"Will Work For Food Or Movies"

We continue our birthday look back and share some picks for the Monday Read

It’s Monday, May 18, 2020, and here’s what I’m reading…

This month is galloping by.

I feel it sliding away, and I feel like I’ve done it all wrong. Nothing I had planned for this month is actually happening. None of the writing I intended to do is getting done. None of what I planned to show the boys got shown. None of what I thought I’d be doing for my birthday is going to happen. It’s all just a big blur.

I thought it was going to be fun to dig into my memories of the last 50 years of film fandom, but it’s actually been the opposite. Maybe it’s silly. Maybe it’s arbitrary. For whatever reason, I’ve always seen 50 as a milestone, as a moment when I would be finished or fully realized or whatever. I thought I’d get to 50, look around, and say, “Oh, so this is my life. Great! Well done!”

That’s not what it’s like, though. Not at all. The truth is I still very much feel like the same person I did the day I walked out of that Clearwater theater in 1977 or the day I saw Lawrence of Arabia for the first time or the day I left Tampa to drive across country to Los Angeles or the day my first play was produced or the day I got married or the day I got divorced. Those milestones have all changed or shaped me in some way, yes, but at heart, that fundamental me is still the same, and that’s one of those things that can be incredible sometimes and other times deeply frustrating. I am only now starting to sort out some of the patterns that have held me back and recognizing how I am the architect of those patterns. I am only now getting the perspective on the choices I’ve made to understand what those choices even were. I have acted impulsively throughout my life, and I have based my behavior on terrible models at times. I learn, but I learn slowly, and I learn by hard example. I have been absolutely drenched in hubris at times, and I have paid dearly for it. The sad truth is that other people have paid for it, too, and that there is damage done by me that I can never fully repay or restore.

That’s life, though. You don’t get an instruction book. You just build it, using whatever piece you pull out of the box next, not following a plan even if you start out following a plan, and by the time the thing is built, it may not be what you thought it was at all. Part of what I’ve learned over time is how to keep moving forward. Some of those lessons I learned from movies, some of them because of my single-minded focus on movies, and many of those lessons have been about work.

When I finally got old enough to get a job, it makes sense that I’d figure out a way to get close to movies. I’ve known since I was seven years old what I wanted to do in a vague sense. I asked my dad as we were standing in the lobby of the theater where we’d just seen Star Wars, “Who did that?” He helped me sort out the various job titles on the movie poster, and we decided that it was George Lucas who did that, which meant that I wanted whatever his job was. That’s what I wanted to do.

When you’re living in Tennessee or Texas or Florida, though, filmmaking doesn’t seem like a real job that real people do. You can’t just start doing that. Or at least, that’s what I was told by pretty much everyone who I ever told about my dreams. I wanted it so badly that would write elaborate press releases and fake magazine articles about my future career. I would write puff piece profiles of my fabulous life. I would write retrospective pieces about my amazing filmography. I would write screenplay after screenplay in notebook after notebook while teachers lectured about algebra or history or AP chemistry. My head was always somewhere else, and I couldn’t wait to get old enough to have other people take me seriously.

Obviously, I couldn’t get a “real” part-time job at 14 years old, but there was a job that was available to me, and considering how much I loved Caddyshack, it seemed like destiny. You’ve probably heard of the Masters tournament, which takes place on the Masters course. Their sister course, less well-known but no less beautiful, is the Honors Course, which was located about two miles from my high school. A very private, very lush course, they had a pretty robust caddy staff year-round, and one of the guys at my middle school told me about how his older brother was working there. They had an open policy at the time that allowed local kids to come in and try out, and it was a pretty strenuous process.

I wanted that extra cash, though, and I tried out for it, and to my enormous surprise, I got it. I didn’t last long because we ended up moving, but it was a great starter job. It was nothing like Caddyshack, though, to my enormous consternation. It was brutally hard work and even when the members tipped well, they made you earn it. We had celebrities who would fly in to play there, staying in the private condos that adjoined the course, people like Tom Selleck (tipped very well, was nothing but lovely to everyone) and Evil Knievel (just as sharp and witty as you’d expect someone with 137 traumatic brain injuries to be), but for the most part, the clients were doctors and lawyers and money guys, people with cash to burn who barely noticed the kids who would hoof it after every terrible shot they shanked into the bush. It was hard work, but on a beautiful course, and if I’d stayed in Tennessee, I might have tried to stay on there and get better at it. The potential for earning was ridiculous. I’ll say this for the Reagan ‘80s… the trickle-down economics I saw those guys laying on the caddies was impressive, more of a hose than a trickle.

