Welcome to The Movie Lovers' Club

This book is for every movie lover who values compelling films, good friends, and engaging conversations. If you enjoy occasionally inviting friends over for hot fudge brownie sundaes and a movie, creating a movie club that uses this book as your group's guide will heighten your movie-viewing experience. For starters, after the closing credits roll, you'll have an abundance of thought-provoking and entertaining discussion questions to choose from, smoothly navigating you past the same-old "I liked it/didn't like it" post-movie conversation. By the end of each delightful evening, you'll have a deeper understanding of the film, yourself, and your film-watching friends.

In addition, The Movie Lovers' Club also gives you the inside scoop about the films you're watching: pithy quotes from actors, directors, and critics; social and cultural background that directly informs the film; and behind-the-scenes insider information. You'll learn scores of insightful movie facts; for instance, Annie Hall was originally titled Anhedonia, which means the inability to enjoy anything — a fair description of the misanthropic protagonist Alvy Singer, but perhaps not as catchy on a marquee. All of these tidbits will enhance your movie-watching experience and illuminate your after-film discussions.

The Movie Lovers' Club is your ultimate companion and guide, providing everything you need to know to set up and sustain your movie club for years, including tips on selecting members, movies, and munchies.

There's more to be gained from participating in a movie club than just a pleasant diversion (though fun is certainly part of the equation). Movies help us connect and empathize with others, both fellow viewers and movie characters alike. Watching movies together can provide a sense of connection that may be missing from our lives, by presenting shared cultural touchstones. For instance, just the mention of a particular movie, such as Breakfast at Tiffany's, evokes the notion of "small town girl makes good in the big city." And anyone who has seen the film will instantly understand what you're getting at if you say, "I felt like Holly Golightly floating down Fifth Avenue."

During the past 100 years the cinema has both mirrored and shaped our internal and external lives: what we think and feel, how we dress, the cars we drive, to whom we are sexually attracted, and so on. The movies we love and identify with throughout our lives have real power to shape who we are and who we aspire to become. Because films have such a capability to transform us, it's inherently and deeply satisfying to talk with friends and family about how the movies we watch relate to our lives.

Discovering and Enjoying the Multiple Benefits of a Movie Lovers' Club

I started my first movie club in 1994 during a time when I was watching one or two films a day as part of my research for a series of books I was writing about women's lives. I found these films to be a source of inspiration in my work and of enrichment in my life. Although I belonged to two book clubs at the time, I knew of no movie clubs. On a whim, I invited several girlfriends to join me in watching movies about women in various life stages, and within a couple of weeks a dozen of us, ages ranging between 30 and 65, began to meet biweekly. I was immediately able to share my insights with others and benefit from theirs.

The group met at my place, which was small enough that some of us had to sit on the floor on cushions. Still, I had a state-of-the-art (for that time) Sony Trinitron, and as a former pastry chef, I happily provided dessert. The other women alternately supplied refreshments, and we took our treats seriously, deriving great delight in serving a spicy mango tea with a fresh boysenberry tart. Once I even prepared homemade espresso ice cream with chocolate-rum truffles. I know, this sounds like a cross between Big Night and Babette's Feast, but, just as often, I'd serve a cheese board or slices of succulent melon or, the old reliable, hot-buttered popcorn and Cokes. The food, after all, was secondary to the featured event: watching a film with friends. After a few weeks, we began to share recipes and became excited about designing a meal or snack that would perfectly complement the genre, country, or theme of our future films.

We were a sundry assortment of married and single, employed and retired, gay and straight. A few of us still had children at home, and we all shared a combined passion for travel and movies. We called our movie club "In Full Flower: A Closer Look at Women in the Movies," and we met regularly that year. Occasionally a fresh face joined the group and one of them, Katherine, soon became my new best friend.

I compiled a rather exhaustive list of possible film choices, and at each meeting we selected our next feature. The movies spanned from the campy but depressing classic Sunset Boulevard, to the madcap The Summer House, starring, with palpable panache, the éternele Jeanne Moreau. Our first film was the playful Shirley Valentine, about a middle-aged, middle-class British housewife who is so far gone she's begun to talk to walls. But Shirley regains her Aphroditic sensuality on a trip (sans husband) to Greece, where she declares, "Sex for breakfast, sex for dinner, sex for tea, and sex for supper." Now, that's my kind of woman. A few months later, with Shirley in mind, we each created our own dream vacation.

By the end of the year, several of us resolved to continue our movie club, but this time we decided to focus on movies about marriage and committed relationships. Those of us who had existing liaisons invited our partners to join the group. Our motto was based on a line from a Marianne Moore poem: "I wonder what Adam and Eve think of it now?" It was de rigueur to watch Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage, but we balanced the torturous with the hilarious by including films like the Tracy/Hepburn gem Adam's Rib, in which Spence and Kate play married lawyers who find themselves on opposite sides of a criminal trial and nearly divorce each other as a result (see July: Independent...