THE EXQUISITE SYMPATHIES OF THE HELP

(The following piece assumes a certain degree of familiarity with the movie being discussed and as such is no respecter of restraint in the matter of spoilers. Be ye warned!)

Here it is, the second week of September, and I’m finally getting a chance to weigh in on a movie that everyone was talking about last month, a movie that may be all talked out, except for at the end of the year and when Oscar nominations are rolled out in January. Please forgive my tardiness. The movie is, of course, The Help , the “surprise” hit based on Kathryn Stockett’s 2009 novel centered on the day-to-day hardships and trials of two African-American maids, the stoic, soul-weary, profoundly angry Aibileen (Viola Davis) and the feisty, funny, perhaps reckless Minny (Octavia Spencer), and the young white woman, Skeeter (Emma Stone), who dreams of making inroads into the (white) man’s world of professional journalism. Skeeter’s own experience with gender-related oppression, and her own memories of closeness to the black nanny who brought her up, allows her to sense a need to tell the stories of these women who, as a result of the prevalent racism of the Jackson, Mississippi of the early 1960s, have made their way through life caring for and providing the support for the white children of women and families who nonetheless treat them more like pets and possessions than human beings. The Help has endured the criticism of intelligent critics who have accused it of bolstering dewy-eyed nostalgia for the racism of the good old days, and arguments against the movie based on its supposed focus on its white characters at the expense of the blacks in the story have been trotted out almost by rote, a kneejerk response to another bout of supposedly kneejerk, feel-good Hollywood liberalism.

Make no mistake: Hollywood has offered plenty of reason in the past to make anyone reasonably suspicious about its ability to see a movie through anything but Caucasian-colored glasses, to "come to terms" with the subject of racism. In the ‘80s movies like Cry Freedom (1987), a Denzel Washington movie ostensibly about anti-Apartheid activist Steven Biko, and A Dry White Season (1989) both couched their critiques of racist South African culture in terms that shifted the focus from the outrage of the oppressed to the inconveniences and hardships of the white minority. (The last third of Cry Freedom takes place after the death of Biko and is concerned only with a white journalist’s attempt to smuggle himself and his family out of South Africa in order that Biko’s story might be told.) Those movies were pats on the back to the white moviegoers who presumably wouldn’t stand for a movie that placed its attention solely on the perspective of the black characters in the story. (Moviegoers of all races, creeds and colors returned the favor by largely ignoring these films at the box office.) Filtering black experience through ostensibly more marketable white voices and faces is hardly a phenomenon restricted to just these two movies, but even on the scale of failed intentions these wishy-washy epics are hardly among the worst offenders.


A movie like Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning is the kind of Academy Award-friendly film that critics of The Help are understandably still smarting from; its whole modus operandi is to brutally trample over the history of the Civil Rights Movement in order to not only elevate the Southern white experience as essentially and emotionally more important in this historical context, but also to justify and falsify the participation of the FBI, which in reality probably did as much to undermine the progress of the movement as it did to seek out justice on behalf of those whose lives it was meant to change. Mississippi Burning offers only the pictorially compelling outrage of black men and women hanging from trees; there are no even modest equivalents of Aibileen or Minny to provide voices for the actual people whose lives were made intolerable, or snuffed out, by the tradition of bigotry and prejudice that was a hallmark of the era, in the North, South, East and West. Incredibly, once the movie moves past the assassination of the three civil rights workers (an incident modeled on the grim fates of James Cheney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner), there isn’t a black character in the film that doesn’t exist solely to be murdered, bludgeoned or humiliated in cinematically hysterical fashion. And the movie’s lunkheaded revenge fantasy doesn’t kick into full gear until Gene Hackman’s fed, pointedly intolerant of his partner Willem Dafoe’s pacifistic methodology, erupts into righteous fury when the white wife of a local deputy who may have had a hand in the murders is brutally assaulted by her husband.

So yes, I understand that people might have cause to be suspicious about a movie like The Help which, on its surface, might not seem to be any different than a well-meaning sop like The Long Walk Home, another drama of the friendship between a maid (Whoopi Goldberg) and the woman for whom she works (Sissy Spacek) which becomes much more about how the white woman reacts to the spiraling repercussions of the Montgomery bus boycott than the story of the black people who were more directly affected by it. But it seems an act of almost willful disregard to what’s on screen to claim that The Help is little more than the standard sugarcoated Hollywood whitewash. For Matt Zoller Seitz, writing in Salon, the movie is “a heart-tugging Hollywood film (that) transforms a harrowing and magnificent period of African-American life into a story of once-blinkered white people becoming enlightened.” Seitz, and many other critics who expressed similar distaste for the movie, are dissatisfied with both the “perky proto-feminism” of the portrayal of Skeeter and the “bigoted, greedy, petty, pinch-faced shrews” that make up what passes for decent white society (female division). These are descriptions that I would argue are as broad and limiting as they claim the realization of the characters and performances to be.


