“Dead or alive, you’re coming with me.”

- Murphy (Peter Weller) in Robocop, 1987, directed by Paul Verhoeven

I was born in 1977 in Falls Church, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C. Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky was number one at the box office at the time, and a few months later, a little movie called Star Wars would dominate cinemas for the rest of the year, becoming a global phenomenon that continues to this day.

By all accounts, I was a pretty normal American kid growing up. My parents divorced early in my childhood, and I split my years between two households, one in Virginia and one in Southern Illinois. Eventually, I had two brothers to share in my upbringing, as well as a host of friends and acquaintances that filled my time.

My family became a bit nomadic, moving frequently due to my mom and stepdad’s pursuit of new opportunities, living in Florida for a time, then back to Southern Illinois. I would visit my father in the summers, where I hung out with my grandparents while he worked during the day, usually at various reprographics firms, something he’d done for a long time, having never found the will to pursue work as a photographer, which was his early passion.

My grandparents, nicknamed Bucky and Har Har, were fairly standard old folks in many ways. They lived in a modest three-story home in Fairfax, Virginia, surrounded by massive trees in a clustered neighborhood, sitting on the corner of a busy street. My grandmother was Bucky, and I couldn’t tell you why we called her that, as her real name was Laurie. She was a big woman, with old-lady glasses and dyed-red hair with a take-no-shit attitude that I always appreciated, even as a kid.

Har Har was thin and grizzled, with a lower jaw that jutted out and a jokey demeanor befitting of an old man his age. He was an alcoholic who served in WWII as an engineer, and upon entry into the house for the first time each summer, he would bellow from the comfort of his easy chair, “Har-Har, Maties!” as we entered. It became something we expected with delight, and decided that it was only fitting that his mantra would also be his name.

His real name was Paul, and I was later told that it was where my name came from, as well as from my dad’s favorite member of The Beatles, Paul McCartney.

My father, Jon, lived in the upstairs of my grandparents’ house, having never found the footing to really branch out on his own after his divorce from my mom, despite several apartments, townhouses, and failed relationships that always ended in his return to Bucky and Har Har’s. Dad was a dreamer, like me, and was quick to follow his passions in the early stages of fermentation, but quickly lost steam when it came time to dig his heels in and stay the course, making him a lifelong wanderer.

The summers would be a vacation for my brother, Scott, and me. Growing up in the 80s, we spent most of our time riding bikes, reading comics, playing with G.I. Joes and Transformers, watching Nickelodeon, beating the shit out of each other, and snacking.

Lots and lots of snacking.

However, amidst driving Bucky and Har Har nuts with our prepubescent antics, they would indulge our whims with trips to the comic shop and the movies, keeping us well fed on entertainment, as well as sugar, throughout our long summers.

When most people think about or discuss their grandparents, they often harken back to fond memories of going fishing, baking, sewing, or learning a time-honored tradition passed down from generation to generation. Outside of Bucky teaching me to tie a bow on a wrapped present, I can’t think of a single thing they taught me. But what they did do, however inadvertently, was plant the seeds of my movie geekdom.

My brother and I had been to the movies many times since birth. I was even taken to Star Wars in 1977, although you’ll forgive me for not remembering the experience, as I was an infant. I remember E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial and the magic of John Williams’ magnificent score tuned to Spielberg’s visual flair. I remember The Goonies, sitting front row because we showed up late, loving every “truffle shuffle” minute of it.

I remembered Back To The Future, always wondering what it meant that the film ended with “To Be Continued…” as we hadn’t yet been weaned on the promise of sequels.

I remembered Rocky IV, experiencing the movie with an audience as if we were at an actual boxing match, the crowd yelling and cheering with each punch. I remembered Teen Wolf, seeing Michael J. Fox become the weirdest-looking werewolf I’d ever seen in a movie that both scared and delighted my young self.

I remembered Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, seeing it with a bunch of my friends on a Saturday afternoon, with one of their older sisters coming along and freaking out at each gross-out scene, causing all of us to chase after her every time she got up and ran out of the theater.