I certainly wasn’t going to get rich working at a movie theater, but when we moved to Florida, I was still about eight months shy of turning 16. There was a sign a few miles from our house announcing that a brand-new movie theater with eight screens was going to be built and I decided to get ahead of things. I reached out to AMC, writing them a letter at corporate, asking them when they expected to have the theater built and open, asking if I could apply early so I could be ready when I was 16. And it worked. They had the Regency Square 8 open in the spring, and I had my interview with the general manager. On my 16th birthday, when most people would have had a party, I went to work for the first time, getting trained as an usher.

I loved it. I loved working at a theater. I did it for the rest of high school and into college and even after college once I moved to Los Angeles. Theater work made sense to me. I took it as a point of pride to try to make movies fun for everyone who came into any of the theaters where I worked. The summer of ’86 was magic for me. Within three months of starting there, I was already learning how to run the projectors and build prints and I learned the concession stand and I learned box-office and I felt like I could do all the jobs and I enjoyed all the jobs and it felt like I’d found my place.

Some of the best lessons I’ve learned about movies, I learned standing in the back of a movie theater listening to an audience. Good movies, bad movies, full theaters, half-empty ones… they all have lessons to teach about the way movies connect with us. Movies played for much longer back then when they were hits. I’m old enough that when I say “back then,” I am actually talking about something from over 30 years ago. That happened fast. It feels like just yesterday that I went to those employee screenings of The Fly or Big Trouble In Little China or Robocop or Aliens, movies where no one was expecting much ahead of those screenings and all of a sudden I had this secret that I couldn’t wait to tell every single person who walked up to the box office the next day. That was a great time to see things because I didn’t know much in advance. There was no great authoritative source of upcoming news and information at that point. I found myself routinely blindsided by movies, and it was thrilling to see something amazing and then walk into every screening of it for weeks or even months just to see my favorite parts on the big screen over and over.

It was great to see the energy around something you loved when it became a hit, and it could be wildly frustrating when something you loved was bombing and nothing you said mattered. Over time, I developed relationships with people who came to that theater who would ask me what to see and who trusted me to steer them right. They would wait until I saw something sometimes before they would decide. It was my first encounter with the idea of curation as something that is rewarding in and of itself.

I think what I’ve only just recently realized is that I spent too much of my life treating movies as a method of getting somewhere. They were steps in a process. If I watch this many movies, then this will happen. Either I’ll learn whatever secret there is that will let me make my own movies, or I will know so much about movies that people have to listen to whatever I say about them, or I’ll finally see whatever it is I’ve been looking for this whole time and I’ll be finished. That’s crazy, of course. That’s not why we watch films. Or at least, that should be why we watch movies. They’re not just things to put on your Letterboxd page, things to check off because the AFI told you to, or a homework assignment the Academy gives you every year. Movies are, each and every time, an opportunity for a complete experience, and treating them like trading cards to collect sells short those experiences. When I was young, I spent most of my time drunk on movies, and that job was an excuse to spend all of my time around them. I got a second job at a video store called Rent-A-Movie, the locally-owned competition to the newly-entrenched Blockbuster Video, and I spent all my time not at the theater working just so I could take even more movies home. I did it because I was hungry for them, not out of obligation. It was like that when I moved to Los Angeles, too. I had been managing my theater in Tampa for a while by that point, and when we moved, I locked down a manager’s job pretty quickly.

That put me in an interesting vantage point as I got used to Los Angeles. It was basically like being thrown in the deep end since the theater I was managing was used by Disney and Warner Bros and several other studios as one of the main test screening theaters in town. We had test screenings there at least two or three nights a week on one of the six screens we had, and I had to deal directly with the filmmakers, the talent who came to see the screenings, the recruited audiences, the test marketing team working for NRG, the studio executives in charge of the whole thing. I had to deal with Jeffrey Katzenberg at least twice a month, which is a huge change considering I had just moved from Tampa a few months earlier. We had a lot of famous people show up just to see films, something I got used to over time. It was startling at first, though. I remember turning around at the concession stand a few days after starting work for the first time and ending up face to face with Robert Zemeckis. This was the summer of Back To The Future III and he was one of my heroes, so my exact response to seeing him was blurting, “Hi! Fphflblabbabada dibbledewibble,” which meant, “Hi! You’re one of my very favorite people!”

He let me babble for a moment before sighing and saying, “It’s okay. Just breathe.”

