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Celluloid Heroes Part VIII: The Drug Of A Nation

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Everybody has that one magical, occasionally momentous summer: the one that lingers in your memories decades later. For me that was the summer of 1994: the first summer I spent the totality of in Toronto. I was living in a house on Ossington Avenue with a bunch of other Film School nerds – Alex Boothby, Marcus Moore, Warren P. Sonoda, and a theater student named Jason Jones (later of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart among other impressive credits). I served as production coordinator and unit manager on two music videos Warren directed that summer for a Nova Scotia band named Fire Rooster:

Summer 1994 was also the last great summer of the Lollapalooza line-up, which I attended at Molson park in Barrie Ontario just north of Toronto.

And I did …

Owing to the fact I had money in the bank and a loose schedule with work it was in July post Lollapalooza that my buddy Mark, whose family was away on an Alaskan cruise, to come stay at his place in my old Scarborough stomping grounds, to grill burgers on the barbecue, to partake of the in-ground swimming pool, and to just enjoy being twenty-one years old. To this day exactly thirty years later the summer of 1994 remains the best summer of my life. Possibly because – and I have reflected on this before – it was probably the last truly care-free summer of my life which would become more complicated as the decade wore on. In my mind and memory the years of 1989-1994 reflect a certain moment in time and in my life almost diametrically opposed to the 1995-2000 stretch that was a lot less fun by comparison (though it had its moments as well).

In a strange way the summer of 1994 was a reflection of Generation X as well; we’d enjoyed a pretty good run the preceding decade or so as we moved to the forefront of the cultural focus. Our music, our movies, our media was dominating the marketplace with no signs of slowing. But as always on those clear summer days and warm summer nights you often miss the storm clouds gathered in the distance. But at the time t hey did feel distant to me. I was having the time of my life. Hanging out, hitting the bars, and watching movies. lots and lots of movies.

If there was jewel in the crown that was the Toronto movie theater scene back in the 1990s the Uptown Theater on Yonge Street just south of Bloor had claim to the prize. The Uptown, specifically “Uptown One” was the largest, most cavernous space with the largest screen short of the IMAX one at Ontario Place, and accompanied by earth-shaking THX-certified sound. For years it was the theater for the Toronto International Film Festival, hosting premieres, and the entirety of the Midnight Madness Film Series where my film school pals and I gorged ourselves on horror, sci-fi-suspense-action films during the glorious ten days of TIFF that kicked off that first week or so of school. It also hosted regular Midnight Movie screenings every Saturday; big-screen movies you needed to see on the big screen to fully appreciate them. Here was an opportunity to catch those movies we missed in theaters the first time around like Jaws, Die Hard, and The Shining.[1] And we availed ourselves of that opportunity every chance we got.

Front row, center, resting your feet on the apron were the best seats in all of Toronto by the way …

The great thing about these midnight screenings was they were almost always packed. Not just a few weirdo movie random types; these were large, diverse movie going crowds willfully denying themselves a good night of sleep to spend two hours beginning between 11:30 pm and 12:00 am to watch a movie they could have easily rented on video because they loved film. I will never forget the bloodcurdling shrieks of one woman sitting a few rows down from me during a screening of Aliens, as a face hugger was slowly picking its way towards an unawares Newt during the Med lab sequence. Same as I’ll never forget that moment in The Shining where I knew (through repeated viewings on video) which column Jack Torrance was hiding behind with his axe as hapless Dick Halloran approached and just had to wait for the audience to jump in their seats and scream.

The Uptown felt like a movie theater; a Movie Palace to be exact, for the main auditorium was enormous, dwarfing everyone who sat inside. The people who ran the Uptown seemed to genuinely enjoy their work too; so much so that on occasion they would surprise audiences with performances from local busker/fringe mayoral candidate Ben Kerr, who once serenaded a packed crowd of filmgoers with a song written for and about the Michael Bay film we were all there to see; Armageddon. The Uptown casts such a long shadow over the collective memories of all who went there that even today there are those in Toronto who mark its closing and eventual demolition (for a condo tower, natch)[2] as the beginning of the decline of Toronto’s movie going scene. All of the great – and to be fair not-so-great – theaters began to fall like dominoes in the early 2000s. The Uptown. The York. The Eglinton. The Hyland. The Hollywood. All replaced by glossy and garish multiplexes that promised Big Screens, Big Sounds, Big Experiences but always felt less special than a movie at the Uptown. Sure they had stadium seats, and state-of-the-art sound. But their lobbies were noisy, garish places with video games and attractions that cheapened the theatrical experience.

Put simply: The Uptown was the theater you went to when you wanted the best possible movie-going experience. When a highly anticipated movie was scheduled to play there, the line to get in routinely stretched around the block, which is where I, along with elementary school friend Mark and high-school/college friend Nathalie and hundreds of others found ourselves on Saturday August 29, 1994 as we queued near the front of that line to see a new Oliver Stone film called Natural Born Killers.

Outside of John Carpenter has any filmmaker has had as impressive a consecutive run of movies as Stone? Beginning in 1985 and ending just ten years later he directed Salvador, Platoon, Wall Street, Talk Radio, Born on the Fourth of July, The Doors, JFK, Heaven and Earth, Natural Born Killers, and Nixon. Stone was very much a filmmaker of his time; that mid-80s to mid-90s run. In that decade he had his finger as firmly on the pulse of the movie-going public as Spielberg and Lucas had from 1975-1985; not as a box-office juggernaut but for sheer gallons of ink spilled in discussing the controversial filmmaker’s body of work.

Controversy has been Stone’s thing pretty much from the start of his mainstream career. He had a spotty, unremarkable run as a low-budget schlock director in the 1970s before breaking out with his screenplay for Midnight Express, followed by ones for Conan the Barbarian and Scarface sparking that now perennial conversation of whether movies have become too violent. But his landmark Platoon put him on the map and again courted controversy with its depiction of soldiers doing less than honorable things in the jungle, most notably in the film’s central My Lai-inspired village massacre. But it was also a powerful metaphoric tale of seduction, of the embodiments of good (Willem Dafoe’s Christ-like Sgt. Elias) and evil (Tom Berringer’s brutal Sgt. Barnes) vying for the soul of wide-eyed youth Taylor (Charlie Sheen). Platoon, which I saw in the theater in Lake Placid NY while on a ski trip with my parents, knocked me on my ass. I wasn’t the only one: as the credits rolled my dad and I stood up to leave and realized we were the only ones in the packed cinema who were standing.

Stone seemed to dial back on that aspect of his work, and what’s remarkable about his subsequent films is in how tame they are. The heroes and villains of Wall Street (greed), Talk Radio (racists), Born on the Fourth of July (an indifferent government) and even The Doors (excess) are both conventional and easily identifiable. Nobody in a Stone film is an innocent though; all of them are tainted by their original sins, even Born’s paralyzed vet turned anti-war activist Ron Kovic, who joins the army to fight the commies in Viet Nam and is “enlightened” by a single VC bullet to the chest.

Stone dealt in broad strokes drama; subtlety was never his strong suit nor was it his intent. His messaging was graffiti sprayed over the steps of the US Capitol; a message best communicated by being shouted to the masses. How well that worked for you was all a matter of opinion. Some hated his proselytizing; others embraced it because it was so clear-cut obvious. It was blunt, straight-forward, lacking in nuance. It was an internet-era filmmaking before the internet really took hold.

