Zack's Fifth Letter of His Newsletter
Mr. Rogers vs. The Hulk! Shadow Repair Shop! Just Say No!
Hey everyone! Welcome to my latest newsletter.
I’ve had a busy week with my new job, which I actually enjoy! And it’s taught me a bit about research. Naturally, that’s led me to use my free time to…find many, many obscure things on YouTube.
I mean, I HAVE left the house. I traded in some old comics over the weekend at a local show, and found they weren’t that valuable because, quote, “you actually read them.” Still, I made some space and used the trade-ins to get the first appearances of King Shark and Squirrel Girl. That counts for something!
This coming weekend, I’m looking forward to getting artsy with it and seeing the French crime thriller LE CERCLE ROUGE from director Jean-Pierre Melville at the Carolina Theatre in Durham, NC! I haven’t seen all of Melville’s movies, but some of his other films, ARMY OF SHADOWS and LE SAMOURAI, were amazing at combing thriller elements with existential questions about morality. Plus, I love a good crime thriller!
WEIRD PICTURE BOOKS, PART ONE MILLION:
Instagram has helped me get a second wind for something I love doing once in a while — finding cool and unique old picture books with unique visual styles.
One that showed up on a used site recently looks AMAZING, but I can’t find a copy for less than $100. EMILY AND THE SHADOW SHOP is a rainbow-colored tale of a girl who tries to fix her broken shadow and I’m not accusing the author of doing drugs but they certainly knew how to recreate that look on the page. This copy for sale has many interior pages online. Anyone see one a mite cheaper, holler at your boy….
JEOPARDY PERSPECTIVE:
A bit of what I do at the new job involves helping find candidates for higher-level job positions, so I found the following article about the mess getting a new host for JEOPARDY kind of resonant. I don’t know the details of the process, but here’s a case where a thorough background check and trusting the institutional memory of people who’d been there longer could have saved a lot of money and embarrassment.
AND THE LINE BETWEEN FICTION AND REALITY GROWS EVER THINNER:
Cameron Crowe’s film ALMOST FAMOUS came out when I was in college and I LOVED it. I remember looking forward to it months in advance because of a review of the script on Ain’t It Cool News…such an innocent time…and the final product did NOT disappoint. The day I saw it, I recall it was a sneak preview and I caught it with a friend after we’d burned some mix CDs, so this is kind of a “product of its time” memory…
But the film really captured for me the excitement of the time, and also what it’s like to be a fan who wants to be a professional, and it influenced how I approached journalism afterward…I think. I still have the DVD, and of course, I got the “Untitled” extended version.
It’s also quite fun to watch the film and see how many people who went on to bigger things had small parts. Marc Maron sets up one of the best moments and his character’s line of “Lock the gates!” was used as a soundbite to open his long-running WTF podcast. Eric Stonestreet, nearly a decade before his decade-long run on MODERN FAMILY, is a flustered hotel desk clerk! Hey, it’s Rainn Wilson playing a real figure from Rolling Stone magazine! Wait, that sleazy record company guy was Jimmy Fallon?! And that’s not counting all the great performances from the headliners, including Patrick Fugit, Kate Hudson, Billy Crudup, Frances McDormand, Philip Seymour Hoffman…
Anyway, there’s a new suped-up set of the movie and the soundtrack, and as a bonus, Cameron Crowe and some other Rolling Stone writers “wrote” the article Patrick Fugit’s character writes about the fictional band in the movie, which is in turn inspired by Crowe’s own experiences as a teen writer for Rolling Stone, and yeah, I’m very confused. But if you love the movie like I do, or enjoy old-school rock journalism, it’s a lot of fun. Jason Lee’s character does NOT come off well in most of it…
DRUGS ARE BAD, M’KAY?
The ‘80s were a great time for convincing children that drugs could and would kill them. I suppose it did help save some lives, but all the ads on TV and D.A.R.E. things at school just convinced me drug dealers were everywhere and made me more anxious than I already was.
Like the infamous REEFER MADNESS, some of these crossed a line into inadvertent comedy, with a side helping of hypocrisy in some cases.
Earlier this week, a VHS collector on Facebook scored a copy of SHATTERED…IF YOUR KID’S ON DRUGS, a low-budget effort about the corruption of some suburban youths…as observed by Burt Reynolds and Judd Nelson, who are just kind of hanging out on the sidelines. Several places that posted this postulated that Reynolds and Nelson were working off some community service hours with their appearances, but I can
not find a credible news source to confirm. It is extremely funny to contemplate tho.
