I'd like to think I gave them hope, I'd make them dream. I'd take them on a brief encounter, I'd take them on the road to Bali, we'd visit Casablanca, get stories from Philadelphia and sometimes from as near as the shop around the corner.
As the years passed, it became less like an event and more like fun. It was hard to adapt but eventually I did. Popcorn was eaten, girls were kissed and sharks attacked. The new audience was younger, harder to please, and louder - but I loved them and they loved me. We went on a Space Odyssey, had Close Encounters and various other crimes & misdemeanors. Everyone knew me and everyone wanted to spend time with me. I always had a full house in the evenings, that's why I never got lonely and why everyone always had beaming smiles.
And then someone in the blackest suit I've ever seen said "why only show one film when you could show three?" He made plans to chop me up into three. Then he made plans to chop me up into seven. I stayed strong, no way; this is just me, on my own, with my friends.. my friends who have been with me since the beginning.
But then my friends started wanting more. More types of popcorn, more movies, bigger movies, bigger sound. I chased after my friends, trying to do what they wanted. Instead they got in their new cars and flew down the road to meet shiny new friends, who watched films on shiny new screens. Before I knew it, everyone had left me.
The nights were quiet. Occasionally old friends would visit. I tried taking them back to Casablanca, I tried giving them all the new pulp fiction but they didn't come anymore. Nobody wanted me.
And then more men in even darker suits came by and said maybe they would cut me up and reshape me and change who I am. They talked and talked and eventually they left and didn't come back anymore. Nobody came back anymore. I tried and I tried. I did everything I knew how to do -- I gave them funny people and gangsters and beautiful women and aliens, but nobody wanted my stories anymore.
I closed my doors, long before I wanted to. We locked up and bolted down. Nobody came by, nobody asked for me.
And now, some men with big smiling faces and tiny shiny devices they talk into have an idea about turning me into a supermarket or row of housing. I looked around one last time in the hope that someone would remember me. Maybe someone would rescue me. They didn't.
Stories were told, dreams were fed and life was lived, but that was a long, long time ago. The world has changed, as have the people.
Film sneaks into our lives in different ways. I grow fond of a film not just for what it is, but because of how we met. Associations sit so strongly in my head that a movie becomes entwined with certain occasions or periods of my life, and a select number of films maiden voyage into my heart was through television. Seeing them beamed out to me from the TV screen for the first time has left them intrinsically connected with a certain period of my life, and, for some strange reason, has reinforced my love of them.
Catching Goodfellas a quarter of the way through, round about the Copacabana tracking shot, or finding the opening credits of Undersiege reaching an end, and with a thrill settle in for guns, cooking and Gary Busey cross dressing (Busey, by the way, featured heavily in my childhood, as the king of the supporting part in dubious 90’s films: Underseige, Point Break, Predator 2). Yes, Undersiege seemed to be on TV almost every weekend when I was 14.
I was drawn to these films because of their violence, their dramatic dialogue and their phenomenal music (Terminator 2’s mournful industrial clanging is still one of my favourite movie themes). Since those tender years I may have watched subtler and more intriguing films, films which have become my all time favourites no less, but whenever I find one of the above on TV, I still have to sit down and watch it, hypnotised. I may have it on DVD but I still have to watch it, then and there, because it is being broadcast to the public. And even though there are more obscure films I love which are rarely broadcast, it’s still a special moment when Undersiege or Candyman invade my living room. And I’m pretty sure it has to do with me at the age of 14, sitting in the television’s electric glow. 