Abandon Ship: An Ode to 2016

So, 2016—that wretched hive of scum and villainy—has a few more weeks to wreak havoc on us, the common people. It’s a helpless realization, sort of like the feeling Ellen Ripley must have had at the end of Aliens (1986) when she slowly realized xenomorph eggs surrounded her as far as they eye could see, only to realize the Big Bad Mama would greet her in the immediate future.

It’s bad, is what I’m trying to say. 2016 has been abysmal, and it’s nearly become sort of passé to mention it, so here is my bold suggestion:

Let’s just cut off our losses while we can.

December? I’ve cancelled it. I’ve cancelled the entire month. You’re welcome.

Oh shit, we also lost Alan Rickman this year, didn't we?

Wait, wait, wait. Come back. You can still have Christmas, if that’s important to you. For me, though, even in the best of years the final weeks lack a certain spark, as if everything that the year has to offer has already come to pass, and all I can do is patiently wait for the fresh beginnings of the new year*. 

I would say that we just start 2017 right now, but unfortunately, the space-time continuum doesn’t work that way. What’s left to do? What you linear folk call December, I’m going to call a month out of time. I’m writing off the losses of 2016** and spending the rest of this month getting ready for 2017.

What does that mean?

As I mentioned earlier in the blog, my reading goal for the year was sixty books. At the time of this writing, I am just over thirty. If I somehow managed to read a book a day for the rest of the month, to the expense of any other endeavor I might attempt, I’d still be a book or two short. The plan? I’m going to almost finish as many books as I can. January 1st, I unleash hell. If hell were a flurry of Facebook and/or Goodreads updates.

I can clear the decks of some other things, though. That army of podcasts that has been slowly burning a hole through my phone. They’re going to get listened to! The deluge of comic books that have been staring at me mirthlessly for most of the year? They, at least, can get read.

I’m also going to be doing a bit of an overhaul on the operations here at Party Now Apocalypse Later Industries. I’m going to update the inventory system*** and maybe add a submission section to the site. I pay top dollar for guest blog posts, and only <one of you> has taken advantage so far! Okay, I may not pay top dollar, but I do pay a dollar, and maybe fourteen other ones. You’re sitting on a gold mine! I’ll probably also update the website with an online store, although I have no idea how I’m going to keep up with something like that in addition to everything else. I’ll find a way. 2017 demands it.

Who’s with me? Let’s devote the rest of 2016 to making the preceding 11 months irrelevant. If 2017 is going to be any better, we’ve got to start right now.

*Now, in 2016’s case, that might be a welcome respite, but again, we can’t trust this year to take a break before dying forever, can we? 

**Okay. I probably need to take a moment to catalogue all the good things that happened in 2016. The Cubs won the Series. And… And… This footnote is going to be harder than I thought. My writing career developed a lot this year. There. I came up with a second one, quit hassling me! Oh! I also did manage to (so far) keep my commitment to add something to this blog every week. Hopefully it brought more eyes to Party Now Apocalypse Later. Hi there, if you’re new(ish).

***As in, actually start one.

Keep Looking Up

Despite the conclusion of my eulogy for CJ the Labradane, when Lora and I came around to adopt another pet, we went for a change of pace, to put it mildly. 

That’s a bit of an overstatement. There are a lot of aspects of the story of both CJ and Abbey* that are the same. They both came from rougher-than-necessary backgrounds, before lucking into the care of people who—understandably—didn’t have the resources to care for one more pet. Knowing we had more than enough room, we opened up the doors of Party Now, Apocalypse Later Industries HQ to another ball of fur. 

The similarities ended there. Instead of a calm and assured dog of some years, we opted instead for a weeks-old kitten. She was mostly ears when we got her, so much so that we (read: I) was worried she was some kind of ear-creature from the planet ear-th**. 

This candid shot taken moments after she realized that Quark, Rom, and Nog were the aliens who crashed in Roswell.

To date, Abbey has only displayed three modes of operation: biting, adventure, and sleep.

Don’t let that last one lull you into a false sense of security around our Abbey. We’ve bought her two beds in the five months since we got her, and she has rejected both of them, in favor of sleeping—ahem—between my legs. I’d like to try and blame my lack of sleep in 2016 on Donald Trump, but I think not being able to shift in the night without hearing plaintive meows is a far more likely culprit.

Meals at home have become less a quiet island in the middle of the day and more a prolonged exercise in target practice. Shots from a squirt bottle are the only thing that has any hope of gently dissuading her from jumping from place setting to place setting in hopes of procuring a new straw*** for her collection. Now, before you tell me that a squirt bottle will be an ineffective manner of behavior modification for a cat, let me save you the trouble. She already told us. She loves being squirted. She’s eschewed her water bowl in favor of the hydrations she receives from misbehaving. She’s either a genius, a maniac, or both.

And then there’s the climbing. Abbey The Cat may only have one concrete, cogent thought: I want to be higher than I am right now. In her efforts to elevate, she has found she gets a great reaction from Lora and I when she jumps up on and clings to the edge of any TV in the house. 

For all the consternation this causes we feeble humans, I’ve sort of come to admire her bold efforts. Most animals—humans included—with any sense of self preservation would panic when they find themselves on a surface that is inherently unstable, and not wide enough to cover their body mass. Our Abbey, however, looks up. Maybe she’s aware that she made a terrible mistake climbing on that particular object, but the only way to rectify the situation is to, somehow, go higher. 

Not that this is going to stop you, but you've already found the highest point in the house.

There’s some sort of lesson there: When things seem to have reached their maximum scariest, don’t look for the solid ground of the past. Search for something even scarier. That, and if you can get away with it, sleep for twelve hours each day. 

One imagines that Abbey will have more wisdom to share with the rest of us, and I’ll keep you posted as she decides to reveal them. In the meantime, I’ll wait patiently for her to grow out of the worst instincts of her kitten period…

She will grow out of them, right?

*If you’re not naming pets after characters from The West Wing, you might not be doing it right. Just ask Lin-Manuel Miranda.

**What the hell has happened to me, writing a line like that?

***This little one loves straws. She loves straws more than a creature should love anything procured from Sonic.

Maybe Next Week: Theses in Search of a Blog Post

I didn’t want to write a political post this week. I really had bargained on an outcome to the election that would allow me to put the proceedings in the back of my mind. As a result, my capacity to come up with one topic to make into a blog post still hasn’t come back. As a further result, this week’s post has turned into a random smattering of thoughts that might, under other circumstances, make for a fine blog post, but for this week will only be just that, a random smattering of thoughts. I promised last week that we’d be back to normal this week, and I really do believe that will happen… next week.

Hiring Steve Bannon. Appointing Jeff Sessions as Attorney General. Then, today, getting bent out of shape after the Hamilton cast spoke their mind to what may end up being the least consequential person in his administration. How many chances was I supposed to give him again? I’ve given him three chances now, and as they say in the only thing that went well this year, I think he’s out*.

That’ll be the last political thought in the post. Probably.

I get that it was over ten years ago, but I’m really not ready for people to start feeling nostalgic for the double-oughts**. The new Motorola commercial asks us to “remember 2007” and lament that the landscape of smart phones hasn’t changed since then. 2007 was the future, guys! What happened? 

For that matter, somewhere along the way, my extensive DVD collection morphed from “impressive” to “sort of ridiculous,” while actually growing smaller over the last several years. With all of this new-fangled video-on-demand technology, having hundreds of movies on disc now feels quaint. 

There are good aspects of this new normal of home video ownership. It’s a buyer’s market for used discs. Money for re-selling pieces of your collection is way down, while it’s exceedingly cheap to build a collection now. In a few—or maybe more than a few—years, having an extensive collection of DVDs and Blu Rays will have morphed again. Bey then, I’ll be “delightfully retro” and not “someone who doesn’t understand how iTunes works.” Either way, I can still watch movies any time I want, even if the WiFi is down. So there***.

Okay, so to close things up for the week, I’ll veer—if however tangentially—back into the realm of the political. Some of you out there may be looking for some manner of escape from the political realities. You could do a lot worse than Aaron Sorkin’s premiere series “The West Wing.” It’s available on Netflix****, but in our days of careening from binge watch to binge watch, seven years of hour-long episodes might be a little daunting. You mat not know where to begin. Let me help you. As far as the first four seasons are concerned, watch every single moment. Watch it twice. Watch Season 2 three times. It’s that good. As far as the post-Sorkin seasons go, keep watching Season 5 for as long as you can, with the knowledge that things will eventually get better. Try to make it as far as “Full Disclosure,” as it serves as an adequate prequel to the rebounding later seasons. Season 6 and Season 7 are worth complete watches. The final season falters a little bit from the rebound that was Season 6, but those flaws are largely not the fault of the producers. After the sudden death of a major cast member halfway through the season, they pull away from what might have been some more interesting developments in an attempt not to have the ending be a spiraling vortex of down notes. In their defense, the producers were smart enough to know that they wouldn’t be able to conclusively wrap up just those plot lines they had created, to say nothing of closing out Sorkin’s characters in a satisfying manner. Instead, they opt for an informal multi-part finale after they wrap up the election storyline, not unlike Deep Space Nine did several years before…

:deep breath: …I just really like the show, and I think you would, too. Especially now. “The West Wing Weekly” podcast is also a good companion piece to the series. 

Anyway, thanks for allowing me to clear out the cobwebs, I’ll be back next week with something more substantial. I might write about nerd blind spots (we all have them). Or maybe I’ll write about my cat. She’s doing her level-headed best to annoy me, but deep down I kind of admire it. Only one way to find out which direction I eventually go: watch this space next week!

*That’s what a baseball umpire says, right? “I think he’s out.”

**Did we ever come up with a definable name for the decade 2000-2009? If so, I didn’t get the memo.

***Man, that nearly did become a blog on its own.

****And, true to myself, I bought the entire series on DVD. Twice.

Cheat Week, Part 5: If ever there was a week to take off... OR When in doubt, Odo

The ratings on this card are top notch. I checked. To be fair, though, his cunning should be stronger... and his integrity... Hell, the whole thing is kind of a low-ball. 

Anything that can be said about the last week has been said before, so I won't add much more to the proceedings. Next week, we'll pick up where we left off with some harmless trifle. That all being said, I find myself thinking more and more about Odo, the shape-shifting security chief from "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine." I think we should all yearn to be more like Odo. Consider:

 •If you're not flexible enough to fit into a bucket, you could still be a bit more flexible.

•Your people may be incomprehensible at times. Still, they are your people. 

 •I've been searching for a quote from the character all night where he extolled the virtues of being different than the people around you. I haven't found it, but it's also a good lesson.

•And, finally: "Laws change depending on who's making them. Cardassisn one day, Federation the next. But justice is justice."

Let's be like Odo. 

See everybody next week. 

But Where Will The Billy Goat Go Now?

I watched some terrific television this week. These “Cubs”—the heroes of a show that has lasted for 140 seasons—pulled off an episode for the ages. I don’t need to tell you; you were probably watching it. I can only hope next week’s episode is half as exciting…

Ha. Ha. We all get it. To talk about sports this week would be a pretty severe departure for this blog and, by extension, me. I’ve often prided myself on my lack of interest in the sportsball* games that show up on the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network of Bristol, Connecticut. 

Still, growing up in a family hailing from Chicago, where the Northside Team was the closest thing we had to a religious tradition**, I couldn’t help but be aware of the highs and mostly lows of the Cubs. My baptism*** had to be scheduled around the 1984 NLCS. Had the Cubs made it to the World Series in 2011****, my father’s attendance at my wedding was subject to cancellation, and everyone understood. When the 1998 Wild Card berth fell into sudden danger, it was the only time that my normally level-headed father needed to “walk it off.” To this date, I don’t know what my father shouted in our backyard, but the grass never grew quite right after that.

