Despite what you might hear on the podcast, I am not a couple of hundred years old, nor did I witness the birth of cinema or the release of “talkies”. The “talkies” were quite well-established by the time I came around.

I was born in the late 60s in a very small town in Northern Ontario. Being that my town was literally a street off of the highway and had a population of about 60 people (not a typo – sixty), there wasn’t a movie theatre anywhere close.

My first movie experience, not tv related, happened in the summer of 1971 when my parents brought my sister and I to the Atomic Drive-in for a double feature. To this day, I can remember the nervous excitement, where we parked, the swing set under the screen, the hot dog my dad bought me, the giant metal grey/green speakers hanging from the posts beside the cars that clipped on to the inside of the driver’s window, but, for the life of me, I cannot remember the kid-friendly movie that played first (I’m guessing that it was Black Beauty). The main feature, however, was Easy Rider, still enjoying a run in the boonies. I was enthralled by the experience. Unlike my sister, who fell asleep early, I got about halfway through the very adult movie before some maternal instinct made my mother turn around to see me with my eyes glued to the sex and violence and colors. Up until then, I thought tv shows and movies were all in black and white. :) I was hooked.

A few years later we moved to a small town that had a beautiful single screen theatre, called the Lake Cinema. It, like many of the other small-town theatres, couldn’t pull in a lot of first-run movies and you’d have to check the paper each week to see if they finally changed it, but it was such a joy to go there that it didn’t matter.

In the late 70s-early 80s, with the coming of the video rental market, my mom got a job at a video store and would bring home stacks of movies for me to watch. Between my mom and spending all of money from my paper route, I saw a LOT of movies.

My favorite genres are SciFi, Horror (yay! Zombies!), Asian Cinema/Foreign films, and a turn-off-your-brain Actioner, but I’ll watch just about anything.

You can email Mark at

mark@goodbaduglyfilms.com

Share and Enjoy:
  • Print
  • Digg
  • Facebook
  • Google Bookmarks
  • Twitter
  • del.icio.us
  • MySpace
  • Live