Laura Schon won't reveal her age, but she gives you a hint. She says her first movie memory was going to see The Wizard of Oz with her parents when she was 5.
"I just remember how scared I was of the witch," said the Toronto resident, who guessed that she has taken in as many as 2,000 movies in her lifetime. "I never said a word when I was in the movie, but I had nightmares for a long time afterward about that witch."
So when Schon saw a story about documentary filmmaker Gail Singer's next project, she immediately signed on.
"I just felt that I would be a good candidate because I used to go to two, three movies a week for 15 years," said Schon, who was recently interviewed on camera by Singer.
The Toronto documentary-maker -- whose film credits include Loved, Honoured and Bruised, You Can't Beat a Woman and, more recently, Wisecracks, a film about female standup comedians -- put up flyers around town asking moviegoers to e-mail her about their experiences at .
Singer plans to deconstruct the whole moviegoing experience -- from the way the brain processes visual information to the nutritional value of a bag of popcorn drizzled with fake butter -- into composite parts, then view the whole again in a new light.
"If a person from outer space came and said, 'What's a moviegoer?' -- I'm trying to construct that picture," Singer explained.
The first round of interviews confirmed the pre-eminence of the movie house as a venue for illicit sex. One woman recounted her teenage escapades in darkened theatres while another man claimed to have taken an usherette out back with a six-pack, only to get a Christmas card the next year informing him they had a son. Television sex expert Sue Johanson also weighed in on the topic.
But Singer is also talking to opticians, dieticians, cardiologists, psychoanalysts, sociologists and historians for a scientific take on the very special connection between man and cinema.
York University neuroscientist Hugh R. Wilson, the Ontario research professor of biological and computational vision at the Centre of Visual Research, "was exactly what I was dreaming of," she said. "He was fascinating."
Prof. Wilson believes movies have a direct conduit to our emotions through our eyes. That's because humans rely on subtle movements of facial muscles to tell them how others are feeling, and a movie screen, of course, is like looking through a magnifying glass at an actor's face. If the actor is convincing, then it enables us to suspend our disbelief by plugging us directly in to the emotional content of the film.
"I go to a movie expecting to become involved in a complex visual and auditory play on my emotions, my thought process, and so forth," Prof. Wilson said in an interview. The neuroscientist said sight has been the major neural input to our emotions for about 100,000 years, around the same time our ancestors lost their facial hair and developed more complex jaw muscles.
"Basically all preprimate mammals use smell. That's why dogs smell each other's butts, to see how they're feeling. . . . Humans do it, thankfully, by looking at the other person's face."
He said experiments have shown a motionless face covered in 40 random, luminous dots doesn't even look like a face when viewed in the dark. But when that face smiles, the pattern of muscle movement makes it immediately recognizable as a human face.
Prof. Wilson, whose research interests include face recognition, said as soon as the retina registers an image, a signal is sent to the primary visual cortex. This is employed to detect familiar shapes, enabling you to recognize people you know in a photograph or a car buff to distinguish a Mustang from a Monte Carlo.
If what you see is in motion, that information is sent on to the dorsal pathway, which helps you figure out where your body is going in relation to the moving object.
"It's interesting that movies are tapping the full visual system, whereas still photographs are only tapping half of it, roughly speaking," he said.
Schon's interiew was less academic, but no less revealing. She told Singer that she likes movies with female characters, and those that feature a character who starts out down and out but emerges victorious in the end.
"I have to relate in some way to the movie," she said. Dirty Dancing, for example, was a film she expected to hate, but she was pleasantly surprised when she discovered it wasn't about the lambada and was set in a resort in New York's Catskill mountains. "I'd been to the Catskills, as a tourist."
The Toronto office worker, who has toiled at a series of "boring" clerical jobs for the past 18 years at City Hall, has lived a life measured by movies.
Wizard of Oz was followed by Hud with Paul Newman, which marked the first time, at 13 years of age, she was allowed to go to the movies with girlfriends. She saw E.T. on her 30th birthday with her best friend and received a week's pass to all the Toronto International Film Festival galas from a relative for her 40th.
Schon remembers her first dates by movies, too: The Godfather was the first for her and an ex; she met her current boyfriend at work, but they got together because both wanted to see Almost Famous.
Singer realizes it's going to be a difficult task to sort through the reams of footage she will shoot from the interviews, but she expects the threads of her narrative to emerge as she interviews her subjects against a blue screen. The visuals are added later.
The idea for the documentary has been germinating for a while, ever since she read The Moviegoer, Percy Walker's 1961 novel about an alienated young man whose life is devoted to watching films, chasing women and making money.
When Singer bought a cabin in the woods near Keith Stata's Highland Cinemas and Museum in Kinmount, Ont., she was entranced by the sheer amount of movie memorabilia and detritus he had collected. She started to wonder what was so captivating about movies that they had survived for so long, even after futurists predicted their demise (with the advent of radio, then television, then videos).
She was also inspired by her friend Margaret Visser, whose 1986 book, Much Depends on Dinner, dissected the origins of table manners and explored the leftovers with great relish.
To her surprise and delight, Margaret and Colin Visser, who now live in Barcelona but were in Toronto to research a new book, agreed to share their moviegoing experiences, while Canadian director Atom Egoyan sat down to talk about life on the other side of the lens.
Singer hoped to collar a few celebrity directors and actors at the Toronto film festival, but that fell through when much of the event was cancelled in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. She plans to travel to New York and Los Angeles to get the interviews with Roger Corman, the king of B-movies, director Quentin Tarantino, Oscar-winner Kevin Spacey ( American Beauty), humorist Calvin Trillin, Woody Allen ("a friend of a friend") and Bernardo Bertolucci.
"I have a long list. We'll see who is there when I'm there," she said.
Singer hopes the film, which was financed by CTV, the Canada Council, Telefilm Canada and the Canadian Television Fund, among others, will be completed by next spring, and could be seen next summer at film festivals or next fall on television (there is both a made-for-TV version and a full-length, feature-film version). Singer also plans to write a book and start up a Web site based on the material she collects for the film.