Monday is a holiday, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day. So, as I have a free Monday, I've decided to take full advantage of one of my Christmas gifts. My brother and sister-in-law gave me Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather Notebook.
If you haven't seen it in your bookstore, it's a copy of the massive notebook Coppola made to help him direct the epic film. Coppola sliced each page of Mario Puzzo's The Godfather from its binding. Then he cut larger pages of paper as if they were frames. Then he glued each page to its frame so there would be larger margins to make notes upon. His notes and insights helped him stage and direct to movie.
My plan is to put my DVD copy of The Godfather on, take my copy of The Godfather Notebook in hand and read while I watch. This is one of the very few movies I watched before I read the book. And it's one of the very few movies I enjoyed more than the book. It will be interesting to study the original book, Francis Ford Coppola's notes and his finished film.
WOW!
We must both be movie junkies, Sbiker. Only a fellow movie nut would respond "WOW!"
I've built up quite a collection of classic movies on DVD, just in time for such a collection to become obsolete due to youtube and streaming services. But what you don't get in formats other than DVD are the special features sections. Short documentaries on the 'making of' and other interesting minutia.
Warner Studios packages something they call 'Warner Night at the Movies'. It's great! They have a short documentary, a news reel of the news that happened the week of the feature film's premier, a cartoon, coming attractions and then the feature film. It's just like going to the theater fifty or sixty or seventy years ago.
Add me to your movie junkies club, but for me there aren't very many 21st century movies that I really appreciate. I much prefer those that are or will soon be classics and even among those, I'm picky.
I started collecting movies by directors. John Ford, Frank Capra (I'm a sucker for 'Capricorn'), William Wyler, George Stevens. And then contemporary directors. Hal Ashly, Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick.
After a while, I realized that I was only a few movies short of having all the films listed on the American Film Institute's Topp 100 list. So I finished that list.
Then I filled in some gaps genre-wise. A few great musicals, westerns, gangster flicks, comedies.
Now I have over 700 DVDs in cabinets flanking my entertainment center.
My all time favorites include, but are not exclusive to; How Green was my Valley, Bonnie and Clyde, Lawrence of Arabia, Yankee Doodle Dandy, Stagecoach, The Godfather, Citizen Kane, To Kill a Mockingbird, North by Northwest, Being There and The Wizard of Oz.
I don't believe I could call a film "classic" if I could drive myself to see it. That's just too new, even though that distinction begins with films made in the mid 1970s, to be "classic".
I have a fascination with life during wartime, Second World War time. It ended twelve years before I began, but the experiences my parents and grandparents and sainted aunts and uncles had definitely formed my character and outlook. I'm the guy who listens to Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Fibber Magee& Molly on the computer while reading an actual magazine in bed each night. I was born too late for culture.