I remembered The Three Amigos! and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, seeing both films multiple times, and loving every revisit more and more. I remember so many films like these that made up a significant chunk of my early cinematic awakening, but it wasn’t until 1987 that it really started to take hold in a new way.

Bucky and Har Har straight-up did not care about ratings. They didn’t even flinch. PG, R, G, whatever, they didn’t care. It was never a consideration for them. But they loved movies. They loved TV. They loved the moving pictures a whole lot, and two chubby grandkids weren’t going to stop them from that enjoyment. So, they did what they had to do. They brought us with them.

On July 17, 1987, the sci-fi action film Robocop was released in theaters. It was directed by Paul Verhoeven, a Dutch-born filmmaker who had previously done the medieval flick Flesh + Blood starring Rutger Hauer and Jennifer Jason Leigh, as well as a string of films in his native Netherlands. The film starred Peter Weller as the titular character, along with Nancy Allen, Ronny Cox, and Kurtwood Smith as the particularly diabolical villain Clarence Boddickeer.

Robocop takes place in the distant future of Detroit, where robotics and military-grade technology are being introduced to fight crime in the deteriorating city, making way for the construction of a “new” Detroit that would seemingly be better than the old one. After a first run at using a robot as a cop malfunctions before even getting on the street, the Robocop program is put into effect, which takes a recently deceased cop (played by Weller) and augments his human body with robotic parts to make him a compliant and effective robotic policeman.

That’s a pretty basic way of explaining Robocop, as anyone who’s seen it knows that it’s got a lot more going on than its sci-fi premise, much of it due to Verhoeven’s sensibilities. Robocop is a subversive, violent, hilarious, and yes, even philosophical film that mirrors what Verhoeven would continue to emulate in later films, which is the absolute absurdity embedded in these violent delights.

At age 10, sitting in a dark theater with Bucky and Har Har, who dragged my brother and me along for a little weekday matinee of Verhoeven’s opus, I was mesmerized.

The shocking, blood-spattered carnage was on a scale I’d never witnessed before. The emotion I felt, watching the movie unfold at a young age, worked me over, as if twisting the wiring in my brain to connect to things I had not yet considered or even dreamed of. My synapses fired like a film reel starting up. It was an awakening.

Robocop was a visual feast, but not just in the sense of special effects. It was a visceral experience that shocked me to the core while invigorating my senses. It was the first time a movie had had that effect on me. In the past, I’d been delightfully entertained, but never shocked. Never tested. Never pushed beyond my PG limits.

Now, let’s take a moment here for those of you who are getting judgy about this. Yeah, I’m talking to you. “No ten-year-old should be watching an R-rated movie!”

Says who? The MPA?

Here’s the thing about ratings: They’re inconsistent bullshit. It’s something I would encounter later for a variety of films and would come to find that they rarely measured up to the content. Filmmakers hate ratings. Studios hate ratings. Ratings are a tired holdover meant to “protect” children and give parents some kind of guide as to what’s appropriate and what isn’t.

The problem is, only you, the parent, know what your kid can and can’t handle. And even then, you really don’t, because you can’t know their limits if you don’t test them.

In the end, we can’t shield our kids from profanity, sex, and violence, any more than we can shield them from poor dialogue, shitty VFX, and recycled plotlines. They’re going to encounter it somewhere, somehow, some way. The kids with strict parents who never allowed them to watch R-rated movies would watch them at a friend’s house anyway and keep it secret.

I’m not saying that you should just let your kids watch whatever they want. In fact, I’m advocating that you watch everything with them, rather than treating the movies and shows they watch as kid-rated babysitters. Kids thrive when they have someone to explain what they’re seeing, discuss it, and understand it. It helps them become better viewers, and, in turn, helps them to appreciate and understand art and how it relates to them in ways that go beyond a two-hour distraction.

But, yeah, my grandparents didn’t do any of that. They just took us because they wanted to see a show, and we were there. Plain and simple. We watched a movie, talked a little bit about it on the ride home, and then, if we liked it, would rave about it to my dad when he got home from work, appealing for him to take us to see it again. Such was the case with Robocop.

