Original Essays

Movie Man

That whole first year is documented in a screenplay I wrote called Movie Man — the finger biting moments, the mistakes I made — the Sturm and Drang of that fall and winter. We fell so far behind with our bills, we almost had to shut the place down several times. To borrow from the title of an old Warner Brothers movie, I died a thousand times that year. But every time we lay bloodied and barely breathing, the cavalry would ride in and rescue us — meaning a Young Frankenstein or a Jaws would come along, we'd make a little money and find ourselves able to pay Coca-Cola or the popcorn people part of what we owed them. The fall was weak, the winter was dismal and the spring and summer, worse. In August we were so desperate that we put an ad in the papers, declaring our new price policy, $1 AT ALL TIMES, and overnight we became a local legend.

My wife and I sold our house and bought a little one on the edge of the woods, a mile from where George Washington crossed the Delaware. We watched the seasonal changes carefully now, the birds flying south, the skunks and the deer who held group encounters at our doorstep. I bought a Super 8 movie camera, with sound attached, and filmed my children's daily lives, little things, like my two sons fighting at the breakfast table. Or my little daughter singing,

Uh. Uh. Uh. Uh.
Staying Alive.

I have learned how to look back since those days. Most of all, I remember the winter nights. I'd stand at the window watching the snow bend the branches of the fir trees, and I would do my best W.C. Fields imitation: "And it ain't a fit night out for man nor beast." We'd be in the kitchen, all of us, my wife in her silky robe, feeding us, the children giggling in their pajamas. And a golden retriever named Gulliver.

I knew they would grow bored with my camera in their faces, so I asked if we could do one last movie together. Pictures In Autumn was a celebration of that beautiful time of year. It began with my daughter in a swing attached to a forest tree singing "Boogie Fever," and concluded with the three of them frolicking in a cornfield, the setting sun at their backs. It was our family's shining hour.

It wasn't long before they were grown up and out of the house. They'd come back on vacations, but not for long. And the woods got very quiet.

We moved to Trenton, New Jersey, where police sirens through the night were a pleasant change from the years in the country. I took pictures of the neighbors' children. I sat in the train station in the morning and drank bad coffee for the pleasure of watching people go places. I would sing fragments of an old song I knew back in high school:

Far away places with strange sounding names
Far away over the sea...

The golden age of our movie theater had ended. All our gray-haired customers had left us in the dawn of cable television. Stores that rented movie videos came in. You could buy them at the supermarket. At night sometimes I'd sneak over to Blockbuster, look through the window like a kid and count the people.

Mornings I would awaken to heavy remembrances of bills unpaid. I was in my fifties now and I longed to be a teenager, so I wrote a play called Jewish Kid and sent it to Jewish Repertory in New York. One of the directors telephoned and said he loved it and wanted to stage it. We met in his Manhattan apartment, where he again professed his profound love for my play, but this time he added, "It needs work, though." What do you want me to do? I asked. "You need to make the boy's feelings clearer," he said. "Just how badly does he want sex with his mother?"

My mouth went dry. "What makes you think he does?" I asked. "Because all Jewish boys do," he said.

I started taking piano lessons after a forty-three year hiatus. I bought a little keyboard, laid it on the candy counter and played between shows. My teacher said I had a talent for music composition, so I wrote little songs for her. She'd play them while I sat beside her on the bench — they were so beautiful, I couldn't wait to show her my next opus. Then one day she told me she was joining a rock group and moving to Las Vegas. I never saw her again and put the keyboard away in the closet.

Often I would wish the time away and dislike myself for it. I'd wander in the parking lot between shows and take in the same sights I'd been looking at for twenty years. Half the stores were empty. People around me opened little businesses — I'd wish them luck — and months later they'd be gone, disappearing in the middle of the night, so the mafia landlord wouldn't nail them for back rent.

I was easily distracted and making mistakes in the projection room. I'd be threading a projector and worrying when the man would get there with the pizza, and then I'd put the wrong movie on the screen. There were dozens of legal pads up there, filled with scribblings about Movie Man and all his unfulfilled longings.

I was sixty years old when my younger son called me from San Francisco. He wanted to know if I had a little money to lend him — he was opening a bagel shop. I said, "Sure, but I'm coming out there with it."

I would arrive at Katz Bagels before dawn. By six o'clock the doors would open and the customers would arrive, many of them with hair still wet from the showers — Mozart, Schubert and Dvorak coming from the speakers. I stood at the window and watched the people walk by. I stayed there all day, and around three in the afternoon, when the sun performs magic with the colors, and the sky turns a blue I'd never seen before, I would pick up my camera and go into the streets.

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