The first time I met him, he asked me, “If you were trapped on a desert island and you could only have five books, what would they be?”

He compromised and upped the list to ten after I hemmed and hawed about his question. I took it very seriously. I was sixteen, and I was taking any question that defined myself very seriously. Now, I can’t remember most of the books I listed. Seven out of ten but completely escape me, but the book to remember for the purpose of this memoir is Gone With the Wind because he remembered. To know him better later, his memory is nothing to brag about, and this was a considerable feat.

Granted, I was wrestling tinsel and a Christmas tree at the time, which can’t be an easy image to erase, and Madonna was crooning, “Santa Baby” when I nodded and said, “Well, I very well couldn’t live without Pride and Prejudice and Gone With the Wind.” So. There’s that.

Two years later around my eighteenth birthday, we had lugged a projector, my laptop, several chairs, my younger sister, acquaintances and their booze, and a white sheet to a barn overlooking the town. The barn was a rusty, ancient ordeal that had housed steam trunks and heirloom Bibles, corsets and old love letters from former residences of the property. That night it was a theater. He tacked the sheet over its rattling sides and spent half a bottle of Heineken trying to distance the projector perfectly.

He remembered Gone With the Wind. He may possibly remember still every book I said, even though I can’t anymore. I felt superior at that screening, invite only, as Tara’s fields swept across the barn and Twelve Oaks glimmered on the sheet. He told me silly facts he had gleaned from documentaries and old Hollywood memoirs about Gone With the Wind’s filming whenever he felt I would appreciate it (such as: burning Atlanta was actually the old King Kong set, the pillars at Twelve oaks were painted facades and that Vivien Leigh had reported at one point in her life that Clark Gable wore dentures and that she dreaded kissing scenes in the movie because his breath stunk) and kept silent when the moment warranted.

Not a week later, he was cleaning (read: innocently pilfering) through the garage of one recently-retired high school librarian. Books and old musical scores overran parking space: a gold mine of forgotten masterpieces and tin quarters.

“The heavens opened,” he was saying later, “And angels were singing,” and he handed me the screenplay, complete with directors’ notes and critique from the producers. I couldn’t believe his luck… no: I couldn’t believe mine. I studied that screenplay with more ferocity than my college application, and concluded that (having just re-re-re-read the book recently), the screenplay was the best adaption from novel to cinema I had ever read.

Granted, I hadn’t read a great many screenplays before. The ones I had were unobtrusive short films that managed to squeak their way to some film noir screenings in northern California. Screenplays about dysfunctional families with inner beauty and loyalty or coming-of-age rants that were loaded with inventive ways to smoke pot and pitiful wet dreams. Gone With the Wind was grand. America’s War and Peace. Sometimes I would stop reading and just laugh, happy that such literature existed.

When Mystery Man asked us, “What is your favorite screenplay and why?” I knew my answer immediately. Unfortunately, my reasoning is more sentimental than technical. I could say something along the lines of, “Reading it makes me happy,” and wouldn’t have much to vouch for its superiority other than that.

But isn’t that enough?

I needn’t tell you of Gone With the Wind’s numerous awards. I needn’t tell you that, after taking inflation into account, Gone With the Wind is the highest grossing film of all time. This is a valid masterpiece. This screenplay inspired me to write for film, or most of all, just write.

Now I remember a girl with dark hair and green eyes, looking at the stars and the roof of an apocalyptic barn, breathing pine and Merlot while a man and his beer leaned over to admit, “You know, back when I was eighteen, I had a funny obsession for Gone With the Wind too.”