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.
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.
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.