It took me a while to figure out how to comport myself around the very famous, but I got comfortable. When Gene Hackman showed up outside my box-office on Friday morning, I was excited, but I managed to play it cool. He tried to buy a ticket for whatever was opening that day, but I just issued him a comp and invited him inside to wait until we opened. He had just recently had his heart attack and vanished from public life, and as he recovered, he came in almost every Friday morning, walking down from his home in Sherman Oaks. He became familiar, which still blows my mind now. He was always gracious about being recognized by anyone, but that was not true of everyone. David Crosby was a giant asshole to a cashier who told him she was a fan, making a huge show of it in the process. Plenty of people just brushed off conversation completely, and I get that celebrities want to be able to have a regular life when they’re in public. My own attitude about that shifted after seeing it up close for a while. I think there’s a line on both sides that people have trouble with. There’s no problem with giving someone a quick compliment. The problem comes from wanting something else from them, from needing some kind of exchange from the person. You can’t ask them to give you something, whether it’s an autograph or a photo or their full attention, without imposing on them, and I think it’s reasonable for people to be irritated when you’re imposing on them. There were people who went out of their way, though, and maybe my favorite example of that was Eazy E, who was so delighted to be recognized that he ended up giving us CDs and LPs that he had in his trunk and signing all of them for us.

I worked those jobs to live, certainly, and they allowed me to get my first foothold in LA, but I didn’t choose them for the wages. I chose them because they gave me movies I’d otherwise never be able to afford, and those movies were what really kept me going. Paying the rent was nice, but unlimited rentals of laserdiscs? Heaven.

We’ll pick up the trip back through my movie memories next time. Right now, I want to spotlight a couple of recent reads that really made me happy.

DON’T F#*K WITH SOUTHERN LADIES

I spent most of my formative years living in the South, and my mother and both of my grandmothers were strong-willed Southern ladies. One of the things I learned was that I was incapable of getting away with anything, no matter how clever I thought I was, because Southern ladies will always figure you out. I didn’t learn it early enough, and I didn’t learn it easy, but I eventually learned it.

I can only imagine how truly fucked a vampire would be if he had to tangle ass with a bunch of sharp Southern women, and that’s the logline of the new Grady Hendrix novel The Southern Book Club’s Guide To Slaying Vampires. This is a great, compulsive read, expertly etched with an attention to time and place that really sent me back to the South in the ‘80s. Hendrix wrote another book set in the ‘80s, and he’s definitely got a knack for evoking the era in a way that borders on virtual reality. I’ve read most of his work at this point and Hendrix is rapidly becoming an important voice in horror not only for his own work but because of the way he’s managed to support other writers in a very tangible way.

His lead character, Patricia Cambell, is a very particular type of Southern woman, modern and quietly progressive in her way, and when I was reading the book, it was just as my parents called to tell me that their old friend Patricia had passed away. The Patricia they knew was a huge part of my life for a chunk of time, and she was one of those neighborhood moms who left an indelible mark on my life because of what a great person she was. She was the guidance counselor at our school and the mom of one of my good friends and my mom’s very best friend, and she always embodied a kind of genteel Southern grace. I couldn’t help but picture her and my mom and their friends when I read this book. The friendships they share and the ways they’re tested reminded me of my glimpses of that private life of adults going on in the neighborhood where we lived in Tennessee. Hendrix has a knack for character and between this and My Best Friend’s Exorcism, I’d say he’s got a real gift for writing about the tricky friendships between women.

If all he did was write about the difficulty of navigating the various friendships in this book club, it would be a huge recommend from me, but he’s also built this incredibly satisfying Fright Night riff, in which one of the women in this book club realizes that the interesting new man in town is a vampire even though no one else believes her, and the book delivers equally on both the genre and non-genre front. It gets dark, and it plays for keeps, and people expecting a romantic riff on the vampire may not be happy. No matter. It’s a huge accomplishment from Hendrix, and probably his best novel yet.

At the same time, he just launched a new podcast to serve as support for his ongoing project, Paperbacks From Hell. He published a book last year that was a look back at original paperback horror fiction from the ‘70s and ‘80s, and then he helped start a publishing line that has gotten many of the books he mentioned back in print, with new titles coming out all the time. I have three of them on my Kindle right now that I haven’t read yet, and I look forward to them because the curation so far has been impeccable. These aren’t kitschy reprints of trash just so we can snicker at them. These are good books, genuinely worth rediscovery, and of the ones I’ve read, I think A Nest of Nightmares by Lisa Tuttle is the best of the bunch. It’s a short story collection by an author I’d never heard of, and I am so grateful to have gotten this introduction to her work. She’s wonderful, with a perspective that never quite comes at a story the way anyone else would. And I never would have read her work if Hendrix hadn’t created this reprint line and written his book. That’s generous, man. Lots of people spend their whole careers only focused on getting their own work in front of you, and I get it. That can be all-consuming. Hendrix has worked as a critic, though, and he continues to do work that uplifts the work of other writers even as he has become a regularly published novelist and a working screenwriter.

