​I turned 60 years old back at the beginning of this summer.  Can you believe it?  I can’t.  For most of my life I have felt 35 years old.  I felt 35 when I was 10 years old (which is why I was such a no fun stick in the mud back then!) and I still feel 35 years old today even though my body is starting to tell me differently.  And I have to admit that arriving in this new decade of age has colored my notions of what I want to do in the years still ahead.  Unlike when I turned 20 or 30 or 40 or 50, for the first time, I can honestly say that I am starting to catch sight up ahead of the end of this journey that we call Life.  While I have no plans to “exit, stage left” any time soon ("Heavens to Murgatroyd!"), it would also be silly for me to not admit that the finish line is starting to appear around the bend like one of those bright lights Wile E. Coyote can see approaching in countless Road Runner cartoons (and we all know how that turned out!). 
 
Realistically, I have around 20 years left to do what I want to do, maybe a bit more.  And my recent health scares in 2022 have contributed to this perspective.  This week’s loss of one of my favorite authors David McCullough (age 89) and another of the iconic singers from my youth Olivia Newton-John (age 73) reinforced this.  Too dark?  Too much of a downer?  Hey, welcome to 60!  (Yeah, I know 60 is supposed to be the new 40).
 
But this summer I find myself, right or wrongly, in the mindset of Col. Nicholson (Alec Guinness) toward the end of The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) where he stands on the finished bridge, staring into a beautiful sunset and observes: 

​I have very few regrets about my life and feel that it has, by and large, been a wonderful life.  I have met some amazing people and am happy to still call many of them friends.  But like George Bailey in that Frank Capra classic, I also find that several of the things that I most wanted to achieve in my life has not happened (almost exclusively in creative terms).  I am sure I am not alone in feeling this way.  We all fail to achieve some kind of dream or another in each of our lives.  And most of what constitutes maturity is being able to come to terms with those disappointments without making an ass of ourselves (like George does before his guardian angel Clarence intercedes).

​But I don’t want to become like one of my favorite writers Truman Capote (1924-1984) who spend the last 20 years of his life vainly trying to finish what he believe to be his literary masterpiece Answered Prayers and never being able to do so for a variety of reasons.  Nor do I want to be another of my favorite authors Mary Lee Settle (1918-2005) who spent her career putting off her dream project (a novel about Thomas Jefferson) over and over until when she finally found the time to start writing it, she contracted cancer and died.

​Well, I still have about a half a dozen horror stories to share of which The Girl In the Basement is the first.  A couple of period thrillers (Eagle Claw, The Great American Airship Mystery, Royally Dangerous).  A pair of Sci-fi stories including Way Out.   A couple of movie industry tales too (Me & Michael Cimino, Pure Cinema, Idyll Soldiers, Last Night In Babylon).   All of them are in various forms of incompletion from outline to multiple drafts.
 
Paramount in importance for me are the trilogy of novels about my alter ego Paul Ruddick and his growing up in the 1970s and 1980s.  I have been working off and on on them for decades.  American Kids needs one more rewrite but I plan to now get it out next summer.
Mountain Cross (which many preview readers consider the best thing I have ever written) is about 3/4s done.  And Movie Me is a quarter written with a pretty good outline on how to finish it.  Many people have asked me what novels about attending high school in the late 1970s or college in the 1980s has to say to people here in the 2020s but the events of the last couple years have convinced me that what they have to say are even more relevant today than they were ten year ago.  In short, younger people, what goes around comes around.  Or as Mark Twain once said: “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.”  I plan to focus on getting these out over the next couple years.
 
And then there is Carnivorous River, my Gone With the Wind scale retelling of the Johnstown Flood.  I have worked off and on this book for the past 30 years and have about 700 pages of it written.  I figure I am about halfway.  And while it may seem like an obscure subject matter, it too has become more and more relevant the more climate change extends its hand across our globe and class and economic differences threaten to tear our society apart.  Don’t worry, I promise to make it entertaining in a John Jakes sort of way.  FYI, this is the title the late great David McCullough (unintentionally) gave me the only time I met him.  I am planning to have this tome out in 2029 (the 130th anniversary).
 
So that is my general plan of attack for the next ten years.  And I will leave it to posterity to decide whether any of it as any value at all.
 
Of course, the real lesson George Bailey learns at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life is that his single-minded focus on what he hasn’t achieved has prevented him from seeing the many good things he had done and achieved.  As George’s guardian angel Clarence tells him, “You really had a wonderful life.”  And it is just as much about helping other peoples’ dreams come true as it is about working to realize your own.  And I plan to do that too.  Or as the Wizard tells the Tin Man at the end of The Wizard of Oz (1939): “And remember, my sentimental friend, that a heart is not judged by how much you love but by how much you are loved by others.” 
 
Speaking for myself, it has been a wonderful 60 years filled with moments and people I will continue to treasure.  Now let’s make the next 20 years just as good. 
 
Please join me in singing along with the late great Harry Chapin in the song “Circle” (part of the greatest concert I ever attended).  This is how I view this life we all are a part of.  Thank you for letting me a part of yours.

​I hope everyone had an enjoyable Independence Day*!  The celebrations are over.  Now we are into the “dog days of summer”.  But that doesn’t mean there isn’t lots going on. 
 
