Immediately inside the front door was a screened-in porch. This was where we did our TV watching in the warm summer months. Hanging just to the left of the door was a handmade wooden sign saying EN-RITE-EN. The photos below show my father inside the porch, then my mother and father in the side yard, porch behind them.

Columbus Ohio, an average town—THE average town, in fact. An extraordinary environment for product testing because of its demographic, a perfect cross-section of the United States (as Charles Foster Kane had described his second wife). Test City was a nickname. Virtually no zoning, no barriers to business. As so much of the sixties USA, expansion without a plan.

Imagine a late spring day, about eighty degrees and no wind. I walk out the door of my tract house in a suburb built just a few years before. I remember my father rolling the sod on the front yard. I remember him planting a few trees. I walk past one little house after another, all with similar designs, all without trees, all with identical driveways. No garages, just driveways. Sidewalks. The sun on the asphalt—the vast expanse of asphalt—is blistering. I’m sweating on my one-mile walk to school.

Kids don’t think about this stuff. They’re supposed to think about seeing other kids, playing, running around. I never knew what was on their minds, what patterns they'd set up, what roles they were playing out. I thought about two things: my eminent atomic destruction, or the sun and how hot it was on the streets and sidewalks. It made me depressed. Lot of fans those days but no AC. Central Ohio can be a swamp.

In April The Sound of Music opened and ran for eighty-four weeks. It was one of the last successful sixties roadshow pictures, and by far the biggest—reserved seats, programs, curtains, intermissions, overtures and sometimes exit music. I loved it even though everybody else did too; my snobbery somehow disappeared. Ernest Lehman (the guy who wrote North By Northwest) abridged the play, which can run really long. (I remember a painful high school production that ran over four hours.)

Julie Andrews was a revelation and I developed a crush. I also thought Robert Wise exploded space and time in that format of formats, staggering 65mm Todd-AO. Those nuns on multiple soundtracks! I wasn't yet an atheist (see 1966) but I've always loved religious elements in pictures. Come to the Stable and One Foot in Heaven were already favorites of mine (particularly that climactic montage of upraised faces in the Frederick March One Foot In Heaven). The Ten Commandments (naturally, the Charlton Heston one) was a bi-annual outing, always on the biggest screen possible.

In ’65 my brain exploded. That summer we moved from the working class parish of St. James the Less to the middle class parish of Our Lady of Peace. A lot of seeds that had been planted earlier came to fruition. I’d become a follower of Hitchcock a few years before, for instance, and had danced around an interest in the Beatles since their arrival in the States. The cultural interests I developed in 1965 were all more important to me than anything experienced before. Everything was intense and new and mattered terribly. The writers, the movies, and finally, The Beatles.

At some point that summer there was a rerelease of Hard Day’s Night on a double bill with Help! Somehow I’d avoided both films; I think my initial resistance to the band was a contrarian impulse: something that popular couldn’t be any good. I remember walking out of the room when they appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. It’s for girls, I said. I believe my friend Jeff was instrumental in finally getting me to the movies. Help! was a lot of fun but Hard Day’s Night was a revelation. I was a permanent fan after seeing it.

I wonder if the dramatic change in my consciousness that year came about because of our move to a new neighborhood. Certainly meeting my new friend Jeff set something off. I don’t want to be maudlin but it was the first time I had a friend. Up to that point the males I’d met—and I was only beginning to talk to the girls—had nothing in common with me. What was on my mind was not on theirs. Many of the guys I saw at St. James were mired in a tough-guy thing and the school grounds weren’t safe for nerds. I turned over the books I was carrying so they couldn’t see the covers; they’d assume school books and leave me alone. It was a tough Catholic grade school in a tough neighborhood. The new neighborhood introduced me to the American middle-class.

What a serious look on the face of this young man! He’s still a serious and focused guy and still working hard at age 70. He’s written a series of literary crime thrillers occupying a prominent space on my bookshelf.

It was the first time Hitchcock's indispensable movie was shown on network television: November 13, 1965. I turned thirteen that summer and was moved to the very core. I watched it on a black-and-white portable, a Zenith we brought with us on trips to The Cottage.

Contemporary viewers are lucky enough to have difficulty envisioning how primitive our TV ecosystem was. Images were never clear and precise like in contemporary displays, even today’s over-the-air broadcasts. Reception was often bad, especially during storms; antenna adjustments were constant. (When is the last time you adjusted an antenna?) And although widescreen films had been common since the fifties (Vertigo for instance) cathode-ray TV screens used a four-by-three ratio, so both sides of a Cinemascope or a Vistavision or a Todd-AO frame were cropped using a crude technique called pan and scan. Movie purists were as outraged as they were ignored.

People were acquiring color sets at a rapid pace, but they were expensive and many still hadn't made the investment. NBC Saturday Night at the Movies was broadcasting in color—it was the first network film showcase to do so—and the films were usually recent. Depending on the film a lot of people I knew watched it through most of its seventeen years. It went off the air in 1978.

I'm not a superstitious person (though I have my share of unreasonable prejudices). Shouldn't every year be pretty much like every other year, at least in terms of how many good movies you see, how many books you read, how many tunes you like? I am suspicious of myself when it comes to favoring certain periods. A given year might seem a better year but I always suspect my emotional temperature made it seem so. Perhaps love made me exceptionally receptive, perhaps anything that happened was imprinted with that experience of love.

I had no love affairs in 1965 until I saw Julie Christie in Dr. Zhivago. She put the other Julie (Andrews) right out of my mind. I hadn’t seen Billy Liar, of course, or Darling. I doubt either of those John Schlesinger pictures played in the suburban theaters like the Beechwold or the Clinton that I was haunting at the time. I do remember going to the Clinton to see Far From the Madding Crowd, the financial and critical bomb that threatened to cut off Schlesinger in his prime (just before his triumph with Midnight Cowboy). I went by myself and saw a couple girls from my school there, looking at me and discussing me, perhaps, this odd boy going to romantic movies alone. After Zhivago I was not going to miss another chance to study Julie Christie.

Was Dr. Zhivago another roadshow presentation like Sound of Music or 2001? I’m not sure. I am sure I saw it in 70mm; it's color and scope knocked me out. There was an intensely romantic Maurice Jarre score; I’d loved his music in Lawrence of Arabia and Zhivago was if anything even more melodic. The single biggest factor that made it a personal milestone, though, was the blonde majesty of Julie Christie, fresh out of the Royal Shakespeare and already an Oscar-winner for Darling. I was thirteen, in the throes of puberty, and the attraction was profoundly sexual.

I’ve mentioned elsewhere the shift in sexual ideation from Donna Reed to Christie. The Donna Reed Show ran from 1958 to 1966; I’d been smitten with Reed and her blonde perm as she led her family through the paces of a better than routine situation comedy. Reed was blonde and pretty, yes, but above all she was strong, unflappable, and smart. She was the capable mom, but not the woman I found attractive by age thirteen. I didn’t care how well Julie Christie could handle a domestic crisis. There was sense of danger with her (danger for me), of passionate extremes that would obliterate the mundane day-to-day. There was something about her—I still can’t precisely identify what it was—that made me want to be next to her, to hold her, to touch her. This was my profoundly typical passage into adult sexuality.