Skeeter may be operating from a position of impatience with the way her gender is treated in the professional world, but it’s that very impatience that softens her to see the parallel (not equivalence, mind) between her brand of oppression and that of Aibileen and Minny. Skeeter may technically be the force who puts the plot into motion in that she suggests the idea of gathering the womens’ stories into a book, but the movie breathes long before Skeeter expresses that idea. It gathers life in the eyes and voice of Viola Davis, in the secrets and anguish they hold back; in fact, Skeeter is off-screen for a large portion of the back half of the movie, the better for it to delve into the spaces where women, black and white, simply sit together and talk, quietly breaking rules of impropriety and law in order to find tentative moments of mutual respect and grace. (It is in the relationship between Minny and Jessica Chastain’s Celia, a role that could have succumbed to pathetic caricature were it not for Chastain’s comic timing and empathy, where these moments get their finest, freest rein.)

As for the villainy of Bryce Dallas Howard’s Hilly and her minions, both the movie and the actresses benefit from the movie’s exaggeration (only slight, I would argue) of the well-familiar type of snotty, upwardly mobile sewing circle of bitchery in the name of (gasp) dramatic license. (How much less “believable” are these carefully coiffed monsters than their counterparts in a modern satire like Weeds?) It’s a comedic exaggeration that, like many such instances before it in Hollywood history, is born not so much of a tin ear as a simple desire to entertain, and in those terms Howard and company could hardly be faulted. Hilly and her company of shrews serve a dramatic function, as a recognizable microcosm of the racism that plagued Jackson in 1963, but it seems the crime of The Help in their regard is not so much the broad strokes of vileness with which they are painted but instead treating them with a measure of bawdy humor and perhaps even sympathy for the curse of their prejudice. (How much easier all this would be to swallow if it were treated with weight and grim import, grainy black-and-white cinematography substituting a heavy-duty visual metaphor for all of Hilly's, and the movie's, designs of sunshine and warm colors.)


I am not unaware of the countless films that have failed to render this historical/dramatic dynamic with nuance, in any way accurately, believably or effectively in the past, and I would not suggest that that The Help is flawless. Perhaps Hilly, the movie’s most virulent villain (who, as Owen Gleiberman accurately points out in his excellent response to the main criticisms of the film, sees herself as a liberal) is a character who is drawn too broadly (I don’t necessarily agree). And perhaps the movie arguably has a bit too much of a Lifetime-style sheen to it, perhaps benefiting from what passes in Hollywood or doses of realism. (This seems like an objection, again, to the fact that The Help is solidly, effectively crafted.) But even if true, these are, to my liberal do-gooder’s mind, trifling objections that are easily overshadowed by the essential clear-headedness of the movie’s melodramatic main thrust and the integrity of its performers.

It’s hard for me to reconcile my own white male-over 50-experience with The Help to the belief of someone like Matt Seitz, who writes that though the struggles of the black characters in the film are sensitively rendered, magnificently acted and sometimes heartbreaking, they are nonetheless “sideshows” to the movie’s main concern, the uplifting of the Skeeter character. I honestly don’t know how one could experience this movie, with the specific contributions that Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer make to it, and come to that conclusion. When Aibileen heads down the road at the end of the movie, there is despair to go along with her burnished triumph. She has been fired and separated from the white child who she has come to love as her own, and the road which she heads down is paved with absolutely no assurances. It is a road that we know, if we are historically responsible and basically intelligent viewers, will offer no detours past another 40 years of struggle for women and men like Aibileen (and women and men completely unlike Aibileen who happen to be similarly pigmented). Yet Aibileen walks armed with the kind of character revelation, that she has talent as a writer, which promises greater things to come. Yes, though the skies are hardly absent clouds it is an uplifting conclusion, not because she is now liberated from her oppressive past—hardly—but because she has discovered, through the friendship and encouragement of someone whose experience couldn’t be further from her own, an outlet for expression of the anger and frustration and fear that has characterized her life up to this point. This may be a noble thing for a person like Skeeter to have had a hand in, but the movie ultimately celebrates not Skeeter for her efforts or newfound understanding so much as Aibileen for facing the perils of that road with the knowledge that she has the strength to live the rest of her life trying to make her own situation better.

And frankly, claiming that the fact that Skeeter is the character who “puts the plot into motion” somehow makes The Help first and foremost about her seems a bit like saying that North by Northwest, all evidence to the contrary, is really a picture primarily concerned with notorious smuggler Phillip Vandamm. From here it’s only a hop, skip and a very big leap to the implications that some made, in response to The Blind Side two years ago, that white people, especially if they’re confident/arrogant, fundamentalist Christians, have no business offering help or support to, and thus shifting focus away from, black characters in films, even if those most loudly objecting might very well applaud the very same actions in real life. One can easily imagine that if Hollywood decided to avoid the subject of bigotry and civil rights altogether, the same people who are complaining loudly about The Help would be wringing their hands over Hollywood’s refusal to tackle the indignities of America's racist past.


I wish I had the time and/or insight to offer as complete a rebuttal to the arguments against The Help as I feel compelled to do. But in the absence of that time, I offer you a link to Owen Gleiberman’s insightful consideration of the movie entitled, ”Is 'The Help' A Condescending Movie For White Liberals? Actually, The Real Condescension Is Calling It That”, in which he writes the following:

“The key to the film’s power, and its originality, is this: It’s a movie not about taking bold crusader’s stands — which, at this point, wouldn’t be a bold movie to make anyway — but about the low-key, day-to-day, highly ambivalent intimacy of black/white relationships in the Deep South.”

