I'm In a Francois Truffaut State of Mind.

I'm in a Francois Truffaut state of mind. Maybe its the heat. The first film of his that I saw was The 400 Blows when I was 19. It was playing at the old Elgin Theatre that I lived across the street from. I shared an apartment in Chelsea, the first place I lived at in New York City. Chelsea was unknown to me, actually everything was unknown to me. I quickly learned.

Anyway The Elgin was a Spanish language movie theatre when I moved to the hood in the fall of 1967, and it quickly changed to a theatre for midnight movies and old classics both American and foreign. The prints were usually lousy but it didn't matter. It was there that I got my limited but rewarding education in great movies.

On afternoons I would check the flyer for the theatre that hung in our kitchen to see what was on for the day and off I would go, down the 6 flights of stairs into that dark dump of a theatre. I remember the effect the film about this poor French kid had on me. I was glowing in the dark and carried that glow with me when I left the theatre.

The title mystified me, and I remember in 1959 when I was 12 seeing ads for the film and thinking it was a violent film, actually the French title means to raise hell which makes perfect sense to me. I watched it on blu ray the other night and once again I was shattered and sat there on my worn couch crying my eyes out.

I once met Truffaut. I was working at a famous film bookstore and early one morning before we pulled up the gates and opened the doors there was knocking on the door, go away we're not opened yet, but the knocking went on, and finally I went to the door and there stood Truffaut. I thought I would faint. Needless to say the gates went up, the door was opened, and the great artist came in to browse. We all grabbed photos for signing and sadly I had to sell the one that he signed for me which was of him with Charles Aznavour during the filming of "Shoot The Piano Player" "A souvenir from Truffaut" he wrote across it. I can still see it.