I remember Har Har walking out of the theater, giggling at the absurdity and excess of the film as we left. He didn’t say it outright. All he could do was laugh, almost as if he’d just taken his grandsons to a cockfight and won $50 bucks. Bucky had a smile on her face, too, which is not what you’d expect from a 70-year-old woman who just saw a Paul Verhoeven movie in the theater.

All of us, old and young, had just seen something special, regardless of how “appropriate” it was or not. It was wild, it was different, it was over-the-top. It was something new we’d never been exposed to, and it stuck with us.

We would continue this trend of going to the movies with my grandparents and even my dad when he was free, taking in movie after movie, frequently without ever having seen a trailer, poster, or having any idea what we were about to see. It seems crazy to think of an era when we weren’t inundated with promotional material for an upcoming movie, but there we were. And it was glorious.

The way we heard about movies back then was by way of the trailers that played before the movie started. We didn’t have any news or information about what was coming out most of the time. No casting announcements, viral websites, or leaked set pics. No, we got a full-on trailer ahead of whatever movie we were seeing at the time, and that would be the extent of the hype to bring us back for it.

In my earliest years, the way you found out showtimes was the newspaper, which would publish the listings and showtimes for all the local theaters. I used to cut out the listing as a young teen and keep it in my pocket to “theater hop” after my folks dropped me off. I’d spend the day at the movies, looking up showtimes in the cut-out newspaper to plan each new show, usually topping off at three movies. I’d even bring an overshirt or jacket and a hat to “disguise” myself between showings.

Some of you may remember Moviefone, which had “Mr. Moviefone” lead you to your local theatrical showtimes, listening to a list of menu options with titles and showtimes. You’d note the time, drive to the theater to buy your tickets, either early or on the day of the screening, and that was that. No online purchases, no picking your seats, or preordering your snacks.

It was the wild west of moviegoing, just slightly elevated from the early days of the 20th Century, where you paid a pittance to sit through an entire day of movies that never stopped.

This was also the Blockbuster era, where VHS rentals were at their height. I know, it seems crazy for the older generation to grasp that most kids born from 2000 on have never experienced the concept, but it’s a fact. Just like the rotary phone (shit, any phone other than a smartphone for that matter) and paper maps, there’s a whole smorgasbord of things the next generation will never experience. And, most of that is for the better.

But, missing out on the Blockbuster experience is a definite loss.

I started my video rental experience with Erol’s, which was a competing chain eventually bought out by Blockbuster. Erol’s had their VHS tapes in these giant red boxes with a cutout of the VHS box art on the front and back, with the video cassette slipped inside with cushioning on both sides to protect it. My dad would frequently go to Erol’s and rent a stack of tapes and come home with them, never alerting anyone to it. He was very much doing his own thing, and we were all along for the ride, so just like with my grandparents, my brother and I would simply watch along with whatever was in the stack, regardless of rating or content.

The excitement I felt seeing a stack of those red boxes being brought home was unparalleled. There was so much possibility in that stack. So much unknown. So much inspiration, laughter, thrills, titillation, and awe. It was a truly unique feeling, just seeing a stack of VHS tapes, having no idea what any of the movies were. My dad would frequently pick a healthy mix of movies, from new releases to old favorites. It was never one genre or one type of film. It was always a diverse array of movies. Legal Eagles, License to Drive, Heartbreak Ridge, Highlander, Clue, Vision Quest, etc., etc. All these 80s gems (and duds) that propagated rental store shelves.

Erol’s was bought by Blockbuster for $40 million in 1990, ushering in a massive chain of rental stores all over the U.S., eventually reaching more than 9,000 stores across the country. Two things you could seemingly find in any town in America were a McDonald’s and a Blockbuster. Food and entertainment were at our fingertips everywhere we went.

What a time to be alive.

Blockbuster was unique. It had a kind of corporate structure that made all of its stores the same in terms of layout, presentation, and design. The employees wore khaki pants and a blue polo with a yellow collar (and later morphed to a more casual hoodie) and wore name tags. They usually were behind the counter or restocking tapes on the shelves and would frequently act as a kind of “product expert” for customers who had no idea what to watch.

