1. I was perhaps thirteen when I saw Citizen Kane for the first time. When it was over, I
couldn’t believe my reaction. My hands were shaking, my palms and armpits felt sweaty and my
heart raced like a jackhammer. I knew I had not only watched a movie, I had experienced one.
True, I didn’t understand all the complexities of Kane, but I understood the phenomenal acting
and fantastic drama. Years later I would understand more, but in that moment I saw storytelling
for more than a two-dimensional celluloid image.
Citizen Kane really wasn’t a weird choice for a teenager: classic era movies were my
friends. My mother introduced me to the Universal Monsters series, and I longed to see Karloff
as the lumbering Monster or Lugosi as a suave vampire. My father showed me John Wayne,
Randolph Scott and a slew of western and war movies. So I naturally drifted to Turner Classics
and AMC (believe it or not, they used to show old movies instead of original content) and ate up
movie after movie. It didn’t matter—silent, black and white, horror, drama, romance,
adventure—I enjoyed them all, the good and the bad. These movies introduced me to Humphrey
Bogart, a personal favorite, and his tough-yet-vulnerable style. I learned Hamlet, Othello,
Macbeth, Julius Caesar and more about Shakespeare from the golden age of cinema, long before
I would ever take a college course on the Bard. Sometimes, alone, I’d sing Sinatra, Crosby or the
Andrew Sisters, albeit horribly off key, but I knew their songs from musicals or the musical
numbers so prevalent in comedies and dramas. I wanted to glide like Fred Astaire, swashbuckle
with Errol Flynn, and clown like Chaplin. Hollywood was hot.
Hollywood, of course, was rarely historically accurate and I wasn’t naïve about it.
Movies were an escape to a (mostly) safe universe of wonder, horror, and adventure where
pirates weren’t nasty and the bad guys always got caught. However, it didn’t take long to realize
that Hollywood glossed over minorities, rarely showcasing individuals beyond stereotypes.
That’s sad, really, when there were, and are, some of the best filmmakers and actors of all races
and genders. It wasn’t until I was older that I discovered foreign films, and the wealth of both
diversity and complexity they provided. The same channels that showed me Hollywood movies
also brought me immensely important minority pioneer filmmakers like Oscar Mischeaux and
the Johnson brothers, Gregory and Nobel.
Over time, I understood acts, beats, music, character arcs and shot composition. Stories
and storytelling are my life. My love for movies has never diminished, and I still love that
sweaty intensity after watching a well-told story. These days, I’m writing about storytelling over
on Nerdbrary, a new site that friends of mine have just started up. We’re opening dialogues about
what stories do and don’t do well, why they move us, and how they play out in our society’s
culture. Check us out, we’d love to hear from you.