This week’s issue contains:
Updates on My Health
The Girl In the Basement – The Novel Has Begun
More Before Noon reviews & news! 
More on Me & Michael Cimino
Ben and Gravity Falls
And more!  Read on!
 
If you want to be added to the email list, please write me in the comments section below!
 
Updates on My Health
Thank you for all the emails enquiring about my health!  I am happy to report that my pinched nerve is doing much better.  The pain only happens if I lay certain ways during the night and even then it is not excruciating like it was to begin with.  I will just keep doing my exercises and taking my pills when needed.  I am hoping this is the end of my health problems for 2022.

The Girl In the Basement – The Novel Has Begun
As subscribers to The Girl In the Basement email list know, I started writing this last Thursday as part of a 30 day challenge.  My goal is to turn this screenplay into an eBook that I can publish this Fall.  As of today I have finished 2 chapters for a total of 25 pages.  And I am still hoping to have it done in 30 days, sort of my own personal NaNoWriMo.** 
 
Do you want to join the Girl In the Basement email list and receive daily updates while I write?  Just express your interest in joining in the comments below.

​More Before Noon reviews & news! 
Don’t know about Before Noon?  Learn more about this work of fan fiction here:
What is "before noon"? - Richard Rothrock
Readers continue to praise my latest work:
“I am reading this now and all I can say is “Wow!” Just when I thought the story of these two had nowhere to go, Richard took it to the next level of love. So enjoying this!!!!!!!!!!!!”
--Lydia Huston
“Fantastic!!! I’m loving it! I adore that series and you are doing it great justice.”
--Lindy Lenk
“Just finished reading your script and I loved it. It was beautifully written.  I wish you the best of luck with this wonderful story.”
--LeeAnn Doherty
“Before Noon is so brilliant.”
--Robert Eberwein, retired OU film professor
 
A few of you are still reading it and I am very much looking forward to your comments.
Would you like to read Before Noon?  Say so in the comment section below and I will send it along.
 
Last month, I entered Before Noon in the Fan Fiction Film & Screenplay Festival in Toronto, Canada.  I will find out on July 31 if it makes it to the next round.  Please cross your fingers and think good thoughts.

More on Me & Michael Cimino
Am thinking of entering the first 15 pages of this script in the Page Turner Screenplays contest.  Deadline: July 26.  If you have not read Me & Michael Cimino and would like to read the first 15 pages, please contact me in the Comments below.

Ben and Gravity Falls
My son Ben is currently serializing his own fan fiction tale by continuing the saga of the classic Disney Channel TV show Gravity Falls.  He is dropping a new chapter each Wednesday this summer and it is very good.  Picking up the story ten years after the series ended, he has captured the tone of the series very well.  If you haven’t checked it out, click on the link below:
Somewhere in the Woods: A Gravity Falls Mystery - Wonder (weebly.com)
​

​Reader For Hire
My initial summer rush is over.  Have you got a project you’d like feedback or assistance on?  Feel free to contact me by replying to this email.
 
More on The Girl In the Basement
I did make the changes to my horror script that my last reader suggested and am pretty darn happy with it.  I just don’t know whether to continue submitting it or just focus on the finishing the eBook.

American Kids
Still working toward my end of the year goal of putting out my novel American Kids as an eBook.  More updates on that soon!
 
Newsletter Schedule
Once again, thank you to all of you who have expressed interest in receiving these newsletters.  I plan to publish them twice a month on the 2nd and 4th Tuesdays.  The first one of the month will pass along any news I have.  The second will feature something creative: either an essay or a blog entry.
 

​Thank you again for reading.  The newsletter will be back on July 26 (cross your fingers) with “How The CBS Late Movie Expanded My World & Changed My Life”.
(3169) "CBS Late Movie" Intro from 1976 - taped from Dayton, Ohio!! - YouTube
 
Happy Writing!
Richard
 
Please feel free to share this!
​
*Independence Day (1996) is one of my favorite popcorn movies.  I have lost track of how many times I have seen this movie.
 
**NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month.  Find out more about it here:
Welcome | NaNoWriMo
 
If you no longer want to receive this newsletter, just let me know and I will remove you from the list.

​




Looking for something patriotic to watch for this year’s Independence Day?  Then you can’t get any better than this movie:
 
1776 (1972) ****stars
Sherman Edwards’ Tony-winning musical has been adapted to the screen with its Broadway cast mostly intact (a rare thing indeed) and original stage director Peter Hunt at the helm.  William Daniels and Howard Da Silva are brilliant as John Adams and Benjamin Franklin trying like heck to wake up the Continental Congress and pass the Declaration of Independence.  The movie entertainingly shows how the divisions we lament in this country have been there from the very beginning.  It also shows how we must learn to overlook those differences if we wish to accomplish a greater good.
 
The songs are fun.  The debate pretty much follows how it all went down.  George Washington’s dispatches from the front capture how on the edge the Continental Army operated.  And I fall in love with Blythe Danner every time I watch this.  (For those of the younger generation, she is Gwyneth Paltrow’s mother).  Virginia Vestoff is all strong and resilient as Abigail Adams (she died of cancer shortly after the film was made).  A shout out as well to Donald Madden as John Dickinson, the tireless opponent of all things relating to independence.
 
