(bright piano music) - I am Norm Silverstein.

Thanks for joining us because we're in good company today with Jack Garner retired national film critic for the Gannett Newspapers.

For more than four decades, Jack was our Hollywood connection, reviewing countless films from the first Star Wars movie to today's latest Oscar contenders.

Throughout his career, Jack interviewed the stars including, well-known names such as Meryl Streep, Martin Scorsese, and Audrey Hepburn to name just a few.

Though he officially retired in 2007, Jack never misses an opportunity to share his love of movies, music, and Rochester.

We are pleased to have him join us today.

Jack, thanks for being with us.

- Well, thank you very much for having me here.

I'm really honored to be in the company of the people I've known that have been part of Norm and Company and it's gonna be a lot of fun, I think.

- I hope so because if we do our job today, we're gonna answer a really important question, which is how did you convince people to actually pay you for watching movies?

- I know, pay me to go to the movies.

What a concept.

Well, I was a reporter.

I came here in 1970 out of grad school at Syracuse, and I was a reporter and a rewrite man, which was a great way to learn the trade.

And then I became an editor for a while and I really missed writing.

So at that point, I wanted to go back to writing.

And I guess I had built up maybe enough cache to suggest what I wanted to do.

And I said, "I'd really like to review films."

I'd always loved movies when I was a kid back in, growing up in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, when I was, you know, 10 or 12 years old, I'd cross the Market Street Bridge to go to the movie theater every Saturday with a dollar bill in my pocket, burning a hole in it, of course, my allowance and the issue became, do I buy the latest 45?

'Cause I also love music, or do I go to the movies?

And with that buck I could probably get in and popcorn and so, you know, and then I started it a bit in grad school, so I loved film.

So at that time they were using a national film critic and they were paying him, 'cause he was a freelancer, so I convinced Gannett, "You know, you don't have to pay this guy, I'll do it."

And so I did it for Rochester for a decade.

And then in 2000, I'm sorry, in 1987, it was 1977, I started with Gannett Rochester and then 1987 I started doing it nationally for all the Gannett newspapers.

And it was amazing.

Yeah, I don't know how I convinced them other than I guess I did it good enough that they thought, "Well, let's let him keep doing it."

- Well, you know, you haven't done too bad a job because when you think about film and Rochester, three names come to mind.

Kodak, George Eastman, and Jack Garner.

- Wow.

I'm flabbergasted to hear that, but I really appreciate it.

And yeah I've been very supportive of Rochester I'm one of those critics that actually is happier when I turn people on to a good film rather than when I turn people off on a bad film.

I'm willing to do that, I have to do that.

It's part of the job, but I still love turning them onto a good film.

And I was always happy when I heard that, first of all, generally Rochester, I always heard was on a per capita basis, at least at one time, had more screens than any other town of its size, you know, per capita basis than any other town.

And I also was happy, for example, I heard once that, a long time ago, there was a wonderful movie called "The Black Stallion."

I raved about it, and somebody told me that the audience attendance here was better than anywhere else.

And they credited my review.

And I like to hear that.

'Cause I like people to know about good movies.

I also, of course need to warn him about bad ones.

- Well, you've done a great job of that over the years, but I understand that when you were young you thought about maybe a career in radio that this wasn't always on the horizon.

- Right, I had a mentor in high school, and God bless him, he just died a couple weeks ago.

He lived to 86 and he was young when I knew him.

He was a beginning teacher.

His name was Bill Byam and when name was Fort Pennsylvania, and he was in South Fort where I lived.

He was a basketball coach, a history teacher, and a newsman and a sports announcer on a local radio station.

He would read the news in class.

So that gave no excuse for our class to not know the news.

But he also was really good with sports, and he would bring me along to do sports broadcasting.

And he really admired me, I guess, and my attitude as a young man, young boy, about sports and so I became at 16 a color commentator on local sports football broadcast in central Pennsylvania.

