“What Do You Mean You Haven’t Seen - ?”
It all started with a game of Hoopla, a fancy form of charades where you pull cards and then are assigned a way to get everyone to guess what’s on your card.
Our son had a middle-school friend over. This young man pulled a card, and his face darkened. “I don’t know what this is,” he said, so our son took the card from him. He stood up, bent his knees into a semi-crouching walk and with one hand mimed as if he were waggling a cigar. Within seconds, our 6-year-old daughter shouted out: “Marx Brothers!”
Pride in our children soon gave way to consternation that the young friend, whose parents were comfortably situated and able to send him to a very nice private school, had somehow suffered such a shocking lapse in his cultural education. How many major cultural references were being lost to this coming generation, who were just graduating at this point from Pokemon to video games?
With this I suddenly felt an impulse many a Yale grad will recognize: “Maybe I should research the topic and write a book!” Oh, my.
Well, it turned out not to be dreary at all. Our family loved our weekly excursions to Video Isle, or “the tape store” as we called it, especially on two-for-one Tuesdays. We would set up our viewing for the week, and much time was spent scanning the shelves and consulting the staff’s expertise, before returning home with multiple DVD’s. The book became an adventure, and every single film was vetted by the important audience: the kids. If anyone got up to go to the bathroom 45 minutes into the film, that was an automatic “no.”
The grownups organized the winning entries as if setting up a theatre season, balancing light fare with challenging, color with black and white, introducing important actors, nodding to the season… until we had 52 entries, for a year’s worth of weekly movie nights. The book that resulted was absolutely marinated in love: love of family, love of movies, love of sharing cherished cultural references.
Our friend and neighbor Craig Wilson, who owned Video Isle, provided lots of visuals (as well as moral support). He belonged to a network of independent video stores throughout the country, and thought the book should be offered as a resource in every one of them. But that didn’t happen, as those stores were beginning to close, one by one.
Undaunted, we thought the book would have a place under many a Christmas tree, allowing delighted families to leaf through it and start their own movie adventures. But we were on the verge of being swamped with the entertainment opportunities offered by streaming services, which rendered the question not so much “What shall we watch tonight?” as “Who’s watching what, on which device?”
The final nail in what was meant to be a multi-book project came when I had embarked on a second volume. I was excited to share with my kids the iconic foreign films that shaped my young imagination – Bergman, Fellini, Kurosawa.
Halfway through my first attempt at writing about Bergman’s Seventh Seal, my son advised: “You know, Mom, my generation doesn’t read books.”
So the book into which I had poured so much love once proudly listed at $24.95 – I believe it is now going for a little over $4 on Amazon. Which is good news for anyone who might want to join the happy few who have browsed about in it and found it to be lavishly illustrated, lovingly written and welcoming to anyone who would like to be introduced to (or reminded of) some wonderful movies. Guess that sounds like a pitch, so here you go: “What Do You Mean You Haven’t Seen - ?”
My royalty share of $4 is unlikely to make me rich, but I’d still love to share the love. Every writer has an “unloved child” out there (perhaps two…or more). And if you are one of the people who wouldn’t know the Marx Brothers if you saw them, I’m shocked, shocked… (yes, that’s another reference).