![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/images\/dda.jpg\" "\\"Dog")
When I was a kid, my father took me to movies I shouldn’t have been seeing when I was 5 or 6. When The Enforcer came out, the theater ran the original Dirty Harry along with it. More than remembering the movie, I remember the theater — how it smelled like smoke, sweat, and the bubblegum the woman in front of us was chewing.<\/p>\n
He took us to see Hell House and The Exorcist at the drive in. My step mother protested, but my dad said, “Don’t worry — the kids will fall asleep.”<\/p>\n
We got there as the first showing of The Exorcist was wrapping up; my sister, step brother, and I saw enough to terrify us. I did my best to fall asleep in the back of the car. I was dozing when my father, returning from the concession stand, thought it would be funny to shake the back of the car like the bed shook in the movie.<\/p>\n
There was no way we could sleep after that.<\/p>\n
I don’t think any of us in the back seat slept soundly for weeks after watching those two movies.<\/p>\n
Clint Eastwood was the coolest in my father’s eyes. Not only was he Callahan, a no-nonsense homicide detective — he was The Outlaw Josey Wales. He was the guy I saw up on the big screen in drive in movie triple feature westerns on weekends my older sister didn’t come along for a visit with our dad. We dozed off during a triple feature one night; I remember a cop knocking on the window thinking we were two drunks sleeping it off.<\/p>\n
And I remember when my dad took me to see Dog Day Afternoon.<\/p>\n
I didn’t doze off in the car or spend my time taking in the foul odors of the theater. I watched every second of Dog Day Afternoon — it was unlike anything I ever saw. The story was different; I don’t think an ending hit me like that again until my dad took me to see The Deer Hunter when it came out.<\/p>\n
What I remember most about Dog Day Afternoon: the characters.<\/p>\n
It was the first time I really felt for people in a movie, even though they were bank robbers. I was still a bit too young to understand why <\/em>they were robbing the bank, but I could tell through the two main characters that they really needed the money for something more than typical greed. They were desperate, and I felt sorry for them.<\/p>\n They were the most complex bad guys I’d ever seen at the time.<\/p>\n To this day, in my own writing, I love<\/em> characters who aren’t normal — characters people sorry for. Even if it’s a “bad guy,” I want people to feel for them, or at least understand why<\/em> they became bad guys. Sure, I occasionally write a typical bad guy everybody wants to see dead by the end of the story, but in general, I think that’s an easy way out.<\/p>\n Since childhood, I’ve been fascinated by how a story goes from script to screen. I sat through Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits three times in a row, trying to imagine the process. I wrote comic book scripts and screenplays before I ever finished a novel (and that novel<\/a> was a screenplay first).<\/p>\n My father only read two things I wrote before he died in 1991 — a 12-page comic book script and a short story — but all that time spent in theaters and at the drive in influenced my writing even more than books.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I was a kid, my father took me to movies I shouldn’t have been seeing when I was 5 or 6. When The Enforcer came out, the theater ran the original Dirty Harry along with it. More than remembering the movie, I remember the theater — how it smelled like smoke, sweat, and the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":""},"categories":[24,23,1],"tags":[67],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2268"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2268"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2268\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The Influence<\/strong><\/h2>\n