CineFile Video

name: Philip Anderson, Cinefile owner
primary watching years: 1980-1983

“Hot Stuff”: “This was one of those movies where I hadn’t seen it in years and years, and upon seeing it again recently, it was fucking unbearable. As a kid, I was really taken by the idea of the camera shooting through a two-way mirror in order to catch crooks [in a pawn shop]. I thought that was a great idea for a movie. Dom Deluise and Jerry Reed made me laugh. They just seemed to be having a good time, and maybe that was what I was tapping into, despite the movie.”

“Mad Max”: “Before having cable in my mom’s place, I remember watching ‘Mad Max’ — but actually watching it, just kinda sorta seeing it on my neighbor’s TV next door. I was the next story up, I had a lofted bed and I could see their TV through the window. At that distance, their screen was postage-stamp sized. Now that I’m thinking about it, I’m not even sure that it was ‘Mad Max’. I probably saw the previews at the house of a friend who had cable, and I knew it was on, so that’s how I must’ve though that’s what they were watching.”

the HBO Guide: “Getting the HBO Guide was a real treat for me, because I could comb it over for R-rated movies, or any kind of horror film. Before cable, I would hear stories from friends of mine who did have cable — there’d be films everyone was talking about that I didn’t have access to, and somehow the imagining what the film was made it that much more elusive and exciting. ‘Halloween’ was one of those. Also, anything with an ‘N’ next to it in its synopsis would mean nudity. It made me sit through things I would’ve never watched otherwise. I saw ‘10′ quite a bit based on that, but I wasn’t interested in the film in the slightest; it was too adult for me. I’d sit through 30 minutes of Dudley Moore to see 3 seconds of Bo Derek’s breasts. That to me was a fair price to pay.”

“Alien”“: The cable vs. VHS memories are kinda hazy for me because I was one of the first people I knew to have a VCR. In 1980, my mom worked for a tobacco company in upstate New York, and she would bring back and forth from work a big top-loader from the office. The first movie my mom bought for me for the VCR was ‘Alien’, the original first Magnetic Video release of it. My mom must’ve paid $90 or something like that for it; I had no idea where she knew where to buy it, because it wasn’t common knowledge back then. I had fantasies of putting up a marquee on the roof of our condo’s garage. My bedroom was right over the pitch of the roof; I thought it a really cool idea to want to have a movie theater in my bedroom…I remember the very first time I wrote down a director’s name: Ridley Scott. I wrote it down on a little piece of Belair Cigarette stationary, and taped it to my refrigerator.”

other memories:
- Caddyshack
- Stripes
- National Lampoon’s Animal House
- The Thing
- Escape From New York
- The Private Eyes

final thoughts: “Looking back, cable TV played a larger role than I cared to admit in deciding to live with my mom after my parents’ divorce. My dad didn’t have cable and so it was the only way you I could get to see the movies that I had heard so much about. A custody battle was going on, my parents were warring. Having cable and the ability to rent VHS was definitely a great thing to escape into.
With my friends, we would imitate anything we’d see, the comedies, doing Spicoli impressions from ‘Fast Times’. We were so enamored with those people, those characters.”

This entry was posted on Friday, March 2nd, 2007 at 6:41 pm and is filed under My Cable Daze. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.