And so I thought I was gonna go into A sports and B from the broadcast side.

So I went to St. Bonaventure University and I started that, but I also also did the, there was a double track at Bonnie's in the journalism department, of course, when I was, I studied journal writing and I really soon became to appreciate more of the depth available at that time in writing.

- And you had another mentor there, didn't you?

- And I had a mentor there, Dr. Russell Jan Dole, who the school is named after now a great, great journalist and great teacher.

I always loved the fact that you'd get papers back from him, you'd write some, you had sign some story to write or theme or some darn thing you'd get it back and it'd be full of red ink and you think, "Well, there's gotta be a D at the top of this."

And there'd still be an A at the top, but he wanted to be sure to teach you.

He would teach.

And I still, some of his sayings pop into my head every day.

We used to say all the time, "Forward ever backward never."

You know, I could have that put on my tombstone.

I mean, it's just, he said it so much I loved it.

And I like the ability to write.

And I love writing and there's all its forms.

So, but I still enjoy radio.

I've done a lot of it over the years.

I've been on here a lot with different kinds of programs with Evan Dawson.

And before that, you know, with other people and Bob Smith and I used to introduce some movie programs and stuff like that.

And then off of here, I've been on Louise's show, you know, there lots of stuff.

So I enjoy radio and I do have a bit of a voice for it, I've been told.

But writing is my mainstay.

- Well, that's great.

We're glad that someone recognized your abilities and pushed you in the right direction.

- Oh, thanks.

- After college, I guess you went to Pittsburgh for about a year.

You worked for the newspaper there and then decided to go on to graduate school.

- Right.

- And you chose Syracuse.

- Yes, I was really kind of torn.

My parents moved to Pittsburgh while I was still in, while I was in college, which is a tough thing for a young guy because you don't have the high school friends anymore.

You don't really know anybody.

I'm working nights.

My days consisted of watching "Andy of Mayberry" reruns and then going to work because I worked nights.

And I just decided that I really wanted to branch out a little bit.

I thought briefly about the Peace Corps.

That was hot then.

But I eventually said, "Well I'm going to Syracuse for grad school."

And I'm glad I did because what I did at grad school I had such a good journalism background at Bonaventure that I didn't need a whole lot of the basics.

But what I did want to do is study some of the fringe things like advertising, public relations and movies and things like that, that it would be around the fringes of what I wanted to do.

So I studied those things, but more importantly, I met my wife there.

- Right, that's where you met Bonnie.

- That's right.

- And you get married and then you decide you wanna work in the newspaper business.

And how did you end up in Rochester?

- Well, I have some roots in uptown.

I was personally from Central Pennsylvania, the Williamsport area.

But my mother was from Olean and we, Bonaventure was kind of a family school.

I was the ninth member of my family to go to Bonnie's.

And so I had that upstate connection.

And then I went to Syracuse to graduate school.

So I really knew and loved upstate New York, and I looked at the big three cities that I could go to and Syracuse was a town that I enjoyed going to college, but I'd already done it, so to speak.

Plus I wasn't, at that time, very nuts about the newspapers in Syracuse.

Buffalo had great papers, but in 1970, Buffalo wasn't the wonderful queen city that it became, you know, it's gotten a lot better over the years.

And in those days, not so much.

So I then in Rochester, we had this hot up and coming company called "Gannett."

You know, at that time they had 23 papers and the Democrat and Chronicle and the Times Union, they were the flagship papers.

And so to come there, I thought, well, you know, I'd rise up with a company and I happy to say that my career kind of paralleled the growth of Gannett.

Not that I had anything to do with it, but it, you know, it came along.

And so it was fun to come here.

And I had heard a lot about Rochester.

I came here once when I was in college to see a concert by my number one music guy who was Ray Charles.

And I came here and I saw Ray at the Auditorium theater.

And the town sort of kind of looked nice.

You don't see much of it coming, going to and from a concert, but I'd heard good things.

