Sean P Carlin

Writer of things that go bump in the night

Tag: The Bronx (Page 1 of 2)

Under the Influence, Part 2:  The Top Five Formative Cinematic Muses from My ’80s Childhood

October 9, 2024 / / 27 Comments

Let’s play Ten for Ten!  To commemorate the ten-year anniversary of this blog, which launched on June 26, 2014, here’s an appreciation for ten of my formative cinematic influences—an examination of why these movies resonated with me when I first saw them, and how they permanently informed my aesthetic tastes and creative sensibilities.  This post is presented in three installments.

“Under the Influence, Part 1” informally ponders through personal example how an artist develops a singular style and voice all their own, and offers an analysis of Quentin Tarantino’s essay collection Cinema Speculation, the auteur’s critical look at the movies of the ’70s that inspired him.

In “Under the Influence, Part 2,” I spotlight five films from my ’80s childhood that shaped my artistic intuition when at its most malleable.

And in “Under the Influence, Part 3,” I round out the bill with five selections from my ’90s adolescence, the period during which many of the themes that preoccupy me crystalized.

Given that my childhood coincided with what Quentin Tarantino terms “the miserable eighties”—that decade of “middle-of-the-road successful films”1 during which “likeability was everything”2—the following ten cinematic specimens that impressed so notably upon my nascent imagination, accordingly, span the years 1978 through 1993.

Before we dive in, let’s stipulate what this digest isn’t.  These are not what I consider the Best Movies Ever, or even the best movies of their era, neither of which I am particularly qualified to judge.

Furthermore, they are not necessarily even my favorite movies, merely the ones that made a meaningful, lasting, and demonstrable impression on me, and whose DNA has (repeatedly) found their way into my own work.

Nor does this cover my literary or musical influences, because, as Geddy Lee suggests, the project of tracing this stuff ain’t easy; it took a surprising amount of rumination to settle upon the ten selections studied here.  (None of them are particularly obscure; if you haven’t seen all ten, you’ve at least heard of them.)

I have excluded any films that may have once held sway over me, particularly ’80s action movies (from police thrillers to sci-fi dystopias to car-worshipping petro-propaganda), whose hypermasculine spirit and/or trashy cynicism I can no longer in good conscience abide.

It must also be noted I am uncomfortably aware of how, well, white all my chosen case studies are.  The filmmakers and screenwriters are nigh exclusively straight white men, with the known exceptions of Joel Schumacher, Leslie Newman, and Janice Fischer.

What’s more, every protagonist across the board is a straight white male, several of them either explicitly or implicitly Irish American, at that.  Boys like me were very well represented in popular media back then—still are—as there are precious few actors of color to be found in any these productions, and, in those rare instances, always in small or supporting roles.

These cinematic influences are all unambiguously predicated on a heteronormative worldview and a white male perspective.  I acknowledge that.

But… as much as they (mostly) glorify white boys, they all (save one) speak to at least one of two themes that have fascinated me throughout my life, and which are the dominant subjects of my own fiction.

The first is the complicated dynamic between fathers/men and sons/boys.

The second:  the special bond of boyhood friendship, and how boys often look to each other for the emotional support they don’t get from their parents.

Men’s relationships with their fathers and their friends was a central theme of “Ted Lasso”

The stories I respond to and the stories I write are, for the most part, about straight white males.  But I consciously seek to eschew the reductive paradigms favored by Hollywood—notably the solitary antihero and middle-aged manchild—in favor of men who are competent but not superheroic, compassionate but not saintly, flawed but not cruel, and definitely not proudly antisocial, brazenly irresponsible, or comfortably violent.

In stark contrast with Tarantino’s reflexively defensive view that cinematic expressions of violence and hypermasculinity (to say nothing of the institutionalized misogyny that inspirits them) are harmless exercises in wish fulfillment, I believe commercial storytellers—particularly straight white cisgendered men—have a moral obligation to be a productive part of the cultural conversation initiated by the #MeToo movement and the George Floyd protests:

We have spent the past half-decade wrestling with ideas of gender and privilege, attempting to challenge the old stereotypes and power structures.  These conversations should have been an opportunity to throw out the old pressures and norms of manhood, and to help boys and men be more emotionally open and engaged.  But in many ways this environment has apparently had the opposite effect—it has shut them down even further. . . .

Perhaps it’s not surprising that in the grip of the culture wars, caring about boys has become subtly coded as a right-wing cause, a dog whistle for a kind of bad-faith politicking.  Men have had way more than their fair share of our concern already, the reasoning goes, and now it’s time for them to pipe down.  But for boys, privilege and harm intertwine in complex ways—male socialization is a strangely destructive blend of indulgence and neglect.  Under patriarchy, boys and men get everything, except the thing that’s most worth having:  human connection.

Silencing or demonizing boys in the name of progressive ideals is only reinforcing this problem, pushing them further into isolation and defensiveness.  The prescription for creating a generation of healthier, more socially and emotionally competent men is the same in the wider political discourse as it is in our own homes—to approach boys generously rather than punitively.  We need to acknowledge boys’ feelings, to talk with our sons in the same way we do our daughters, to hear them and empathize rather than dismiss or minimize, and engage with them as fully emotional beings.