The Cubs victory over the Indians in game 7 of the World Series has flung me for a loop, although that probably doesn’t begin to cover how Dad feels. My father has followed the Cubs for decades, and that entire time “Maybe Next Year” was as close to a rallying cry as fans ever got.

But what about next year? Well, clearly, the World Series will be a re-match of the Cubs and the Indians, and the Cubs will win it in four. That much is obvious. But what is that next great unattainable? When my father and I discussed it, we figured that the only equivalent for me to the Cubs winning the World Series for him would be if scientists were to discover the secret safe, fun, and affordable time travel. Which, as we all know, would’ve allowed me to make more than a little money on the Cubbies this season.

I have a temptation to make this blog entry conform to themes that appeared in previous blogs, and contort the victory of the Cubs into some plea that society keep itself together for another week, but it seems a little hum-drum to try and equate the election with the Cubs win. Game 7 of the 2016 World Series was genuine magic. We all witnessed it. Did you see Bill Murray’s face at any time in the last week? The election, hopefully, will be fine. If it isn’t, we’ll all be fine. No matter what your hopes are for the days ahead, I do believe we’ll all learn to live with the outcome*****. As in all things, even for Cubs fans, there’s always “next year.”

That being said, if Election Night is anything like Game 7, in lieu of flowers, please donate to the American Heart Association.

*Sportsball is the one with the shoulder pads and the ice skating, right? I mean, it’s not like we have a game called “football” that only intermittently features the use of feet. That would be madness.

**Besides, you know, Presbyterianism.

***Yep. I was baptized. I know. This blog is really going off the beaten path.

****They didn’t, but you already knew that.

*****But seriously, though, folks? Go vote.

NaNo? More like "No, no!" Am I right?

It’s mid-October as I am writing this, but it will be late October by the time you read it. I’m assuming we’re now living in a wild future of Cubs championships, and someone finally getting Donald Trump to say his name backwards so that he disappears back to his dimension of shriveled pumpkins and shouting*. Now that the major crises of our time are-p winding down, I want to direct our attention now to an entirely different plight.

Do you have friends who fancy themselves novelists**? Well, they may be ramping up to that greatest of challenges: NaNoWriMo***. National Novel Writing Month. One book. Thirty days. 50,000 words****. 

It’s not for the faint of heart. For that matter, I can’t understate the importance of exercises meant to strengthen and loosen up your wrists. I participated for the first time last year, and “won,” to use their term. I came in at 57,309 words and completed the first draft of what will hopefully one day become The Once and Future Orson Welles…*****

And I kind of wish I hadn’t done it at all. I may not have been in the best state of mind going into November 2015, and I think that gave the writing I produced that whole month a decidedly rushed feeling. A character pops up in Chapter One, I abandon him by Chapter Three, and then I realize that the plot falls apart without the mystery person****** before I type the words “Epilogue.” I have yet to master the muted nature of the story, and am only now finding an internal life that might save it. And the title? Oh boy, did that title elude my conscious mind until just a few short months ago.

And this is all fine. This is the work of rough drafts. Vomit some words and then spend the next year trying to mold them into something worth someone else’s time. But for me, NaNo became an endurance test, fueled by increasingly daredevil amounts of caffeine and a steady diet of Rocky soundtracks. But, writing shouldn’t be an endurance test, or at least it doesn’t have to be. Creating a writing career for yourself? That is where the endurance comes in. The better rough drafts I have written, I was relaxed and able to let my mind wander ahead of me from time to time. NaNo doesn’t really allow for that. Just as you finish your word count for the day, another day comes careening right behind it. Unfortunately, you can’t claim it’s a religious holiday and get off of work. Also, you can order T-shirts. I can see it being a wonderfully valuable thing for someone to jump start the work ethic that is needed to bring a novel into reality, but I don’t think diligence about regular writing is my problem. I need to like doing this for it to still be worth doing. If I don’t, then it might as well be my day job.

So, I’m not going to do NaNo this month. I did, however, think I should do something to test my endurance, or somehow re-enforce my writing. For a brief moment, I considered doing the exact opposite of NaNo and not write a single word for the entire month. I could try living a little and re-connect with the things that made me want to write in the first place. But then, I realized that if I spend even one day not writing, I’m a walking, talking headache medicine commercial*******. If I were to try for thirty days, I would quickly become a poster child for the Toht school of exfoliation.

So, I quickly ruled out not writing at all. I will try to clear the decks of any other projects I have been working on, and really bear down and try to fix the book I wrote one year ago. While I have spent the last several months working out many of the details of “The Fourth Wall********”, I think I have cleared my brain of all the muck I’ve gathered in the writing of The Once and Future Orson Welles that I can attack its problems once again, and this time a little more productively. I know I can. I just have to take my time.

And yet, there is still the matter of testing my endurance. I could try watching Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Again. The Ultimate Edition, no less. Not quite the restorative experience I might have otherwise hoped for. It might behoove me to try and get back on track with my reading goals for the year. I’m well below my quota, and am in very reasonable danger of not making the goal for the first time in several years. Sadly, even if I were to somehow read a book a day for the whole month, I would still be running behind. 

I really should work on getting back into shape. After a smattering of health issues last year and losing a fine walking buddy in CJ, I’ve let my physical activity slide, and its starting to show. If I keep letting these things slide, there may come a day very soon when I can’t try to get any healthier. So, instead of writing at least 1,667 words every day, I’m going to go walking. I’ll take a book with me and I will walk as far as I can before I feel I have to turn back. It won’t get me fit as a fiddle again, I’m sure, but it just might get me back on the right track. I think I can do it. I mean, I wrote a novel in a month… I can do anything, right?

*Note from the future/present: Boy, did I call that one wrong. I forgot to factor in the possibility of Anthony Weiner. And one should never negate the possibility of Anthony Weiner giving a Yeoman’s effort in ruining things.

**Of course you do. If you’re reading this, chances are you know me personally. With that being said, if you enjoy what you see here, please tell your friends about the blog…  That is, your other friends. Don’t tell me about Bloggy B. Bloggington, DDS. It’s already on my RSS feed.

***Don’t ask me how to pronounce it. Just like with religion, each person has to look in their heart and decide what the truth is. If you want to say the word like it is a homonym of “kumquat,” then by all means…

****Or 1,667 words per day, for those of you that just got a nosebleed looking at that many zeros.

*****Did I just reveal the title of Orson Book 3? I guess I just did. Gah, now I have to go actually finish the damned thing.

******Okay. You twisted my arm. I admit it. I tried to cut Orson Welles out of The Once and Future Orson Welles. Probably should have picked up on that one earlier than I did.

*******Does that make me an addict? Maybe. So what? There are far worse things to be addicted to in this world.

********Coming soon, from Party Now, Apocalypse Later Industries!

Five Years In And No End In Sight: Thoughts on Marriage

I’m supposed to give my wife something wooden this year, as we are celebrating our fifth wedding anniversary. As I neglected to follow the rules and get paper for the first anniversary, cotton on our second, leather on our third*, or fruit/flowers on our fourth, I think she’ll forgive me for not procuring something whittled out of an oak tree this year, or God forbid, whittling it myself.

We’ve never been ones to do what was supposed to be done, though. Both before we met and after, we’ve (and she may deny this a little more than I would) both been pretty good about not doing something simply because it was the accepted way to do it. 

I abandoned law school for a quiet job** and time to write; she returned to college after a five year gap to finish her degree. Had either of us become a lawyer or just made do with the job we had, we likely never would have met.

She ensorcelled me quickly, pretty much from the moment that she made reference to both Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) and Back to the Future (1985) in the span of one conversation. Now, keep in mind, this wasn’t a pre-formatted confab on the wonders of 1980s time travel comedies. Her mind just went there over the course of a half hour conversation. That’s right; there are two of us. 

While I hesitate to speak for her, I’m willing to bet that somewhere between my sporting a mid-90s Jonathan Frakes vibe*** and questioning why she thought she was able to park in the handicapped spot, she may have started to think I was probably an okay guy. Please don’t dissuade her of that notion. Left to my own devices, our house would both flood and catch on fire in the same instant****.

We are a team. Scratch that. I’m on her team. I want her career to take off and for her to make more money than me not because it means I can take it easy for a few years*****, but because she always wants to do more than what she is doing right now. If she wants it, I want it. Even if that means watching Empire Records (1995) and I don’t quite understand how a rational person would ever want to do such a thing.

Together, we are an unstoppable force. If you come up against us… You. Will. Lose. Also, we’ll make fun of you for trying. And here’s a little secret for you: She’s funnier than I am. 

Part of the traditional wedding vows include “forsaking all others,” and I don’t think many people give that clause the consideration it's due. Marriage really isn’t that hard if you’ve got your priorities in order, and sometimes that means everybody else can go to hell. Dear Reader, you are very important to me, but if you went away tomorrow, I’d still write, and she’d still be there for me. What’s more, if she ever asked me to stop writing altogether, I’d do it******.

Have a different view on the whole marriage thing? Do your six separate times down the aisle give you far more experience than my scant one try? Let me know in the comments. In the mean time, I’ll spare the rest of you the mushy details of our fifth anniversary coming up on the twenty-ninth, except to say: I love you, semicolon, and if it’s really important to you, I’ll take up whittling.

*Cotton? Leather? Somebody is just making these up. The anniversary gifts are starting to sound like the rider of an insane rock star. For our seventh anniversary, I have to get Lora 713 blue M&Ms in a turquoise jar, or apparently its grounds for divorce.

**I’m still waiting for that part to come true. Ever. So. Patiently. Waiting.

***Known in other circles as a grin and a beard.

****Our house has such poor ventilation, that the Tulsa Fire Department has deemed our house “98% Backdraft.” Don’t look it up.

*****It’s also because of that.

******Although, saying that is pretty easy, because I know she would never ask.

Election 2016: Remember When This Used to be Fun?

For months now I’ve been hinting at—or maybe threatening—a meditation on the election in this blog. It’s probably time to make good on my threat. We only have a few weeks left of this garbage fire. I know, I also am both excited that it’s almost over, and bewildered that the networks didn’t cancel this show over the summer.

Part of my hesitation to weigh in has been that this space has, largely, been an entertainment blog. While I often fail to see the difference between entertainment and politics, any strictly political entry seemed like a bummer when compared with a thousand words comparing what it would be like to have Michael Keaton play Batman just one more time. Also, this election in particular is more of a bummer than most elections.

Now, I make that above “bummer” conclusion not in an effort to echo the sentiment so many others have offered that this election is a choice between two evils, and that we’re far too interested in what’s happening on “The Walking Dead” to decide which evil is lesser.

Also, this election has been so strange, so obsessed with lurchingly moving from one weird fringe issue to another ghastly revelation, that it’s been hard to get a handle on one, unified thesis on the matter. I’m fairly certain I’m not going to find it in these few paragraphs, but it doesn’t mean I shouldn’t make the attempt.

There is a very clear choice in this election. If you, dear reader, are in favor of Donald Trump, I can respect that. If you like the things he says, and still like him when he denies ever saying the first thing you liked, then that is your choice. Each of us must make a decision* in this election, and you have made yours. But make no mistake: if you vote for Donald Trump even once, you’ll be a Donald Trump voter for life. You can’t take it back. Same thing goes for Hillary or the rest of the people on the ballot. If you can live with choosing the person you intend to vote for, then I think you should absolutely vote for them.

