traveling all over the world getting

into comic trouble, but he just as well could have been.

He did things that made no sense at the time,

but seemed vitally important to him.

Some were small like his refusal

to pay admission prices to anything.

If it were an antique fair, he would always sneak us in

through the service entrance

rather than pay a dollar to get in.

Or he'd speak in gibberish

until the person at the front door gave up and let us in.

He'd tell my mother he was betting only a hundred dollars

on a boxing match, but I'd see thousands of dollars come

and go, and I knew he was lying to her.

But the biggest move my father made was a day he announced

to me and my mom that he would no longer be speaking

to his own father or his brothers ever again.

Even for my dad, this seemed like a crazy thing to do.

He was cutting off his family completely.

When I probed him further, he told me that his whole life,

they never understood him, never encouraged him,

and he needed to expunge them now

in order to finally feel free and be fully happy.

He said one day he would explain the whole story,

but for now, I just had to accept

that it was something my father had to do,

so that was that.

Making that heartbreakingly difficult decision

in order to help himself

showed me that my father had a level of guts

I couldn't imagine.

In the movies, I always saw courage

as Rod Taylor saving Tippi Hedren

as the birds attacked her in Hitchcock's Film.

Or Richard Dreyfuss getting on the mothership

with the aliens in "Close Encounters."

But in my real life,

I had never seen a braver thing done by anybody.

[somber music]

[man singing in Italian]

With my father's open wounds

about his own family now exposed,

he decided I was mature enough

to appreciate the most famous movie made about a family,

Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather"

and "Godfather Part II."

The movies were playing in revival at the Regency Theatre

on West 67th Street.

Those movies were a lot to take in

and I would have to see them both many times more

to fully get their impact,

but it clarified my youthful belief

that Francis Ford Coppola was

the greatest filmmaker of all time.

Something I also noted was

that the actor playing Fredo had a quality

that just cut to my heart.

I related to his loneliness, his otherness.

There was a sadness in his eyes,

a weakness in him amongst all the other machismo

in the films, and I deeply connected to it.

In college, I put together

that the same actor from the Godfathers was

also in "The Conversation," "Dog Day Afternoon,"

and "The Deer Hunter."

And that I loved him in all those films.

Years later, I would make a documentary for HBO.

"I Knew It Was You. Rediscovering John Cazale,"

and would be able to shine a light on the man

who only did five movies,

all of them classics,

all of them nominated for best picture.

It was an incredible run, never duplicated.

Cazale was Al Pacino's best friend,

Meryl Streep's boyfriend,

and he died of cancer at 42.

Of the bountiful pleasures in doing that documentary,

the best was that I got

to interview many of my childhood movie heroes,

including Coppola himself.

It was quite a thrill talking with him,

though I didn't have the guts to tell him

that I had memorized all the narration

from "Apocalypse Now."

I also didn't tell him that one day in high school,

I saw that a movie was being filmed at the Plaza Hotel

and I followed the cables from the generators on the street

into a side door, up some back stairs, down a long corridor,

through two giant banquet rooms filled with equipment

and onto the set of his movie, "The Cotton Club,"

where I stole some craft service donuts

before being spotted and kicked to the street.

- What do you think you're doing?

[cheerful music]

- [Richard] Growing up in New York was also great

for stumbling onto film sets.

One night I was near the Metropolitan Museum

and came across a big movie being shot there.

There was a large crew and many period cars.

Not knowing any better,

I walked past the rest of the New Yorkers watching,

slid under several police barriers,

snaked my way through a bunch of crew members and extras,

and found myself exactly where I wanted to be,

standing at the video monitors right behind the director,

who in this case was the great John Huston,

who was making the not so great film version

of the Broadway musical, "Annie."

♪ Clears away the cobwebs and the sorrow ♪

- [Richard] No one said anything to me as I stood there,

as they all assumed that I was a son of someone important

and meant to be so close to the action.

I watched take after take,

incredibly excited by all the machinations it took

to get a scene done.

I was a bit confused that Huston wasn't yelling action

or cut himself.

Wasn't it always the director who yelled cut?

- [Henry] Cut!

- Who said cut?

- I had a film run out.

- [Eli] How many feet of film are left in that camera, Gabe?

- 33.

- Goddamn your fucking eyes out.

How dare you yell cut on my set?

- Well, what the hell, Eli, 33 feet is nothing.

- It is 22 seconds, Henry.

In 22 seconds, I could break your fucking spine!

In 22 seconds,

I could pinch your head off like a fucking insect

and spin it all over the fucking pavement.

In 22 seconds, I could put 22 bullets

inside your ridiculous gut.

What I seem unable to do in 22 seconds is

to keep you from fucking up my film!

- [Richard] Without a doubt,

my favorite movie set watching experience was

when Brian De Palma's "Dressed to Kill"

took over East 70th Street where my high school was

for three days of filming.

Being so close to an actual film set

for so long was the kind of high-grade,

24-frames-a-second smack

I needed to shoot directly into my cinephile arm.