Ruth Whippman, “Boys Get Everything, Except the Thing That’s Most Worth Having,” Opinion, New York Times, June 5, 2024

The storytellers could contribute to a meaningful shift of the cultural mindset if we summoned the moral imagination to refuse to further represent masculinity as a binary (and compulsory) choice between two equally oppressive and simplistic models of social posturing and self-identity—either he-man or Peter Pan—and dared to instead portray boys and men as human beings of nuanced emotion, as capable of expressing sympathy as they are deserving of receiving it.

Now more than ever, we need thoughtful, responsible fiction by men about men—stories that explore masculinity and manhood without invoking the same tired, narrow, noxious archetypes of tough-guy antiheroes who “play by their own rules” and stunted-adolescent slackers for whom rules, the mere acknowledgment of let alone adherence to, are the stuff of “adulting,” and fuck that shit.  Such prosocial, aspirational fiction might very well be called helpful exercises in wish fulfillment.  That’s what I’ve called for, and what I strive to produce myself.

Now let’s look, in mostly linear order, at the films that shaped my tastes and style, starting with the first five (of ten) selections.  Click on any of the links below to jump directly to that particular subheading and its corresponding treatise:

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No, Virginia, “Die Hard” Is Not a Christmas Movie

December 20, 2023 / / 25 Comments

Ah, it’s that magical time of year!  When the Hudson hawk nips at the nose, and the skyline over the New Jersey Palisades bruises by midafternoon.  When chimney smoke from private houses spices the air, and strings of colored lights adorn windows and fire escapes.  And, of course, when the Internet engages in its annual bullshit debate as to whether perennial holiday favorite Die Hard, currently celebrating its thirty-fifth anniversary, is a Christmas movie.  And since “bullshit debates” are my brand…

In fourth grade, I scored what was, by 1980s standards, the holy grail:  a best friend with HBO.  Over the following five years, I slept over at his house every weekend, where we watched R-rated action movies into the night.  Whatever HBO was showing that week, we delighted in it, no matter how idiotic (Action Jackson) or forgettable (Running Scared).  For a pair of preadolescent boys, that Saturday-night cinematic grab bag abounded with illicit wonders.

Much as we enjoyed those movies, though, they were for the most part—this isn’t a criticism—ephemeral crap.  We howled at their profane jokes and thrilled to their improbable set pieces, but seldom if ever revisited any of them (Beverly Hills Cop [1984] and its sequel [1987] being a rare exception), and certainly none inspired us to playact their scenarios as we had with PG-rated adventures Ghostbusters (1984) and Back to the Future (1985).  They entertained us, sure, but didn’t exactly impress upon our imaginations in any lasting or meaningful way…

That is, not until an action thriller with the snarky guy from Moonlighting (1985–1989) and Blind Date (1987) came along.  I still remember seeing Die Hard (1988) for the first time, on a thirteen-inch television with side-mounted mono speaker at my friend’s Bronx apartment.  As a viewing experience, it was about as low-def as they come, but that didn’t diminish the white-knuckled hold the movie had on us; we watched it in astonished silence from beginning to end.  From that point on—and this was the year no less than Tim Burton’s Batman had seized the zeitgeist, and our longstanding favorites Ghostbusters and Back to the Future got their first sequels—Die Hard was almost all we could talk about.

At the time, Manhattan College was in the process of erecting a twelve-story student residence overlooking Van Cortlandt Park, and we would gather with our JHS pals at the construction site on weekends, running around the unfinished edifice with automatic squirt guns, playing out the movie’s gleefully violent plot.  Hell, at one point or another, every multistory building in the neighborhood with a labyrinthine basement and rooftop access became Nakatomi Plaza, the setting of a life-and-death battle staged and waged by a group of schoolboys, our imaginations captive to the elemental premise of Die Hard.

We obsessed over that fucking movie so exhaustively, we passed around this still-in-my-possession copy of the pulp-trash novel it was based on—Roderick Thorp’s Nothing Lasts Forever (1979)—until every one of us had had a chance to read it:

The now-battered copy of “Nothing Last Forever” I bought in 1989 at the long-gone Bronx bookstore Paperbacks Plus

The thirteen-year-old boys of the late ’80s were far from the only demographic taken with Die Hard.  The movie proved so hugely popular, it not only spawned an immediate sequel in 1990 (which we were first in line to see at an appallingly seedy theater on Valentine Avenue), but became its own subgenre throughout the rest of that decade.  Hollywood gave us Die Hard on a battleship (Under Siege), Die Hard on a plane (Passenger 57), Die Hard on a train (Under Siege 2:  Dark Territory), Die Hard on a mountain (Cliffhanger), Die Hard on a bus (Speed), Die Hard on a cruise ship (Speed 2:  Cruise Control), Die Hard in a hockey arena (Sudden Death), Die Hard on Rodeo Drive (The Taking of Beverly Hills), Die Hard at prep school (Toy Soldiers)…

Christ, things got so out of control, even Beverly Hills Cop, an established action franchise predating Die Hard, abandoned its own winning formula for the third outing (scripted by Steven E. de Souza, co-screenwriter of the first two Die Hards) in favor of a half-assed “Die Hard in an amusement park” scenario.  This actually happened:

Eddie Murphy returns as Axel Foley—sort of—in “Beverly Hills Cop III” (1994)

None of those films has had the staying power of the original Die Hard.  Mostly that’s owed to Die Hard being a superior specimen of filmmaking.  Director John McTiernan demonstrates uncommonly disciplined visual panache:  He expertly keeps the viewer spatially oriented in the movie’s confined setting, employing swish pans and sharp tilts to establish the positions of characters within a given scene, as well as imbue the cat-and-mouse of it all with breathless tension.