If you’re voting for Clinton, or Trump, or Johnson, or Stein, or McMullin** really think about whether you are supporting them, or are objecting to something one of the other candidates said. All of them have said stupid foolish things***; they are human beings competing in a realm that punishes anything resembling human behavior****. If we’re unhappy with the menu, we may only have ourselves to blame, but that doesn’t change the options available.

The impulse to go shopping for another option is strong. I’ll admit, as a mostly partisan Democrat*****, I thought about voting for Gary Johnson for a long stretch of time. Wait, wait, wait. Come back. I was only going to do it to help Hillary out in the long run. Hear me out. If Gary Johnson could post halfway-decent numbers in 2016, and the Libertarian Party received more public funding for 2020******, they would be in a better position to peel off disaffected voters from the Republican nominee, increasing Clinton’s chances at re-election. Then I realized that a) Johnson is less a sane alternative for President, and more a retired weed salesman in need of a hobby, and b) the Libertarian Party is peeling off disaffected Democrats almost as much as they are the Republicans. I went firmly back into the Hillary camp.

Look, fellow Democrats, I get the ennui. We’ve been spoiled as of late. After the heartache that was 2004*******, Election Night 2008 was a shot of pure endorphins. We’ve been chasing that high ever since. 2012 didn’t quite cut it, at least not in the same way. 2016 probably won’t either, although some of you might think if Bernie were the nominee and won the general, that would bring back that old familiar feeling********. I think we may need to, at least for this year, realize that the age of Barack Obama is coming to a close and take our medicine.

I might be wrong. As I read over the preceding paragraphs, it dawns on me that I might have done a yeoman’s job at pissing off every corner of the political world*********. Oh well. Let me leave you with a thought we can all agree on: Just go vote. If you vote, you get a sticker. If you get enough stickers, you’ll never grow old, and you’ll never die. It’s science. Look it up. No. Don’t look it up. Just trust me, I have all the best science knowledge. It’s election season. Why would I lie to you**********?

*Disabuse yourself of the notion that not voting at all is the decision that absolves you of any responsibility for what’s about to happen. You still made a choice. You still voted in your silence. No one gets out of this without some responsibility for the mess.

**I’m sad to report that he is not on the ballot in Oklahoma, my Republican friends. However, if you live in the far-flung untamed wilderness of Utah, you have a real opportunity to throw some fun chaos into the election.

***The first stupid and foolish thing that these people say is usually, “I declare my candidacy for President of the United States.”

****Before you start: If the current polling is any indication, presidential politics also has the thankful habit of punishing inhuman behavior as well. Just as it should be. Did I just betray my bias?

*****I’ve voted for a few local Republicans in elections. This would occur in races where there was no Democrat and the third party candidate was to the right of the Republican, or in races where I knew the Democrat was kind of a scuzzball. I’ve never been remotely close to voting for a Republican for President, but it is a possible scenario. It would have to be a matchup similar to a hypothetical one between walking-haircut John Edwards and legitimately decent, intelligent human being Colin Powell. In short, this isn’t that election.

******Which, in and of itself, would be pretty ironic.

*******Kids, ask your parents.

********It won’t.

*********Jill Stein smells funny. There. Now I’ve pissed everybody off.

**********In the future, I think scholars will call this my footnote period. And before you make the comment — no, I do not admit that Hillary lies more than Trump. Stop asking. It’s a silly question.

Fixing Pop Culture Errors of the Past, Part Three: Try As I Might, I Can’t Fix the Theme Song.

Before you read this blog post, you might want to watch Season 4, Episode 22 of Star Trek: Enterprise, “These Are the Voyages…” If I’ve lost you already, I can respect that, but this still might be interesting.

We've all been there. You’re sitting around talking about movies or TV shows, carefully avoiding any discussion involving the real issues of life like mortgages, mortality, or the fact that as time goes on, those aches and pains are becoming the norm. The discussion becomes a indictment of sorts, bringing up pointless charges against the various “crimes” perpetrated by pop culture over the years.

Inevitably, there is no forward momentum to these discussions. At best, we collectively revel in our knowledge that we know what these artists did wrong. All too often, all we do is rage against their wrongness in the face of our incorruptible rightness.

Before, I never seemed to have any other solutions for the problems. Well, with this blog series, I’m going to change all of that. Here, I offer the third (and final, for the moment) of what may end up being several pop cultural solutions. 

These fixes can’t cheat. Aaron Sorkin can’t keep writing for the fifth season of The West Wing. Obviously, that would improve the lost season of that show. However, the man wrote nearly every episode of an hour-long drama for four straight years. Burn out would have come along at some point. Just look at the one season of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.  

We can’t go with simple answers, either. It isn’t enough to say just make Batman & Robin (1997) “better.” You take that script and that cast and in just two years make a better movie. I dare you*.

Now that I’ve gotten my obligatory dig into Schumacher out of the way for this week, let’s look to the stars for a moment.

In the 1990s the Star Trek production team at any given moment were producing two television series and a feature film. While they were just a tiny subset of the massive Paramount/Viacom machine, they managed to have more greenlight power than most independent studios of the time.

It didn’t last. As ratings declined for Voyager and Insurrection (1998) engendered a relatively lukewarm reaction at the box office, the machine slowed down. They did not immediately replace Deep Space Nine with a new series. When Nemesis (2002) fared even worse, the one series left on the air didn’t exactly demand the love of Trek fans.

Enterprise started strongly enough, with a concept that took the franchise in a new (if continuity defying) direction. But a writing staff largely unchanged from the creative nadir of Voyager led the show into the same rut of time travel**, holodeck, and Borg stories that hobbled the storytelling potentials of its predecessor.

Things did start to improve for the fourth Trek spinoff. A creative shakeup in the fourth season re-committed the program to its concept and dug deep to further flesh out the universe that Roddenberry ushered into life. The varying head ridges on Klingons? Explained, and with a storyline that weaves in elements of Khan and the Eugenics Wars, Mr. Data’s family tree, and a stray reference to the Briar Patch. The Mirror Universe comes back (or arrives for the first time) in a big way. The show even begins to follow through on the promise of its original mission and depicts the first blossoming of the later ubiquitous United Federation of Planets. The Next Generation didn’t truly find its way until the third or fourth year, and Enterprise was beginning to overcome a shaky start.

It couldn’t overcome an audience that had stopped watching, however. The fourth season proved to be Enterprise’s last. Despite turning in an encouragingly watchable season, the show’s final episode often rivals 1968’s “Spock’s Brain” as the worst episode in all of Trekdom. “These Are The Voyages…” goes back to that holodeck trope I mentioned above, making the entire episode about Commander Riker from The Next Generation watching TV for an hour that he really could have spent working. Episode writers and show creators Brannon Braga and Rick Berman wanted the final send off of 18 years of constant Trek production to be a “valentine to the fans.” What they ended up producing was a room temperature cup of dingy bath water. For eleven years it has left a sour feeling in the stomachs of the fans, the actors, and even the writers themselves, who eventually renounced the episode as “a misstep” and “languid.”

But what if it wasn’t? What if — while the episode may not have been a superlative finale to the voyages of Captain Jonathan Archer and crew, it could have lived up to its ambition and brought the era of The Next Generation to Enterprise to an end and looked forward to the hope that Star Trek might rise again with the help of lens flares.

It would take a lot of work to fix the episode. Here’s just a couple of ideas to recalibrate things.

1. The framing device needs to take place post-Nemesis. It’s pretty weird that the thesis statement for all of Trek up until that moment has to be wedged into the middle of an obscure (if pretty good) episode from 1994. If the producers were dead-set on letting the 24th century look back on the 22nd, it would have been better to look forward. For another thing, we wouldn’t have to try to buy Jonathan Frakes as ten years younger, when he is, for lack of a nicer term, definitely not.

2. If you want it to be a finale of all Trek, that means all Trek. In the episode as aired, there are a few references to The Next Generation, two quick stop-offs to The Original Series, and then nothing. Deep Space Nine and Voyager—accounting for fourteen of the twenty-eight years of Trek produced to that time—aren’t given so much as an acknowledgement. The producers didn’t have two hours to go everywhere and see everything, but I think there are opportunities that they just whiffed.

3. If you’re going to include characters from other shows, it wouldn’t kill you to actually give them an arc. Here is Riker’s story in “These Are the Voyages…”: Riker is debating whether to tell Picard about the existence of a top-secret cloaking device (we know that he does; we've already seen that episode). He then decides to tell him. The End. Credits. If Riker had at least half an obstacle to overcome during his interactions with the holo-versions of the Enterprise crew, that might go a long way to making the episode work on even a basic level.

4. The show should probably try to be some kind of a finale for Enterprise. Now, again they only have forty-two minutes to work with here, but the final episode pointedly avoided any sort of pathos towards the larger Enterprise crew. Hoshi Sato, the reluctant comm officer on the NX-01 is reduced to a handful of lines, at least of third of which are devoted to questioning how attracted she was to another to another character.

Granted, that already is a pretty long list of grievances to redress. It would take somebody re-writing the entire episode from page one to make an honest attempt to fix the episode and end things on a high note.

That person would have to be crazy to completely re-write an eleven-year-old episode of television. Right? Right.

So, I re-wrote the episode. All of it. You can find it here. 

I’m strangely proud of it, or as proud as I can be of anything that distracted me from other writing projects off and on for three weeks. I hope you get a kick out of it.

Was I crazy for undertaking this project? Have we already gone over that much? Is the final episode of Enterprise a work of staggering genius that must be given its proper respect? What songs would have made a better theme song for the show? Gangsta’s Paradise? One-Eyed One-Horned Flying Purple People Eater? All of them? Let me know in the comments.

*You probably could. Any of you. Even you. I don’t know what I was thinking defending Joel Schumacher.

**A word about time travel stories. I love them. LOVE them. They are my bread and butter. That being said “Year of Hell” style stories run out their welcome pretty quickly. You got to have stakes in your story, guys (and ladies). The reset button should be avoided at all cost, or at least subverted. Therein ends the time travel rant.

Fixing Pop Culture Errors of the Past, Part Two: When in doubt, Keaton.

We've all been there. You’re sitting around talking about movies or TV shows, carefully avoiding any discussion involving the real issues of life like mortgages, mortality, or the proper mixture of spices for a Crock Pot pot roast. The discussion becomes a indictment of sorts, bringing up pointless charges against the various “crimes” perpetrated by pop culture over the years.

Inevitably, there is no forward momentum to these discussions. At best, we collectively revel in our knowledge that we know what these artists did wrong. All too often, all we can detect is a general sense of badness that is not terribly more evolved than Tom Hanks trying caviar for the first time*.

Before, I never seemed to have any other solutions for the problems. Well, with this blog series, I’m going to change all of that. Here, I offer the second of what may end up being several pop cultural solutions. 

These fixes can’t cheat. Sean Connery can’t fix Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) with his mere presence alone. For one thing, Connery has completely retired effective with League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003)**. For another, the movie’s problems run much deeper than its lack of callbacks to Last Crusade (1989).  

We can’t go with simple answers, either. It isn’t enough to say that M. Night Shyamalan should have stopped making movies with Signs (2002). For one thing, The Visit ((2015) is actually a return to keep-you-guessing form, and there just has to be a version of The Village (2004) that actually works. It probably involves the absence of a Sci-Fi Channel documentary about the mysterious wonder that is M. Night Shyamalan.

