Wednesday, February 28, 2018

The Spectrum Files: Altered States


Spectrum was important for peppering my film growth.  It was like film school to me, albeit I was only in about the 4th grade. My film experience before we subscribed consisted of TV-edited car chase movies and the occasional sci-fi epic.  We borrowed a boat-anchor VCR a few times which peppered in the infrequent Cheech & Chong or Bruce Lee flick, but there wasn't much there but a slightly dusted blank slate as a film history for this boy.  While Spectrum broadcast first-run films just off their theatrical jaunt, it believed in variety and most importantly films of historical importance, despite their audience size or box office cume.  As I stated in the explanation of this blog series, whoever ran the show down there at Spectrum was ahead of their time.  Some of the fairly recent movies it peddled at the time of the subscription, are now deeply regarded as cult classics.

Ken Russell's Altered States was fresh off of its theatrical run, but nonetheless fit into the pretentious art-film mind-funk category just as easily.   A very young William Hurt plays a scientist who decides to dabble in sensory depravation in a quest for exploring the depths of the human subconscious and manages to drive himself a few versions of crazy in the process.  Lots of psycho-medi-babble is bandied about by various actors-as-scientists, and I'm quite sure I remember Hurt being one of those driven men of groundbreaking ignoring warnings by his peers!  At the time up-and-comer (and red-haired Jacqueline Kennedy look-a-like) Blair Brown played Hurt's put-upon lifemate in this inordinately weird opus, and I seem to remember her suffering at the altar of near-subservience, a character trait very common for females of the genre in this era.



William Hurt is now a frequent supporting actor, but his punch is still felt.  His uber-bastard "Thunderbolt" Ross is one of the great baddies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and he plays the role with great relish, having lost none of the power he possessed as an actor over 30 years ago.  The character he plays in Altered States doesn't seem far from the type of scientific mega-geeks Ross torments with regularity in the name of the government and national defense in the MCU.  But I digress.  

Much like many films in the Spectrum playbook, at 10, I wasn't prepared for the route I'd be heading down.  I was blasted with psychedelic and often disturbing quasi-religious imagery that I was in no way prepared for.  The special effects were up to the task in adding the required punch to what I was receiving to my young and not completely formed psyche.  If Mr. Hurt's character was victim, I was a goddamn innocent bystander.

The seeds for future films like Jacob's Ladder and The Doors were sown here, and it is obviously a movie designed to get under your skin and it does so successfully.  Mind you, at the age I was, I was probably processing about 20% of what was happening, and understanding even less, but was still affected and wanted what was happening to Hurt's character to stop.  Didn't anyone else in the room see my head snapping to the left and the right during the most obvious scenes, looking for an explanation or at the very least to be armed with a way to deal with it?

To hell with it, I was probably watching it alone anyway.  That still isn't clear, but I did truly give myself whiplash anyway.  A smarter boy would have simply run from the room.  (once, and I'm not sure what prompted it, a friend, the quirky Neil,  said to me: "I never run from a room" with a straight face, no hint of irony, humor, or even malice.  It was one of the most hilariously glorious moments of my life) Those moments from Altered States, so easily avoided had I the gumption to do what the heroic and obviously suffering-for-all-of-us Neil never stooped to doing,  are vividly implanted in my memory.

Altered States may not be a horror film by definition, but it sure as hell felt like one, and it was one of hell of a mark-leaving introduction to the class, edge, and nasty of the still undervalued William Hurt. (and the stubborn deer-in-the-headlights movie watching I subjected myself to.)











Tuesday, February 27, 2018

Bound to the Past: Star Wars Storybook




The above scene is one of my five favorite scenes of all time in film.

Not because of my love of Daniel Stern.  Not because I grew up with a crush on Ellen Barkin.  But because part of me is Schreivie.  That guy who remembers not only record labels, years, baseball statistics, movie trivia, and song titles, but also connects them firmly to a moment, or moments in the past.

I think everyone has a little bit of that in them.  I once knew a girl who swore to me with stars in her eyes and a tilted grin, that the Joan Jett & The Blackhearts' version of "Crimson and Clover" took her back instantaneously to the summer of 1981 each and every time she listened to it.  She hung back there for a moment or two after telling me that, seemingly hypnotized by the song's echoey refrains, before snapping back to the present moment.  I believed her instantly because she seemed a bit embarrassed by the loss of consciousness that took place there, albeit briefly.

She had gone back in time.  It's a connection.


The connection doesn't always have to be aural.  It can be visceral, like a faint smell of a food not often enjoyed floating in the air at a county fair you remember fondly... or even visual, as in my story to tell, where a picture can take you back in time.  Perhaps even with a quick shocked jolt of shortened breath of warm nostalgia you experience if you haven't seen it in some years.

I have a book full of those moments.

Sometime in 1978, My parents ordered me a copy of "The Star Wars Storybook" from the Scholastic Book Club order form, that by now all kids of several generations are familiar with.  I reopened it recently after re-discovering it, and had that gasp hit me several times...

The still shot of Luke admiring Obi-Wan's blue light saber after he turns it on for the first time.  The X-wing fighter with red laser beams skating perilously close to it, released by the tie-fighter behind in its fierce pursuit.  This same exact image actually graced my metal Aladdin lunchbox.

