We rant and rave about 4K and begin our look at my thirty favorite films from the year I was born

1970 was a wild time for cinema and a great place to start

I don’t know how writing works for anyone else.

It’s a process I still find a little bit magical and mysterious even after working at it for over 35 years. I’m hard at work on the latest draft of this thing I’ve been working on for a while now, and it can be all-consuming at times. I walk around with all these characters and voices and situations rattling around in my head all the time right now, and until I manage to wrestle them onto the page in just the right configuration, I’m going to be a slow-rolling disaster. I’m just using up too much of my interior real estate on this one equation. Everything else slows down to a crawl as a result, and I know I can be frustrating to deal with, even though I also know I can’t really work any other way. This is my brain. It’s the only one I’ve got, and I only know how to make it do this magic trick a certain way.

I’m still hard at work on this project that I’ve been engaged with since the end of 2022, and there’s a reason it is a difficult process. Writing something that is both fiction and memory, colliding into something that is neither, can be emotionally exhausting, but I think that’s how you know you’re doing it right. It costs something to really look in a mirror and ask yourself questions about who you were when you made certain choices or went through certain changes. It’s one of the things that I always find thrilling when I’m reading someone’s work, when it feels like they’re laying something bare that they are almost afraid to fully examine. For example, I’m reading the recent Bret Easton Ellis novel The Shards with my girlfriend right now, and it’s making me nostalgic for a Los Angeles I never quite experienced.

The book is set in 1980 and 1981. I moved to Los Angeles in 1990. Now that I’ve lived in this city for thirty-four years, longer than I lived in every other place added up before I moved here, I feel like I know this city very well. But the city that Ellis writes about so beautifully in what I think is easily his best book in many, many years is a city that was already gone by the time I got here. There are many landmarks that are the same, and there are places he describes here that I picture in 3D virtual reality because of how vividly I remember them, but there are also things he talks about that were already long-gone by the time I arrived. Look at Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Terminator 2.

image courtesy of Carolco

Both of those films were shot in the Sherman Oaks Galleria, but one was shot in the era Ellis is writing about and one was shot right after I arrived in Los Angeles. They feel like totally different places, but you can see one laid over the other. Today, that entire mall is gone and the mall that stands there is totally different. It makes me sad every single time I go there precisely because of those movie images as well as my own memories of the original version. The first test screening I ever saw in Los Angeles, something I did frequently for years and years, was at that mall, at the theater you see in Fast Times, and that delighted me at the time. That original mall shows up in Chopping Mall and Commando as well, and any time I see a film that was shot there, it sets off wave after wave of memories. Reading a sequence in the Ellis novel set in that mall just made me want to break out all of those movies again, just for a glimpse of that place the way it used to be.

image courtesy of 20th Century Studios

As I mentioned, Arnold Schwarzenegger used that mall for two very different iconic action movies. Commando came out when I was living in Florida, and it was five years later when I moved to Los Angeles that I first saw the mall in person and realized how many films I’d seen it in. Actually being in a space I’d seen in so many movies made me feel like I was one step closer to my dreams becoming reality. I worked in a movie theater that no longer exists when I first moved to town, then started working in a laserdisc store that is also long gone. While I was working at that laserdisc store, I met a number of people who were on the crew for Terminator 2, and I started hearing wild stories about James Cameron and the movie. We knew when they were shooting at the Galleria but we weren’t able to get close enough to really see anything. Cameron was not just the subject of intense gossip at Dave’s, but also a constant source of gigantic sales records when he released special editions of his films.