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.
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:
- Superman: The Movie (1978)
- Ghostbusters (1984)
- Back to the Future (1985)
- Stand by Me (1986)
- Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
Superman: The Movie (1978)
- Directed by Richard Donner
- Story by Mario Puzo
- Screenplay by Mario Puzo, David Newman, Leslie Newman, & Robert Benton (with uncredited contributions from Tom Mankiewicz)
- Based on Superman created by Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster
For better or—as Tarantino would surely argue—for worse, my sensibilities were forged in the Golden Age of the Blockbuster, which commenced in earnest with Jaws (1975), then crystalized with Star Wars (1977), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and Superman: The Movie, setting a template that would define Hollywood tentpole movies throughout the “miserable eighties”:
Bob Gale (screenwriter, Back to the Future): An interesting thing starts to happen in the ’70s, where you get the people who are becoming the filmmakers grew up on the fantasy stuff of the ’50s. This was something that sparked their imaginations when they were kids, and then they wanted to capture that and bring that back and tell those stories in a way that modern audiences would appreciate.
You Will Believe: The Cinematic Saga of Superman, “Origin” (Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2006), DVD
I don’t know for certain Superman is the first live-action feature film I ever saw, but I can say it’s the first one I remember seeing—and definitely the first to make a lasting impression on the blank slate of my imagination. (I also recall Superman II [1981], the concluding half of this two-part saga, being my first live-action movie experienced on the big screen.)
Superman may begin a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, but quickly transitions—after a brief sojourn in a consciously Rockwellian depiction of the American Midwest—to the congested streets of Midtown Manhattan in the 1970s. Fascinating though I found them, Krypton and Smallville were equally alien to me, but Metropolis, by contrast, provided all the comforts of home: I was raised in New York, and my dad worked at a publishing company in a high-rise office building just like the Daily Planet. It made perfect sense to my young mind that after his interstellar journey and apple-pie upbringing, Superman would settle in my world, which I assumed—and Hollywood has always strongly implied—is the center of the universe.
When I rode home on the school bus in kindergarten, I would gaze skyward at the towering apartment complexes in my Bronx neighborhood and imagine myself in flight high above the rooftops; I was effectively projecting my own movies onto the environment right outside my window. I could playact as Luke Skywalker whirling an imaginary lightsaber (a Wiffle bat) on an imaginary space station (a schoolyard jungle gym), but I could picture myself as Superman soaring across the unaugmented cityscape around me. Superman trained me to fantasize about and within reality, a practice I employ to this very day.
As a reader/viewer, I seldom cotton to high fantasy, and as a writer, I wouldn’t know where to begin the task of worldbuilding from whole cloth. I’ve always preferred instead to work within very real, recognizable, tactile realities… and then introduce an instance or element of the fantastical to that reality. Label my work however you like: supernatural fiction, magical realism, reality plus—whatever. For the most part, I don’t give a shit about extraordinary worlds that don’t exist; I’d much rather see something extraordinary happen in everyday reality.
Such are the stories I respond to—as I’ll demonstrate—and the kind of stories I produce. I have to believe that guiding creative instinct can be traced back to my formative fascination with Superman, which was very deliberately conceived and crafted with narrative realism at the forefront of the filmmakers’ minds:
Marc McClure (“Jimmy Olsen”): On March 24th, 1977, cameras rolled on both Superman movies with one objective in mind: verisimilitude.
Stuart Baird (editor): Dick [Donner]’s great mantra was “verisimilitude.” Of course, we all had to look it up, but, um, what it means is, I think, truthfulness. Keep to the, uh, keep to the reality, the real truth of a situation.
Tom Mankiewicz (creative consultant): Dick has a talent, because of the things that are in him as a person. He wants to believe in those myths, and when you can make an audience believe that what’s happening on the screen—even though it’s totally extraordinary—that this is actually happening, that’s when you have… verisimilitude.
Richard Donner (director): I have a sign to this day in my office of Superman flying through the air dragging a sign behind him that says “verisimilitude.” Because this story had to have its own honesty; everybody had to believe it was real.
Michael Thau, “Making Superman: Filming the Legend” (Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2001), DVD
Basically, “verisimilitude” means an appearance of or resemblance to reality. And arguably more than any other art form, cinema carries the wondrous potential and bears the tricky responsibility to deliver on verisimilitude, owed to its unique storytelling properties:
Outside of, like, VR videogames, cinema is the most immersive medium there is—as well as the most literal. When you read a book, you have to exert some effort to read the words: you set the pace; you turn the page. But in a film, you just sit back and let it wash over you. In a book, when something is described, you have to create your own mental image of it. When you watch a play in a theater, the set is an abstract version of a location, and your mind has to fill in the blanks and imagine a world in which this is meant to take place. But in film, it does all the work for you. You see the full cohesive reality. Everything that was simply described in words on the page, now it’s all literally there in front of you—a fully realized world that you can watch as a spectator.
Willems, Patrick (H). “When the Faithful Adaptation Is Actually Worse.” YouTube video, 59:05. March 30, 2024.
Right. And creating that fully realized world—presenting a “full cohesive reality”—is the special power and burden of the filmmaker above all other artists. Speculative cinema, in all of its varied subgenres, rises or falls on how persuasively it effectuates verisimilitude, the sum total of a series of interconnected creative decisions presided over by the director. Pull it off, and you get A New Hope and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). Fuck it up, you get The Phantom Menace (1999) and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008).
It’s tricky stuff, and, as such, writers of fantasy rely on a few tried-and-true strategies, codified by narratologist Farah Mendlesohn in her 2008 study Rhetorics of Fantasy, to at least get their stories off on the right foot by adhering to one set of conventions over another. In immersive fantasy, a term coined by Mendlesohn, the storyteller plunges the audience directly into a make-believe world, as in The Lord of the Rings (1954–55), Dragonslayer (1981), Conan the Barbarian (1982), Ladyhawke (1985), Legend (1985), and Willow (1988).
A portal fantasy, alternatively, begins in a grounded reality only to swiftly transition to an otherworldly realm: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), The Wizard of Oz (1939), The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–56), Tron (1982), The Last Starfighter (1984), and Labyrinth (1986). (Also qualifying to some extent are metafictional fantasies The NeverEnding Story [1984] and The Princess Bride [1987], in which the audience surrogate of both films is a ten-year-old boy in the “real” world of a frame story who isn’t directly participating in the events of the main narrative, but is nonetheless experiencing and commenting on them in real time. This “once-removed” character provides a bridge between the viewer’s everyday reality and the fictional realm of the fantasy; he is both our portal into the imaginary world as well as the filter through which we observe it.)
Superman flips the portal-fantasy script—it’s what’s Mendlesohn calls intrusion fantasy, of which E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and The Dogcatcher (2023) are representations—thereby allowing the audience to accept a fantastical character in a real-world setting. Rather than using reality as a springboard into fantasy, Donner grabbed the audience exiting Star Wars, pulled us into Superman, and incrementally led us from the cold, crystalline aesthetic of that galaxy (notably, John Barry was the production designer on A New Hope and the first two Superman movies before his untimely death during the production of The Empire Strikes Back) to the warm, comforting nostalgia of 1950s Americana (after a decade of civil unrest and geopolitical turmoil, it can’t be overstated just how shitty national morale was by the mid-’70s, Tarantino’s favorite decade) before bringing us back, for good, to the everyday streets of late-twentieth-century New York… albeit with one little hopeful, magical flourish.
Long before I consciously appreciated Donner’s creative approach to the material or had ever heard the word “verisimilitude,” Superman imprinted indelibly on my narrative sensibilities. When I wrote The Dogcatcher, great pains were taken to make the fictional Finger Lakes city of Cornault—which is to Ithaca, New York, what Metropolis is to Manhattan—a lived-in place with a tactile sense of geography, history, and community.
Currently, I’m at work on a trilogy of magical-realism novellas set among actual neighborhoods in, respectively, the Hudson Valley (Spex), the Bronx (The Brigadier), and the San Fernando Valley (H.O.L.O.) during the late ’80s; in all three stories, real streets and bygone businesses are namechecked. Superman unquestionably schooled me to strive for verisimilitude—an appearance of reality, no matter how extraordinary the circumstances—in my own speculative storytelling.
It also demonstrated for my five-year-old eyes, quite powerfully and altogether happenstantially, a sense of scale. I followed the formulaic adventures of Superman every Saturday morning on Hanna-Barbera’s animated series Super Friends (1973–85), which I watched on a 13-inch black-and-white television set. From countenance to characterization, Superman was entirely one dimensional on that show; so were Batman and Robin, whose simplistic heroism (“This sounds like a job for… the Super Friends!”) closely mirrored their portrayal on the straight-faced, live-action ’60 series Batman (Adam West even provided the voice of the Caped Crusader in the final two seasons of Super Friends).
Superman: The Movie scaled its hero up dramatically. The screen was bigger. The story was bigger. There was humor and humanity and an eye-popping visual palette. It’s true that Star Wars demonstrated those virtues, too, but that immersive sci-fi fantasy was born on the silver screen; there was no point of comparison to reference. By contrast, Superman experienced a 40-year evolution from four-color print to cel animation to low-budget live-action offerings with Kirk Alyn and George Reeves as the Man of Steel before some of the finest talent in Hollywood convened to make us believe a man could fly—to elevate newsstand pulp fiction to sublime American mythology.
While I would only fully appreciate that much, much later in life, Superman primed me to understand it—to appreciate, on the most foundational level of my perceptions of narrativity as a medium and a craft, how some stories aspire to artistry, while others are content to be (and if you’ve read my essay on Superman IV, you know this isn’t a criticism) nothing more than ephemeral crap. The film’s ambitious production, complemented by its uncommon verisimilitude, set a standard for my nascent imagination against which all subsequent stories—whether I consumed them or wrote them myself—would be unconsciously measured.
