Long before we met, Steph took a class in film studies at
UW-Madison, taught by David Bordwell. Prof Bordwell retired in 2004, but he
still writes a blog that we read, and we've heard him speak at
Madison's Cinematheque. Stephanie had mentioned that she wanted his latest
book, Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling,
because it's about old movies (and she loved old movies) and because it's
written by Bordwell and she liked him and learned a lot in his class. But she
ran out of time, and never bought the book. This will seem silly perhaps, but I
might want to buy the book for her. I might read it myself, but whether I did
or didn't, I'd definitely add it to the Shrine.
* * * * * * * * * *
This will come as no surprise to anyone who knew us:
Stephanie and I liked movies. A trip to the cinema was something both of us
enjoyed, before we met and all the time we were together. We went to the movies
two or three times per month — more frequently if something interesting was
playing, less frequently if money was tight. We had popcorn if we could afford
it, or snacks snuck in if we couldn't. We held hands in the dark, and whispered
wisecracks in each other's ears.
We were a smidgen pickier than your average moviegoer, as we
generally skipped Hollywood's many sequels and remakes and blockbusters, all
the low-imagination horror movies, the comedies that didn't look funny, and the
endless series of superhero movies at the cineplexes these days. Instead we
favored movies that had earned enthusiastic reviews, along with foreign or
independent movies.
When there was nothing new that looked interesting, our
reliable stand-by was old movies, either at home or at a revival screening. If
a movie is fifty years old and you've never heard of it or the reviews suggest
it's rather blah, take that as a thumbs-down and move along. But if a movie
from fifty or seventy or ninety years ago still has a good reputation or still
gets good word-of-mouth, that's probably a movie worth seeing.
We were always streaming old movies off the internet or
inserting discs into our cheap DVD machine. You can check out old movies for
free from the library, you know. And whenever we were impressed by a performer,
a script, or a director, we would seek out more of that person's work. Thus we
watched twenty Joan Crawford movies in the course of about two months, and we
had similar living-room retrospectives for Bette Davis, Kathryn Hepburn, Fred
Astaire, Quentin Tarantino, Cary and Hugh Grant, and many others. Our last
homemade film festival celebrated Blaxploitation from the 1960s and '70s, with
about a dozen titles from the genre — some were weird, some were almost
offensive, but a few were borderline brilliant. We were planning to explore
John Sayles' filmography next, but again, Stephanie ran out of time.
* * * * * * * * * *
We never attended the film festival in San Francisco when we
lived there, because tickets were always beyond our budget. In Kansas City,
where we lived next, Google says there's been a film festival every year since
1997, but we never heard about it while we lived there (2001-04), so we never
went. But there's a well-known and well-publicized festival in Madison — the
Wisconsin Film Festival. We've attended every year since moving here, and
almost always we've had a marvelous time.
The first year we went was 2005. The film festival publishes
its calendar a few weeks in advance, so folks can know what's screening when
and where, and figure out the showtimes and venues where they want tickets. We
grabbed two copies of the calendar, and spent an hour or so going through the
listings separately, each of us circling more screenings than we could afford.
Then we compared our lists, narrowed down the selections, negotiated about
which screenings we wanted to attend, and which screenings we strongly
wanted to attend. That's how we picked our festival screenings every year, and
every year even the choosing was fun.
For our first festival, we decided we could afford to see
three films, and settled on which three to see. I waited at the box office to
buy our tickets, and it was a long wait, but the movies we'd selected were all
excellent. Our first film festival screening was Double Dare, a
documentary on the lives of two stunt-women. Steph always liked movies with a
strong female protagonist and this one had two, so she loved it and so did I.
For our second year, the festival went high-tech and started
selling tickets on-line, but their computer system really wasn't up to the
task. It's a wild workload, if you think about it — the film festival runs for
only one week each year, and all the tickets go on sale on the same Saturday
morning, so of course there's a huge crush of people trying to access
everything, and of course the server repeatedly crashed. Buying eight tickets
for four movies took several hours — longer than I'd stood in line to buy
tickets the old-fashioned way the year before. But we got our tickets, and the
movies were excellent again.