Think about that. While Ida E. Jones of the Association of Black Women Historians is busy knocking the movie as a “white coming-of-age story” with a lack of positive black male role models, one which “makes light of black women’s fears and vulnerabilities, turning them into comic relief” (a statement so wrongheaded that it calls into question Ms. Jones’ ability to see what is directly in front of her), Gleiberman is recognizing that the value of preaching to the choir lies in showing them something that they may not have seen before. That is, something of the intimacy in the way that civility could bubble up beneath the cracks of oppression, a civility that does not cavalierly ignore, for the purposes of bad or misleading storytelling , the historical reality of how difficult it was to come to even such a modest sliver of understanding as that. What I don’t understand is the implication by critics like Jones and others that any movie which dares to set itself in the midst of every-day racial tension in Jackson, Mississippi in the mid-‘60s is somehow obligated to turn itself into a laundry list of horrors so that we can be assured the filmmakers aren’t being willfully ignorant of history and we can feel better about ourselves for not falling for the usual barrage of sentimentality. Maids routinely subjected to sexual assault at the hands of their white male employers? An undeniable historical fact. But to imply that this kind of abuse was an experience shared by every black woman who ever put on an apron for a white employer, one that demands to be included in any “serious” discussion of the way people interacted with each other during this time in order for the tale to have any integrity, is as suspicious as trotting out the prevailing Margaret Mitchell-inspired mythology to suggest that masters actually respected their slaves and treated them as if they were members of the family. And as for Jones’ assertion that The Help makes light of women’s fears and vulnerabilities, it only makes one wonder about the Association of Black Women Historians’ tolerance level for the oeuvre of Tyler Perry.


But for some even worse is the movie’s big set piece, and that it is a comic set piece to boot-- the consumption of what Minny calls the Terrible Awful, a chocolate pie presented by Minny to Hilly as an apparent act of contrition for having used the indoor toilet, itself a violation of racial propriety for which Minny is promptly fired. Minny’s moment of triumph, and Hilly’s spectacular comeuppance, is the crowd-pleasing highlight of the film, but many have objected to the extreme unlikelihood that a black maid in Minny’s position would have ever staged such a stunt for fear of immediate and possibly violent reprisal. This may be true. And one would not wish any movie to veer so violently away from history as to besmirch it and the memory of the people who lived through it, who caused it, who were changed by it. On the other hand, why can’t there be room in the telling of a generally responsible story of this sort, which is again essentially melodramatic and emotional in nature, for a bold gesture of defiance like this? What is wrong with the release of a kind of wish fulfillment revenge fantasy that finds a maid, fired for sitting down on a white man’s toilet, fashioning a pie made of her own shit which she then serves up to her monstrous ex-employer, who proceeds to gobble it down with great satisfaction… until the special recipe is revealed? When white girls Mary Stuart Masterson and Mary-Louise Parker conspired to kill and cook Parker’s abusive husband and serve the corpse in a stew to their café customers in Fried Green Tomatoes, revenge was sold (and bought) as punishment that fit the crime. But when Minny serves up the most just of all desserts, we’re supposed to poo-poo the bad taste and shake our heads with disapproval over the historical improbability of the act? Sorry. Not when the triumphant Octavia Spencer commands the scene.

Finally, one aspect of The Help and its status as a massive movie hit and cultural event that has gone virtually uncommented on is its value for parents in helping to introduce their children to an examination of recent American history, to say nothing of encouraging them to appreciate movies (and actors) that are not entirely centered on superheroes or lightning-slinging wizards. My wife and I took both our daughters, ages 11 and 9, to see the film, but not before taking the opportunity to review with the older one, and familiarize the younger one with the historical context of the film. We explained to them the meaning of Jim Crow, the reality of segregation in the Deep South at the time, and the efforts of blacks and whites in the Civil Rights Movement who were working in dangerous conditions to better our world during the time in which the movie takes place. As an introduction to these concepts, The Help was not only valuable, but it was emotionally accessible in a way that engaged them more than a simple textbook-based classroom discussion ever could have. I told my oldest daughter, who entered middle school this fall, that she should remember what she saw in the movie when study of the period at school resumes for her in the next few years. And by the way, in suggesting its appropriateness for children I don’t mean to imply that The Help is simplistic in its portrayal of systemic racism crystallized to the very personal; quite the contrary, and as such I fully appreciate Gleiberman’s comparison of the film to the work of Robert Altman:


“It is… a sprawling ensemble piece that asks everyone in the audience — black and white, women and men — to identify with everyone on screen. That’s the way that Robert Altman’s films used to work. They were tough-minded spectacles of shifting empathy, and The Help, though it lacks Altman’s storytelling magic (it’s prose rather than poetry), isn’t so far removed in spirit from an Altman film. Every woman in it has her own way of looking at the world, and the movie wants you to understand how those viewpoints all jostle and mesh and collide.”

I’d like to think that a movie that presents different ways of seeing the world and how those perspectives once co-existed, some at the extreme expense of the others, might encourage my daughters, and other young people, and yes, even adults, to consider that the movies and popular culture can be kaleidoscopic instead of myopic, even in a broadly historical context such as the one The Help presents. And when they’re ready for Taylor Branch, maybe they’ll look back at The Help and think of it as an experience which both moved them and also helped prepare them for more incisive, critical thinking about the horrors and the glories of American history outside the realm of popular entertainment.