But audiences were unprepared for 1991’s JFK; his propulsive, occasionally convincing, always thrilling deep dive into conspiracies revolving around the assassination of the president on November 22, 1963; a date that loomed as large in the Boomer psyche as September 11, 2001 would in the memories of subsequent generations. JFK was unforgettable both for the subject matter but also for the way the film was presented, in a dizzying montage of varied film formats, aggressive narration, flashbacks, and newsreel footage including the famous Zapruder film showing the back of the president’s head blown out over and over and over (“Back and to the left … back and to the left … back and to the left”) again.[3]

Had JFK been a sluggish historical drama it might not have garnered much notice; to that point Stone’s films had earned respectable dollars at the box office but never blockbusters. JFK changed that with its top-flight cast a virtual murderer’s row of talent; Kevin Costner, Sissy Spacek, Tommy Lee Jones, Gary Oldman, Walter Matthau, Ed Asner, Jack Lemmon, Kevin Bacon, Laurie Metcalf, John Candy, Michael Rooker, Jay O Sanders, Sally Kirkland, Wayne Knight, Tony Plana, Vincent D’Onofrio, Bob Gunton, Donald Sutherland (in one of the greatest single-scene performances in film history), and Joe Pesci. The $40 million dollar JFK earned $200 million worldwide, making the three-hour plus film a genuine success. In late 1991 it was the movie you had to see; I recall attempting on two separate occasions to see it in Kingston, and the film being sold out by the time we got to the box office window.[4]

But even to my impressionable teenaged mind Stone’s JFK was hokum, albeit entertaining hokum; a mix of narration, fast cuts, mixed media, all of it creating a propulsive story that’s convincing because it moves so fast. And had I seen JFK in the theater in 1991 (it wouldn’t be until 1994 that I, along with Warren, went to see it at the Paradise Cinema not far from the rental we were sharing) I would be writing about it and not Natural Born Killers, which came along barely than three years later and proved to be an even more controversial film. As though Stone himself was saying: “You want controversy!? I’ll give you controversy!”

Natural Born Killers feels born from the response JFK received in the mainstream press and the often vicious, vitriolic attacks Stone himself received from politicians and pundits, not to mention what I am sure were many angry letters sent to his production office. Stone was personally affronted by the JFK backlash and identified the news media as the main culprit, accusing them of whipping up negative reviews and creating controversy all at the behest of their corporate masters. The news media who, in Stone’s mind, had for three decades perpetuated the “myth” of Kennedy’s assassination, toeing the Warren Commission’s line about Oswald being the lone gunman.

And yet Stone himself even identified that while the old guard hated JFK, it tested and played very well to the filmgoers born after the assassination: Generation X. The ones much more willing to cast a wary, distrustful eye to their governments, their leaders, even their parents. Like he too saw this next generation as more willing to ask tough questions of what the news deigned to show them.

If only there were a project he could make to draw from that audience …

It took a little while to figure out what that project would be. Stone followed JFK with Heaven & Earth, the “third part” of his loosely connected Vietnam trilogy, this time focusing on the experiences of a Vietnamese woman caught up in the war. The film’s mixed critical response and box office failure seemed an additional rebuke. Here was Stone addressing his critics and attempting to tell a woman-centered story about the horrors of war, only to have it be soundly rejected, presumably as an additional punishment for stirring the conspiracy pot. The failure of Heaven & Earth seemed to light a fire in Stone. All he needed was the right project.

Then producers Don Murphy and Jane Hamsher passed Stone a screenplay they’d optioned by a young writer on the up-and-up named Quentin Tarantino. Natural Born Killers was an incendiary black comedy about two thrill-killers, married couple Mickey and Mallory Knox, and how they become media superstars, aided and abetted by the same tabloid news media that depends ratings-wise on their exploits. The 90s saw the rise of tabloid and “Reality TV” which was another “only in the 90s” innovation that would rise to dominance beginning in the early 2000s beginning with MTV’s The Real World –  a “documentary” about a group of 20-something GenX-ers cohabitating in a NYC loft – that made minor celebrities out of “normal” people (until the next season’s cast came along, and the next, and the next …)

“Reality TV” extended to the actual real world, and incendiary criminal acts became daytime news fodder as well. Court cases like Eric and Lyle Menendez, Lorena Bobbitt and – in a bit of real-life-to-showbiz synergy nobody saw coming, OJ Simpson, captured the public’s attention whether we wanted it or not. You couldn’t avoid knowing who Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan were because the nightly news blasted you with every bit of information about them. The Goldman-Simpson Murders occurred earlier the summer of Natural Born Killers’ release, prompting Stone to add in a shot of OJ – still a year away from his trial – at his arraignment to the film’s closing montage weeks before release. With the first Gulf War resolving itself too quickly for the news media to really make bank it was looking for something – anything – to draw in viewers and keep them there as 24-hour news network CNN made its bid for dominance and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News was waiting in the wings, lunching its 24-hour channel in 1996.

Stone loved the script. It represented his chance to take some retaliatory shots at the media who had eviscerated him and make them, not the killer couple, the true villains of the story. In Stone’s mind (and in his massive rewrite, aided by Richard Rutowski and David Veloz, of Tarantino’s screenplay – the budding auteur only got a story credit), Mickey and Mallory are victims of the same trash media and insidious reach of television that made Stone himself Public Enemy #1. Mickey’s fleetingly glimpsed childhood is one of abuse and murder and suicide. Mallory lives in a home under constant physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her domineering father (Rodney Dangerfield) and doormat of a mother (Edie McClurg); that flashback plays out as a deranged sitcom with laugh track called “I Love Mallory”, filmed on a soundstage with big bulky TV cameras. Mickey’s entrance is to audience applause, and tasteless jokes get the laugh-track treatment.

Mickey and Mallory were young punks (and killers, let’s be clear) but are simultaneously the only three-dimensional characters in the film. The rest of the main cast – Tom Sizemore’s media-savvy super-cop Jack Scagnetti, Tommy Lee Jones’ prison warden Dwight McClusky, and Robert Downey Jr.’s trash tabloid reporter Wayne Gayle – are all cartoon characters played to an even more cartoonish hilt. The only actor who comes close to projecting any sense of gravitas is activist turned actor Russell Means, who cuts a sympathetic, short-lived figure in his brief role as a Native American who takes Mickey and Mallory in during their desert wanderings.[5]

Natural Born Killers is a surreal road-trip through the American psyche, or at least that’s how I imagine Stone described it. Everything in it is played to the nth degree, from teenage serial killer groupies proclaiming Mickey and Mallory “the biggest thing in murder since Manson” to the Superbowl Sunday prison post-game broadcast interview an incarcerated Mickey gives to Gayle that ends up stirring the prisoners to riot by speaking some hard, harsh truths about America, about human nature, about life and how all of ours are exploited by wealthy parasites who get rich off others’ miseries. It’s a crude film in violence, in action, in dialogue, but it is never boring. Viewed in the present it sometimes feels and looks like the pre-internet-pre-cell phone-pre-social media outrage cycle world that it definitely is. Yet it also reads as a warning about where America was heading with its obsession with fame and fortune and celebrity. Gazing about the current hell-scape of influencers and social media stars and provocateurs stirring up outrage in an attempt to go viral and boost their own SEOs, the world Natural Born Killers prophesized has become our reality.