McTiernan consistently sends his hero scuttling to different locations within the building—stairwells, pumprooms, elevator shafts, airducts, the rooftop helipad—evoking a rat-in-a-cage energy that leaves the viewer feeling trapped though never claustrophobic.  The narrative antithesis of the globetrotting exploits of Indiana Jones and James Bond, Die Hard is a locked-room thriller made with an ’80s action-movie sensibility.  It was and remains a masterclass in suspense storytelling—often imitated, as the old saying goes, never duplicated.

Perhaps another key reason for the movie’s durability, its sustained cultural relevance, is owed to its (conditional) status as a celebrated Christmas classic.  Like It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989) and Love Actually (2003), Die Hard is a feel-good film—albeit with a considerably higher body count—one is almost compelled to watch each December.  Yet whereas nobody questions any of the aforementioned movies’ culturally enshrined place in the holiday-movie canon—nor that of cartoonishly violent Home Alone (1990)—Die Hard’s eligibility seems perennially under review.

Why does the debate around Die Hard die hard… and is it, in fact, a Christmas movie?

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Highway to Hell:  Car Culture and Hollywood’s Hero-Worship of the Automobile

June 21, 2023 / / 46 Comments

With road-trip season upon us once again, here’s an examination of how American car culture has been romanticized by the entertainment industry; how automobiles, far from enablers of freedom and individuality, are in fact “turbo-boosted engines of inequality”; and how Hollywood can help remedy an ecocultural crisis it’s played no small role in propagating.

In any given episode, the action reliably starts the same way:  a wide shot of the Batcave, Batmobile turning on its rotating platform to face the cavemouth, camera panning left as the Dynamic Duo descend the Batpoles.  Satin capes billowing, Batman and Robin hop into their modified 1955 Lincoln Futura, buckle up—decades before it was legally required, incidentally—and the engine whines to life as they run through their pre-launch checklist:

ROBIN:  Atomic batteries to power.  Turbines to speed.

BATMAN:  Roger.  Ready to move out.

A blast of flame from the car’s rear thruster—whoosh!—and off they’d race to save the day.

By the time the 1980s had rolled around, when I was first watching Batman (1966–1968) in syndicated reruns, every TV and movie hero worth his salt got around the city in a conspicuously slick set of wheels.  Muscle cars proved popular with working-class ’70s sleuths Jim Rockford (Pontiac Firebird) and Starsky and Hutch (Ford Gran Torino).  The neon-chic aesthetic of Reagan era, however, called for something a bit sportier, like the Ferrari, the prestige ride of choice for Honolulu-based gumshoe Thomas Magnum (Magnum, P.I.) and buddy cops Crockett and Tubbs (Miami Vice).  The ’80s were nothing if not ostentatiously aspirational.

Even when cars were patently comical, they came off as cool despite themselves:  the Bluesmobile, the 1974 Dodge Monaco used in The Blues Brothers (1980); the Ectomobile, the 1959 Cadillac Miller-Meteor Sentinel in Ghostbusters (1984); the Wolfmobile, a refurbished bread truck that Michael J. Fox and his pal use for “urban surfing” in Teen Wolf (1985).

The DMC DeLorean time machine from Back to the Future is clearly meant to be absurd, designed in the same kitchen-sink spirit as the Wagon Queen Family Truckster from National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983), but what nine-year-old boy in 1985 didn’t want to be Michael J. Fox, sliding across the stainless-steel hood and yanking the gull-wing door shut behind him?  And like the characters themselves, the DeLorean evolved with each movie, going from nuclear-powered sports car (Part I) to cold-fusion flyer (Part II) to steampunk-retrofitted railcar (Part III).  “Maverick” Mitchell’s need for speed didn’t hold a candle to Marty McFly’s, who’s very existence depended on the DeLorean’s capacity to reach 88 miles per hour.

Vehicles that carried teams of heroes offered their own vicarious pleasure.  Case in point:  the 1983 GMC Vandura, with its red stripe and rooftop spoiler, that served as the A-Team’s transpo and unofficial HQ—a place where they could bicker comically one minute then emerge through the sunroof the next to spray indiscriminate gunfire from their AK-47s.  The van even had a little “sibling”:  the Chevrolet Corvette (C4) that Faceman would occasionally drive, marked with the same diagonal stripe.  Did it make sense for wanted fugitives to cruise L.A. in such a distinct set of wheels?  Not really.  But it was cool as hell, so.

The Mystery Machine was the only recurring location, as it were, on Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! (1969), and the van’s groovy paint scheme provided contrast with the series’ gloomy visuals.  Speaking of animated adventures, when once-ascetic Vietnam vet John Rambo made the intuitive leap from R-rated action movies to after-school cartoon series (1986), he was furnished with Defender, a 6×6 assault jeep.  Not to be outdone, the most popular military-themed animated franchise of the ’80s, G.I. Joe:  A Real American Hero (1983–1986), featured over 250 discrete vehicles, and the characters that drove them were, for the most part, an afterthought:

With the debut of the 3 ¾” figures in 1982, Hasbro also offered a range of vehicles and playsets for use with them.  In actual fact, the 3 ¾” line was conceived as a way to primarily sell vehicles—the figures were only there to fill them out!

