JANUARY 1980
Gold hit a record $850 per ounce.
Indira Gandhi was voted back into power in India.
The Rockford Files aired its final episode on NBC.
Jimmy Carter decided to boycott the Moscow Olympics.
And Paul McCartney went to jail for ten days in Japan for marijuana possession.
I think of the eras of my life in terms of where I was and who I was when certain movies were released and sitting down to figure out exactly where I was in January of 1980 led me to realize I’ve always had the timeline wrong in my head.
It’s always easy when we can round our narratives off in nice, neat, easy ways. I’ve always told the story that we moved from New York to Florida when I was three, from Florida to Texas when I was ten, and then Tennessee a year later. That would have put me in Texas in 1980. But that’s not right, and when I really think about what I watched where, it helps me get the framework aligned correctly again. The truth is that we only stayed in Florida for five years, and when we moved to Texas, I was eight. I remember watching Battlestar Galactica and the awful Star Wars Holiday Special in Texas. I also know that we moved away not long after there was a massive flood in Conroe, and that took place in July of ’79.
When 1980 rolled around, I was already living in Chattanooga, TN. It was a tough move for me, and I wasn’t happy about it. Texas had been a weird and traumatic detour for my family, and I was hoping we’d go back to Florida where we had friends and some history. Instead, we landed right in the buckle of the Bible Belt, where I felt more like an alien than ever before. My dad was a civil engineer, so he went where the work was, and now as an adult, I respect the way my dad raised us. As a kid, all I knew was I had a lot of first days in new schools with the last name McWeeny, and that was a nightmare.
My memories get more specific the older I got. I don’t really remember living in snow, but I sure remember the sunshine. Florida was hot and humid and non-stop, and movie theaters were a beautiful refuge from that, a two-hour hit of air conditioning with a trip to somewhere else as a bonus. Texas was quick and hot and awful, and the whole thing went by in a blur.
Chattanooga came right as I was really leaning into film fandom. I saw it as a constant in a life that was very chaotic. Movies were movies wherever you lived. They seemed like something I could hold onto, and I was starting to really push to see all kinds of things. After all, I was going to be ten in May. That was practically grown-up. I was only starting to become the voracious film nerd I’d be by the end of the decade. January is always a slow month, even today. In 1980, though, in the days before the constant churn of product at a rate so breathtaking that things show up on your home TV before they’ve played a theater, it was clear that they weren’t even trying to release new movies that might compete with the big releases that were held over from December of 1979.
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