So when January began I had every intention of just posting links to the first episode of The Celluloid Heroes Podcast. Then the great David Lynch had the audacity to ascend to a higher spiritual plane, prompting the most recent posting about Lynch, Lost Highway, and his extraordinary influence on my life and career.
If you haven’t yet read it you will find it, well, here:
Celluloid Heroes: The Prologue Episode and Episode One are now live on Spotify. More platforms will be added in the coming weeks.
The Prologue Episode is something of a “Mission Statement” for the Podcast. It’s an overall summary of what I plan to do with the show, the films I plan to cover, and other ephemera. It’s short and sweet at around 15 minutes of your day.
Next, is the first full episode:
CHAPTER 1: 2001 A Space Odyssey Every story has a journey and the Celluloid Heroes story begins with a fateful trip to the Ontario Place Cinesphere to see – for the first time – one of the greatest films of all time: Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey. This is more or less the format you will find the show occupy, with each episode running 30-40 minutes in length overall.
I am also including some of the YouTube clips I sourced for this episode to compliment the main show.
Here’s Ontari-Ari-Ari-O:
Here’s Ontario Place (It’s All Yours)
And here is the theatrical release trailer for 2001: A Space Odyssey
As mentioned previously, I am stepping away from regular updates for this website so I may focus on the podcast. I will post announcements and show notes here monthly though, and do have a couple of longer-form updates and blog posts through this coming year.
Your comments on Celluloid Heroes are always appreciated, as is your liking/subscribing/all that stuff. You may comment here or on the Spotify page.
And here’s a preview for next month’s episode. I’ll see you then.
My fourth and final year of film school was quite the different beast from the three years preceding. Whereas before our schedules were loaded with classes on film theory, film history, art history, business, design, film technology, storyboarding and more, the final year we had one class – film production. To earn our final grade and graduate we either had to make a thesis film, or work on at least three other films for other directors in a consistent supporting capacity; cinematographer, editor, sound recordist … or screenwriter.
Me being me I did both. I co-wrote two films for other classmates, story-edited a third, and co-wrote and co-directed my own film with roommate Marcus; an action thriller heavily influenced by Frank Miller’s “Sin City” comic book series titled Vigilante. It was slick and competent, it featured probably the first photo-real computer-generated images of any Ryerson student film, and was loaded chock-a-block with as much swearing and guys-sticking-guns-in-each-other’s-faces as one would expect from a mid-90s crime caper film. Our production teacher thought we were wasting our time, talent, and money on a “dumb action film” in his words, but there was a definite method to our madness.
Unlike me, Marcus still wanted to direct at that point though he was becoming more interested in animation. I wanted to burnish my action movie credentials because my plan post-graduation was to go gunning after the various low-budget genre outfits dotting Toronto at the time churning out low budget direct-to-video movies starring low-budget actors like Jeff Wincott, Jeff Fahey, Michael Dudikoff, and Sven Ole-Thorson. I wanted to be the low-budget schlock John Sayles before I moved on to make my Matewan, my Lone Star, and my Eight Men Out. I reckoned that armed with Vigilante and the various action and genre scripts I’d been shopping around I was bound to get some traction somewhere, right?
Well, yes and no. Breaking in as a screenwriter was neither easy nor was it quick. Not that I didn’t have success or the promise of it; getting read was easy and my work showed some potential on my imagined road to following the Sayles method of cutting my teeth in low-budget exploitation then graduating to more personal work; I just wasn’t there yet. But just writing a screenplay the right sort of people liked wasn’t enough; it had to be something they could sell, and selling took a long time, with a lot of false starts and false promise and having some genuine close calls with stardom on projects that nearly got made only to fall apart in the eleventh hour.
The prime example of this was Hell For Breakfast, a criminals vs. cannibals caper comedy Joe O’Brien and I had been writing on and off over the previous year. By then Joe had landed a job in the offices of low-budget film producer Damian Lee, best known then for the Jesse “The Body” Ventura-starring Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe, and the Corey Haim-starring adaptation of Dean Koontz’ Watchers. So it came to pass one day as Damian was flying to Los Angeles that Joe, in a fit of what was either confidence or stupidity, slipped a copy of Hell For Breakfast into Damian’s satchel without telling him. Damian, intrigued, read it on the plane and when he landed, called Joe to tell him how much he liked it and wanted to talk to him and me about it when he returned. One hastily signed option agreement and small fee later we were in business.
By early 1997 Hell For Breakfast was looking increasingly to become my big break. It was tailor-made to be filmed in one primary location on a budget low enough to almost guarantee a return on the investment, and was actually written to accommodate the geography of Filmshack even though by that point we’d all moved out. But Damian saw greater potential in Hell For Breakfast and for a time it seemed he was right. The screenplay made the rounds and all of a sudden became a hot property, attracting at one point a cast that included Judge Reinhold (Beverly Hills Cop), Sheila McCarthy (Die Hard 2), Michael Madsen and Chris Penn (Reservoir Dogs), James Russo (Once Upon A Time In America), William Forsythe (The Rock), Balthazar Getty (Young Guns II) and Corey Haim (The Lost Boys) himself. This led to a very surreal January 1997 weekend of screenplay work-shopping and revisions with Judge, Sheila, Corey, and Damian at the latter’s condo in Yorkville, right above where the University Theater used to be where I’d seen The Right Stuff just thirteen years earlier.
