04/01/10

Given that cinema isn’t so great right now, I figured this was a good week to get all self-important on you, my much loved reader. Sure, How to Train Your Dragon is No. 1 at the box office right now, making about $43 million last weekend. Perfect fodder for wisecracking, right? Alice In Wonderland is approaching the $300 million mark and Hot Tub Time Machine is actually a reality - all worthy of discussion, right? Meh. We’d rather tell the story of StageBanter, in the hopes that fellow cinephile types will e-mail us their own history of film. Anyhow, here we go … 

I grew up in a baseball family, meaning that my older sister and I did three things in our pre-teen years: play baseball, talk about baseball and watch baseball on TV. I only went to the theater exactly two times before entering eighth grade; The Care Bears Movie with my grandma at age five and Dutch, on a fluke, at the dollar theater with my dad, age 11. To this day I’ve never been to the theater with my mom or older sister.

We didn’t watch TV or rent movies in my family. We didn’t have cable and we didn’t read Entertainment Weekly. My best friend from age five to 22 was an African American kid named Teddy. He lived across the street and shared my passion for baseball and basketball. Around the time I turned 12 his parents started asking me along to the movies - always black cinema of the early 90s. The first film I remember seeing that I actually cared about was 1992’s White Men Can’t Jump, a movie I still adore to this day.

Around this time I also started hanging out with a more rebellious/radical crowd or longhairs than I had before; we stayed up all night on the weekends watching movies like Boyz N The Hood, Die Hard and, umm, Sliver. Ha. Around this time my folks also split up, which of course meant that we could finally get cable TV. Needless to say, I became addiction to two things: NBA basketball and any and every movie that was on TV. USA’s “Up All Night” to me, at that time, was the greatest thing ever invented. And then, in 1995, I saw a film called **Hoop Dreams** that changed me forever. No longer were movies just entertainment to me, they were life, art, everything. Music and art mattered an awful lot, too, but movies … they moved me.

This is where things got out of hand. From age 13-15 my idea of a perfect night was watching as many movies and as much basketball as I could. Sometimes Teddy or the rebels came along and at some point I started in with girls and music, but movies were almost always center stage. At age 15 I met a guy named Clint Litton (a friend I still love to this day) who worked at the then-happening Coventry 13 theater. Knowing that my 16th birthday was coming up, I befriended the guy and, with his help, got an interview at the theater. I’ll never forget that interview or the joy I felt when the “you’re hired” call came.

This is Part One of a two-part essay. Stay tuned for Part Two.

Written by G. William Locke