The book’s a winner. I can’t wait for the Amazon streaming series based on it. The podcast is just getting underway and I will certainly check it out. And Paperbacks from Hell is ongoing. That’s a whole lot to recommend, and I hope you check some or all of it out.

ON THE MOVE

In general, I root for Drews.

When I was young, I didn’t hear that name often. Now that I’m older, there are a number of notable Drews, and perhaps chief among them is Drew Magary, who is perhaps best known as a columnist for Deadspin and a writer for GQ. He’s now on his third published novel, and I think he’s getting stronger as he goes. The Postmortal, which I remember reading at Sundance one year, is about a world where a cure for aging is discovered and what would change because of that. He did a great job of not only telling a personal story about navigating this new world but also looking at the ways it would change the world itself. With his new novel, he once again takes both a personal and global look at the changes in society after a major innovation, and in this case, he’s writing about teleportation.

Considering how much science fiction I’ve read, I’m surprised how little there is that really examines the idea of teleportation in any depth. It’s normally just a utility they’ve introduced, something that exists like cars or telephones, a device everyone uses without comment. It rarely feels like authors think through all of the ramifications of what would change, and with Point B, Magary’s done one of the best theoretical explorations of the social end of things that I can imagine. It’s interesting reading this during a pandemic because so much of the book is about the way America’s very character defines the ways in which we bruise and damage the world around us. We can’t help it. It’s baked in. We’ve got colonialism in our DNA, and the moment you open the door to us internationally, we will help ourselves even as we hold rallies and chant about the need to build walls. What’s ours is ours and what’s yours is, too. God bless America. Point B looks at the way the entire definition of a wall or a border would change if you could go to the beach in Rio for breakfast, then go to school or work in LA all day, and then spend the evening walking in Paris before going back to sleep in your own bed. Immigration, tourism, exploration… all of it would shift seismically, and Magary’s book digs deep.

It also tells a strong mystery story about a girl hunting for her sister’s murderer that is distinguished both by strong character work and a real smart-ass wit. Magary’s funny, and even his most serious work is funny in places. Point B plays for keeps, and it paints just as evocative and challenging a portrait of a possible world as The Postmortal did. He’s got a cynic’s heart, but he never lets it fully define his work. With a strong queer lead and an engine driven by the way the haves seem so willing to eat the have-nots, Point B feels very contemporary, but it doesn’t feel calculated. It is vibrant and the lead character, Anna Huff, is nobody’s easy stereotype. It’s a lot of fun, but it’s also sticking with me the way Magary’s books do. It’s the sadness and the strangeness packed deep into his books that really makes them linger, and Point B is a terrific escape (and perhaps equally effective cautionary fable) right now for a world stuck firmly in place. His first two books were with larger imprints, but this is self-published, an interesting move that I fully respect. I’m curious to read more about his choice. Clearly, it’s got nothing to do with the book itself, which is a terrific read, and I hope he’s got a huge hit on his hands.

AND FINALLY…

One of the best values you can get in terms of streaming content today is the Criterion Channel. I have been a Criterion customer since 1989, and I’ve always admired and loved the work they do.

When I spoke above about how I used to see films as something to simply check off a list, The Criterion Collection was one of the lists I absolutely made sure to work my way through. I think they continue to display terrific taste as one of the most aggressively curated and programmed streaming services. They don’t just make big content deals and then shovel through titles. Everything they put into the collection or onto the channel, they chose. They had to negotiate all of these rights individually. They had to work to add these films.

These days, I love to use the Criterion Channel as a gun, loaded for roulette, going to the service and just sort of poking around. They rotate through programming, so it’s never the same experience twice. And I’m grateful for that. This is what I want from a streamer. This feels like it’s worth paying for, especially based on how much it can be just to buy one Criterion Blu-ray. I love their discs, but paying a nominal monthly fee for access to hundreds and hundreds of their films that I haven’t been able to purchase? That’s amazing. That’s the future I was promised, damn it. Now all I need is my robot butler.

