Going to the Movies
Chapter One
La Grande Illusion
“The future is film.”
— Jean Renoir
August 1959.
The sun was high and it was very late in the morning when I finally got into my car and headed north on Highway 101 to Berkeley, California. It was a big step for me. For several years after my parents’ death, I had been floundering, not knowing what direction I wanted to take in my life, not knowing what I wanted to be or do. My mother’s last wish before she died was for me to become a “professional person,” which meant, in that special, unspoken communication between mother and son, that she wanted me to become a doctor, lawyer or dentist.
Wanting to honor her wishes, and thus ignoring my own, I enrolled at USC in predentistry, but it took only a few weeks for me to discover it wasn’t really for me. The courses I liked were English literature, but as my aunt, who was raising me after my mother’s death, patiently explained, the only thing I could do with an English degree was teach. And what was the future in that?
A friend of mine from high school, Frank Mazzola, happened to be tak ... read full excerpt from: Going to the Movies ebook
