I was maybe just old enough to kind of understand what a movie was — i.e. a story that I got to watch — and I remember seeing TV interviews with Spielberg and somehow comprehending that this goofy bearded guy in the baseball cap made "E.T." What that meant, I didn't know. He was just the boss. I think, at that time, I thought Spielberg was the guy whose job it was to make all of the movies.
It was a couple years later when I saw Ivan Reitman's "Ghostbusters" (1984). The TV trailer scared me — which, of course, meant I wanted to see it. I remember my mom explaining to me that it was a comedy (watching that trailer now it's so obvious, but at the time it was the spooky stuff that grabbed me). I can't remember if my parents took me or someone else did, but I know I saw it in the theater as well.
The experience was seismic. I loved it, of course — it was scary, to my delight, but it was also really funny — but, even more important, I think it was the first movie I saw that made me say "I want to do that."
I was either six or seven, so by then I had just enough awareness to not only understand what a movie was in vague terms, but to have at least a fundamental understanding of how a movie was made. Someone sat down and wrote a story, and then someone else took a camera and filmed other someones pretending to be in the story. The someone with the camera was a "director" (it would be years before I understood the difference between a director and a cinematographer) and the someones pretending were "actors."
This was crazy to me. It was essentially what my friends and I did on the playground at school every day. I couldn't then — and cannot now — fundamentally see the difference. It was doing "let's pretend" for a living.
As the painfully shy, proto beta-male that I was at the time, I knew right away I didn't want to be an "actor." That seemed way too scary. But I had just enough burgeoning alpha in me to think I could maybe be a "director." Certainly, I could be a "writer."
But I wanted to hang out with the actors. They seemed fun. I love Bill Murray as much as anyone else, but the guy I wanted to get to know was Dan Ackroyd. He seemed approachable, like the sort of goofy uncle who would take you to the amusement park and let you eat as much candy as you wanted until you threw up, then give you a Tic Tac and tell you not to tell your parents. I didn't really have a sense of celebrity at the time, so it just seemed to me that he was a guy you could hang out with.
"Ghostbusters" made the whole process of making a movie seem really fun. It seemed like a bunch of friends hanging out, coming up with something crazy, and then just going out doing it. I couldn't believe that this was an actual job that grownups could do. It seemed so silly, but that revelation was profound.
As a movie, "Ghostbusters" holds up remarkably well. As with some of the other films on this list, I don't have a whole lot to say about it. You all know how great it is, and I suspect I don't have to convince you.
As a personal fork in my own road, however, it's absolutely priceless.
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