The film makes us realize what a close shave getting independence declared actually was.  It is all here: deathly ill Caesar Rodney’s midnight ride through the night to cast a Yes vote, James Wilson’s last minute change of heart.  It makes you realize in this age of filibusters and 60 vote minimums, that many of the greatest laws we’ve passed in this country did so by the skin of their teeth. 
 
Be sure to watch the restored 164-minute version readily available on DVD.  It was cut by half an hour when released in 1972.  President Nixon, friends with producer Jack Warner and busy orchestrating the Watergate cover up at the time, thought some of the dialogue and the song “Cool, Cool Conservative Men” liable to anger the country and send the population into the street.  So Warner cut them.  Fortunately, the cut footage has mostly been restored.  Frankly, I find it all prescient on where the country was going to go.  Of where we find ourselves now.
 
TRIVIA: The last movie filmed at the original Columbia Pictures studio before it was torn down and sold.
 
PET PEEVE: Director Peter Hunt restored all of the footage except the complete version of John Adams’ song “Piddle, Twiddle, & Resolve”.  I got a chance to ask him about that once and he confessed that he didn’t restore it because he always hated how he shot the song.  Daniels is standing there singing how it is “hot as hell in Philadelphia” and steam can be seen coming out of his mouth (because it was really a chilly night in L.A.).  You can watch the complete song HERE.
 

​It’s Flag Day, Everyone!  Lots of things going on.  This issue contains:
Before Noon review & news! 
Me & Michael Cimino & The Black List
The Girl In the Basement and eBooks. 
And more!  Read on!

​Newsletter Schedule
Thank you to all of you who have expressed interest in receiving these newsletters.  I plan to publish them twice a month on the 2nd and 4th Tuesdays.  The first will pass along any news I have.  The second will feature something creative: either an essay or a blog entry.

Before Noon
Don’t know about Before Noon?  Learn more here:
What is "before noon"? - Richard Rothrock
 
Thanks to each of you who have agreed to read my new script Before Noon and give me some feedback on it.  Award-winning filmmaker Pat Neff read it and had this to say:
“Finished BEFORE NOON last night!! Absolutely Phenomenal… It’s so good, Richard!! It’s practically criminal that this won’t be made… Proud of You!!!  PS - The true love/real love speech Jesse gives is one of the best things you have ever written!!!”
Thank you, Pat!  Looking forward to my other readers’ impressions.
 
Would any of you like to read it and give me your thoughts?  The first ten pages are attached to whet your appetite and peak your interest.  Please contact me if you want to read the whole thing.  Thank you to those who are!
 
Last week, I found a fan fiction contest on Film Freeway to enter Before Noon in: the Fan Fiction Film & Screenplay Festival.  The deadline is next week on June 22.  If you are (or have agreed) to read the complete script, please have your notes back to me by this weekend.  And thank you!

Me & Michael Cimino
Seriously considering sticking my award-winning script up on The Black List to see if I can raise its profile and make some industry noise like the equally popular spec script The Shark Is Not Working about the making of Jaws.  Stay tuned!

The Girl In the Basement
My horror script hangs in there.  Lots of praise but no takers.  I got some reader notes back in March on how to improve it.  Unfortunately, as many of you know, I fell ill at the same time and so am only now able to contemplate them.  I agree with most of the suggestions and am incorporating them now.  Should be done by the end of the week.  What to do after that?
 
The Girl In the Basement & eBooks
Well, I am thinking my future as a writer lies in eBooks.  And from what I have been reading, the shorter the better.  More like a novella length (15K to 30K words).  So once I have finished the changes to Girl In the Basement, I am thinking of turning it into an eBook for a Halloween release.  Currently reading How To Write & Publish a Book in 30 Days (2018) by Jolene Church on how to do this.  It is not too different from the underrated How To Write a Movie In 21 Days (1988) by Viki King.  Stay tuned!

​American Kids
Still working toward my end of the year goal of putting out my novel American Kids as an eBook.  More updates on that soon!
 
Still Reading Screenplays
One of you asked if I am still providing coverage for scripts.  Yes, in fact, this is one of my busiest times of the year.  I still do scripts (TV and features), pitch decks, and participate in table readings.  So far this year I have read a Polish action film that turns into a horror movie, spent time back in World War II (with the Jewish underground in Nazi Germany & Australians fighting the Japanese in Malaysia), William the Conqueror’s 1066 invasion of England, a western about true life gunfighter Johnny Ringo, a comedy about how the group Smash Mouth saved the world, a biography of St. Valentine, a live action reboot of the 90s animated show The Pirates of Dark Water, an action script about a troubled Afghan war vet looking to free her teenaged daughter from criminals, the Spanish Civil War, the American Civil War, and the 2nd American civil war that is supposed to be just around the corner.  Next up is a tale of a blind boxer then back to WWII and the Battle of Arnhem. 
Got a project you’d like feedback on?  Feel free to contact me by replying to this email.
 
