#1 – Greatest Movie Ever Made! – George reminds me of Dad – I cry at one scene every time I watch it – and I watch it a lot!

When I ran for president in 2016 I asked the Eric Clapton twitter account if I had their permission to use this song from the soundtrack as my campaign theme song – I took no reply as not a no – lol! I really do want to change the world! When the movie came out I bought the soundtrack on CD – and a few years ago a student saw it in a store and bought me one as a gift. I told her “Thank You!” – now I have a copy at school and one at home. Always say “Thank You!”. Never say “I already have that.” 🙂

#2 – I grew up wanting to be George Bailey – grew up watching this over and over and over – I have it memorized. My Dad WAS George Bailey! (Click the link to find out how…)

#3 – “I want my life to have meaning…” “My Name is Temple Grandin. I’m not like other people.”

#4 – I had a 1970 Blue Chevelle Malibu SS with 350, 4 barrel Holley carburetor, 6×9 Jensens in the back, 5′ Craigs in the door and a 200 Watt Craig SLIDE-MOUNT 8-track player in under the dash in high school in 1978.

#5 – I Am the President! I think I was a pretty good president. (I DID run for president in 2016 after all)

#6 – “I AM the PRESIDENT!” President Andrew Shepherd made a great speech!

#7 – My Life Story – I was born in Alabama, got shot at in the Army, and have my own ‘Jenny’

#8 – Part II of my Life Story – I grew up poor in a Cotton Mill Village. Click this link to learn about Mom and my childhood and her amazing life.

#9 – Part III of my Life Story – I liked to party in high school – and I have been friends with my Best Friend Stevie since we were born 5 months apart in 1960, January for me, May for him – and we have talked just about every day since we began speaking…. So my biography is 3 movies 🙂

#10 – 1962 , I was 2 years old… Living in Alabama….

#11 – Play it Sam! It was hard making this one #11 ! “Of all the gin joints….”

#12 – I Just LOVE this movie! Two of the greatest scenes in movie history! One is CHILLING! The other? “I am Sheeba, the God of Death!”

#13 – THE Greatest Movie Ever Made! #1 All Time – Click the Link below to look for yourself:

The American Film Institute proudly curates lists to celebrate excellence in the art of the moving image. They reflect the collective opinion of a wide range of scholars, artists and experts who champion the power of the art form. We believe their greatest impact is to inspire personal, passionate discussions about what makes a great film and why. We encourage you to join in the conversation as we continue to pursue the revolutionary power of visual storytelling to share diverse perspectives, inspire empathy and drive culture forward.

I have seen 92 of the top 100 – you? A lot of the movies here are on that list. 6 of them.

Per ChatGPT: (“How did Orson Welles change moving making with “Citizen Kane” – specific details please”)

Short answer: Orson Welles didn’t just tell a different kind of story in Citizen Kane (1941); he changed the grammar of movies. Here are the specific, concrete ways the film reshaped moviemaking—many of which are still standard today.

1. Deep Focus Cinematography (Seeing Everything at Once)

What changed

• Before Kane, filmmakers usually guided your eye with shallow focus—one plane sharp, the rest blurred.
• Citizen Kane keeps foreground, middle ground, and background all in focus simultaneously.

How they did it

• Cinematographer Gregg Toland used:
  • Wide-angle lenses
  • High-intensity lighting
  • Smaller apertures (deep depth of field)
  • Optical compositing when needed

Why it mattered

• Viewers could choose where to look, making scenes more psychologically complex.
• Blocking and performance mattered more than cuts.

Classic example

• Young Kane playing in the snow outside the window while adults argue his future inside—all in focus, all at once.

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2. Radical Story Structure (Nonlinear, Fragmented Narrative)

What changed

• Hollywood typically used straightforward, chronological storytelling.
• Kane tells its story through multiple flashbacks, each from a different character’s perspective.

Key innovation

• The film never gives a single “true” version of Kane.
• Each narrator reveals more about themselves than about Kane.

Why it mattered

• Introduced the idea of the unreliable narrator in film.
• Anticipated modern films like Rashomon, The Godfather Part II, Memento, and Pulp Fiction.

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3. Low-Angle Shots and Visible Ceilings

What changed

• Studio sets traditionally avoided ceilings so lights could be placed overhead.
• Welles insisted on low-angle shots that show ceilings, making characters appear powerful—or trapped.

How they did it

• Built muslin ceilings
• Dug trenches in studio floors for cameras

Why it mattered

• Visuals reinforced theme:
  • Kane looks godlike early on
  • Small and imprisoned later in life

This was revolutionary

• It made cinematography serve character psychology, not just aesthetics.

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4. Sound Design That Acts Like a Character

What changed

• Dialogue in early sound films was clean, staged, and theatrical.
• Kane uses overlapping dialogue, echoes, and environmental sound.

