a tale of movie watching & movie making

Flushing the toilet is the first thing I remember filming back in the camcorder days when I was at that silly age of 6(ish) years old. Since then, I’ve learned to flush toilets without filming the process. 

My parents exposed me to movies only a white, boomer couple could. At an elementary age, I was watching Mel Brooks’ movies with my dad and feminist, indie dramas like Real Women Have Curves with my mom. The strange thing is I wasn’t allowed to watch certain kid shows like SpongeBob, The Fairly OddParents, or That’s So Raven even though I watched other late 90s/early 00s kid faire like Hey Arnold!, Lizzie McGuire, and commercials for Baby Bottle Pops. Parental censorship and the religious guilt of sneakily watching Rated R movies as a youth (like Fight Club and Apocalypse Now) plagued me until college.

My life changed when a DVD set of Season 5 of Frasier made its way into my household. Never again did I watch Disney Channel and gone were my Nickelodeon days.

In middle and high school when people were gawking over Harry Potter and Twilight, I was on a mission to watch all the Tom Hanks and Michael Douglas movies. I was obsessed with Winona Ryder. Wes Anderson taught me that everything in a movie is a choice. Sofia Coppola proved that women can be directors (as long as your father is an acclaimed director). Tim Burton showed me macabre, black-haired heroines on the big screen (Winona Ryder & Helena Bonham Carter).

Before DVR and streaming, I was ass up, bent over, sorting through the $5 Walmart DVD bin. My dad and I frequently walked to the local movie theater where I had memorized the phone number to the movie line and could even do an impression rattling off movie showtimes. I – of course – have the movie ticket stub collection to prove it. I spent as much time browsing DVDs at Randy’s M&Ms (a Blockbuster alternative) as I did watch DVDs. 

On my quest to watch classic movies and all the rom-coms, in my own personal time, I made my own flashcards of movie facts and stats. I essentially invented the paper version of IMDb. I also recorded how many times I watched the same movie. The competitive movie watcher in me has seen Sleepless in Seattle 30-40 times by now. 

At night in bed, I would memorize filmographies or practice calligraphy of the Academy Award Best Picture titles. I would thumb through my collection of books on movie history. I was a 12 year old subscribed to Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly. I often held movie nights where I forced my high school friends to watch old comedies like The Jerk and The Burbs.

Summers were filled with making movies. I made news parodies, filmed my cousin lip syncing to Shania Twain, made a female version of the Jim Carrey movie, Yes Man, and wrote screenplays on a typewriter. One of the most fun summers I had was making a Lady Gaga mashup music video. 

I created my moviemaniac email that is still in use over 15 years later. I’ve made a video that Neil DeGrasse Tyson has seen. I added Film and Media Studies as my second major, the first time I went to college. 

I’ve wanted to be a writer, director, producer before I hit puberty. So… although I just started film school at UNLV a couple of months ago (Jan 2025), I have already come to the realization that my film school dreams are dead. But like characters in movies, just because they’re killed off doesn’t mean they won’t come back again in the squeakuel or multiverse. In the few months I’ve been at UNLV I have already met so many people, learned so much about the movie industry and have a better understanding of film school that I’ve decided that film school is literally not worth it (college be expensive). To be continued…