Just outside the window of my science class was

a full film crew, as well as Angie Dickinson,

Keith Gordon, Nancy Allen, and Michael Caine,

but mostly there was director Brian De Palma.

I watched them shoot as often as I could,

sometimes cutting classes right in front of my teachers.

If you listen closely to the film,

you can hear us, the kids on the soundtrack.

[kids chattering]

I remember talking with De Palma, getting his autograph,

asking him questions.

When the film was released, I saw it opening day.

I can't tell you how many times I've seen it since.

Sexy, daring, violent, and disturbing.

It's De Palma's slickest film and in my mind, his best.

It's a Hitchcock homage, of course, but much, much more.

It has jaw-dropping scenes of violence,

but a beating heart as well.

[subway door slamming]

It's also a true New York movie with dirty,

dangerous subway cars,

and even more dangerous building elevators.

It also has a scene set at the Met

that I think is one of the greatest set piece sequences

in all of modern film.

Unhappily married

Angie Dickinson meets a mysterious stranger

while sitting in front of a large Alex Katz painting.

The pair seem to connect.

[dramatic music]

But then they don't.

[dramatic music]

But then they do.

As the possible future lovers glide from room to room,

the suspense ratchets.

Each shot, each glance, each cut raises the sexual

and cinematic tension.

[dramatic music]

Helped enormously by Pino Donaggio's brilliant score,

this exquisite dance of flirtation between Dickinson

and the man might be my favorite scene in any movie ever.

It shook the film out of its B-movie roots

and clearly announced

that it was a genre- bending work of art.

[dramatic music]

"Dressed To Kill" is also a film

where Brian De Palma uses split diopter lenses

that keep foreground

and background in focus to maximum effect.

Later, as a filmmaker myself, I continued to refer back

to much in the movie,

using split diopter lenses on my thriller,

"The Perfection," in a very clear homage to De Palma.

Like many films of that era,

parts of "Dressed to Kill" are problematic,

but the movie still holds up, still tingles, still scares.

[woman screaming]

I bought the soundtrack, of course,

used it to score some of my Super 8 thrillers.

I read Pauline Kael's rave about it

in the New Yorker over and over.

She wrote,

"The pleasure of the movie's suspense

becomes aphrodisiacal."

My God, could there ever be a better compliment

in a film review?

At this point, movies fully took over my life.

I was all in.

My already bad grades got worse, but it didn't matter.

New York was a mecca for all things film

and I took full advantage.

I saw nearly everything that got released

from "Blood Beach" to Eric Rohmer's "Pauline at the Beach."

[Marion speaking Italian]

- [Richard] My high school friends,

Mark Mullin on the left,

and Liam Plevin, were also film obsessed.

So I had partners in crime going to the movies.

"The Road Warrior," "Altered States,"

"The Shining," "Tootsie," "Tender Mercies,"

"Being There," "Prince of the City."

For the four years of high school,

we'd go to films every Friday after school,

sometimes Saturday and Sunday too.

If the movie was rated R, we asked people to buy us tickets,

always young couples on a date.

If the line was too long,

we'd loiter in front of the theater

and then when the line started moving,

we'd effortlessly cut it like the super smooth movie spies

that we were.

Senior year, Liam and I even got part-time jobs

at the Criterion Movie Theatre in Times Square

because back in the early '80s,

being an usher at a movie theater

in the city allowed you two tickets

to any other movie theater in the city at any time.

It was like a secret society.

You just called up and dropped the bomb.

You would let the ushers in for free

to your theater if they did the same for you.

The idea that I could go to any movie in the city for free,

my God, it was heaven.

When my parents heard about that perk,

they reminded me that when they were young

and just beginning to date,

my father won a movie trivia contest in a magazine

and the prize was a free pass for two

to any movie in the city for a year.

This is how my parents courted.

This is how they fell in love.

It's funny how my dad and I both managed

to get into the movies for free

at pivotal points in our lives.

Hustlers, both of us.

There were six screens at the Criterion

and Sidney Lumet's "The Verdict" played there

for several months in the winter of 1982.

I'm sure I ended up seeing it at least 50 times,

parts of it at least, which was okay with me

because I loved it.

It was a studio film made for adults

as opposed to studio films today,

which are made for kids.

Watching it expanded my universe, didn't placate to it.

- I'm going up there, I'm gonna try it.

I'm gonna let the jury decide.

You know, they told me about you.

That you're a hard ass, you're a defendant's judge.

Oh, I don't care.

I said, "The hell with it."

To hell with it!

- [Richard] The Criterion also showed,

"The Empire Strikes Back," in re-release

before "Return of the Jedi" was to come out.

Part of my job was to check the picture projection

and sound, and one day I walked into one of the theaters,

which was thick with pot smoke

and found that the sound was completely off.

No R2-D2 beeps.

No Wookiee howls, no John Williams score, zilch.