It’s also worth noting that we find in Superman the first of my established thematic preoccupations, that of fathers and sons, though that admittedly only developed later, during my fatherless adolescence. Ultimately, this is a very affecting story of two fathers and their shared son: The portentous death of Jor-El (Marlon Brando) gives Superman life; the unremarkable death of Jonathan Kent (Glenn Ford) gives him purpose. (The two mothers, played by Susannah York and Phyllis Thaxter, are steadfastly supportive but decidedly secondary.)
That motif lands all the more impactfully in Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut (2006), which pays off Jor-El’s cryptic prophecy from the first film—“The son becomes the father, and the father, the son”—a key plot point that was regrettably abandoned when Donner was replaced by Richard Lester before finishing work on the sequel; in an act of creative self-sabotage, the entire Brando subplot was jettisoned from the theatrical release of Superman II.
I was 30 when the Donner cut was produced—it’s not a director’s cut, but rather an almost entirely different presentation of the same film (with Brando’s scenes restored)—and it gave me the gift of one more never-anticipated adventure with my first childhood hero, as well as a proper goodbye to him. I cherished that magical experience… though these days, Hollywood feeds an insatiable appetite for ’80s nostalgia through endless “legacy sequels” and “cinematic multiverses.” Call it “No Child Childhood Hero Left Behind.” (Reeve himself was digitally—and controversially—resurrected for a cameo in The Flash [2023].) Personally, I find all of that uncomfortable at best and embarrassing at worst.
For decades now, Americans have been living in a period of all-conquering artistic populism; our culture industry has fully absorbed the notion that there is no sin greater than snobbery when it comes to appreciation of music or movies or television. We’ve essentially gotten rid of the divide between children’s and adult entertainment, insisting that it’s perfectly fine—maybe even preferable—to have the same tastes as an adult that you had as a child.
Freddie deBoer, “What Will It Take for Hollywood to Grow Up?”, Opinion, New York Times, August 11, 2024
One can’t survey our current pop-cultural landscape and deny that. This year alone saw the return of Beetlejuice, Mufasa, Axel Foley, Eric Draven, the O.G. Ghostbusters, the Terminator, and the xenomorph. We don’t have to keep doing this. As I hope this tribute to Superman demonstrates, it’s possible to appreciate a formative influence without becoming a lifetime subscriber to whatever corporately mediated franchise it begat.
As an adult, I’ve become a critical opponent of Hollywood’s superhero–industrial complex. I don’t write superhero stories, I don’t read superhero comics, I don’t watch superhero movies. My generation bears the shameful dishonor of perverting concepts and characters explicitly created to broaden the imagination of children into hyperviolent wish-fulfillment fantasies for commercially infantilized adults—of clinging possessively to characters like Superman and Batman and Wolverine, all of whom have headlined multiple R-rated movies over the past decade, instead of passing them down to our sons.
Such is why, as far as comic-to-screen adaptations go, Richard Donner’s Superman has never been topped—in both its creative execution and intention. He turned an inherently silly concept into a cinematic sci-fi epic without ever losing sight of—or betraying—Superman’s intended audience: preadolescent boys. If, at the time of its release, Superman—like Star Wars (itself an unofficial update of Flash Gordon)—put grown men back in touch with their inner 12-year-olds, so much the better; but it wasn’t for adults. It was an aspirational fairy tale—a simple morality fable—for children. Nothing that came after it, beginning with Tim Burton’s Batman a decade later, managed the same feat of artistry and purity.
When you grow up, you realize the world teems with Batmen, at least [The Dark Knight Returns’] version: angry tough guys who break things and push other people around yet always see themselves as the victim.
What the real world needs is more Supermen, people who use what they were born with to help those around them. You act out of care for your adopted home rather than from anger at what your birthright has become. As an adult you recognize that you can’t cure trauma by traumatizing others. You cure it through love.
It’s telling that the protagonists of the major adult superhero works of the 1980s, like Watchmen and DKR (and my personal favorite, O’Neill and Cowan’s The Question), all reach the same conclusion: “You know what? Being a superhero is dumb and probably counter-productive. Let’s stop.” They go on to contribute to society in more substantive, less violent ways. If you’re a Joseph Campbell fan, this is no surprise. The Hero’s Journey is always a coming-of-age story; it’s a passage from youthful exuberance to adult acceptance. The dream becomes reality: less flashy, but more precious, because it’s real.
Fred Van Lente, “Dark Knight Returns: A Storytelling Landmark—Whose Cracks Show 35 Years Later,” 13th Dimension, March 20, 2021
For many, Superman: The Movie takes its place in the cinematic pantheon as the prototypal superhero blockbuster—the granddaddy that paved the way for Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man saga, Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, the X-Men franchise, the MCU, and the so-called “Snyderverse.” If that’s its cultural legacy, then so be it. But that’s not why it matters to me.
No movie since, superhero-based or otherwise, has so convincingly persuaded me a man can fly. Superman made me believe I could fly; it was the spark that ignited my own imagination and inspired it to soar. That the late Richard Donner was born in my hometown of the Bronx only makes Superman’s leadoff position in this all-star lineup all the more fitting.
I’ll close this section by noting that for those of us who came of age during the Golden Era of the Blockbuster, the soundtrack of our youth was predominantly scored by John Williams, and I don’t think he’s ever composed a more emotionally heroic fanfare than this one, which is epic and intimate in equal measure. It gave me chills then, and it gives me chills when I hear it now. I got to see Williams conduct the “Main Title March” live at the Hollywood Bowl some years ago, and I felt like a kindergartner again, imagining myself body-surfing the Santa Ana winds high above the peaks of the Hollywood Hills.
Ghostbusters (1984)
- Directed by Ivan Reitman
- Written by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis
Prior to compiling this list, I would have considered Ghostbusters a lifelong joy—I absolutely remember seeing this one in a two-screen theater down on Broadway in 1984—but not necessarily a formative influence. And yet…
So much of my fiction is marked by explicit references to it: Frank and Waff in The Dogcatcher recall their days “ghostbusting” as kids (to say nothing of the novel’s epigraph, which features a direct quote from Ghostbusters II). One of the episodes in my forthcoming novella Spex features the 12-year-old protagonist “discovering” the actual Ghostbusters firehouse during a downtown adventure in Lower Manhattan. The firehouse playset features in yet another novella, H.O.L.O. The young hero of The Brigadier cites The Real Ghostbusters (1986–1991) as his favorite Saturday-morning cartoon. I don’t think there’s a movie that gets called out by name more than this one in my work…
Why?
Well, for starters, director Ivan Reitman’s creative approach to the material, beginning with his opening-salvo suggestion that Dan Aykroyd’s first-draft screenplay be reconceptualized from immersion to intrusion fantasy, was straight out of the Dick Donner playbook:
Aykroyd presented the script to Reitman; the two had worked together in a Toronto-based live-television variety show years earlier. “It was a screenplay that was impossible to make but one that had brilliant ideas in it,” recalls Reitman, who once admitted that the original draft “exhausted” him. Far darker than the version that was eventually shot, it took place in the future and on a number of different planets or dimensional planes. Yet it contained elements that would make it onto the big screen, including the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man and what would become the world-famous Ghostbusters logo—a ghost trapped inside a circular red stop symbol.
Aykroyd and Reitman went to lunch at Art’s Delicatessen in Studio City to discuss the project. “I basically pitched what is now the movie—that the [Ghostbusters] should go into business,” says Reitman. “This was beginning of the 1980s: everyone was going into business.” He also urged Aykroyd to extract the film from the realm of pure fantasy and set it in a modern American city. “I called it my domino theory of reality,” he says. “If we could just play this thing realistically from the beginning, we’d believe that the Marshmallow Man could exist by the end of the film.”
Lesley M. M. Blume, “The Making of Ghostbusters: How Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, and ‘The Murricane’ Built ‘The Perfect Comedy,’” Vanity Fair, June 4, 2014
There must be a word for that…? Ah, yes: Verisimilitude. And which city more closely resembled reality, at least for me, than the one right outside my window?
By October 1983, the team began shooting in New York City. During the Art’s Delicatessen meeting with Aykroyd, Reitman had proposed grounding the action in a town renowned for being a universe in its own right.
“I wanted the film to be . . . my New York movie,” he says.
It was a gutsy setting choice. At the time, New York wasn’t exactly close-up ready: the city was emerging from a decade of fiscal disaster, dissipation, and violence.
ibid.
And Ghostbusters doesn’t sugarcoat that. Hollywood movies have always—but perhaps especially in the Reagan era—had a schizophrenic view of New York, either letting the camera make softcore love to the city, as in Herbert Ross’ The Secret of My Success (1987) or pretty much any Woody Allen film, or, alternatively, showcasing its cinematic seediness: Walter Hill’s The Warriors (1979); Abel Ferrara’s King of New York (1990).
By contrast, the New York of Ghostbusters isn’t entirely polished or squalid; rather, the movie presents New York as a New Yorker might’ve matter-of-factly seen it at the time: a great city that was trying to emerge from some very challenging socioeconomic times, but that had never at any point stopped being a functioning metropolis, even amidst systemic dysfunction. In New York, life just kinda goes on. Ghostbusters got that—it nailed the city’s working-class ethos.
Scenes from the film are set everywhere from the Columbia University campus up in Morningside Heights to City Hall down at the Civic Center, from the ivory towers along Central Park West to a boarded-up fire station in Tribeca, a neighborhood described by Egon (Ramis) as a “demilitarized zone.” The Manhattan of Ghostbusters has enough room for all of those locational incongruities to coexist, just as they did—and do—in reality.
