Movies
I wasn’t all that interested in watching movies when I was a kid growing up in Dos Palos. We had a little movie theater in town, but except for a few James Bond movies, I don’t recall going to it all that often. We had a color television at home, but we watched mostly network tv shows like Bonanza, Twilight Zone, and Ed Sullivan.
We didn’t have a tv at the SAE House in Berkeley, so the only way to watch a movie from 1971 to 1974 was to walk downtown and see a show at the old Elmwood Cinema. But that only happened a few times, including a couple of X-rated movies.
We were too busy commuting and working during the Castro Valley years (1976 to 1987) to watch many movies. It wasn’t really until we moved to Minnesota in 1987 that I started buying movies on VHS tapes. The convenience of watching movies from home changed my viewing habits forever. Kyle, Lance and I spent hours together in the walkout basement watching all sorts of children’s movies plus a few others they probably shouldn’t have watched like the original Chuckee (Child’s Play), a slasher movie that scared us all.
VHS tapes became semi-obsolete in the 1990s and were replaced by DVDs although Blockbuster Video continued to rent VHS tapes well into the early-2000s. Blu-ray became available towards the end of the decade. Most Blu-ray DVD players are backwards compatible, so my library today is still a mix of Blu-ray and DVD formats.
After we moved to Skillman in 2004, I finally had the time and desire to start building a serious movie library. Our walkout basement was an ideal room to watch movies and I took full advantage. Since I wasn’t working anymore and both kids were off at school, I would spend my days at Cherry Valley CC playing golf and bridge, and my evenings watching movies. It was a good combination for me. The collection grew rapidly, thanks mostly to Amazon, to over 1,000 titles. I began watching movies from all genres and discovered I even liked foreign films from Directors like Kurosawa, Truffaut and Fellini.
We moved to Verrado Arizona in 2011 and the new home we built had a perfect bonus room that I converted into a movie theater complete with two leather, custom-made lounge chairs, and built-in shelves for the entire collection. Liz went back to work in 2012, and I spent the next few years splitting my time between Arizona and New Jersey. In 2013 I began playing competitive golf on the Golf Channel AM Tour which required travelling all over the country. Golf, travel and movie watching dominated my life for the next few years until Liz finally stopped working in 2018 and we decided to sell the Verrado home and move into an apartment in North Scottsdale.
That move forced me to downsize the movie library as I simply didn’t have the space to store 1,000 + DVDs in any of the three different apartments we lived in. We moved to Prescott in 2021 to escape from the brutal summer heat of Scottsdale and built a new home that we moved to in late-2023. The new home at Talking Rock does not have a dedicated movie room, but we do have five different televisions and Blu-ray players so we can watch movies from a variety of locations.
As you can tell from the IMDb lists that are posted in this tab, I have begun to add to the collection again and would not be surprised if it approaches 1,000 titles by the time I am done. I have started shopping for used DVDs from a variety of places in Prescott. My favorite location is the Prescott Library which sells their used DVDs for just 50 cents. There are two local Goodwill stores that also have a decent used DVD inventory for just $1.29 per title. I enjoy hunting for bargains. And of course, Amazon is still getting a good share of my business, and it’s hard to beat their next-day or second-day delivery.
I often get asked what’s my favorite movie. My answer is I don’t have one. The A-List movies are a combination of Best Picture Oscar winners and American Film Institute (AFI) Top 100 rated movies. The movies in John’s Bedroom are ones I could watch over and over, and often do, especially Mulholland Drive and Raiders of the Lost Ark.
So, there you have it. A brief intro into my love affair with movies. After a busy day of trading, I am ready to retire to the guest bedroom, which has the nicest television and a king-sized bed, and watch one or two movies before calling it a day. Cara almost always watches with me and then falls asleep on the bed. Rather than wake her up and force her to get off, I often just move to my bedroom for the night. It’s really hard to get a good night’s sleep with a 100-pound sheepdog taking up more than half the bed.