I asked one of the 10 people in the audience

how long the sound had been out and he smiled

and he said he thought about 15 minutes.

In that time, no one had come out to complain.

They were all too fucked up.

At other times, packs of teenagers would try to sneak in

by walking backwards

as the crowd streamed out of a previous show.

As someone who was used to scams getting into theaters

for free, I appreciated the creativity.

I'd joke with my parents for years about

how back in the early '80s,

when it was one of the most sketchy areas in all of America,

they let me work in a Times Square movie theater.

Truth was they never really seemed

to give it a second thought

that I was working in a neighborhood of thieves

and roving gangs and pimps and prostitutes.

It was New York and I was a New Yorker.

I just had to deal with it.

[upbeat music]

I saw every kind of movie during those years.

Art films, teen comedies, Oscar winners, Kung Fu films,

Schlocko action pictures.

I saw horror movies like "The Fan," "The Fog,"

"The Fun House,"

insane low budget wonders like "Parasite 3D,"

"Amityville 3D," "Psycho 2," "Halloween II," "Wolfen,"

"Silent Scream," "Creep Show," "Basket Case,"

"Dawn of the Dead," and "Fade to Black,"

that starred that guy from "Breaking Away"

and had some great gratuitous nudity.

I saw foreign movies

like Italy's "The Night of Shooting Stars,"

France's "La Boum," Japan's "Kagemusha."

I saw the "The Draughtsman's Contract,"

"Circle of Deceit," "Time Stands Still,"

"Breaker Morant," and "Gallipoli."

Jean-Jacques Beineix's film, "Diva," blew my mind

with its use of color and music and punk rock beauty.

This unique French movie about obsession, opera,

and priceless recordings that lead to murder was,

along with "Dressed to Kill,"

one of the most influential films I saw

during that period.

I realized that beautiful design and music,

and a unique cinematic style,

could elevate a genre movie into something better,

that films could have more than one level to them.

In fact, the more levels, the better.

I wasn't yet ready to give up my schlock film mania

for only art films,

but I had finally started to notice the difference.

I got so film obsessive that I didn't even have the patience

to wait till 3PM when school got out

to see the new movies that were opening.

I started cutting classes on a scarily regular basis.

I saw "Star Trek: The Motion Picture"

at the Paramount Theater at the first 11AM screening

on opening day.

For a "Star Trek" fanatic,

that turgid slog of a film was especially disappointing,

but I didn't mind.

I was where I wanted to be.

My 11th grade girlfriend, Mitzi, and I

cut school to see "One From The Heart,"

because, well, I just had to.

It was Francis Coppola after all.

Mark Mullin and I didn't even show up to school

the day "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan" opened.

It was thankfully leaps

and bounds better than the first one.

We also saw "Poltergeist" on that same day,

one right after the other,

just crossed 86th Street from the Loew's Orpheum

to the Town and Country.

- What's happening?

- [Richard] Now that's an excellent Friday afternoon.

Shortly after our drama teacher, Betsy Lifton,

joined us as we ditched school

to see Martin Scorsese's brilliant

and misunderstood, "The King of Comedy."

Suddenly, Scorsese was all I was talking about.

Coppola appeared in my rear view mirror.

Mark Mullin had been making Super 8 films himself

before he transferred to my school,

so we instantly hit it off when he arrived in 10th grade.

Soon, he and Liam and I were making films together.

Thrillers mostly, but some dramas and comedies too.

They were far more ambitious in my Super 8 solo efforts.

In "Shadows From The Past,"

a title my father helped come up

with along with the catch line,

"Memories may haunt you but reality will kill you."

We convinced our high school history teacher,

Mr. Lakaye, to play a version of himself,

except that he's a high school teacher

who's a homicidal serial killer.

Mark played the transfer student who recognizes Mr. Lakaye

as a suspected murderer from his former school.

- Sit down, Mark.

[hand slaps newspaper]

Have you told anyone about this?

'Cause if you had, I'd suggest you change your story

or it might become, as we say, unhealthy.

- [Richard] In another film,

we intercut Mark having a conversation

with Robert De Niro from Taxi Driver.

- You talking to me?

- [Mark] Yes, Mr. De Niro.

Let me rephrase the question.

How did it help you learn to deal with people?

- Are you talking to me?

- [Richard] Achieving this

by buying a short Super 8 version of the movie,

you could do this as before the age of home videos,

studios used Super 8 movies as a marketing tool

and we then spliced it in with stuff we shot.

- Okay, okay, Mr. De Niro.

Okay, okay, I get the point.

- [Richard] We showed these movies

to our high school classmates,

usually in a packed auditorium after school.

We made posters and flyers to get them

to come just like the pros did.

It was always an immediate blast to watch

and listen to our classmates as they viewed our films,

to hear their laughter, to grab their attention.

Soon, our principal, Colin Reed,

who himself was a movie buff, got caught up in our passions

and started funding our films with the school's money.

