Celluloid Heroes: Episode One

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:

https://bradabraham.com/2025/01/17/celluloid-heroes-part-ix-the-long-lonesome-highway/

Now back to semi-regular programming.

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.

Celluloid Heroes Part IX: The Long Lonesome Highway*

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.

Changes

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.

Celluloid Heroes Part VIII: The Drug Of A Nation

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

[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.

October Country

October is my favorite month of the year. The month where the blast-furnace heat of summer has finally departed, where the days are shorter, the air crisper, the autumnal colors exploding everywhere. Where I can wear that jacket that makes me look cool.

And of course, October is Halloween month. Not day – month. That’s when I turn my personal preferences in media – film, TV, books – changes to the strange, the dark, the unusual. Halloween is the one holiday-that-isn’t that everyone is free to celebrate in his/her/their own way.

I would argue that to know the truly inherent kindness of people, look to Halloween. That one night of the year where people will decorate their homes and give out candy to children with promise of nothing in return other than spreading about a little bit of magic and wonder before the long, dark onset of winter. Unlike Christmas and Easter and the religious holidays Halloween is for everyone. There’s no agenda, no moralizing – well, except for the religulous (NOT a typo) types who loudly – always loudly – proclaim we’re going to hell for giving some snack-size M&Ms to a kid dressed as Peppa Pig.

Halloween month for me is always a magical time. It always has been, from when I was a young tyke in a home-made Darth Vader costume cobbled together from Glad trash bags and a store-bought mask, to a teenager whose Halloween night meant watching horror movies with friends, to the now parent of a child who anticipates Trick or Treating with almost as much delight as his father does.

Yet October represents another seasonal moment in my life, recurrent since I was around twelve going on thirteen, as October is the month I will inevitably drag out my old paperback copy of this book for an annual reread:

Something Wicked This Way Comes is the book I’ve read more than any other. Something Wicked may be my favorite book solely because it’s had an outsized influence on my own writing. Not directly (though it is referenced in Magicians Impossible) but thematically.

Looking at my work (Mixtape in particular), Something Wicked is the one that’s left the deepest mark. Not for the magic and mystery, nor the terrors of Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, its hall of mirrors, its Dust Witch, its cursed carousel.

No, it’s for the central relationships in the novel.

I’ve been thinking of Something Wicked a lot lately for many reasons, not the least of which was a trip back home over the summer that saw us driving through the small town where I lived out my teenage years (the same town that became basis for Garrison Creek – the town where Mixtape is set). There’s something about revisiting the places of your youth; the places you couldn’t wait to leave, only to now wish, in some small way, you could return to. As Teo Stone in my own novel Magicians Impossible described it, “You spend half your life trying to run away from home and the rest of your life trying to run back to it.”

Seeing my old stomping grounds was an experience. A sad one in some ways. The old town hasn’t done so well in the years since I lived there. Factories closed, people moved. Indeed it is one of a select number of small-to-mid-sized towns in that part of the country that experienced negative population growth. When I lived there in the late 80s and early 90s its population sat at around 21,000 people. Today in 2022 its population sits at … around 22,000 people. That’s thirty years of negative growth. People grew up, they moved away, and the aging population just … left. Some relocated, some moved, some passed away.

In a way I wish I hadn’t visited it at all. I wanted to preserve the memory of what it was, not what it had become. The same feeling carried itself with me when I was able to reconnect with some high school friends during that same holiday, the six of us convening at a patio in Toronto’s west end. It had been years since I’d seen any of them – one I hadn’t seen or spoken to in nearly 25 years. The last time that group had all been together at the same time in the same place would have been the night before we all left that small-town for the big city, for college, for the beginnings of our adult lives. THAT particular night had occurred almost 30 years earlier to the date we met again on the Danforth.

It was a fun gathering but again, a little sad. Thirty years ago we were all teenagers at the beginning of our adult lives. Thirty years from now, well, the odds are good we won’t all be here anymore. Hard and sad but true. The fact that over the past year a good half-dozen people I’ve known or known of have passed away really hits hard. People I went to school with. Spouses and parents of friends and colleagues, and people even closer than that

Something Wicked is about that impulse as stated by Teo Stone – that we spend half our lives trying to run away from home and the rest of those lives trying to run back to it in some fashion, right down to those childhood touchstones – the movies, the books, the music – that got us through those sometimes difficult times. It’s about looking past the borders of your home, your neighborhood, your small little piece of the world, anxiously stepping over that threshold, only to look back and see that single step has carried you miles from there. In distance. In years. In experience.

