Behind the Scenes of The Film Club

My son Jesse was a bright, beautiful, friendly kid who had nothing wrong with him, except he hated high school. I couldn’t look him in the eye and tell him he was wrong to feel that way – because that’s the way I felt when I was his age.

But nobody’s too hip or too smart to not be wounded by failure—failure at Math, failure at English, failure at Social Studies, everything right across the board. Those nightmare report cards were shredding his self-esteem and distorting his personality. I thought, I’m losing him. Something’s got to be done. It was like he was dying right in front of me. 

So near the end of his first term in grade ten, I offered him a deal —watch three movies a week with me and you can quit school. And so the Film Club was born.

In the months that followed, I woke up to dreadful, middle-of-the-night bouts of anxiety. I wondered if I’d created a glib, disastrous life precedent for him:  Hey, if you don’t like doing something, quit!

But he was a healthy kid, and I had a gut feeling that we should just water him like an exotic plant: water him, stand back and see what happened. (Just because you can’t see how a kid is growing doesn’t mean that he isn’t.)

One afternoon, three years and hundreds of films later, he levitated off the couch and said, “That’s enough movies for now, Dad.” He got his first apartment, a new girl friend – and he went back to school.
What my son needed, it occurs to me now, (perhaps what all adolescents need) was time with his father. Or perhaps he just needed time. Time to become who he was.  

A few years ago, I was thinking about writing a book about how to get over a woman when she leaves you (I’ve had some experience). I ran the idea by him. He listened politely, sitting on the same couch on which we’d watched On the Waterfront and Chungking Express and 8 ½. At the end of my pitch, he said, gently, “That’s a terrible idea, Dad.” (How things change between a father and son.)

He went on. “Why don’t you write a book about the time you and I spent watching all those movies. You could call it The Film Club or something like that. What do you think?”

And that’s how the book came about  – his idea, entirely.