A Piece of Writing Advice
Not many people remember Detroit area playwright Milan Stitt (1941-2009).  He is known mostly these days for the award-winning play The Runner Stumbles (which became Stanley Kramer’s last movie in 1979).  In 1980, I attended the writers conference at Oakland University.  I attended a seminar hosted by Stitt only to discover to both he and I’s surprise that I was the only attendee.  What a followed was a delightful one hour one on one session where I got a lot of great advice about a writing.  His one piece of advice that stuck with me was:
“Remember when it comes to dialogue that each time women speak, they tend to speak in two or three sentences.   Each time men speak, they tend to speak in two or three words.”
After that, I started writing my dialogue this way and have been praised for my realistic script conversations ever since.  Consider giving it a try!
 
That’s all for now!
 
Thank you again for reading.  The newsletter will be back on June 28 with “How The CBS Late Movie Expanded My World & Changed My Life”.
(3169) "CBS Late Movie" Intro from 1976 - taped from Dayton, Ohio!! - YouTube
 
Happy Writing!
Richard
 
Please feel free to share this!
 
If you no longer want to receive this newsletter, just let me know and I will remove you from the list.

Before Noon is a fan fiction sequel script to the award-winning Before series.
 
The Before series is a trio of movies by Richard Linklater chronicling the evolving relationship between Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy).  The two first met as college students on the streets of Vienna in Before Sunrise (1995), reunited as thirtysomething adults on the streets of Paris in Before Sunset (2004), and debated whether to continue their relationship while vacationing as 40-year-old parents on a Greek island in Before Midnight (2013).  For me, these films have organically evolved into the best films ever made that realistically chronicle an evolving relationship through the years.

​Since the movies came out 9 years apart, fans like me expected a new film in 2022.  Unfortunately, Linklater, Hawke, and Delpy announced last fall that there would not be a new installment to the series this year.  Hawke went even further to say that he thought the series had run its course.
 
I disagreed and I even had an idea of what the subject of the next film should be.  And that is how I came to write Before Noon.  Call it fan fiction but I am very happy with it.  And it keeps the story of Jesse and Celine moving forward in the spirit of the overall series..
 
Before Noon Logline
After dropping their twin daughters off to their first day of college, Jesse and Celine stroll around Greenwich Village and confront the twin notions of aging and the empty nest.  What does a couple do once the children are out the door?
 
What are readers of Before Noon saying?
“Finished BEFORE NOON last night!! Absolutely Phenomenal…It’s so good, Richard!! It’s practically criminal that this won’t be made… Proud of You!!!   PS - The true love/real love speech Jesse gives is one of the best things you have ever written!!!”
 
Interested in reading Before Noon for yourself?  Let me know in the comments below!

DISCLAIMER
I do not own the Before series (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight) or any of the related characters. The Before series is created by Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy, and Kim Krizan and owned by Castle Rock Entertainment. All rights to the Before series belong to Castle Rock Entertainment. This story is a work of fan fiction and is meant for entertainment only. I am not making any profit from this story.

,We all have those moments in our lives.  That indescribable emotional, intellectual, and sensual instance when we realize that the person we are staring at, that person staring back at us, is generating this iridescent feeling within of affection only more so.  This profound realization that this person gets me, understands me, and even sees life the same way I do.  We feel connected.  We are them and they are us.  We usually call this emotion, this realization, this attachment…..love. 
 
Normally, we attach this label to people or animals.  But we also use that term when describing works of art we admire (movies, books, plays. painting, or sculptures). and the people who create them (directors, authors, playwrights, screenwriters, painters, sculptors, etc.). 
 
Today, I want to start this series by describing the moment I fell in love with the work of director Michael Cimino. 

It happened early on in his supposedly monumental folly called Heaven’s Gate (1980) – a western about the real life Johnson County War in 1892 Wyoming when rich cattle ranchers hired a mercenary army to kill immigrant farmers encroaching on their grazing lands.  A movie that failed so completely that it derailed Cimino’s career and made the western unbankable for over a decade.  It is also credited with destroying 1970s director driven Hollywood and replacing it with the studio controlled moviemaking that we still have today.

Keep in mind that I came into this movie cold.  I had not seen Cimino’s two previous films: neither his Oscar-winning The Deer Hunter (1978) nor the Clint Eastwood thriller Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974). 
 
As I settled into my seat for a Sunday matinee on the film’s opening weekend, all I knew about Heaven’s Gate was that it had been released the previous November to such horrible condemnation that United Artists had pulled it from release for reediting.  That it was now only two and a half hours long instead of the nearly four hours of the original version.  But it had my favorite cinematographer (Vilmos Zsigmond) and a number of actors that I already loved (John Hurt, Sam Waterston, Jeff Bridges, Joseph Cotton, Brad Dourif).  And the movie’s imagery that I glimpsed in the trailer had blown me away and whetted my appetite for more.  As the lights went down, I expected a muddled story but gorgeous scenery.
 
I began to think the critics’ opinions were wrong from the movie’s opening shot of Jim Averill (Kris Kristofferson) running across the 1870 Harvard campus, already late for his own graduation.  I felt an inhalation of wonder when he caught up with the parade of graduates.  The sweep of the camera crane starting up high then dropping down to catch Jim as he fell in beside his best friend Billy Irvine (John Hurt). 

But the moment when I fell in love with the film and the director was after the commencement ceremony when the graduates and their ladies fair waltzed on the Harvard Yard to the strains of the “Blue Danube”.

