'Film Geek' shows how Richard Shepard lost it at the movies

'Matador' director delivers deeply personal video essay about film and family.

In his personal visual essay “Film Geek,” filmmaker Richard Shepard remembers seeing the slasher movie “Friday the 13th 3 3-D” at the Loews Theater on 86th Street, in the New York of the early ‘80s that was his gritty, grimy, wonderful playground.

At one point in the film, a teenager crammed in a VW bus with her friends offers up a joint, and because of the crude 3D technology, it seems as if she’s extending her hand out towards the audience. Shepard remembers the audience reaching out their hands to try to grab the weed from her.

It’s a funny anecdote that encapsulates the twin strains of “Film Geek” – how Shepard’s tales of a rough-and-tumble upbringing in New York in the ‘70s and early ‘80s are entwined with a deep, overwhelming intoxication with the movies. 

Above all, the film, which was a personal project for Shepard during COVID lockdown, is a love letter to his father, a complicated but loving patriarch who opened the world up to his son through moviegoing. “This is a story about a boy, his dad and the movies,” Shepard says in his voiceover narration at the opening of “Film Geek.”

Intimate and joyful, “Film Geek” weaves together home movies of Shepard as a grinning young boy with clips from the movies he saw in theaters between the ages of 6 and 18. “The Godfather,” “Jaws,” “Apocalypse Now,” “Saturday Night Fever” and a hundred others make their appearances onscreen, each provoking one of two reactions from the viewer: 1. I need to see that movie, and 2. I need to see that movie again.

In his narration, Shepard (who went on to make some great films like “The Matador” and “The Perfection”) talks about being a boy not just loving movies but addicted to them. He talks about coming out of “Star Wars” or “Blue Velvet” feeling utterly transformed, and hungry for the experience again. 

His father was an eager guide into this world, feeding his addiction, sharing movies that he loved, MPAA ratings be damned. (“He took me to the movies. He took me into the movies.”) Throughout the film, Shepard details the “Three Scariest Moments” in movies that terrified him when he was a kid. Some might now say the scenes “scarred him for life.” Shepard prefers to wear those scars as tattoos, or badges of honor.

Shepard’s love for his father resonates throughout “Film Geek,” even as he recognizes the complications and contradictions in him. His father lived an artistic life despite never selling any of his work, a handsome man who grew a rakish goatee in middle age that distinguished him from the other fathers. Shepard describes him as both selfless and selfish, sometimes at the same time, such as the time he loaned his son $10,000 in cash to make his first movie – but demanded $11,000 back in cash in seven days. Shepard made the payment and the movie. It seems like a strange arrangement to have a loan shark for a father, but would Shepard have had a filmmaking career, and an abiding love of movies, without him?

Peppered throughout the film are elegant illustrations by Skip Sturtz of the bygone movie houses that Shepard went to in his youth. But although “Film Geek” dwells on the past, the tone is less nostalgic and wistful than thrilled and grateful. This is where it all started, Shepard tells us, launching him into a life obsessed by movies.

“Film Geek” is not available on VOD as far as I know, but if you’re in Madison, Shepard is presenting “Film Geek” at 7 p.m. tonight at the UW Cinematheque, 4070 Vilas Hall. He’s sticking around town to screen “Friday the 13th 3 3-D” at 7 p.m. Friday.

If you go see it, and the girl reaches out of the screen to hand you a joint, reach back.