It was an odd thing, really, having a clerk who rented out tapes giving recommendations to people who wanted to watch a movie, but had no idea what they should pick. There was no training about what was good or bad or how to attune selections to a specific customer. It was all based on what the individual clerk was aware of, and they made recommendations as such. So, if they were partial to horror or action, then that’s typically where they’d guide you.

However, most people seemed to know what they were looking for, and it was almost always the new releases. Patrons would come in on a Friday night and camp out by the return box, which was like a library book depository where you dropped the tapes off. New releases were for one night and had to be returned the next day, whereas older titles you could keep anywhere from two-to-three nights.

People would get nasty about new releases and camp out, waiting for whatever new release they wanted, hoping that someone would drop off a copy and they’d be the first to scoop it up.

Imagine being the clerk, working a shift on Friday night with some random lady standing there asking if the movie she was looking for was in the batch of movies that were just deposited in the drop-off box. Some people would wait upwards of an hour in hopes of getting the movie they wanted. It was radical times.

The real magic of Blockbuster was the shelves. Shelves and shelves and shelves of movies (and later, video games), from new releases to older titles, all spread out in alphabetical order and by genre. For those who have been raised in the digital generation, it would be like being inserted into the iTunes library, but now an actual library, with physical copies to browse, neatly aligned on rows and rows of shelves.

There’s something about being able to pick up the box and look at it, reading the synopsis, looking at the images, and gleaning all the info you could about a certain movie to see if it’s one you wanted to watch. If you knew what you were looking for, there was a burst of excited glee when the movie you were looking for was on the shelf.

Each store only had a certain number of copies, so you were frequently playing the odds. There were always more copies available for big-ticket movies, but those numbers dwindled for more obscure or lesser-known ones. Usually, the number of boxes on the shelf determined how many copies each store had, and they would place the physical copy of the movie behind the box. From there, it was first-come, first-served.

But, just as you spend hours at home, surfing through the endless library of streaming content now, so would you have spent that time at Blockbuster walking the aisles, perusing the shelves of VHS box art, which was especially cool in the 80s and 90s, and looking for that special movie or two (or three or four) to take home for the night.

Like a bookstore of movies, you would pull one off the shelf, consider it, and if it felt like the right choice for the night, then that was it. The risk of choosing something that could be either good or bad was exciting. Maybe a friend had seen it before and recommended it. Maybe you’d heard someone talk about it. Maybe you saw a trailer for it at the movies or on another VHS. There was a feverish excitement about not knowing what you were getting into.

You couldn’t go to rottentomatoes.com and check the percentage rating. There was no YouTube to watch a trailer. There was no IMDb.com to cross-reference actors. No, this was a chance encounter that could end badly or become a lifelong friend.

You had to choose. You had to risk.

If there was a drawback to Blockbuster or VHS rentals in general, it was late fees and rewind fees. This is a pain that the current generation will never know, and it was a distinct one. Most can’t imagine having to get in their car and drive to Blockbuster to drop off a movie they just watched the night before.

It seems rather insane to think about, but that was the reality for a new release. If you didn’t watch it the night you rented it, too bad, it was due back. If you decided to keep it, you accrued a late fee, which was about the same as renting it for another night.

Then, there were rewind fees, as the cassette had to be rewound to the start of the film, so that when the next group of folks rented the film they could just pop it in the player and hit play. One common thing to be considered when leaving the house was to rewind the tapes you had watched to avoid the fee (eventually, they even sold “rewind” decks specifically for this). It’s absolutely crazy to think that this would be a thing, as the advent of DVD/Blu-Ray/4K and streaming has made such things obsolete.

Blockbuster was a unique alternative to going to the theater in those days, just as streaming is today. Watching from the comforts of home and then bringing the movie back to the store the next day was the next level up in enjoying filmed entertainment, and it would only grow from there, even as the era of VHS went the way of the Dodo.

It was an amazing, unique, and life-changing time, one that would usher in my early film education and one I’d also eventually be a part of.