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Further reading on The Help:

A statement from the Association of Black Women Historians

Superb rebuttals to criticism of The Help from Owen Gleiberman and, even more convincing, John McWorter , in which pieces by Nelson George and Valerie Boyd are linked to and discussed.

Andrew O’Hehir’s guide to the critical reaction, positive and negative, to The Help.

Matt Zoller Seitz

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FILMS AND RUMORS OF FILMS

UPDATE SEPTEMBER 15 11:49 a.m.



Here’s a couple of quick notes on some fun and unusual stuff happening in Los Angeles that you might want to take advantage of.

Bicyclists may want to avail themselves of the vast array of short films that are screening this weekend at the Downtown Independent Theater as part of the Los Angeles leg of the Bicycle Film Festival. You won’t see Breaking Away or Bicycle Thieves or, perhaps thankfully, American Flyers or Quicksilver at this festival. Instead, festival goers, many of whom bike to the event, of course, will be treated to an international menu of short films all centered on the wide, wonderful world of pedaling. You can see trailers for the films on tap here. The festival runs through Sunday, September 11, and tickets are still available.



There are rumors that the UCLA Film and Television Archive will soon be beginning a series of classic films screening at the Million Dollar Theater on Broadway, downtown Los Angeles.

UPDATE: Here's the complete word on the Million Dollar Theater series from UCLA on their Web site. Some of the double bills are really juicy including a Cronenberg two-fer of The Fly and Videodrome on October 12, The French Connection doubled with To Live and Die in L.A. on November 9 and Lawrence of Arabia on November 16.

Also check out this piece on a Last Remaining Seats screening written by the archive director Jan-Christopher Horak for a glimpse inside this spectacular movie palace. (Thanks to Robert Fiore for the heads-up.)


Yet another Grindhouse-style anthology tribute to the worst of our collective taste in horror and sci-fi is coming your way via low-budget directors Adam Green, Joe Lynch, Adam Rifkin, and Tim Sullivan. It’s called Chillerama, and it unspools on the last night of operation of the Kaufman Drive-In (a nod to Troma founder Lloyd Kaufman, this reference will give you a hint as to where the directors’ sympathies lie), where a foursome of fearsome fright flicks (whew!) will hopefully be distributing chills and laughs in equal measure. Green directs and writes the no-doubt measured and tasteful The Diary of Anne Frankenstein; Lynch bears responsibility for Zom B Movie; Rifkin is credited with bringing the seminal Wadzilla to life; and Sullivan’s gay-centric satire I Was a Teenage Were-Bear is the poppable cherry on top. (The trailer, which highlights all four segments, can be seen here.) Chillerama is rolling out in a few cities and choice locations before making its debut on VOD and DVD, but with the exception of screenings in Los Angeles and Chicago it hasn’t been booked into any actual drive-ins. The Hollywood Forever Cemetery will be home to the movie’s premiere on 9/15, and Chicago’s Midway Drive-in will feature Chillerama as part of a dusk-to-dawn horrorathon on the 17th. All other shows are listed here. Maybe there’s still hope for a screening at our beloved Mission Tiki Drive-in sometime soon!


Finally, a real treat for fans of Steven Spielberg’s most reviled movie, and especially for those who revere its superb John Williams score—the Cinefamily will be hosting a rare theatrical screening of 1941 in celebration of the release, for the very first time, of Williams’ entire score for the movie, on a 2-CD package from La-La Land Records. The CDs will be available at the screening, and the Cinefamily promises very special guests which have yet to be announced. The screening happens Sunday, September 25 at 7:30 p.m. If you’re in Los Angeles and come out, you’ll definitely see me there rejoicing in the splendorous excess of one of my favorite movies. Wild Bill Kelso couldn’t keep me away!

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COMING SOON (WITH SOME HELP FROM US): TIM SCHNEIDER'S LEFT WITH YOU

I spent some of my birthday downtime revisiting some old back issues of the EC Comics I used to love. Of course Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror were always favorites, as were the DC variations from the ‘70s like House of Mystery and the Warren Publishing titles like Creepy and Eerie. But this past month, resubmerging myself in the reading habits of my younger days, I found myself most taken with the decidedly non-supernatural tales in my old copies of mags like ShockSuspenStories. These scenarios, which featured the usual oversaturated color and visual hysteria found in the pages of EC, were no less morbid and fatalistic than the ones spun by the Cryptkeeper, but they did tend to sprinkle elements of more recognizable social issues, like race and drug addiction, among the more routinely clever and demented horror imagery. And they were sometimes even adapted from short stories by big-name authors in the genres of horror and science fiction—one of my favorites, which I rediscovered this past month, is a tale derived from a Ray Bradbury short story called “The October Game.” It’s the story of a madman who hates his wife so much that he dismembers his own daughter, the symbol of the woman’s greatest love, and in the story’s elliptical and shocking finale distributes her body parts to the young guests gathered for a Halloween party. The comic book uses the form brilliantly to allude to the tale’s most gruesome and psychologically searing imagery, in much the same way that the story might be told in its more purely literary form, and proves, particularly for genre tales in the short-story format, that less can often be far, far more. (Click here to read the story in its entirety.)