‘3 ¾” Vehicles,’ YoJoe!

But who needs drivers when the vehicles themselves are the characters?  The protagonists of The Transformers (1984–1987) were known as the Autobots, a race of ancient, sentient robots from a distant planet that conveniently shapeshifted into 1980s-specific cars like the Porsche 924 and Lamborghini Countach, among scores of others.  (The premise was so deliriously toyetic, it never occurred to us to question the logic of it.)  Offering the best of both G.I. Joe and The Transformers, the paramilitary task force of M.A.S.K. (1985–1986), whose base of operations was a mountainside gas station (what might be described as Blofeld’s volcano lair meets the Boar’s Nest), drove armored vehicles that transformed into… entirely different vehicles.

Many movies and shows not only featured cars as prominent narrative elements, but literally took place on the road:  Vacation.  Mad Max (1979).  Smokey and the Bandit (1977).  CHiPs (1977–1983).  Sometimes the car was so important it had a proper name:  General Lee from The Dukes of Hazzard (1979–1985).  Christ, sometimes it was the goddamn series costar:  KITT on Knight Rider (1982–1986).  Shit on David Hasselhoff’s acting ability all you want, but the man carried a hit TV show delivering the lion’s share of his dialogue to a dashboard.  Get fucked, Olivier.

1980s hero-car culture at a glance

As a rule, productions keep multiple replicas of key picture cars on hand, often for different purposes:  the vehicle utilized for dialogue scenes isn’t the one rigged for stunts, for instance.  It’s notable that the most detailed production model—the one featured in medium shots and closeups, in which the actors perform their scenes—is known as the “hero car.”  And why not?  Over the past half century, Hollywood has unquestionably programmed all of us to recognize the heroism of the automobile.

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EXT. LOS ANGELES – ONE YEAR LATER

June 27, 2022 / / 20 Comments

I thought I’d said everything I had to say about Los Angeles last winter.  Should’ve known Hollywood would demand a sequel.

Even at the height of its considerable cultural influence, I never much cared for Sex and the City—for a very simple reason:  I didn’t in any way recognize the New York it depicted.

As someone who’d grown up there, Sex seemed like a postfeminist fantasy of the city as a bastion of neoliberal materialism, conjured by someone who’d never actually been to New York or knew so much as the first thing about it.  It certainly didn’t reflect the experience of any working-class New Yorkers I knew.

(It would seem the more things change, the more they stay the same:  The recent SATC revival series, And Just Like That…, is reported to be full of unintentionally cringe-inducing scenes of the gals apparently interacting with Black women for the first time in their lives.  Sounds on-brand.)

But this isn’t a retroactive reappraisal of a 1990s pop-cultural pacesetter—those have been exhaustively conducted elsewhere of late—merely an acknowledgment that the impression the series made on the generation of (largely) female Millennials who adored it is undeniable, legions of whom relocated to New York in early adulthood to have the full Sex and the City experience, and who, in turn, in many ways remade the city in Carrie Bradshaw’s image, for better or worse.

I can’t say as I blame those folks, really.  That they were sold a load of shit isn’t their fault.  Here in New York, we were just as susceptible to Hollywood’s greener-grass illusions of elsewhere.  As a student in the 1990s, the Los Angeles of Beverly Hills, 90210 (1990–2000) and Baywatch (1989–2001), of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) and Clueless (1995), seemed like a fun-in-the-sun teenage paradise in stark contrast with the socially restrictive experience of my all-boys high school in the Bronx, where the only thing that ever passed for excitement were spontaneous gang beatings at the bus stop on Fordham Road.

The high-school experience depicted on “Beverly Hills, 90210” is one I think we can all relate to

The sunny schoolyards and neon-lit nighttime streets of L.A. carried the promise of good times, the kind that seemed altogether out of reach for me and my friends.  The appeal of what California had to offer was so intoxicating, in fact, my two best pals and I spent an entire summer in the mid-’90s trying to make the streets of the Bronx look like Santa Cruz—a place none of us had ever been—for an amateur sequel to The Lost Boys, the ’80s cult classic about a coven of adolescent vampires who’ve (wisely) opted to spend eternity on the boardwalk.  That notion unquestionably took hold of my impressionable imagination—it made me want to be a part of that culture, and tell those kinds of stories.

Accordingly, it’s fair to say it wasn’t merely the movie business that brought me to Los Angeles in my early twenties as an aspiring screenwriter, but arguably the romantic impressions of California itself imprinted upon my psyche by all those movies and TV series on which I came of age.  Yet for the two decades I lived there, the city I’d always imagined L.A. to be—a place full of golden possibilities, as low-key as New York was high-strung—wasn’t the one I experienced.  Not really.  Not until last month, anyway.

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You Can’t Go Home Again:  Hopeful Reflections on Returning to New York after 20 Years Away

February 28, 2022 / / 21 Comments

Following up on the personal story that began last month in “A Hollywood Ending:  Hopeful Reflections on a Failed Screenwriting Career,” here’s my take on whether we can ever truly go home again.

When I left my apartment of two decades in Los Angeles last spring, I knew it was the last time I’d ever see the place.  I’d never really experienced that particular manner of finality before—walking away from a longtime home with full knowledge I would never again cast eyes upon it—because when I moved to L.A. from the Bronx in 2001, it was implicit I’d have ample occasion to return.  My mother was here, after all, so it was still “Carlin homebase,” so to speak.