Innovations

• Voices fade in and out
• Sound bridges across scenes
• Dialogue overlaps naturally, like real conversation

Why it mattered

• Increased realism
• Influenced radio-style sound layering in film (Welles came from radio drama)

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5. Lighting Inspired by German Expressionism

What changed

• Hollywood lighting favored bright, even illumination.
• Kane uses high-contrast lighting, shadows, silhouettes, and darkness.

Why it mattered

• Externalized inner emotion
• Visualized corruption, isolation, and moral decay

Legacy

• Direct influence on film noir of the 1940s and 1950s

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6. Editing as Meaning, Not Just Continuity

What changed

• Editing previously focused on invisible continuity.
• Welles and editor Robert Wise used editing to compress time and reveal emotional change.

Famous example

• The breakfast table montage:
  • Years of a marriage collapse in under 3 minutes
  • Same table, same characters, growing emotional distance

Why it mattered

• Showed how editing could express theme, not just plot.

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7. The Anti-Hero at the Center of the Film

What changed

• Hollywood protagonists were usually likable and morally clear.
• Kane is charismatic, cruel, generous, selfish, idealistic—and hollow.

Why it mattered

• Normalized morally complex protagonists
• Paved the way for later figures like Michael Corleone and Daniel Plainview

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8. Total Artistic Control (The Auteur Model)

What changed

• Studios normally controlled scripts, casting, shooting, and final cut.
• RKO gave Welles unprecedented creative freedom:
  • Final cut
  • Casting control
  • Experimental structure

Why it mattered

• Helped establish the idea of the director as the film’s author
• Influenced the French New Wave and modern auteur theory

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9. Visual Metaphors Instead of Exposition

What changed

• Films often explained emotions through dialogue.
• Kane shows ideas visually.

Examples

• Kane dwarfed by his own political posters
• Empty halls of Xanadu echoing with footsteps
• Snow globe as a symbol of lost innocence

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Bottom Line

Citizen Kane changed moviemaking by proving that:

• How a story is told matters as much as what is told
• Film could be psychological, ambiguous, and visually symbolic
• Audiences could handle complexity

Nearly every modern serious film borrows from it—often without realizing it

#14 – “Beware the Dwarf!” I was 18 in 1978 – took my high school sweetheart and future wife to see this…

#15 – 1979 – Married my high school sweet heart. In AIT at Fort Gordon, Augusta, Georgia – Radar Repair on Helicopters School – Living off post with my wife in a trailer. We go to see this movie – she crushes my hand in fear – a good night…. I miss her (she died of ALS)

#16 – My Favorite Western – Look at how young Kevin Costner is! A great cast!

#17 and #18 and #19 – I never read the comics but love the movies!

#20 – There’s No Crying in Baseball!

#21 – HITCHCOCK! Love them all – this is my favorite! “My name is Thornhill, well obviously you have mistaken me for someone else.”

#22 – Greatest Baseball Movie Ever Made!

#23 John Wayne! These count as 1 movie – they are the same movie, just changes the singer…

#24 – THE John Wayne Movie! (“Print the Legend.”) Every Western, set in the West or in Space, is about good guys and bad guys. Settlers vs Ranch Owners. That is true in real life. Me to CoPilot: “Please list throughout history when the conflict boiled down to settlers (farmers) vs ranchers (already there, owned a lot of land), from the West then to Africa and Asia today.”

Western U.S. (19th Century)

• Fence‑Cutting & Cattle/Sheep Wars (1870s–1890s)
  Homesteaders built barbed-wire fences that restricted cattle access to water/grazing. In retaliation, ranchers cut fences, leading to violent local feuds across the Plains and Southwest. [en.wikipedia.org], [skillsetmag.com]
• Johnson County War (Wyoming, 1889–1893)
  Large cattle operators (“cattle barons”) hunted small ranchers and settlers they accused of rustling. The feud escalated into a siege of local homesteaders before federal troops intervened. [skillsetmag.com], [countryadv…ntures.net]
• Pleasant Valley War (Arizona, 1882–1892)
  Feud between the Graham and Tewksbury ranching families escalated into a range conflict involving settlers over land/grazing rights, resulting in dozens of deaths. [countryadv…ntures.net], [en.wikipedia.org]
• Colfax County War (New Mexico, 1870–1877)
  Centered on land grant disputes affecting settlers and cattle owners, it involved bands of armed ranchers and violent evictions. [en.wikipedia.org], [famousfix.com]
• Lincoln County War (New Mexico, 1878)
  Initially rooted in conflicts among merchant-rancher factions, it aligned settlers/ranchers and involved figures like Billy the Kid. Armed confrontations ensued over economic and land control. [en.wikipedia.org], [famousfix.com]

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Africa (Modern — 21st Century)

