I became a film nerd in 1970 when I accompanied my father (who was an avid moviegoer) to a double bill screening of Goldfinger and Thunderball at one of those cavernous, ornate movie palaces that used to be a cherished fixture of every main street in suburbia. Sean Connery. James Bond. For an eight year-old kid it couldn't have been a better introduction to the world of movies. I was hooked. Over the next ten years I went to see every single film that played at that theater, methodically listing the title and date I saw it in an old ledger book my father had given me. In high school, in addition to writing capsule reviews for the ink-stained eight page high school newspaper as well as a local community rag, I became a regular at a repertory cinema catching up on films from the past 35 years. At university I joined the Film Club and started writing short reviews of dozens of the mainly foreign films that we screened (in 16mm) on campus each weekend. Goddard, Bunuel, Bergman, Renoir, Fellini, Truffaut, Antonioni, Bertolucci, Bresson, Visconti et al. It was the next best thing to attending Film School.