I knew about its optical reputation, you know, it was all about Kodak and about Xerox and all that.

So I said, "Yeah, that's try Rochester."

And I applied to and was accepted at the Democrat and Chronicle.

And there I kind of met a third mentor in a way.

And John Dougherty was the best editor I ever saw.

He was amazing.

He was the guy who hired me from the Times before the Times Union.

Their managing editor of the late John Dougherty was a fabulous guy.

- Well, you mentioned the Times Union.

That was back in the days when cities had morning and afternoon papers.

- Right.

- The Times Union was the afternoon paper.

- Right.

- But you actually made your career there and it was on a kind of an unusual circumstance.

You were the rewrite man for the Attica Riots.

- Yes, yeah.

I was hired to be a rewrite man, which was a great way to learn writing discipline, speed, accuracy, all those kinds of things.

And what we have to understand that people, maybe younger folks who don't know about evening papers, because they're almost gone, I think, is that they would have deadlines scattered throughout the day.

So you would have the first deadline I think was like 11 in the morning, and then there'd be a two in the afternoon, and they do about six o'clock at night.

And they would sell 'em in the boxes on the street corners, and then eventually in the newsstands, and then they get delivered.

So because you had those deadlines and because reporters in 1970 to 77, when I was 74 or three, or whenever that period was, the reporters of course didn't have cell phones.

They didn't have iPads.

They, you know, they had none of that stuff.

All they had was a quarter, or in some cases it was early enough, a dime to put into the phone box.

You call somebody up, and then you way you, who you would call is the rewrite.

We all heard the old gag from the old movies, "Get me rewrite, sweetheart."

I would be the rewrite man.

And then Atica Prison Rebellion came around, what was it, 72, I think.

And I was involved with getting the reporters calling in information.

And so I wrote a story, one of several stories that I wrote that week.

Nobody slept that week, but I wrote a story that for the reporters, John Hotchak and Dick Cooper won them the Pulitzer Prize.

It was a reporter's prize, I understand that.

But I was just proud that my story was the one that passed muster enough to win them an Oscar.

And I mean, not Oscar changing my business to win them a Pulitzer.

And I was just, I'm very proud of that.

And so we all sort of thought of it as a team effort and we all were part of it.

And that's what led me to then becoming an editor and then having.

- Right, you got noticed.

And then the Democrat and Chronicle.

- Iron me up to be a night editor.

- Right.

- And then I came back to the DNC I was a feature editor, and then I really missed writing.

And then I created this job for myself where I would write about movies mostly, but occasionally about jazz and first or second generation rock and roll.

I remember reviewing the Who and stuff like that.

So I wrote for about 10 years, and I'd go to New York for press, you know, interview situations.

And in those days, being a local critic, you'd sit at a round table to do the interviews with people.

'Cause I didn't have the prestige or the power of my audience.

In other words, you need a big audience for them to justify a solo interview with somebody famous.

But in 1987, when I became the chief Gannett critic for all the Gannett papers, and they originally wanted me to move to New York because it would be closer to the, where all the interviews.

- Right.

Tell us about that, I can't imagine, you know, you're still a young guy.

You know, you want to be a national critic and they say, "We're gonna move you to New York."

And what do you say back?

- Well, I said, well, a couple things happened.

First of all, the money wasn't gonna be much different and so and it's expensive to live in Westchester County.

And it's where the papers were.

The Westchester Papers were owned by Gannet.

And so I decided to pass on that as much as I, if I was single, I would've probably have done it.

But the fact is that I was married and had a wonderful family, still do.

But I had a wonderful family at that time where they were all home.

My three kids, our three kids.

And so they were going to schools in Rochester.

They loved it.

And so I decided that as much as I would've loved to have done it, I was gonna pass on it.

And then I was thrilled when Gannet said, "We don't care we still want you to do it.

Do the job, not, not the move."

So I became the national film critic in here, which was unusual because most national film critics would either be in New York, LA, or Chicago.

