I picked up a book entitled My First Movie: 20 Celebrated Directors Talk About Their First Film and on the first page found the Coen brothers reminiscing about their early education in film: a local TV program that featured Fellini films beside Roman sandal movies like Son of Hercules. This was followed by college, specifically the film society at the University of Minnesota “that showed the kind of stuff you wouldn’t normally be exposed to,” said Joel: “Godard and the Marx Brothers — who were both kind of hip at the time.”

“I guess that doesn’t exist any more,” Ethan added. “But for a period people would show black and white 16mm prints on some crappy projector in a basement in the university building somewhere. I guess video ended that.”

Do we value those early movie experiences more because of how hard it was to have them? I’m still trying to get used to the idea that everything is available all the time, thanks to the internet. I can’t quite imagine what it’s like growing up with the idea that I can have/see/listen to anything just by Googling the title, or going to Netflix. (Though don’t bother searching for “Son of Hercules” — there were a million Steve Reeves movies with something like that in the title and I think JC meant the name to stand in for all such body-building, history-bending epics.)

When I was a senior in high school, attending a “free school” in Auburn, California, my English teacher told me that if Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses was ever playing anywhere (the campus at UC Davis, say, or one of the art house cinemas in San Francisco) I would have to drop everything and go. And not long after that I did: I can’t remember if I hitchhiked to SF (three hours) or took a bus, but I went to the Cento Cedar cinema on Polk Street and saw Stolen Kisses on a double bill with the 400 Blows. And then hitchhiked home…

I wonder now if my English teacher had wanted me to see the film (in which Jean Pierre Leaud plays an older version of the kid in 400 Blows, a young man with female trouble) because he was encouraging me to cheat on my girlfriend (we all have ulterior motives) or he was just trying to give some direction to my rather directionless life. The ultimate message of Truffaut’s romance (maybe all Truffaut romances) is of the carpe diem variety: All kisses, all love, are stolen from death. Get it while you can.

That’s a good thing to hear when you’re 17 (hell, that’s a good thing to be reminded of when you’re 67) but I wonder if the lesson was all the more memorable for me because I had to stand on an off-ramp in the rain just for the privilege of hearing it. Would it be the same, watching in on my iPod while instant-messaging my friends?

Please promise to kill me before I become a grumpy old man.