Sitting across from actual successful Hollywood actors it felt like my moment in the sun had come, but as rapid was its rise so too was Hell For Breakfast’s fall. Clashes of personality, clashes of vision, some bad blood between people I never even met, and most importantly a lack of interest from the international film markets killed the project later that year. It would eventually be resurrected, but that would be until much later in a story I will get to. Yet that was the story of my career in 1997; a series of false starts and early promise before it all came tumbling down.
Hell For Breakfast’s implosion wasn’t all terrible though. Now on Damian’s radar he commissioned me and Joe to write a Dirty Dozen-styled heist thriller set in the dying days of the Vietnam War, and a brief stint in a hastily assembled writer’s room developing a television series with the very-90s title Team Xtreme. Neither took flight, but they were all valuable in they taught me a lot more about the ins and outs of the entertainment biz, namely “have a contract in writing before you put pen to paper” followed closely by “know when to keep your mouth shut”.
Just staying alive and keeping a roof over my head was a challenge. Working long hours for low pay at my various minimum wage jobs was soul-crushing, but the worst part of it was working so much for so long for so little meant so many closely-knit friendships I’d made in film school were quickly fraying. Not deliberately but because we were all so damn busy and we were all struggling. Some gave up the quest. Some moved back home. Some found they didn’t much like the film industry and pivoted to different fields. We were all of us in that critical juncture between youth and adulthood where the question “what do you want to do with your life?” became much more frequent and much louder. I felt at times as if I was on a highway at night driving through an obsidian void, the only illumination being the headlights reflecting the lane divider line back at me. Small wonder David Lynch’s Lost Highway hit me in the right place and at the right time. But then David Lynch and I had a lot of mileage together already.
Beginning in 1989 my interests in movies had moved beyond the juvenile to the adult. Through my consumption of movie books and magazines I was hearing the names of groundbreaking maverick filmmakers like the Coens, Gus Van Sant, and Mike Leigh before I ever got to see any of their films. But the most mysterious, most intriguing of all of them was David Lynch. I’d heard about Eraserhead and of course had seen the notorious flop Dune because in the 80s bad sci-fi wasn’t as bad as a boring drama (and for the record I like that version of Dune, messy as it is). I was well-aware of The Elephant Man, having first seen its gloomy black and white movie trailer numerous times when we lived in Vancouver. But it was my buddy Elliott who mentioned he’d rented Blue Velvet and asked if I wanted to watch it, so armed with a VHS from the Video Place we settled into the basement rec room of our house on Chipman Road – the one my parents had build just in time for it to help blow their marriage apart – and settled in to Lumberton, North Carolina and a mystery revolving around the discovery of a severed human ear.
Blue Velvet was an experience. The closest thing I think I’d watched to that point that so perfectly captured the feeling of being in a waking nightmare. It was surreal, dream-like, and punctuated by shocking sex and brutal violence and topped off with an unhinged performance from Dennis Hopper in a movie teeming with eccentric (what we would later call “Lynchian”) characters. Both Elliott and I were in awe-struck silence the whole way through and when it was over, both added a silent “masterpiece” comment in our brains anytime anyone ever brought up Blue Velvet. The movie was a stunner, but I don’t think I quite realized just how much of an impression it made on me until after giving Elliott a lift home. Driving back to my place along Brockville’s quiet streets everything around me felt just vaguely “off” from the way the pavement felt beneath the car’s tires to the architecture of the houses I passed. I stopped at a red light and waited for the green. I waited, and waited, and waited a seemingly impossible amount of time as that red light just bathed everything in crimson, then started flashing on and off before finally switching to yellow, and then green. It was a moment heightened by my post-Velvet mood. To put it simply: it was very Lynchian.
But you say what is Lynchian? To me it is a world-view out of step with the normalcy we see on the surface. It is the teeming masses of ravenous insects that lay beneath your nice green suburban lawn. It is a confession that the world we inhabited was a chaotic place where one false step can pitch you over the edge into a twilight realm where the nightmares dwell. Lynchian is a visual and sonic assault on your senses; a mood more than a concrete idea or structure with an ominous, surrealist tone only a very select few people can hear and immediately recognize. It is, as Velvet’s protagonist Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) would say, “a strange world”.
