You can click here if you want to see a photo of my father, my oldest son, and me at a geocache in 2014.
THE CACHE IS NOT AT THE POSTED COORDINATES! If you go there, you will likely get hit by a car or arrested or something else bad would happen. So don't do it!
Movies were one of the most important things in my father's life. For nearly fifty years, he ran a classic film convention which he founded with a couple of other film buffs back in the late 1960's. Growing up around him, movies became an important part of my life and my relationship with him.
When I was very young, my dad was showing a print of King Kong (the original one, with Fay Wray) and I was scared by the movie. He showed me that light was coming out of the projector and there was nothing on the other side of the screen. I can't say that I can recall ever really being scared by a movie, so I guess his lesson took! The first movie I really remember specifically asking to go see with him was the Disney science-fiction movie The Black Hole. I think he must not have been enthusiastic about that choice, but he agreed that if I took a nap we would go. I slept, and we went! I still remember the John Barry theme music for that film, which I played over and over on an LP when I was young.
As I moved along in school, we kept watching movies together. A lot of these, such as Back to the Future and The Princess Bride are ones I've since watched with my own children. This multi-generational sharing of movies continued even with this last movie dad and I saw in a theater - Guardians of the Galaxy. He and I watched it during its original release and then my sons and I watched it at home.
Another aspect of movies which dad enjoyed and which I also took an interest in was the music written for films. He had been a music education major in college and music was his other significant artistic interest. Among his favorite film score composers were Bernard Herrmann, Miklos Rozsa (who provided the score for The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, a movie which featured the special effects work of Ray Harryhausen -- another favorite of dad's), and John Williams (among whose many iconic themes is the five-note alien communication from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a movie for which he won the second of six straight Grammy Awards for Best Album of Original Score Written for a Motion Picture or a Television Special).
We watched older films, too. When I was cast in a high school production of Harvey, we watched the Jimmy Stewart movie of that play. Jimmy Stewart also starred in Vertigo, an Alfred Hitchcock movie that I saw for the first time in the basement of one of dad's film convention's co-founders. Sometimes we'd see fairly obscure movies. One that I remember watching together on video was Went the Day Well?, a British movie, made during World War Two about a village taken over by German forces.
One of dad's favorite actors was William S. Hart. Hart started out on the stage and moved into making movies when he was nearly fifty years old. For a couple of years he was rated as the biggest money-making star in the United States. He mostly appeared in westerns such as Tumbleweeds (his last movie) and Hell's Hinges. Both his movies and characters tended to be serious rather than romanticized -- "harshly realistic" and "an unglorified, dusty vision of the West" are phrases which show up in his biographies.
I could go on and on about dad and me and the movies... He was thrilled by how well the Peter Jackson adaptations of Tolkien's novels turned out. The Return of the King came out right around the time his own father passed away; the Annie Lennox song over the end credits struck a chord with him and it was one of the pieces we selected to play at my dad's funeral.
When I was a kid, I'd asked dad what kind of films he liked and he'd told me "good ones." I had thought it was a non-answer back then, but now I get it. Growing up, I wanted nothing to do with westerns. One of his favorites was High Noon with Gary Cooper -- I finally watched it as an adult and realized what I'd been missing out on by dismissing whole genres of movies.
But most of all, when I think of dad and the movies, I think about Star Wars, which he went to see many times in the theater during its initial release, bringing along just about anyone he could get to go with him. Though I don't specifically remember going to see it, I know it was one of the first -- if not the first -- movie I saw with him in a theater. And he and I watched all six of the movies released during his lifetime together.
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