The choice of music and the circular dancing conjured up memories of Stanley Kubrick and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).   But the waltzing circles within circles were also visually setting up much of the story that would follow.  The graduate waltz would be echoed later in the roller skating of the Wyoming immigrants.

Jim’s dancing with the Beautiful Girl (Roseanne Vela) would be echoed later in his solo waltz with Ella Watson (Isabelle Huppert) at the same roller rink.

And the large circles the graduates made on the lawn would be echoed in the final battle between the immigrants and the cattle ranchers’ mercenary army.

It was a scene that even Newsweek’s David Ansen conceded in his otherwise dismissive review was a “cinematic grand slam”. 
 
In that moment, my life changed.  I bonded with Michael Cimino and his movie.  I came to believe that I got him and he got me.  From now on, I was all in with what he wanted to do.  And that I wanted to make movies for a living.  Subsequent viewings of The Deer Hunter and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot merely affirmed my belief. 
 
Decades later, when my family visited England, I had us visit the same place where the scene was filmed (Mansfield Quad at Oxford University).   Standing on the lawn, I could still hear the “Blue Danube” in the air.

Experience the moment below:

Well, Thanksgiving is over and the Christmas season has finally begun.  Have you got your tree up yet?  Have you started your present shopping??  Have you found yourself reaching for the eggnog yet???
 
Even though I have been an occupant of this planet for over 50 years now, the Christmas season still remains as magical to me as it did when I was a child growing up in the 1960s and 1970s.  Jean Shepherd was wiser than he knew when he proclaimed in that classic yuletide movie A Christmas Story (1983) “Christmas was on its way. Lovely, glorious, beautiful Christmas around which the entire kid year revolved.” Amen!  And it is still that way for adults too.
 
So as the turkey leftovers disappear and the meager Thanksgiving decorations come down (usually just a cornucopia on the dining room table), I find myself asking how did I know that the Christmas season was finally here back when I was a kid? 
 
Here are my top 10 indicators that Christmas was on its way:

10. Thanksgiving night usually featured the annual showing of Miracle on 34th Street (1947) the story of how one year Kris Kringle became the Macy’s Santa Claus.  It was the perfect holiday transition movie because its story began on Thanksgiving morning and ended on Christmas day.  Edmund Gwinn is perfect in his Oscar-winning role and was there ever a more realistic movie child on screen than Natalie Wood’s Susan Walker, just the right blend of child-like hope and real life cynicism.  Her mantra (“I believe.  I believe.  It’s silly but I believe.”) has proved very useful over the years.  And there was just enough holiday magic thrown in to get you to believe.

9. My family started listening to holiday music on our stereo.  Out came the special albums played that one month of the year, collections like Columbia Records’ The Great Songs of Christmas and Christmas With Clark (available at your local Clark gas station when you filled up your tank!) featuring “Don Janse and his 60 voice children’s chorus.” 
 
But the first collection we always listened to was our 8-track tape of Christmas songs recorded off the radio and the first song on that tape was Perry Como’s “There Is No Christmas Like a Home Christmas”.

8. The Wish Book catalogs from Sears and JC Penney arrived in the mail!  My sisters and I took turns leafing through its pages (forget those stupid clothes sections!) and going crazy at all the toys available.  We would dutifully write our names beside each item we wanted.  In later years, Mom asked that we institute a star system to indicate what we MOST wanted that year.

7. My elementary school teachers started hanging up classroom decorations.  They included cardboard cutouts of Santa Claus and Nativity scenes.  Some even erected small Christmas trees in the corner of the classroom.  And we drew names out of the hat to see which student we would get a Secret Santa gift for.  But the decorations I enjoyed the most were these:

6. Companies would start airing Christmas themed commercials both on TV and on the radio.  Back in the 1970s when we lived in Weirton, West Virginia, there was a local furniture store named Heslop’s..  One year, their holiday jingle was “Deck the halls with furniture from Heslop’s.  Fa-lalalala La la la la.”  My father would sing it for years after every time the season began.  I guess it just stuck in my brain.
 
5. Mom would apply Glass Wax Christmas stencils to our front windows.  Was there anything more festive????

4. Celebrity Christmas specials began airing on TV.  It seemed like anybody who was anybody had a Christmas special back then.  Even Bob Hope had a regular special entertaining the troops in Vietnam.  For me, it seemed the best ones were the ones hosted by Bing Crosby and Perry Como.  Nothing could get me into the spirit of the season faster than Bing Crosby crooning “White Christmas”.  And there was nothing like Perry Como singing “Ava Maria”.

3. Mom started making holiday cookies and holiday snacks.  My favorites were the Spritz cookies and the meatballs in grape jelly.

2. Animated holiday specials began showing on TV.  I am glad to have grown up in the heyday of the animated Christmas special.  A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965), How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1966), The Little Drummer Boy (1968), Frosty the Snowman (1969), Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town (1970) all debuted before I was ten.  But the Holy Grail of specials for me was and remains Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964).  That’s a lot of my childhood up there on the screen in that special (without the red nose and the ability to fly).  In my dark days of school bullying and peer ostracizing, it was Rudolph who gave me hope that better days lay ahead.  And it is a message I carry with me to this day.