I picked up a used copy of Blue Velvet on VHS later that year at one of the Brockville Public Library’s annual sales. Clearly it had been decided they had enough copies of Blue Velvet or one copy too many for comfort. I would practically wear that tape down to nothing over the next several years through multiple re-watches. The visual noise and terrible tracking issues that resulted just added to the ambiance of Lynch’s vision. In the degradation of that tape I felt like I was adding my own layer of reality to Lynch’s, distorting further what was pretty distorted already. My parents thought the movie was weird but they pointedly didn’t forbid me from watching or owning that copy. Like even they knew I was going to have to learn how strange the world we lived in really was.
The world – or at least North America and only for a short time – caught up with Lynch’s vision in February 1990 when his and Mark Frost’s TV series Twin Peaks went to air. Peaks was a phenomenon in those early months of a new decade, but even that understates what a lightning bolt to the TV landscape it was considering the top-rated shows of the time remained Cheers, Roseanne, 60 Minutes, The Cosby Show, and A Different World. Lynch’s and Frost’s stab at the small screen was unlike anything else on it and pretty soon everybody was talking about cherry pie, donuts and damn fine coffee. Here was a soapy murder mystery complete with bodies wrapped in plastic, dancing backwards-talking dwarves and an oppressively nightmarish mood that intensified as day became night and those traffic lights blinked red. In the more than thirty years since Peaks first aired it, along with Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, remains my favorite television program.
My obsession with Lynch would remain over the years, though it would wane with Wild At Heart which while bolstered by some nutso performances, brutal violence and graphic sex, felt like the Pabst Blue Ribbon version of Blue Velvet. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me I would see that first autumn of film school and leave me mostly mystified. I wasn’t alone either; by 1993 Lynch and Peaks were mostly forgotten by a fickle public who had moved on to the much safer weirdness of The X-Files. Lynch still occupied a special corner of my memory though; when presented the opportunity to see Blue Velvet for the first time on the big screen at the Bloor Cinema I jumped at the chance and was just as transfixed by its widescreen images previously cropped by video.
I don’t quite remember how I first learned about Lost Highway, though I suspect it may have been the Nine Inch Nails song “The Perfect Drug” which would appear on the film’s soundtrack that first announced Lynch was back. And so it was on my birthday weekend of 1997 I opted for Lost Highway and not the other big movie released that day, George Lucas’ special edition of The Empire Strikes Back. I don’t think anything else shows how far removed I now was from that four year-old Star Wars fan I had been. I and the assorted friends who had joined me for the celebration settled into our seats at … I want to say the Carleton as it was the most centrally located art-house friendly cinema, but like much about my odyssey through Lynch’s nightmare landscape, there’s the truth and there’s my interpretation of it.
Lost Highway was a surreal odyssey that quite possibly never leaves the prison cell its protagonist Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) finds himself in jail after being convicted for the brutal murder of his wife Renee (Patricia Arquette). Fred is a jazz musician – a saxophonist – somehow able to afford a gorgeous home somewhere in the Hollywood hills. Or is it Renee’s house and is he leeching off her? Or is it her house at all, we can ask as through the course of the film we learn more about her mysterious past. We don’t know but despite seemingly being the happy couple there is strife. There is sexual tension, there is jealousy, and there is the most noir of clichés of wondering if your wife is really who she says she is.
What sparks our voyage into this Lynchian reality begins with somebody buzzing the intercom of their home and delivering the message “Dick Laurent is dead”. Fred doesn’t know a Dick Laurent; Alice claims to be just as in the dark. They chalk it up to a mistaken stranger; this is L.A. after all where weirdness comes with the territory. But that weirdness will not let them go not, and what follows are a series of mysterious videotapes that begin showing up on the Madison doorstep. Each contains grainy handicam footage of the Madison house. Then inside the house. Then inside the bedroom as Fred and Renee sleep. The final videotape is of Fred, standing over Renee’s mutilated body; an act that catapults him into a cell on death row, awaiting execution for a murder he claims to have no memory of. Or is the man in the prison cell actually Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty) a young man with no memory of how he got in there with a now vanished Fred nowhere to be seen? Pete is who he says he is though, and the baffled police release him to the custody of his parents (Gary Busey and Lucy Butler) to resume his daily grind, vigorously screwing girlfriend Sheila (Natasha Gregson-Wagner), and being the auto mechanic of choice for ferocious mob figure Mr. Eddie (Robert Loggia).
And then there’s the very Lynchian Mystery Man (Robert Blake); a pale, Kabuki-painted figure who may be a figment of Fred’s imagination, or who may be an actual corporeal being. The final piece of this very Lynchian puzzle arrives in the form of Mr. Eddy’s moll with the evocative name Alice Wakefield, played again by Arquette this time as a buxom blonde. And if you can believe it, things from get a lot stranger from there, culminating with Fred, on the run from police, stopping outside his home and ringing the buzzer to announce to the occupants that “Dick Laurent is dead” bringing the journey back to where it started, then well beyond it.
