Am I old or am I experienced?

You know we have been watching films this week. Yesterday was Frankenstein and I was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (both 1931 and pre-code). Tomorrow we're watching Angels with Dirty Faces (1938, so post-code) and then talking about all three. They were interesting/entertaining enough. It was a little difficult to watch Frankenstein mostly because I've recently seen the National Theater Live broadcasted stage version of Frankenstein which was based on the original source material and not on the movie and so wildly different. And so I watched the whole thing constantly comparing the two. But if you think about the three eras - when the book was written, when the film was made, and when the stage play was made - it is an interesting comparison. You learn a lot about people by what they find horrific. Mostly though I'm falling farther and farther behind in my reading for that class because it's just not as interesting to me as trying to prep for tomorrow's shoot, or trying to work my head around new story ideas for screenwriting.


We're all doing our shoots for our first films over the next several days. I'm going tomorrow and then 2 of Friday, 2 on Saturday, and 1 on Sunday. One of the guys has decided he wants to get very experimental and so he's going to shoot with 2 cameras and put color film into one of them. He has worked out that I know what I'm doing and so asked me to do the second camera for him. He is the one who is not in our major and is taking the class for fun, though registered for a grade. So he's really embracing the opportunity to experiment and stretch since it's not like anyone is going to see these films after this in all likelihood. I admire him for that. The rest of us I think feel like we have a little too much riding on it to do something risky.

Then I had my obligatory feeling old moment for the week. I try to limit myself to not more than one a week. I need to find a book by an acting teacher to do a report for the acting class. I got a friend to make some suggestions so I went into the library to see if we had them. And I walked in and stood there for a moment and thought, right, no more card catalogues. Intellectually I knew that but I hadn't actually tried to find a book since those days. In the last 15 years or so when I went to libraries it was to browse the sci-fi section and find something random to read. I had to actually break down and ask a librarian what to do. My god did that make me feel old. But in my defense the answer wasn't just "use the computer" which I was expecting a variation of. It was "log into one of the computers, open a web browser, go to this specific url, and then you can do a search." Really? The default home page for the library's computers isn't the search? So even if I had been brave enough to poke at a computer without asking first I still would have had to ask because there was no way to know without asking.