And the fact that I did it out of here was pretty remarkable, I think in some ways.

And I give Gannett a lot of credit for allowing me to try to do that.

What I did was, I traveled a lot.

I went to New York two or three times a month, probably for a couple days at a go to interview people and see people.

I went to a lot of film festivals.

I went to the Toronto Film Festival, was my big daddy.

That's a big, it's a great, great festival.

And it's a good mix of art and popcorn so you can, you know, get both of your sides of your soul satisfied.

And then I'd also go to the Palm Springs and Palm Desert Festivals.

Any festival that began with the word palm was okay by me.

And I went to the Hawaii.

I went to one in once in Morocco.

I went to one in Turkey once.

So I had some good traveling out of it and seeing a lot of films.

And I did a lot of interviewing because at that point I had a hundred papers behind me.

So that De Niro or a, you know, Brad Pitt or a Meryl Streep would be happy to talk to you.

And then the other thing that helped me a lot in terms of interviewing and access to people was the Eastman Museum, then known as the Eastman House.

They would bring in people for the different Eastman Awards.

And that's how I got to meet, you know, the people like legends like Jimmy Stewart and Lillian Gish.

I can't believe in my lifetime I met arguably the first movie star, but it's because the industry is still that new.

Plus she was 96 years old, which kinda helped.

But, and so I met a lot of people because of the Eastman Museum.

That's been a big source of things that I was able to do.

- Well, you're kind of a humble guy, Jack.

'Cause you didn't mention that you also were awarded the George Eastman Medal of Honor in 2007.

Tell us about that.

- That's arguably the proudest moment of my life.

Aside from the birth of children and grandchildren and the wonderful woman who agreed to marry me that stuff other than that, other than the personal stuff getting that award was an extreme honor.

I was the second person to get the George Eastman Medal of Honor.

The first was Louise Slaughter.

The third and fourth were Ken Burns and Jeffrey Ward, who you of course know intimately because of their great work for PBS, including their recent, you know, Vietnam series.

So these things, it was a great honor and it was a wonderful night.

I'll never forget all my friends showing up and paying homage right away to me, I guess into the Eastman Museum, which is wonderful.

And they had a film series of some of my favorite films, you know, it was great to and I showed that, I think that night I showed "On the Waterfront," which is one of my very favorite films.

So it was a great pleasure and I'm very honored.

- Yeah, that is a terrific honor.

And you're right, I knew Ken Burns and Jeff Ward were also winners of that award.

But it's 2007 and now you're thinking about retiring.

- The movie industry was changing.

The nature of movies was changing.

The way they promoted movies was changing.

It was harder and harder to get the kind of interviews you wanted.

They were promoted more and more through the internet, through television.

All that was changing.

The newspaper business was changing.

It not just getting epic everywhere.

They were going to more and more to social networking and to the internet and all these things that we're seeing more and more even today.

So that, all those changes, they were, I'm not saying, "They were good or bad, they just weren't me."

They weren't like kind of what I signed up for.

So I was ready to give that up and but I wanted to keep writing and they've allowed me to continue to write a column, which I still write 10 years later.

- Yeah, you mentioned the internet and then to some extent, I guess that's changed the role of the film critic.

Now you have sites like Rotten Tomatoes and other sites where people are the reviewers.

- Right.

- How do you think that's changed the role of the film critic?

- Well, it's bothered me a little bit.

I know when I was near the end of my career, there was a move by some of my editors and I understand it to maybe have me bring in some amateurs to go to the movies with me and see what they think of a film.

And as one who studied film all my life and went to college and studied it and, you know, really kind of worked at it and honed my craft, there's a part of that that says, "Well wait a minute I've really worked hard to express my opinions and I have a right to do that."

So, but on the other hand, if you look at it, it's just sort of like polling people, I guess that's okay.

It changes, everything changes, - You know, you've mentioned a few things about the film industry and obviously that had a huge impact on Rochester.

What do you see for the future?