Dan Aykroyd (co-screenwriter/“Dr. Raymond Stantz”): Well, the city is a character in the film—we were successful in conveying that. . . . It was the Reagan years, of course, and one political analyst said it was the perfect movie for the Reagan years because. . . our opposition was the EPA! He we are, we were new entrepreneurs—a startup company, if you will—and we were contravening environmental laws. So, nothing politically correct there about the Ghostbusters, and it very much hewed to the time in terms of what was going on in the city in the ’70s—the Dinkins/Koch years.
Terrence Kiriokos, “‘Who Ya Gonna Call?’: A Ghostbusters Retrospective” (Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2014), Blu-ray
The diversity of Aykroyd’s influences—his academic interest in spiritualism coupled with his sketch-comedy training at the Second City and Saturday Night Live—didn’t merely foster the creatively fertile conditions in his imagination to allow for Ghostbusters to be conceived; he had the creative instinct to know enough to take his speculative premise seriously but not self-seriously, not humorlessly:
While sitting around the family farmhouse, Aykroyd says he read an article in a parapsychology journal and he got the idea about trapping ghosts. “And I thought, I’ll devise a system to trap ghosts . . . and marry it to the old ghost [films] of the 1930s,” Aykroyd says. “Virtually every comedy team did a ghost movie—Abbott and Costello, Bob Hope. I was a big fan of [them.]” He began hammering out a screenplay.
Blume, “The Making of Ghostbusters”
I had a similar moment of inspiration when I conceived The Dogcatcher. Unconvinced that an instance of paranormal activity in Small Town, USA, would be investigated by two FBI agents, as was the case each week on The X-Files (1993–2002), it occurred to me that the public office more likely suited to the task of containing a cryptid would be Animal Control. And when I realized my premise boiled down to “dogcatcher versus werewolf”—with the key ingredients of any winning pitch, logic and irony, communicated in only three words3—I knew I had a smart story predicated on a scary scenario that was also inherently humorous. One Goodreads reviewer called it “An absolute blast of a book that feels like a fun 80s werewolf flick”—exactly what I was going for.
Ivan Reitman (director/producer): There’s something about high intelligence working in a kind of big, physical way—in a physical comedy—that is very endearing to our audience.
Geoff Boucher (entertainment journalist): Yeah, it helps the center hold, too—
Reitman: Yeah.
Boucher: —I mean, as far as, like, it feels like there’s something to learn or have fun with as it goes along.
Aykroyd: We thank Harold [Ramis] for the elevated tone of a lot of it. And also the tradition at Second City of always just trying to be at the top of your intelligence, and then maybe you’re gonna reach the bottom of someone else’s.
Kiriokos, “‘Who Ya Gonna Call?’”
With the humor and horror of The Dogcatcher’s premise self-evident, I could then start developing the story’s emotional arcs and thematic ambitions. Just as Ghostbusters was a snapshot of New York in the Reagan era, The Dogcatcher was tailored to speak to its own sociopolitical atmosphere—a statement on the role of public servants in the era of COVID-19. The five principals—four of whom work for local government, the fifth for academia—are all undergoing transformational arcs that work (I hope) like counterparts in a Swiss watch, each character’s personal journey challenging and inspiring the others to change and grow, too.
I passionately believed that a story could—that a good story should—operate on several levels: emotional, intellectual, visceral, even sociopolitical. And despite what I’d been told by dogmatic managers and agents as a screenwriter, I knew from my earliest exposure to cinema that supernatural horror and buddy comedy and earnest romance and family melodrama could not only coexist in the same narrative, but balance and buttress one another. Superman had accomplished that tonal mélange, shifting fluidly from spartan Stanley Kubrick science fiction to golden John Ford pastoral drama to snappy Howard Hawks screwball comedy to gritty Philip D’Antoni urban thriller to campy Roger Moore–era 007 adventure to high-stakes Irwin Allen disaster film. So had Ghostbusters:
Reitman: I remember watching it in those first screenings with audiences—they were really enthralled in a way that frankly surprised me, because I was always thinking of the comedy and how that was going to work, and really what was… made me feel really good as a director is that how involved—emotionally involved—and how, frankly, frightened the audience was at a certain point.
ibid.
There have been many times, in the middle of the night, I’ve considered perhaps The Dogcatcher—bad pun alert—bit off more than it could chew, that it tried to marry too many ideas and themes and styles, that despite my efforts, the parts don’t gracefully tot up to something greater than their sum. Then I get a reader review like this one:
I understand that most people who pick up a “dark comedy/horror” about a werewolf have not come, nor intend to stay, for the stuff about a man reconciling with his father and brother over the death of their mother. I might also have been one of those, except for the fact that it is in the level of humanity and charm Carlin infuses throughout his story, that I absolutely loved just being in the book, whether or not shit was hitting the fan yet.
This leads me to what I loved about the book more broadly. Beyond the fact that it is an absolute ripper of a story, never remotely boring, often amusing and occasionally surprising, Carlin is one enviably good writer. . . . He has a style all his own, an impressive way of seamlessly fusing plot with character development and exposition.
Stahl, Benjamin. Review of The Dogcatcher, by Sean Patrick Carlin, DarkWinter Press, 2023, 302 pages. Goodreads.
What’s so validating about a comment like that—thank you, Benjamin!—isn’t the ego-stroke, but the reassurance that all your creative ambitions for a story can cohere, and maybe even add up to something that transcends all the conscious, logical choices—the mechanical parts—that went into its creation. The best intentions and ingredients don’t always make for a delicious meal. All we can do is filter our influences through our own personality and life experiences, and then bring all our skills to bear in the development and execution of the story itself. If we do that, we can summon the faith required to finish the project even—especially—in the face of self-doubt.
Finally, note that in Ghostbusters we find the second of my principal thematic preoccupations: male friendship. While the four Ghostbusters are men, not boys, they habitually demonstrate a charming sense of childlike enthusiasm (particularly Aykroyd’s Ray Stantz) and puerile sense of humor (notably Bill Murray’s Peter Venkman). Even the most hilariously stoic character in the movie, Ramis’ Egon Spengler, loses his shit at one point and barks the witless invective that was on the tip of every schoolboy’s tongue in the 1980s: “Your mother!”
The Ghostbusters also seem to be, despite their contrasting personalities and even incompatible dispositions, genuine friends. This stands in stark contrast with most other buddy movies of the era—48 Hrs. (1982), Beverly Hills Cop (1984), Top Gun (1986), Lethal Weapon (1987), even the arc of the Balboa/Creed rivalry across the first three Rockys (1976, 1979, 1982)—which were mostly dick-measuring contests until the third act, when the mismatched professionals would develop a grudging respect for one another just in time for the final shootout.
From minute one, the Ghostbusters speak in shorthand—sometimes even in wordless glances—and work together without ego: Each trusts the other to fulfill his particular role in the organization; they don’t step on each other’s toes or intrude on another guy’s area of expertise (Venkman as the mouth of the operation, Spengler the brain, and Stantz the heart, with Ernie Hudson’s Winston Zeddemore playing devil’s advocate). Superman was about a single heroic guy who handled every problem by himself; Ghostbusters is about a group of underdogs whose success depends on the concerted contributions—sometimes sacrifices—of all its members.
That spirit of teamwork, also evident in The Real Ghostbusters animated series, is what made the concept so attractive to groups of boys, like me and my friends, who would playact Ghostbusters together: There was always room for another person—another personality, another perspective—on the team. While elements of Ghostbusters’ Reagan-era ethos have not aged well (its disdain for government regulation of private enterprise; Murray’s “charmingly lecherous” pursuit of Sigourney Weaver), its uncommonly healthy portrayal of male partnership—of men who genuinely respect and enjoy one another—is something we could use a lot more of in commercial media.
By the way, together the two Ghostbusters movies directly engage the question Tarantino posited in Cinema Speculation: “Does anybody think a less sarcastic Bill Murray is a better Bill Murray?”4
In Ghostbusters, Venkman is very much “the same sarcastic aloof asshole at the film’s end he was at the beginning.”5 But in Ghostbusters II (1989), the filmmakers show us what his refusal to change has cost him in the intervening five years; they don’t let him off the hook. Though the sequel suffers from some muddled plotting (it violates a screenwriting principle known as Double Hocus Pocus), it makes up for that—as well as for some of the moral shortcomings of the first film, like its dubious environmental messaging and habitual cigarette usage—by demonstrating a far greater degree of emotional maturity and sense of social responsibility.
If Superman influenced my preference for intrusion fantasy, Ghostbusters established the supernatural—much more so than superhero or sci-fi—as my subgenre of choice. I don’t relate to superheroes as a grown man, and the technobabble-driven exposition intrinsic to science fiction is at odds with my predilection for naturalistic dialogue. But tales of the supernatural are creatively hospitable to the type of relatable, down-to-earth, working-class characters I prefer to write, while also allowing for fanciful instances of monsters and magic that can serve as powerful analogies for the human experience.
Perhaps more than even its sense of the supernatural, I responded to Ghostbusters’ sense of humor. That’s all over The Dogcatcher. Humor might even be the most human of all emotions—certainly the most human of reactions. And it’s been all but banished from contemporary speculative cinema. Nerd culture takes itself very seriously, its grimly solemn ethos now the dominant modality of blockbuster filmmaking (Dune) and postnarrative television (House of the Dragon).
Humor is a major component of the following three specimens, though you’d be hard-pressed to label any of them as comedies. They’re all adventure stories about boys and their dads, none so conceptually novel as our next selection.
Back to the Future (1985)
- Directed by Robert Zemeckis
- Written by Robert Zemeckis & Bob Gale
Boy, if you made me pick an all-time cinematic favorite, it would have to be this one, the only instance of portal fantasy in this lineup. It was my number-one movie at nine years old, when I saw it in the summer of 1985, and no movie before or since had evoked anywhere near a commensurate sense of wide-eyed awe from me. As someone we looked up to—quite literally, given the whole “up, up, and away” shtick—Superman was an aspirational hero. So, to some extent, were the Ghostbusters; they were Ph.D.-credentialed parapsychologists, authorities in an arcane pseudoscience. I admired them more than I related to them.
Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox), by contrast, was a kid only a few years older than I was. His bedroom was a mess. He got around town on his skateboard. His Walkman was permanently affixed to his waist. One of his parents was a drunk. He was always looking around the corner for the school principal, who never missed an opportunity to needlessly complicate his life. And unlike Superman and the Ghostbusters, he needed virtually every plot point in his own story explained to him. He was at all times just trying to keep up with, let alone get ahead of, the twists and turns of the narrative.
It probably helped that, at the time of production, Fox was shooting Family Ties (1982–1989) by day and Back to the Future at night, sleeping in the car that shuttled him from the set of one production to the other; the sense of disorientation and exhaustion he felt probably had the perverse effect of enhancing his performance as Marty rather than detracting from it:
Robert Zemeckis (director/co-writer): He’s a reactive character, and he was written that way. He reacts to everything. I mean, because he’s a stranger in a strange land. So, he’s basically the alien in the movie. And it takes an actor with a perfect sense of comedy timing, and a really great actor, because it’s been said that acting is reacting. So, he was able to understand that the humor was not in the punch line, it was in the reaction. . . .
Michael J. Fox (“Marty McFly”): I never tried to tackle any of the physics of it or the temporal logic of the spacetime continuum or any of that stuff, but from Marty’s point of view, I understood the story. I mean, I understood what was driving him. I mean, it was basically girls, rock ’n’ roll, and skateboarding, and that’s not far from being major focuses of my life just a couple of years earlier. And two of them still were.
Laurent Bouzereau, “Tales from the Future: In the Beginning…” (Universal City, CA: Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2010), Blu-ray
We all know the premise of Back to the Future at this point: During a science experiment gone awry, a 1980s teen (Fox) travels back in time to the 1950s, where he inadvertently thwarts his parents’ fated meet-cute, thereby endangering his (future) existence. Now he has a week to play cupid before his own date with an infamous lightning bolt that, if all goes to plan, will send him back to the future.
On the matter of creative inspiration, the genesis of the project is a textbook example of Geddy Lee’s criterion for developing one’s own artistic voice: “It’s basically when your influences have become so diverse that they’re no longer easy to trace; they’ve blended together so thoroughly as to create a stew of your own making.”6 The screenwriter of Back to the Future shares his own nebulous memories of the media that shaped his sensibilities:
Bob Gale (producer/co-writer): I can’t really put my finger on when I stumbled on the idea of time travel—whether it was from watching The Twilight Zone, whether it was from reading Superman comics, or whether it was when the H. G. Wells Time Machine movie, the George Pal movie in 1961, came out. But I do remember being totally fascinated by that film. It inspired me to read the book. I made my own little miniature time machine out of Popsicle sticks. The whole idea of it was just something that I totally got fascinated by.
Laurent Bouzereau, “Back to the Future: Making the Trilogy—Chapter I” (Universal City, CA: Universal Studios Home Video, 2002), DVD
In “Under the Influence, Part 1,” I talked about how taken I was with the supernatural comedies of the 1980s, the likes of Ghostbusters and The Lost Boys (1987). Like Gale, I had a thematic preoccupation—a speculative storytelling device that ignited my imagination—but what I didn’t have was a narrative premise.
It was only in 2008–09, when my wife and I were binge-watching our way through The X-Files, that I found myself wondering whether the FBI would really be the government agency tasked with investigating a cryptid attack in Small Town, USA, or if in fact a more logical first responder would be the Animal Control Officer? That question suggested a conceptual hook—dogcatcher versus werewolf, with all the horror and humor that implies—that formed the germinal basis for The Dogcatcher. Similarly, the narrative foundation of Back to the Future took root when a hypothetical scenario occurred to Gale and seized control of his imagination:
Gale: Bob Zemeckis and I for years had discussed the idea of doing a time-travel movie and we were never able to figure out sort of the hook: What was gonna make a good subject for a time-travel movie? Well, after we made a movie called Used Cars, I was back in St. Louis visiting my parents, and my father went to the same high school that I went to. And I found his high-school yearbook in the basement. And I’m thumbing through it, and I find out that my father’d been the president of his graduating class. I didn’t know this. And I’m looking at him, and I’m thinking about the president of my graduating class, who’s a guy I had nothing to do with. And I thought, “Would I have been friends with [my father] if I had gone to high school [with him], or would I have just hated his guts?” So, I got back to California and I’m telling the story to Bob, and he’s going, “Yeah, that’s really interesting.” So, we just got going with that, and that was the germ of the idea.
Bouzereau, “Tales from the Future: In the Beginning…”
As noted in the preamble, stories about the relationships boys have with their fathers and with their friends—a major theme of our next agenda item—have always spoken very directly and personally to me. Which makes me wonder: How is it no male storyteller before Gale thought to question whether he and his father might have been pals had they been peers? Talk about inspiration! Gale’s speculative query—“Gee, if I went to high school with my dad, would I have been friends with him?”7—demanded a response that could only be satisfied by fiction:
Zemeckis: As I remember it, the idea for Back to the Future came about with—and who knows where these ideas really come from—but it was like the notion that Bob Gale had of what it would be like to see your parents as kids when you were the same age as they were. . . .
Gale: The idea that every adult was once a kid really had never been done before as a movie. This was an idea, an original idea, that we’d never seen dealt with before.
Bouzereau, “Back to the Future: Making the Trilogy—Chapter I”
Just as Dan Aykroyd wedded a moment of inspiration (an article he’d chanced upon in a parapsychology journal) with his formative influences (the ghost comedies of the ’30s and ’40s), so had Gale. Immediately, the narrative possibilities of what would become Back to the Future began to suggest themselves:
Zemeckis: My feeling about making a time-travel movie was to, first of all, make a fun adventure. The reason we chose the 1950s was a simple logistics question. Our hero is 17 years old and he has to go back to the time when his parents were 17 years old, and that just simply put us in the ’50s. The second reason was that the 1950s was the birth of American teen culture.
Les Mayfield, “The Making of Back to the Future,” (Universal City, CA: Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 1985), Blu-ray
He further elaborates:
Zemeckis: I was only like three or four years old in 1955, so I don’t really remember what it was really [like] then, but it was a time where there was an explosion of media, there was television, there were movies. It was the first time in the history of mankind that adolescents—which we now, you know, they call them “teenagers” for the first time—became and economic and powerful force. So, it was a great time to do a story about adolescence—because it was sort of the birth of adolescence.
Laurent Bouzereau, “Tales from the Future: Time to Go” (Universal City, CA: Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2010), Blu-ray
Such are the happy accidents that so often occur during the creative process—and you go with them when they do! The Dogcatcher took place in Ithaca, New York, because I’d spent a long weekend there in 2007 and thought it would make a great setting for a story (one I wouldn’t have until a year later while watching The X-Files). But in researching the city, I discovered it had never had—still doesn’t have—an Animal Control Department. Instead, those services are provided by private pest-control companies and the county SPCA. (In point of fact, the wildlife-removal companies have been among Ithaca’s most vocal opponents of establishing a public Animal Control office.)
Obviously, having an Animal Control Department was central to my story’s premise. But rather than disregarding the real-life politics of Ithaca and doing whatever I wanted—because, hey, it’s fiction!—I instead, in the spirit of verisimilitude, embraced the city’s lack of public animal-welfare services and incorporated it into the narrative. By serving as the head of a municipal agency the taxpayers explicitly didn’t want—but was nonetheless pushed through by the mayor, the hero’s father, for reasons that are assumed to be entirely nepotistic—my protagonist became even more of an underdog than originally positioned, perpetually made to justify his office.
Though I wound up fictionalizing the city anyway, christening it “Cornault” as a nod to Edith Wharton (influences!), the absence of Animal Control in Ithaca nonetheless stands as evidence that reality can suggest plot complications and thematic textures you wouldn’t have come up with on your own, which lends the story—particularly if it’s fantasy—both greater depth and greater verisimilitude. While it’s true Zemeckis stumbled into his time period purely mathematically, he had the wisdom to recognize his good fortune, being that the ’50s “was also the time when the birth of the teenager happened, anyway, and teenagers in America were given power—power by the media, power to buy things; they became an economic power. So, that worked out well for us.”8
Exactly—in Back to the Future, the shopping-mall culture of the ’80s, emblemized by Marty, stands in side-by-side comparison with the sock-hop culture of the ’50s. It’s no accident that the site of Marty’s trip back in time is the parking lot of a suburban shopping center, which he discovers was pristine farmland in 1955…
Or that the exterior scenes in the ’50s were shot in Pasadena on tree-shaded streets of prewar Craftsman-style homes, whereas the ’80s locations feature prefabricated postwar ranch houses, backdropped by transmission towers, in the sunbaked San Fernando Valley…
Or that the town square (on the Universal backlot) goes from a bustling business district of quaint boutiques to a skid row of seedy pawnshops, bail bondsmen, and adult bookstores. Note the way the village green has been paved over in the intervening decades, and the once-grand courthouse is falling apart; the faded sign beneath the clock reads “DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL SERVICES,” suggesting little to no investment has been made in public welfare in a long, long time. In 1950s Hill Valley, the American dream is still very much mint-in-box; by the 1980s, suburbanization and neoliberalism have taken their toll, drawing bold lines between the haves and have-nots.9
Gale: That was always one of the major elements of the story even in its earliest incarnation, which was to take a place and show what happens to it over a period of 30 years. What happened to everybody’s hometown was obviously the same thing: They built a mall out in the boonies and it killed all the business downtown, and everything changed.