Now that that is out of the way, let’s talk about Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016). Again. Is it the worst movie of all time? No. Is it even the worst movie that features billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne and Alfred Pennyworth, his trusted butler? No. Does it have the worst third act turn in the history of screenwriting? Probably. But I may have come here not to bury Martha, but to praise her.

There are things to like about the movie. Against all odds, the man who was cut out of Elektra (2005) ended up being a pretty awesome Batman. I, begrudgingly, look forward to more from Affleck in Justice League***, and definitely anticipate his solo-Batman film. He’s a pretty great director, and it’ll be interesting to see a Directed-by-and-Starring-Affleck Batfilm.

But almost no one was on board with the idea of him as the Dark Knight when his casting was announced. I made the jokes, too. It wasn’t even that Affleck was a bad idea. Sure, he got a hefty pile of superhero-stank on him appearing Daredevil (2003).

And because of that film, he swore he would never be in another superhero movie. It seemed a little off. For my money, though it just meant that Affleck had to be good a this. If Daredevil was an embarrassment, whiffing on Batman would be pretty bad indeed. Although, to be fair, Clooney recovered.

I think our collective allergy to Batfleck came not from the choice of he-who-also-wrote-Good-Will-Hunting to fill Christian Bale’s breeches, but that Warner Brothers couldn’t wait for The Dark Knight Rises (2012) to hit Blu Ray before they started working on rebooting the character all over again. Your mileage may vary with each movie of the Nolan trilogy, but it’s hard to deny that he produced a pretty definitive version of the Caped Crusader about a half an hour before Affleck donned the cape and cowl.

Here’s my pitch, or at least what would have been my pitch, had Warner Brothers asked me in the days following the release of Man of Steel (2013).

Go ahead. Make your DC Cinematic Universe. You can’t let Marvel have a monopoly on that kind of an ongoing series. The Time Warner board won’t sit still for it. I get it. But, here’s the one change you need to make to your plans:

Don’t include Batman.

Hear me out. The character needs at least ten years before someone else can bring something truly new to the table. Let it lie.

Now, I didn’t say anything about not including Bruce Wayne****.

One of the seminal Batman stories that has yet to be brought to the film***** is The Dark Knight Returns. Its tale of a Bruce Wayne past his prime has had far reaching impact on subsequent Batman stories. Both the animated series and ongoing comic Batman Beyond is built on the concept of a geriatric Bruce searching for some sort of relevance post-Batman. Even Kingdom Come finds Wayne aging out of the Batman role, but modifying what Batman means so that he can continue to keep order in Gotham.

The future Justice League films should follow (or should have followed) Kingdom Come’s lead. In the sequels, as Superman amasses the League to meet the challenge of Darkseid or whatever big bad the movies are headed towards, there is one source of resources and information that simply can’t be ignored. 

Bruce Wayne has long since hung up the cowl, but he is the key to giving the Justice League their best chance to prevail. He wouldn’t have to be in the movie long, but he would have a central role in the plot.

Who would play him?

Well, the one actor I have a long track record of saying should play almost every role in movies:

Think about it. Give him the Marlon Brando deal: a few days of work, a Brinks truck worth of money, and he doesn’t have to don a big rubber suit. And give him a meaty, memorable role****** that just might interest him again. It would have worked. Furthermore, while we all think that Warner Brothers has been running behind on the shared cinematic universe. What if I told you that the first film of the DC Universe movie was actually released nearly thirty years ago? With the recent groundswell in the 90s nostalgia-industrial-complex, the movie would have sold itself. Manchildren in their thirties******* from all over will become positively rapturous over the mere notion of getting their Batman back, even if only for few minutes.

Do I need to leave Warner Brothers alone? Are they geniuses routinely trouncing those fools over at AOL-Time-Disney-Lucasfilm-Marvel? Am I being too soft on them? Do they need to be subjected to wave after wave of ridicule until they can piece together a watchable film? Let me know in the comments.

Next week: I go full-Kurtz on this trip down the pop culture correction river. It’s big. It may be the dumbest thing I have ever done, but it sure is big. I’ll give you a clue: Edosian Suckerfish.

*For the record, caviar is delicious. This will be the one and only time I will publicly disagree with Tom Hanks.

**Probably for the best.

***Even if the early trailer is a little light on course correction from Dawn of Justice.

****No. I’m not pitching Gotham: The Motion Picture. Something about that show bugs me, and I just can’t put my finger on it. I can’t stop watching it, so I guess that’s something.

*****Outside of Bale’s half-baked decrepitude and arbitrary retirement in the aforementioned Rises.

******Lest we forget, the flimsy arc of Batman Forever (1995) was the reason Keaton originally hung up the cowl and we were all subjected Val Kilmer smiling in a mask.

*******And if there’s one thing I understand, its manchildren in their thirties. Look at that! I may have broken my record for footnotes.

Fixing Pop Culture Errors of the Past, Part One: Let Joe Flaherty Have the Last Word

We've all been there. You’re sitting around talking about movies or TV shows, carefully avoiding any discussion involving the real issues of life like mortgages, mortality, or what kind of beans should be used to make vegetarian goulash. The discussion becomes a indictment of sorts, bringing up pointless charges against the various “crimes”* perpetrated by pop culture over the years.

Inevitably, there is no forward momentum to these discussions. At best, we collectively revel in our knowledge that we know what these artists did wrong. All too often, all we can detect is a general sense of badness that is not terribly more evolved than Donald Sutherland’s famed reaction in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978).

We don’t seem to ever have any answers for how we would do things better, do we**? Well, let’s change all of that today. Here, I offer the first of what may end up being several pop cultural solutions. These fixes can’t cheat. We can’t have Heath Ledger play his Joker in Suicide Squad. He’s unavailable. We can’t go with simple answers, either. It isn’t enough to say that George Lucas shouldn’t have made a movie about a ten-year-old Anakin Skywalker; we’ve got to come up with the framework under which the prequel trilogy, or even a film with li’l Darth Vader, could work better.

I’ve written a little bit about it in this blog previously, but despite my absolute untempered love for Back to the Future Part III (1990), the movie is not without its flaws. It has one flaw that completely unravels the film when one subjects it to the amount of scrutiny that I have over the last 25+ years.

The ending doesn’t make a lick of sense. The moment Doc’s time traveling train shows up, the logic of all three movies breaks down, just so that Doc and Marty can share one last exchange, and Doc can get his dog back. Final exchanges between the two heroes are fine, and just leaving Einstein to fend for himself would have been a pretty callous fate for the pup. I’ll admit that much. However, a large amount of the tension in the trilogy is predicated on trying to get the DeLorean time machine to work with limitations of pre-1985 technology. Doc can’t get the time machine to work when he first arrives in 1985, but now that he’s a known train robber, he can make one out of a train, no problem.

It’s a set piece. It’s a nice image. The movie still needs a better framework for its ending.

So I went ahead and fixed it. I had planned on just pitching the beats of my alternate ending to Part III, but as I continued to work on it, I just went ahead and re-wrote the last five pages of the script from scratch. Like to hear it? Here it go.

EXT. HILL VALLEY - TRAIN TRACKS - DAY

MARTY and JENNIFER approach the wreckage of DeLorean.

JENNIFER

You’re right. There’s not much left.

MARTY

Doc’s never coming back***.

Marty leans down and among the parts of the car, finds a torn shard of the picture of DOC BROWN at the dedication of the Clock Tower. He examines the picture.

MARTY

(cont.)

I’m sure gonna miss him, Jenn.

She has only a moment to give him an ounce of sympathy, before they are interrupted by the sound of a car approaching. They turn to see an old truck approach. A frail, OLD MAN wearing a suit exits. He looks stern; world weary. He holds a clipboard.

OLD MAN

I feel ridiculous asking this, but are

you Martin McFly?

Marty and Jennifer exchange a worried look. How do they explain the pieces of the DeLorean? Marty still hasn’t put together where he last saw this man.

MARTY

Who’s asking?

The man grimaces and through a limp, approaches. He reaches into his jacket pocket and as Marty and Jennifer both wince, he pulls out an envelope.

OLD MAN

I’ve got a letter for you!

It’s only at this moment that it dawns on Marty although the preceding thirty years may not have been kind to him, it is the WESTERN UNION MAN who brought Marty a message from Doc Brown thirty years earlier. Marty takes the envelope and eagerly takes the envelope.

WESTERN UNION MAN

Sign on line six, please!

Half-way through the envelope, Marty stops to sign the man’s papers. He then goes back to the letter. The Western Union Man continues, but neither Jennifer nor Marty are paying attention, as they look at the letter.

WESTERN UNION MAN

(cont.)

I almost forgot, I’ve got a package as

well.

(beat)

You know, I’ve been working for Western

Union for forty years, and you’d never

know it, but we get a lot of strange

requests. You see, we’ve had that

letter in our possession for nearly

100 years! 95 years, 5 months, and 2

days to be exact.

 (beat)

You weren’t here at the moment we

were instructed to deliver the letter,

but my supervisor figured I better

check again!

(beat)

I nearly asked him who’d be around

to complain, but who needs that kind

of aggravation?

(beat)

I tell ya, the weirder the request, the

more likely the recipient is actually

going to be there to take possession!

Close in on the letter as Marty reads.

DOC BROWN

(v.o.)

Dear Marty…

CUT TO:

EXT. SHONASH RAVINE - 1885 - DAY

DOC BROWN and CLARA observe the wreckage of the train. Marty’s hoverboard floats nearby.

DOC BROWN

(v.o., cont.)

Once again, let me assure you that

I am alive and well. 

DISSOLVE TO:

LATER

The entire town (including SEAMUS and MAGGIE has come out to see the re-dedication     of the ravine in favor of their fallen hero, Clint Eastwood.

DOC BROWN

(v.o., cont.)

I am also pleased to report that we

are completely free of any legal trouble

after our latest experiment…

CUT TO:

INT. HILL VALLEY COURT HOUSE - 1885 - DAY

MAYOR HUBERT officiates at the trial of BUFORD’S GANG. Doc is on the witness stand. It is clear from the looks on the gang’s face and Doc’s pantomime that he is implicating them in the train robbery for which Doc and Marty are responsible.

DOC BROWN

(v.o., cont.)

Although I can only hope Buford’s

gang are never released from their

chain gang.

(beat)

If my calculations are correct, you

will receive this letter immediately

after you returned to 1985…

DISSOLVE TO:

MONTHS LATER

The entire town has come out for Doc and Clara’s wedding, Mayor Hubert officiates and the town has taken the same seats for the event.

DOC BROWN

(v.o., cont.)

Although I hope you will forgive me

if my calculations prove to be incorrect.

I’ve been a bit distracted as of late.

CUT TO:

INT. DOC’S HOME/BLACKSMITH SHOP - 1886 - DAY

Clara is giving birth. The doctor hands Doc his first son, JULES.

DOC BROWN

(v.o., cont.)

Even if the technology were available

to somehow reach you in the future, I

can’t deny that my life has moved on

from trying to rebel against the tyrannies

of the space-time continuum. As it

has been several years since I last saw

you, I can only assume that you have

done the right thing and destroyed

the DeLorean.

DISSOLVE TO:

LATER - EARLY 1890

Doc now has two children, Jules, and VERNE, both toddlers. They wobble around the         blacksmith shop as Doc works off in the distance.

DOC BROWN

(v.o., cont.)

But you can’t keep a good scientist

down.

CLOSE ON

Doc working on a rudimentary television. He’s almost nailed it, over forty years before         we know them to have been invented.

DOC BROWN

(v.o., cont.)