Is there's still gonna be a film industry as we kind of know it?

Or is it all going digital?

- The big problem.

It did go digital.

It's funny how it sort of morphed.

There was a time when digital first came along, around the time of that whole second wave of Star Wars movies, now I guess they would be the fourth, fifth, and sixth ones made or whatever it was, where they wanted to get the special effects.

When you shoot on digital, it is easier as I understand it, to get special effects and morph 'em into the thing.

So we had that happening.

And then we had, so because of that, they started using digital to shoot a film on, and then they would transfer it to film to get it into theaters.

But then they finally convinced all the theaters across the country at some considerable expense and in some cases big fundraising programs and all sorts of things to get digital equipment in.

So now they all have it in, now we're gonna say, "No, now we want the film back in."

I don't know, it would take some a miracle for that to happen.

So I think what they, you may find at least, and I think you are finding is that a lot of people will shoot on film because of the way it looks and then transfer it to digital for a presentation.

- Well, I was thinking about the way vinyl records are making it comeback.

- Right.

- And wondered, I mean, we have great interest at the little, when we show a 35 millimeter film.

- Right.

- Particularly for young people.

They say, "They've never seen film before."

- Wow.

That's unbelievable, but I guess it's true.

- What are your favorite films?

- I used to say two and then I've that to four.

I may have gotten a little more generous with my attitude, but the original two that I said, and they're all by the way of, of they're are all inarguably classics.

One is "Citizen Kane," which in 1940, Orson Wells used all the amazing technology that could possibly be used in stuff that nobody had ever used before.

And the genius of the film is that he didn't know what he was doing.

So he could do, he didn't, he wasn't stuck just old ways of doing it.

He, you know, and he had a cinematographer Greg Tolan who wanted to do that stuff too.

So for example, you would see the ceiling in shots where if you really panned up to the ceiling like we are right now, there's lights up there and everything.

And, and in, so he, he made it so that they would have the, you could see the ceiling so it looked realistic.

It wasn't the first phone to do it, but it was the very pronounced thing in the film.

He used deep focus, he used all sorts of, the narrative is that uses the flashback techniques, flashbacks upon flashbacks, the sound, because he came outta radio.

The sound is spectacular.

Like when he's in a big auditorium speaking, it sounds like he builds the echo in.

So all that stuff, the only problem with the film, and it's not a problem, it's the film being honest, is that it's cold 'cause it's about a cold man.

So if you want a warm movie that you can cuddle up to on a desert island, it would be "Casablanca."

- Right, my favorite film.

- Yeah.

A wonderful, wonderful movie.

And it's a great casting film.

And Ingrid Bergman was where she was when she got called to do "Casablanca," Rochester, New York.

- Really?

- Her husband was a student Peter Lundstrom at the U of R Medical School.

And she lived on South Avenue and she used to take her little daughter Pia ice skating on Riley Pond in Cobbs Hill.

And she was here when she got the call to make "Casablanca."

So that's number two.

Number three is "On the Waterfront."

Again, because of Brando, I think to this day, no performance in the history of film to this day has been as powerful as Brando in that film.

I think he's so amazing in that movie.

And not just the famous taxi cab scene.

There's another scene where he's talking to Eva Marie Saint and she has this little dainty glove.

She's the dainty little school girl.

And she drops the glove on the ground, which was not planned.

And he picks it up and he actually tries it on his hand instead of just giving it to her.

And it's just the way the scene plays out, they improvise it.

And Kazan wisely keeps rolling the cameras.

So that's a great sequence and it's a great movie.

And I also love the fact that it's a film with background that if you don't know it, the film is still great.

But if you do know the story of the blacklist and the fact that Kazan was chastised and criticized heavily right until his death for naming names, he makes the hero of this film.

Somebody who names, names Brando, you know, says his names, the names of the mobs guys that are running the union.

- Right.

- And then the fourth one is "Lawrence of Arabia."

The great thinking person's epic.