Mayfield, “The Making of Back to the Future”
Whereas Ghostbusters provided a socioeconomic snapshot of a major American metropolis in the early ’80s, Back to the Future offered a compare-and-contrast split screen of Everytown, USA, in the years following the victory of the Second World War and those in the wake of the failure in Vietnam. All of this is just backdrop, of course—I appreciated none of it at nine years old—but it illustrates that both of these movies (and Superman, too) are informed by the social, political, and economic conditions of their era. They’re fantasies that are in conversation with the culture that birthed them. I credit all of them with instilling in me an appreciation for that kind of real-world specificity in speculative storytelling.
I consciously emulated Zemeckis and Gale’s approach to their fictional California community, Hill Valley, when creating Cornault, New York. Hill Valley was imbued with a rich history (that expanded with each sequel); it’s a reminder that even if your story isn’t set in a set in real place, it should still feel like one. Taking a page from Hill Valley, I endeavored to lend the same degree of historical, geographical, and cultural specificity—the same verisimilitude—to Cornault. And even though I plundered the city of Ithaca for particulars, it in fact has no central town square like the one featured so prominently in The Dogcatcher. That was a flourish inspired directly by Hill Valley—a little idealized Americana I just couldn’t resist.
And as they did with their fictional American suburb, Zemeckis and Gale brought that same careful eye for detail—for verisimilitude—to the speculative elements of their story:
Zemeckis: I’ve always felt that the best two time-travel stories were the The Time Machine and Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. And basically Back to the Future follows the same type of time-travel rules as The Time Machine, which is that you can travel through time but not through space. And a lot of time-travel stories violate that concept: Not only do you travel a hundred years in the past, but you also travel from Los Angeles to England miraculously. So, we believed in the H. G. Wells Time Machine idea of time travel.
Bouzereau, “Back to the Future: Making the Trilogy—Chapter I”
I often find with immersive fantasy fiction, worldbuilding eventually—and rather lamentably—becomes the entire point. Fiction is reduced to an exegetical exercise, a puzzle to be “solved” through the meticulous application of forensic fandom. Consider all the mental energy fans of Star Wars and Game of Thrones and the MCU spend policing and reconciling continuity discrepancies, wringing their hands over what counts as “canon,” and generally seeking to understand how fanciful technologies like lightsabers and sonic screwdrivers and Captain America’s shield actually work. (The short answer? Because they’re not real.)
In these instances, the mythos is no longer serving the narrative by providing a basis of verisimilitude, but instead the narrative, such as it is, exists solely to support its own sprawling mythos. This is what’s known as explainerism, “the entertainment mode that attempts to satisfy the unquenchable impulse to overthink and pedantically document a fictional setting.”10 With Back to the Future, Zemeckis and Gale took care to establish logistical parameters for their sci-fi premise—88 miles per hour, 1.21 jigowatts, and so on—but stopped themselves short of getting lost down that ever-branching rabbit hole:
Gale: A lot of people think that Back to the Future is a science-fiction movie. A lot of people think it’s a special-effects movie. The fact is that there are only 31 or 32 special-effects shots in the entire film. In discussing with our special-effects people and our artists about what was time travel going to look like, we started coming up with, and they started coming up with, all kinds of ideas—What is the spacetime continuum going to look like when Marty’s in the DeLorean?—and all kinds of great big visual eye candy. And at a certain point, Bob and I looked at each other and said, “You know, that’s all bogus. We don’t need any of that stuff.” Time travel should be instantaneous. This is a story about people; it’s not a story about hardware. The hardware is just what we use to make it believable. Mark Twain had the Connecticut Yankee get hit over the head and wake up in King Arthur’s time. There’s other stories where somebody wishes that they were in the past. None of these things were interesting to us. We felt that if it was a machine that did it, then it was more believable than if it was a wish. Because we know that machines can do stuff and we don’t have any example of somebody wishing for something as crazy as this and ever having it come true. So, the machine is just a way to make the idea of time travel believable.
Bouzereau, “Back to the Future: Making the Trilogy—Chapter I”
Exactly. While the filmmakers gave great thought to the “rules” of their time-travel adventure, they kept the focus on the very human question that inspired the story in the first place: Would my dad and I have been friends in high school?
Steven Spielberg (executive producer): [Zemeckis and Gale] brought [the script] over to me and they said, “Nobody gets this. Maybe we’re crazy. Will you read this and let us know what you think?” And I read it, and it was a very unusual story. And yet it was based on a lot of old-fashioned principles—of family, coming of age, getting your first car, all the dreams and desires you have for your own life, the dreams and desires your parents might have had but didn’t succeed in realizing. And it was about the generation gap, and it was about the major disconnect between our generation and our own parents’ generation. And that was all done through an amazing object lesson, which was this sort of accidental trip back into the past.
Bouzereau, “Tales from the Future: In the Beginning…”
More than the tricked-out DeLorean leaving a trail of flames behind it, it is exactly what Spielberg describes above that wowed the shit out of me at nine years old, and still leaves me satisfied when I watch Back to the Future today. Zemeckis and Gale taught me a fantastical conceit only has value insofar as it sheds light on the human condition—that it offers some universal truth or cathartic insight we wouldn’t otherwise have if not for that speculative fantasy premise. Like The Time Machine. Like A Christmas Carol. Getting caught up in worldbuilding—in the intertextual crosspollination and pointless dot-connecting that is now the raison d’être for pretty much all of our IP-driven multimedia franchises—is to miss the point of a good story entirely.
So, Back to the Future is a case study in what happens when influence meets inspiration. It’s an exemplar of how a fantasy storytellers enjoy the freedom to set the rules as well as the obligation to play by them—but only in service to an emotionally relatable narrative, not for the sake of open-ended worldbuilding itself.
It is also, more so than any other film I know, a masterclass in principles of story design—the gold standard for how to set up plot points (through indirect exposition) and pay them off later (in both showstopping set pieces such as the “Johnny B. Goode” performance and blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moments like the revised name of the shopping mall after Marty returns to 1985):
Gale: We used the index-card method of plotting. So, we would have a big bulletin board in our office, and we would say, “Okay, we know,” for example, “Marty goes back in time,” so an index card goes up says “Marty goes back in time,” and then, toward the end, “Marty goes back to the future”—that’s another card. So, we said, “Okay, wouldn’t it be cool if he invented rock ’n’ roll?” So, we put up a card saying “Marty invents rock ’n’ roll.” Well, we need to establish that he can play rock ’n’ roll, and that he wants to play rock ’n’ roll, so, that means that, somewhere on the bulletin board, before the card that says he goes back in time, establish Marty’s desire and ability to play rock ’n’ roll. Same thing with the skateboard: If he’s gonna invent the skateboard, show him on the skateboard. So, these pairs of index cards would come up.
Zemeckis: But to write a screenplay like Back to the Future, it was just an immense amount of very hard, backbreaking work. I mean, there was nothing really fun about writing the screenplay. It was really hard.
ibid.
I don’t doubt it was. Seventy-five percent of the work that goes into any kind of creative writing is done during the outlining stage—or “breaking the back” of the story, in Old Hollywood parlance. I’ll typically spend at least a month on this stage: composing the logline, establishing the character arcs, determining the 15 major plot points, then expanding on those by sequencing the story’s 40-or-so “beats” on a bulletin board, complete with setups and pay-offs, just like Zemeckis and Gale did.
I won’t write Word One of the manuscript until the entire foundation has been laid, same as you wouldn’t start building a house without a drafting a blueprint then pouring a concrete slab and assembling a wood-frame endostructure. And I produce better first drafts for my effort, which in turn makes the revision process—all the scene-sculpting work—heaps more fun, because I’m not trying to plug plot holes or solve story problems, all of which have been worked out in advance.
During my adolescence, I would to some extent drift away from these kind of plot-driven adventures in favor of darker character pieces, as we’ll discuss in “Under the Influence, Part 3.” And as a writer, I place a far higher premium on who my stories are about over what happens; I don’t enjoy overplotted movies (like the mind-numbing time-travel turd X-Men: Days of Future Past) and TV shows (couldn’t follow two consecutive minutes of Game of Thrones). But…
I appreciate how meticulous narrative causality engenders trust in the audience—how it makes a viewer/reader more receptive to your message, because they sense they are in the hands of a master storyteller. And what the elegant narrativity of Back to the Future demonstrated for me was that no detail in a story should be incidental. Everything is a conscious choice, all for the effect of advancing the plot, echoing the theme, revealing character, and/or eliciting an emotional reaction. Back to the Future is one of the most disciplined screenplays ever produced, and about as perfect a movie as has ever existed.
But not entirely perfect. If the movie has a single shortcoming, it’s that while it is self-aware enough to understand that postwar prosperity was ultimately undermined by neoliberal austerity, in the final tally, Back to the Future ultimately cheerleads for the same spirit of Reagan-era materialism—the phony rewards of capitalism—as nearly every other movie and TV show (including Fox’s own The Secret of My Success and Family Ties) of the 1980s:
Zemeckis: That ending was a comment on the ’80s, because, you know, it was the “Me” generation. I mean, it’s really an ending that I don’t think you’d want to do today. I mean, the idea that having a BMW is a good thing, or being successful as a novelist and having a home that’s appointed with expensive furniture is very much an ’80s idea. It’s an ’80s idea, and, as a matter of fact, there were a lot of European critics who commented on that, that, “Hmm, that’s an interesting comment on American society.” Although, in America at the time, it brought the house down. But it does set the movie in its own historical time.
Bouzereau, “Tales from the Future: Time to Go”
With all due respect to Zemeckis, I’m not sure that coda was a comment on “Me”-generation materialism so much as a reflection of it. Marty didn’t need to be rewarded with a brand-new Toyota at the end of the film.11 The reward was attaining a deeper understanding of—a kinship with—his parents. (The notion that the rekindled affection between a father and son is ultimately more important than some sought-after material possession is explored in the fifth and final entry below.)
