Some weeks, if I’m being honest, it’s hard to find a topic to talk about. There’s so much going on in the world, in the business, in life itself, I can’t always find a way in. Decision paralysis and all of that. But there is one thing that I haven’t talked about in depth: my goal to watch 365 movies this year.
It’s both a fairly obvious quest and a totally bonkers thing to do. Is it borne out of my freelance, no-day-job-right-now life? Maybe a little. But there is a deeper goal. A deeper connection to something that I haven’t been quite as engaged with over the last few years.
One of the things about the various forms of dramatic writing is that, despite their obvious similarities, the three main types are all actually radically different. I’ve never been great at bouncing back and forth between them. I tend to be an all in or all out kind of writers. When I moved from prose writing to playwriting, I basically never wrote narrative fictional prose again. When I started to focus on screenwriting, I stopped writing plays (a couple of times). When I was working steadily in TV, I didn’t really write or even think about any feature films. I could do side hustles, like podcasts and comic book writing, but digging into something like a feature felt impossible. Some of that was a time management issue; being on a writing staff can be a pretty immersive job that doesn’t leave a lot of creativity left over.
But, over the last couple of years, as the TV world has contracted and upheaved, I’ve had the brain space to tackle feature film writing. I tend to learn from watching, so watching more movies seemed like a good course. I had been focused on TV for the past few years and while I saw movies, certainly, and maybe even more than the average bloke, I stayed generally in the lane of the big releases, the buzzy movies, the big splashes.
I’m also a numbers guy and weirdly competitive about things, despite hating competition. I joined Letterboxd and saw the diary and the weekly counter. A friend of mine mentioned on IG a goal of seeing 200 movies in a year. And, of course, I thought, I can do better than that.
I’m also a proud AMC A-List member and making the most use of it possible is how I stick it to the corporate overlords. In that brief magical time that Moviepass was allowed to exist with the worst business model possible, I think I saw Thor: Ragnarok three days in a row? Just because. The A-List is a bit more restrictive (4 movies a week), but starting from that baseline, it’s only three more movies a week. Not so bad.
I’ve seen 122 movies so far this year. I’ve seen the big, splashy hits. I’ve seen weird, squirrelly indies. I’ve seen low-budget horror that blew me away. I’ve seen low-budget action that bored me. So far, I’ve only walked out of one. And quite a few I’ve seen more than once. My all-time repeat viewing (in the theatre) record is still Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which I saw 9 times in theatres (and twice two times on the same day). Last year, I saw Sinners, Weapons and One Battle After Another each three times in the theatre. But those are the outliers.
So what am I seeing? What am I learning from spending more than 200 hours in the dark for the last four months? A lot. I’ve learned new techniques for storytelling. I’ve learned how flexible the medium can be, how laughs and horror go so well together, how empathy is built. Some of this, obviously, I knew, but I’m digging deeper into it because I’m watching so many different ways those things are achieved.
And, no, it’s not all new movies or first time watches (though I am leaning towards that). I think I’ve only done one Lord of the Rings watch this year. (I’m due for another one soon, I think.) I also subscribe to, well, just about every streaming service available, so there’s never really a shortage of movies to watch, straight-to-streaming ones as well as the ones I miss in the theatre. Despite the A-List and my current ability to go to matinees and double features whenever I want, I remain one single person. I can’t be in every multiplex at once.
Going to the movies is such a powerful experience for me. I’ve always gone to a lot of them. From the time I was ten, I was going to movies with my parents, nearly all of which were not child-appropriate. I’ve gone to grindhouses with sticky floors, the first waves of mega-multiplexes (Loews Lincoln Square, I miss you), to indie theatres with thin walls and pretentious audiences (Angelika, I miss you, too). In LA, I’ve gone to the truly wonderful revival houses, The New Beverly, Vidiots, to see old favorites with a full crowd. And I essentially live in the Citywalk AMC. Because, ultimately, no matter where you are, going to the movies is the same.
You sit in the dark, mostly with strangers, and watch a story unfold at 24 frames per second and hope that it will transport you to someplace far, far away from your life for 120 minutes or so. You hope to laugh with joy, to hold your breath with fear, to have that beautiful human experience of a sudden rush of emotion that can only be expressed with a vocal utterance that isn’t really a word, but a release of something that you can’t hold back. You hope that you’re in the company of other people on the same journey, that human connection that can only happen in a dark room with people you don’t know.
I went to one movie this year, a low-budget horror flick that blipped in and out of theatres. The theatre was surprisingly full for this kind of movie and that made the experience so much better. This is the kind of movie that is somehow both intentionally and unintentionally funny, full of jump scares and plot holes and gross-outs. I had a blast. There were two women sitting next to me who were having the best time. Clearly not horror fans and definitely not horror snobs and we were all on the same rollercoaster together.
And there was a small group of folks, sitting close to the screen, doing their best Mystery Science Theatre 3000, chirping at the screen at each ridiculous plot turn. It wasn’t particularly annoying to me, just a kind of murmuring. But it definitely bothered someone in the theatre because about halfway through someone said, super-loud, “Will you shut up” to the chatterers.
I’m usually in agreement with that. I like a quiet theatre. But I also know that the AMC is not where you’re going to get it. Go to the New Bev for a strict no-talking policy. You come to the AMC, you’re agreeing to the terms and conditions. One of those is that someone’s gonna be chatting. So when someone piped up to shut down the whispers, I was sympathetic.
But then something truly magical happened. The talkers responded with “But…it’s so silly.” And it was. They were right. The rest of the theatre burst into laughter and we all went right back to watching. Because it was silly. It was fun and dumb and stoopid with two Os. Sometimes a movie theatre is a temple to art and sometimes it’s a theme park. You have to know what ticket you’re buying and get on the ride.
Has all of this helped my feature film writing? I think it has. It’s given me a more expansive sense of storytelling, of filmmaking, of the most important part of the entire project of writing: how to make the audience feel the things you want them to feel. That horror movie was indeed pretty silly, but I still jumped in my seat and yelped. I still wanted to Final Girl to actually be the Final Girl and get away unscathed. It was damn good 90 minutes of my life and I have no regrets.
The old saw is that you have to do something for 10,000 hours to be great. Watching movies may not be writing movies, but it’s damn close. I don’t know that watching 365 movies in a year will make me a great writer. But I figure it’s not going to hurt.
So, as the twin gods of film criticism used to say: I’ll see you at the movies.