I saw Jaws with my father in the summer of 1975, the year it came out. When we walked out of the Oaks movie theater in Berkeley, California, we were giddy, punch-drunk. It’s a perfect movie—a big, exciting American movie. From its opening minutes you live inside of it, your regular life suspended somewhere behind you. Waiting for my mother to pick us up, we noticed that we were both vaguely on guard against shark attacks, even though we were standing on Solano Avenue, where the only dangerous sea creatures were down the street in the King Tsin lobster tank. The tagline of the marketing campaign was “You’ll never go in the water again,” and my only non-Jaws thought during the movie was I am never going to the beach again.

My mother picked us up, and we tried to tell her about the effect it had on us. My father compared it to Psycho, which many people of his generation did.

“There’s a guy who gets his leg bitten off!” I said. “And you see it floating to the bottom!”

“Sinking to the bottom,” my father said mildly.

I thought of the leg falling through the water, the foot in its tennis shoe landing first and making a little bounce: sinking.

[From the January 2025 issue: Walk on air against your better judgment]

My father loved the movies, and he knew a lot about them. He’d grown up in Greenwich, Connecticut, and as a child he’d gone by himself to the Pickwick Theatre every weekend. On Saturdays, he’d get the whole enchilada: the serial, the cartoons, the short subjects, the newsreel, a Western, and then the feature. On Sundays, there would be a shorter, more dignified program—the coming attractions, the newsreel, and a better class of feature. I had the clear impression that those hours at the movies—maybe as much as his tremendous reading, which began early and never stopped—were the most fully lived hours of his childhood. While other boys were playing baseball or running track or engaging in any of those dull and harassing pastimes that boys were supposed to love, he was at the movies.

He went to see the original Dracula in 1931, and it had a tremendous effect on him. He loved to say, “Children of the night—what music they make!” in a very Bela Lugosi way. He did it for laughs, but “children of the night” must have been a frightening thing to hear as a kid, and he was partly laughing off his own childhood fear.

When I was about 10, he started taking the family to a Berkeley revival house that played the great movies of my parents’ youth. I loved those nights; even though many of the movies confused me, I never missed a show. I was a Flanagan, and this is what we did—we read everything, and we saw a lot of movies. There were lines from some of them that we repeated for years: “I was misinformed” and “Was you ever bit by a dead bee?” My older sister looked a bit like Lauren Bacall, with the same side part, and sometimes we’d address the question to her. “Ellen, was you ever bit by a dead bee?”

The movies were shown in a double feature, and in the half-hour intermission between them, you’d spill out of the black-and-white 1930s and into the night carnival of Telegraph Avenue, 1971. Pushing through those doors was like Dorothy Gale opening her own front door in The Wizard of Oz, when the world switches from black and white to Technicolor; the scene on Telegraph was itself a bit like Oz: filled with strange people, vibrant with noise, attractive but also tinged with menace. What a relief to get back to the world of light and shadow, to the breakfast tables set with white linen, where educated people shake open newspapers and murmur, “Yes, please,” when uniformed servants offer coffee from a silver pot. Was real life ever like that? It was in the movies.

When I was in seventh or eighth grade, my sister moved out, which left a gaping hole in the family. She was the smart one, the ideal moviegoer, my father’s favorite. In an effort to drag me up from the farm system, my father instituted a new policy: On very special Saturdays—which would follow no schedule and would always be announced on a Wednesday night—he and I would go to San Francisco, have lunch, and see a movie. My father didn’t drive, and this was before BART ran under the bay to the city, so these trips—unlike the countless times my mother drove me or all of us to the city—never really felt like a sure thing until we were back at the house. First, we’d catch the 7 bus that went from the Berkeley Hills to downtown Berkeley, and then we’d wait for the F into San Francisco. Very occasionally, and theoretically in a way that could be predicted by looking at the bus schedule in the kitchen, what creaked to a stop wasn’t the 7 but the 7-F, which had all of the benefits of the 7 combined with the ultimate destination of the F, and we received it as an augury of safe passage and a fantastic piece of luck. From the moment we took our seats, way up on Cragmont and Euclid Avenues, we could relax as the bus moved in its stately way through Oakland, and then onto the freeway and across the Bay Bridge, eventually to the end of the line, the old Transbay Terminal in San Francisco, which I recently read described as a “hot mess” during that era. But San Francisco itself was a hot mess at that time.

The city was peerless in its beauty and famous for murderers who came with boogeyman names: the Zodiac Killer, the Zebra Killers. There was also street crime, much of it violent, and political assassinations, and bombings. The terminal was cavernous and poorly lit, and I thought it was a bit scary, but my father’s noninterest in ordinary things, such as driving and figuring out a bus schedule, extended to a failure to notice—really to acknowledge—dangerous circumstances, and so we’d hop off the bus and ankle it up to Union Square to have lunch at Lefty O’Doul’s.

Lefty’s was a baseball bar named for a beloved player and manager, so you wouldn’t think it would be a Tom Flanagan kind of place. But it was also an Irish bar with shamrocks and tricolors in the grand old tradition of the San Francisco Irish, so it was actually very much a Tom Flanagan kind of place. It also had a great steam table. We always ordered either hot pastrami sandwiches or plates of corned beef with the works—cabbage, carrots, horseradish, the full catastrophe—and then we’d bring our trays to a table and give the cocktail waitress our order (“One martini and one Coca-Cola, please”), and we’d sit there eating and talking.

He’d order a second martini, and I’d have a slice of what I think of as California cheesecake (the flat kind, unlike those texture-filled ordeals I would encounter in the East). There was never another child in the bar, but no one ever said anything about my being there, just as nobody said it at the Top of the Mark or the half a dozen other San Francisco bars I frequented with my parents. I owe a lot of my education to conversations held in those places. Lefty’s closed in 2017 because nothing gold can stay, but you can almost catch a glimpse of it at the very beginning of The Birds, when Tippi Hedren walks past Union Square and takes a left on Powell to go Davidson’s Pet Shop.

At a certain point, my father would look at his watch and say, “Okay, drink up,” and we’d squeeze our eyes shut, drain our glasses, and head out. Our first movie was The Poseidon Adventure, which was released at the beginning of the disaster-movie craze of the 1970s, and unlike Spellbound and Casablanca, I understood it perfectly and found it thrilling. It’s about an ocean liner that gets capsized by a rogue wave—“an enormous wall of water,” someone tells the captain, played by Leslie Nielsen—and a group of passengers who band together and try to escape.

Every disaster movie operates the same way. In a busy and cheerful first act, you meet the principals and find out what makes them tick: Mr. and Mrs. Rosen are going to Israel to meet their grandson. Mr. Rogo is a brusque cop who’s always trying to cheer up his wife—the 13th labor of Hercules because she’s a former prostitute who tells him that one of the men on board looks like a former customer—played by Stella Stevens. Reverend Scott, who will eventually lead the group to safety, is a turtleneck-wearing, semi-groovy Protestant minister trying to hash out his theological problems. Once you’ve made these and several more introductions, disaster strikes and you wait to see who gets picked off and who makes it.