I find any number of ways to keep

myself busy during my semi-retirement.

CUT TO:

EXT. HILL VALLEY TOWN SQUARE - 1895 - DAY

Doc has concocted a rudimentary flying machine and is getting ready to test it. Clara and the boys are watching along with the rest of the town. In the background, construction on the clock tower has been completed.

DOC BROWN

(v.o., cont.)

Sometimes I worry that my work in

the past will have unforeseen consequences

on future events…

Doc’s flying machine takes off and amazes the collected crowd as it flies circles around the clocktower and the town square.

CUT TO:

EXT. EMMETT L. BROWN ENTERPRISES HEADQUARTERS - 1900 - DAY

The blacksmith shop has been replaced by a plant. Doc is master of ceremonies at the dedication of the plant. All around the place are billboards for items that Doc he “invented.” A couple of his flying machines zoom by overhead. We can see it in Doc’s eyes; this is just the beginning.

CUT TO:

EXT. TRAIN TRACKS - 1985 - DAY

DOC BROWN

(v.o., cont.)

But I can’t worry about that anymore.

Which brings me to two requests I have

for you. First: Your future hasn’t been

written yet; no one’s has. Your future

is whatever you make it, so make it a

good one!

Jennifer stops reading and tears up the fax from the future.

DOC BROWN

(v.o., cont.)

And second, see that Einstein gets a

good home. As we discussed previously,

walk him twice a day, and he only likes

canned—

The Western Union Man has returned from his truck. He hands Marty a flat package held together with aging, frayed twine. Marty takes the package and opens it. Is a nice, framed copy of both of them in front of the newly-minted clock. An inscription reads on the bottom: TO MARTY - PARTNERS IN TIME - SEPTEMBER 5TH, 1985. He stares at the picture and fails to pick up with the letter where he left off.

JENNIFER

What should we do, Marty?

He grasps the photograph and puts both it and the letter under his arm.

MARTY

I don’t know. Let’s go see what the

future has in store for us?

She smiles and nods. They join hands and walk back to his truck, leaving the befuddled Western Union Man behind. As the camera pans up, we see the entirety of Hill Valley before us. The clocktower square, Lyon Estates, Hilldale, the High School, maybe even the Lone Pine Mall. Only 1985 isn’t quite how Marty left it. Flying cars are everywhere. His present is a lot closer to the future he saw in 2015. As a flying car zooms into the camera, we:

FADE TO BLACK

THE END

All right, I’ll admit it: I may have gone a bit overboard here. I've also had the advantage of twenty-six years to come up with a different answer. But I think this a) keeps the beats of the ending that work, b) is of a similar tone with the rest of the movie(s) and c) doesn’t leave too many loose ends. Is my head way too far up my own ass to ever be rescued again? Is there another, even better ending for the movie? Do you have an impassioned defense of the original ending? Let me know in the comments.

*We have a real problem, on a societal level, regardless of ideology, of confusing annoyance and inconvenience with injustice. Injustice is quite real, but lets try and reserve that term for prejudice and hatred, not the lady in the office who sneezes too much.

**And by we, I mean “I.”

***Case in point. He does come back, like, thirty seconds from now. I guess he wasn’t thinking fourth dimensionally, but I submit that Marty’s just about the only one thinking fourth dimensionally at this moment.

We’ll Always Have Manhattan: Rethinking My Love for Woody Allen’s Movies

I may be over Woody Allen.

I know, I know. I was surprised, too. There was a time when Manhattan (1979) was far and away my favorite movie. I loved everything about it. I was in love with the knock-off music they used for the DVD menu, for crying out loud. 

The release of his movies, which have long-since stopped attracting the attention that other, more toy robot-centered studio flicks currently enjoy, were practically a religious holiday for me. It helped that one could count on a new entry in the canon each year. When I lived in Stillwater, which never ran his movies at the local Carmike, I would venture out to Tulsa to be sure to catch the movies for the week they ran at the AMC Southroads. Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), Whatever Works (2009), Anything Else (2003). You name it. I was there. If you made a pie chart of Allen’s box office gross in Oklahoma, a very clear sliver of the circle would be me and whoever I talked into being my date for the evening. All right, there were rarely dates, but a fella can dream, can’t he?

I know, I know… There’s a certain amount of ugliness that can orbit around Woody fandom. He did marry the adopted daughter of his longtime girlfriend, Mia Farrow. That’s… pretty undeniably not great. Worse still, one of the children he adopted with Farrow maintains that he sexually abused her. This is terrible, but he insists the abuse never occurred and charges were not brought against him. This isn’t an article about his unsettling personal life. I don’t know what to believe about the more heinous accusations against the man, and believe me, I’ve given them their due consideration.

This is more about how his films and I have parted ways. People have been saying that his movies suck for years. I had written off Bill Maher as an asshole* when he devoted a “New Rule” to his assessment that any movie Allen made after Annie Hall (1977) was lousy, and that actors needed to stop clamoring to work with him, but for years I believed the guy made more entertaining fare at a faster rate than anyone else working in film. 

Then came Café Society. Circle Cinema has been running the movie for weeks, and I’ve been meaning to go the entire time. I finally got to a screening** and… And…

The movie is fine. It’s not one of his punishingly dour dramas, of which there are a few, but something didn’t connect for me. Maybe its that he decided to shoot on digital for the first time***. It might be that, with a budget of $30 million, Allen’s most expensive film was destined to be become his most distant. Ultimately, though, I think it’s mainly because I’m over his movies. I’m certainly over his stock characters.

The main character, Jesse Eisenberg**** professes his love for Kristen Stewart despite having a wife and child at home. He isn’t the only character in the movie that sleep-walks through cheating on their spouse. First, and this may make me sound like a square, but there isn’t an ounce of romance to infidelity. His characters blithely, almost mindlessly opt for cheating on partners often guilty of no transgression against them whatsoever. I’m not sure what time in my life I might have found that appealing, but it certainly isn’t now. 

Then there’s the whole murder thing. While Allen deals deftly in Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) with the notion of an otherwise-respectable person morally accepting the fact that he is responsible for a murder, but he deals with the subject again in Match Point (2005), and here again he touches on it with the amount of focus normally reserved for a vine*****. I’m fairly convinced that Allen killed a hobo in the mid-80s and has been so far unsuccessful in working out his angst over the topic through his screenplays. Regardless of whether or not Woody is secretly a serial killer, the theme has moved from intriguing to decidedly not universal.

I’ll probably still see his movies as they are released, although I may not make a point of seeing them in the theaters. I’m intrigued by his upcoming Amazon TV series Crisis in Six Scenes, but I’m not holding out a lot of hope. He is advancing in years, but I still hope he has a few more films like Midnight in Paris (2011)****** in him before he either retires or passes away. He may yet be able to surprise us; it’d be pretty terrific if someone near the end of his career could still try new things. It would mean there’s hope for the rest of us.

*Maher is an asshole, and an increasingly unfunny one at that. It’s a strange assessment for me to come to, as I essentially agree with most of the things he says.

**It was only as I wrote this article that I realized I somehow missed one of Allen’s movies, 2015’s Irrational Man. Apparently I’ve been over his movies for a couple of years now and never realized it.

***My quest to defend the virtue of real film may be doomed, but it does not mean that it should be surrendered. 

****Thankfully, he wasn’t playing Lex Luthor. The guy isn’t always miscast.

*****Vine is still a thing, right? Should I have used snapchat instead? Will someone please tell me which references are hip with the youths of today?

******Man, I really love that movie, but even it seemed like it was pandering to me in a weirdly specific way. Also, I may be going a little over-board on the footnotes this week.

The biggest electric train set any boy ever had: On Making Movies

For the first time in nearly fifteen years*, I’ve directed a movie.

Why so long between filmed projects? 

I tried for a couple of years after Really Good Man to put together other projects, but they never came together. My inability to be in the correct headspace to follow through is the only real reason I can come up with to explain these project’s inability to get off the ground. Eventually, I became content with never shooting another frame again. The gap between available resources and my own minimum expectations for my work always seemed too wide. With novels, I could send Orson Welles to the red planet and back, but with film I could barely get Tulsa’s one-and-only superhero across the street without taking on an Ahab-like air of obsession.

Still, I had always said that, after RGM, I just didn’t have an idea for a movie that I could reasonably produce for almost no money.

That’s probably mostly true. I never did have a produceable idea, until I recently had the opportunity and means to make an educational filmstrip, but with just enough James Whale (or Carl Laemmle, depending on your level of attachment to the auteur theory) to make things interesting.

Kaz Kirkpatrick is both the star of the video and a sharp-eared, world-class sound man. Here he is pictured, alongside a publicity still of Bela Lugosi from the 1930s. Eagle-eyed readers will realize that Mr. Kirkpatrick is the one on the left... er... right. Kaz is on the right. Right?

After writing eight pages of script, coordinating two half-days of shooting, and buying a post production facility/paper weight/Macbook, I’m once again the proud papa of just under a reel’s worth of pretty good** footage. 

Jack Burgos, the hero of the piece, during a contemplative take. The crown and shirt are mine.

And here’s the thing: it was comforting to be back at the helm again, perhaps insidiously so. Between finally exercising again those parts of my brain that can plan out just how much coverage I need to shoot in order not to give me a headache in editing, to the simple act of making costuming decisions*** made me feel like I was once again putting every groove and synapse of my brain to good use.

Multimedia projects might be too much trouble and not enough payoff, but when it works, it is sweet. After the two days of shooting, I slept like the dead. I had felt as if I had exhausted every ounce of usefulness out of the day, and my body couldn’t argue. 

Filmmaking may not be a drug, but I have a feeling I’m off the wagon regardless. I want back in, and I don’t intend to let a decade and a half pass before I get back behind the camera.

Now I only need to figure out how to get that done… Maybe I need to do a reverse Orson Welles****. Start with movies, and THEN move on to radio. Yep. That might just be the ticket. More on that later.

In the meantime, please take a look at the fruits of our labor. The film is intended as an introduction for potential new members to our writing critique group, Nevermore Edits. If you take that caveat into consideration, the video is pretty entertaining. I hope you enjoy it.

*Longtime visitors to the site will remember The Adventures of Really Good Man, but if you haven’t taken a look at it, find all four parts of the tenth-anniversary edition here. I’m pretty proud of it, all things considered. For those of us who were involved with the movie, it’s a pretty cherished memory of our high school years. I’m probably more proud of that quality than anything else.

**Or Really Good. See? I can make the jokes, too.

***All right… When you see the video, you’re going to realize that “costuming decisions” basically consisted of choosing a wide array of hats. Sue me. I wanted every character to have a distinct silhouette.

****Which, incidentally, was my nickname in high school.

Can You Spare A Minute To Talk About The (Writer's) Bible?

I wonder how much I can get into this without spilling the beans on the semi-secret project I’ve been working on, but suffice it to say, I’ve been reading a lot of bibles lately.

A writer’s bible is an interesting beast. Predominantly used for television series*, it attempts in a few pages to define the parameters of a show.

A writer’s bible almost always features a breakdown of the main (and some recurring) characters. There is often a brief discussion of the pertinent events that led up to the pilot, which might influence episodes to come. As the primary audience for these tomes are prospective freelance writers for the the series, it can also feature a breakdown of what type of stories the producers have zero interest in buying.

It can also help keep the regular writers of the program on the path they originally set out. In practice, however, a bible is a case study in early rules made to be broken, or obvious mistakes that had to die in order for a show to find its eventual greatness.

