Growing up, I dreamed of unemployment, days where there was simply nothing I had to do.
Heaven.
When university mercifully ended, unemployment was finally mine.
What will you do now, asked my friends. I am going to watch movies, I replied. I was 20.
But instead, I just sat around like an unattended plant, bored senseless.
Before long, Records Records was up and running. The unemployed man had bowed to the protesting work ethic once more.
Thirty-five years later, I sold Records Records.
What will you do now, asked my friends. I am going to watch movies, I replied.
Three weeks ago, I finally made good my promise.
I went down into the basement and inspected the boxes of videos and DVDs I had collected over the years.
What to watch? Should I watch The Last Picture Show for the fifth time, I mean, really? I decided to watch the oldest movie in the boxes first.
I have always loved old silent films.
When we were flush, our family used to rent films from Hugh and G. K. Neill on the corner of George and St Andrew Sts.
It was always hard to get Charlie Chaplin, and we usually finished up with Harold Lloyd, a Clayton's Chaplin, albeit a brilliantly entertaining one.
When we ran Lloyd and The Keystone Cops backwards on our whirring old reel projector, it was as good as it gets.
Bullitt had nothing on a backwards chase scene from a silent movie.
Later, Harold Lloyd became much more than a Chaplin copyist, with feature films like Safety Last, which memorably closed a recent film festival at the Regent Theatre, Lloyd hanging off the hands of a giant clock hundreds of feet above the street.
Yes, he did that stunt himself.
Unfortunately there was no W.C. Fields or Buster Keaton to rent in those days, but my basement boxes happily contained both.
And some Charlie Chaplin.
The acting maxim that to get the character you first get the walk began right here.
I loved The Kid, just 68 minutes long, and crying out to be re-made into two hours in 2010, 89 years on.
Think Paper Moon meets Changeling.
I had become a W. C. Fields fan in Austin in 1997 with record producer Joe Gracey, the first man to record Stevie Ray Vaughan.
While our wives inexplicably enjoyed the unrelenting Texas sun, Joe and I sat inside in the dark and watched the very best of W.C. Fields.
What I had was far from the best, just a collection of early shorts, but the essence of Fields was still there.
Fields was not loveable like Chaplin or Lloyd.
He swindled anyone with money, stole other men's wives in clusters, loathed domestic pets and threw rocks at small children.
He also loved golf, and two of the shorts I had featured this passion.
He had a good swing.
Fields' oft-quoted line "When I play golf, I carry two things, a bottle of whisky in case I see a snake, and a snake" remains one of the best in all golf fiction.
Yes, Fields was a drunk. A hopeless one, in fact, he filled his fountain pens with vodka.
He was also very, very funny. But Buster Keaton was the true genius.
He had a Daniel Vettori penchant for wanting to do it all - write, direct and act.
Plus he insisted on doing all his stunts, death-defying moves so scary you turned your face from the screen.
Some years ago, a friend of mine in Christchurch, Olly, blew 30,000 of a family inheritance writing a biography of Buster Keaton.
He even managed to get to Keaton's wife.
Movie maven Leonard Maltin declared it the definitive Keaton work, but publishers baulked, and now Olly just sells it online, printing copies one at a time.
The Little Iron Man by Oliver Lindsey Scott.
It's huge and it's good. Give Olly a break. He's unemployed, too.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