The narrative arc of Back To The Future was essentially Ronald Reagan’s vision for America. We would rewrite the past as something manlier, more noble, and in the process create for ourselves a brighter future, where everyone gets a shiny new pick-up truck and a hot girlfriend to take to their house on the lake.
Vince Mancini, “‘Back To The Future’ At 35: Looking Back On The Movie That Made America Great Again,” Film/TV, Uproxx, July 2, 2020
It stings a little to concede the truth of that analysis, more so than the sins I now identify in Ghostbusters, whose mea culpa via its sequel goes a long way toward forgiveness, and Die Hard (1988), whose sequels only double down on every offensive attribute of the original. It’s a bit like reflecting on some of the decisions my parents made when they were the same age I am now and thinking, “Really? You didn’t know—couldn’t have done—better than that? That’s not the choice I would’ve made…”
But retrospective judgmentalism—condemning those of a previous era for not upholding the moral standards of the current one—is one of the least productive, least tolerant aspects of cancel culture, born from an arrogant assumption that one emerged from the womb fully enlightened. Even Zemeckis concedes Back to the Future isn’t morally immaculate, embedded with dubious messaging the filmmakers probably weren’t even conscious of.
But it is also a consciously crafted fable about coming to understand your parents wrestle(d) with the same limitations, disappointments, pressures, and insecurities as you—and that maybe they deserve the benefit of the doubt that they would have done some things differently had they known then what we know now. So do our good-faith storytellers.
Funny enough, as a preteen fan of Back to the Future, my only quibble with the story was that ending—but it had nothing to do with the movie’s rubber-stamping of conspicuous consumerism. Instead, I didn’t understand how George McFly (Crispin Glover) had made it to the ripe old age of 47 before having his first novel published. “That would’ve happened decades earlier,” I naïvely reasoned.
My first novel, The Dogcatcher, was published in September of 2023. I was 47.
Stand by Me (1986)
- Directed by Rob Reiner
- Screenplay by Raynold Gideon & Bruce A. Evans
- Based upon the novella The Body by Stephen King
The movies I was seeing theatrically at this point in my life—Superman II and III, Ghostbusters, Back to the Future—were all strictly PG-rated adventures.12 It was on home video in the summer of 1988, when I was 12, that I first saw Stand by Me on summer vacation in, fittingly enough, the Pocono Mountains of Northeastern Pennsylvania, in a woodsy little township not dissimilar from the movie’s fictional setting of Castle Rock.
The story of four friends from [sic] small town in Oregon, hiking into the countryside in search of the body of a boy who has been hit and killed by a train, is an unlikely coming-of-age tale. Yet in Reiner’s sensitive hands, it becomes a meditation on mortality—one that transcends its 1950s setting to have a universal appeal.
“Stand By Me” is unique in other ways. For one thing, it rivals “The 400 Blows” in its ability to evoke complex characterizations from young actors. Not only [River] Phoenix as spiritual leader Chris Chambers, but co-stars Wil Wheaton as sensitive Gordie Lachance, Jerry O’Connell as wisecracking Vern Tessio, and Corey Feldman as hot-tempered Teddy Duchamp, provide finely wrought portraits of boys on the cusp of adulthood.
Brent Lang, “‘Stand by Me’ Oral History: Rob Reiner and Cast on River Phoenix and How Coming-of-Age Classic Almost Didn’t Happen,” Variety, July 28, 2016
In those characters, I immediately and quite intimately saw my own grade-school gang, ourselves in that inflective summer between the comforting familiarity of elementary school and the strange new world of junior high. We had a counterpart in our group for each of Stand by Me’s young heroes: the introspective artist who felt misunderstood by his parents (Gordie); the bright kid with a heart of gold who found himself unfairly handicapped by his family’s bad name (Chris); the boy fascinated with military culture who harbored a murderous hatred for his absentee father (Teddy); the goofball sidekick (Vern). We had ’em all.
Never before—and in some ways since—had I so directly related to the characters in a work of fiction. It was like King and Reiner had used me and my friends as the template for their young ensemble! Our zany preadolescent misadventures in the Bronx and Manhattan—I’ll provide a few examples under the next entry—were our reprieve from the turbulence of pervasive domestic dysfunction. All our households were afflicted with some combination of divorce, alcoholism, abandonment, unemployment, depression, infidelity, and for one of us, even violent mental illness on the part of a parent. It was, as someone once wrote, both the best of times and the worst of times. And, it turned out, it wasn’t exclusive to my little gang:
Stephen King (author): For a long time, I thought, “I would love to be able to find a string to put on a lot the childhood experiences that I remember.” A lot of them were funny, and some of them were kind of sad, and the people that I’ve known, and some of the guys that I hung out with that really weren’t headed anywhere except down blind alleys. And, uh, nothing came, and nothing came. And what you do when nothing comes is you don’t push, you just put it aside. And there came a day when I thought to myself, “If these guys go somewhere—if there’s a reason for them to go somewhere and do something, what could it be?” And I came up with the idea of them going down the train tracks to look for the body of a kid—and I made up a situation whereby they would know the body is there and that they could go and find it. And everything else follows from that. I think that most stories, good stories, about boys are stories about journeys.
Rob Reiner (director): He writes these wonderful characters, and he writes wonderful dialogue, and most of the times they’re encased in these kind of horrific, supernatural-type pieces. This was really bereft of that; it was a real character piece, and a character study, and very personal to Stephen King, ’cause it was kind of his life.
King: My memories of boyhood was that it was a riot, that it was a lot of fun, and there’s a lot of funny stuff that happened, and I tried to put a lot of that into the story. And Rob tried to put a lot of that in the movie, too. And he had a nice cast, and I think that aside from the material, which clearly appealed to his sense of humor, I think that he must have resonated with some of the boyhood experiences because the direction is so surehanded.
Reiner: I found my own way into it through my own personal experience and said, “Gordie has to be the main character.” It’s all about a little boy who doesn’t feel good about himself, who’s looking for approval, can’t get it from his father, and looks to his friends to be bolstered and find that approval and feel good about himself. And once I hit upon that, I said, “Okay, I can tell this story.” ’Cause those are feelings I had felt as a young kid growing up and trying to make my way in the world.
King: There are certain rites of passage that all boys go through with their friends: the first time that we run away from home; the first time that we really had to face something frightening by ourselves; the first time that you face death; the first time that you face disillusion about your parents; the first time that you had to face a situation where you know if you don’t back off a step, you’re gonna be hurt. These are all things that boys go through and they’re part of what makes boys men.
Michael Gillis, “Walking the Tracks: The Summer of Stand by Me” (Culver City, CA: Columbia TriStar Home Video, 2000), DVD
Christ, I couldn’t say it any better than that. And it’s startling to me how few stories—how few storytellers—are willing to engage with the complexities of boyhood with any emotional honesty. Instead, we get archetypes (the leader, the smartmouth, the nerd, the fat kid), like the motley crews in The Monster Squad (1987) and The Sandlot (1993), and the perpetually preadolescent protagonist of The Goldbergs (2013–2023), whose “characterization,” such as it was, consisted entirely of a single-minded obsession with ’80s pop culture and a propensity to mutter “Balls!” as an expression of frustration.
What sets Stand by Me apart from something like The Goonies, another millennial-beloved picture about scrappy kids setting out on a quest, is the fearlessness with which it confronts the ugliness of maturity. Goonies never say die; this quartet is stuck in a vortex of abuse and mistreatment, usually coming from a parent to their child. The film tacitly links Teddy’s volatile behavior to his fraught relationship with his father, a WWII vet who mutilated his boy’s ear during what we’re led to understand is a post-traumatic fit. (More touching still, Teddy flips into defensive mad-dog mode when a trashmonger dares to call his father a “loony.”) Chris comes from a family full of crooks and booze-hounds, and Gordie himself wrestles with profound survivor’s guilt over the death of his brother (John Cusack) while his grief-stricken parents have completely disengaged from the world around them.
But even as they’re beset on all sides by sadness and tragedy, they still live the way kids live. Reiner brings a nuance to the boys and faithfully captures the distinctive ways that these odd pubescent creatures interact with one another. Bruce Evans and Raynold Gideon’s script nails the wandering-mind banter sessions so common among barely pubescent young men, as they tool on one another in a gesture of affection and fraternity. . . .
. . . Stand by Me gets its staying power from its well-measured bittersweet take on the good ol’ days, resulting from the combination of Reiner’s intuitive knack for seeing through a child’s eyes and [King’s] brutal awareness of what comes afterward.
Charles Bramesco, “‘Stand by Me’ at 30: Why This Stephen King Movie Is Timeless,” Rolling Stone, August 22, 2016
I appreciated that emotionally as a 12-year-old kid—the movie struck a chord in me like none before it, perhaps in part because that was the same summer during which my own father’s alcoholism, hiding in plain sight for years, finally became apparent to me—but in the intervening decades, I’ve developed an ever-deepening intellectual appreciation for Stand by Me’s uncommon and unflinching perspicacity.
My forthcoming collection of magical-realism novellas, each about the experiences of a different preadolescent protagonist, aspires to the same degree of insight and courage: Spex dramatizes the inevitable disillusionment with our parents that marks the end of childhood and the beginning of adolescence; The Brigadier is about the unacknowledged psychological toll parental addiction and divorce take on children; H.O.L.O. explores the emotional and social complexities of having a foot in childhood (still playing with action figures and watching cartoons) and a foot in adolescence (noticing the opposite sex and wishing they would notice you), and how unwarned and utterly unprepared we leave boys to navigate that hormonal minefield.