Some shows never really had a real bible. Some, like The West Wing, were so tied into the voice of one creator, that there wouldn’t be a lot of traffic from freelance writers**, and Larry David once boiled down the rules of writing for Seinfeld to the commandment “No Hugging, No Learning” before he went on to create a show that eschewed scriptwriting all together.

Many show bibles are available to read online, and here’s just a few of the more interesting.

~The writers guide for Batman: The Animated Series is an interesting artifact of the series birth in the wake of the Burton-directed feature films. Little did the show know that it would surpass those earlier entries in the bat-canon and become the definitive version of The Dark Knight for many.

~The bible for The Real Ghostbusters is an interesting artifact in how it wants to turn its episodic entries away from its cinematic progenitor. For that matter, it’s also a stark reminder in how those years leading up to Ghostbusters II cemented the fact that Slimer had become not only the star of show, but the franchise as a whole.

~The most useful of the publicly distributed writer’s bibles came from the far-flung reaches of the final frontier. In the 90s, various Star Trek bibles were in wide distribution, largely due to the franchise’s unusual open-submission writing policy. While opening the flood gates in this way likely lead to a lot of cranks shuffling their ramblings over to the Paramount lot, the process did yield some terrific episodes (like “Yesterday’s Enterprise”) and gave careers to some truly wonderful writers like Battlestar Galactica’s Ronald D. Moore. An early version of The Next Generation’s bible can be found here. This pre-dates the open-call policy, echoes the bible for The Original Series, and goes to great lengths to tell the reader what type of stories the show doesn’t want to do, and that they are only interested in submissions from established TV writers. Most people view the early years of TNG as the nadir of the franchise’s writing, but far be it for me to draw connections between the two situations. 

The producers simplified things greatly for both Deep Space Nine and Voyager, perhaps in hopes that the more valuable freelance writers would preternaturally be able to write the better, more produceable Star Trek stories, and would only need a general reference volume for names, locations, and backstory.

And before you ask, yes. Somewhere out there, conceivably on a set of 3.5 floppies or spiral-bound notebooks, are my twelve-year old attempts to put together teleplays for Voyager and Deep Space Nine. They were going to make me a huge TV writer before I turned twenty. It is one of my deepest fears that they might eventually see the light of day.

Most people wanted to be sports or music stars when they were kids. Maybe they wanted to be something important like a lawyer or government official. A few might have wanted to be something useful, like a plumber. I, on the other hand, wanted to be a mid-level script writer working on the Paramount lot. Are you like me? Is there a show you always wanted to write for, but for want of a time machine, can’t? Let me know in the comments.

* Although other long-form, no-end-in-sight stories, like comic books use some version of the document.

**Also, Sorkin—genius though he was—would throw the show’s continuity out the window and just wing it (pun accepted, if not intended).

Cheat Week, Part 4: Somedays you just can't get rid of a bomb.

I've been posting for nine weeks straight, and there is a temptation to say my recent viewing of the third season of Batman (1966-1968), and specifically the odious episode "Nora Clavicle and the Ladies' Crime Club*" for my inability to put a coherent thought together this week.

It may that simple. I have committed myself to a weekends' worth of consumption, and probably need such a period to recharge my batteries. The truth is, I've got a lot of projects in the hopper nearly ready. Book 3 of my Orson series is proceeding along nicely, if slowly. I did manage to figure out the title, though: The Once and Future Orson Welles. I've also begun developing another project that I'm not quite ready to talk about, but will start to move Party Now, Apocalypse Later into more multimedia projects as time goes on. For this blog, I do have some thoughts (read: an ongoing identity crisis**) about this year's election. I'll also probably move on from my recent entries about local movie theaters, and get into that other phenomena of cinephilia: creation. I may yet read a book again and offer a review or three. Watch this space for more.

* The entire year, while fortified by the refreshing addition of Yvonne Craig as Barbara Gordon/Batgirl (one of the only contributions of the show to the ongoing Batman-mythos), is stagnated by a pervasive cheapness, and an episode like "Nora Clavicle..." wherein a villainous women's rights activists usurps Commissioner Gordon's position, and hires only women to staff the police department. As they trade cooking tips and fret about ruining their outfits, the city descends into chaos. The crisis is only neutralized by Batman, Robin, and Batgirl, guiding an army of robotic mice via the use of penny whistles. Oy. 1968, am I right? Sure, it had the Apollo 8 moonshot, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Planet of the Apes. But there was a lot to complain about, too! Like wars, the entire city of Chicago, and the tragic unfunny-ing of the Caped Crusaders.

** Settle down. I'm not voting for Donald Trump, or for that matter anyone whose name doesn't rhyme with Smillary Blinton.

Movie Theaters of Days Past: Part Five of Five: Village Movies 8 (Just off of Memorial near 71st) ALSO: The theaters that didn’t, couldn’t or wouldn’t make the list.

Note: I went to these movies from 1990 through the first week in July, 2016.

First things first: an editorial note about last week’s entry. My father mentioned a particular outing to the Sand Springs Cinemark that went down in family history, and I would be remiss if I didn’t mention it in this series:

The movie: Gladiator (2000). We’re watching the movie, and it’s fine. One of the other theater goers (we came to call him “Cletus”) leans over to his progeny (we came to call him “Little Spud”) and says loudly so that we all hear him over the carnage and savagery of Rome, “Now, you understand boy, they’re all bad guys, ‘cause they have false Gods.”

The pronounced eye roll my pop and I shared has echoed through the ages.

Now, on with this week’s final entry.

Photo Credit: Lauren Grubb via cinematreasures.org

Maybe Movie Theaters are passé. A movie theater is the first date with the one you marry, or the one that got away. It's surprise outings with your parents when you are kid that you still remember twenty-five years later. It's the only place where you can enter when it is light, time bends, you have no awareness of the outside world, and when you exit, night has fallen in your absence. But, let’s be honest. Home video technology has advanced to the point where the only good a movie theater is a shared cinematic experience. This can be good and bad. I recently went to a 75th anniversary of Citizen Kane, and the film took on a whole new life in front of an audience, some of whom had never seen it before. On the other hand, see the above incident with Cletus and his spawn.

The memories of these places have been on my mind a lot lately. Movie Theaters are now built more as recliner showrooms than movie houses, but I long for the movie theaters of my youth. Some are still plugging along, more or less. Others have been (likely permanently) lost to the sands of time. Over the past few weeks I explored the older, perhaps less-loved movie theaters of this town I call home. Join me, won’t we?

For this week’s entry, I closed out my travelogue* of the lower theaters by stopping by the Village Movies 8.

Movies I memorably saw here in the past:

Star Trek: Generations (1994). I’m ten years old, and I had acquired the screenplay to the forthcoming movie at a Star Trek convention six months earlier, so the movie held no surprises for me. Kids, that’s exactly the kind of thing we had to do back in the day if we wanted a film ruined for us before opening weekend.

I Am Legend (2007). I went to a number of movies at this theater during the dark, grim days of my brief attendance at Law School. The memories of which movies I saw during this period (aside from I Am Legend) have become hazy, but the ability to run away from a life perpetually out of control sticks with me quite well. 

Today:

The Village 8 Movie theater, for the multiple hands that the theater has gone through, it has gone largely unchanged after a cursory glance. The theater closed recently, but a theater owner who had just closed another venue elsewhere in town and has upgraded the individual theaters with the remaining bits of his now defunct first-run theater. As such, it was a surprisingly modern set-up for a second run house, and I would really recommend you give the place a shot.

Oh, yes. There was also a movie involved in this little outing:

I saw The Boss starring Melissa McCarthy. It was fine. Ghostbusters is funnier. C’est la vie.

Final verdict: 

The Movies 8 is fine. I can say without any thread of doubt that it is the nicest second-run theater in town. New amenities and the latest projection systems (again, film would be nice, but I get now that might be an unreasonable request) mean you get an experience close to some of the newer first-run theaters in the city. 

But that isn’t the point. These posts have been an attempt to look back and get some sense of feeling that these theaters once brought me. I largely did get to visit those feelings, but with so much of the core business of movie theaters, I find myself missing the experience of going to the movie theater when I was younger, and those feelings will likely never come again.

You know what? I don’t really have too much more to say about this theater. The entire time I’m sitting there while Melissa McCarthy goes through her faux Martha Stewart routine (more on that later), I can’t help but think about all the theaters I can’t go to because they are no longer there. I really want to talk about them. So I will.

Photo Credit: Lauren Grubb via cinematreasures.org

Woodland Hills Cinema 6

Right across the street from the Movies 8, no less. Even when it was running, this probably wasn’t the greatest movie theater in town. In fact, I can only remember seeing one movie there in particular, but it was a doozy. Begging and pleading throughout the summer of 1992 yielded a screening of Batman Returns that was equal parts thrilling, horrifying, and… formative**.

The theater lay abandoned for years after it closed in 2001.  And then they tore it down and put in a Wal-Mart Supercenter. Some people just have no respect for the proper use of commercial real estate.

Photo Credit: Lauren Grubb via cinematreasures.org

Fox Four

A smaller theater that spent most of it’s last days as a second-run house. Large fabric murals of Superman and Indiana Jones remain in my head as testament to the last time the place saw a face lift. Aside from seeing The Empire Strikes Back (1997 Special Edition) there, the theater’s main claim to fame was its proximity to the late, great Novel Idea bookstore. If there is such a thing as heaven, one hopes a second-run theater and a book store are within walking distance of each other. Now, the bookstore is a Dollar Tree, and the theater has been converted to a gym and tanning salon. Not quite the caustic insult of a Wal-Mart, but still disappointing.

Photo Credit: Lauren Grubb via cinematreasures.org

Fontana 6

This one might yet be a bright spot, one possible opportunity to bring a movie theater back from the brink, although it is probably the least personally memorable on the list. For the life of me, the only movie I can firmly pinpoint seeing at the theater was the leaden Carrot Top vehicle Chairman of the Board (1998). Yes, you read that right. Had it not been for my father and I, the reported box office receipts of $181,233 would be an even $181,230.

A church now runs the space, and I can’t help but wonder if the congregation were to ever fall on hard times, the space might yet be converted to its truer purpose.

Photo Credit: Lauren Grubb via cinematreasures.org

Annex 7

Ah, the Annex 7. I won’t even get into all the movies I saw at this theater, before it so callously had the nerve to disappear in the late ‘90s. If I ever found myself trapped in the past***, the first place I would go is to the Annex 7 to catch a screening of…anything. I’d see any movie there, if given half the chance. When I think of where I fell in love with movies, it was in this place. Like many theaters in this list. It isn’t quantifiably anything special, but it is one of the most special places in the world. And it’s gone.

I will mention one movie I saw there. It is the late spring of 1990. I am nearly six years old. I have already nearly worn out my VHS copy of Back to the Future Part II (1989), and my imagination is aflame with how great the promised third movie will be. Then, activity. Sudden. Unfathomable. Dad is coming home early from work, and we are then going…somewhere. In the pit of my stomach, I feel like a doctor’s visit is in my immediate future. 

No. We go see Part III. The only thing better than Back to the Future is brand-new, surprise Back to the Future. That particular alchemy of positive things has never occurred again. Even on the inevitable day Universal gives into the immovable forces of the modern movie marketplace and remakes the original movie, something will be lost in translation. It is one of my fondest, and clearest childhood memories.

But did it really go away? It was most certainly demolished in the efforts to revitalize the Southroads area in the late 90’s. But the 41st and Yale Vintage Stock stands at its old location. I get most of my DVDs and Blu Rays here. Old habits die hard; I just can’t stop getting my movie fix from this location.