Those early days in theaters and the aisles of Blockbuster were game changers for me and many others who grew up in that era. It was the funnel of our entertainment, and we loved it. We didn’t know anything beyond it, so it never felt like we were restricted or somehow lacking. The existence of DVDs or streaming was a concept beyond our reasoning back then. That was sci-fi level futuristic shit, and who knew if we’d live to see it?

Eventually, people would start figuring out ways to really milk the VHS format to fit their home viewing needs, as you could buy blank VHS tapes and simply copy movies from one player to another, or record movies off of HBO or network TV.

My dad was an early advocate of this, eventually amassing a healthy library of movies onto blank cassettes. The cool thing was that you could fit up to 6 hours or more of movies on a single cassette, so people would make their own “movie mix tapes”.

The father of one of my close friends in high school had the biggest library of bootleg VHS movies I’d ever seen. Hundreds of tapes, each one containing three to five movies, with corresponding time codes so that you knew how far to fast forward if you wanted to watch one of the titles further in the tape. He even had a folder with all the tapes labeled by number, so you could easily find the tape and the movie you wanted to watch. It was a beauty to behold.

By the early ‘90s, after making my life-altering discovery about Tony Scott and how each movie had its own style and vision guided by the filmmakers, I was deeply invested in all things film. I had decided that I would become a director myself and would daydream endlessly about it while getting my hands on anything and everything I could about the industry, the trade, and the craft of moviemaking.

I would buy up all the magazines I could on the topic, which was a fairly booming industry at the time. Premiere, Movieline, Entertainment Weekly, etc. Even Us Weekly used to be a movie news magazine before it became a gossip rag. I read every interview, every news announcement, soaking in the details as if I were trying to crack The DaVinci Code of filmmaking. Obsession barely scratched the surface.

As a child, I used to keep a scrapbook for Star Wars. It was a standard lined notebook which had pictures cut out of magazines, stickers, trading cards, etc. that I would glue on each page, creating a piece of memorabilia tailored to my liking.

I distinctly remember sitting in my kitchen in 1983 and my mom saying, “Do you want to work on your book?” She pulled out my Star Wars scrapbook, along with a pile of clippings, and I went to work, making a collage of images that I’d later do professionally in programs like Photoshop more than a decade later.

Since the Internet was years away, I took it upon myself to do something similar with my movie journey. Entertainment Weekly would put a grade at the end of their movie reviews, from A to F, and that quickly took hold as a way to rank movies, foregoing the usual star rating from one through five.

So, I started making little booklets that would serve as a scrapbook collection of the movies I saw in theaters, complete with images I collected from magazines and newspapers, along with my ticket stub from each film, and a small section that had my grades for the film.

I gave an overall grade, but also graded everything from cinematography to acting to score to editing, etc. I also had sections for rankings, including my favorite actors and directors. Much of it was incomplete, as it was harder to come by multiple images for many films, but that was also the thrill of the endeavor. Finding new images was always exciting, and I’d clip and glue them into my book with a sense of excited glee.

I kept these books going annually, starting a new one each year, until the advent of the Internet and Photoshop came into my life. But I view these books as a picture of my hunger to express my passion for this craft, essentially making “web pages” before web pages existed.

Perhaps it was destiny…

I began to make lists of movies I needed to see to complete my film education. By then, I’d developed a list of directors I would follow voraciously. Tony Scott, of course, Ridley Scott, John McTiernan, Quentin Tarantino, Steven Spielberg, John Woo, to name a few. But I knew I had to go beyond those that appealed to me at the moment. I dove into Francis Ford Coppola, Sidney Lumet, Stanley Kubrick, John Schlesinger, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, William Friedkin, and countless others.

My desire was to be as complete and well-read as possible. Studying the works of these filmmakers continued to broaden my horizons and take me to places I’d never imagined. The frenetic energy of Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon, the dreamy carnage of Apocalypse Now, the piercing violence of Taxi Driver, the trippy narrative structure of Reservoir Dogs, the perfectly crafted dolly shots from McTiernan’s Die Hard, and the balletic display of slow-motion action from John Woo’s Hard Boiled had me magnetized to the screen.

