January 15, 2024

Howdy folks, here's another late blog. That might be the norm rather than the exception for a while. I've never done so much writing in my life, and there are only so many hours in the day. In recent days I've just been watching documentaries rather than movies because I can't find anything new on Youtube. Tonight I watched an old Walter Cronkite doc on the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. I do have one film, starring our pal Ron Foster, who keeps surprising us, popping up just when we thought we'd seen his entire repertoire. He's kind of like John Agar in that way, we keep finding new movies for him also, and both those guys were great. The movie I watched was called "Diary of a High School Bride"(1959), and unfortunately it wasn't one of Foster's best. He was good as always, and first time actress Anita Sands wasn't bad as the teenage bride in question, but the director or the producer or the screenwriter or someone made the decision to start the movie off as a kind of black comedic parody of whatever in-joke was going on in rehearsals, or in the filmmaker's minds - it seemed like a group decision. As the film opens, Foster and Sands are driving down the highway. To backtrack just a smidge, the title sequence shows them leaving Balboa Island, and that got my attention because my Dad used to take us down to Balboa when we were kids, and I always remembered the pier and a particular stand where they sold chocolate covered frozen bananas. I loved going to Balboa Island on the ferry, so in that respect, the movie started off on the right foot. I'd never seen a movie with Balboa Island as a location.

But then came the highway scene, the movie's first scene, and it looked like and felt sub-Roger Corman. The teenage bride (Sands) almost seems like a zombie or an automaton, riding in the passenger seat while Foster drives them home from their wedding, or maybe it was just the marriage registration, I don't know. I can barely pay attention to what I'm watching these days, though I try. But Sands' character talks like she's programmed, and she has a toy dog she clings to symbolically, like she's a Dolly Figure, and Foster is her master. It might have worked in the context of drive-in hipster cinema circa 1959 - the word "swinger" is used in a coffeehouse - but it comes off as bizarre when compared to other movies from the era, even the ones about teen hoodlums and rebels without causes. The director launches this flick like he's trying to make an interior statement, but then he levels off and steers course toward a standard 50s teenager movie in which the 25 year old Foster is seen as a "square" by the high schoolers, who ride around town with their molls. The conflict pits the former boyfriend of Sands against Foster. The boyfriend is the school stud, and is played by an actor named Chris Robinson, who I thought I recognized from somewhere, and it turned out (according to IMDB) that he was a soap star in the '80s who had a regular role on "Santa Barbara", which my Mom and I watched daily for a while around 1990 or 91. Robinson is the best thing in the movie as the "tough teen" (and of course he looks older than a high schooler) who can't deal with losing his possession (Sands) to the older, squarer Foster, who is also an ex-Marine and can therefore beat him up.

The movie is good as a curio, with some good coffeehouse scenes featuring a flamenco-pop guitarist and a Johnny Rivers type who is really good for one song, but it lost me with whatever they were trying for in the early "zombie bride" scenes, and I was never able to fully recover. But give it a shot for Ron Foster, who is incapable of turning in a bad performance.   

Here's a question: What do you guys think about movies from the '80s? Was it a good decade for motion pictures? Mediocre? Bad? I think overall, it was pretty good, although I'd have to see a lot of the movies from that decade over again to see how they hold up. One thing about movies from the Golden Age of Hollywood (1930s through the early 1950s) is that they hold up very well; every single movie that was good then is still good now, that's why you can watch a studio system movie again and again, and that's because they are stylized, the very thing that 1970s filmmakers, with their emphasis on realism, rejected. The '70s was a very good decade for movies, but maybe not as out-and-out great as we once thought. Realism has it's limits, especially if the actors are "in-crowd" types who are given free reign by an auteur director. The auteur theory (imagine having a "theory" about filmmaking, can you get any more pretentious?) was invented by the Europeans, especially the French directors of the 50s and 60s, who thought a movie should be the director's vision entirely. The American directors who took this stance, when the studio system collapsed, were telling stories through an American lens, and they knew things about a hidden America, an underground "big city" America, that most moviegoers weren't aware of. And so you had a hipster element that, in European cinema, would seem fun or whimsical or merely hip (as in Godard's goofy flicks), where as in Hollywood it came off not as hip but as as hip"ster". A "hipster" is someone who takes "what's hip" and tries to co-opt it by adding a subversive, semi-hidden element (hidden from the public) that only he and his fellow hip-sters, know about. Or so they assume.