But in one particular area Natural Born Killers genuinely stuck the landing and one must give credit to producer Jane Hamsher, who assembled a series of mixtapes for Stone to listen to while driving around scouting locations through the US southwest. Tapes loaded with the crème of the crop of angry, aggressive GenX-centric music. The idea being this was the music and these were the bands people like Mickey and Mallory would have grown up with, who expressed the rage of a generation crying to be heard. Stone responded with genuine enthusiasm; despite being nearly fifty years old, the film he produced was squarely dropped into GenX territory. Its soundtrack, produced by Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, was an exercise in audio overload featuring L7, Jane’s Addiction, Cowboy Junkies, Dr. Dre, Leonard Cohen, Rage Against The Machine, Diamanda Galas, Marilyn Manson, The Specials, The Melvins, and Duane Eddy that played out in the film and on its accompanying soundtrack album as one long uninterrupted fever dream of music, like an Adderall-addicted teen scanning through the radio station settings. And it was that soundtrack that led to Natural Born Killers becoming one of those “of the moment” movies that captured the imaginations of its intended audience; GenX.

As to why it hit so hard, one has to look at Natural Born Killers in the context of the year in which it was released for 1994 was a volatile year for GenX beginning with the suicide of Nirvana front-man Kurt Cobain. Alternative Nation had been shattered to pieces and it was looking for something to grasp onto with the same spirit Nevermind had brought to the mainstream. Bands like Oasis, Blur, and Green Day tried to fill the void and while soon to become megastars in their own right, they all lacked that rage Cobain delivered in his guttural howl so well; unlike Cobain, these artists wanted to be superstars.

TV was no help either, at the time preoccupied with the ongoing OJ Simpson saga. The movies of that summer had also been a bit of a letdown. Yes, there were megahits like The Lion King and Forrest Gump and Speed, but for young adults culturally immersed in nose-rings, tattoos, dyed hair, and loud aggressive music they were all pretty safely mainstream. While Tarantino’s next film, Pulp Fiction, astounded everyone by winning the Palm D’Or at that summer’s Cannes Film Festival it wasn’t due to be released until that October. That was the environment Natural Born Killers was about to cannonball itself into.

Seeing Natural Born Killers on opening weekend truly felt like participating in an act of generational rebellion. The film was already being called “dangerous” and “incendiary” and “irresponsible”; naturally we had to see it in the best theater possible. As already stated the line to get into Uptown 1 stretched around the block but Mark, Nathalie, and I were near the front. We had tickets, but what we didn’t have were the best seats in the house. That was my job to secure and I knew, from numerous screenings at the Uptown that they were in the first row. Normally the first row is where you don’t want to sit as it’s right up against the screen, but the Uptown’s design was as such that the first row put you up against a lengthy apron leading to the screen further back, and you could put your feet up on the edge of it and stretch out (if there was one failing in the Uptown’s design it was the lack of leg-room).

So I was ready to do my part, and once they tore our tickets and let us inside the building I was off like a shot, racing up the long staircase while the rest crowded onto the escalator. I was in the theater, bounding for the front row, and managed to secure the three seats in dead center before either Mark or Nathalie knew what had happened to me. On locating me right where I said I would be, they were amused, but appreciative for having the best seats that night for what would be an epic experience.

And to be fair, if the experience of seeing Natural Born Killers was better than the actual movie, you couldn’t fault it or us for feeling that way. We did enjoy the movie because we were all the right age – in our early 20s – for its blend of satire, violence, humor, and anger. The audience was fully on-board, laughing at the blood and gore, cheering when the villains got their just desserts, and just tripping out on the truly wild visuals; even compared to JFK, Natural Born Killers looks and feels like no film Stone – indeed anyone – had made before or since.

There was a definite split in reactions to it as well and the split happened right along generational lines: in short GenX loved Killers and Boomers loathed it. In hindsight it’s not difficult to see why in both cases. What the movie and Stone seemed to be saying was this is the world we’ve created for ourselves. A world where ratings, where profit, drives all, and as long as Mickey and Mallory promise Big Ratings and Ad Revenue they’re not only safe but dare we say necessary to keep that spice flowing even if it means a few people get killed along the way.

Stone’s film ends with a roll-call of then sensational media figures Erik and Lyle Menendez, Lorena Bobbit, Tonya Harding, and the Big Kahuna himself OJ Simpson – at the time just arrested and charged with the murder of his estranged wife and her friend – everybody in that audience at the Uptown recognized them because we’d been inundated with news stories courtesy of the tabloid culture that came to infest mass media discourse in the 1990s and never really went away. Every week a new outrage, every year another Trial of the Century and on and on and on. Fiction became fact by sheer repetition. TV gurus like Oprah elevated shills like Drs. Phil, Oz, and for all I know Frankenstein as well.

In short, the world Natural Born Killers depicted was a Boomer Creation, and a world GenX had no choice but to live in. What Stone and company were pointing to was something we all had come to realize; that the media was not our friend. That the days of Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, and Dan Rather were coming to an end. Truth was less important than ratings, allowing the Rupert Murdoch’s and Clear Channels and Sinclair Broadcastings of the world to buy up the competition was a genuinely bad thing that was just the first salvo in a decades-long decline in independent voice and independent everything.

Natural Born Killers marked the end of the Stone Decade. Never again would the filmmaker capture the public’s imagination and ire in quite the same way. His post-Killers output of Nixon, U-Turn, Any Given Sunday, (multiple cuts of) Alexander, W., World Trade Center, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Savages, and Snowden, while all possessed of their own merits just didn’t have the same zing as Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, and Natural Born Killers. Those movies put him on the map, and simultaneously made him the punchline to many lesser types’ jokes.

Viewed through the passage of time though he was a filmmaker unlike any other working at the time with the possible exception of Martin Scorsese. But whereas Scorsese’s obsessions were of the rot in the human soul, Stone’s was the rot at the heart of American Identity, extending to his early 2000s documentary series “The Untold History of the United States” which blames American interventionism for every ill and evil of the twentieth century (while simultaneously hand-waving away the crimes of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot as aberrations of rather than features of totalitarian communist ideology).

In a similar way Natural Born Killers ended up marking the end of the GenX era as well – the angry, volatile brand of it anyway that had dominated the discourse and culture for that first half of this tumultuous decade — which was always a minority, albeit a vocal one. That rage of being a rat in its cage which began in 1989 had lost its way by the end of 1994. Kurt Cobain was dead, the economy was improving, things were looking better than they had at the beginning of the decade. Britpop took the wheel and promised happier, bouncier times. Grunge would soon become a footnote; an outsized one in GenX memory to be fair, but still a footnote. Music was becoming lighter, brighter, peppier, and spicier.

Yes, GenY was making its voice heard and they had the internet as their megaphone. The next five years would look very different from the previous five. Grungy black and white was becoming Gen Ys boy bands and pop princesses. It all made NBK feel like the last hurrah for Alternative Nation as well. I would go back to see the movie in the theater two more times, and I’ve since seen it numerous times more on DVD. Somehow we (my roommates and I) acquired a big bus-shelter sized NBK poster for the living room wall where it hung pretty much until we all moved out at the end of 1996. I’ve revisited in times since but I’m a much older man now and it doesn’t posses that lightning in a bottle it did in 1994. Life looks a lot different in your fifties than it did in your twenties and while I’m still angry at the state of the world I work hard on my side to improve it in whatever ways I can. Certainly not through the barrel of a gun. Definitely not by staring at a screen.

And despite 1994’s summer weighing outsized in my mind there have been great summers to follow, not coincidentally all of which have occurred since my son was born. Nothing makes you appreciate summers more than your child to share them with you. His experiences become your re-experiences, from summers on Cape Cod (1982 and 2024 respectively) to relaxing poolside (1994 and 2024), movies, museums, activities and adventure. Life is what you make it and that applies too to summer.

