When Nicole Brinkley, Julia Fell and Megan O’ Connor were told by a visiting speaker at their freshmen orientation that they would never succeed if they did not take initiative and become leaders, they decided to form a club based on the one thing they liked doing: watching movies.
The trio founded the Historical Film Society (HFS) a few weeks after the fall 2010 semester began. First-year English and journalism major Brinkley, first-year theatre arts major with a technical theatre concentration in costume design Fell and first-year education major with a concentration in English, O’ Connor created this club because of their love for historical films.
“In the beginning of the year, we saw how much we loved watching movies, especially historical ones,” said O’Connor. “We were like ‘why don’t we start a club?’ So we did that.”
Brinkley, Fell and O’Connor take care of all the E-board duties. Brinkley attends the council of organizations meetings and handles the paperwork, Fell runs the Facebook site and keeps track of who comes to the meetings and O’Connor makes sure the E-board have the movies needed for each meeting and takes care of the technical issues.
With a variety of films at their disposal, HFS shows many different flicks during their weekly meetings from “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl” to “Pride and Prejudice.” During the meetings, HFS shows a film to their members and then discusses the costumes and historical accuracies or inaccuracies of that film.
“Not everything is historically accurate,” O’Connor said. “Since we live in a visual kind of society, I feel as though people would rather see it acted out [on screen] than just reading [about] it.”
HFS is for anyone with interest who wants a deeper appreciation of movies. Some of their upcoming films includes “Van Helsing,” “The Pianist” and “The Illusionist.”
“There is a never-ending list of movies to watch,” O’Connor said.
HFS meets at 6 p.m. on Monday in Student Union 409.