Well, that’s another year behind us.

I should point out right now that this post has nothing to do with Fellini’s AMARCORD (1974).  It’s a great movie, I love it a lot, but I didn’t watch it this year.  Up until ten minutes ago, I don’t think I thought about AMARCORD once in 2010, which is pretty funny, given that the title translates as “I remember.”  Nonetheless, this key image from the 1975 Academy Award winner for “Best Foreign Language Film” sums up the burden I feel as I reflect back on the past twelve months of life, love, work and the movies.  I started writing about movies — really seriously hacking away at the subject, with trips to the Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center and stuff — in 1997, with a feature article for Video Watchdog about the differences between the Technicolor and black-and-white versions of Michael Curtiz’s DOCTOR X (1932).   Not long after that I became a moderator at the Mobius Home Video Forum, where I helped keep the conversation lively yet civil while posting news items and movie reviews; in 1999 I was invited by publisher/editor-in-chief Tim Lucas to join his “Kennel” of regular contributors at Video Watchdog on a permanent basis.  At the peak of my Watchdog powers, I was turning in 12 to 15 reviews a month, which an average word count somewhere between 800 and 1,200 words.  In the ensuing years, while banging out the work for VW, I also contributed to the books Contemporary North American Film Directors and Contemporary British and Irish Filmmakers for the United Kingdom’s Wallflower Press, Vampiros and Monstruos: The Mexican Horror Film of the 20th Century for Midnight Marquee and The Book of Lists: Horror for Harper Collins and wrote a ton of supplemental material for such DVD companies as Anchor Bay Entertainment, Dark Sky Films, the Italy-based NoShame Films, Synapse Films, Severin Films… liner notes, talent bios, box copy, ad copy, I wrote it all.  In 2005, I went to work for Turner Classic Movies, writing programming articles, DVD reviews and blog posts for The Movie Morlocks.  The punchline is that I write a lot every year and have for a lot of years.  And I watch a lot of movies every year and have for… well, you get the idea.  My point is, it adds up.  But to what?

I know guys who keep track of the number of movies they see each year.  I don’t do that.  I’m not saying those guys are nerds or anything.  I might do that if I thought of it in a timely fashion, just as I might wake up on the first of each month and say “Rabbit-rabbit” for good luck or eat Hoppin’ John on January 1st for prosperity, but the bottom line is that I never think to do it.  Too bad, as my numbers are probably up there.  Reviewing one movie might compel me to watch one or two others as research, or more.  When I was assigned Radley Metzger’s SCORE (1974) a few years ago, I hadn’t yet seen any of his films.  Wanting a sense of how Metzger’s themes and filming style evolved over the years, I queued up THE ALLEY CATS (1966), CARMEN, BABY (1967), CAMILLE 2000 (1969) and LITTLE MOTHER (1973) by way of comparison.  You do the math: in order to assess one 90 minute movie, I made myself watch 3 hours of other movies.  I was a bachelor at the time, I had no children, and other than a 9 to 5 job in a hospital my time was my own.  When I was assigned Monte Hellman’s TWO-LANE BLACKTOP (1971), I watched the movie every evening for a week when I got home from work before I set down to write my review.

Mind you, there are a lot of disturbed people out there, angry loners, obsessives and weirdos who watch movies all the time – I’m not saying this tendency or preference or whatever you want to call it makes me unique or even interesting.  All of this is just context for saying that I feel a little odd at the end of each year, as if I have to assess all the movie-watching I’ve done, process it, make sense of it all.  And yet watching the movies is only part of my year-end inventory.  There’s all the research, too… the hours at the Academy library in West Hollywood pulling books off the shelf or poring through old files of clippings from the trades, reviews, press releases, studio biographies; the time online running down biographical information on actors, writers, directors, producers, cinematographers; the history you have to read if you want your reviews to be accurate and smart and actually useful for more than the minute and a half it takes someone to scan your articles from top to bottom.

At the moment I’m writing an article that will go into the program for the second Turner Classic Movies Classic Film Festival in the spring of next year.  Last year I wrote about Hollywood landmarks festival-goers might pass on Hollywood Boulevard – the Pig ‘N’ Whistle, the Cherokee Building, Musso and Frank’s, the Hollywood Theater – and this year I’m writing up a new handful of locations of interest.  The research is fascinating – in so many ways, the story of Hollywood real estate is the story of Hollywood, from the lemon groves that got paved over to make room for movie studios (still standing and long gone) to the dusty horse lanes that are now clogged with Priuses and Landrovers to the Valley ranches that yielded to tract housing, tanning salons and Yogurtland.  I’d love to have walked the streets of Hollywood during the Golden Age of movie-making but I was born too late, so research has been for me the next best thing.  Add to all the volumes (hardbound, paperbacked or electronic – bless you Google Reader!  Bless you Amazon Look Inside!) I’ve tucked into for the purposes of research are still more that I’ve read because… because… well, because I need to know these things, about Puritan America and the Civil War and the influenza epidemic during World War I and slavery and medicine and religion and even finance and economics.  Once you get started, how can you stop wanting to know things?

As I struggle to make sense of it all, to fit a year’s worth of movies and information and history and trivia and my feelings about all of these things, I come to a kind of impasse.  It is what it is, as the man once said, and it all fits, it all goes into the flow chart.  It was a pretty good year, end-to-end, and I’m proud of my work and my accomplishments.   Earlier this year, Morlock Jeff proposed a blog-a-thon to commemorate TCM’s festival of Native Americans in Film; instead of one blog post, I devoted the entire month to the subject of Native Americans in Horror Films, watching I don’t even remember how many titles and backing my criticism with references to history, politics, literature and other tangentially related topics.  Did I overdo it?  Probably! This year I also got to write about Rex Ingram’s THE MAGICIAN (1926) and Hammer’s VAMPIRE CIRCUS (1972) and the Russian fantasy VIY (1967) and the unjustly obscure Spanish horror film THE PEOPLE WHO OWN THE DARK (1976) and and the pre-Code shocker MURDERS IN THE ZOO (1933).  I got to write about Mantan Moreland and Glenn Strange and Woody Strode.  I got to stand up for mummy movies and end of the world movies. I got my geek on about fang size and vampires who blowed up good.  And I got to interview the ginchy genre artist Belle Dee and celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Friedman Brothers’ hilariously inappropriate Warts and All.  And I got to invent The Horror Dads, a clutch of like-minded fathers who love their kids and all things horror and don’t mind getting together from time to time to talk about it.  And if none of the above had come to pass, 2010 would still have been worth waking up for just to work the TCM Classic Film Festival, where I got paid money to watch and write about movies, movies, movies… so many movies squeezed into 3 days that I wanted by the end of the weekend to pull my own eyes out of my head.  When you want to do something like that to yourself you know you’ve really been somewhere.  Long story short, what a year!  Happy new one!  Peace and love and see you at the movies.