Ticket to Hollywood by Gary Reilly

Author:Gary Reilly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: comedy, humor, taxi, denver, laughs, cab, taxi driver, cab driver, gary reilly, murph
Publisher: Gary Reilly

Chapter Fifteen

Saturday was the last day of the Mile-Hi International Film Festival. The weather was cold but clear. I was planning to go to the Esquire Theater at two in the afternoon and catch Vertigo, then make it over to The Flicker where they were showing Psycho. And then, depending on how willing I was to face angry glances, I would walk over to the DCPA theater to catch Shadow of a Doubt. I planned to drive my Chevy this time since I didn’t trust any of the cab companies including my own to get me to The Flicker on time. Of course, this meant that I would be going to the movies sober, something I generally try to avoid doing because it diminishes my ability to ignore the director’s personal vision.

I’m still up in the air about the validity of the auteur theory. On the one hand there is no doubt that Hitchcock was the puppet-master on all his greatest films, but on the other hand I doubt if he turned on the water during the infamous shower scene. So what does it really mean when the critics say “auteur”? It probably means I should ignore the critics. But then who am I to question the intelligence of people who don’t make movies?

With the exceptions of the animation festival and the short-subject program, I had missed most of the contemporary films being introduced or heralded at the festival, but this did not really bother me. It had been a long time since I had been impressed by what the critics call a “must-see” film. I hate to think of myself as a cinematic curmudgeon, but it seems to me that “must-see” is just a label the studios slap onto all their releases nowadays, sort of like the Surgeon General’s Warning. Who takes it seriously? My idea of a “must-see” film is something like Dr. Strangelove, which came out when I was a kid. My Maw wouldn’t let me go see it. Somehow she had known that Stanley Kubrick had directed “that jiggle movie” Lolita, and she wasn’t about to give me fifty cents to see a Kubrick film with the words “love” and “strange” in the title. So I didn’t get to see it until I was in college. Imagine my disappointment when I discovered that it wasn’t a jiggle movie.

After Vertigo ended, I sped over to The Flicker and got in line for Psycho. The cashier who had given me grief on the previous Monday was behind the counter again. When I stepped up to buy a ticket, I looked her right in the eye. I knew she would recognize me. She didn’t. It made me feel unimportant.

After Psycho ended, I hung around in the lobby until I overheard a group of people talking about walking over to DCPA to catch Shadow, so I sort of tagged along behind them. I’ll admit it. I didn’t want to walk in the dark by myself after seeing Psycho. I had made that mistake once in college.

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