Film Geek

Focusing largely on his formative childhood and high school teenage years in inner city New York City in the 1970s and early 1980s when he watched a large number and wide variety of movies, some not age appropriate, filmmaker Richard Shepard delivers a monologue on how he became, as the title suggests, a film geek. He talks about getting something out of most movies he watched, the good, the bad and the ugly. He credits much of that love of movies to "DNA" from his parents, most specifically his father, Robert Shepard, who also loved movies and fostered that love in him. While this path to becoming a filmmaker was somewhat due to having no skills or aptitude to do anything else in almost having failed out of high school in not placing any effort into his schoolwork, he also states it was not a foregone conclusion in needing the opportunities. He also talks about his complicated relationship with his father, the younger Shepard, at the time, never knowing how his father made a living, but who always seemed to exist on the fringe of respectability, and who, as the younger Shepard explains, could be both selfless and selfish, often at the same time.