And, to be sure, I loved coming back for Christmas, and other sporadic occasions, to reconnect with the old hometown.  It was and remains the only place in the world where I can strut down the avenue like Tony Manero on 86th Street in Bensonhurst, both master of all I survey yet somehow, simultaneously and incongruously, just another townie.  I love that sensation—of belonging to a place so completely and so comfortably.  When I walk down the streets of New York, I am home.  And if that’s the standard for what home feels like, nothing else has ever come close—even L.A. after all that time.

After my screenwriting career abruptly ended in 2014, I spent the next several years nursing a quixotic fantasy in which I made my escape from L.A. both on a moment’s notice and without a backwards glance.  Sleep tight, ya morons!  Only trouble is, that’s like imagining yourself racing heroically into burning building to rescue someone trapped inside:  It’s an easy scenario to envision when it’s purely hypothetical, unlikely to ever be put to the test.

But over the winter of 2021, from the point at which my wife and I initiated the purchase of our new apartment in the Bronx through the day we left California for good, I had a lot of time to say the long goodbye to L.A.—to come to terms with the idea that I actually was leaving.  And throughout that six-month period, I couldn’t get Sean Penn’s elegiac soliloquy from State of Grace out of my head.

Gary Oldman, Robin Wright, and Sean Penn in “State of Grace” (1990)

State of Grace is an obscure crime thriller from 1990 about the Irish-American street gangs that once ruled Hell’s Kitchen, New York.  (The director, Phil Joanou, has made the entire film available on Vimeo free of charge and in high definition.)  In it, Penn plays a character named Terry Noonan who grew up in the Kitchen and spent his youth running with the Westies, but who absconded, suddenly and unceremoniously, around age twenty.  He told neither his best friend, Jackie (Gary Oldman), nor his girlfriend, Kathleen (Robin Wright); he just disappeared like a thief in the night, his whereabouts unknown.

The story opens with Terry returning to the Kitchen after a decade-long absence, picking up where he left off with Jackie and Kathleen and the Westies.  This being a mob movie, I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to say it ends tragically for just about every character, Terry included.  “I thought some things,” Terry wistfully confesses to Kathleen in a scene preceding the movie’s blood-soaked climax.  “That I could come back.”  He goes on to explain his reasons for coming home, and how he assumed everything would be when he got there, once he’d reintegrated himself in the old neighborhood.  He’d pictured it all so perfectly…

But it was only an idea.  Had nothin’ to do with the truth, it’s just… a fuckin’ idea, like… you believe in angels, or the saints, or that there’s such a thing as a state of grace.  And you believe it.  But it’s got nothin’ to do with reality.  It’s just an idea.  I mean, you got your ideas and you got reality.  They’re all… they’re all fucked up.

From State of Grace, written by Dennis McIntyre (with uncredited contributions from David Rabe)

Now, I don’t imagine it’ll surprise you to learn I was not involved with the criminal underworld when I lived in New York, nor did I slip away unannounced in the middle of the night without providing a forwarding address.  Nonetheless, Terry’s lamentation played on a loop in my mind’s ear throughout that winter:

I thought some things… that I could come back.

State of Grace is about a guy who learns the hard way you can’t simply come home after all that time away and expect to just pick up where you left off; it’s a cautionary tale about what we expect versus how things actually are.  Faced with the prospect of finally going home for good, I wondered:  Is that even possible?  Or was Thomas Wolfe right?  Had I been carrying around a romantic notion of a happy homecoming that had nothing to do with reality?

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A Hollywood Ending: Hopeful Reflections on a Failed Screenwriting Career

January 24, 2022 / / 36 Comments

I’ve alluded to the irretrievable implosion of my screenwriting career in many a previous blog post.  I never felt ready to write about it at length before now.  So, since we were just recently discussing the artful revelation of backstory, here’s mine.

Given the long odds of a career in Hollywood, even under the most favorable of circumstances, the unexpressed question that looms ominously over every aspirant is:  How do I know when it’s time to call this quits?

My wife and I were having drinks at the S&P Oyster Co. in Mystic, Connecticut, when I knew I was done with Hollywood forever—that my ship wasn’t coming.  That was September 24, 2014, during a visit to the East Coast for her aunt and uncle’s golden-anniversary party, exactly thirteen years to the day after we’d relocated from our hometown of New York City to L.A.

Right out of college, I’d landed representation as a screenwriter—though that management company folded a few months prior to my move, catalyzing, at least in part, my decision to try my luck in Tinseltown—and I had a reel full of TV spots and short films I’d cut while working as an audiovisual editor in SoHo, so I felt certain I’d land on my feet in Hollywood, this despite having no contacts there.

So, in the predawn hours of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, I left the Bronx, the only home I’d ever known, and met my wife, though we weren’t married at the time, at JFK Airport to embark on our new adventure together.  Perhaps the cosmic timing of our departure (which was delayed by two weeks) should’ve been taken as a sign that the road ahead would be bumpier than I’d naïvely anticipated?

It took a full year in L.A. before I could even get a call returned, but finally I got some opportunities to edit a few independent shorts and features, and began networking my way into the industry.  But it would be another seven years yet before I procured representation as a screenwriter again, during which time I can’t tell you how many contemporaries I watched pack up their shit and abandon their dreams to move back home.  They’d decided it wasn’t worth it, that life was too short.  I’m certain I’d have been one of them were it not for my wife, who remained steadfastly supportive, and for a few friends—notably my buddy Mike—who were also Hollywood hopefuls determined to keep at it, too, through bad times and, well, less bad.  We were going to be the ones that hung in there and made it.

