"Was It a Real Movie?"

My major was zoology, but all I really wanted to do was take special topics courses. They were the discovery of my life. Mike and I had decided to take a course called "The Films of Charlie Chaplin." It was random on our part. It is just what we did.

The course was taught by a visiting professor named Horwitz who had made a film that had been a minor success, so he was something of a name. The course was taught in an auditorium holding about a hundred students, and from the moment Horwitz walked onto the stage, the room was transformed as if by magic.

He was a bearish man with longish hair and a very thick beard, and separated as he was by the stage, he looked much bigger than life. Horwitz had somehow managed to get bootlegged copies of all of Chaplin's films, and he had made a course out of them. But it was more than that. Horwitz loved those films, and he made us love them, too. Each week, we'd come to class more enraptured than the week before, Horwitz explaining the intricacies of The Tramp and how the character evolved. We'd listen to his lecture, then sit in the dark as the Chaplin image flickered across the screen accompanied only by the click-click-click of the film running through the projector in the little room above. Nobody breathed. We learned about comedy in the early films, then about pathos in the "The Kid." "Gold Rush" made us howl. "City Lights" let us weep. But always there was Horwitz somehow interweaving his magic with Chaplin's, himself looming in our imaginations. Even the students with whom we sat took on a supernal hipness and profundity. Though we never spoke in class, we began to recognize one another outside the classroom, and we knew. There had never been anything like this.

One day, Mike and I came upon Horwitz standing outside before class. He was alone, smoking a cigarette in an invisible bubble, students piled around its perimeter, glancing at him in his repose but not daring to approach. But Mike and I had come upon him unawares suddenly finding ourselves standing next to The Man himself.

"Hello," Mike said. "I really enjoy your lectures."

"Ah, yes," he said.

Mike asked him something and he said something as I stood by thinking, "Look at us! We're talking to Harry Horwitz! People are watching. I mean man, man, we are something. We are something."

Horwitz was talking about the film he made, Mike nodding like a bobble head to show he was getting it and agreed. I was feeling like a hanger-on, I guess, a sidekick, since I hadn't really contributed anything to the conversation, so I said--and oh how many times I've wished since then that I could take it back--"Was it a real movie?" It was like the sound of cars crashing, of twisting metal and shattering glass. Harry looked like he had been sucker punched.

I had never heard of the movie he had made, and what I had meant to ask was whether it was a feature film or a documentary. Really, I think that is what I was trying to ask, though it has never mattered since. I had blundered. The thing was done. Horowitz looked at me with a special distaste and snarled, "Yea, a real movie, you know, popcorn and theaters." And with that he stubbed out his cigarette and turned away.

Mike looked at me like I'd just shit my pants, but he was laughing. "What the hell was that!" he asked?

"I don't know. I didn't mean it like that."

"Jesus, man, you'd better be glad he doesn't know your name."

That was the day we watched "Modern Times." Inside the darkened auditorium, Horwitz spoke to us of the genius of Chaplin in his use of sound, of how other silent film stars failed in the "talkies" because their voices were not what audiences expected them to be, but Chaplin had put off speaking until the end of this film, not speaking at all but singing a song instead. And that day, for the first time all term, there was sound, and we all watched with great anticipation through the recordings and the mechanical voices never spoken by humans but always coming from machines instead, us watching The Tramp and The Orphan, waiting, waiting. And then. . . .

A collective chill ran through the room, a palpable trembling you could feel like a low vibration. We were groupies, and Horowitz had prepared us for this all term. This was The Moment. We were shaken by a religious frenzy.

Oh, it is not of any use to tell this if you weren't there, if you had not sat in that hall all semester long, if you had not been whipped up and prepared. But we all knew. It had been a seminal moment. Everything had changed.

The next semester, Horwtiz taught another class, this one focusing on other silent film stars of the era. Mike and I did not sign up for the class. We probably could not have as news of the Chaplin course had spread across campus like wildfire and everyone wanted in. But Mike and I went to the theater a few times just to sit in on the course, and it was not the same. This was the second wave, people who had heard but came too late like Americans in Paris in the 30's. Nothing, we knew, could be like that again.