- Now you interviewed was it?

- David Lean.

- Right.

- I spent an hour with him.

It was one of the great hours of my life.

I love the great filmmakers.

I've done Scorsese and Coppola and several of them.

But the big greatest thrill was David Lean and not just for Lawrence although that's a major one, the major one.

But there's "Shevago," there's "Bridge on the River Quad."

There was great English movies.

Like he did the two greatest Dickens films.

Yeah, it was a thrill to talk to David Lean for sure.

- Mentioned a few of the actors and actresses you knew.

What about Louise Brooks?

There's a special story there, isn't there?

- Yeah, Louise is, was very close to me.

I mean, we really loved each other, I think in a lot of ways that she was and my wife as well, we were very close to her.

What happened was, I got to meet her.

I'd heard that there was this reclusive actress in Rochester.

I hadn't yet heard of Louise Brooks.

This was before the revival, where now a lot of people know her.

But in the early eighties, that wasn't the case or whenever this was.

Anyway, what happened was John Wayne died and I found out from a friend of mine, Michael Walsh, who used to be a music critic here.

And he's gone he went on to other things.

But Mike knew of Louise and had her phone number.

So I called Louise 'cause I knew that Louise's last film was one of his first, it was a Saturday matinee thing called the "Overland Stage Writers," in which he was, well Wayne was one of what they called the Three Muskeeters.

which was the western version of Three Musketeers.

So I called her and she had written a book or somebody else had written the profile of John Wayne, a book.

And she had written the introduction and she gave it a great title.

The title was "A Duke by Divine Right."

Apparently she really dug John Wayne.

So anyway, and I don't know how far that went, but that's, there's talk that, you know, so anyway, so I said, "Can I come over and talk to you?"

She says, "Oh, sure."

So I came over to her apartment.

She lived in an apartment at seven North Goodman.

You walked right in the door.

She never locked her door.

She lived in, she's mostly spent most of her time in a single bed, in this little bedroom.

And I think, you know, she would rather, she was too lazy to get up and open the door.

I think she'd rather be attacked than bother locking the door.

So she, so and I got to know her.

We talked a lot and it was a two-way.

It was a two-way thing.

On one hand, it was an old lady who needed help.

So my wife and I would do things for her, run errands, bring her over Thanksgiving dinner, stuff you would do, normally do for an elderly person.

On the other hand, she's a very famous elderly person with great stories to tell.

So our gain, of course, was to learn all this stuff from her and to talk to her about her summer with Charlie Chaplin when they were lovers for a while.

And her work on some of the films and are going to Germany to do Pandora's Box.

And I even wrote an outline at one point to do a book on her and Jerry Paris, writer Barry Paris rather beat me to the punch.

Really a really good biography of her.

And I have since written about her a couple times, but mostly in the forwards of other people's books or a chapter in my own book from my seat on the aisle.

So, but yeah, she was an interesting lady.

She burned every bridge she ever walked over, you know, she was an ornery cuss, but she was brilliant.

She was, that was part of the problem.

She was much too bright than for that whole Hollywood scene to be sitting around and waiting for, to, you know, a movie to get going.

And she would just be bored and she'd be reading and she'd be writing things.

And she eventually came here at the impetus of James Card from the Eastman Museum to start studying film, watching her own film, watching other people's films and writing essays for big, high-end academics, film magazines.

They were then compiled later into her own book, "Lulu in Hollywood," which is a great memoir.

And so yeah, Louise was very special.

That's one of the great joys of my life and my work is, it's not only to meet people that made special movies that I love and all that, but also just meet interesting people that I found, you know, I interviewed Spike Lee once here at the Eastman Museum.

He happened to come here for an honor.

And he had just made a movie about basketball with Denzel Washington.

And he loves basketball.

We all know that.

And this happened to be during the playoffs, and it happened to be a year when, believe it or not, the Knicks were in the playoffs.

And he loves the Knicks.