We'd go in and pitch him ideas like we were at a studio

and he'd either greenlight it or pass.

[upbeat music]

When we saw Alan Parker's brilliant and exuberant, "Fame,"

still one of my favorite films,

we made the far less brilliant and exuberant "Audition."

- I killed my own mother!

- [Richard] When we saw Martin Scorsese's

rock and roll fever dream, "The Last Waltz,"

we made a music doc about Mark's high school band,

Quarter Deck.

[upbeat music]

- Wait, stop, stop, stop.

- [Richard] Watching it now,

I think our studio head, Mr. Reed,

should have passed on that one.

My mother and father were encouraging

of my cinematic output,

but they were also honest in their assessment,

especially my father.

My dad liked some of my Super 8 movies,

but others didn't work for him.

This remained true with all my films,

even my professional ones, until the day he died.

He never really bullshitted me when it came to my work.

If he saw a film of mine that he thought wasn't successful,

he went outside to smoke a cigar

and hoped the subject would be changed before he returned.

That's why his compliments meant so much to me.

When it connected, he connected,

and while I wasn't always striving for his approval,

I can't say it wasn't in the back of my mind.

That's why I wish he could have seen the movies I directed

as an adult,

when I finally started finding my true voice as a filmmaker.

The ones I made after he died, "The Matador,"

"The Hunting Party,"

my eyeballed Jude Law gangster flick,

"Dom Hemingway."

It's not surprising

that so many of the movies I've written are about outliers,

men who won't conform, lovable criminals and rogues,

[explosion]

men who absolutely do not play by any rules.

It's a darkly humorous cinematic world I understand

and relate to because I grew up with a man

who was those characters.

It's sad how I couldn't really start writing those movies

until after my father got sick.

As if I needed the space,

the transition to be able

to become the filmmaker I was meant to be.

I really wish he could have gotten a chance to see them,

to see what the filmmaker he had nurtured actually produced

when set free.

[footsteps thumping]

As one can see with his cameo in my movie, "Mercy,"

my father sometimes looked like a homeless person.

It was a persona he cultivated so he could go unnoticed

as he broke into abandoned buildings

or tried to negotiate a better price

for one of his antique toys he collected.

Once in 11th grade when I was performing

in Peter Shaffer's "Black Comedy,"

a performance, it should be noted,

where I broke my nose running into Michael Bregman's skull

during one of the blackouts in the play,

my father was turned away from the door of our high school

because some teacher thought he looked

like a crazed street person.

Of course, he'd wear a tie if he had to,

and he rocked that look because he was a man of vanity

and style, but he also carried brass knuckles in his pocket

because he never strayed too far from New York's underbelly.

That was my father,

sophisticated when it suited him,

but otherwise edgy and scrappy like the city he loved.

That duality extended to other parts of his life.

He was a man who was selfless

and selfish, sometimes at the same time.

When I called him to get help taking

a giant 12-foot "Star Wars" marquee sign home

from the Criterion Movie Theatre,

he told me to figure it out myself.

After all, he hadn't needed help getting

that Coca-Cola sign home,

but he would show up at every school play no matter

how mediocre my performance was bound to be.

Once when I was 12, he took me to a "Star Trek" convention

at the Hilton on 54th Street.

Dropped me off is a better description

as my dad had no interest in going

and he rarely did what he didn't want to do.

["Star Trek Theme"]

Anyway, when he came to pick me up later that afternoon,

I wasn't outside as planned.

Frustrated, my father went inside

and found me standing on an endless line

to get James Doohan, Mr. Scott's autograph.

I had been waiting for two hours

and I was now very close.

Realizing that I wasn't going to leave,

my father joined me on the line.

He wasn't happy about it, but he did.

Just then, James Doohan stood up

and said that he was finished.

His time was up.

I instantly broke out in tears.

I was so close to him and I waited for so long

and now he was just going?

Seeing my heartbreak and always up for a little rumble,

my father said in an incredibly loud voice,

loud enough for James Doohan and half the Hilton to hear it,

"My son and I just drove 12 hours

from South Carolina in the rain

so we could get Mr. Scott's autograph.

I would hope that he could help us out."

[dramatic music]

Feeling terrible for me

and having no idea that my father was bullshitting

and that we lived just uptown,

Mr. Scott motioned us over

and quickly signed my 8-by-10 glossy of him.

[cheerful music]

That was my father.

He made my day.

He thrilled me.

That he later secretly sold all my "Star Trek" memorabilia

while I was off in college

because he needed some quick cash

for some scheme is another story all together.

As I said, selfless and selfish.

New York City was my father's city,

but it was also mine

and that was a true gift my dad gave me.

New York was alive with cinema.

It was just up to me to seek it out.

I mean, where else could you see "My Dinner with Andre,"

an hour-and-51-minute movie

of just two brilliant guys talking?

Or "Chan Is Missing," a $22,000 indie that's as funny

and original as any bigger film?

