Grandchildren and old movies.

A Grandchild story:

Grandson Eli, who is 5, likes a book I have about movie bad guys (The Bad Guys, by William K. Everson, Cadillac Publishing Co.) It is full of interesting old movie stills and actor portraits focusing on movie villains. The old silent era stills are especially dramatic with the over-the-top expressions and makeup of that era. As a fan of old movies for years this book is one of my favorites too. In the movie "Sunset Boulevard" the Norma Desmond character is a former silent film star who quit when talking pictures took over. She expressed her feeling about sound by saying "Voices! We didn't need voices! We had faces!"

I have often felt that the villains and character actors in these films were the most fun part of the movie. You can’t have a hero without a nasty villain and it takes good character actors to flesh out a film.

Eli brings the book and climbs into my lap and we start looking at the pictures. He knows the captions are words and he wants to know what the words say. Early on, I found that the actual words (actor names , name and date of movie, etc) were not that interesting so I began to make up dialogue for the pictures like: “drop that gun mister” or “let that girl go”. Soon, Eli insisted on hearing a mini-plot and dialogue for each picture that caught his interest. He points to someone in the picture and asks “what is he saying”. It strains my creativity making up dialogue and mini-plots. Eli keeps asking “and then what happened?”. Off the cuff story telling is hard. It is in our genes to like stories and we all want to know “what happened next?”. Nevertheless, it is a joy for me to have a comfortable chair, a child, a book and some imagination.