This coming month, Criterion’s put together a schedule that is packed with stuff I’ve never seen, stuff that I should see. Not to fulfill a checklist but because it’s important to constantly challenge the accepted canon. After all, the canon is just the list of movies that the mainstream has decided made a mark in some way, either in significance or accomplishment or box-office achievement, and I think it’s clear that the system has always been imbalanced in terms of what gets the big platform and what doesn’t. There are hundreds of filmmakers who I do not know who I am sure are every bit as great as the filmmakers I already love and revere, and the reason I don’t know their work is because it was never given the same spotlight, the same attention, the same urgent acclaim telling me that I had to.

That’s where a service like Criterion can really shine. Because they’re doing this:

In 1979, poet Adrienne Rich observed that “one of the most powerful social and political catalysts of the past decade has been the speaking of women with other women, the telling of our secrets, the comparing of wounds and sharing of words.” Curated by guest programmer Nellie Killian, Tell Me celebrates female filmmakers who took the simple, radical step of allowing women space and time to talk about their lives. Made in a range of idioms encompassing cinema verité, essay film, and agitprop, what the assembled films all share is a startling intimacy between camera and subject. Whether through the bonds of shared experience or merely genuine interest, these portraits capture women talking about trauma and sexual identity, summoning new language to describe the long-simmering injustices and frustrations we still face today, making jokes, admitting insecurities, and organizing for the future. Featuring films by Chantal Akerman, Barbara Hammer, Camille Billops, Chick Strand, Yvonne Rainer, Joyce Chopra, Vivienne Dick, Su Friedrich, and more, this cross-section of feminist filmmaking speaks to Rich’s insight that “in order to change what is, we need to give speech to what has been, to imagine together what might be.”

Growing Up Female, Julia Reichert and Jim Klein, 1971
Janie’s Janie, Geri Ashur, Peter Barton, Marilyn Mulford, and Stephanie Pawleski, 1971
Betty Tells Her Story, Liane Brandon, 1972
It Happens to Us, Amalie R. Rothschild, 1972
Joyce at 34, Joyce Chopra, 1972
Yudie, Mirra Bank, 1974
Chris and Bernie, Bonnie Friedman and Deborah Shaffer, 1976
Guerillère Talks, Vivienne Dick, 1978
Inside Women Inside, Christine Choy and Cynthia Maurizio, 1978
Soft Fiction, Chick Strand, 1979
Dis-moi, Chantal Akerman, 1980
I Am Wanda, Katja Raganelli, 1980
Clotheslines, Roberta Cantow, 1981
Land Makar, Margaret Tait, 1981
Audience, Barbara Hammer, 1982
Suzanne, Suzanne, Camille Billops and James Hatch, 1982
The Ties That Bind, Su Friedrich, 1985
Conversations with Intellectuals About Selena, Lourdes Portillo, 1999
Privilege, Yvonne Rainer, 1990
The Salt Mines, Susana Aiken and Carlos Aparicio, 1990
The Transformation, Susana Aiken and Carlos Aparicio, 1995
Mimi, Claire Simon, 2003
No Home Movie, Chantal Akerman, 2015
Shakedown, Leilah Weinraub, 2018

When I look at that list, I can’t totally blame the mainstream. Yes, there is a problem with the attention spent on a film in the press is determined largely by the money spent to market that movie, and that’s the way it definitely works these days. But I also have to point the finger at myself and my own baked-in biases and predispositions. I talk about being open to anything but I often default to what is comfortable and familiar when I am picking what I will or won’t watch for coverage. No one can see everything, so it’s about how much attention you have, and I have championed work by many women over the years… but not enough.

This schedule will allow me to sample a wider range of voices in one place. I can’t complain about how hard it is to track things down because there they are, all curated and ready to go. This is one of those moments when the service absolutely delivers more than I could ever get out of a simple movie channel. Criterion wants to make the conversation about movies better, and their programming is adventurous and genuinely expansive, and I deeply appreciate it. If you’re on the fence about subscribing, but you like their work, I think it’s maybe dollar for the dollar the best value out of any streamer I have besides Netflix, and maybe even gives it a run for its money.

I’ll have more for you this week. It feels like I’m getting ahead of the things that made last week so tough. And look… here’s the Monday Read for you, and it’s actually still Monday! Not too shabby!

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Image courtesy of Warner Bros
Image courtesy of Penguin/Random House
Image courtesy of Drew Magary
Image courtesy of The Criterion Channel