I didn’t know what the hell to think of Lost Highway when it was over. So too did many of the people in the audience. It ended to some clapping, some scattered boos but mostly, to reference a different Lynch film, total silencio. It wasn’t even one of those movies we could say was “good” or “bad” because in those immediate moments following its conclusion we just didn’t know what the hell it was. Not that there weren’t some noble attempts over coffee and birthday pie afterwards. The most popular interpretation was that the Pete portions of the movie were all a construct of Fred’s tormented mind at his moment of execution; the violent jump-cuts, his face contorted, his skull bulging as he transforms into the much younger Pete. Like in Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” the rest of the movie playing out in a nanosecond where Fred imagines a different life, a daytime contrast to his nighttime world where he’s young and virile, where he jackhammers Renee/Alice to orgasm, where he kills the bad guys and saves the day. Another interpretation was the film’s narrative actually began in reverse, with Pete meeting Alice, murdering Mr. Eddie, and the two of them changing their names and growing to become Fred and Renee. But even then in the theater and in the post-movie discussion that followed those solutions seemed too convenient, too linear, too predictable for a Lynch film.
Written by Lynch with his Wild At Heart collaborator, novelist Barry Gifford, Lost Highway did not set the box office on fire. The film was largely reviled in critical circles and what audience Lynch had won with the quirky, TV-friendly Twin Peaks hit eject after it. A shame too, because Lynch’s next two follow-ups, the wonderful The Straight Story and the nightmarish Mulholland Drive are among his best work. In fact Drive (which I would see at the 2001 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival before the general public) shares so many similarities with Highway even their titles suggest a duality present in both films. In Drive it’s bright-eyed and chipper protagonist Betty Elms (Naomi Watts) who shares many traits with Fred Madison as she too navigates a nightmarish version of L.A. to help amnesiac friend Rita (Laura Elena Harring) discover who she is. Or is Betty actually Diane Selwyn; a struggling actress in deep depression following a disastrous affair with Harring’s Camilla Rhodes? Viewed as a companion piece to one another, both Drive and Highway communicate to each other with Drive’s mysterious Cowboy and terrifying vagrant seeming to be of the same universe as Blake’s Mystery Man in Highway. In a Lynchian world, both interpretations are probably one and the same. The acclaim both The Straight Story and Mulholland Drive received (the latter is frequently named the best movie of the 21st Century) plants Lost Highway almost as an outlier; a strangely forgotten Lynch film few mention, as though it never existed at all. But in the years since its reputation has grown as audiences have rediscovered Lynch’s film and placed it within the context of his entire body of work.
Lynch passed away just yesterday, and the news hit me quite hard. Lynch and his work were such a part of my formative, early years of becoming an artist I quite honestly shudder to comprehend the life I might have lived had I not seen Blue Velvet with Elliott when I did. More than any other filmmaking living or otherwise, I think it is Lynch who set me on this path I’ve been following all of my adult life and some of my teenage years as well.
David Lynch. 1946-2025.
Silencio.
*The preceding is an excerpt from my non-fiction book “Celluloid Heroes: A GenX Journey Through Fifty years of Cinema”. Still a work-in-progress, hopefully some news on that soon.
I miss the internet. The old internet. That weird wild west of flying toaster screen savers, dancing babies, 56k modems, the screechy dial-up sounds, and landfills full of AOL internet CDs (okay maybe not that part). I miss the highly curated, highly individualistic movie fan sites like AICN, CHUD, Dark Horizons, IGN, and Coming Attractions. God help me I even miss the message boards, trolls and all.
I miss the egalitarian days of the personal Geocities and Livejournal and Angelfire. Of webpages like, well, like this one. Ever since Facebook burst onto the scene in 2007 we’ve seen a gradual, steady death of the free and open internet with quirky personal websites and personality, in exchange for a blandly corporate community fueled by sponsored posts, advertisements, and updates from people you never remember following in the first place. It’s become the equivalent of those boxy new luxury duplexes blocks popping up in neighborhoods near me; blandly corporate structures in place of charming small homes that once resided there.
yes, Netscape Navigator was Peak Internet and yes I still miss it okay?
Along came Instagram, and Twitter/ Xhitter, and Tik Tok and all sorts of negative energy-fueled apps and time-sucks that despite claiming to bring us all together have served to drive us all further apart. Before we occupied these personal spaces for our own creativity and enjoyment. Now engagement is everything and if negative content gets more engagement than positive, well, we really have built the world we truly deserve. We chase algorithms, troll for clicks and likes, and focus on Building The Brand and hoping one day to become someone other people listen to.
And the supposed “saviors” of this algorithmic mess like Threads and Mastodon and yes even BlueSky aren’t making things any better either. Despite their claims of a smaller, more intimate, more friendly experience I have to wonder if another social media platform is really what we need right now when, frankly, we’d all probably be better off without social media, period. We once allowed our minds to roam free, to walk without distraction, to dine without need of a little rectangle filled with information to keep us locked in a cell of our own making.