We leave our boys unprepared for puberty, I think, because we adults have forgotten—or have chosen to forget—how confusing and oftentimes raw it really is. We prefer to remember prepubescence as depicted in The Goonies and The Goldbergs—emotionally uncomplicated, with its reassuring restoration of the status quo—when in reality it is much closer to Stand by Me: messy, silly, vulgar, thrilling, traumatizing, irreversible—the swan song of innocence. For this reason, we need a lot more fiction like Stand by Me—bildungsromans that invite men to remember, to touch base with, their 12-year-old selves.
That’s what I’m aiming to do with Spex, The Brigadier, and H.O.L.O. They aren’t set in the late ’50s, when King was 12, but rather the late ’80s, when I was. Like ’80s-throwback series Stranger Things (2016–present) and The Goldbergs, they are steeped in the pop culture of their day; unlike Stranger Things (whose preteen characters exhibit genuine emotion, yet exist only in service to the show’s high-stakes puzzle-box plotting, with few if any occasions for childlike frivolity) and The Goldbergs (whose characters merely express schmaltzy sentimentality, disingenuously tacked on to the coda of the show’s nostalgic gimmick-of-the-week premise), they aspire to be a “well-measured bittersweet take on the good ol’ days,” specific to my experiences but universal in their emotional truthfulness.
Richard Dreyfuss (narrator of Stand by Me and childhood friend of Reiner): It’s very common now for people to do that in movies and TV shows—to reach back to their own history and their own past and bring back the ’70s or the ’80s or whatever. But I think that Rob was the first guy to do that. I remember when I watched the film that it kind of—I sprang to attention at that moment because we had done that; Rob and I had done that with our friends. It was a part of our lives which we thought was unique to us. And Rob was able to see that it wasn’t unique to us at all—it was a universal thing. And I think I truly fell in love with the film at that moment.
Gillis, “Walking the Tracks: The Summer of Stand by Me”
Me, too. While Spex, The Brigadier, and H.O.L.O. were conceived as wish-fulfillment fantasies about novelty items that become magically enchanted—what are known as Out of the Bottle narratives per Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat!—I surprised myself on each project by how deeply I pulled from my personal preadolescent experiences; things I hadn’t thought about in 35 years—some significant, some momentary, some hilarious, some heartbreaking—found their way into the stories. Everything in each of those magical-realism novellas actually happened to me, to one extent or another.
Technically speaking, it was the easiest manuscript I’ve ever written; it leapt straight from my soul onto the page through the keyboard. Emotionally, however, it’s been the most trying creative endeavor of my life. Like King did for The Body, I excavated my boyhood experiences—the friendships, the misadventures, the formative traumas—and wound up self-conducting the most agonizing and illuminating course of therapy I never would’ve voluntarily signed up for.
Same for my WIP The Lost Boys of the Bronx, a non-speculative coming-of-age drama (a “Buddy Fleece,” like Stand by Me) about the guys I came up with, and how we carried one another through the trials of family dysfunction and adolescent depression when the adults in our lives wrote us off as sullen teenagers who just needed to “snap out of it”—if they noticed us at all—when they might’ve instead regarded us as fully emotional beings who yearned to be approached generously rather than punitively. When the authority figures at home and in school couldn’t be there for us, we stood by each other. That theme is touched upon in The Dogcatcher through Frank and Waff’s odd-couple relationship, but it is the central preoccupation of the fiction I’m presently writing—that I’ve unknowingly prepared my whole life to produce.
Reiner: We see that moment at which Gordie is made to feel good by his friend Chris, and for the first time, we see the genesis of this boy becoming a real writer. And how the fears that this young boy has about not being loved by his father, feeling that his father hates him, and that this friend of his steps in at a time when this boy is most needy and is able to support him, and make him feel good about himself, and tell him someday he’ll write about us, and that these’ll be the experiences that you draw from that will inform your capacity as a writer.
ibid.
My magical-realism trilogy is about the transition from childhood to adolescence; The Lost Boys of the Bronx dramatizes the passage from adolescence to adulthood. These two works of fiction are thematic bookends. Perhaps when both projects are finished, I’ll have said everything I have to say about analog-era youth… and maybe I’ll tell stories about middle age in the Digital Age?
Either way, it’s been the pleasure of my professional life to reflect on and narrativize the adventures and friendships of my youth. Stand by Me provided the model—it inspired a 12-year-old with a creative disposition to mentally record each experience as it happened, and to resist the temptation to sugarcoat any of it, ’cause there just might be a story in all this one day…
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
- Directed by Steven Spielberg
- Story by George Lucas and Menno Meyjes
- Screenplay by Jeffrey Boam (with uncredited contributions from Tom Stoppard)
- Based upon characters created by George Lucas and Philip Kaufman
Fans of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)—meaning, those who’ve appreciated its radical tonal departure from Raiders of the Lost Ark—as well as critics of it—those who’ve lamented Temple’s radical tonal departure from Raiders—have at least always agreed on one universally accepted premise: With The Last Crusade, Spielberg and Lucas—for better or worse, depending on one’s position—reverted to the comfortable, tried-and-true stylistic and structural aesthetic of the original film.
That has been the unchallenged thesis of no fewer than a zillion needless reevaluations of the Indiana Jones franchise over the past three decades. And it is a fundamentally inaccurate—to say nothing of demonstrably disprovable—assumption.
Whereas the conventional approach to sequels in those days was “same story, only bigger”—Jaws 2 (1978), Rocky II, Beverly Hills Cop II (1987)—Lucas had demonstrated with The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and More American Graffiti (1979) an altogether different creative modality: shifting genres—i.e., invoking different narrative models—on subsequent installments. To wit: Raiders is romantic, David Lean–inspired desert epic; Temple is a gross-out, subterranean horror movie; Last Crusade is a road-trip buddy comedy; Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is Atomic Age sci-fi. (Very much taking to heart the moral of Last Crusade—to make the sober choice to unburden oneself of decades-long fixations—I took a pass on Dial of Disney.)
We’d been so dark with The Temple of Doom that we really wanted to go in the opposite direction and make this one lighter than Raiders of the Lost Ark.
George Lucas. “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: ‘A Look Inside.’” Paramount Pictures, 1999. Videocassette (VHS).
Furthermore, The Last Crusade represents a major structural departure from the series’ formula in two important ways. Whereas the other films settle down for their second acts in a single geographical region (Egypt, India, and the Amazon, respectively), Last Crusade propels Indy (Harrison Ford) from Venice to Austria to Hatay by every conceivable mode of transportation: car, motorcycle, speedboat, zeppelin, biplane, heavy tank, horseback. It’s also the only of Indy’s adventures in which he doesn’t get his hands on the MacGuffin at the midpoint, but rather during the third act, the point at which the physical retrieval of the Holy Grail becomes the film’s narrative and emotional climax:
Steven Spielberg (director): I mean, this is great drama to tempt a director to say, “I’ll make that movie.” To prove whether you believe or don’t believe the myth of the Grail, [the villain] turns the gun onto Daddy and shoots him right in the stomach, and he falls over. . . . Now Indy has a finite amount of time to discover the Grail, the cup of Christ, and to bring back the healing liquid to feed the father and to pour over the bullet hole—and to make it all go away. It’s redemption—redemption of the soul, redemption between a father and a son, and that’s when you know a story’s working: when you have that kind of drama, and you can shoot one of the leading characters.
George Lucas (executive producer): Well, it was a little tricky and we were all a little nervous about that. That sort of evolved in the script before we actually took that chance. It seemed very logical to connect it that way and to have the extra pressure on at that point of Sean Connery dying, and Indiana Jones having to get the Grail and get back in order to save his father.
Laurent Bouzereau, “Indiana Jones: Making the Trilogy” (Hollywood, CA: Paramount Home Entertainment, 2003), DVD
Unlike Raiders and Temple before it, the third Indy outing is less about attaining the prize than experiencing the journey—“You call this archaeology?” Connery’s Henry dryly comments during an extended desert tank chase replete with physical stunts and visual gags—and consequently looks and feels nothing like the original, despite endless “critical” assertions to the contrary.
Lucas: The thing I like the most about the film is, in the end, the real pleasure was in finding each other, and throwing the Grail away and realizing that, you know, Indiana being with his father was more important than any of the other stuff that was going on, uh, was a great ending—because it didn’t have anything to do with the object. In the end, we always have to get rid of the object somehow; that’s always a problem. And this was the perfect way of getting rid of the object; it was the perfect way of telling the story.
Spielberg: So, the drama of Last Crusade doesn’t end with a truck chase or a climactic upheaval of special effects and ghosts and spirits, but it ends in the most personal way—more personal than any of the previous Raiders movies—where Indy and the father have a meeting of the minds and a meeting of the hearts.
ibid.
Right. Far from a play-it-safe Raiders reprisal—despite the welcome return of Brody (Denholm Elliott) and Sallah (John Rhys-Davies), who are both given substantial and essential roles in the story, not the bullshit fan-service cameos we get today—Last Crusade had its own rhythm and raison d’être:
Spielberg: There was so much humor to be mined in a father/son movie, especially when they haven’t been getting along in twenty years. The fact that Indy’s dad keeps topping Indy. He uses the umbrella to make the birds, the seagulls, take flight and then get caught up in the props of the Messerschmitt coming around the corner for a third strafing run. And that brings the airplane down, and Indy just looks at his dad walking away with the confidence of a man who still has an umbrella on a nice, sunny day, the umbrella’s up, and Indy looks at his father with so much love in his heart for his dad, with a whole new level of respect and admiration. And that’s what made that movie worth shooting.
ibid.
The Last Crusade came out only a month after I’d turned 13, and less than six months after my parents’ separation. I was still very much in that 12-going-on-13 developmental liminality, and Crusade spoke to me emotionally at that juncture in a way the previous two films, much as I love them still, didn’t and couldn’t. Hell, Last Crusade even opens with a 10-minute mini-adventure featuring a 13-year-old Boy Scout Indy (River Phoenix, the goodwill he’d banked from Stand by Me still fresh on our minds), as though to say, This one’s for all the preadolescent boys out there. The Indy movies had always been fashioned in that juvenile spirit; the prologue of Last Crusade merely made those intentions explicit.
