Return of the Index Cards

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I’ve been a little beside myself with joy, thanks to a recent discovery. Let me explain.

When I got interested in cinema over forty years ago, I started writing capsule reviews on 3×5 index cards that I bought in packages of 100 at Woolworth’s. They weren’t card stock, but paper, yet the same size of those you’d use in grade four speeches. At first I comprehensively wrote short pieces on every film I saw, until the quantity of viewings outweighed the time spent writing about them. Still, in the six or seven years that I kept up the “index card movie database”, I had amassed over 2000 reviews. After that, I wrote in those black dollar store hardcover notebooks, and eventually on a hand-me-down Mac IIsi with a whopping 68 MB hard drive, where The Eclectic Screening Room was born.

For reasons too long-winded to get into here, these cards were put into storage many years ago, and forgotten about. All the while I had wondered about their fate, until a recent excavation. I was elated to discover they had survived!

This project began when the home video market was exploding. VCRs became more prevalent in homes, and suddenly came a plethora of titles to explore. Along with the videocassette boom was a proliferation of reference guides lining bookstore shelves, which told people what to watch, what to skip, and what they were missing. These books (most popularly, the annual guides by Leonard Maltin and Steven Scheuer) offered a crash course in movie history. Cinephiles like myself lined their own shelves with collections of these books. Certainly they influenced my own film education, but they also prompted me to start reviewing. Perhaps the endgame was to collect them in a reference book of my own. 

Structurally, these pieces are similar to those reference guides of yore: a capsule review preceded by a cast list, director, running time, and of course a rating from one to four stars. (Four films however got half-a-star, and one received zero. Guesses on that title?)

As for the reviews? Well, to be sure, Roger Ebert had no competition. Many of these pieces are embarrassing now, from the pen of a snotty teenager. They may also have incorrect or outdated information, based upon whatever research I had at the time. (This was a small town, pre-internet, so we took what we had.) At the very least, this collection is an amusing snapshot of a time and a young cinephile finding his voice. My opinions may have changed, and (hopefully) my writing has improved in the meantime, but the text brings back a lot of memories on films I haven’t seen since.

These cards were first kept in an empty box of After Eight Mint Chocolate Thins, until the collection grew and grew. Now, they are preserved in a clear plastic container. The next step is to preserve them electronically, if only for an audience of one.

I’ve been transcribing these, at a goal of fifteen a night, word for word (as much as that pains me). I haven’t been able to do it every night, but I estimate this will be completed by the end of the year. Because of some factual errors and occasionally subpar writing, I could never release them into the world, but this body of work is so important to my cinematic upbringing. It’s a part of a significant period of my life. No wonder I was so moved when I found them.

Still, with some editing and some polish, this collection will be very helpful in my greater project, chronicling a lifetime spent in the movies. I’ve also been considering writing capsule reviews again, after years of doing longer, fewer pieces. What’s old is new again.