I recently endured my third move in four years.  If you’ve been fortunate to have remained in the same place for a long time and if you aren’t a film critic, maybe the immensity of this particular event might be lost on you… but let me tell you, gentle reader, that over the course of the last two weeks I’ve been through the looking glass.  I’ve been writing professionally now for over ten years and in the space of that decade I’ve amassed a considerable amount of, shall we say, research materials.  (To put it another way, 99% of what I now own in excess I didn’t possess at all only ten years ago.)  When my wife and I moved from our Upper East Side Manhattan one-bedroom apartment in 2004, we had something like 130 boxes, 90 or 95 of which were filled with books, video tapes, DVDs and music… guess whose. We’ve moved those same boxes (and more) twice since then and every time we do I go through a kind of gnawing spiritual inventory… do I need all this stuff, do I want all this stuff, why do I have all this stuff?  I had made do for the past two years with a sort of skeleton crew of books and discs limited to a single bookshelf inside my cottage apartment, with all of my videos and 90% of my reading and viewing collection packed away in the garage, so it was both a terrible blow to have to deal again with all of this heretofore unseen baggage… and yet kind of wonderful, too.  I’d forgotten about some of the things I owned… for instance, my collection of SCREEN WORLD annuals. 

I bought my first edition of SCREEN WORLD in the early 1970s.  New York schoolteacher turned theatre and film archivist John Willis was the editor and his devotion to his subject, to cataloging film releases (both major studio films and flinty independent efforts, as well as foreign imports) in an accessible and attractive package, was both obvious and inspiring.  Those books were gorgeous, packed with clear, silvery film stills and tons of factual information.  Back before the IMDb, these books were the best place for a fledgling film writer (and anyone with a love of the movies) to look up who was in what, when it was made, who released it, how long it was, what it was rated, what other films came out at the same time and which celebrities passed away that year.  Every year I saved up money for the then-staggering $13-15 cover price… but it was worth all that allowance money.  Each volume was a thrill ride, a treasure trove and a sobering summing up.  In the obituary sections of older volumes I bought at used bookstores, I found out that some actors I’d long admired and expected to see in future films had been dead for years.  By the time I stopped collecting these volumes, in 1990 when movies just weren’t interesting to me anymore, I had a complete series of SCREEN WORLDS for the 1970s and 1980s and a couple volumes from the 60s as well.  And I worked these books, let me tell you… when I first began reviewing movies, I pored through them, I made copious notes, I haunted the index, I practically had all 24 volumes on a spinning Lazy Susan for quick access.  They were invaluable to me, if exhausting… and yet when I found out about the Internet Movie Database, I dropped them like the proverbial hot rock.  The Internet was just more convenient and didn’t take up any shelf space.

I found my old SCREEN WORLDs while packing recently and put them aside to sell to a local used bookshop.  I thought their relative rarity would bring me some good scratch in store credits, which I could then use to buy something more useful.  And yet when the time came to port these books over to the store, I balked.  I couldn’t do it.  I can’t really tell you why… it’s not as if, even now, in the biggest place I’ve ever lived in, I have more shelf space than I can use.  I don’t!  Placement is still competitive in my library… and yet I’ve made space for these obsolute beauties.  Because they are beautiful.  I can still sit down with a year and lose myself for an hour or two, remembering the movies I’d seen, wondering about the ones I hadn’t.  The curios (Barry Brown’s THE WAY WE LIVE NOW, Daniel Haller’s PIECES OF DREAMS, Barry Pollack’s THIS IS A HIJACK) buried in each edition of SCREEN WORLD (and represented by one or no pictures) are more beguiling here than they are on the IMDb, where they’re just a shopping list (often incomplete) of actors and technicians.  I guess I kept these volumes because they keep me connected with a sense of wonder and a willingness to find out that the Internet just doesn’t engender. These books slow me down, open my eyes and take me somewhere.  I can’t imagine a better way to honor the movies.