Looking back today, as dangerous, incendiary and irresponsible as Natural Born Killers may have seemed one cannot deny that it was onto something. What seemed an exaggerated cartoon portrayal of American life in 1994 has sadly become more prescient now as we’ve hurtled into the third decade of the 21st Century. There’s a full laundry list of atrocities – Columbine, Newtown, Uvalde, Tr**p – that have come to pass since Natural Born Killers’ release to be met with a largely benumbed gaze as “just another day in America ending with Y”. Mass media has given way to social media and its amplification of everyone’s voices to little benefit. Because of algorithms always seeming to hand a bullhorn to the very worst aspects and voices in society it keeps people watching and sharing and scrolling. It makes celebrities of stupidity and ignorance, it platforms cruelty and delivers hatred to an audience addicted to its flavor. If Killers was made today Mickey and Mallory would have been social media stars, broadcasting their crimes on TikTok to millions of adoring fans and spurred countless of copycat murderous couples killing for Internet clout.

In one of life’s many ironies the then-present day critics of Stone’s film would likely admit now that as offensive to their sensibilities the film was then, in the cold hard light of today it looks positively quaint compared to the daily outrage and insanities we carry around in our pockets everywhere we go. It’s a shame Stone is more or less retired from filmmaking; he could make a hell of a movie about our present day nightmare.

[1] The Uptown staff were also big movie fans, so much so that the tickets for that screening of The Shining were deliberately misspell to read “The Shinning” in reference to a popular spoof from The Simpsons TV show.

[2] The reason the always profitable Uptown closed? It was sued for not being wheelchair accessible. When the court ordered them to make it compliant, the prohibitive cost of a retrofit led the Famous Players chain to shutter the building and sell the property to a developer. In a tragic twist to the story, during the demolition of the building a wall collapsed onto an ESL school housed next door, killing one.

[3] So mainstream was JFK that it was parodied in an infamous episode of Seinfeld.

[4] Think of that: a three-hour plus film about the investigation into the Kennedy assassination selling out multiple times. We’ve come a long way, baby. Or not. It wouldn’t be until sometime in the mid-90s I finally saw JFK on the big screen, at a rep screening at Toronto’s Paradise Theater with my roommate (now president of the Director’s Guild of Canada) Warren Sonoda.

[5] In this post-The Doors film Stone hadn’t quite let go of his obsessions with Native American mysticism.

ADDENDUM:

A reader asked about the significance of this entry’s title. It comes from a great song by the great 90s hip-hop group Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy “Television, The Drug of a Nation”, the message of which might just as well apply to the internet culture of today.

Celluloid Heroes Part VI: In The Pale Moonlight

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Summer always seems endless when you are younger and the first week of summer vacation was always my favorite. School was wrapped up for another year, and the memory of those hallways, those lockers, those desks lingered fresh in the mind as we embarked on what was two full months of freedom from pencils, books, and teachers’ dirty looks. Living in Brockville Ontario at that time was a definite advantage; being a river town swimming and boating on the St. Lawrence were the norm and I recall many afternoons spent piloting the small outboard boat we owned around the bays and inlets lining the Canadian side of the river (and occasionally the American side as well – you could do that pre-9/11).[1] Before July and the official start of the summer season began, that last week to handful of days remaining in June were an oasis of calm before summer “really” started, with its jobs, its family trips, its obligations, and with its hopeful leisure time.

Summers for me back then was also extra-special because that was when the best movies were released. Not “best” as in critically because they frequently were pretty mediocre or downright bad, but “best” as in “this is a movie where you munch popcorn and allow yourself to be transported”. Unlike now where a “summer movie” can be released in the dead of winter) back then Hollywood made us wait until the warm months to unleash a horde of summer-friendly cinematic fun upon us. They didn’t have to be all-time greats; they just had to be good enough to be a good time[2] and I, like so many others of my generation, were fortunate to have lived through the Golden Age of the Summer Movie: Jaws, Star Wars, Grease, The Empire Strikes Back, The Shining, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Dragonslayer, Superman 2, Conan the Barbarian, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Poltergeist, The Thing, E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, Tron, Blade Runner … and that carries us up to only 1982.

By 1989 movies were very much at the forefront of my mind as well as I was very much focused on pursuing a career in the entertainment biz. But doing so back then was difficult verging on impossible when you were a kid in a small-town far from the bright lights big cities of New York, L.A. and Toronto. There wasn’t much in the way of opportunity for a Brockville teenager like there was one who hung his or her hat in Studio City, Van Nuys, or Santa Monica. There also wasn’t much opportunity to learn the ins and outs of moviemaking, in this pre-DVD behind the scenes and audio commentary world of 1989. Learning the ins and outs of the movies themselves meant going to the cinema, renting the VHS, or watching every movie-related program TV had to offer.

Thankfully I had two great lifelines courtesy of TVO – TV Ontario to those of you not from Ontario Canada. If you are from Ontario though, those three letters will signify something. TVO was and remains the province’s public broadcaster, airing special interest programming, news, multilingual documentaries, children’s programming, all of it funded from the public purse. It is, like PBS in the states, one of the finest examples of our tax dollars at work we can genuinely see and access. TVO was also producer of two informational TV shows I watched pretty religiously.

The first was Prisoners of Gravity, created and produced by Mark Askwith; a well-known comics luminary (who I would come to know quite well as my career took off) who later went on to become a segment producer at Canada’s Space: The Imagination Station – Canada’s answer to the Sci-Fi, later SyFy Channel. Along with host Rick Green (of the famous Canadian comedy troupe The Frantics), Prisoners of Gravity chronicled the happenings in the sci-fi community with an emphasis on literature and comic books. Interviews with luminaries like George Clayton Johnston, Robert F. Sawyer, Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Julie Czerneda, Tanya Huff, William Gibson, Harlan Ellison and Spider Robinson. Prisoners of Gravity (or “PoG” as fans referred to it) aired weekly on TVO between 1989 and 1994 on Friday nights and I watched it any chance I got. PoG dug deep into the art of writing, of ideas, of crafting stories that genuinely provoked thought rather than just passive distraction. Outside of Ray Bradbury and Richard Matheson I wasn’t a huge sci-fi and fantasy literature fan when I started down the PoG road, but by the end I was a full convert.

The second TVO show was actually a block of films that aired Saturday nights titled, appropriately, Saturday Night at the Movies, hosted by a kindly looking elderly bald man with glasses and a broad grin named Elwy Yost.

Elwy was what we would call one of the great ones; a man clearly in love with films, and whose love of them was infectious. The program for Saturday Night was simple; two films aired back to back, with an intermission comprised of interviews with the actors, filmmakers, and behind the scenes personalities behind those films. Hitchcock and Ford, Hawks and Curtiz, Donen and Wise were favorites of Elwy’s, but he also introduced me to the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, Billy Wilder, and Francois Truffaut among others. Saturday Night excelled in introducing you to the movies that in some cases you couldn’t see elsewhere. While home video was certainly well-entrenched in the late 80s I would never had a chance to see 1968’s The Swimmer or 1964’s The Americanization of Emily without Saturday Night at the Movies.  

This is all to say I spent many a Saturday night at home, watching Elwy and TVO when other teenagers were out cruising the strip, getting drunk, and getting laid. It wasn’t uncommon to make up some excuse to friends as to why I couldn’t go out on a particular Saturday, just so I could stay home and watch Matewan with an accompanying interview with its director John Sayles, or Jason and the Argonauts because Elwy’s guest that night in conversation was none other than fellow Canadian James Cameron, who himself looked as delighted to be talking with Elwy as Elwy was with him.

The films aired without commercials and uncut, and my home library of video tapes back then included many episodes of Saturday Night at the Movies. I could have just set the VCR to record and gone out but for me watching them in the moment was a lot more satisfying, in the same way see in a film in the theater always is. It was the immediacy, the “blink and you’ll miss it” element that to this day has me leave my phone locked in the car or left on the dresser at home when going to a show.

