Of numbers, movies and a gold guy named Oscar

You never forget your first love, and mine has never left me. Though they go by many names, the movies have carried me through good times and bad and remained by my side, or rather, in front of me, through childhood, puberty, marriage and the birth of a child.

My years, in fact, have been marked by movies. At age 3, there was “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” My oldest brother, who was 10 at the time, convinced my parents it was a good idea to take his baby brother along. About 15 minutes after being dropped off, he made a call home: “Momma, come get Daniel. He’s running up and down the aisle screaming, and I can’t get him to stop.”

At age 5, there was the “Planet of the Apes“-themed birthday party. We didn’t have costumes, but I remember us running around like monkeys, and my big present that year was a Cornelius action figure.

“Jaws” hit me like a tidal wave at 9, and I swore never to go in the ocean again, a promise I kept for the next nine years. At 11, “ Star Wars” merged mythology and science fiction, creating a cult of light saber-wielding fans. We might have looked silly pantomiming the battle scenes, but it didn’t matter — the force was with us.

We’re always looking for heroes, and I found a new one in Indiana Jones. For my 15^th birthday, I asked for a fedora and a bullwhip after watching “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” I received a set of car keys instead and was disappointed. You see, my two best friends already had cars, but nobody I knew, in Mississippi, had a bullwhip and a fedora.

At 18, I was legal. I could vote, join the military and drink beer. It was also the year I stepped inside a time-traveling DeLorean and went “Back to the Future.”

After two years of college I’d had enough of simply watching movies, I wanted to be a part of them. My best buddy and I headed for the hills of Hollywood, that mythical place of milk and honey. Within a week, we had a job in the film industry, working at the Mann Theatre in Tarzana.

By the end of the summer, we’d served popcorn to two of the Jackson Five (but not Michael) and rocker Pat Benatar, and we’d memorized the best lines from “Full Metal Jacket,” “The Untouchables” and “ Robocop.” We were also broke and homesick.

The 90s were good to me, movie-wise. I started the decade working for one of the nation’s largest corporations, a telecommunications giant with nearly 100,000 employees. I spent my days as a data analyst, crunching numbers, but my heart was still with the movies.

These were the days before the Internet, and after work I would walk over to the Birmingham Public Library and devour encyclopedias and histories of film. I also read Daily Variety, memorizing the weekend’s box office results the way some people study baseball box scores.

I was fascinated with not only the storylines of movies, but also the dollars and cents. Using a Lotus spreadsheet (remember those?), I tracked the earnings of popular films. In 1990, when Westerns were supposedly dead, I was surprised to find that “Dances with Wolves,” with a $22 million production budget, brought in $184 million domestically and another $240 million in foreign theaters.

But Hollywood, as I would find out, has a funny habit of giving too much power to too few people. That happened to Kevin Costner after the Dances with Wolves success and would lead to abominations such as Waterworld and The Postman.

Numbers and movies continued to collide for me. I’m no numerologist, but I was intrigued, and somewhat puzzled, by the nomenclature movies used when referencing numbers. I stayed up late at night, trying to uncover why the sequel to “Weekend at Bernie’s” used the Roman numeral “II” in its title, while “ Speed 2: Cruise Control” simply chose the number “2.”

And these were not isolated incidences. There were other examples, such as “Catch-22″ and “Slaughterhouse-Five.” I began to feel like Billy Pilgrim, the time-trotting protagonist of the latter film — someone who had become unstuck in time.