It has been six years since I first “discovered” these little known, immensely reassuring and increasingly numerous movies and novels about the transformation of life’s second half. Our efforts to introduce them to wider and wider audiences so that they can help us all to outgrow the negative and increasingly inaccurate notion that life after fifty is all about stagnation, isolation, and decline, have met with increasing success. I first began to show them and discuss them in the Boston area, and then won two National Endowment for the Humanities Grants to showcase them at Lifelong Learning Institutes around the country. Nineteen LLIs from coast to coast enthusiastically participated, and many of them are still running our first program The Elderquest in Today’s Movies and Novels or variations on it. I have also developed a second set of programs for LLIS and other institutions, The New Cinema and Literature of Age, Part Two: Men, Women, and Late Life Relationships, and I suspect that our list of converts nationwide now numbers in the thousands.

But these great movies and novels deserve an even bigger audience, boomers as well as elders, millions rather than thousands, and they will need one if they are to replace our increasingly destructive conviction that aging is bad with the more positive messages embedded in these second half stories.

www.secondhalfstories.com has been designed with that in mind. It will feature reviews of movies and novels, new comprehensive film and book lists that will help you to identify and find them, and instructions for starting and running your own movie and book clubs—an initiative that will culminate in the publication of a mass market book entitled , Second Half Stores: Movies, Novels, and the Transformation of Life’s Second Half that will be available here and then elsewhere around the country.

But before we can hope to accomplish these admittedly lofty goals, we must first enlarge and enliven our community of enthusiastic movie goers, and readers, teachers and students of these inspirational and provocative second half stories  You are therefore particularly encouraged to join the discussion by visiting our easy to use forums and contacting our various partners to swap experiences and ideas.  To do so and to purchase any of our products  all you have to do is to register. It’s free and extremely simple. You can use your email address as a user id and we will remember your password for you.  Everyone involved with this project is excited by its possibilities, and we are confident that you will be to.

Yours,
Chuck Nicholas