My interest and education in film was largely self-taught, through Starlog and Premiere magazines, through video rentals and newspaper reviews but also by going to the movies. Summer movies were a big deal back then and had been since Jaws devoured the box office in 1975. Up until Jaws movies were generally slowly rolled out across the country, opening first in the larger markets like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco and Toronto. You would frequently hear about a movie like The Godfather or The Exorcist for months before you got to actually see it. But with Jaws and then Star Wars the movies began to open bigger, and wider. Throughout the 80s the summer movie season became Hollywood’s Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, and Birthday rolled into one two-month stretch where you could more or less make your year. And if one of the many movies released became an all-time classic of its genre like Dirty Dancing, Ghostbusters, or Beverly Hills Cop, you would continue to rake in the dollars on home video. Over the intervening fifteen or so years since Jaws the summer season became bigger and longer, with the first “summer” movies debuting in mid-May and running more or less through August.

In the list all-time Legendary Summers of my lifetime, three from the 1980s stand out. 1982 gave us Star Trek II, The Thing, E.T., Poltergeist, Blade Runner, Conan the Barbarian, and Tron. 1984 had Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Ghostbusters, The Last Starfighter, Gremlins, The Karate Kid, Purple Rain, and The Terminator.[4] 1985, with Back to the Future, The Goonies, and Cocoon seems almost quaint by comparison. The trajectory by then was well-established, and movie critics would groan collectively as Hollywood dumped its biggest releases into the summer months, and pine for the relatively calmer, saner, “better” films of autumn.

But the Summer of 1989 was different and everyone recognized those differences in the moment. Dubbed “The Summer of the Sequel” we had Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, Ghostbusters II, The Karate Kid Part III, License to Kill and Lethal Weapon 2 among the pickings, along with Honey I Shrunk The Kids, The Abyss, When Harry Met Sally and Uncle Buck.[5]

But to look at 1989 and the Summer Film in general, we have to look at the third film from a quirky filmmaker who, after Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985) and Beetlejuice (1988) was handed the reigns of a comic book character best known to audiences as the star of his very campy 1960s TV show. And while Tim Burton’s Batman, released to theaters 35 years ago this day of publication, is campy in numerous ways, it ably demonstrated especially to me the role a director played in turning the everyday into the extraordinary, in those rare cases when the right director meets the material best suited for him. Simply put: Batman 1989 would have been a very different film if it had been directed by anyone other than Burton.

Now let me add a quick little 2024 aside: I love Batman. I love the character, I love Gotham City and its Rogue Gallery of Villains. Heck, the wallpaper of my iPad is, you guessed it …

But in 1988-1989 Batman was kind of hokey to me. My prevailing memory of watching the old 60s Batman TV show likely dominated this belief, as did the old Superfriends cartoon series. And while friends in Brockville had talked up The Dark Knight Returns, Batman: Year One, and Batman: The Killing Joke as being dark, adult stories, I had yet to be converted.

Burton’s film would change all this.

Like many of us, Burton was the weird kid. Growing up in sunny suburban Burbank California, he was obsessed with Universal horror, Vincent Price, Edmund Gorey, German Expressionism, and monster movies on TV. Graduating from Cal Arts he became an animator at Disney before branching out into directing. His unique visual style was his calling-card, and crossing paths with comedian Paul Reubens, Burton’s star would climb when Reubens picked him to direct Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. He followed that with Beetlejuice; a truly odd film that proved to be a big hit, and introducing Gen X to one of its seminal poster girls (and personal movie crush); Winona Ryder. I saw Beetlejuice with a group of kids from school, and could hear the girls we were with unimpressed by Winona’s Goth Lydia Deetz, calling her gross and weird and creepy but those preppy teenage girls just didn’t understand the appeal of being strange and unusual.

It was shortly after seeing Beetlejuice in the theater in 1988 that a friend mentioned that Burton was directing the upcoming Batman movie. That Michael “Beetlejuice” Keaton would be playing Bruce Wayne, with Jack Nicholson taking on the role of the Joker. At first I thought this friend was having me on, but an issue of Starlog confirmed it all later that month. In that pre-internet age news traveled slowly; movie news particularly so. It wasn’t uncommon to learn a movie even existed until you plopped down in a theater seat and saw the trailer pop up on the big screen. This was the case when in early 1989 when going to see a movie whose title escapes me now, seeing the trailer for Batman. You can still find it on YouTube and it’s quite a stark difference from the slickly produced trailers of today (and to be fair even back then). There was no music, basic production sound, no narrative. Just clips from the film which looked like nothing any of us had seen before. It looked dark, gothic, expressionistic, seeming to straddle multiple eras all at once, with the duster coats and fedoras of the criminal gangs contrasted with the Batman’s hi-tech gadgets and car:

Bat-mania developed slowly over the first months of 1989. We all knew the Batman movie was coming, but so too were the returns of the Enterprise Crew hot off the smash success of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and the Ghostbusters were back as well. Even Indiana Jones had his Last Crusade, indicating this third film would be the final entry in the Indiana Jones series.[6] So yes, Batman; but would it be a hit? Would audiences who grew up on Adam West and Burt Ward and the notion that comic books were kid’s stuff respond?

In that sense, the decision to have Prince record songs for the movie, and be so enamored with the Batman mythos the Purple One recorded a whole damn album of songs was a masterstroke. Prince’s Batman album is widely derided now and even was so on its release, but you cannot deny it helped usher people – particularly the teens who made MTV, Much Music, and CBC’s Video Hits a staple of afterschool viewing. The “Batdance” video in particular was a real banger in that regard, with Prince appearing as himself, as a character calling himself “Gemini”, with dancing Batmen and Jokers and Vicki Vale’s cavorting about an obvious soundstage while music punctuated by audio clips from the movie. It’s one of those “only in the 80s would this work” moments in pop culture that burned itself into the memories of every GenX kid who watched it. It also made every school-age kid who saw it want to see Batman.[7]

I was looking forward to Batman like most summer filmgoers, but more so because by 1989 I was a big comic book fan. I had been one since 1984 when I discovered the G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero comic series but my tastes had matured though by 1987 as I discovered books like Hellblazer, The Shadow, and Sandman. Brockville’s first comic book shop, The Comic Cave, opened in 1988 and I spent many hours there browsing the racks discovering a new favorite book almost every week. A friend finally convinced me Batman was cool when lending me his paperback editions of Batman: Year One, The Dark Knight Returns, and most particularly The Killing Joke. That book was what made me most interested to see Batman, especially when in an interview in Starlog Burton made mention of it being an influence. It’s no surprise the version of Batman occupying my brain was a much different beast from the one we got. 

I actually didn’t see Batman opening day despite it actually arriving at the Parkedale Cinema in Brockville on day of release, because opening day and night were spent at my friend Casey’s lakeside cottage outside the city. Being teenage boys being boys the “sleep-over” became a “let’s stay up all night and play poker and burn shit in the camp-fire” so by the Saturday afternoon when I and my buddy Mark visiting from Toronto staggered back to my house to crash, we somehow decided seeing Batman that night was the much more prudent course of action than, you know, sleeping. But movies were important back then. They were cool back then. And back then you had to see it on opening weekend so you could say you had seen it. And so, after a hasty dinner of pizza the two very bleary-eyed of us staggered to the Parkedale to stand in line for tickets and crowd into the sold-out theater to take our seats and try to get through Batman without nodding off.  