Hipsterism is about showing up and making the scene, and using insider knowledge to show that you have a secret and are part of an in crowd, while knowing that nobody cares. But in getting back to 1970s movies, when you have an auteur director from Hollywood or New York, who considers him or herself "inside", and thus "edgy", and he passes this edginess on to his actors, who are itching to show off their edginess also, then you have The Method run amok. But generally speaking, even when '70s movies became too "gritty", with male sideburns on display (does anyone have sideburns anymore?), the movies were still pretty good. I am trying to get a fix on the '70s without relying on Taxi Driver or women's lib comedies. A movie like "The Exorcist" showed that the studio system, what remained of it, could still turn out an all-time masterpiece. Overall, then, we can say that the 1970s was a great decade for movies (but not as great as we thought), and for music it was off the charts. 1970s "rock and roll" music (a very broad spectrum) will never be topped, except perhaps by the pop music of the 1960s. And of course it's all subjective. 

I feel like I'm running off at the mouth, and that's because my mind is going a thousand miles an hour. I am working on my book, and I'm already up to 1989. Of course, it's only a first draft and will take many run-throughs because there is so much detail to remember. It would be great to have other input from other sources, and I'd love to interview anyone who was there.

I am looking for all kinds of details, for instance, yesterday I was trying to remember when my friend Mike B. moved away from Rathburn. Mike was the first kid I met when we moved to 9032. He came to the house just days after we moved there in June 1970 and introduced himself. He was 11, I was 10. When I was 12, Mike turned me on to the music of Deep Purple and Black Sabbath. I have him to thank for introducing me to Ritchie Blackmore, my favorite musician. I went to high school with Mike (though he was a grade ahead), but we went to separate junior highs. Mike went to Northridge, I went to Holmes. Mike and I cruised Van Nuys Boulevard on Wednesday nights in the '70s, riding in his blue 1968 Corvette. We also went to many concerts together. In May 1979, I got Mike a job at MGM's Metrocolor Lab, after working there for three months myself. I saw an opening posted for Positive Developing, the department I was in, and mentioned it to Mike, who was working at Malibu Grand Prix at the time. He sounded enthused - it was a job in the motion picture business - so I told him I'd mention him to my foreman Jerry, which I did. Mike got hired shortly after that on my recommendation. We often rode together to work, trading off the driving duties, he in his blue Corvette, me in my blue BMW 320i. You never see a 320i on the road anymore. Someone should restore one. Those were awesome cars, except for the cooling system......

But yeah, I'm trying to pin down exactly when Mike moved away from Rathburn. I think it was in the Spring of '89. I hadn't seen him much for several years by that point, even though he lived just two doors away. That might've been because he stayed in the lab, while I quit in 1982, and he advanced in film processing until he eventually became a colorist, which I suppose was something like a timer. A timer was the guy who adjusted the color in the film, to perfect the imperfections from the camera. I'm sure it was quite a bit more complicated than that, but anyhow, Mike went up the ladder and had a variety of jobs at various places. He even worked at Skywalker Ranch for a short while (but quit because of all the yelling....it might've been like working for Bill Gates.)

Anyhow, yeah I lost track of Mike after 1982, though we did go to the beach one day in July 1984. Mike wanted to go to Zuma just once for old-times sake, because we used to go a lot in 1978. I will never forget coming home that day in '84, though. Mike turned on the radio, and as we crossed Kanan Road, we heard about the McDonald's massacre in San Ysidro. I got home and it was all over the news.

I didn't really see Mike after that, I don't think. His career took off, and I think he moved to Morrow Bay, or maybe he didn't move to Morrow Bay until the early '90s. Or maybe he and his wife (Mike got married) moved to Morrow Bay but his Mom stayed at the Rathburn house. I remember there was a time when Mike flew into Los Angeles (at Burbank) to work for three days, then flew back to Morrow Bay for the rest of the week.

I did see him, though, just before he moved from the Rathburn house for good. I think it was in Spring 1989. I want it to be accurate for my book.

And that's all I've got for today. ////