By 2009, things were looking up—considerably.  At long last I’d found representation once again with a management company, this time off a spec I’d written called Leapman, and all manner of opportunities soon followed:  to turn Leapman into a comic-book series; to sign with a big-letter talent agency; to vie for open screenwriting assignments; to develop an undersea sci-fi thriller (in the vein of The Abyss and Sphere) with a red-hot producer.

From “The Abyss” (1989), a movie about deep-sea extraterrestrials akin to the one I was developing

Around this same time, I got friendly with another up-and-coming screenwriter—we were repped by the same management—and he and I formed a critique group, enthusiastically enlisting half a dozen fledgling screenwriters we barely knew.  In short order, we all became close friends, meeting every other Tuesday night at one watering hole or another around Hollywood to trade script notes and war stories.  All unknowns at the time, some of those scribes have since gone on to write for shows including The Handmaid’s Tale and Women of the Movement, as well as WandaVision and Ted Lasso.

I was also, during this period, developing a short film with Mike.  He and I had met in 2003 on the postproduction crew of an indie film; we were on location in the redwoods of Marin County, right down the road from Skywalker Ranch, cutting dailies in a ramshackle cabin that looked for all the world like Ewok Village Hall.  Under those circumstances, it didn’t take long to become fast friends:  We were the same age, came up on the same cinematic influences, and—most notably—shared the same irreverent sense of humor, turning our verbal knives on all of Hollywood’s sacred cows, delighting in making one another howl with one progressively outrageous remark after the next.

Also like me, Mike was married to his teenage sweetheart, sans children, so we were both in the same place:  free to pursue our Hollywood dreams with the support of the women we loved.  It was and remains the closest male friendship I’ve ever made in my adult life.  As Mike continued to come into ever-more-promising editorial opportunities on studio features, my screenwriting career was kicking into high gear.  With aspirations to direct, he asked me if I wouldn’t mind taking one of my concepts—a horror/comedy I’d pitched him that reflected our mutual sensibilities—and scripting a short film for him to shoot.  So, there I was, developing a big-budget monster movie for a legit prodco by day, and a no-budget monster movie with my best friend by night.  After over a decade in Hollywood, everything had clicked into place.

And then came 2014.  Frustrated with the inexcusable lack of progress on the short—I’d written a script all of us were expressly happy with, and yet years had gone by and we were no closer to rolling camera—I put pressure on the project’s producer, Mike’s spouse, to do her part.  Consequently, for the first time in our decade-long association, our friendship grew strained, and once we both crossed the line and turned our caustic criticisms, the source of so many years of bonding and hilarity, on each other, our relationship eventually became irreversibly poisoned.  I’d lost my closest friend and ally in Hollywood, and that was only the beginning of my troubles.

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Entre Nous

September 1, 2021 / / 22 Comments

An old friend called recently for a commensurably old-fashioned reason:  just to say hi.  Turns out, Xers still do that.  Incorrigible habit we picked up in the analog age, I’m afraid.

We’d grown up together in the Bronx, though she’s lived in New England nearly as long as I’ve been in L.A., and we’ve seldom had occasion to cross paths in the old hometown over the past two decades.  Still, we’ve remained close; I regard her in every way as an older sister, indistinguishable from my actual older sisters.  She wanted to know how my wife and I were settling into our new home (more on that matter in a forthcoming post), and asked how my various writing projects were going, citing each by title.  Few of my friends ever inquire as to my writing (they’ve probably long since reasoned I’d be only too delighted to tell them, in exhaustive detail), and I’d buy the lot a round, with chasers, if even one could reference a single project by name.

This particular friend is a registered nurse who took a professional leave of absence to care for her terminally ailing mother after a prognosis set the woman’s lifespan expectations at perhaps a few months.  That was well over two years ago.  My friend’s life and career, accordingly, remain on indefinite hold.  So, when I asked how she was doing, she sighed and blurted, “Not great.”  To be clear:  She wasn’t looking to complain, only to confide.  I think it helped her, however fleetingly, to have the ear of someone who knows and loves her family as if it was his own, but isn’t directly involved with or affected by its short- and long-term dramas.

In May of 2016, we had a rare chance to hang together at the Casino Ballroom in Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, to see old favorite Extreme perform (pictured: Gary Cherone and Nuno Bettencourt)

The entire conversation stood in stark contrast with an experience I’d had only a week earlier.  I was at a backyard barbecue in Jersey—there have been quite a number of those this past August, as it happens—with friends and relatives I hadn’t seen since well before the shutdown, folks I’ve known for at least a quarter century if not the entirety of my life.  We’d all just endured the collective trauma of pandemia, and I guess I had a notion in my head that being in each other’s company once again would provide a tangible sensation of catharsis—a renewed appreciation for our shared history; a deeper sense of trust in one another; a tighter grip on the ties that bind; a desire, for lack of a more erudite phrase, to be real.  To confide.