I’m in the mind of EC Comics and the art of concise, allusive storytelling this morning because Bruce Lundy, an actor and now producer living in Eugene, Oregon, who also happens to be my best friend, is helping to mount the production of a short film which I believe has the potential to be powerful and haunting in the manner of the best of these kinds of stories. The movie is called Left with You, written and directed by a young filmmaker by the name of Tim Schneider. It tells the story of two men (played by Lundy and a young actor named Alexander Fraser), the only survivors of the crash of a starship on a desolate, frozen planet, and the lengths to which they are driven to try to revive a damaged emergency distress beacon and send a rescue signal before they both succumb to the unforgiving elements of this strange world. I’ve gotten a glimpse at the latest draft of Schneider’s screenplay which, if it is like most of the templates from which movies are crafted and willed into existence, will undoubtedly receive further refinement as the process of readying it continues. But as it is now, it’s a wonderfully precise piece of work, lacking the busy-ness of some scripts of this nature whose aim is more to dazzle the reader than leave room for the creative process of the director and his actors. What I like most about the way Schneider has written his story (and, I’m assuming, the way he intends to tell it) is how it retains the kind of suspense and the trajectory toward an unexpected and shocking resolution while leaving room, even within the constraints of the short film format, for his actors to do their jobs in a creatively suggestive manner. As I read Left with You I was struck by how well it would have fit into the tradition of a magazine like Shock SuspenStories or Weird Science-- the touchstones of grim, realistic science fiction are all there, and it has a conclusion worthy of the best of the EC Comics classic twists. But its contemplative tone suggests that Schneider has designs on finding a visual style that will allow the bitter cold of the Oregon locations to reflect both the nature of the men’s predicament as well as the despair and the perhaps paradoxical capacity for feeling that resides in both of them as they confront an icy fate, isolated far from the rest of humanity. (Even the title offers a clue, choosing to allude to the more personal nature of the material rather than the more exploitable angle of hypothermic horror.)

(From left in photo, writer-director Schneider, producer-actor Lundy in background, and Fraser)

Schneider and Lundy project that the film’s entirely modest budget will top out at around $30,000. Once it has been completed they hope to get the film a shot at the festival circuit. And right now, if you haven’t already deduced as much by the widget found at the top of this blog’s sidebar, it is within your power to help them realize their vision. The two filmmakers have registered the movie with the popular Kickstarter online financing campaign in an attempt to raise $10,000 of their projected budget. They would appreciate any help you can give, and as a backer myself (I couldn’t contribute much, but as they say every little bit helps) I can honestly say that I feel Left with You is a movie that has the potential to make anyone who had even a small hand in getting it made very proud that they did. To make your contribution, just click this link or the one on the sidebar above and follow the simple instructions. In a few seconds you will have made your contribution and added monetary momentum to the push to get this film made. Schneider, Lundy and Fraser are all confident—as the video below amply demonstrates— that they’re onto something special here, and based on their testimony and the current draft of the film’s script I find it hard to disagree. Click over to Kickstarter and become a backer of Left with You-- the fundraising campaign has only 32 days left before it closes out, and the $10,000 goal must be reached if funds are to be distributed to the filmmakers. If they (we) fall short, then Left with You is back to square one. But they’ll (we’ll) get there. And I promise, after the movie gets made and shown we’ll all gather back here at SLIFR and talk about the final result. I have a feeling that’s going to be an entertaining and lively discussion.



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IT'S CURTAINS FOR PAPOO'S HOT DOG SHOW

A Burbank-Toluca Lake legend passed away this past week after 62 years, and it will be missed a lot more than the transient sitcoms and failed pilots of sitcoms shot at the nearby Warner Brothers studios will ever be. I’m talking about the best show in town. After 62 years in business, Papoo’s Hot Dog Show shuttered its doors on Sunday for reasons that have nothing to do with business, which was by all accounts as strong as ever. Owner Leona Gardner says, in an interview with the Burbank Leader, that the city of Burbank was enforcing code violations that would have started a domino effect of remodeling that she could not afford. “The renovations were really the last straw,” Gardner told reporter Mark Kellam, the city specifying that the hood covering the grill was not in compliance with city ordnances for health and safety. Gardner explained, “The letter said that statute in 1964 when the hood was put in was in violation because the [deep fryer] underneath it was a few inches bigger than it should be. Once you rip that out, you have to redo the kitchen. And we need to redo the roof. Really, there’s a lot of renovation that should be done here and I’m not in a position to do it right now.”

The restaurant was a local landmark, to be sure, and one close to a lot of hearts. But it was a pop culture touchstone as well, its proximity to the Warner Bros, Universal and Disney studios making it a easy stop for the movie industry looking for a vibrant, lived-in location. It would make a fascinating investigation indeed to try and spot the many appearances Papoo’s has made in the movies and on TV since it first opened its doors in 1949. One indelible impression of the Show came in 1956’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, when the restaurant was primarily an outdoor eatery.


The other comes courtesy of the wonderfully flea-bitten exploitation classic Revenge of the Cheerleaders (1976), in which several of the title characters and their goofy boyfriends take time out from partying and the various other hostile and sociopathic exploits which take up the movies 88-minute running time for a dance sequence that I wrote was “the drive-in equivalent of a musical interlude from Chico and Harpo.” Better still, this one features a completely rhythmless David Hasselhoff tearing up Papoo’s dance floor (such as it was) in a turn so spectacularly bad that many believe it singlehandedly spurred on the Saturday Night Fever phenomenon purely as a cultural emetic designed to flush all memories of Hasselhoff’s moves from memory forever. Thank God for YouTube, then, and low-budget DVDs!