Doing anything while sleep-deprived is a challenge. Seeing a movie while sleep-deprived makes for a wholly different experience. And I noticed it from the beginning as the Warner Brothers logo transitioned to a gloomy landscape as the credits rolled and Danny Elfman’s now legendary score played over what would eventually be revealed to be the Bat-symbol. The movie was dark, and it was dim, and while I was attentive to it, in its most gothic moments – the opening in Crime Alley, the raid on Axis Chemicals and the (re)birth of the Joker, all the way to the operatic showdown atop Gotham City Cathedral, I couldn’t be sure I was in the theater watching Batman, or having a dream about being in a theater watching Batman. As I recall afterward Mark felt the same way, and on the way home we quizzed each other (“Did the Joker really pull a massive gun from his pants and shoot down the BatWing?”) to confirm that yes we had actually seen Batman and hadn’t been dreaming the entire thing.

So I’d seen Batman. But did I like it? To be honest I couldn’t be sure, so I saw it again a second time in a state of full waking to make sure what I’d seen the first time was what I’d seen. And at the time I was kind of mixed. It certainly had atmosphere to spare, but the story was thin, the action clunky (Burton is many things but a director of action is not one of them). That’s not to say it wasn’t good because deep down it did what every film should do which is to transport you to a time and a place where you do not exist. Where you are just some silent presence observing the trials and tribulations of these characters and their world.

In Batman’s case the world is Gotham City, and what a dingy, dreary world it is; possibly the best representation of the city outside of Matt Reeves’ The Batman in 2022. Bolstered by Anton Furst’s gothic production design, the Gotham of Batman is very much that “third main character” after Nicholson’s Joker and Keaton’s Dark Knight.

As for the plot, well, there really is none. It’s an origin story. For the Joker. For Batman. And for the dominant form of blockbuster moviemaking that would really kick into gear in the late 1990s with Blade, the X-Men series, and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy, all of which paved the way for 2008’s Iron Man; a modest hit that ended up kicking off a cinematic universe to spread across screens big and small over the following fifteen years.

It’s surprising looking back even now to consider just why Burton’s Batman hit so hard because it’s so damn weird. Not weird like Batman Returns would be in 1992, not weird as in the “what the hell were they thinking” weird of Batman and Robin of 1997. Batman is a loose, almost plot-less film carried along by its stunning production design, moody cinematography by Brazil‘s Roger Pratt, loopy score by Oingo Boingo’s Danny Elfman, snazzy costumes by Bob Ringwood, and diametrically opposed performances by Keaton’s brooding, slightly off-kilter Bruce Wayne/Batman and Jack Nicholson’s very off-kilter Jack Napier/Joker. The premise of Batman – Batman must stop the Joker from poisoning the citizens of Gotham City – is pretty much the plot. The vibes are funhouse mirror though, with Nicholson chewing scenery and camping it up to the hilt while the normally just as loopy Keaton in the straight role of “man who dresses as bat”

Batman is an exercise in style and in mood. It is a brooding, shadowy nightmare of dark alleys, Lovecraftian architecture, and gothic styling. More than any movie I’d seen up until that point, Batman made me truly understand and appreciate what a director brought to the table. A Batman film by Tim Burton is diametrically opposed to one from Joel Schumacher, Christopher Nolan, Zach Snyder, or Matt Reeves. And while all of the latter films are very much their own things all of them owe some of their vision to Burton’s first film. We certainly see shades of it in Batman Begins’ expressionist jumble of tenement slums and in The Batman’s nightmare version of Gotham. We even see it in 2023’s box-office bomb The Flash, which resurrected Keaton’s Caped Crusader for an extended cameo and did absolutely nothing interesting with him.

Batman 1989 was also quite campy, becoming more so as the Joker begins his campaign of terror. Like he’s hijacking the narrative, tearing away the brooding noirish atmosphere of the film’s first act and giving it a dose of his Smylex gas. Street mimes become Tommy-gun-blasting maniacs. Trenchoat-and-fedora goons get makeovers with snazzy leather jackets bearing a Joker logo. Gotham’s mayor, police chief, and District Attorney Harvey Dent (Billy Dee Williams) break the fourth wall and look to the Joker on his TV screen as he interrupts their TV-screened press conference. The criticism of Batman from its fans; the heavy use of Bat-machine guns, Bat-bombs, Bat-missiles would seem to fly in the face of the legacy of a character who never used a gun, but this isn’t the comic book Batman; this is Tim Burton’s Batman and Batman is a Tim Burton movie.

In the wake of Batman’s extraordinary success, what was truly surprising though was the lack of any films Batman inspired. We really didn’t get any other “comic book movies”; no new Superman, Flash or Wonder Woman, no Spider-Man, Captain America, or X-Men either (Marvel’s finances were in a general shambles throughout much of the 1990s). Instead what we got were movies starring characters whose origins were pulled from the same Great Depression era as Batman and Superman. 1990 saw Dick Tracy, 1991 gave us the retro throwback The Rocketeer, 1994 gave us The Shadow, 1996 The Phantom. It was as though Batman’s enormous success somehow convinced studio execs that the movies the kids of the 1990s were desperate to see were the characters their grandparents grew up with back in the 1930s while listening to their exploits on the radio. None of these Batman-inspired follow-ups hit in the way Burton’s film did (and most of them bombed outright). What was even more surprising was that Batman didn’t inspire that wave of comic book movies; all the 90s brought us outside of modest hits like 1994’s The Mask and outright flops like Barb Wire were three more Batman movies.[8]

As to why it was such a hit though, I wouldn’t point to comic book fans, which even then were not a major force in a box office success. I would suggest instead that because so many of that summer’s movies were sequels audiences were just looking for something new even when “new” in this case meant a character first created in 1939 who’d been a recognizable piece of pop culture for the intervening fifty years. The Bat-Logo was hip. It was cool. Using it as the principal marketing hook was a master-stroke, and one that you can credit producer Jon Peters with; he alone may be the one most responsible for changing how movies were marketed and you can see the simplicity of Batman’s logo poster throughout the next thirty-five years of film. All throughout that summer and well into fall a Batman logo t-shirt was considered to be a “cool” fashion choice, even among the girls. Batman may not have been a great film, but it was a fun one, and one that just happened to be the right film at the right time for it to take flight.

I remain a Bat-Fan to this day. I have a massive Lego Bat-Wing mounted on my office wall. I have a collection of Lego Batmobiles spanning the Adam West-Burt Ward TV series through Robert Pattinson’s incarnation. I even grabbed a Michael Keaton as Batman circa 1989 from McFarlane toys just to have him on my shelf of 70s-80s movie-inspired action figures. To me Batman is the most malleable of the superhero figures comic books gave us. He can be dark and brooding, he can feature in a horror or action or romantic storyline, he can do “the Batusi” and appear in Lego form but always, always be that same character. His rogues gallery of villains are the best rotating cast of n’er do wells in fiction bar none, from The Joker and Penguin and Catwoman to The Riddler, Two-Face, Clayface, Mr. Freeze, R’as Al Guhl, Scarecrow, Mad Hatter, and Bane. The Gotham of Batman, like the Metropolis of Superman, is a fictional city everybody knows about and has probably visited at one time or another. There is quite literally a Batman for every occasion and inclination.