There are plenty of other Tulsa theaters that come to mind. The Park Lane Twin at 51st and Sheridan, which was subsequently gutted to become a campus of the now-defunct Wright Career College. The Eastland Mall 6, that was sadly swallowed up by the collapsing mall around it. Even the Promenade 8 disappeared in front of the newer (and now decaying) Regal Promenade 12.

Are there any disappeared theaters that tug at your memories? Let me know in the comments.

*I had originally intended to include the Admiral Twin Drive In, but as my home of Oklahoma has been dubbed by meteorologists as “fundamentally indistinguishable from fire,” that trip may have to wait until the fall. There may be yet another entry in the offing!

**Thank you, Michelle Pfeiffer. I’m so proud that I didn’t have to look up how to spell “Pfeiffer.”

***Which, for the record, has yet to happen to me.

Movie Theaters of Days Past (Part Four of Five): Sand Springs Cinemark (On Charles Page Blvd. near the abandoned K Mart)

Note: I went to these movies during the week of July 11th-15th.

Movie theaters can leave one oblivious. A movie theater is the first date with the one you marry, or the one that got away. It's surprise outings with your parents when you are kid that you still remember twenty-five years later. It's the only place where you can enter when it is light, time bends, you have no awareness of the outside world, and when you exit, night has fallen in your absence. Sometimes the world outside of the movie may need a little more attention paid to it.

The memory of these places has been on my mind a lot lately. Movie Theaters are now built more as recliner showrooms than movie houses, but I long for the movie theaters of my youth. Some are still plugging along, more or less. Others have been (likely permanently) lost to the sands of time. Over the next few weeks, and perhaps intermittently if other inspiration will not be sated until a post is written, I will be exploring the older, perhaps less-loved movie theaters of this town I call home. Join me, won’t we?

For this week’s entry, I ventured farther than I have or will for these entries, to Sand Spring’s Cinemark theater. Of all the houses on this list, this is probably the one I went to the most growing up, as my grandparents lived in Sand Springs while I grew up, and outings to “the show,” as Grammy would—and likely still does—call it.

Movies I memorably saw here in the past:

Addams Family Values (1993). 

Star Trek: First Contact (1996). After my parents picked me up from the screening, I called it “the best two hours of my life.” They laughed and said that I was “young, yet.” I’m still not sure I get the joke. Two hours?

For some reason, I have the strongest memory of seeing the Joe Pesci/Danny Glover stinker Gone Fishin’ (1997) during a summer (not unlike this one) that I committed to the idea of seeing everything that came out. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that J.J. Abrams wrote it? Look it up.

I have some vague recollection of seeing Batman Forever (1995) there during its particular summer. It may have more to do with a much stronger memory from the same period of being stuck in line at the concession stand while staring at the character poster of Robin from the film, which to this day appears as if Chris O’Donnell really wants to punch everyone in the face.

I’m pretty sure that the last movie I saw there was Bryan Singer’s X-Men (2000). I saw it with Chris Moore and Bill Fisher. Chris insisted it would be cheaper to see it there. Even then, it felt like a bit of a schlep to make the trip. Later that year, my grandparents moved away from Oklahoma. Outside of this blog series, I haven’t had a reason to go there since.

Today:

I didn’t even know it was going to rain on July 14th. But, in the attempt to get to the end of my little movie theater travelogue, I ran out for an early matinee.

Of all the theaters I returned to, this one seemed to have changed the least, and in a truly surprising turn of events, I bought my ticket while still outside of the premises. Inside the doors I saw the crane game that I had a legendary run on in the summer of 1997. My grandmother may still have the Jurassic Park mug that I acquired from the highlight of my career.

The only thing to have changed since the last time I was there is the neighborhood. In days past, the Sand Springs Goldie’s was located caddy-corner to the theater. It’s long gone. The local K Mart was just down the road, and it recently closed. The entire shopping center has that neglected feel that I’ve come to notice surrounding most of the older theaters. If the burger joint were still there, it might have stayed my theater of choice for the past fifteen years.

By this time in my adventures, the thought of another bag of popcorn to accompany me in my escape from reality makes my stomach turn. Having just had breakfast, I opt to avoid all of the available concessions and suffer through the movie unsalted, unhydrated, and uncaffinated. Its fine; the theater is cool enough, and the seats have been upgraded in the fifteen plus years since I was last there. Also, there was going to be more than enough water by the end of the morning.

The movie was fine (more on that later) and the projection system is the same just-too-bright and just-too-clear digital projection that I’ve railed against in other entries. The movie also took place largely in Hawaii. During the course of the screening, I thought I heard thunder and figured bad weather would somehow figure into the film’s plot. It never came; I put it out of my mind. I probably shouldn’t have.

This is part of the problem and wonderful thing of the times I have spent in movie theaters. The world melts away. Those rows of seats and the images flickered on the screen exist outside of time. You can avoid most anything in there. Sadness. Worry. Violent storms.

Which is why I missed out on most of the storms of July 14th. The thunder in the movie was real thunder! Never even occurred to me. On a fun note, my car was emerged in about a foot and a half of water. So the end of my moviegoing experience ended with me wading into lake Sand Springs to get to my car. It feels like, even a month later, that my brown shoes* are still wet.

Oh, yes. There was also a movie involved in this little outing:

I saw Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates. As my week progressed, I definitely moved out of the arena of movies I wanted to see, but hadn’t gotten the chance to see, and moved into the territory of “Well, I’m already at the theater, I might as well see something.” I may have laughed a handful of times, but if you saw the trailer, you probably laughed as much as I did. It was another example of perfectly talented people phoning it in, maybe just for the free trip to Hawaii. For the life of me, I don’t understand why Zac Efron has been elevated from “man in stock photo” to comedy star.

Final verdict:

The Sand Springs Cinemark is a nice place. Clean, cool, with good prices and amenities for a first run theater. Worth the drive, if you are in the mood, but I would caution you: the parking lot is secretly a crater and becomes a massive body of water after any degree of rain.

Next week:

I bring the series to a conclusion with the final theater I visited in my week off, before I also offer some thoughts about the theaters I could not visit because either a) they’ve been lost to the ravages of time or b) it’s hot as balls out there.

*I own one pair of brown shoes and one pair of black shoes. When I wear them, their lace are never tied. Deal with it.

Movie Theaters of Days Past: Eton Square (51st and Memorial)

Note: I went to these movies during the week of July 11th-15th.

Movie theaters are essential. A movie theater is the first date with the one you marry, or the one that got away. It's surprise outings with your parents when you are kid that you still remember twenty-five years later. It's the only place where you can enter when it is light, time bends, you have no awareness of the outside world, and when you exit night has fallen in your absence.

Your time in a movie theater doesn’t have to be communal either. Some might think me weird for being all-too-willing to go to a screening on my own. But some of my best thinking is done in those moments before the trailers begin when all is darkness, aside from the projection of softball trivia questions and orders to check in with the concession stand. I’m never more pumped than when I walk away from my seat as the end credits play behind me. This is true, even if the movie is lousy. The music over the end credits of any movie is universally great.

The memory of these places has been on my mind a lot lately. Movie Theaters are now built more as recliner showrooms than movie houses, but I long for the movie theaters of my youth. Some are still plugging along, more or less. Others have been (likely permanently) lost to the sands of time. Over the next few weeks, and perhaps intermittently if other inspiration will not be sated until a post is written, I will be exploring the older, perhaps less-loved movie theaters of this town I call home. Join me, won’t we?

For this week’s entry, I ventured to Eton Square 6. Of all the first-run, non-art house theaters in Tulsa, it has been around the longest. It makes do with cheap prices and less-than state of the art amenities. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Movies I memorably saw here in the past: 

Home Alone (1990). I also remember seeing Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992) at the same theater after what only felt like a few weeks interval. It may have been the first time in life that I got the sense that life—or at least movies—tend to repeat themselves.

The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993). At the age of nine, I didn’t like the movie very much. I was also an idiot back then. That is, I’m still an idiot now, but for entirely new reasons. Anyway…

The Lion King (1995). I get the feeling that any kid’s movie in the 1990s led me to this place.

Today:

I haven’t been back to this theater since the 90s, I think. Entries from cinematreasures.org confirm my memory that the theater closed in 2000, but has since reopened. It’s sort of an encouraging notion that a theater can fully disappear, but then come back, even though the other closed theaters in town have been since converted into all sorts of soulless wonders like a Walmart Supercenter or a TGI Fridays, but more about those sad thoughts in another entry.

I remember the parking lot being bigger. Much bigger. But the apartments of fairly new construction must have filled what could previously handle many more theatergoers.

The box office is inside the lobby. It occurs to me now that I can’t think of any movie theater in town (outside of the Cinemark at Tulsa) that uses the designed outside box office consistently. The AMC Southroads does a little bit, but I can’t remember the last time I went there and hadn’t bought my tickets weeks in advance.

The lobby looks no different than it did back in the day, which is encouraging. I half expect to find large cardboard cutouts to be on display, asking me to meet the various cast members of The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Oh, also. They have a pinball table in the lobby. This may be my favorite theater in town now. It’s a “Striker Extreme,” a soccer-themed table, made by the fine people at Stern. It’s seen better days, but is still quite playable and only costs 75 cents per round. The full-service restaurant attached to the Warren is nice, but this place is starting to give it a run for its money, amenities-wise.

Also, and I think we all really need to have a conversation about this, especially if anyone working in the movie theater industry is reading this. The Eton Square cinema has, and is more than willing to serve me, unsweetened iced tea. In a cup with ice and everything. I don’t know why this particular commodity is missing from the usual movie theater fare, but it always annoys me when it becomes clear that the only form of orange pekoe I can consume at most theaters is laden with enough sugar to make it chemically identical to a Mountain Dew. I’m tired of just getting a bottle of water when it comes time to wash down my bag of popcorn salt and kernels. I’m so old and tired, I may have just become the Andy Rooney of Tulsa movie theaters.

The theaters themselves are plenty odd. For the back half of the theater (I have a hard time imagining anybody ever sits in the front half if they don’t have to), they have ripped out every other row of seats and replaced them with tables. It’s actually an interesting solution to the problem of concession.

My first choice of seat was… ahem… wet. So I moved, and I was much happier. Aside from that one problem and the ongoing scourge of crystal-clear digital projection, the theater was kept in the low sixties (the temperature at which the people from my home planet are most comfortable) and I think unless I’m dead set on partaking of the Warren, then this may be my new first-run theater of choice. 

Oh, yes. There was also a movie involved in this little outing:

I saw The Legend of Tarzan. Shot with the certain misty production-designed panache that Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) made fashionable and Avatar (2009) made de rigueur, the film is an inoffensive action piece that nearly completely disappears from memory the moment you exit the theater. Of note, I completely didn’t notice that Margot Robbie played Jane until I collected my thoughts just now and did a quick IMDB search. Not for nothing, that’s a fair indication that she may have a longer career ahead of her if I don’t automatically notice that the thought “oh, Margot Robbie is in this movie” doesn’t immediately come to mind. Also, my surprise to learn that both the character and actions of Samuel L. Jackson’s character are taken from history were somewhat akin to the title card at the end of Bloodsport (1988), that claimed the film was based on a true story. Otherwise, the film will probably be forgotten pretty quickly. If you look at the box office returns, then there’s something to the notion that people largely forgot the film before its release date. 

Final verdict:

Eton Square may be the neglected step-child of first run theaters in Tulsa, but it still has value. Is there a new release you only kind of want to see? Then its lower prices may be ideal. It’s amenities are (almost) nicer than you would think, but there are a few unique things that will likely keep me coming back for any number of matinees in the future.