Though I hadn’t been there for years, Papoo’s had always been a favorite of mine and my coworkers, given how easy it was to drop in for a Friday lunch. (This was back in the days of the early 00’s when most of us actually still had money to spare for lunches that we didn’t pack or defrost for ourselves.) And I often took my oldest daughter in with me to Papoo’s when it was my turn to pick up everybody’s grub. Leona and the staff would always greet her loudly, fawn over her and make her (and me) feel like she was a one-of-a-kind princess whenever she came in. It is my impression that if one were to gauge by the effusiveness of the folks at Papoo’s there are multitudes of princesses and princes toddling the streets of Burbank, and many who will remember ending up feeling pretty royal when all they thought they were doing was following Dad inside for a burger. And it was a hell of a burger too, to say nothing of the hot dogs. Whatever you ordered, Papoo’s put on quite a show. It’s a daily lineup that those of us who were lucky enough to frequent its performances, or silly enough to take them for granted, will dearly miss. Here’s hoping that somehow, someway the curtain will once again rise on this fine Burbank-Toluca Lake tradition, Papoo’s Hot Dog Show.

(Photos courtesy of Blogging Los Angeles and Dear Old Hollywood.)

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ONCE AGAIN INTO THE LOBBY: A RETURN VISIT TO MY HOMETOWN MOVIE PALACE

During my recent trip to Oregon I had a chance to revisit and actually see a movie at my venerated old hometown show house, the Alger. Any return to this theater is kind of fascinating for me, but mixed with that fascination there is almost always a curious tincture of dread. The Alger was never, probably not even in its best, shiniest days, a technically spiffy place to see a movie, and those spiffier, shinier days are definitely in its past. In fact, much comedy and local legend in my circle of friends has been rooted in and enjoyed at the expense of this theater’s shortcomings. But despite all that, the Alger was where I learned to love the movies, and because of that fact it’s still sobering to see the façade, which once boasted not only bright colors and beautiful showcase windows for both current and coming-attraction one sheets, but also a selection of ornately displayed lobby cards and stills on the inner walls leading into the lobby from outside. As you can see from the photo above (and this one), that façade has fallen into disrepair and neglect, a state which began back in the mid'70s. (Vandals shattered the glass on the one-sheet cases, and rather than invest in fixing them the manager boarded them up, a state in which they remain to this day.) As far as the presentation of the movie itself, the last time I went there, some two years ago, I saw Jim Carrey in A Christmas Carol and was appalled by the poor quality of the sound. The picture quality was better, the theater having abandoned the worn-out, unkempt carbon-arc projectors of old with a platter system transplanted from a theater in Coos Bay. But the sound was wretched—no highs, and a completely muddy low-end, making dialogue almost indecipherable.

So when I arrived at the Alger a couple of weeks ago with my daughter Emma and my niece Kamaryn, on a mid-August Saturday night, to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 it would not be an exaggeration to say that my expectations vis-à-vis the technical presentation were on the low end of the scale. The first thing I noticed when I approached the box office window was a sign that goosed my dread in a different direction. It said: “This building was built in 1930. We do NOT have air conditioners. Only fans. Sorry.” It hadn’t been a particularly hot day, and I tried to remember any time when it was uncomfortably warm inside. Then I recalled that in my childhood days when I attended this palace with religious fervor the Alger was never open during the summer. Its doors were locked during the warmest time of the year in favor of the more seasonally appropriate Circle JM Drive-In. So I really didn’t know what to expect in terms of just how stuffy and hot the place could get.

Turns out I needn’t have worried too much. Inside, at the front of the auditorium, were two huge stand-up fans that effectively moved the air about the auditorium and kept things cool enough for relaxing with a summer blockbuster. They weren’t pretty, and they created a relatively deafening hum to compete with the movie’s soundtrack, but they did the job. However, we wouldn’t see them until we sat down. The trailers had already started when we walked into the lobby, and the first thing that struck me was how loud and clear the sound was. It wasn’t THX-approved Dolby Digital 5.1 or anything, but compared to what we grew up with, and certainly compared to the wretched audio soup of two years ago, it was a light-year’s worth of improvement. I was ready to see a movie at the Alger and perhaps for the first time really enjoy the sound at an unheard-of level of quality. My excitement dimmed, though, when I walked through those red velvet curtains separating the snack bar from the auditorium (the same ones that hung there when I was five years old, I’m sure) and saw the trailer for Captain America, a Scope trailer for a Scope movie playing before a Scope feature, squeezed to perfectly fit the Alger’s standard 1.85 screen. That screen is the same size screen that it’s always been, yet whenever a Scope movie would screen there in the past the projectionist would of course attach the anamorphic lens to the projector and the image would be stretched out to its proper aspect ratio. There would be some black (or white, absent masking) visible on the top and bottom of the screen, much the way 2.35 movies look when shown in letterbox format on TV, or even on wide-screen TVs with essentially a 1.85 screen aspect ratio, but I always felt this was an acceptable trade-off. (The screening of a wide-screen movie at the Alger was always a source of “fun” at reel changes too because the projectionist could never manage to get the anamorphic lens precisely in focus for the upcoming reel, so often the blurry, distorted image would take four of five seconds or more to get in focus and in a proper, non-warped rectangular shape once the reel changed over.)

