FILM GEEK

And remembering Robert Duvall

Kathleen Norris on FILM GEEK

The film director Richard Shepard is a man after my own heart. I couldn’t resist the title of his documentary Film Geek, and was rewarded with an enjoyable romp through movies I saw on their first release in the 1970’s and early 1980’s, what many now consider a Golden Age of filmmaking. The documentary focuses on movies that Shepard saw from the age of six to eighteen. He cheerfully admits that he loved awful exploitation and genre films as well as renowned masterpieces such as Apocalypse Now and The Godfather. He went to everything, including the gory Friday the 13th III in 3-D. As he puts it, he was inhaling films, learning from the best and the worst. He skipped high school classes so often to attend movies that he was nearly expelled, but after rejections from a number of colleges he was finally accepted into the film program at New York University. This came as a lifeline, as Shepard had been desperate: movies were his life, and he had no backup plan.

One joy for me watching Film Geek was realizing that Shepard and I were both in New York in the early 1970’s and frequented the many revival houses that were then thriving in Manhattan. One shot reminded me that we both loved the Argosy Book Store, another that we saw the powerful French documentary about the aftermath of World War II in France, The Sorrow and the Pity, at the small Paris cinema in Midtown. I sighed when he described going to the New Yorker Theater at 89th and Broadway, as that great old movie palace was around the corner from my first New York apartment. I went to movies there three or four times a week and like him I received a valuable education in film. It was a privilege to see classic American films like Footlight Parade, The Maltese Falcon, Laura, On The Waterfront, The Wild Ones, and East of Eden, or French gems like Au Hasard Balthasar, Jules and Jim, and Shoot the Piano Player on a big screen.