On the surface, Something Wicked This Way Comes is a story principally of two thirteen year-old friends, Jim and Will, and their harrowing experiences with the mysterious and enigmatic Mr. Dark of Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show. However, the novel also touches on several of the townsfolk of Green Town, Illinois, who all must struggle with one of the oldest conflicts known to humankind; a deal too good to be true. A devil’s bargain. It’s the story of Faust, set in Depression-era America. A place that, at the time of Something Wicked‘s publication in 1962 was as far removed from that present day as the 1990s are today. No doubt there were some in the early years of the space age who looked back on the 1930s with a wistfully golden nostalgia; Rod Serling’s work on The Twilight Zone in particular demonstrated this in stories like “Walking Distance” (my personal favorite TZ story) and “A Stop In Willoughby”. The shanty-towns, dustbowl, and Hoovervilles of the dirty thirties never made an appearance. In Bradbury’s case he both looks back at those childhood years with fondness but also acknowledges the darkness of an insular small-town upbringing. It’s the flip-side to Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town”, and the current waves of nostalgia masquerading as content we see today on Disney Plus.

Curiously the so-so filmic adaptation is *not* on Disney Plus despite being a Disney film …

That’s the premise. The story, however, is of these two friends, Jim Nightshade and Will Halloway, both thirteen, both unaware that life is already pulling them apart. Will (whose last name – Halloway, recalls both Halloween and “away” meaning he’s destined for greater things) born just before midnight on October 30. Jim, born just after 12:01am on October 31st is the Nightshade; the Dionysian opposite of his friend. the troubled kid. The kid who’ll never amount to anything but trouble (and yes, the kid knows this). Yet these two are friends for life, but life is, as always, far too fleeting and much too brief.

Second, more importantly, is the relationship between Will Halloway and his by then middle-age father Charles. The book is written as a reflection from an adult Will, meaning by the time of its telling Charles is no doubt long in his grave. Charles is old for a parent to a thirteen year-old and knows it, like Will knows himself. He’s janitor at the local library (the so-so 1984 film adaptation starring Jason Robards – a movie which led me to seek out the book – re-cast him as the town librarian, presumably because janitors couldn’t be heroes in the 1980s). Charles mourns his youth, and fears the coming years of his health failing while his only son is still young. Charles of course, is the real hero of the tale, which becomes as much about defeating the insidious Mr. Dark as it is in Will saving Charles, and Charles saving everyone else. Something Wicked is about the end of childhood, and the realization that not every friendship stays with you. It’s also about the realization that your parents will someday pass on and make you truly an orphan.

I think of this book at this time of year, every year. But this year in particular its bite is a little deeper. Death has been making more frequent appearances in my life. This year in particular has reminded me of autumn, of final goodbyes before winter’s onset. The older generation, my parents generation, the Baby Boomers passing away.

It echoes what I wrote about back in August, about the movie Stand By Me and the novella it’s based on. Stephen King’s work is full of Bradbury’s influence – note the blurb on the book cover further up – though perhaps a little less whimsical; the depression era Green Town Illinois, replaced by the vampiric ‘Salem’s Lot and the haunted Overlook Hotel. King, that master of horror, made a career of charting childhood innocence and the loss of it, in Gordy, Chris, Vern, and Teddy from The Body but also Danny Torrance from The Shining and the Losers Club from It. I started reading King because I was a fan of horror. I became a fan of King because of his writing so succinctly captured life’s little triumphs and tragedies. Of being young, and seeing the adult world encroaching like a freight train on a railway trestle. Of those four friends – Gordie and Chris, Teddy and Vern – and that one fateful weekend in 1959 and how it represented the beginning of the end of that once close friendship.

Something Wicked now reminds me of myself and my relationship with my son, who’s at that age now where he’s able to take his bike and go riding with his friends, to have adventures in our little suburban corner of the world. I watch him ride off and hope he’s careful and mindful of traffic, but also that he not ride his bike too quickly. To not make those wheels spin so fast that sooner than either of us realizes it he’s left home. The carousel at the heart of Bradbury’s novel can make the old young and the young old, but only on the outside; the mind remains the same. A child could age into an adult but posses none of the wisdom of adulthood. An elderly woman can return to their youthful self, though plagued by the loss of memory, the slowing of thought, the onset of dementia and senility. Bradbury’s warning here is to enjoy where you were in life, be you child, middle-aged, or elderly.