Or the X-rated epic, "Caligula" with Malcolm McDowell,

Peter O'Toole, John Gielgud, Helen Mirren,

and a bunch of porn stars that was both dirty

and boring at the same time.

With my friends, Mark and Liam,

there was rarely a film we didn't go to,

a theater we didn't know, the Coronet,

the Baronet, the Paris.

They had some great names.

The Sutton, the Gemini, the Carnegie Hall Cinema,

the Trans Lux 85th Street, Cinema I and II.

And The Thalia, which always smelled of Chinese food

and consistently played the smartest, coolest films.

I lost many, many hours in each of those movie theaters.

Of course, this being New York of the early '80s,

I learned to avoid a few of the sketchier ones

along the way.

The Embassy at Broadway

and 47th Street was a guarantee of danger.

It was only to be entered in cinematic duress.

The UA East on First Avenue was a recipe for being mugged,

although I did see the sci-fi film "Hangar 18" there.

- Keep the lid on Hangar 18.

- [Richard] I mean, how could I not see a film

that purported to tell us

why the government was concealing UFOs?

Mark, Liam, and I got some of the girls in our class

to see "The Dogs of War,"

a brutal action picture with Christopher Walken,

by convincing them

that it was an animated film about a bunch of cute dogs

that accidentally get recruited to the army.

[werewolf growling]

We saw "An American Werewolf in London"

and a few weeks later,

we recognized the film's director, John Landis,

walking on Madison Avenue and stopped him

and peppered him with a million questions

and all he could do is look at us incredulously

and say, "Who are you guys?"

- Wonderful, thanks a lot.

[phone ringing]

- [Richard] We saw the thriller,

"When A Stranger Calls," starring Carol Kane

as a babysitter getting ever threatening phone calls

from a killer.

- [Killer] Have you checked the children?

- [Richard] And it provided the third

and biggest scare I had

at the movies as a kid.

What was so great about

the scare was that I actually

knew it was coming.

See, the theater had a waiting area inside,

a few couches to sit on if it was rainy or cold.

We got there early and were waiting patiently

while the previous showing was nearing its conclusion.

Suddenly through the closed theater doors,

we heard the entire audience scream in unison.

We excitedly looked at each other,

what horrors could cause an audience to react like that?

Just then, the theater doors swung open and a man ran out

and puked in fear in the lobby.

It was truly the greatest preamble to a horror movie ever,

and the movie didn't disappoint.

The first 20 minutes are the film's best,

ending with the police calling and telling the babysitter.

- [Police] We traced the call.

It's coming from inside the house.

- [Richard] But the true scare,

the scare that caused the entire audience to scream

and some dude to puke happens at the end.

It's years later and Carol Kane is married

and is living a normal life when the killer escapes.

There's a scene at night where Carol Kane is in bed

with her husband and the closet door slowly starts to open.

It's terrifying because we suspect

that the killer is hiding in there and we just want Carol

and her husband to get up and get out.

- [Jill] Stephen. Stephen.

[suspenseful music]

[dramatic music]

[Jill screaming]

- [Richard] Cue the giant audience scream and the puke.

[cheerful music]

Few movies of that period were

as critically mistreated as Michael Cimino's

"Heaven's Gate."

Vincent Canby of "The New York Times" wrote that,

"The notoriously over budget,

three-and-a-half-hour Western was an unmitigated disaster."

And continued,

"The film fails so completely that you might suspect

Mr. Cimino sold his soul to the Devil

to obtain the success of The Deer Hunter,

and the Devil has just come around to collect."

That review was nitroglycerin in newsprint.

I couldn't stop rereading it.

I counted the hours till school was over

so I could race over to Cinema I to catch it opening day.

I didn't care if they thought it sucked.

I had to see for myself.

Sometimes the thought of a very bad movie was just

as enticing as a very good one.

Of course, not everyone was as adventurous as I was.

A week after the film opened, it was yanked from theaters

because it was such a cataclysmic box office bomb.

It basically put the film studio out of business.

I didn't love the movie, but an unmitigated disaster?

Had they seen "Meteor?"

- That meteor's five miles wide

and it's definitely gonna hit us!

- [Richard] The critical laceration of "Heaven's Gate"

was the beginning of my obsession with movie reviews.

I eagerly attacked my parents' newspaper every Friday

to see what the critics would say.

I read the film section in "The Village Voice"

and Pauline Kael in "The New Yorker,"

and I became obsessed with Siskel and Ebert,

who at that time weren't quite famous,

but instead were doing a small weekly movie review show

on public television.

I loved those guys.

They were as film nerded out as I was.

One thing that reading all those movies reviews did was up

my game on defending the movies I loved.

♪ Pennies from heaven ♪

- [Richard] Or expertly eviscerating the ones I didn't.

I was always up for a good film argument

and sometimes they'd last for days.

That said, no one was ever able to convince me

that Robert Benton's "Kramer vs. Kramer" deserved

to win the Best Director Oscar

over Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now."

[helicopter roaring]

Still, I loved "Kramer vs. Kramer."

