Growing Up at the Movies

I saw Jaws with my father in the summer of 1975, the year it came out. When we walked out of the Oaks movie theater in Berkeley, California, we were giddy, punch-drunk. It’s a perfect movie—a big, exciting American movie. From its opening minutes you live inside of it, your regular life suspended somewhere behind you. Waiting for my mother to pick us up, we noticed that we were both vaguely on guard against shark attacks, even though we were standing on Solano Avenue, where the only dangerous sea creatures were down the street in the King Tsin lobster tank. The tagline of the marketing campaign was “You’ll never go in the water again,” and my only non-Jaws thought during the movie was I am never going to the beach again.

My mother picked us up, and we tried to tell her about the effect it had on us. My father compared it to Psycho, which many people of his generation did.

“There’s a guy who gets his leg bitten off!” I said. “And you see it floating to the bottom!”

“Sinking to the bottom,” my father said mildly.

I thought of the leg falling through the water, the foot in its tennis shoe landing first and making a little bounce: sinking.

From the January 2025 issue: Walk on air against your better judgment

My father loved the movies, and he knew a lot about them. He’d grown up in Greenwich, Connecticut, and as a child he’d gone by himself to the Pickwick Theatre every weekend. On Saturdays, he’d get the whole enchilada: the serial, the cartoons, the short subjects, the newsreel, a Western, and then the feature. On Sundays, there would be a shorter, more dignified program—the coming attractions, the newsreel, and a better class of feature. I had the clear impression that those hours at the movies—maybe as much as his tremendous reading, which began early and never stopped—were the most fully lived hours of his childhood. While other boys were playing baseball or running track or engaging in any of those dull and harassing pastimes that boys were supposed to love, he was at the movies.

He went to see the original Dracula in 1931, and it had a tremendous effect on him. He loved to say, “Children of the night—what music they make!” in a very Bela Lugosi way. He did it for laughs, but “children of the night” must have been a frightening thing to hear as a kid, and he was partly laughing off his own childhood fear.

When I was about 10, he started taking the family to a Berkeley revival house that played the great movies of my parents’ youth. I loved those nights; even though many of the movies confused me, I never missed a show. I was a Flanagan, and this is what we did—we read everything, and we saw a lot of movies. There were lines from some of them that we repeated for years: “I was misinformed” and “Was you ever bit by a dead bee?” My older sister looked a bit like Lauren Bacall, with the same sid