1000

Tonight marks the 1,000th entry into Cap'n Howdy's Blogorium. It crept up on me and until last night the Cap'n truthfully had no idea we'd gotten this far. Writing every day will do that for you, but the multiple film coverage from Horror Fests 1-3 and Summer Edition certainly bolstered the numbers.

It was tempting to do some kind of retrospective, but to be honest with you all of those posts are still accessible and it's better to look forward than backwards*, at least in terms of what's been written. On the other hand, I did feel like taking this opportunity to give you folks an idea of how I arrived at one thousand posts and the indoctrination into cinema that facilitated it.

A love of movies is something I've always had. I've mentioned before that the first two movies I was ever taken to were before I could possibly remember them: The Muppet Movie and The Empire Strikes Back. I've told you about my first memory of going to see Return of the Jedi was also my first exposure to midnight movies and fandom / cosplay (before it even had a name).

I don't often mention that it was Dad who started this off. Once we had a color tv and a Betamax, he would tape anything and everything off of broadcast television and HBO that we might like. For years I didn't see the first five minutes of Tron because the tape started with Dad frantically flipping the channels to get to the movie. I always thought it started in the computer, not with Flynn's Arcade at night. I still can't think of the beginning of Tron without seeing Bill Cosby's face flip past.

Dad was (and still is) a science fiction geek. It's because of him that I saw The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy not long after it first aired in the US. My love for all things Disney came from mom and, to an extent, my grandparents who kept a copy of Robin Hood at their river house in West Virginia. Dad could not wait to show us the Star Wars Trilogy on tape, and eventually corrupted our young minds by showing us Blade Runner and Spaceballs a little too early.

I learned how to copy a vhs tape from him, although we weren't supposed to do it. Because we could rent a laserdisc player and laserdiscs from Video Bar, I saw the director's cut of Aliens years before it was released on vhs. We spent a LOT of time in Video Bar and Carbonated video, and I spent accumulated hours wandering the genres looking at the covers of tapes. Years before I ever saw them, I knew of The Hills Have Eyes, They Live, Swords and Sorcerers, Time Bandits, and The Evil Dead.

My favorite series of books were the Video Home Movie Guide by Mick Martin and Marsha Porter. It was like a video store with handy synopses of movies I'd never heard of, cross referenced by genre and with a listing of actors, actresses, and directors in the back. I might never have known what Shock Treatment was if not for accidentally stumbling upon the entry. The foundation of film geekhood was well in place; it was simply a matter of finding like minded folks.

Shows like USA Up All Night and the early days of the Sci-Fi Channel also gave me the opportunity to watch movies (sometimes edited, sometimes not) that I never would have thought to rent. If Elvira ever aired in Cary, I didn't see it, but WKFT TV 40 did air MonsterVision with Joe Bob Briggs on Saturday afternoons. That, along with Mystery Science Theater 3000 gave me an appreciation for the low budget monster movies of the fifties and sixties. Even if they were bad, the flicks were still entertaining.

All this time, I'd never considered writing about movies. Sitting down to do such a solitary thing is actually counterintuitive when you have fellow film geeks to talk to. Part of the fun of those first two years of college was meeting folks who had the same love of cinema and could talk endlessly about a wide swath of topics. We had movie viewings and shared tapes and played the "Movie Game". I even started a movie quiz in a composition book; one apparently so hard that almost no one got all of them right.

I owned two dvds before even having a dvd player. They were Ghostbusters and Mallrats. I still have Ghostbusters. I still own almost all of my tapes.

Writing about movies didn't really begin in earnest until I had a livejournal. It was something else to write about other than the day to day business. I was still watching movies all of the time and at the end of the year I would send out a massive email to everyone I knew that served as a recap of "the year in movies". People enjoyed it, so I kept it up.

Finding the balance is always tricky. The hardest thing about the last two Horror Fests has been walking away from the party outside to recap a movie before starting the next one. We do watch movies all night long, but there are breaks of anywhere from five to fifty minutes sometimes depending on how good the discussion is on the porch. Sometimes I wish I had a laptop so as to be able to share the experience while it happens, but in other ways I would like to try to get as many of you out here for Horror Fest as well. It's a whole hell of a lot of fun.

As far as the future goes, I have some ideas for what I want to work on as a dissertation in Graduate School, but the urge to write a book about the history of the drive in is gnawing at the back of my brain. I'm really interested in understanding how it supplements the notion of the grindhouse in larger cities, and how roadshows and drive ins helped bolster the reputation of "cult" films of the 1960s and 70s.

I'd also love to write more about "cult" cinema and horror. I realize I do it here almost all of the time, but no matter what else I watch, I tend to gravitate back to the two. I guess you can thank Up All Night, MonsterVision, and MST3K for that too. If there's one thing I tend to get behind on, it's seeing things on the big screen.

While it is true that there are a number of hassles with seeing a movie theatrically these days, it is still an experience which can't be fully replicated at home. I always mean to do it more but rarely do, and honestly it's not likely to change any time very soon. Working on Friday nights and Saturday mornings don't really help that much, but I have so much at home begging to be watched that paying ten dollars or more sometimes isn't worth the hassle.

That being said, the drive in story may continue in some form at the 1.50 theatre, a subject I'd like to explore more. There's so much more that can be said and done. So many more movies to watch and discuss. So many more people and conversations about mutual experiences to be had. Enough to fill another thousand posts, or even ten thousand.

Will the Cap'n still be writing this in thirty years? Even ten? Five? Next year? I don't know, but whatever I do, I'll welcome you to keep reading and to keep giving me your input. It helps improve the quality of the writing, which should be evident if you go back to post one and follow chronologically. Look forward to at least two more Horror Fests, because I do.

And thanks for reading. I really do appreciate it.





* is it totally obvious that my car was totalled? like, never coming back totalled? well it is, so I am forced to move forward from this stupid accident.