My Lego Batwing, hanging on the Bat-wall

I also remain a Burton fan, though when looking at the overall scope of his work, his most essential years to me remain his early ones, from 1985 and Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure through 1994 and his biopic Ed Wood. Many believe he lost his touch after Ed Wood’s box office failure but I feel Burton has always been Burton; it was just in that decade or so stretch comprising Pee-Wee, Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Batman Returns, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Wood found his eccentricities in sync with the movie going public and the cultural shift as GenX took the wheel. It’s no big stretch to see a similarity between Beetlejuice and Scissorhands with David Lynch briefly entering the mainstream with Twin Peaks, and the Alternative Rock generation moving to the forefront. Strange and unusual was “in” for a time and then it wasn’t, and while there is a lot in Burton’s subsequent work to admire, notably Sleepy Hollow, Big Fish, and Sweeney Todd which feel more fully realized than his Planet of the Apes, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Alice In Wonderland, and Dumbo. Tim Burton just became what all successful filmmakers do at some point; he became Tim Burton, Incorporated; a filmmaker with a certain style and language and outlook that becomes the selling point over what he’s actually selling.[9]

Lego Batmobile and minifig collection. Thank the pandemic for my Lego obsessions

1989 was the Summer of the Bat. It announced that the 1990s would be a much different decade than the 80s. A decade where the formerly weird suburban kids like Tim Burton would be handed the keys to the kingdom and both shape and be shaped by a cultural shift that would change everything that came before. As for me it was the summer my movie obsession and career path resultant really kicked itself into high gear. The next three years would be some of my most stressful but also my most happy even as my home life would take a turn for the worse. But, like Bruce Wayne, I would find reason to fly.

Just a portion of my 80s movie and TV figure shelf. You have to grow up but you don’t have to grow old.

[1] And occasionally the American one as well; the border was a lot more open back then compared to now.

[2] And if not? It was still two hours in an air-conditioned theater when the temperature outside hit 90 degrees.

[3] Contrast that with 2023, where we seem to ge a “summer” movie every month.

[4] 1981, with Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Road Warrior, and Escape From New York was no slouch either.

[5] None of these were as anticipated by me as Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing but owing to its R rating and not making it to theaters in Eastern Ontario I had to wait for it to hit video before watching it multiple times.

[6] Unfortunately, and your mileage with Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and The Dial of Destiny may vary, it was not.

[7] And became a great punchline in Edgar Wright’s 2004 film Shaun of the Dead in the process. The “gag” which I won’t spoil wouldn’t work nearly as well if it had been any album but Prince’s Batman one.

[8] 1990’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was a hit but one still in production when Batman was released.

[9] He shares that similarity with Michael Bay of all people, whose more interesting films like Pain and Gain, 13 Hours, and the terrific Ambulance are lost in the shuffle of five (!) Transformers films.

Celluloid Heroes Part II: Judgement Day

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[This is Part 2 in a series called “Celluloid Heroes”] in which I take a look at the movies that inspired me to become a storyteller. Part 1, about Back to the Future can be found here.

Working on the Mixtape pilot has more or less been my full-time gig this year. We’ve penned I don’t know how many drafts of the pilot, we’ve had weekly story conferences, we’ve discussed everything from music rights to marketing. We’ve even brought in some fresh young voices into the mix because we – the 40-spomething creators of a TV series largely about teenagers – felt it would be wise to incorporate the voices of writers and artists who graduated high school in this century.

And one of the questions we, the makers, have been pondering through the year plus we’ve bene working on Mixtape: The TV Series is this;

When did the 1990s begin?

Not chronologically, but culturally. What was That Moment where the 80s, and all that had come before, ended? What was the demarcation point?

There are theories. Music historian and radio personality Alan Cross pinpoints November 9th, 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall as the demarcation point that changed the world enough to mark the end of the 80s and the Cold War, with this “pocket decade” between wars, ending with 9-11-01 and the War on Terror. There are some say that the decade really began with the videotaped beating of Rodney King by the LAPD on March 3, 1991. The first ever viral video that changed the discussion about the police forever being on the side of law and order. You can pretty much draw a straight line from Rodney King to the endless stream of viral videos we watch on our phones or computers to this day.

I myself have a different theory.

My theory is that the 90s officially began on May 25, 1991. That was the date that record stores began utilizing a new technology called SoundScan. For the first time in history, record stores could report accurate, real-time sales figures for every piece of music purchased. Up until that point reports were self-submitted, meaning record stores and record companies could gin up numbers and push the artists they wanted to see hit big, at the expense of smaller acts. SoundScan eliminated that guesswork and told the record companies, the record stores, MTV and Much Music, and the artists themselves, how many units were being sold.

The results of these were surprising to say the least.

The first album to benefit, by debuting at number 1?

For contrast, “Nevermind” debuted at #170 when it was released a few months later

Another beneficiary was this album, released by N.W.A.

Remember that up until this point, Hip-Hop was regarded as a niche and a fad. SoundScan burst that bubble and made record companies go “hmmm, maybe there’s more to Hip-Hop than we thought”. Because the brilliance of SoundScan was that not only did it tell you how many units of an album were being sold, but more importantly where they were being sold. And NWA wasn’t just selling in South Central Los Angeles or The Bronx; they were selling in the suburbs, to largely white middle-class suburban kids.

Another beneficiary? Alternative Rock. Those weird indie bands and niche artists like Depeche Mode, the Pixies, The Jesus and Mary Chain were selling better than previously thought. And it got record companies to likewise go “hmmm, maybe we should send some A&R people to the markets where this music is selling and source out some local bands. Places like Boston, and Austin, and, oh, I guess Seattle? There’s some music coming out of there, right?”

SoundScan was the first shot across the bow of the old order, soon to be aided and abetted by the rise of the internet. SoundScan technology soon made its way to the video store, the bookstore, and today we see it in viral videos, and the numbers of followers a writer or artist has on social media. Don’t believe me? When publishing Magicians Impossible I had to fill out a questionnaire and list my social media profiles, and numbers of followers, along with the number of “unique” monthly visits to this website.

Even now, within the first week of publishing a bookseller will know how many copies of a book has sold and can project with reasonable certainty how many it will sell in a month, six months, a year out. That’s why those first week sales and pre-orders of any piece of media are so important. It’s why a studio and the theater chain will know by first weekend ticket sales if a movie is going to be a hit or a flop.

Our lives today are guided by algorithms and sales dates. And we have SoundScan to thank for it. The true “Judgement Day” – the day the machines took over..

That is why I would likewise argue that culturally speaking, the 1990s began with this film:

Buckle up

But to talk about Terminator 2, we first need to talk about James Cameron.

So Avatar 2 hits theaters this December; the sequel to the biggest box office moneymaker of all time. A movie that, if you believe the popular discourse, left no lasting cultural impact despite the fact everybody and their uncle knows what Avatar is (hint: it is not The Last Airbender, sorry Anime nerds).

I’ll admit I was wary of an Avatar sequel; I feel the first film did an adequate job of telling a single contained narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an ending. There’s no Avatar Cinematic Universe, there are no TV and video game tie-in that expand the scope of the story and the world. Avatar has been gone from the public consciousness enough that relaunching the franchise (another sequel has been filmed, and there’s two more on the boards). It’s as huge a gamble as the 2009 film was; something scoffed at and derided by the press and film fans in general until it actually hit theaters. Then they all learned the lesson us older genre fans had known since roughly 1984.

So that was my opinion. Until I saw the trailer for AVATAR: The Way of Water

And then I remembered:

Never. Underestimate. James Cameron.

He’s the guy on the left

I discovered James Cameron in 1984 (technically 1985 when I first saw The Terminator on home video). It blew me away.  The Terminator, along with later action-centered films like Predator, Die Hard, and Robocop, shifted the sci-fi fantasy landscape away from Jedi and ET’s to killer robots, alien hunters, and cyborg police officers. These movies were loud, violent, and profane; catnip to a teenager. This was next level shit for an 80s kid; from Luke Skywalker to Indiana Jones to Sarah Connor. A maturing of SFF cinema, pushing the envelope of blood and gore and mature storytelling. After The Terminator everything changed.

