7,714 Movies, and Counting

On January 26, 1958 (the date is written in pencil), I began keeping a list of all the movies I'd seen, using lined notebook paper that I further divided in half so that I could get upwards of 50 movies per page. I was 12 years old. (Compulsive? I was too young to know the concept.) I would list the title on the left, then add the last names of the stars, and then give each movie a rating: Poor, Fair, Good, Very Good, Excellent, Superior. My scoring system was taken from a long-defunct magazine called The Motion Picture Herald.

I started by retroactively listing all the movies I'd seen since 1950, my memory aided by annual hardback anthologies called Screen World, which were compiled by my favorite uncle, Daniel Blum. These were my sacred texts.

The first entry is "Cinderella" (Very Good). At the top of the page, displayed like pennants of college football teams, were my favorite movies of all (12 years') time: "Giant," "Stalag 17," "High Noon," "Picnic," "The Bridge on the River Kwai," "Carmen Jones." Two years later, in 1960 (on page seven, entry No. 308, "Sink the Bismarck!"), my cinematic sophistication having expanded, I began adding in parentheses the name of the director (Lewis Gilbert).

I've kept up the list my entire life. It now fills 146 handwritten pages—close to 8,000 movies, though the number would be higher had I added all the movies I saw on TV, but in those days I was too much of a purist to include them. I didn't relent until the arrival of the VCR changed what it meant to watch a movie on a tube.

It's the diary of my life: the titles transporting me back to the theaters and cities I saw them in, the people I saw them with. An obscure chunk of my childhood in Los Angeles returns with the 1952 title "Francis Goes to West Point" (raise your hand if you're old enough to remember the "talking mule" series, with Donald O'Connor). The odd sensation of watching James Dean—who was like no one I'd ever seen on screen—for the first time in "Rebel Without a Cause," which opened a month after his death. Just reading the words "The Night of the Hunter" can send a shiver through me (that indelible image of murdered Shelley Winters underwater in her old jalopy, her hair billowing above her). I can remember the first time I saw hail, because I'd just emerged, ecstatic and sun-dazed, from a matinee of "Lawrence of Arabia" at the Beverly Wilshire Theater. Jerry Lewis's "The Nutty Professor" transports me to an outdoor theater on the island of Kos in 1965 where my brother Jim and I laughed at one thing, while the Greek kids always laughed at another. Or the thrill of seeing, back to back, Truffaut's "The Wild Child" and Bertolucci's "The Conformist" in Avery Fisher Hall at the 1970 New York Film Festival, though how I scored the tickets is a complete mystery.

My list may be a lot longer than the average moviegoer's—I'm lucky to have turned my obsession into my profession—but it doesn't tell just my story. These titles defined my generation: they told us who we were, what others thought we were supposed to be (John Wayne, Doris Day), who we wanted to be (Bogie, Audrey Hepburn, Brando, Kim Novak, Cary Grant, Elizabeth Taylor). Between the lines of my list I can read the convulsions of a country that was radically redefining itself as it passed from the big, affluent, homogenized Eisenhower '50s through the roller-coaster ride of the '60s, all the way up to our fragmented and fearful present. It's a long way from "Prince Valiant" and "Three Coins in the Fountain" to "Borat" and "Brokeback Mountain."