Then today, writer Nathan Rabin, whom you’ll recall I commissioned to write about CHAMPAGNE AND BULLETS last week, sent out a thing for backers of his book THE JOY OF TRASH on Kicktarter about “Get High On Yourself,” a 1981 special and series of PSAs overseen by legendary movie producer and studio head Robert Evans…as part of a deal he cut after getting busted in a massive cocaine deal.
In his autobiography, THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE (the book is fun, the documentary is excellent, the audiobook is the BEST) Evans crows mightily about the impact of “Get High On Yourself,” which…he might have exaggerated. Still, here’s the special below, complete with Ted Nugent doing the title song. Again, hypocrisy…
And seeing both of THOSE reminded me of ANOTHER amazingly campy anti-drug special, DESPERATE LIVES. In this one, future Emmy and Oscar winner Helen Hunt has a bad encounter with PCP…not to be confused with the other TV movie she did, ANGEL DUSTED, which was unrelated. I can’t find the full thing, but here’s a scene so over-the-top Hunt showed the clip during a self-deprecating monologue when she hosted SNL; it’s had some death metal added to it, but its over-the-topness speaks for itself.
I suppose things like these WERE effective in the sense that I’ve never done recreational drugs, tho I am watching curiously for when marijuana is legalized in my state. It might help my anxiety. Or make me very paranoid. We’ll see.
IN CASE THAT DRUG TALK GAVE YOU THE MUNCHIES:
Because I like to include recipes, here’s a nice simple one for chocolate chip cookies. I’ve made it a few times, and the cookies are big and rich! I tend to leave out the nuts, and one time I used sea salt instead of regular salt, which gave a slightly richer if less sweet taste to the cookies.
IN ADDITION TO DRUGS, YOU SHOULD NEVER EXPERIMENT WITH GAMMA RADIATION:
A very sweet thing I found on YouTube was a compilation from a couple of episodes of MR. ROGERS’ NEIGHBORHOOD where he visits the set of TV’s THE INCREDIBLE HULK and interacts with stars Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno!
What I liked about this was…well, when I was a kid, the opening credits to reruns of the Hulk show scared the CRAP out of me! When he roared at you, it was FIERCE! Later, I just appreciated the show for its fine writing, its haunting end theme, and its relentless slow-motion destruction of balsa-wood props. Still, I remember that fear, because way too many things traumatized me as a child that I KNOW were silly, but I wasn’t alone in said trauma.
Anyway, it was so nice to see Mr. Rogers go on the set and explain to the kids at home that it was just make-believe, and show how Ferrigno turned into the Hulk through makeup, and even talked about how it’s normal to get angry and how the actors found healthy ways to deal with their own frustrations when they were kids, and made it all seem normal.
Also, Bixby and Ferrigno were so nice. Poor Bixby had a rough time after this — his son, whom he mentions, died, and his wife committed suicide in the aftermath. He still had a surrogate son with Brandon Cruz, his costar from THE COURTSHIP OF EDDIE’S FATHER, with whom he remained close. And he had a good career as an actor and director in television, but he passed away in 1993 from prostate cancer. Here, it’s touching to see him out of character, as a kind, gentle man who’s genuinely happy to meet Mr. Rogers. And Ferrigno is also touching as he talks about losing part of his hearing as a kid, and how that drove him to work out and become a bodybuilder.
Man, this brought back a lot of memories…and was also like a rebuttal to an old childhood fear. And watching Mr. Rogers as an adult, I think I might be learning more from him now than when I was a kid. Miss ya, Fred.
AND FINALLLY:
I keep finding all these old filmed plays on YouTube, and that’s extended to a number of classic (and “classic”) TV movies as well. For this letter’s share, let’s go classic with a 1979 Royal Shakespeare Company production of MACBETH, starring Ian McKellen and Judi Dench!
FUN FACT: The street I grew up on was “Birnamwood Road.” Although I loved reading, I didn’t know that was a Shakespeare reference until I read MACBETH many years later…then forgot it again until I had a Shakespeare class a few years ago.
My childhood home had some woods behind it, but the play’s line about how “The forest shall come to Birnam Wood” feels particularly ironic now, given that most of the houses I knew have been torn down for McMansions. Ah, gentrification! Yours is a power greater than a witch’s curse!
That’s all for now! Remember to like/subscribe/share/comment/whatever!
Zack: I think you'll like Le Cercle Rouge. It's a good one!