1. We finished decorating our Christmas tree by putting our nativity set under the tree.  We were one of those families that used the Thanksgiving holiday to get a jumpstart on Christmas decorating.  We had used an artificial tree since the mid-1960s so putting it up early was a no brainer.  And the final touch was placing the red skirt around the tree and placing the nativity scene at the base (pictured below)

I would then sit under the tree, stare up at the lights and decorations, listen to the music of the season and anticipate with a smile the magic that lay ahead. 
 
So what did YOU do as a child to get the holiday season started?  What traditions helped you get into the holiday mood?

I spent last Sunday afternoon at the Detroit Film Theatre watching the “Extended Director’s Version” of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984).  The movie is a wonderful masterpiece.  Leone’s last film which has had a troubled and tempestuous history, particularly here in America.  On the surface, it is a movie about Jewish gangsters and their time in the sun during Prohibition in the 1930s.  But underneath the plot (the romances and the shoot outs and the violence) what it is is a movie about friendship and memory, how both evolve over the course of our lives and not always for the better.  The movie does this by moving back and forth through time from the gang’s heyday in 1933 to their poor childhood on New York’s lower east side in 1921 to 1968 when the surviving characters are looking back and trying to make sense of their past through the prism of old age.

When America first came out, I was jazzed about it because it marked Sergio Leone’s first movie in twelve years.  It was a big expensive epic about America and it had a brilliant director striving to make his greatest film, something I am still a big sucker for: a filmmaker trying to make the Great American Film.  It had a huge impressive cast led by some of my favorite actors like Robert De Niro and James Woods.  It had the makings of a classic.  I had no idea it was going to turn into a personal touchstone for both me and my late father.
 
The first time I saw the film was out in Minnesota in June 1984.  I was in my fourth summer working at Valleyfair Amusement Park.  I had read about the clashes between Leone and his American distributor, the financially troubled Ladd Company.  How they had taken it out of Leone’s hands and edited it down from the director’s 3 hour 47 minute version to one running 2 hours 24 minutes.  And how they rearranged the movie into chronological order so that it told its story straight from 1921 to 1933 to 1968.

When I showed up to see it by myself at the Southdale General Cinema in Minneapolis, I knew it was a cutup mess but I was prepared to love it anyway.  And I did.  Even though I knew it was not what Leone intended, it still placed 6th on my list of 1984’s ten best movies, even as it ended up being one of the year’s biggest bombs sending the Ladd Company into bankruptcy.  In a decade when it was still unusual for anything other than a big hit to be released on VHS or for another version of a recent movie to show up again in theaters, I never expected to see Leone’s original vision.
 
So I was stunned when the Detroit Film Theatre announced they would be showing Leone’s original version in January 1985.  I was in!  I was NOT going to miss this.  A chance to see Leone’s preferred cut in my favorite art house theater? Oh yes, baby!  Yes, yes, yes.  I planned to go by myself because I did not want ANYONE to come between me and the movie.  And afterward I planned to drive over to Detroit’s Greektown and take myself out to my favorite restaurant there, the Olympia, the one my parents used to take me to before……….before………

…….OK, I need to back up here and fill in some personal blanks.
 
Back in March 1984, my father moved out of our house and my parents started rather acrimonious divorce proceedings against each other.  The only reason I had gone back to Valleyfair that summer was to escape all that.  As 1984 came to an end, the divorce and the acrimony were still an every day part of my life.  I was doing anything I could to escape it.  An evening by myself seeing Once Upon a Time in America seemed just what the doctor ordered.
 
And then my mother did something that surprised me to this day.  She asked me to please take my father along to the movie.   I am ashamed to admit that I didn’t want to at first.  I was still mad at him for a variety of divorce related reasons.  But I knew it would be the nice thing to do.  Dad and I had watched a million movies together prior to the divorce.  Not so much since.  Many of the movies Dad wanted me to watch were gangster movies.  He loved gangster movies.  Me?  Not so much.

So I called him up and asked if he wanted to go.  And he seemed really happy to say yes.  On the evening of the showing, Dad came to pick me up.  He was wearing a suit.  Say what?  We drove down to Detroit together.  We saw the movie with a near full house and it was great.  It filled in the blanks and questions that the first version had raised.  Dad thoroughly enjoyed it: laughing at the comedy moments (for a violent gangster film, it has a number of funny lines),thrilling at the action scenes and letting the vast sweeping crowd scenes take our breath away.  Leone was one of the great film virtuosos.

And even though it was a 4-hour movie experience that ended around 11pm, Dad asked if I wanted to go get something to eat.  I said yes.  And we ended up over at the Olympia restaurant that I had planned to go to anyway.  And we had a long leisurely dinner.  I asked my father why he liked gangster movies so much and for the first time ever he opened up about his childhood.  How much of it back in the 1930s and 1940s was spent running the streets with other boys like we had just seen the lead characters do in America.  And how he grew up loving the gangster movies of the time starring James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson, etc.  They seemed so glamorous, those gangsters, the fantasy version of how he and his friends wanted to be if they could just get out of their small Indiana town.  For the first time, I understood my father’s background a little clearer and I understood him a little better.  That night was the beginning of our adult relationship.  No longer father to son but man to man.
 