• Farmer–Herder Conflicts (West & Central Africa)
  Since around 2010, violence between sedentary farmers and pastoralists (e.g., Fulani herders) over dwindling land and water—exacerbated by climate change, demographic pressures, and militant exploitation—has claimed over 15,000 lives. [africacenter.org], [link.springer.com]
• Violence in the Sahel
  In countries like Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, seasonal crop versus grazing land use intensifies during droughts, with pastoralists and farmers clashing over access and water rights. [climate-di…lomacy.org], [gisreportsonline.com]
• Nigeria’s Middle Belt
  Persistent Fulani herder–farmer violence since the 1990s has worsened in recent decades. Over 3,700 deaths between 2016–18 highlight the conflict’s scale, driven by changing transhumance routes, land governance failures, and climate stress. [en.wikipedia.org], [factually.co]
• Eastern Africa (Kenya)
  In Laikipia (2021–2022), drought-driven incursions by pastoralists (e.g., Samburu, Rendille) into privately owned ranchland—some inherited from colonial settlers—sparked violent clashes, with state intervention to evacuate herders. [theelephant.info], [news.mongabay.com]

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Asia (Contemporary)

• India (Gujarat pastoralist resistance)
  Maldhari pastoralists in Gujarat protest land and grazing rights loss, campaigning against encroachment of communal “gauchar” lands by farmers or mafias. Thousands affected; ongoing legal actions. [landconfli…twatch.org], [indiawaterportal.org]
• China (rural land dispossession)
  Not traditional herdashers, but farmers and land custodians face state and developer expropriation. Local officials may carry out forced evictions for urban-industrial expansion, upending agrarian communities. [oxfordpoli…review.com], [lincolninst.edu]

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Summary of Themes

Across West Africa and Asia, settler/farmer vs. rancher/herder (or analogous roles) conflicts continue today, often driven by:

• 🌍 Ecological pressures: climate shifts, drought, desertification.
• 👥 Land tenure changes: fencing, privatization, shifting migration patterns.
• 🔧 Governance issues: weak land rights, policy misalignment.
• 🤝 Ethnic and identity factors: overlapping with resource disputes.

This pattern echoes the 19th-century Western U.S. range wars—where land and resource control between agrarian and pastoral populations repeatedly triggered violent confrontation.

#25 – ARMY TRAINING SIR!

#26 – My “Jenny” Song and a great movie!

The Song?

#27 – One of Mom’s favorite movies (along with Dr. Zhivago and The World According to Garp – Mom had a wide range of movies she loved – and she loved her movies!) She loved Danny Devito!

#28 – Animal House “Can we dance with your dates?”

#29 – Streets of Fire – a Rock and Roll Fable. Great movie! Fun to watch – great soundtrack! Two songs of many:

#30 – Again, I grew up in Alabama in the 1960s. Read the book.

I could probably make my own top 100! My Stephen King Movies. (They ruined my favorite King book, “The Dead Zone”, and changed the ending to “The Shining” but a lot of great movies are from Stephen King’s imagination, from his books to his short stories.) Bette Davis movies “Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte…” Val Kilmer movies – from “Top Gun” to “Tombstone” to “Heat” to “Spartan” to “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang”. Comedies like “Airplane”, “Caddyshack”, “Old School” and Cheech and Chong movies. Robert Redford movies like “Sneakers” and “3 Days of a Condor” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and of course, “The Sting”. And of course movies like “Shane” and “Old Yeller”. If I did 100 I would think of more. I love movies. Grew up on them. Mom loved them. Friday nights at the drive in. Kids movie first “The Gnome Mobile” and “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly”. Eddie Murphy movies like “48 Hours”, “Trading Places” and “Beverly Hills Cop”. I love old Film Noir movies. Comedies. Love stories. All but horror movies. “Halloween” is enough horror for me. Mel Brooks movies “Blazing Saddles” and “Young Frankenstein”. Steve Martin movies. Robin Williams. I could go on forever. . Bruce Willis movies. Gene Hackman Movies. Sigourney Weaver movies. Of course Meryl Streep movies! I could just rattle off movie titles of movies I loved, from “Big Lebowski”.and “The Fisher King” to “The Ghost and Mr. Chicken” and “No Time for Sergeants”. I could do the same thing with songs, from STP’s “Interstate Love Song” to Luther’s “Power of Love/Love Power”. Oleta Adams “Get Here When You Can” to Ronnie James and George Strait. Bette Midler to Johnny Cash. Thank you for reading my list. I have had an awesome life with some great memories. From growing up with Papa’s polkas, John Mancini and John Philip Sousa Albums and Lawrence Welk on TV to Dad and Moms’ DECCA and SUN records. Doobie Brothers to Rush. Songs and movies bring back awesome memories for me. And remind me of folks I have loved over the years.

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