[In point of fact I *did* take BlueSky for a brief spin but after barely a month I decided that social media and yours truly just aren’t compatible. At all. And rather than try and force it to be a component of my daily life I was pretty well content to just cut the rope and let it drift off into the big blue sky above never to return. So for those of you wondering no you will not find me on BlueSky at this time.]
It’s enough to make one despair, but it reinforces my focus on keeping this little patch of internet real estate alive and kicking. I update fairly regularly, I post long-form pieces (for free I might add), and I require nothing other than you reading it and maybe commenting on what you like.
But to do all of the above … has been very draining lately.
It’s been a challenging year for me I’m not going to lie. I’ve been querying three different manuscripts, one of which is the Celluloid Heroes book. There has been some mild interest so far, but no takers. The fact is I need an audience much, much bigger than this website has been providing me with. While mine is probably one of the more heavily trafficked ones, it still pales in comparison to the traffic a popular Facebook or Instagram page will get.
Forget pale: we’re talking anemic here.
So what do I do? I find a new way forward. Two of them actually.
Some of you are aware but for those who aren’t I’ve been a semi-regular guest on GI Joe: A Real American Headcast. Once a month myself and a crew of regulars discuss an issue of the classic GI Joe: A Real American Hero Comic, an episode of the iconic 80s TV cartoon, and various other GI Joe related ephemera.
And it was here that I realized the solution was there all along. More on that in a bit.
The other thing came last month, November 8, when I hosted the first in an ongoing series of GenX films at the West Newton Cinema. The movie was John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club. Joining me was author Susannah Gora, who years back penned the authoritative book on the Brat Pack/GenX/John Hughes era:
I reached out to Susannah in New York, who was thrilled to attend and brought her equally lovely family – husband, daughter, parents, mother-in-law, and best friend – to the screening. A screening which, I am happy to add, was a packed audience of young and old but mostly those of us born between 1965 and 1980 – Generation X. We watched, we laughed, we cried, we cheered, and we pumped our fists like John Bender at the end of Club.
Then I took to the stage, microphone in hand.
I’m not going to lie when I say being up there before a packed audience with that microphone I felt pretty damn good. Both for the attention because I’m nothing if not needy, but for the fact I could stand there, talking about John Hughes, GenX film, 80s cinema, then conduct a discussion with Susannah and field questions from that audience, and feel totally in my element.*
It turns out I actually do know some thing. A lot of things.
About movies. About culture. About life.
Things even repeated viewers of The Breakfast Club did not – like how janitor character Carl (John Kapelos) – is seen in a high school graduate photo at the beginning, implying that this Shakespearean clown figure, the guy who sweeps the halls and fixes the leaks, knows everything that goes on inside Shermer High School because he used to be a student there.
Or that Shermer High is the same high school seen in the movie Hughes would release the following year: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
Or that “Don’t You Forget About Me”, the Simple Minds song that opens and closes Club wasn’t a song they wrote or even wanted to record until forced to by their record label and management, and the song ended up becoming both their biggest hit, but also has been forever enshrined as THE Generation X anthem, with Smells Like Teen Spirit a close second (I’m sorry but you know that’s also true).
Standing there, I remembered things. That I love movies. That I love watching them. That I love writing them. That I love writing about them. And I love talking about them.
So beginning next month, January, I will be taking a step back from this website to focus on the launch and updating of:
I spent October through December teaching myself audio recording, editing, and mixing on the Audacity App and more or less have it figured out enough. Because what the world clearly has a dearth of is podcasts featuring aging GenX-ers talking about the movies of their youth. Only, to be fair, I feel my take is different than the norm. if you’re a regular reader of the Celluloid Heroes entries on this website you have some idea what this will entail. For those of you unfamiliar, I encourage you to check them all out.
Presently I’m in good shape; I have six full episodes ready to go and those will unspool monthly. My goal was always to be six months ahead of the curve to allow for things like life events, technical foul-ups, fire, theft, and other acts of Dog.
What to expect? Well, let’s call them spoken-word performances of the Celluloid Heroes essays, chapters, and otherwise. Interspersed with music clips, trailers, commercials, and some surprises along the way. Some will be familiar as they are expanded versions of the essays I’ve posted here. There will be some new ones as well. Mostly new ones.
Now while I will be taking a step back from posting regular updates to this website I won’t be abandoning it entirely. I will be posting show-notes and annotations here on a monthly basis with the arrival of each episode. There will be some other writing here and there as well.
For me my reasoning behind this decision is two-fold. Maybe three.
One, to put the Celluloid Heroes story to audio and hopefully reach the audience you need to have to get a non-fiction book about film published in this day and age; I fully admit that. If it sounds mercenary, well, it kind of is. Having a book based on a (hopefully popular) podcast won’t hurt the cause. It may even help it.
But at the same time the very real prospect of a Celluloid Heroes book never being published would be just as disappointing. With a podcast (hopefully a successful one) the stories get told whether a publisher bites or not.