We started seeing each other more often.  We started to go see movies again.  We starting to go to dinner.  We started chatting on the phone again.
 
As the years went by, Once Upon a Time in America, despite its length, became one of those movies my father and I shared over and over.  When it came out on VHS, I got it for him.  When it came out on DVD, we got it for each other.  I was surprised to learn that the DVD was actually the slightly longer 3 hour and 50 minute version Leone screened at Cannes back in 1984.  It had a bit more violence and a bit more sexuality.
 
In the fall of 2014, I found out Leone’s “Extended Director’s Edition” running 4 hours and 20 minutes was coming out on DVD.  I knew immediately what I was getting Dad for Christmas!  So I bought it and looked forward to sharing it again with him.  But then Dad died rather suddenly four days before Christmas.  He didn’t get to open his presents that year.  And the copy that I got him ended up back with me.  It was not easy opening up the shrink wrap and watching it for the first time alone.

So when I found out a couple weeks ago that the DFT was showing Leone’s extended cut, I knew I had to go.  To see one of my favorite movies by one of my favorite directors once again.  In one of my favorite theaters.  And to spend time with my father in the only way I can now.  As I sat in the theater on Sunday I pretended my father was sitting there with me.  I tried to remember the parts where he'd laughed. 

I pretended that many of my friends who I no longer see but once saw films with at the DFT were there with me too.  It made the nearly empty balcony seem crowded.  It made me smile and it made me melancholy all at the same time.  A funny turn of events for a gangster movie about relationships and memories.
 
And yet oddly appropriate as I look back on my own past – the people that have gone, the people that have stayed, and the people I still miss.  Part of getting old, I guess.

Today, it started............

I began writing a book called Sunday Nights With Walt which is to be published by Theme Park Press.  It is a celebration of the classic TV shows Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color and The Wonderful of World of Disney.  How they colored and changed my generation.

Here is where I need your help --

What episodes from this series stand out in your memory?  

Which were they and why have they stuck in your mind?

Please reply in the comment section below or on Facebook.

Thanks your help!

Today marks the 75th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.  On this day back in 1941, in the span of about two hours, planes from the Japanese Navy surprised the U.S. Pacific Fleet at their base in Hawaii, inflicted considerable damage including the loss of over 2000 lives, and plunged the United States into World War II.  So many words have been written about this moment in time that I could not possibly add to it from a historical perspective.  So today, I want to address it from a purely personal one: as a kid I was obsessed with Pearl Harbor.
 
I don’t really remember when or how the obsession started.  Back in the early 1970s, World War II was not that far back in our collective past: only 30 years back which is roughly the same amount of time between now and the first Gulf War back in 1991.  Most of my uncles were WWII vets.  Pretty much all of my male teachers were WWII vets.  I even took a class on World War II during my senior year at Pontiac Central High School taught by a veteran of the Pacific war.

It is also possible that my obsession was geographical.  Growing up in West Virginia, the state celebrated its strong connection to Pearl Harbor – seeing as how the battleship USS West Virginia was one of the ships present and sunk that day.

Of course, they end up in the middle of the attack but they rise to the challenge, dodging bullets and rescuing sailors from the sinking ships on Battleship Row.  And, of course, Mike’s new sailboat ends up sinking along with the other ships of the Pacific Fleet.  The illustration of Mike crying as his boat sinks beneath the waves is seared on my youthful brain.

But, by far, my favorite book on the subject at the Weirton Library was the official U.S. Navy Report on Pearl Harbor: a big thick book in blue binding that could not be checked out because it was part of the Reference section.  So I spent several weekends sitting in the library reading that book from cover to cover.  It was devoted just as much to the aftermath of the attack as to the causes and featured a ton of photographs about the salvaging of the ships that I have never seen before or since.

My obsession manifested itself in other ways.  Naturally, I bought and made the Revell models of the USS Arizona and USS Pennsylvania.  In fact, between the various battleships, aircraft carriers, troop transports, cargo ships, cruisers, and destroyer models I built, I could (and did) put my own private Pacific Fleet to sea on the floor of my bedroom.

But that still wasn’t good enough.
 
Finally, I did what any red-blooded nerd of eight would do in that situation: I built my own Pearl Harbor.  Using nothing but a pencil and a whole lot of notebook paper.  I drew the major geographic points of the harbor: Ford Island, Pearl City, Hospital Point, the dry docks, the various docks and piers then drew the significant buildings that occupied those sites.  I drew the adjacent airfields of Hickam and Wheeler Fields.  I drew the Scofield Barracks across the street from Wheeler Field.  For each ship, it was not enough to just draw a ship, I had to draw the ship EXACTLY how it looked – not an easy thing to find out in the pre-internet days.  It required a lot of trips back to the library to consult the big blue book.  And, if a ship was damaged or sunk, I made a separate drawing showing how the ship looked after that.
 
Having done all of that, I laid out my own personal Pearl Harbor on the floor of our family living room (one of the most versatile rooms I ever knew.  I will have to share a post about that some day).  My mother’s only rule was whatever I laid out on the floor had to be picked up by the end of the same day.
 