It was set on the Upper East Side where my school was

and several of the locations were places I walked

by every day.

It was exciting to see my city when I went to the movies.

Peter Falk in a taxi in Herald Square in "The In-Laws,"

the Upper West Side restaurant my parents

and I would sometimes go to in "The King of Comedy,"

the corner where I grew up

in the opening sequence of "Romancing The Stone."

"Kramer vs. Kramer" was a true New York movie.

Every inch of it felt lived in and real.

Dustin Hoffman was deeply moving in the film,

out of his depth as a parent.

- Daddy, it's burning, it's burning!

- What? - It's burning.

- Ow!

Damn it!

Goddamn her!

- [Richard] But stepping up when it mattered.

It would be years I have to admit,

before I could appreciate

Meryl Streep's complicated character.

At the time, I hated her in it.

- Okay, look, we're gonna sit here, and-

- [Richard] The movie was about divorce and it resonated

because all around me,

my friends' parents were splitting up.

It was like a Manhattan Upper Middle Class virus

that was spreading at an alarming pace.

It was everywhere.

I always assumed my parents would be together forever,

but around the time that "Kramer vs. Kramer" came out,

my parents' arguments were getting edgier and louder.

- [Ted] Just do what you have to do.

[glass shattering]

- [Richard] And I remember crying,

thinking they would be the next to split.

They didn't.

My parents stayed together

and pretty happily, it seemed,

for 40 years until my dad died.

This, even though my father was a master flirt

when he wanted to be,

and secretive in the way a man having affairs would be,

I didn't think about it much then, though

I saw so many films about infidelity in high school,

"An Unmarried Woman," "Betrayal," "Body Heat."

- I'm a married woman.

- Meaning what?

- Meaning I'm not looking for company.

- And you should have said, "I'm a happily married woman."

- [Richard] But now I wonder about all those summer nights

my father was in New York City

when my mother and I were in Connecticut.

What was he doing?

Was he just going home alone at the end of his day

or was there something else?

Did he cheat on my mother like Albert Finney did

to Diane Keaton

in Alan Parker's devastating "Shoot The Moon."

- Well then, tell me about Sandy.

Does she fuck you morning, noon, and night?

- [Richard] I don't know.

At least I didn't know then.

Near the end of my father's life and later after he died,

I would uncover some of his many secrets.

Most were ones I didn't wanna know.

It's funny how mysteries are the center of

so many great movies,

but in real life, solving those mysteries,

revealing dark secrets can shatter perfect memories.

I can't just look at my youth

with the happy tint of nostalgia anymore,

but I accept it all.

My parents were simply human.

That's the truth.

And growing up is finally just understanding that.

In 10th grade, I started to keep

a list of all the movies I saw that year.

I'd write it in the back of my school's yearbook,

on one of the advertising pages just as a record.

By senior year, my list of movies overflowed to the pages

beyond and an eclectic list it was.

- Showtime, folks.

- [Richard] I could just as well be swooning over

"Q - The Winged Serpent,"

an awesome low budget Larry Cohen movie

about a large serpent living in Manhattan

as I would be at Robert Redford's beautiful

and emotional, "Ordinary People."

The fact was I was inhaling movies at a furious pace.

If they projected it, I went.

"Capricorn One," "Porky's II," "Superman III,"

"The Class of 1984," "1990 The Bronx Warriors,"

[cannon blasting]

whatever it was, I was there.

My father would often ask why I was seeing such garbage.

I told him I learned something from every movie I saw

and while he didn't believe it, I did.

Plus, a lot of those movies were simply fun.

"Rocky III" was about as good a time

as I've ever had at the movies.

- I pity the fool.

- [Richard] Plus, because we went to a sneak preview,

they gave us a free 45 record of "Eye of the Tiger"

by Survivor.

Who wouldn't want that?

I also went to a sneak preview of a film

by one of my favorite directors growing up,

Steven Spielberg.

I didn't have high hopes for the movie.

I hadn't heard anything about it,

and the photos at the theater looked kind of lame,

but about 30 seconds

after "Raiders of the Lost Ark" started,

I knew that my initial instincts were rubbish

and I was about to rocket

to some higher cinematic pleasure dome.

It was really nice to turn my dad on to a movie.

If he liked something I recommended,

I always felt a rush

as if I was sitting on his lap again as a child.

Only this time, I was the one introducing him to films.

He didn't always understand me in high school,

but he understood movies and my love for them

and that's where we connected.

I certainly didn't recommend everything to him.

Pretty sure he wouldn't have dug "Ms .45,"

but if it was in his cinematic sweet spot,

penetrating dramas like "The Great Santini,"

visionary sci-fi, like "Blade Runner,"

a throwback film like "Raiders,"

he would usually respond like I did.

[metal clanking]

[man screaming]

What a strange time in film the early '80s.