For me that’s more important: telling the story. That’s number two. the worst fate to befall any creative is to create something you genuinely toiled on and just as genuinely believe is quite excellent, then find out nobody’s buying or worse, nobody’s interested in taking even a look at it. This podcast allows me to circumvent the tastemakers and gatekeepers and out the Celluloid Heroes story out into the world.
The third thing? Well, I won’t lie when I say that the writing game has been a tremendous strain these past several years. Both with the endless querying and piling up of rejections, but also with a general lack of motivation to write when I know just to put pen to paper for the first time means to embark on a months-to-years long effort until I have something read-ready that will in all likelihood get passed on with a stock rejection.
And frankly, I don’t have that much time left in me. Not is a specific “I have bad news for you Mr. Abraham” way; just that my age being what it is there are fewer miles ahead of me than there are in my rear-view. That I am nearer to the end of this movie than I am the beginning This is not any sort of pessimism: these are just facts. I’m not whining or begging for your sympathy. Short and sweet of it is that I want to devote what time I have left on creative projects that will actually get out in the world to be seen, or in this case heard.
I thrive best when I have an ongoing thing to work on, to engage with, to create. With The Celluloid Heroes Podcast I have that; I can write, record, edit, mix, and release a new episode every month that’s out in the world for everyone to see and hear while still having time to pursue other things. There are no agents, no editors, no gatekeepers to drop the portcullis and say “sorry but we’re going to pass on this one.” I’ve spent/wasted far too many days, months, weeks, and years waiting for people to give me an answer e it thumbs up or thumbs down. Here I get to bypass them entirely and get my work into the world.
So that’s where I leave things this 20th of December 2024. New episodes will be available on Apple and Spotify, and I will post links to the shows (with some show-notes here as well). I see the podcast being a component of this website and vice versa.
To that end regular non-Heroes updates maybe a little sparse here, but I do hope to continue with the regular updating of this site to justify your return visits. I will still aim to pen some non-podcast stuff here as well. Who knows? It seems anytime I think I’m done with something, that something finds new inspiration to barge itself back into my life.
So until January I bid all of you a fond holiday season, and I hope all of you will tune in to the first episode of The Celluloid Heroes Podcast. It will be the ultimate trip, I promise.
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 Nightat 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: TheFinalFrontier, 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.
Back in 2010 I was a still freshly-minted New Yorker, still adjusting to my new life in the Big Apple. While I’d visited the city extensively in the eight or so years previous, this was now my home. Because of that I enjoyed something of a personal renaissance.
I have to admit here friends, before settling in NYC I was on a sad trajectory. I was entering my mid-thirties. My adventurous wanderings through popular culture had stagnated into keeping up with some favorite bands from the 80s and 90s like U2, Green Day, R.E.M., P.J. Harvey, Garbage, and Green Day. When I wasn’t listening to classic rock and alternative radio I was I was mostly listening to news stations and – shudder – talk radio.
The latter was a thankfully brief flirtation with the dark side of angry white middle-aged men who blamed “teh liberals” and “the immigrants” for every ill, not the least of which being a loser spending his day listening to talk radio. Though to be fair this was Canadian Talk Radio; a much friendlier, less-angry version of the stateside brethren. But I was a long way from the college-rock Lollapalooza-alternative music era of my youth.
It was, ironically, creating Mixtape that snapped me out of my reverie. I’ve written elsewhere but the basic gist was the discovery of my old comic book collection, old music magazines, and old boom-box in my mother’s basement that led me back down the memory path, listening to old mixtapes and thumbing through old magazines. I rediscovered the simple joys of music, and once settled into NYC, began digging into more contemporary artists who stoked those same feelings: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, MGMT, Sleigh Bells, Mumford & Sons, Florence and the Machine, and a little-known, little-remembered Fratellis side-project called Codeine Velvet Club.
Spearheaded by John Lawler with Scottish singer Lou Hickey, their first and only album was short, sweet, jazzy, poppy, melodic, and to the point (and featured a great cover of The Stone Roses’ “I Am the Resurrection”). I’d love for you to listen to it but that’s going to be difficult outside of YouTube, and is sadly the point to this whole exercise in memory.
You can listen to the album here … but for how long is the real question
To listen to Codeine Velvet Club takes some effort. The album is long out of print and while you can stream it on YouTube you won’t find it on Spotify or Apple Music. You can’t even buy it on iTunes and while used copies are available through Amazon a “new” unopened copy will run you close to 60 bucks. That’s just one example; one album released fourteen years ago this very year. There are many more. More movies, more TV series, more albums and books unavailable and in many cases largely forgotten, all thanks to this Streaming Apocalypse. Thankfully I own a physical copy of Codeine Velvet Club. I can listen to it whenever I want to because I own a physical copy of it.