Those images danced me back almost 40 years.  An old home in Somers, Wisconsin.   A boy in his pajamas, sitting on the rug of his bedroom, just off the living room.  Book open wide in his lap, tiny fingers tracing the line of the Tusken Raider's weapon, flipping pages, ignoring text to regale more images as the smell of pancakes and corned beef hash sifted through the air. Chewbacca and Han Solo inside the Falcon against the refrain of Dad calling his sister to come upstairs to eat breakfast.

And C3-PO and RD-D2, with the sharp twinkle of the falling sun's reflection sparking warmly off of their dusty metal.  Before DVD, and even VHS, it was books like this that kept the image of the movie alive in a young boy's imagination.  It was harder work than re-watching, but in many ways more satisfying, because of the creativity of the mind it elicited in him, as he involved himself in the fantastical storylines.

Yeah, this old book isn't worth much, but it is priceless to me.

As far as books go, It has immense power.

It doesn't contain incantations or rituals, nuclear codes, or manuals of weapon creation.  Its strength is tenfold over any of that.  It can travel through time and take a person with it.  It can bring about smiles, laughter, pride, and sometimes, tears as it is gazed upon.  It can reconnect people who haven't seen one another in decades.  It's a product of love, emanating from the passion of the creators of its contents, in collaboration with those who would bear it as a gift.

Show me a government classified document that can do any of that.



































Wednesday, February 7, 2018

Bound to the Past: Instant Replay



Growing up in the early 80's, Green Bay Packer football was awful for the most part, and continued to be well into that decade.  At one point, as I was lamenting their mediocrity, my father let me know that they were once great.

"Really?"

"Yes, Rob.  As a matter of fact they won the first two Super Bowls."

I may have had a cerebral aneurysm at that point.  That information was staggering. 

That was an actionable statement from the old man. I began to check out books from the library and rent NFL Films videos from the local mom-and-pop on that very subject, The Lombardi-era Packers.  I was energized with the incredible footage of the machine that was Vince's teams.  The skill of their offensive execution, the power of their defensive dominance was regaled in pages of old library books,
and those old dusty VHS tapes that no one but me ever rented.  Watching the Ice Bowl was a staggering event to behold, and to think that it wasn't just the Green Bay Packers, my team, but it happened just a short jaunt to the North of where I was born and raised.

Names were frequently tossed about in my painstaking research (which was required to steel myself in the team's history, so I could put knowledge to use in the acquisition of these great men's bubble gum cards) like Bart Starr, Paul Hornung, Willie Davis, Jim Taylor, Herb Adderley, Ray Nitschke, and Jerry Kramer.

Jerry Kramer.

Fast forward to the winter of 1985.  Waco, Texas.

I was a new kid in the area, having just moved there in October from Wisconsin.  I filled weekend hours with walks, often to the local Richland Mall.  In these days, the mall was different.  I could spend hours there.

First and foremost, a little known fact is that Texas in the summer is just 18 degrees cooler than Hell itself, and the mall was exquisitely air conditioned.

Secondly, Camelot Records was there.  This place was where I began to build onto a record and tape collection of Rock Music and comedy that was just in its infancy.

Third, Waldenbooks and B. Dalton.  A side effect of solo time is vast quantities of reading, and these two stores along with the library provided me with my fodder.  One Friday December evening, while waffling through the sports section at B. Dalton, I came across it.

"Instant Replay" by Jerry Kramer with Dick Schaap.

Kramer was the guard who opened holes for Taylor and Hornung, and one of the protectors of Bart Starr.  He was among the 5 masters of execution on that great Lombardi O-line that helped win 5 NFL Championships in 7 years and 2 Super Bowls.

"Instant Replay" was his diary of the 1967 Season and some 18 years later, it was a descent into a time period, a sports era, and the mind of a young man who was motivated to greatness by one of the greatest coaches in NFL history.  The observations of what was minutiae of every day life to an NFL player was fascinating to me, but the sharp contrasts in what life as a player in that 1967 league to the flash of 1985's version was even more compelling.  I must have read that book 3 times.  The humble nature of this man, while living a life swirling in glorious moments, always brought a smile to my face. The comraderie, the battles, and those small moments...  I learned more about Lombardi's team from that book than all those other sources combined.


This past weekend Jerry Kramer was finally voted, about 30 years late, into the NFL Hall of Fame.  It's true the Hall is filled with Lombardi's soldiers, and that cannot be argued.  In effect so many, that it's reasonable to believe that writers who vote for the players nominations may have been fearing over-saturation of players from that era of the Green Bay Packers.

I thought that was bullshit.  Study the film, guys.   Jerry was a monster.

I'm happy for Mr. Kramer.  He claims it didn't bother him much that he wasn't in, but you could see by the reaction upon his induction that he was overwhelmed with joy.

I met Mr. Kramer about 10 years ago at a signing, where I brought a vintage copy of "Instant Replay" that my mother got for me at a garage sale.  It was just after Replay's co-author had passed away, and I managed to pass along my condolences as well as tell him how much the book meant to me.  He thanked me on both counts, was gracious as hell, and I'll never forget his huge hand as he shook mine.

The book he signed is not the one I stumbled across at B. Dalton all those years ago.  Sadly, along the way, that dog-eared copy with its awkwardly designed cover art and all, vanished.  They both mean the world to me.


Congratulations, Jerry Kramer.  And again, thank you.