While later in the decade, the Top Guns

and "Ghostbusters II" would dumb down the studio business

in a way it would never recover from,

many of the early '80s studio movies still tried

to embrace intelligence over commerce.

"Raging Bull," "All That Jazz."

"My Favorite Year," "Sophie's Choice."

In the years I was inhaling movies at a critical pace,

those films and others pushed buttons

and caught people off guard.

Yes, there was plenty of crap and I saw most of it,

but along with the crap, there was something else.

There was art.

Some of the other films that I saw in that period

that had an impact on me, artful or not,

included John Carpenter's "The Thing,"

a terrifying and wonderfully claustrophobic horror fest

that made me a lifelong lover of practically done,

non-CGI visual effects.

I dug "Starstruck," a rough and tumble Australian musical,

directed by Gillian Armstrong.

I remember listening to the soundtrack

on a dinky cassette player.

[upbeat music]

There was Bill Forsyth's "Local Hero,"

still one of the lightest,

most swirling original movies ever made

with a great Mark Knopfler score.

Another great score was by Philip Glass

for "Koyaanisqatsi,"

which Coppola produced.

A wordless, plotless documentary

about a world out of balance,

it sounded potentially slow and pretentious,

but because Coppola was involved,

I went and I was blown away.

I saw it three times.

Debra Winger stole my heart in "Officer and a Gentleman."

I saw it twice because of her earthy, sexy,

lived in performance

and frankly, the graphic sex scene,

though nothing compares to how a hot

and beautiful Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver were together

in Peter Weir's journalists-in- a-war-zone romantic thriller,

"The Year of Living Dangerously."

I was turned on by both of them.

Jessica Lange was ravishing in "Tootsie,"

but it was her devastating

and ferocious performance in "Frances" that stuck with me.

The film was about the 1940s movie star, Frances Farmer,

who because she was fiery, unpredictable,

and refused to play by society's rules,

was given a lobotomy

which tragically neutered her personality.

This horrific surgery was all the rage at the time

in dealing with people who did not conform.

- Along with the cure comes a loss of affect,

a kind of emotional flattening

with diminished creativity and imagination.

- [Richard] The movie was heartbreaking.

"Cutter's Way" was one of those dark

and emotional cinematic discoveries

that lift you up off the ground.

With a healthy amount of '70 cynicism

matched with a beautiful 1980's aesthetic,

courtesy of director, Ivan Passer,

and cinematographer, Jordan Cronenweth,

it showed flawed characters desperately trying

to do the right thing in the face of overwhelming odds.

Amazing how Jeff Bridges kept showing up

in some of my favorite films.

I went to "Out Of The Blue"

because it was directed by Dennis Hopper

who had been in "Apocalypse Now,"

and I remember being captivated by Linda Manz

and this dark little story of tragedy in punk rock.

"Over The Edge" by Jonathan Kaplan

and starring a very young Matt Dillon,

had a similar punk attitude,

[gunshot] [explosion]

as did Penelope Spheeris's amazing doc,

"The Decline of Western Civilization,"

as did Susan Seidelman's low- budget fireball, "Smithereens,"

as did Nick Cage and Martha Coolidge's "Valley Girl,"

one of the greatest,

"Hello, I'm destined to be a fucking movie star" performances

I've ever seen.

[somber music]

The more and more movies I saw,

the worse and worse my grades got.

By senior year, I was nearly failing out of high school.

My SAT scores were even more embarrassing.

My directorial heroes were the first generation

that went to film schools.

George Lucas at USC, Francis Ford Coppola at UCLA,

and Martin Scorsese at NYU.

They had set a trail I wanted to follow.

It didn't matter that many great directors before

and after completely bypassed film school.

In my mind and at that time,

the main way to a career in the movies was going

to one of those universities.

Plus, I had no other options.

I had no interest in anything else

and no talent for anything else either,

so I sent in my applications.

My guidance counselor almost cried.

There was no way with my grades I was getting anywhere

near those schools and it was true.

With each application came a rejection.

USC Film School, UCLA Film School.

My dream of following Lucas

and Coppola to California became just that, a sad dream.

Then in February, I got turned down by Boston University,

my safety school, the one I'd go to if all else failed.

The skyscrapers of the city collapsed

around me like some cheesy disaster movie.

I had been given a gift, a loving family,

a privileged upbringing that allowed me

to become the person I wanted to be and I blew it.

I fucking completely blew it.

What was I going to do?

Movies were the only thing I knew.

From the earliest age, I had been molded by my father

to love and devour them,

to watch films and talk about films and make films.

They were my blood, my heart.

[somber music]

My parents, knowing that I was spiraling

and seeing how truly scared I was

at the prospect of not getting in anywhere,

did their best to comfort me,

though I knew they were worried too and disappointed.

Finally, my father asked if I was free one Saturday to go

to the movies with him.

Go to the movies, not with my friends,

but with him for the first time in months

to go see "Winter Kills."

And so we did.

And afterwards, on the way home, he told me something,

something that made everything I knew

about him suddenly make sense.

