Little Paulie Gets Into Movies

And he never gets out.

I already used this photo at the top of my birthday post in February, but it’s the best one I have of myself in my embryonic stage. I’m 5 years old there and quite obviously ready to rumble. Actually, “Little Paulie” is not all that different from the Paul typing this, much to the chagrin of those who know and desperately try to love me in my current state.

People often ask me how I became so obsessed with movies, and I actually have an answer for them (I have an answer about my rock & roll obsession, too, but that’s for a different post).

I wasn’t a particularly big movie fan when I was 5, but I was already getting interested in them in a big way by the time I was 9 or 10.

Once I could read, it was game on. I’d sit in the living room devouring Time and Newsweek movie reviews in between setting up orange Hot Wheels tracks and playing Nerf basketball with my brother, Jim. Never mind that I couldn’t possibly understand most of the films I was reading about and wouldn’t even be able to see them for another ten years, when I was both old enough to do it and we finally had home video players. I simply couldn’t take in enough information about movies.

Here’s how this aberrant behavior started, in three parts.

PART 1

Back when my family still lived in Cleveland, we would often visit my Uncle Ted and Aunt Emily’s house in nearby North Olmsted. During the drive, there would come a moment where, if you looked at just the right time, you could see the movie that was being projected on the screen at the local drive-in. I think you had to peer through an opening in some trees to spot it.

The glimpse I caught of that screen one night may well be my very first memory. My siblings and I all turned to look, and saw a few seconds of a woman driving a motorcycle and squeezing a bunch of mustard into the face of a man who was driving a car.

That’s all we got. But it was enough for me.

The action was very mysterious, given the total lack of context, and the sheer size of the image was stunning. I had never experienced anything like it. I still remember what it felt like to see it glowing there in the dark.

Many years later, dogged Internet research uncovered that I had glimpsed a shot near the end of a godawful, now mercifully forgotten Bob Hope picture called Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number that was released in the summer of 1966. So I would have been about 3 1/2 years old at the time. Some unknown character actor drove the car, and Phyllis Diller manned the mustard while driving the motorcycle.

That’s it. That brief, stupid moment had a tremendous impact on me. Which led to...

PART 2

I imagine I was in the first grade when I was looking through my mom’s big, brown Encyclopedia Britannica. I used to just choose a random volume and stop to read about things that I thought were interesting as I thumbed through it. Understand, I wasn’t looking up the theory of relativity or the ins and outs of kidney dialysis. It was more like “dogs” or “hamburgers” or “baseball.”

One day while perusing the M’s, I stumbled upon “motion pictures.” The entry included a shot of an entire 1950s movie crew standing on a set. There was a duplicate image right next to it, except the people were just outlines with numbers in them. So you could look up what each person’s job was— “1: Director,” or “14: Focus Puller,” or “17: Script Girl,” etc.

I returned to this illustration over and over again for the next several years. I was shocked that it took that many individuals to shoot a movie, and it nailed the concept in my brain that people make this stuff up! I was still a little kid, but now movies were starting to churn in my mind.

Then, the clincher...

PART 3

That’s me with, as you can almost certainly tell, a nun. I forget her name, but she laughed at my jokes and was really nice to me. She was not the dreaded “smack you with a ruler” type of nun.

I’m posing after my First Holy Communion outside of the old St. William’s Catholic Church in Guntersville, AL. I’m holding my arm like that so you can see the watch I was given that morning by my parents. (I’ve spent the past forty or so years trying to shake off my Catholic indoctrination. Your mileage may vary. I no longer have the watch, which was much easier to lose than the Catholicism).

You can see on the edge of the photo there that this was taken at some point in 1971. By the time the film was developed in December, that church was being torn down in favor of the then more modernistic one that still stands on that very corner.

While they were building the new church, the owner of the Lake Theater in Guntersville kindly let St. William’s borrow the place so we could have mass there on Sunday mornings.

That’s right— when I was 8 years old, I went to church in a movie theater. I don’t need a psychologist to tell me this is significant. Or, if you will, I don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

At that point in time, I’m pretty sure I had been inside exactly one walk-in theater, when my parents took us all to see Dr. Dolittle shortly after we moved to Alabama in 1967. I hated Dr. Dolittle. It was ugly-looking and boring as hell, and even as a child I knew there couldn’t be a more annoying human being on the planet than Anthony Newley. I totally remember wanting to smack him each time he started singing.