Being the older-than-the-average parent to a child still in his single digits weighs heavy on those 3am wakeups. At the same time I think of all the experiences yet to come and realize the key to remaining young at heart is to be in the presence of the young. The ones who still taking delight at the sight of a bird, or an inch-worm, who still believes in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, that this heartbreaking world of ours can still contain some magic. 

I often wondered what became of Will and Jim. Will was clearly not long for Green Town. You could sense he was destined for greater things, and the fact that the book is written as a recollection an older Will is making of that fateful October many years before. Jim, however, probably stayed. Living, working, aging, and dying in that little patch of rural Illinois. Maybe he lived a long life, certainly long enough to see his town, his world change. Maybe he met someone, married, and started a family of his own. Maybe he lived old enough to see his children and their friends grow up, grow older, and move away. Left behind as one of those people who just stayed there, to age and watch the town he knew change, and the people he loved pass on and pass away. Living in a town and a time rapidly becoming another phantom, another shade of what once was.

And Will? Well, he clearly became a writer. He became Ray Bradbury, author of The Martian Chronicles, A Sound of Thunder, The Halloween Tree, The Illustrated Man, and Fahrenheit 451. But I wonder if Ray too, in his later years, thought back to the friends he had, the people he knew, that small town of his that grew and changed so much it wasn’t his anymore. Just a place occupied by shades of memory. 

It’s the same reason my old hometown still holds a piece of mental real estate for me. Not a grave, but a memory of what once was. It was shocking and a little sad to see and hear second-hand through an old acquaintance how the town had fallen on hard times after we all left. This friends’ mother was a teacher who witnessed first-hand generational poverty, in the faces of the kids she taught before her retirement, the off-spring of the children she’d taught at the start of her career. Still trapped in that vicious circle.  

There’s a song by the Kinks (naturally) I keep coming back to, called “Do You Remember, Walter?” In the song Ray Davies’ narrator recalls an old school friend, wondering what became of him. Ray wrote the song at age twenty-three; quite prescient for a rock and roll song. But the lyric that jumps out at me is the one that goes —

Do you remember, Walter, how we said we’d fight the world so we’d be free?
We’d save up all our money and we’d buy a boat and sail away to sea
But it was not to be
I knew you then but do I know you now?

Walter. Jim and Will. The Losers Club. Gordy and Chris, Teddy and Vern.

My old friends. Some still here, still friends in the day-to-day, but many more of them forgotten. Some not here at all.

The people you share that ride on the carousel with for a time, but eventually they climb off and resume their lives, the common experience of being together fading as you move off and move on with your life.

But memories still remain, whispers in the night reminding you that we’re all on the same journey. Unlike Cooger and Dark’s carousel there’s but one way forward; a journey every one of us takes. But what we do on that ride … that’s up to us.

ADDENDUM:

So a commenter – Hi Bailey! – asked if I was doing the “31 Days of Halloween” Movie-TV challenge (in which you attempt to watch one movie or horror-themed TV show a day for the 31 days of October. As it happens this year was the first year I attempted it. But to make things more challenging I decided to watch only horror-spooky movies and TV I had NEVER seen before so it was all new. I did all of that, my reward would be a viewing of John Carpenter’s The Thing on Halloween night (a movie I have seen and numerous times). As of this writing I did it – 30 never-before seen spooky entertainments in 30 days:

  1. Old (2021)
  2. Candyman (2021)
  3. Firestarter (2022)
  4. Children of the Corn (1984)
  5. Little Monsters (2018)
  6. Mr. Harrigan’s Phone (2022)
  7. X (2022)
  8. Hellraiser (2022)
  9. Carrie (2013)
  10. Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark (2021)
  11. Hotel Transylvania (2013)
  12. Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022)
  13. In The Tall Grass (2019)
  14. My Best Friends Exorcism (2022)
  15. XX (2017)
  16. Dead Calm (1989)
  17. Dracula Untold (2014)
  18. Halloween Kills (2021)
  19. The Sandman (Netflix Series)
  20. Dahmer (Netflix Series)
  21. Hotel Transylvania 2 (2015)
  22. Monster House (2006)
  23. My Friend Dahmer (2017)
  24. A Monster Calls (2021)
  25. The Midnight Hour (1985)
  26. Sometimes They Come Back (1991)
  27. Willard (2003)
  28. Peninsula (2020)
  29. The Black Phone (2021)
  30. Boo! (1980)
  31. The Thing (1982)