I’ve been watching a great series on Netflix recently, “The Story of Film,” a multipart look at everything having to do with movies from the 1890’s to the present.  Some of the history I knew (remembering local lore as an old Hollywood resident) but some things I didn’t (like that the great director Jean Renoir was the son of the great painter Pierre- Auguste Renoir).  Produced in 2011, the “Story of Film” unfolds on several continents and is (thank goodness) not the same old Hollywood-centric story.

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Logan's Run from Memories of Hollywood

Like a fledgling sea turtle released too soon into the wild, at age nineteen I inserted myself into the swift moving currents of diverse humanity in 1980’s New York.  Of course at the time I didn’t know this one critical fact – I had been the recipient of inadequate preparation.

Existing in a world quite far from this self-awareness, I thought I was more like Private Hudson in “Aliens,” the ‘original badass,’ strutting and showing off his hardware.  It was New York after all, and I was hyper, I slept little because there was so much to do but I had no idea where to begin.  My actual training for all this consisted of living as a reluctant mama’s boy in a rundown Art Deco building in Miami Beach, Florida.

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Me and Uncle Larry

My Uncle Larry came to stay with us for a while in Hollywood.  I was happy because I would finally have a straight-shooting male role model that I could look up to.  I didn’t even mind giving up my bed (with its cool Superman bedspread) to him while I took a spot on the floor nearby.

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