Tuesday

Act One: I like movies. I'm not fanatic; my pursuit of encyclopedic minutia isn't obsessive. I just like to watch and understand them. I use them. It's more of an affair than a hobby. My DVD collection occupies a considerable number of shelves along our long interior hallway. It's not obsessively organized. Certainly it isn't in alphabetical order. It languishes like a roommate--reordering as it grows and changes. It's not a goal, to aerobicize or perfect, but a relationship to explore and refine. I've watched maybe half of it. There's always something new remaining to discover. Act two: some of my DVD collection is horror. The birth of my affair is probably not unique. It began as fuel for a hungry imagination. Coming of creative age in the late seventies, movies provided raw material for me to build on. As I practiced, those raw materials became increasingly tacit; but inspiring the young Mr. Cavin required more literal blocks. My unapologetic nostalgic gestalt, then, began with the obvious. Act three: therefore, my heart will always remember its flutter over out-of-the-box fantasies--rubber monsters and model spaceships. Of the former, the work of Stan Winston* remains invaluable: evolving Hollywood's long creature cosmetics tradition into mad science. Often Mr. Winston abandoned his human templates altogether, constructing creatures entirely from the make-up. These hollow creatures--but alive!--nourished my insatiable desire for creative building blocks. Mr. Winston's hollow creatures filled whole technologies of literal creativity, arguably crafting whatever modern expectations we have of monster cinema in the process. Dénouement: Stan Winston died on what was Sunday night in his time zone. He masterminded generations of innovation in just two-thirds of a lifetime, and I mourn that missing third somewhat selfishly, I guess: those new materials we can literally now only imagine. [Cavin]