Or, who is this guy writing about the movies?
My earliest movie memories are watching Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte and A Fistful of Dollars from the backseat of my parents’ car at the drive-in. I was around 5 at the time. From then on, I was hooked.
As I grew, I would comb through the newspaper’s TV listings to see what movies were coming on. TV listings? Those were actual lists in the printed newspaper that showed what programs were airing nightly, back before cable, when we had three, maybe four, channels. There were movies in the afternoon after school. Movies after the 10 p.m. news (I grew up on central time).
Then one year, our local public television station aired Film Odyssey with host film critic Charles Champlin, which showed foreign films, such as Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Ivan the Terrible, Part I, Battleship Potemkin, and The Running, Jumping, & Standing Still Film, on Sunday afternoons.
Then came Sneak Previews on PBS with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert (later becoming At the Movies), a never-missed — or at least, a rarely missed — program.
Oh, and weekends were wonderful. We had a station that aired a locally-produced Horrible Movie, with a goofy cast including the host, Scarticia. I saw all the classic horror and science-fiction movies on that.
Before we could drive, my best friend, Charles Corder, and I would have our parents drop us off at one of the cinemas around town, and often sit through back-to-back showings of movies. (They would let you do that back then if the theater wasn’t crowded.) Once we could drive… well, cinemas were much more available.
In college, Charles and I expanded our moviegoing to include reviews, published under the pseudonym of David Innes in our student newspaper. (We were studying journalism, and had other roles at the newspaper under our real names.)
By 1981, I was working full-time in the newspaper business, as a reporter and later an editor and designer. Throughout the rest of the decade I continued writing movie reviews and began making Oscar predictions (including one perfect score).
— Bill Lampkin
For more, see the Post-Credits Scene.