Dr. Dolittle certainly did little for me (actually, that’s the kind of thing I used to write in my reviews for CNN. Back then I got paid for it).

Anyway, there was an altar set up just beneath the screen at the Lake Theater, and the congregation, including my family, sat in rows of numbered flip-up seats, just as God intended.

That was odd fun, but the real kicker was the lobby. The lobby of the Lake Theater might be the single most influential room of my life when you consider how much of my brain came to be filled with moments from great motion pictures and how much of my adulthood has revolved around writing about and talking about movies, not to mention writing screenplays.

A spark was generated in that room, and it ignited the psychological kindling I’d been gathering for the previous few years.

Here are three posters that I can recall being displayed in that theater lobby. They seemed so completely adult to me— all of these pictures are strongly rated R. I felt like I shouldn’t even be looking at their come-ons. But I was fascinated. I’d get an eyeful of them on the way into our makeshift church, then examine them at length while my parents were standing around talking to their friends on the way out:

Klute (d: Alan Pakula)

This looks tawdry now, let alone when I was 8 years old!!

I had no idea what a call girl was, but I quickly surmised that I shouldn’t go asking my mom for clarification. I now knew, though, what a hot woman with a great haircut unzipping her slinky, sparkly dress looked like, and I can’t say that I was any worse off because of it.

Fonda would win a much-deserved Oscar for her work here, by the way. I’ve always felt the rest of the picture is considerably overpraised, if rather bravely unpleasant. The moral, if you need one—and apparently no one does nowadays—is “Don’t become a call girl, or some weirdo might try to kill you.”

Not exactly “There’s no place like home,” but it’ll do in a pinch.

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Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask (d: Woody Allen)

Obviously, I had zero idea what was going on here! I mean, I was totally lost. I imagine what I most wanted to know about sex when I was 8 was what sex actually was, and I sure wasn’t going to find out during mass, unless some renegade priest decided to start opening up.

When I finally saw Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex years later, I laughed at the horror movie takeoff with the giant breast rolling around like the Blob, and the artsy Italian movie parody was pretty good, too. Otherwise, it’s easily the least funny picture out of Woody Allen’s “early funny movies.” However, that actor to the right of Woody on the poster, the guy with the mustache who’s wearing a dress, is the great Lou Jacobi.

Oh! That guy!

I once saw a very elderly and grumpy-looking Lou Jacobi shopping in a D’Agostino grocery store on W. 57th St. and 9th Ave. This must have been around 2001 or so. I also saw Nipsey Russell and Leslie Uggams in that same D’Agostino, although not at the same time. Vaguely recognizable showbiz types do not travel in gaggles.

That’s all I’ve really got for you.

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The French Connection (d: William Friedkin)

Last but not least, in the extreme!

If you were to shake me awake in the middle of the night tonight and ask me to name my favorite movie, I’d tell you it’s The French Connection. I cannot get enough of its documentary feel, its sheer nuts-and-bolts New York City bluntness, the rubble-filled urban decay of it.

What Gene Hackman says in the final scene—“That son-of-a-bitch is here. I saw him. And I’m gonna get him.”—is the plot. He could have said it at practically any point during the picture. “Popeye” Doyle, as he pursues that snooty French heroin smuggler, is as single-minded and remorseless as the shark in Jaws.

The French Connection is loaded with cool. There’s that thrilling car chase with the elevated subway train, of course; Hackman won his first Oscar for aggressively shouting his dialogue at one and all; Roy Scheider’s broken nose has never looked better; weatherbeaten overcoats flap all over the place; and Don Ellis’ churning music full of cellos and blaring brass may well be the least properly appreciated score in cinema history. William Friedkin also won an Oscar for Best Director, and the movie itself took home Best Picture.

The French Connection is nothing short of fantastic, up and down and backwards, and the poster, yet again, strongly suggested I was in over my head just by looking at it. Guys didn’t get shot in the back by pissed-off New York City cops in the kinds of movies my parents let me look at, and I couldn’t wait for the opportunity to see it happen right there in front of me!

When I finally got to watch The French Connection as a teenager, I had a religious moment.

I don’t drink wine out of this particular chalice, but I get more mileage out of coffee anyway, just as I get more spiritual sustenance from movies than I do church services.

Cheers.