Back in November came the news that for the first time since streaming movies and TV became popular you couldn’t find a single James Bond movie on any streaming service. Fifty years of 007 just vanished with nobody along to pick up the slack (Apple TV currently has the streaming rights so it was just temporary as long as you’re an Apple subscriber that is). I myself was unconcerned as I already owned the complete 25-film Blu-Ray box set so could actually watch any of the Bond films anytime I wanted. But their temporary disappearance was troubling on multiple levels because this wasn’t some obscure arthouse film; this was Bond. James Bond.
Pictured: Bond, James Bond.
And yet after years of loyalty to the various streaming services I believe consumers have begun to wise up to the fact that ownership of physical media – books, music, movies – means to curate, not just to consume and they have begun to answer this with a drive back to physical media. 4K and Blu-Ray copies of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer sold out everywhere on its release in December. People are anticipating the 4K Blu-Ray release of Dune Part Two to accompany their copy of Part One. It was almost as if we suddenly re-discovered the pleasures of unwrapping a DVD or Blu-Ray box set of a favorite television or film series.
I’m not the buyer of physical media or indeed any media that I once was but I am shifting more to curation. Over Christmas I acquired Blu-Ray sets of the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street film series, the complete 1978 Battlestar Galactica, the complete 1979-1980 Buck Rogers, the Criterion Collection’s remastered edition of Mean Streets, and the two Guillermo Del Toro films – Nightmare Alley and Pinocchio – I didn’t yet own but now do. They sit alongside my Blu-Rays of Star Trek (The Original TV and film Series), The Twilight Zone, and Planet of the Apes film series. I own the Despecialized Star Wars Trilogy, all the Bond and Mission Impossible films, and roughly five to six hundred other assorted DVDs and Blu-Rays spanning the early silent era to recent releases. Thanks to physical media I can watch both the theatrical and TV versions of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, the Extended Editions of The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, numerous behind the scenes documentaries, commentaries, and special features, any time I feel like it and even without an internet connection.
Of course there’s my still growing collection of Movie Novelizations as well which while tapering off in recent years still stands as a curation of yesterday’s trash paperbacks with a projected short shelf-live now containing books over fifty years ole.
With comic books my reading has mostly shifted to digital as time and money demands more of both from me in other areas. Yet over the last three months I decided to seek out and acquire a complete run of Marvel’s The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones comic book series which ran from 1982-1985 and continued the narrative begun in theaters with Raiders of the Lost Ark, running 34. Back issues remained easy and inexpensive to acquire, but furthermore outside of some astronomically priced trade paperback collections released by Dark Horse Comics in 2008, the only way to read this series was by acquiring the actual individual issues.
Which I did …
Between physical media resurgent and people stepping back from streaming it’s almost enough to give one hope for the the media we love. Even the studios seem to be coming around to admitting that for all their investments in services HBO Max and Paramount Plus, that Netflix is still top dog and that it’s a lot easier (not to mention profitable) to license their films back out rather than keep them under lock and key on their own services which cost a lot to maintain. Just a quick perusal of Netflix and Amazon offerings in January displayed a bounty of DC Warner Superhero titles and giant shark movies that while I had absolutely no interest in actually watching were at least an option whereas before I should have had to subscribe to Max to watch.
Thankfully I have a library; my home library and the public one in our town. That library has an extensive movie collection I can borrow from on a whim, and a library borrow is usually more than enough to scratch a particular itch rather than buy a movie, watch it once, and let it gather dust on my shelf ever after. We’ve come a long way from the days of Blockbuster Video and Tower Records, Borders, Virgin, and Barnes & Noble (the last of which being the only game less standing and even their DVD/Blu-Ray section is a shade of what it once was). I doubt those lost behemoths are coming back, and physical media’s position in our fat-paced world remains precarious, but as long as they’re still producing I’m still buying.
As was the case with the video rental and sales era, there was a golden age of streaming but that age ended with Disney Plus, followed by Peacock, Max, Apple, and all the services cropping up. What once was limited to Hulu, Amazon, and Netflix is now spread out over a dozen rival services. To have access to everything streaming would cost you hundreds a month and you’d never have time to watch all of it (I have films in my Netflix queue I added years ago I still haven’t gotten around to – probably time to admit as much and delete them). We’ve come full circle back around to the 500 channel universe cable TV once promised less than ten years after abandoning it for streaming.
Now, there are some great free ad supported services like Tubi and Plex. I binged in old episodes of CHiPs, Miami Vice, Knight Rider, The A-Team and The Greatest American Hero, and fun lesser-known movies like Raise the Titanic, Southern Comfort, Rolling Thunder, Hell Night, Dreamscape, Strange Invaders, and a lot more. Thanks to PBS and my wife and I being supporters of our local affiliate we have access to a near complete library of documentary series on a variety of subjects. Frontline, Nova, Secrets of the Dead, the American Experience, and scads more.
