IVAN. (Patreon)

There are other people who can and have eulogized Ivan Reitman far better, but perhaps because of timing alone, the man was completely synonymous with "the dawn of understanding movies" for me. 

It was simple. GHOSTBUSTERS was my favorite movie right at that really young age where I was beginning to understand what movies really were and I was like "people make these!? How!?!!?" And thus my mom got me this book, Don Shay's "Making Ghostbusters."  And that was it. I was in. All I wanted to do was learn more about them / make them / watch them. I even made little home movies using a giant paper cut out of the Stay Puft Marshmallow man and hung it from the stairs so it could seem like I was fighting that giant monster. 

Seriously, I found a pic of it in an old photo album.

(Sorry, the gloss makes it really hard to take a picture and I dare not pull it out of the sticky film)

What's perhaps interesting about Reitman being part of my dawn of understanding is that you look at all his best films on paper and they shouldn't work. But he threw himself into absurdity of high-concept with reckless abandon. In that, he turned Murray into a superstar. He got comedy gold and comedy coal out of Arnold. He made what is perhaps the most underrated Kevin Kline movie. He made just as movies that didn't work as he did absolute gems. And thats because he always tried to make movies that were drunk on potential. Even now, he was still producing and working on a few legacy comedies.

I'll miss him. But most of all I thank him.

<3HULK