By the third year we attended, the festival's web wizards
had worked out most of the kinks, and ever since, ordering film festival tickets
on-line has been about as hassle-free as ordering socks from Amazon.
For those first few festivals, most of the screenings were
downtown, and before and after and between features we hung out at the Steep
and Brew coffee shop on State Street. Steph and I both adored the neighborhood
vibe — walking a few blocks to the next screening, and chatting with other
festival-goers on the sidewalk. It made the film festival very much a part of
Madison. Some of that magic faded over the years, as the festival moved away
from its downtown venues. Now most of the screenings are at a westside
multiplex, which has far less charm than such downtown venues as the Orpheum
(built in 1926) or the Bartell (1906). The coffee shop on State Street has
closed, too. Sorry, I'm an old man, and old men tend to grouse about how
everything has changed for the worse.
Most years we attended three or four movies at the festival,
and in all those festival flicks we saw a few that were only pretty good, but
the rest were outstanding. I won't bore you with a movie-by-movie list or
reviews, but I will mention that Stephanie and I continued talking about some
of our festival movies even ten or fifteen years after we'd seen them. And that
wasn't because we had nothing else to talk about, it was because we saw some
very memorable movies at the festivals.
When Stephanie was first having difficulty walking, we went to
a festival screening that was close to sold out, and an usher was waving
everyone upstairs, to the balcony. The stairs were very, very difficult for
Stephanie, and this was at an old theater that didn't have an elevator. I
started saying something to the usher, but Stephanie said, "No, it's
OK," and started climbing the stairs. For everyone else it took 15 or 20
seconds; for Stephanie it took several minutes, and her balance was precarious so she wanted me behind her,
to make sure no-one nudged her, rudely or accidentally. Then we had to climb
more stairs to find a seat, and when she finally sat down she was wet with
sweat and wincing with pain. And still she said, "I'd rather climb those
stairs again than ask for special treatment."
I thought she was wrong, and gently told her so. "There's
no shame in asking for special treatment, when you need special treatment. If
we would've explained it, they would've found us a seat on the main
floor." I didn't win that argument — I never won our arguments. She was
Stephanie and Steph could be stubborn.
A few years later, we almost didn't attend the film festival
at all. Stephanie had her left leg amputated in January of 2016, followed by
complications that landed her in three separate hospitals, before spending
several months in a lousy nursing home. I'll tell you that whole story
at some point on this website, but you won't enjoy it. Of course, neither did
Stephanie.
The film festival was in April, but Stephanie was still in
the nursing home. She could get around fairly well in her wheelchair, but they
hadn't yet taught her how to shimmy from the bed into the wheelchair, or from
the wheelchair into the car. The physical therapy team had been working with
her, but Steph was struggling with the technique.
This meant that something as seemingly simple as getting
from the bed to the toilet required buzzing for staff's assistance, followed by
a seemingly mandatory ten- or fifteen-minute wait before two nurse's aides
would come in, and rather brusquely lift Steph from the bed to her wheelchair, roll
the chair to the toilet, and again rather brusquely lift her from the
wheelchair onto the porcelain. Several times, when the staff took too long to
respond to the buzzer, I did the lifting myself. It hurt my back, though, and I
was probably just as (unintentionally) brusque as the staff, picking Steph up
and plopping her down. And of course, if just taking a whizz was that much of a
hassle, there was no way we could go to the film festival.
But sometimes I can be stubborn, just like Stephanie. I brought
two copies of the festival calendar to her room in the nursing home and
announced, "We're going to the film festival, so you need to hurry up and
learn how to shimmy."
It was a bleak era for us, so Stephanie wasn't her usual
optimistic, there's-nothing-I-can't-do self.
"This nursing home is a prison," she said.
"They're not going to let me go to the movies."
"I've already inquired with the warden," I said.
"This place feels like a prison, it's run like a prison, but it's not
quite a prison. You are free to go to the movies, or anywhere you want to go.
The only requirement is that you sign out at the front desk when you
leave."
She stared at me for several heartbeats. "So … we can
go to the film festival," she said, finally.
"Well, no, we can't go. Not because this place is a
prison, but because you can't shimmy."
"So I need to learn to shimmy." She stared at me
again, far longer this time, and then she said, "May I see the film
festival calendar?"