Next Week:

I venture out to the untamed wilderness that is Sand Springs. The sea was rough that day, my friends, but I lived to tell the tale. Although, if the election continues to go along its current path, I may have some thoughts on that topic.

Movie Theaters of Days Past: Circle Cinema (Just off of 1st and Lewis)

Note: I went to these movies during the week of July 11th-15th.

Movie theaters are essential. A movie theater is the first date with the one you marry, or the one that got away. It's surprise outings with your parents when you are kid that you still remember twenty-five years later. It's the only place where you can enter when it is light, time bends, you have no awareness of the outside world, and when you exit night has fallen in your absence.

When I was six-years-old, after a particularly VHS-laden Christmas, I decided to open up a movie theater in our living room. I placed pieces of paper in the windows letting passers by know our showtimes. Batman (1989) would be shown at 10:00. Back to the Future Part III (1990) would be shown at 12:30 (after lunch, naturally). At 2:45? Batman again, naturally.

Nobody ever came by to partake of the theater, disappointing child-me and being the best possible end result of me inviting strangers to watch videos in our house. My efforts to get my nascent movie house listed in the paper along with the supposedly more legitimate cinemas didn’t get past the earliest stages.

The memory of these places has been on my mind a lot lately. Movie Theaters are now built more as recliner showrooms than movie houses, but I long for the movie theaters of my youth. Some are still plugging along, more or less. Others have been (likely permanently) lost to the sands of time. Over the next few weeks, and perhaps intermittently if other inspiration will not be sated until a post is written, I will be exploring the older, perhaps less-loved movie theaters of this town I call home. Join me, won’t we?

For this week’s entry, I ventured to Circle Cinema, Tulsa’s only non-profit, supposedly art house cinema. 

Movies I memorably saw here in the past: 

While I don’t have any first hand memories from its initial run* in the 1920s-60s, or from its run as an adult theater in the 1970s, since its renaissance in recent years I’ve partaken of several special screenings of older movies and a few movies that aren’t played anywhere else, including:

Blue Jasmine (2013) 

Halloween (1978) for a rather disappointing screening, the reasons for which I will get into in just a bit.

Fargo (1996) for a 20th anniversary screening.

Weiner (2016). This was just a few weeks ago, and man, could I go on and on about what a fascinating garbage fire I witnessed there, but that is an entirely different blog entry.

Today:

The men's room proudly displays a poster for Moonraker (1979). I’m not sure if the choice aims to bolster its its the popcorn-movie bonafides, or a statement about where the outer space-themed films of Roger Moore rank when its totem is placed less than three feet away from a urinal. Either way, just the sight of the poster amused me to no end.

Outside of the toilet facilities, the theater is kind of a knock out. Modern amenities are practically carved out of the skeleton of the theater’s glory days, giving the whole place a feeling almost as if it sprang forth from the exposed brick all around you. It is almost as if the place won’t, can’t be anything other than a movie theater. Even in the days when it slummed as a porno theater, it had to play with shadows and light. I like that, somehow. Even when the world seemingly moved on, this place would live its purpose.

Even with the unalterable core at the heart of Circle Cinema, it experiments with other things. While there are often a plethora of movie posters (some signed) on the walls, on this particular day they are all taken off the walls in anticipation of a renovation of one of the smaller screening rooms. The lobby is also host to occasional art exhibitions. While the place knows that it always was and always will be a movie theater, it can’t help but wonder what it would be like to be an art gallery. And the only art gallery in Tulsa that serves White Castle sliders. I like that, too.

There is a one drawback to the place, and it is a factor I’ll likely keep coming back to in these pieces. Each of the screening rooms at Circle uses digital projection; not a single room uses a film projection system. Complain about the prequels all you want, but the big legacy Lucas left us before selling everything to Disney was insisting on digital projection systems. They are a drag. There’s a lifeless, antiseptic quality to it. In most larger theaters, it’s a presentation I can get used to. At Circle, many of their screenings are just projections off of a blu ray player. This was especially sad when, at a special screening of Halloween, I realized that I could have gotten almost the same exact experience at home, and there I could have taken my shoes off, or paused the movie if I needed to pee. That realization has led me to beg off going to some of their screenings of other classics. 

It’s a nitpicky thing for a place doing such wonderful work, but maybe I dream of the slight danger of a reel breaking in the middle of a movie. Maybe its just me, but I need that air of uncertainty in my leisure time.

Oh, yes. There was also a movie involved in this little outing:

I saw Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made. Whoo, boy. I’ve got a lot of thoughts about this film. As the man who was once the boy that would conquer Hollywood with nothing more than his intermittently reliable wits and a camcorder, the movie struck a chord. 

In fairness, that chord often led me to mutter, “Jesus, guys. Move on.”

While the documentary delves into the making of the lions’ share of the subject’s efforts to cobble together a shot-for-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark, the main thrust of the narrative deals with their attempt, over twenty-five years after they “finished” their movie, to film the one scene** they could never finish. The level of obsession these people had for their project is something I might be able to call commitment, if it weren’t for the fact that they spent their time (and, admittedly, their love) making a movie that was made quite well before. Say what you will about my occasional forays into filmmaking, but I was absolutely making my own movie. I also never almost lost my job over it. Maybe that makes me a sell-out, but if these guys could make an original film, I would have been far more sympathetic to their plight.

Final verdict: 

Circle Cinema is kind of a small miracle of a place. In a town all-too eager to throw away theaters older than thirty years, this place not only still fulfills the function for which it was originally built, but thrives in the endeavor. They show the movies that no one else in town will show. Still, they are also not so inaccessible that they are above more entertaining fair. Their upcoming screening of Evil Dead 2 seems like it would be a good time for all. I do wish that they were equipped for actual film projection, but as I continue through this project, I get the sinking feeling that film projection has died out. Long live George Lucas.

*Again, I can’t confirm or deny that I have enjoyed a long lucrative career as a time traveller. I do acknowledge that there is a significant amount of circumstantial evidence to support that hypothesis.

**The sequence where the Nazi flying wing explodes.

Movie Theaters of Days Past: Part One of FIve: Searchlight Cinemas Super Saver (Mall 31; 31st and Sheridan)

Note: I went to these movies during the week of July 11th-15th.

Movie Theaters are holy places. Maybe they don’t lead to profound theological truths* but they certainly do house the moments that matter. A movie theater is the first date with the one you marry, or the one that got away. It's surprise outings with your parents when you are kid that you still remember twenty-five years later. It's the only place where you can enter when it is light, time bends, you have no awareness of the outside world, and when you exit night has fallen in your absence.

The memory of these places has been on my mind a lot lately. Movie Theaters are now build more as recliner showrooms than movie houses, but I long for the movie theaters of my youth. Some are still plugging along, more or less. Others have been (likely permanently) lost to the sands of time. Over the next few weeks, and perhaps intermittently if other inspiration will not be sated until a post is written, I will be exploring the older, perhaps less-loved movie theaters of this town I call home. Join me, won’t we?

For this week’s entry, I ventured to Searchlight Cinemas Super Saver, one of only two second-run theaters left in the city. 

Movies I memorably saw here in the past: 

Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993)

Jetsons: The Movie (1990) (May have been the last first-run movie I saw there)

Small Soldiers (1998) (The only movie I ever abandoned before the end credits. Sorry, Joe Dante)

One blissful day in 2000 when, on a 50 cent Tuesday I saw Toy Story 2, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, and what I can only hope is a better film than the last one I listed, all in the course of a day.

A screening of The Scorpion King (2002) in the summer of its release that I abandoned before the scarce coming attractions began either to engage in some sort of adolescent debauchery or drama elsewhere. I honestly can’t remember which.

A screening of Tomorrowland in 2015. The flood of memories from that screening in some small way led to the blog series you are currently reading.

Today:

The Mall 31 seemed like an abandoned idea twenty years ago, and much to its credit, has not decayed much beyond that time.

There used to be a great arcade and a game shop there. The arcade went vacant for the better part of ten years, and is now a low-rent furniture shop. In "Right" I described a corner in Stillwater that had nothing but a strip club and an abandoned used car lot as the place where capitalism went to die, but I may have been secretly thinking of this place. The game shop is still in operation, but it has seen better days. I buy a package of Monty Python Fluxx and quickly make my way back to the theater.

The box office for the theater must have been abandoned some time in the 1990s. I can’t remember the last time I bought tickets at any theater outside of the building. Makes sense, too. I can’t imagine having to work in that little booth with the high summer sun never moving away from the box office window on its journey from east to west. Just can’t imagine why they keep building these outside box offices.

The lobby is sparse (hardly surprising for a second run theater on a Monday at 1 PM) but surprisingly clean. Further developments won’t be that encouraging.

Back in the day, the corridor leading to each theater was a borderline psychedelic   tunnel of rotating lights. In that ongoing need to equate the movie theater experience with some sort of reality-bending experience, this place used to sell the illusion. Now, there’s just a normal hallway. I can’t express my disappointment at the change. Walking to my screening is such a banal experience now. I wonder if I somehow imagined its bright, colorful precursor. If it was real, I can’t help but wonder what became of the old hallway. Does someone have that contraption in their house connecting their breakfast nook to their den? Why isn’t that hypothetical person my best friend?

Now, imagine if they turned the lights on! Photo by John Wise. Source: johnwise.com

The illusion of stepping into the past almost comes back when I enter the theater. There’s an ambiance to current movie theaters that is distinct, yet hard to define. After much consideration, I can only guess it is some sort of carefully curated lighting and paint job that is meant to evoke the feeling of a movie theater from an even more bygone, classic era. Instead, while clean and comfortable, the mise en scene only soaks the place in an Epcot-esque counterfeit quality. This theater doesn’t have any that. Close your eyes, imagine a movie theater you went to in the early 90s. That’s the kind of place I found myself in.

The seats must have narrowed in the intervening years. Each armrest snugly bunched up against either of my sides. There can be no other reasonable explanation.

Ahem.

I wish I could say that the strange time capsule of a theater I entered had eschewed the ravages of time. Unfortunately the flying saucer like water stains on each and every panel of the ceiling introduced a brief feeling of dread, before I remembered the admission price and put the possible airborne pollutants out of my mind. Disrepair was the order of the day; of the feeble-looking speakers, one appeared to be taken from one of the employees old home sound system.

And another thing: throughout the entire experience the air conditioning was blasting, but the place — while cooler than the Satan’s sweat lodge that has replaced Oklahoma — couldn’t have been cooler than 85. MAC BOYLE DOESN’T DO HEAT.

Oh, yes. There was also a movie involved in this little outing:

I saw The Nice Guys from famed director and screenplay over-writer Shane Black. The movie was delightful, made only the more so by the fact that of the four people in the theater (including myself) at the beginning of the movie, I was the only one still sitting at the end. Apparently, the others didn’t find the comedic teaming of Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling to be all that nice. Their loss.

Final verdict:

The place has seen better days, and is in a location that doesn’t attract any real retail TLC. The print I saw today looked sort of bleh digital, but I could have sworn that I saw Tomorrowland here very recently with a 35mm print. If this is the theater in town that could be used to play 35mm movies regularly, it is not being used to its maximum potential.

Next Week:

I go to Circle Cinema, Tulsa’s premiere art house/not for profit theater. They have White Castle sliders and art exhibits! It’s a good thing.

* They do lead to theological truths, but that is a topic for another blog, and somebody reading this is going to take umbrage with that first sentence, so peace, everybody. Peace.