The Film Club / by David Gilmour

What if you could get away with skipping school in order to watch movies all day? One kid did. It's essentially the deal author David Gilmour made with his teenage son Jesse. No longer seeing the purpose of an education, the youth had let it be known at the beginning of the 10th grade that he was planning to quit school after his sixteenth birthday. Gilmour allowed his son to get his wish (and be allowed to live at home) under the following condition: that he, Jesse, promise to watch three movies a week with his father. Beginning "the film club"--the tag denoting the duo's nightly sessions in the basement--with Truffaut's The 400 Blows, Gilmour and son ran the gamet of from classic cinema like Roman Holiday to popular movies (Basic Instinct) and everywhere in between. There were no lectures preceding or following viewing any of the films, no tests on the finer points of cinematic art: just a father and son watching movies together. Gilmour, a former film critic and current TV host in Canada, orchestrates one of the more extreme (or maybe not so extreme as all that though at least original) child-rearing experiments in recent memory. Apparently the little parenting gamble worked, at least to some degree: Jesse began attending college-level courses after getting his GED equivalent. (B GILMOUR)