So he would say, he said, "I'll do the interview as long as you can put me in a room with a TV so we can watch the game."

Now, some people would say, some critics who don't know much about basketball or care about it would say that, "That's a really bad thing.

It's gonna be very distracting.

I'm gonna have a lousy interview."

My attitude was, he's so famous for his love of basketball, his movie's about basketball, we'll have a ball.

We can always talk during the timeouts and halftime.

So it was fun to watch a Knicks game and interview Spike Lee at the same time.

- I heard that you had an interview with some other reporters with Bill Murray and that that one didn't go quite as, quite as everyone planned either.

- A ton of fun but what do I have when I'm done?

Yeah, this was a group of reporters.

This was back in the days, like I said, "Sometimes you'd do these things as a group."

And we were, in this case, we weren't in a ballroom and the talent didn't come to us, so to speak, but we had to go around to these, on a hotel, the whole floor of a hotel.

Each star was in a certain suite, and you'd go into that suite and talk to him.

So we are ushered into the suite where Bill Murray is, and he says, "Okay, who wants a bloody Mary?"

And we all said, "Well, yeah, sure."

So he goes over to the wet bar and he makes bloody Mary's for everybody.

Now we only have a half hour about the time he's done with the last bloody Mary for the last reporter, the publicist comes in and says, "I'm sorry, time's up."

So you have a, you could just write, go home and write and think, "Well, Bill Murray makes great Bloody Mary's."

The other guy that was a tough interview in a similar way was Robin Williams, the late great Robin Williams, because he was always on, there are a couple of, there are two actors that are famous for always being on.

One was him and the other was Peter Sellers.

And they, they almost like, they didn't have a personality outside of being on.

And it was just in a way kind of sad to think about.

But Robin Williams, I always made a point of him very early in the day because he hadn't warmed up yet.

If they warm up and he's telling you a ton of jokes, you laugh a lot, but you leave the thing saying, "What do I got to write about?"

You know, so.

- Well we started off by saying that, "If we can get to why or how you convince someone to pay you to do watch movies, to do probably what some people would say is the greatest job in the world."

- Certainly one of 'em, - One of them.

Take a look back and share with us what was the best part, what's been the best part of being a national film critic?

- Seeing some parts of the world, of course.

But I'll see seeing interesting people and not just the major stars or the directors, although that's a big part of it.

But I met some really interesting, I've made some good friends over the years, other reporters, other critics.

And I also got to see films and really pristine conditions.

A lot of great movies that I got to see.

But I love the fact that I was able to turn on people to great films and to this day, I will occasionally run into somebody who says, "You know, thanks to you, I got to see whatever it was."

In some cases, it has to do with the fact that I taught for a while at MCC and I teach an 8:00 AM class.

And after I talked about the film at 9:00 AM when the lights would go down so I could show up for two hours, the lights would go down and half the heads in the room would hit the table.

They were done.

They're out.

But the rest would watch, you know?

And I found that so many kids told me that that was the first time they ever saw a black and white film.

First time they ever saw a subtitle film, they initially would argue, "What I gotta read this thing?"

But I says, "Well, you only have to read it if you wanna learn something about the world that's not in England, America, New Zealand or Australia, there's a whole other world out there.

You wanna learn about Italy, you wanna learn about Germany, you wanna hear about Japan, watch a Kurosawa movie, whatever it is."

So that was, that's a great rewarding thing is to let, is to help people get an appreciation for this amazing art form.

- Well, you've got a great Rochester story.

You chose to come here.

You could have gone to New York, you probably had many other opportunities, but you thought this was a great place to raise your family and you chose to stay in Rochester and you're still here.

Well, we're glad that you stayed here in Rochester and we're honored to have had this time with you.

- Thank you I've enjoyed it a lot.

This has been fun.

- It's fun for us too.

And thank you for watching.

You can watch this episode and past shows online (bright piano music) at wxxxi.org and we'll see you next time.

on Norm and Company.

- It was fun.

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