I handed her one calendar, and opened the other myself. We
spent the next hour or so going through all the listings, same as we'd done
every year before that, same as we did every year after that. That particular
year, yielding to good sense because Stephanie truly wasn't doing well, we
decided we would only attend a single screening, and we chose a collection of
locally-themed short subjects, playing in a matinee at the Barrymore Theater.
We ordered the tickets, and Steph had nine days to learn to
shimmy. She worked very, very hard at it, and by the third day she had mastered
it. The procedure uses a long, narrow slab of wood called a slideboard,
varnished to prevent splinters, and laid out like a bridge from Point A to
Point B. Lifting one buttcheek at a time, a disabled person can incrementally slide
across the board, inch by inch, and then swivel onto the destination — the
wheelchair, the toilet, or into the car. It was rather impressive to watch,
especially when Steph was climbing — her bed at the nursing home was eight or
ten inches higher than the seat of her wheelchair, but she was able to shimmy
her award-winning butt up that hill.
I'd wager that not many people attend the Wisconsin Film
Festival from a nursing home, but Steph did, in 2016. There's not much parking
near the Barrymore, so we came and went via Metro's paratransit bus. It was
Stephanie's first time out in public since she'd had her leg amputated, and
she'd been worried that she'd feel freakish, embarrassed, isolated from
everyone else. But instead, she said, it felt pretty much like going to the
movies.
She had a Coke, and we shared a popcorn, and for a couple of
hours she was out of that nursing home/prison, living something akin to her normal
life. We saw ten shorts about Madison and Wisconsin, loved seven of them, liked
the other three, and we had a delightful chat with a complete stranger who sat
near us. It was our only one-screening year at the festival, but we had a
marvelous time, and then we waited for the paratransit bus to take us back to
the nursing home.
We signed out for several more field trips after that — to
the library, to Steph's favorite Ethiopian restaurant, and to a movie at a
multiplex in the suburbs. And finally, a month or so later, we signed out of
that nursing home forever, and Stephanie returned to our apartment in
reasonably good health.
Through our remaining years after that, she never went six
months without thanking me again, for suggesting that we should go to the film
festival from the nursing home. "It was a crazy idea," she said,
"and I love you for it." It might not even be an exaggeration to
suggest that it helped in her recovery. Between learning to shimmy and the joy
of signing out from the nursing home for day trips, her spirits improved, and
her health improved too. Probably it was just a coincidence, but Stephanie
didn't think so.
* * * * * * * * * *
For last year's film festival, we bought advance tickets to
five screenings — the most we'd ever been to, and then midway through the
festival we decided on the spur of the moment to buy tickets to a sixth movie.
In quantity and quality, it was our busiest and best festival. We had the same
splendid time we always had at the film festival, and looking back it feels
like a scene from a movie set in Heaven — a little out of focus and too good to
be true. I vividly remember certain moments, like helping Steph find the
well-hidden ladies' room at the end of a long hallway at the mall multiplex,
which must have been frustrating but in my memory it's somehow comical and
sweet. We had local-favorite Babcock Hall ice cream between shows at the Union
South venue, and it was so luscious we bought buckets afterwards for the
freezer at home. We ate excellent burgers and fries at a restaurant near one of
the theaters, and promised each other we'd eat there again, but we never did.
We had such a good time at last year's film festival, Steph had
the idea of going all-in the next year — instead of whittling our choices down
to a few, we would each go through the calendar, and circle the movies that
interested us, and then we would buy tickets to all the movies either of us had
circled. I would take a week off from work, and we would do the film festival
like we'd never done it before. We calculated what it would cost to attend two
or three movies each day, plus the price of meals between movies, and the cost
of parking, and we set up a savings plan so we could afford it by the time the
next year's festival came.
And that "next year" is now. The film festival
calendar is on newsstands and on-line, but I haven't even glanced at it. What
would be the point? There are things I can do without Stephanie, but not the
really fun things. Not the things we delighted in doing together, so
very often, like going to the movies. Can't do that. The moment the lights dim,
I'd start crying and have to leave.
Maybe I'll go to the movies without her next year, or maybe
the year after that. Honestly, though, I doubt it.