But the sound was noticeably improved, and appropriately loud, so I vowed, when the movie started and was squeezed in the same way, that I wouldn’t allow my fussiness to ruin the evening. After about five minutes “I got used to it” and let it pass. Now, I know, from having seen the movie twice already that it is indeed a Scope movie with a 2.35 aspect ratio (like the entire series), and after the fact IMDb would confirm this. (And, actually, the non-IMAX, non-3D release print of A Christmas Carol was 2.35 as well, but the image was not the problem that night.) But this was clearly not a case of the right lens being on and the screen not being wide enough, as used to happen every time they’d show a Scope movie in one of those shitty rat-traps in Medford or White City, Oregon that I had to endure in the ‘80s. This image was squeezed up to fit 1.85—all the actors were elongated, stretched like taffy, the way they are when someone doesn’t have their fancy HDTV system formatted correctly.

So as I said, I endured and enjoyed the movie, for my blood pressure’s sake as well as for the enjoyment of the kids, who didn’t seem to much notice that Harry seemed taller and thinner than ever before, even before that moving epilogue. But afterward, as the credits rolled, the manager of the theater came down to shut off the two giant fans that would have drowned out the old-school Alger audio system. So I walked up to her and complimented her on the sound. I told her that I’d been seeing movies here since I was about four years old, that I couldn’t remember it ever sounding so good, and that it was a great improvement over the disastrously bad audio I heard in 2009. “Did the audio system get upgraded?” I asked, expecting an enthusiastic answer, the kind given when somebody hears an unexpected compliment from a satisfied, interested customer. “Uh, I dunno,” she mumbled, grinning sheepishly. “Maybe!” For some reason I thought it wise to drop that line of inquiry, and quickly picked up another. “And by the way, is there a reason why the projectionist didn’t show the movie in its proper aspect ratio?” I asked. The storm clouds of confusion began almost immediately to gather darkly over her face. “Huh?” she retorted. “I mean, it was a wide-screen movie,” I offered, “and he didn’t have the right lens on the projector. The image was all squeezed up.”


But instead of answering me, the manager tilted her head up and shouted, “Hey, (whatever his name was), this guy says you didn’t have the right lens on the projector!” I turned and looked up at the balcony, where I saw the projectionist filing through the rows of seats armed with a garbage bag into which he was tossing crumpled-up popcorn bags and the other remaining artifacts of the evening’s show. He stopped and replied: “What?” So I continued: “The picture was squeezed up onto the screen. You need an anamorphic lens to ‘un-squeeze’ the image on the film to its proper proportion.” He paused for a second, imagining, I was guessing, the weirdly skinny people on his own HDTV at home. “No, that’s the way it’s supposed to look.” I laughed. “Uh, no, it’s not,” I said, suspecting this conversation was going to go nowhere fast. “I’ve seen this movie twice before, and never did Harry look like he was seven feet tall.” I tried to explain how, if shown properly on this screen there would be some room at the top and bottom, just like on a letterboxed movie on video. He then tried to explain how the screen was completely filled with movie and therefore everything was the way it was supposed to be, adding for good measure that the lens that was on the projector was, in fact, an anamorphic lens. “Well, no, it’s not,” I offered one last time, “otherwise the picture would have been in the right proportion.” It was then that the projectionist reversed gears completely and told me that, well, they didn’t have an anamorphic lens. Not buying this dodge for a second, I retorted, “What happened to the one you had the last time I was here? Everything was fine with the picture then.” (A slight exaggeration, as this has never entirely been the case at the Alger Theater, but I digress.) “I don’t know,” he speculated, “because this is the one we always use. Besides, the picture looked fine to me.”

Anyone ought to recognize the futility of arguing with a projectionist who likely didn’t even know the meaning of the term “aspect ratio,” much less what an anamorphic lens was, so I bid him well and ended the dialogue. My daughter and niece looked up at me, the end credits having long since ended, as if to say, “You’re embarrassing us.” So I thanked the staff for the excellent sound and we headed out the front door, which was held for us by the manager herself, who was probably thinking that she could have been out of here 10 minutes earlier if it weren’t for me and all my nosy questions. “Thanks for coming,” she muttered, as we walked out into the night air. I smiled and thought to myself, well, at least we could hear the damn movie, a radical change from years of substandard sound at the old show house.

As we drove home, and as I drifted off to sleep that night, I thought of all the things I would do with the place if I won the lottery—new façade outdoors; new seats; take out that phony “stage” they built 15 years ago when some wise guy got the idea to moonlight the Alger as a community theater; maybe even turn it into a McMenamin’s-style pub theater with booths and couches and tables instead of seats, with pizza and beer to go along with popcorn and Pepsi; and a programming schedule that would alternate classics early in the week (lots of cowboy shows, for sure) with the regular sure-fire first-run family fare that has taken over the normal calendar. Ah, dreams. Not exactly the same kind I always used to come away with whenever I visited the Alger, but they were sweet indeed. And they were all unsqueezed and in the proper aspect ratio too.

