Hi, this is Steve.

There was a time in my life when I couldn't think of a better way to spend a day than going

down to the local video store and renting a couple of movies on VHS.

Okay, sometimes it was more than a couple.

Sometimes it was three or four, five or six if it was a two-day rental.

This is when I took those first tentative steps to becoming a cinephile, so of course included

in those rentals were films by Wells, Kubrick, Kurosawa, David Lean and Alfred Hitchcock.

But the fact is, those cinematic masterpieces didn't exactly represent the majority of my

rentals.

There probably was just as much John Carpenter as there was John Houston.

It wasn't that I didn't watch movies with subtitles.

It's just that more often than not, they were subtitling Jackie Chan or Jet Li.

And while I was beginning to learn about European filmmakers like Ernst Lubich, Francois

Truffaut and of course Austrian director Billy Wilder, the Austrian who appeared most frequently

on my small TV was Arnold.

Now, I have no idea how many times I rented Conan, Commando, Raw Deal, Running Man and

of course the Terminator.

But I actually believe it was his performance in John McTiernan's predator that solidified

his status as a bonafide movie star.

Oh, and one more thing.

You know, I realized I might have given the impression that I was somehow all alone

with that stack of VHS tapes.

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