Heh.  My wife warned me years ago I’m a hopeless Romantic.  Well, she was right yet again, because while it was certainly nice to see them, we mostly just talked about the same old shit:  the Yankees’ midseason slump; the enduring mystery of why Millennials venerate The Office as the Greatest Sitcom Ever; etcetera, etcetera.  I wasn’t asked about my work—I can write about all this publicly with full confidence none of them will ever read it—and I’ve learned to stop asking about theirs; I never get an answer, anyway.  And Christ knows no one expressed a candid or unflattering word about how they were feeling.  No, everyone just put on a happy face—though many of them didn’t seem particularly happy to me—and a lot of perfectly polite if entirely superficial discourse ensued… just like the good old days.

The difference this time, I suppose, was how attuned I was to the skillful manner by which some of those folks—not all of them, to be perfectly fair—fluidly change the subject the instant a question trips the “too personal” wire.  Suddenly, I found myself flashing back on a zillion cocktail conversations over multiple decades and wondering if a piece of information has ever been exchanged that offered even so much as a cursory glimpse at their secret hearts?  I don’t think it has, and not for lack of trying on my part.  I make it easy for people to open up, if they choose.

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One Good Idea: Reflections on My Longest-Running Project—and Most Successful Creative Collaboration

February 15, 2021 / / 34 Comments

My wife and I are celebrating twenty-five years together this winter.  God, that’s three impeachments ago.  To place it in even more sobering perspective, the January morning we’d met for our first date at the AMC on Third Avenue at 86th Street, I’d never in my life sent an e-mail.  At best, I had peripheral awareness of the “World Wide Web”—whatever that was—and certainly no idea how to access it (not that I’d ever need to).  I definitely didn’t have a cell phone—which, admittedly, would’ve come in handy, seeing how I was running late to meet her.

But we met that morning just the same; in those days—don’t ask me how, for this secret, like the whereabouts of Cleopatra’s tomb, is permanently lost to history—folks somehow met up at a prearranged location without real-time text updates.  It’s true.  We met many more times over the month that followed, in many more locales around the city:  Theodore Roosevelt Park on the Upper West Side; Washington Square Park in the Village.  (Public parks are a godsend for penniless students at commuter college.)  It was cold as hell that winter, but I never cared; I was happy to sit outside in the bitter temperatures for hours—and we did—just to be with her.  By February, we were officially inseparable—and have remained so ever since.

A lifetime has passed since then, one in which, hand in hand, we’ve graduated college, traveled to Europe on several occasions, moved across the country (on September 11, 2001 of all cosmic dates), weathered the deaths of a parent apiece, eloped in Vegas, cared for twenty-four different pets (mostly fosters), consciously practiced patience with and developed deeper appreciation for one another during this indefinite interval of self-quarantine (we haven’t seen our immediate family on the East Coast since Thanksgiving of 2019), and have perennially quoted lines from GoodFellas to one another… because, well, GoodFellas might be the only thing that’s aged as well as we have.

Goodfellas Joe Pesci and Ray Liotta at the Jackson Hole diner in Queens, the site of many of our dates in the college years

She’s certainly aged preternaturally well in her own right.  She was the prettiest girl at school—no minor triumph, given that there were almost 20,000 students at Hunter College at the time—but she’s impossibly more beautiful today.  When I glance in the mirror, however, I in no way recognize the kid that fell in love with her all those years ago.  This is a good thing.  I think—I hope—I’m a much better man today than I was then.  Kinder; more compassionate; more sensitive; more patient.  Certainly wiser.  And hopefully more deserving of the love she’s given so freely and steadfastly.  Indeed, hopefully that above all else.

All the best ideas to grace my life over the past quarter century have been hers, without so much as a lone exception.  Long before I took up blogging, she’d encouraged me to do so.  I was such an incorrigible Luddite, however; furthermore, I reasoned it would be a distraction from my “real” work:  screenwriting.  Now I wish I’d swapped screenwriting for blogging years earlier.  The former—my bright idea—made me miserable; the latter has allowed me to better know myself unquantifiably.  I am an exponentially better writer for this continuing project—the one she had the wisdom to suggest years before I could see the value in it myself.  She didn’t hold that against me, though; she even set up my WordPress domain.  Now you get to read all about the esoteric bullshit she alone used to entertain over dinner.

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Trick-or-Treating Is Canceled? Why Disrupted Halloween Traditions Are Nothing to Fear

October 26, 2020 / / 32 Comments

Owed to my Romantic proclivities, the most spiritually challenging aspect to living in Los Angeles is its seasonal monotony.  I am never so acutely aware of it than at this time of year, when my biorhythms, still calibrated for the East Coast after nearly two decades, anticipate the cooling of the air and coloring of the foliage.  With only gentle reminders, at best, from Mother Nature of the Earth’s shifting axial tilt, a greater metric burden is placed on holidays:  Celebrating St. Patrick’s Day is how I make the mental transition to spring; Fourth of July reminds me summertime has commenced in earnest; Thanksgiving heralds the coming Christmas season, when those who are dear to me will be near to me once more.

In that way, holidays do more than merely mark the passage of time—another birthday, another Mother’s Day, another New Year’s Eve—but in fact give the year its very structure.  With the exception of August, which itself is traditionally a time for family vacations, every month has at least one official holiday that helps define it.  The particular aesthetics of one over the other, from its foods to its music to its very color palette, conjures a fully immersive sensory experience all its own.  Sure, we may prefer some holidays over others, or celebrate some more than others, but where would we be without them?