WHAT, THIS OLD THING? A GALLERY OF BIRTHDAY MOVIE T-SHIRTS

The Mrs. (with some help from Mom, my pal Katie, and even my own keen fashion instinct) went a little crazy with a T-shirt theme for my birthday this year, so much so that I just had to show some of them off. Some were not movie-related, like the beautiful transfer of the Mothers of Invention Weasels Ripped My Flesh album cover, or the lovely periwinkle blue tee featuring a faux-worn image of Alfred E. Neuman, or the Rush print reproducing the art from the Roll the Bones album. But the majority of them accessed my movie love in wonderful, sometimes obscure, sometimes one-of-a-kind ways, and those were the ones I thought you might want to see. Some I will not comment on-- if you get the reference you get it; if not, well, think on it and try again later. A couple of them need some 'splainin', and I will do my best. For now, feast your eyes and imagine how cool I'll feel (and probably how dorky I'll look) as I sport this year's line of birthday movie T-shirts.




While scavenging for last-minute supplies at a WalMart in Newport, Oregon at the beginning of my Oregon Coast bike ride, I spotted this lovely designer number on the rack in the menswear department. Unsure if I wanted to take on any more of a load at this point, I vowed to return in two days and if Chucky was still hanging there waiting for me I would take him home. That was Monday. I returned Wednesday. Chucky was still there. But he's not anymore. Now all I have to do is figure out how to wear the shirt without my youngest daughter seeing it.


Mom picked this one up while vacationing in Utah earlier this year. It may not be the most beautiful design, but it is a neat memento of the recently renovated Gem Theater in Panguitch, Utah, which was built in 1909. They even have their own Facebook page and an ice cream parlor in the lobby.






Katie, an Indiana University alumnus, had these authentic-looking Cutters T-shirts made up to celebrate the completion of our 60-mile Oregon Coast bike ride, and she unveiled them to me as a surprise the night before we left. When this pic was taken, the ride was over and we felt triumphant, like we'd just conquered our own Little 500, and I can say with certainty that she and I will be ready for more next year. What a way to turn 51, with so much adventure and so many adventurous fashion statements to drape around the coming year. I will be the envy of all who see me, I'm sure-- those who can avoid completely averting their eyes, that is! Thanks, Patty, Mom and Katie for dressing me up and helping to make my birthday truly memorable.

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FOR CHARLIE, WHO WOULD BE 14 TODAY...

It’s 14 years later now. Fourteen years separated from the day I held you, my son, for what seemed like a moment of genuinely suspended animation. That moment, comprised almost entirely of sorrow the likes of which I could never, in my most empathetic moment, have ever imagined, was tempered by fear that any movement, any shift of focus, would cause the river of time to start flowing again, its unforgiving waters to come pushing through the doors of the little room just off the nurses station in which we sat together, rising to overwhelm us forever. Sometimes I wish that we could have drowned in that river, you and I. If we had, I wouldn’t need to write this now. More often, though, I just wish for the tens or maybe hundreds of things that went wrong that summer to have magically gone right. I wish that we were here, above water, together.

I’ve spent the last few days beside the waves on the most beautiful of coasts, and tomorrow I’ll be on the water again, in great company, floating, casting for fish, soaking up a world for which I am longing, but from which I am separated for now. And I often dream of how different my world would be if I could have only shared experiences like these with you. This is every father’s dream, of course, and there’s a very specific reason for mine. The dream is a way of keeping you near, of remembering you, of imagining who you might have been, of thinking about all the ways in which you’ve changed me, and the ways in which I might be different still if you had lived.

This is your day. It’s a day of sorrow, certainly, but as the years pass an increment of joy remains in it as well, because there is pleasure as well as pain in thinking about the beautiful young man you would have been on your 14th birthday. It is this way. It must be this way. That pain is the price to be paid for keeping you alive in my heart, in all of our hearts.

On this day I also often think of my own hopes and imperfections, two inseparable considerations, it seems, and contemplate the degree of love that even the most imperfect of men is capable of offering to his son. Two moments in two of the great movies of all time, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, for me perfectly sum up that love, that desire for the welfare and company of one’s children, and the regret for a life that took one too many wrong turns on a path choked with multiple forks in the road. In the second film, we see a young Vito Corleone assassinate a local don practiced in a parasitical “protection” of the neighborhood in New York’s Little Italy which they share. Vito’s escape from the scene, over the rooftops of that neighborhood during a parade commemorating the Feast of San Gennaro, ends when he arrives home to his wife and the three sons, all sitting outside on the steps of their modest apartment. He joins them silently, attending to the youngest, a newborn whose path in life he cannot yet know, though we in the audience do. “Michael, your father loves you very much,” he says to the infant, and there is no denying the exquisitely expressed truth of that simple statement.

The other scene plays out in the story’s timeline some 30 years later. Vito, now old and infirm, expresses to a grown Michael the political reality of the family business he is about to inherit, as well as one of its possible immediate outcomes, and the interaction of the actors, the tenderness of the screenplay, and its aliveness to the way fathers and sons silently express their affection and respect for each other in the way the men take up physical space together and inside the frame, perfectly crystallize the movie’s understanding, without moral judgment, of a flawed man’s dashed hopes and undying love for his boy. It is one scene inside a film full of similar empathy and power, a film that I so wish we could have one day seen together. I can only offer my thoughts of it to you in the hope that somewhere you’ll understand and know that, Charlie, your father loves you very much.


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