And so, I would use my Pearl Harbor assembled entirely out of notebook paper to recreate the attack in my head with each ship sinking in the correct order as wave after wave of invisible Japanese planes strafed the floor of our living room.  The capsizing of the Oklahoma and the Utah.  The sinking of the California and the West Virginia.  The unimaginable explosion of the Arizona which literally ripped that great battleship in half.  The explosion of the destroyer Shaw.  The Nevada making its break for the sea only to beach at Hospital Point rather than risk getting sunk in (and blocking) the narrow harbor entrance.  The whole thing was very portable.  It all fit inside a large 11 x 14 legal envelope. 
 
Then, at the height of my Pearl Harbor madness, 20th Century- Fox came out with Tora, Tora, Tora!  (1970) – a $20 million dollar ($300 million today!) epic recreation of that day which will always live in infamy.

Of course, I wanted to see it.  I desperately wanted to see it – but my mother decreed that I was too young to see it.  So I had to wait for that day – some day in the future – when it might end up on TV. 
 
It didn’t help that most of my elementary school friends saw it and endlessly talked about it at the bus stop.  Mostly they talked about the humorous true moments in the film.  They liked to laugh about the Nevada’s band continuing to play “The Star Spangled Banner” even as the attack started around them, only playing at an increasingly faster tempo.  They loved the scene where a female flight instructor teaching a teenager how to fly found herself in the middle of the incoming Japanese squadron.  “I’ll take over now, Davey!” became one of those catch phrases that always got a laugh in my elementary school yard. 
 
Finally, after three years of waiting, I learned that Tora, Tora, Tora! was going to premiere on the CBS Friday Night Movie in the Fall of 1973. 

I was ecstatic.  I was beyond ecstasy.  I pleaded with my parents to allow me to move the portable color TV from their bedroom down to the living room so I could set up my living room Pearl Harbor and watch the movie there, all while recording each ship as it went below the waves in the movie.  They, naturally, agreed.
 
It was one of the greatest nights of my childhood that I have almost forgot about.  And it marked the high water mark of my Pearl Harbor obsession.  After that, I began to pull my Pearl Harbor out of its manila envelope less and less.  My Revell Pacific Fleet stayed more or less permanently anchored on the shelves of my room.  I moved on to my next obsessions.  In later years, I threw out my notebook paper Pearl.  The model ships went in the garbage when I moved away from home.  But Pearl Harbor has remained a real and memorable part of my childhood just as it continues to have a hold on our nation’s imagination.
 
Besides Tora, Tora, Tora! the 1970s saw other Pearl Harbor related productions like the major miniseries Pearl (1976) and From Here To Eternity (1977) – which briefly became a TV series.  There was Steven Spielberg’s 1941 (1979) which took a comedic look at the war scare hysteria Pearl Harbor caused west coast Americans who feared the Japanese would invade at any moment.  And there was The Final Countdown (1980) which imagined what would happen if a modern nuclear aircraft carrier mysteriously traveled back in time to that day in 1941.  Would it use its jet planes and modern weapons to stop the attack?  Or would it let history play out the way it did?
 
For my money, the two best films about the attack – besides Tora, Tora, Tora! – remain the original From Here To Eternity (1953) which brilliantly captures what life was like in our peacetime military before the attack and WWII altered it forever.  The other is In Harm’s Way (1965), a bit of a rambling John Wayne war epic whose Act I is devoted entirely to the attack.  It nicely captures the shock and awe experienced by everyone on that fateful Sunday morning.  (Sorry, but Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor (2001) is a big, lumbering, interminable mess). 
 
So why does Pearl Harbor stick with us 75 years after the events of that day?  Why was I so obsessed with it for awhile in my childhood?  I don’t know if I know the answer but I suspect it has to do with the same reasons all disasters stick with us whether it is the Titanic or the Challenger explosion or 9/11.  For some of us, it is a chance to play arm chair quarterback, to go back and piece together the trail of intelligence that shows how the people in authority SHOULD have known what was about to happen, another chance to show how incompetent our government is.  For others, it is a chance to take inspiration from the countless acts of heroism performed that day by sailors, soldiers, and civilians who found themselves rousted out of bed by the first bombs and rose to the challenge.  “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition!” a naval chaplain blurted out during the attack and it became a national catchphrase for a time.
 
But I think the real reason Pearl Harbor continues to haunt our minds is because there is always that moment before the attack happened, , where the possibility of an entirely different future hangs in the balance as a real possibility before events spun history down the path we find ourselves on today.  The Pacific Fleet gets the warnings and is ready.  The Titanic sees the iceberg a minute earlier.  The 9/11 hijackers are identified and stopped before they can board the planes.  Thousands of lives are saved; some of the worst events in history are averted.  And we are allowed to pretend that our lives could continue in some innocent utopian Eden unsullied by the events of the past 75 years. 
 
Every generation has a moment when they lost their innocence.  For many of us of a certain age, it is the Kennedy assassination.  For others, it is 9/11.  For the Greatest Generation, it is Pearl Harbor.  When we honor events like Pearl Harbor (or any cataclysmic event) we are not only mourning the loss of life but also our own lost notion of a different, better “what if” before history stepped in and wrote our future (now present day) in unchangeable stone.  
 
 
Tora, Tora, Tora! (1970) will be aired tonight on TCM at 8pm EST.