Yet Crusade, like Superman: The Movie before it, wasn’t content to be pulp ephemera—unambitiously mediocre crap for indiscriminate 12-year-old boys, not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that. The artistry on display from all the movie’s creative contributors is exemplary, from Spielberg’s exquisite camerawork (watch the movie with the audio muted to fully appreciate his sublime visual storytelling), to Boam’s intelligent plotting (none of the actions or events seem illogical, implausible, contrived, or convenient), to Stoppard’s witty dialogue (which casts a long shadow over Crystal Skull’s banal banter), to Ford and Connery’s note-perfect screen chemistry:
Spielberg: Who could intimidate Harrison Ford? Not some English character actor from the Royal Shakespeare Company. But Sean Connery is Harrison Ford’s match. And he’s the only person I could imagine on the planet Earth to play Indiana Jones’ father.
Lucas: The James Bond film was kind of the father of the Indiana Jones films, ’cause that’s how Steven and I first started talking about it—was that he wanted to do a James Bond film. To use James Bond as the father of Indiana Jones, it seemed like the perfect, you know, outside-of-the-real-movie ironic humor.
Spielberg and Lucas. “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: ‘A Look Inside.’”
Even costume designer Anthony Powell added to the depth of storytelling, subtly augmenting Indy’s famous field outfit with a black officer’s tie—a subliminal indication of the latent anxiety aroused by his father’s judgmental disapproval of his life choices. For Dad, Indy makes himself more “presentable.”
Every scene in The Last Crusade is endowed with an added undercurrent of emotional tension, elevating the typically quest-driven Indiana Jones formula, already an exercise in high-stakes suspense, to something more character-centric and comedic, as estranged father and son find themselves on a perilous race against the Nazis, airing old grievances between breathless set pieces.
The man who made the greatest impression in Indy was not his father, who was a very good man. But almost as a counterreaction to the good man his father was, he had found a bad man, and kind of took the idea of the hat and the leather jacket from him. And so, when I see Indy now in his leather jacket and his fedora, I think that that’s a very strong statement he’s made against how he was treated by his own father.
Spielberg. “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: ‘A Look Inside.’”
Respectfully, Mr. Spielberg, I would argue that it was his father who made the greatest impression on Indy: All of Henry Jones Junior’s idiosyncratic accouterments, from his hat to his bomber jacket to his self-consciously adventurous moniker, were convenient affectations adopted to distinguish himself, temperamentally and nominally, from Henry Senior. In Spielberg’s own words, this was a statement against something—an attempt by Indy to distance himself from the man who, for better and worse, made him who he is. The unnamed tomb raider Indy meets in the 1912 prologue was just a convenient model on which to pattern his persona.
It was my own father who’d directly inspired my boyhood adventures on the streets of the Bronx in the ’80s. We’d sit for hours in Ehring’s Tavern on West 231st Street—him guzzling Meister Bräus, me sipping Cokes through a red cocktail straw—where, barstool storyteller that he was, he’d regale me and the rest of the neighborhood drunks, their sunlight-deprived faces cured in a lingering swirl of cigarette smoke and whiskey vapor, with his childhood exploits in Upper Manhattan during the Depression. The time he and his two pals cut school and snuck into the 1939 World’s Fair out in Flushing to see Johnny Weissmuller. Or when his friend’s horse jumped through the plate-glass window of the flower shop where Dad worked onto the sidewalk—an anecdote I appropriated for The Dogcatcher.
I wanted to be able to tell tall tales like that one day; I wanted to experience adventures just as thrilling and funny as Dad’s. Consequently, my pals and explored the abandoned housing/condominium developments commissioned during the 1980s building boom that had been left to rot and ruin after the ’87 Wall Street crash. We scaled the vertiginous understructure of the Henry Hudson Bridge. We even dressed up as Boy Scouts and sold candy in the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria. The riskier, the wilder, the funnier, the better. It was all done to share something in common with my father, not that I ever discussed any of those adventures with him.
I couldn’t have articulated this in 1989—hell, it really only occurred to me at some point over the past few years—but I wonder if part of the special appeal of Last Crusade was that it’s a story about a father and son who finally share a grand adventure together, and, in doing so, heal the ties that bind. (Christ, Dad and I never had so much as a vicarious adventure together—he never once took me to see a movie. Isn’t that wild? It was my mother who made the Superman sequels, Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, and The Last Crusade a theatrical priority for me, for which I am grateful.)
Gee, as I type this, I can’t help but consider for the first time that Indiana Jones and Frank Antony have virtually identical backstories: both lost their mothers as preteens from illness-related deaths (scarlet fever and Lou Gehrig’s disease, respectively), and both have been at odds with their emotionally distant fathers during the intervening twenty years. They also both grew up to be committed professionals in their chosen fields, and their workwear is more than a utilitarian practicality; it is an unconscious expression of unconfronted emotional insecurities. In the hopeful spirit of Last Crusade, The Dogcatcher is a far more cathartic father/son story than Spex or The Brigadier, which more accurately reflect my own never-resolved paternally inflicted pain.
Spielberg: Well, you know, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the whole movie, thematically, is about leaps of faith. You know, personal leaps of faith, to trust your love for your father when all your experience has told you that there’s not a relationship to be had there—it’s one leap of faith after the other. And of course there’s many betrayals on that, on that sort of broken highway.
Bouzereau, “Indiana Jones: Making the Trilogy”
Indeed. That’s why this particular piece of “prestige pulp” resonated with me at exactly that neither-here-nor-there threshold between childhood and adolescence, delineated yet more starkly for me by the seismic disruption to our family—the divorce of my parents—resulting from Dad’s rock-bottom alcoholism. Crusade was a warm, funny, reassuring fantasy for a newly minted 13-year-old boy headed into puberty with no one to model manhood for him, who needed to believe his father’s absence from his life, though welcome at the time, wasn’t permanent.
But it was. And over the 12 months that followed, I’d be rocked by a succession of major personal upheavals—the separation was only the beginning—that permanently ended the innocence and happiness of childhood. So, when I see that closing shot of Last Crusade, with Indy and his three (male) companions literally riding off into the sunset, I’m reminded of how the summer of ’89 was a kind of last hurrah of carefree days before those, too, were sunsetted. I was marching inexorably into the 1990s—and adolescence. Consequently, a different type of cinema—darker and far more character-driven—would soon take hold of my impressionable imagination…
“Under the Influence” concludes with “The Top Five Formative Cinematic Muses from My ’90s Adolescence.”
Footnotes
- Quentin Tarantino, Cinema Speculation (New York: Harper, 2022), 141 ↩︎
- ibid., 121 ↩︎
- I’m not tooting my own horn, by the way, merely pointing out that a commercial pitch must convey (as briefly as possible) a narrative premise that is logically sound but also contains dramatic irony ↩︎
- Tarantino, Cinema Speculation, 122 ↩︎
- ibid., 121 ↩︎
- Geddy Lee (with Daniel Richler), My Effin’ Life (New York: Harper, 2023), 211 ↩︎
- Bouzereau, “Back to the Future: Making the Trilogy—Chapter I” ↩︎
- Bouzereau, “Back to the Future: Making the Trilogy—Chapter I” ↩︎
- Even more telling: By 2015, as depicted in Back to the Future, Part II (1989), the social-services office has been evicted from the courthouse, which has been refurbished—privatized—as an upscale shopping mall. Debuting theatrically less than two weeks after the Berlin Wall tumbled, Part II presented a vision of the future in which socialism had been completely stamped out by capitalism, and in which the promise of liberty and justice for all had been so overwhelmingly, indisputably, and irreversibly fulfilled—“The justice system works swiftly in the future,” Doc (Christopher Lloyd) informs Marty, “now that they’ve abolished all lawyers!”—courts of law had been converted into shrines to consumerism. (The sequel also foresaw an insatiable—and commercialized—nostalgic appetite for all-things ’80s: One store on the square traffics in used crap like Dustbusters and Betamax VCRs; the coffee shop is a grotesque pastiche of ’80s cultural artifacts straight out of Ernest Cline’s paraphilic fantasies; the local movie theater is playing a reboot of Jaws.) ↩︎
- Max Read, “Hollywood gave nerds exactly what we wanted. Oops.”, Style, Washington Post, August 30, 2024 ↩︎
- Though the truck does give Marty a nice emotional payoff during the penultimate scene of Back to the Future, Part III (1990) ↩︎
- I wouldn’t see my first R-rated movie in theaters until the following winter, when my friends and I snuck into a screening of The Fly II (1989), the tagline of which, quite notably, was “Like Father. Like Son.” ↩︎
Always nice to read your posts, Sean. I must admit, I liked the old movies better than this new batch.
A great five choices, but I think one gem from 1969 stands out that really is worth writing about in terms of telling stories from the perspective of someone who isn’t a heterosexual white male: Midnight Cowboy. Yes, the lead is a white male, but he’s not heterosexual, and struggles to find a real, lasting platonic relationship with someone after a lifetime of being used by others for simple sexual gratification.
Another film worth mentioning as one of my MANY cinematic influences is 1984’s The Terminator, which expertly combines the horror, science fiction, action, and romance dramas, and in which the unseen future resistance leader, John Connor, becomes a powerful influence over the relationship between his parents and himself, and over how they come together. It’s a sort of, “What if I could choose whom my parents are and how they met?” that, under a less adept storyteller, might have been a colossal failure, yet James Cameron adapted the story of Oedipus for modern audiences in a way that really hadn’t been done before or since, to do a truly unique matchmaker film.