I would spend hours upon hours watching and studying all the movies that were deemed the greatest of all time, but with some limitations.

Let’s be clear, I wasn’t trying to become a good little robot that regurgitated what everyone already felt about these movies. No, I wanted to see for myself how they measured up, not how I was told they should.

Along the way, I missed big chunks (and am still catching up). I never really took the Alfred Hitchcock pill, despite enjoying Psycho and Rear Window. Kubrick was hit or miss, and I could never make it through Barry Lyndon. It would be decades before I discovered David Lean and was able to truly appreciate what he offered with The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia.

I gravitated to the (then) modern mythmakers. Tarantino was a tremendous influence in that way. He came off as a fan first, a lover and purveyor of movies, not some stuffy arthouse filmmaker trying to push through a message. I mean, this is a video store clerk who became a filmmaker. He took his passion and made the kind of movies he wanted to see. He didn’t make what studios wanted him to make, and he didn’t cater to their whims.

Another filmmaker who would light a fire for me was Robert Rodriguez. The Texas native director got his start by taking part in a medical study that eventually got him enough money to make El Mariachi, the 1992 action film that felt like a Spanish-language John Woo film. El Mariachi would launch Rodriguez onto the sequel, Desperado, with Antonio Banderas, and a team up with Tarantino and George Clooney in the vampire/crime hybrid flick From Dusk Till Dawn.

Rodriguez was a self-titled “guerrilla filmmaker” who did almost everything on his own, from writing, shooting, directing, producing, editing, and scoring, making him a kind of jack-of-all-trades filmmaker. His book “Rebel Without A Crew” served as a kind of biblical inspiration for me in my college years as I began my own filmmaking journey.

And no filmmaking journey in the ‘90s is complete without Kevin Smith. The Jersey-born director scraped together enough money (and charged it to credit cards) to make the black-and-white comedy Clerks, which was based in part on his own life experiences as a convenience store clerk. The raunchy, honest, and pithy dialogue delivered by the lovably obnoxious cast makes Clerks one of the best and most endearing independent films ever made (and is still Smith’s best work, in my opinion).

Smith had a humble approach to his work, frequently counting himself lucky to do what he did, even if he strived and sacrificed to get there. He wasn’t particularly gifted in terms of visuals, but his writing and characters stood out tremendously.

As I write this, Tarantino, Rodriguez, and Smith are all still pumping out films, some better than others, but they’ve remained on the path, and they continue to inspire. Beyond the auteurs, however, some filmmakers are more commercial, more genre-based, and still as strong and visionary as their more well-regarded peers.

John Carpenter redefined the horror genre with Halloween while continuing to make grade-A B-movies like Big Trouble In Little China, They Live, Starman, and Escape From New York. Other genre filmmakers like George A. Romero (Night of the Living Dead), David Cronenberg (The Fly), Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch), Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), David Lynch (Blue Velvet), etc. all started a lineage that would pave the way for modern masters like David Fincher, Guillermo del Toro, The Wachowskis, James Gunn, Neill Blomkamp, etc. The list is ever-growing, and the influence is never-ending.

So, why do these people matter in the grand scheme of things?

Simple: My journey wouldn’t exist without them.

What it all boils down to is that these artists created something that had a profound effect on me. It changed the course of my life. Had I been inspired by sports or philosophy or current events or scientific study or the medical profession or any of the millions of paths I could’ve chased, my life would have been immensely different. But my passion was born in art, and it was there that it would remain, grow, and flourish, no matter how much I deviated in the years to come.

If I only knew then what my journey would become. If Doc Brown himself showed up in a time-travelling DeLorean and told me what I’d be doing, I still wouldn’t believe it. But, I’d definitely check my photographs at home to see if anyone was starting to disappear…

NEXT: Becoming a “Clerk” and The Birth of Online Movie News Sites

© 2026 Paul Shirey. All rights reserved.

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This installment is part of a serialized nonfiction work based on the author’s personal experiences. Some names, dates, locations, and identifying details may be altered to protect privacy.

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