It’s Father’s Day today – so I’d like to thank my dad for all he did to contribute to my warped cinematic sensibilities. He didn’t know it at the time, but some of the films he took me to as a kid had a profound experience on me. Four immediately come to mind.

When Jaws came out in June of 1975, I was seven-years-old and remember riding my Hot Wheels on the sidewalk and running into an older neighborhood kid who stopped to tell me about seeing the film, and how at his screening some old lady had barfed right at the moment a severed head had wobbled into view (in retrospect, an unforgivable spoiler). He’d also heard that at other screenings people who couldn’t handle its intensity simply fainted. Of course, after that kind of description I became obsessed with seeing it.

Dad promised to take me with one caveat: I had to first read Peter Benchley’s novel from beginning-to-end. Those 309 pages were a bit daunting for a seven-year-old but, thankfully, the film stuck it out at the neighborhood theater for several months and that gave me the time I needed to finish the book and watch the film during its closing week. Nobody passed out or let fly with their lunch at my screening, or if they did I was too enthralled to notice. In many ways, I credit this experience as having a huge and positive influence on both my love of reading and for the cinema.

A few months later, that same year, my father did something totally unexpected and reckless; he took me along to a campus screening of The Groove Tube. Whereas Jaws was PG (back then, now PG-13) this one was rated R – so I have no idea what he was thinking. Maybe he thought is was a light comedy starring Chevy Chase, and that’s why he thought it was harmless. But the tip-off that it was not was the audience. The place was packed with very stoned and drunk college students and it was there that I got to see full male and female nudity, scatological bits, various sexual encounters, drug use, profanity, and an extended sketch of puppet theater involving a penis with googly eyes pasted on the testicles giving a talk about sexual safety.

And then the movie started. Oh, wait, no, that was the movie. For me the audience and film sort of melded together given all the scantily clad people around us who were engaged in public displays of affection, using all kinds of unprintable language while in various stages of inebriation. The Groove Tube certainly wasn’t great cinema, nor did it inspire great behavior from its audience, and I recall dad being embarrassed by the whole thing – but I was hooked by the experience.

A few months after that my dad took me to see a film that was more his cup of tea: Three Days of the Condor. Robert Redford plays the part of a C.I.A. researcher who is paid to read books (his code name is Condor). One day he goes out for a sandwich and comes back to find everyone dead. At first it seems like an outside job, but then he realizes that “almost everyone he trusts will try to kill him.” I’m going to hazard a guess as to why my dad liked this film: back in the 1950′s he had been a bookworm that had unknowingly been conscripted by the C.I.A. as a cold-warrior to “spread democracy and fight communism.”

The specifics: In 1959 he was one of 18 students who received a full fellowship for the International Student Relations Seminar at the University of Harvard. Every aspect of it, from the professors who taught the seminar, to the books used in class, were paid for and provided by the C.I.A. as part of their goal to infiltrate the National Student Conference with indoctrinated cold warriors. This scandal was later uncovered by Ramparts Magazine in the mid-sixties. The irony was that U.S. government would look at communist countries and point out their practice of taking over student groups as an example of why communism is evil, while domestically it was doing exactly the same thing. Add the Vietnam War and Watergate to that and one can see why my father would remain an informed skeptic of the political machine for the rest of his life. How did he impart this lesson onto me as a child? Whether playing cards or chess, he’d let me catch him cheating every now and then, and I’ve been questioning authority ever since.

Speaking of the sixties and a haunting parable for Vietnam, I’ll never forget dragging my dad to see Night of the Living Dead for another campus screening. At this point my memory is a bit fuzzy as to my age, but I was still quite young and what I distinctly remember was somehow convincing my dad that we needed to spice up a family reunion by taking a gaggle of relatives and children to see Romero’s zombie classic. The film gave several of them nightmares and it took my dad several months to forgive me that particular trespass. In my defense: what part of Night of the Living Dead was unclear? It’s all spelled out in the title. Granted, it’s not The Texas Chain Saw Massacre but, still… Perhaps he thought it was going to be a farcical bit with Abbott and Costello, but had that been the case it would have been called Abbot and Costello Meet the Living Dead. It’s curious that they never did, given everyone else they met. I’ll agree that such a film, in hindsight, would have been more appropriate for the occasion. But, even so, why not start them young? It worked for me.

Happy Father's Day, pops!