Books? Obviously I still buy them, having devoted a fair amount of shelf-space to the Movie Paperback collection that carried me through the COVID era, but that too is winding down partially because the easiest “gets” have already been “got” and because I’m legitimately out of room to store them. That said there is nothing, nothing quite like a big bulky expensive book, like this massive Omnibus Edition of The Art of G.I. Joe, all 20 lbs, $150.00 of it:
Collecting things is my hobby, and a good hobby to have. Hobbies are good to have in general and you can tell the difference between those with and those without. The busybody condo association president or HOA member butting into everyone else’s business? No hobbies. The person glued to the daily outrage of their phones? No hobbies. Collecting books, movies, comics, toys, games and the like are a two-fold experience in both the acquisition but also the enjoyment of. I don’t think I’m ever as relaxed, as chill, as I am when stretched out on the sofa reading an actual book printed on actual paper.
That’s the other great factor in favor of physical media: it’s yours, and nobody can take it from you. With the plethora of special-interest groups out in the world agitating for and launching book bans targeting school libraries and public ones, it’s no paranoia to suspect at some point these “goose-stepping morons” (as derisively and accurately named by Henry Jones Sr.) might start gunning for what we watch as well. Not only external forces but internal ones as well. Disney made headlines last year when they began removing low-rated, low-performing original content (like their Willow series spinoff I was never able to find time to watch) from the service, leaving the people who hadn’t yet caught up with them adrift with no other means to watch other than sailing the high seas of Pirate Bay.
All of the above is very much on my mind for another reason as I work my way through the first draft of a narrative non-fiction book based on my popular Celluloid Heroes webseries. Over the course of its 140,000 or so words I take a deep dive into those bellwether GenX films that inspired me to become a storyteller myself. Some of these films are well known like Star Wars, The Goonies, E.T., Back to the Future, L.A. Confidential, The Matrix, and Avatar. Lesser known are films like Dragonslayer, Blue Thunder, La Bamba, Singles, Lone Star, The Limey, Bubba Ho-Tep, and Inside Llewyn Davis. To adequately research this book I couldn’t rely on the here today/gone tomorrow world of streaming; I had to draw from my collection of movies and, where lacking, purchase the physical copy of the movies I had yet to own (fortunately I’d say a good three-quarters of the films covered I already owned and the remainder were easy to pick up).
Frankly, the studios would love it if everyone ditched their physical media for streaming. They’d love for you to pay them ten to twenty dollars a month in perpetuity to have access to their respective libraries of films and exclusive streaming services as well. All the more reason to deny them that pound of flesh. Especially as we may be entering a golden age of physical media too, with the resurgence in remastered vinyl, 4K Hi-Def, an upswing in excellent behind the scenes features and more bells and whistles, like the near hour plus of deleted scenes that come with a very affordable version of Cameron Crowe’s grunge-era romantic comedy Singles. You won’t find that on streaming.
With a physical copy there are no ads. There are no disclaimers about content, no un-skippable notices informing you that Gone With The Wind, The Searchers, or even Blazing Saddles were the product of different times, and different mores. A physical movie will not be pulled from your library, and occasionally re-inserted minus offending scenes or minus politically “offensive” episodes, like Community’s infamous “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons”.
Which was supposed to be offensive to point out why Dark Elf-face is wrong and … (sighs in irritation)
When art is owned by corporations that corporation decides how accessible it will be. Sometimes maliciously, often times pure indifference. There are many, MANY Canadian bands of my teenage-twenty something years whose music is nowhere to be found online outside of shoddy YouTube clips taped off Much Music thirty years before; National Velvet, Grasshopper, hHead, Glueleg, and many more I’ve forgotten about because they’re otherwise unavailable outside of used record and CD stores, themselves a dying breed.
For years I began to see my shelves laden with books and DVDs, my long-boxes of old comics stowed away in closets and storage spaces as something of a burden; the detritus of a life that’s seen many years, many cities, and many homes. There are e-books, e-comics, and streaming video; who needs physical media anyway? Well, as one who owns examples from all of the above that are out of print, out of circulation, not available to stream, and just plain rare, well, I like to think curating a collection of physical objects still has a place in this digital age. And because of that digital age where things can disappear at the click of a button, holding those objects closer feels more essential than ever.
I like owning things. I like my books, comics, vinyl records, CDs, DVDs, Blu-Rays, Lego sets, toys, and games. I enjoy having them around me, just like I enjoy being able to decide to pull Excalibur, Tombstone, No Time To Die, Ravenous, The Breakfast Club, The Irishman (thank-you Criterion), the “Space Vampire” episode of Buck Rogers, or binge watch Season One of The Twilight Zone by taking it down off the shelf. These things we own hold their own magic, their own alchemy. There’s still a little thrill I get when the DVD or Blu-Ray menu pops up on the screen and I select “Play” on the remote. In that moment I, not the studio, not the streamer am controlling the horizontal and the vertical. I am deciding what to watch, when to watch, and how to watch.
When was the last time any of us were able to say the same?