What’s remarkable about that first Terminator movie is that it, unlike its many sequels, is more of a horror movie than a sci-fi or action. Seriously, this is one frightening movie, with its visions of a post-nuclear holocaust, its unstoppable merciless killer prowling the streets of Los Angeles (filmed at and released during The Night Stalker’s reign of terror). While your mileage on the Terminator sequels will vary, I think all will agree that none of them captured that feeling of nightmarish dread the first did so well.

[As an add to that, I don’t think anyone born post-1990 will ever know the existential dread of nuclear war that us 80s kids grew up against. Most of us were convinced we’d never see adulthood; that our lives, the lives of our families, the world as we knew it, gone in a flash of radioactive hellfire. The Terminator tapped into that fear hard and boy did it work.]

The Terminator put James Cameron on the map. Then in 1986 he unleashed Aliens on an unsuspecting world. I’ve written elsewhere about the first Alien being a seminal movie-going experience in my life, so Aliens was one of the first movies I remember really looking forward to. First was an article in Starlog Magazine. Then came this trailer that I believe ran before Top Gun:

So even before I finally got to see Aliens in the theater sometime in August of that year I knew the story. I knew what happened. I knew who lived and who didn’t.  That prior knowledge did not in any way detract from the experience of Aliens on the big screen. That is how you know you’re in the hands of a master storyteller; like in Cameron’s own Titanic you knew how the story ended but were still along from the ride. I was a Cameron fan; even more so when, in response to a flurry of fan letters to Starlog magazine critiquing Aliens, Cameron himself penned a lengthy response that Starlog published where he addressed every writer’s questions and concerns. It was the first real glimpse into the mind of a film director I believe I ever received; an audio commentary before audio commentaries existed. 

So I was on the Cameron train. Waiting eagerly for the next film. And in 1989 we got:

Let me state this upfront: I LOVE The Abyss. It’s in many ways the “forgotten” Jim Cameron film (along with True Lies; we won’t talk about Piranha 2: The Spawning); one of those movies that when you say the name Jim Cameron you tend not to think of. Of all of Jim Cameron’s films I think it’s easily the Jim Cameron-iest. The one with the themes of love under pressure, of nuclear Armageddon, of the fantastic intruding on the everyday all coalesce in a film whose reach may have exceeded its grasp but remains a film well worth your time (the Extended Edition I mean, NOT the theatrical).

But the Abyss is regarded as Cameron’s first misstep; unfairly so. Released during the legendary summer of 1989 its competition included Ghostbusters 2, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Honey I Shrunk The Kids, and a little movie you may have heard about called Batman. A lone original summer movie in a sea of franchise-starters and sequels stood little chance. The Abyss performed respectably but not well-enough to recoup its costs. Jim Cameron’s star had faded, his reputation tarnished. Following The Abyss’ performance at the box office, Jim was in trouble. The career trajectory he’d enjoyed with The Terminator and Aliens had hit a wall. He needed to prove himself again.

And boy did he.

This movie needs no introduction. I think everybody has seen it. If The Terminator announced Jim to the world, T2 became a cultural phenomenon and a still-relevant cultural touchstone. “Hasta la vista baby”, liquid metal’, ‘Judgement Day’. But to me, then as in now, T2 is as potent a metaphor as anything for the massive cultural shift about to take place.

See, the summer of 1991 was notable for one other cannonball into the pop-culture swimming pool:

It’s hard to believe now, but Lollapalooza 1991 wasn’t terribly popular. It did well, but in some cities they actually had trouble giving tickets away. The lineup was certainly more eclectic than the norm. To know even half these bands put you on the fringes of the mainstream. The “alternative” to the popular artists of the day, if you will.

But for an idea of how swiftly things did change, here was 1992’s lineup:

That’s where SoundScan ties in. Because a year later Alternative Rock was no longer Alternative, but the mainstream.

How this ties into T2 is forever fascinating to me. Back then as now (but not so much) movies liked to try and piggyback onto what songs and artists of the day were popular, to release hopefully a tie-in video to promote the film on MTV and Much Music. Si in T2’s case the big promo song was by none other than Guns N’ Roses; then the biggest band in the world. The video featured clips from T2, Arnie made a cameo with the band. Heck, you can check it out right here;

The  two Use Your Illusion albums were expected to be THE big rock event of fall 1991. And they were both big sellers. Anticipation was even higher for Michael Jackson’s new album, and U2 was making their comeback with a strangely titled album called Achtung Baby, and an even stranger first single called The Fly. 

But the album release that fall nobody saw coming? That’s the one that forever changed the metric;

T2 blew the box-office to smithereens, becoming one of the biggest moneymakers of all-time, becoming one of the all-time great action epics. It showed that the best Jim Cameron was the Jim Cameron with his back against the wall and something to prove; a success he repeated in 1997 with Titanic and 2009 with Avatar. Say what you will about those films now in our jaded, pre-packaged/focus-grouped to death corporate movie world, to deny the financial and cultural impact of both is to prove yourself a liar.

Nevermind happened. The alternative rock revolution had begun. Soon artists like Guns N Roses and Michael Jackson were considered old-hat. Passé. Bands with names like Hole, Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, Teenage Fanclub, and Soundgarden captured the imaginations of suburban and urban kids everywhere.

The culture had changed. By 1992 nobody outside the metal heads cared about GNR. Their moment in the sun had come and gone; the kids were following the grunge movement, not the metal movement (though I would argue that there’s a good 12-15 songs on the combined Use Your Illusion albums to comprise one really great GNR record).

The 90s had begun, and Terminator 2 was the cannon blast across the water. Not Nevermind, not Lollapalooza. It wasn’t quite as underground a hit as Nevermind became but it was the film that, like Nevermind, launched a thousand imitators. There’s a clear line from the T-1000 of T2 to the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, to Jar-Jar Binks, Gollum, Iron Man, Groot, and the host of all-digital creations we take for granted in 2022. the fact that realistic CGI dragons can be created for television is because of T2 and Jim Cameron. And when I take my kid to the playground and glimpse some jade pre-teens in Nirvana and Pixies T-shirts, I see the reach that pivotal year of 1991 still touches.

I began my final year of HS that fall. A year later I was firmly ensconced in FS; a journey that began in 1986 with Aliens. Because if a guy from Chippewa Ontario could go onto Hollywood success, it meant every Canadian kid with celluloid dreams could too, or at least try. As I met and befriended the people in film school who would become lifelong friends and collaborators the one bit of common ground we all seemed to share was that while we were definitely the children of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, it was James Cameron who made us want to be filmmakers. 

As for me, I’m really looking forward to The Way of Water, simply because I have no idea what to expect. With the plethora of comic-book movies approaching, I know what I’m going to get because with those movies expectations must always be met. Same with the never-ending churn of Marvel and DC and Star Wars content we’re getting; all seemingly designed to be more about I.P. management than creating anything memorable or lasting. That’s why in the year 2022, a sequel to Avatar, still the biggest grosser of all time, feels like a revolutionary act. Something James Cameron has done over and over again.

Never. Underestimate. James. Cameron.

Next up, is a trip back in time to 1986, and the third (and final, for now) part of this series.

And no, I’m not going to be talking about Aliens.

UPDATE 2023

As of this writing (January 5th) James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water has grossed 1.4 billion dollars worldwide, putting it on course to becoming one of the all-time top grossing films of all time, alongside Titanic and Avatar. I saw it December 31st and loved every one of its 190 minutes. It will probably be the first movie I see more than once in theaters since 2015’s Mad Max Fury Road. So much for “no lasting cultural impact” eh film-bros?

Never. Underestimate. James. Cameron.