He told me that when he was a young man,

dreaming about being an artist,

he, like Jessica Lange as Frances Farmer,

was fiery, unpredictable,

and refused to play by society's rules,

and his parents had almost lobotomized him.

[somber music]

They hated his nonconformity,

his dream of an artist's way of life.

It was only because a forward thinking uncle intervened

that my father was spared this terrifying medical procedure.

With that news,

I finally understood why my father lived his life

the way he did,

why he was unlike the other dads in the school,

why he refused to get a normal job,

and basically lived his life tap dancing

on the edge of respectability.

It was because his parents had almost destroyed him

for being himself and he was gonna make damn sure

that was never gonna happen again.

Good, bad, liar,

thief, husband, father.

My dad was who he was.

No one was gonna stop that.

He was a man truly comfortable in his own skin.

I loved him for it.

And because my father had his artistic dreams

nearly destroyed by his own parents,

he went out of his way to make sure I would never feel

that I couldn't have an artistic life.

"College or no college,"

he said, "It didn't matter."

I would be all right.

I would be all right if I just took that love of movies

that he had given me and let it take me where it might.

I would be all right if I could be comfortable

in my own skin like he was,

comfortable being the film geek that I was.

[upbeat music]

Rocky running up those stairs

in Philadelphia was nothing compared

to how I felt that day.

I saw a future again.

I would continue making movies.

I might not win every fight,

but I knew I could go the distance.

[instrumental music]

Two weeks later, I came home

to an acceptance letter from NYU Film School.

One more story about my dad.

It takes place about 15 years after high school.

I've made a few independent films at this point,

but I'm barely scraping by financially.

I've managed to raise a million dollars

to make my movie, "Oxygen,"

much of it coming from

the air freshener king of Long Island.

Three weeks before we were to shoot,

the investor paperwork wasn't done

and I had the film's pre-production payroll to meet

with no money in the bank to pay it.

Desperate broke and facing my movie falling apart,

I did what any self-respecting film director would do.

I turned to a loan shark for help.

I turned to my father.

Through thick cigar smoke,

my father agreed to loan me $10,000 for a week

until the investor's money came through.

He would deliver it to me in cash in a brown paper bag

in specific denominations wrapped in thick rubber bands.

In return, I would pay him back $11,000

exactly seven days later,

in cash, in the same denominations,

in the same brown paper bag

with the same thick rubber bands.

It had to be the same rubber bands.

In a weird way, only my father could explain,

it was the most important thing for him.

My dad's one week vig was 10%.

That was a lot of money.

When I tried to negotiate, he stopped the conversation dead.

If I wanted his money, I had to do it on his terms,

selfless and selfish.

But he came through for me like he always did.

I paid him back and the movie got made

and it led to other movies, larger movies,

and TV pilots, and TV series, and short films,

and documentaries.

Would any of that have happened without my father,

without him holding my hand all the way

through "King Kong" when I was six,

sharing his movie dreams with me?

It's sad that with all the Super 8 films I made,

there's so very little footage of my parents.

I didn't have them act in any of my childhood productions

except that once early on

where my dad clearly enjoyed playing the bad guy

and got strangled by my friend.

[somber music]

Before I was born,

there were these brief frames at my cousin's first birthday,

grainy, shaky images of my parents,

months after they were married.

Big smiles and big dreams, I'm sure.

There was only one film,

even remotely feeling like a family home movie,

a trip my parents and their friends made

to visit me at sleepaway camp.

The footage is mostly of me or my camp buddies,

but there are these three quick shots of my dad,

just a few frames, cigar in mouth,

shirt unbuttoned like he used to wear in the summer.

It strangely really captures him.

It's like I can step into that frame of Super 8 film

and see my entire childhood with him.

And then there's this pan that almost gets to him,

but heartbreakingly stops.

If only the camera had kept panning.

There's even less footage of my mother,

just this quick moment in a yellow shirt sitting next

to her friend, Hannah, looking happy and beautiful.

Just a few frames of her, nothing more.

[somber music]

I did put my dad in a few of my feature films

and I feel really lucky to have that footage.

Yet when I watch it, I see the older version of my father,

the father I knew as an adult,

when I came home on vacation or stopped by for dinner,

as always a warm, loving, complicated person,

but not the man who is my whole world.

But still, when I look into his eyes here,

I'm able to go back in time

to see the man I built forts with

and read books on his lap with and walked the city with,

the man who took me to the movies, took me into the movies,

gave me this specific love, this lucky cinematic life.

[somber music]

- Had a fellow used to come in here every afternoon,

exactly at 3 on the nose.

I think he was a school teacher.

He used to come in here every day, sit where you're sitting,

order a Maker's Mark, pull out his false teeth,

and place it in front of him.

And get filthy drunk.

Then he died.

[somber music]

- That's a nice story, Sally.

- [Bartender] Yeah, it is.

[somber music]

[tape deck clicking]

[Upbeat instrumental music]