I guess we’d be in 2020.  I don’t know about you, but the only friends I got drunk with on St. Paddy’s were Sean Penn and Gary Oldman; the only baseball games I got out to this past spring featured Cleveland Indians starting pitcher Charlie Sheen; the only beach I visited this summer was out on Amity Island.  My cousin’s son turned twelve this past May, and I couldn’t help lament he wouldn’t be spending what will likely be his last summer of innocence on the streets with his friends as I did; I sent him a copy of Stephen King’s The Body so he could at least have a vicarious boyhood adventure.  We’ve all made due however we must this year, “celebrating” seasonal occasions in our living rooms or backyards, clinging to the semblance of normality those traditions provide in these traumatically abnormal times.

But when the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health prohibited trick-or-treating last month, that was a bridge too far.  Parents—not kids, mind you—went apeshit, and the very next day L.A. softened its position substantially, merely recommending against the time-honored practice, so cease-and-desist with the hate-tweets, please!  Banning trick-or-treating was perceived as canceling Halloween—an unacceptable sacrifice in a year full of previously unthinkable compromises.

The Peanuts gang goes trick-or-treating in “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” (1966)

It’s impossible to imagine my own parents, who always made the holidays special, reacting so histrionically.  The first decade of my late father’s life, after all, coincided with the Great Depression; I don’t think he would’ve felt particularly sorry for us had trick-or-treating been suspended on account of a major public-health crisis.  And not because he was unkind or unsympathetic, but rather because he wouldn’t have viewed it as an impediment to celebration.

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The Lost Boys of the Bronx: A Tribute to Joel Schumacher

July 4, 2020 / / 18 Comments

Batman Forever and The Lost Boys director Joel Schumacher died on Monday, June 22, at the age of eighty after a yearlong battle with cancer.  In an industry where branding is sacrosanct, his brand, as it were, was his steadfast refusal to be artistically pigeonholed:  Hit-and-miss though his track record may be, he was a rare breed of filmmaker who worked in virtually every genre, from comedy (D.C. Cab; Bad Company) to drama (Cousins; Dying Young) to sci-fi/horror (Flatliners; Blood Creek) to crime thriller (Falling Down, 8mm) to legal thriller (The Client, A Time to Kill) to musical (The Phantom of the Opera).  His filmography is as winding and unconventional as was his path to commercial success:

Schumacher was born in New York City in 1939 and studied design at Parsons and the Fashion Institute of Technology. . . .

When Schumacher eventually left fashion for Hollywood, he put his original trade to good use, designing costumes for various films throughout the Seventies. . . .  He also started writing screenplays during this time, including the hit 1976 comedy Car Wash and the 1978 adaptation of the musical The Wiz.

In 1981, Schumacher made his directorial debut with, The Incredible Shrinking Woman, a sci-fi comedy twist on Richard Matheson’s 1959 novel, The Shrinking Man, starring Lily Tomlin.  Fitting the pattern that would define his career, the film was a financial success but a flop with critics. . . .

Schumacher’s true breakout came a few years later in 1985, when he wrote and directed St. Elmo’s Fire, the classic post-grad flick with the Brat Pack cast, including Rob Lowe, Demi Moore and Judd Nelson.  Two years later, he wrote and directed The Lost Boys, a film about a group of teen vampires that marked the first film to star both Corey Feldman and Corey Haim, effectively launching the heartthrob duo known as “the Coreys.”

Jon Blistein, “Joel Schumacher, Director of ‘Batman & Robin,’ ‘St. Elmo’s Fire,’ Dead at 80,” Rolling Stone, June 22, 2020

Though Schumacher did not write The Lost Boys (1987) as the Rolling Stone piece erroneously asserts (the screenplay is credited to Janice Fischer & James Jeremias and Jeffrey Boam), neither his creative imprint on the project nor the cultural impact of the movie itself can in any way be overstated.  Sure, teenage vampires may be a dime-a-dozen cottage industry now, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Twilight to The Vampire Diaries, but if you happened to grow up on any of those Millennial staples, it’s worth knowing that pubescent bloodsuckers had never really been done prior to The Lost Boys—no, that celebrated iteration of the vampire’s pop-cultural evolution is entirely owed to the pioneering vision of Joel Schumacher.

Late filmmaker Joel Schumacher; photo by Gabriella Meros/Shutterstock, 2003 (498867t)

When Richard Donner left the project to direct Lethal Weapon instead, the script Schumacher inherited was essentially “The Goonies… with vampires.”  By aging up the characters from preteens to hormonal adolescents, Schumacher saw a creative opportunity to do something scarier—and sexier.  A cult classic was thusly born, and though The Lost Boys itself never became a franchise (save a pair of direct-to-video sequels two decades later, and the less said about them, the better), its fingerprints are all over the subgenre it begat.  We owe Schumacher a cultural debt for that.

Kiefer Sutherland’s David (second from left) leads a gang of teenage vampires in “The Lost Boys”

And I owe him a personal debt.  Over any other formative influence, The Lost Boys is directly and demonstrably responsible for my decision to study filmmaking in college and then to pursue a screenwriting career in Hollywood.  More than simply my professional trajectory, in point of fact, my very creative sensibilities were indelibly forged by that film:  The untold scripts and novels I’ve written over the past quarter century have almost exclusively been tales of the supernatural with a strong sense of both humor and setting—the very qualities The Lost Boys embodies so masterfully and memorably.  All of that can be traced to the summer of 1994.

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