Fixing Pop Culture Errors of the Past, Part One: Let Joe Flaherty Have the Last Word

We've all been there. You’re sitting around talking about movies or TV shows, carefully avoiding any discussion involving the real issues of life like mortgages, mortality, or what kind of beans should be used to make vegetarian goulash. The discussion becomes a indictment of sorts, bringing up pointless charges against the various “crimes”* perpetrated by pop culture over the years.

Inevitably, there is no forward momentum to these discussions. At best, we collectively revel in our knowledge that we know what these artists did wrong. All too often, all we can detect is a general sense of badness that is not terribly more evolved than Donald Sutherland’s famed reaction in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978).

We don’t seem to ever have any answers for how we would do things better, do we**? Well, let’s change all of that today. Here, I offer the first of what may end up being several pop cultural solutions. These fixes can’t cheat. We can’t have Heath Ledger play his Joker in Suicide Squad. He’s unavailable. We can’t go with simple answers, either. It isn’t enough to say that George Lucas shouldn’t have made a movie about a ten-year-old Anakin Skywalker; we’ve got to come up with the framework under which the prequel trilogy, or even a film with li’l Darth Vader, could work better.

I’ve written a little bit about it in this blog previously, but despite my absolute untempered love for Back to the Future Part III (1990), the movie is not without its flaws. It has one flaw that completely unravels the film when one subjects it to the amount of scrutiny that I have over the last 25+ years.

The ending doesn’t make a lick of sense. The moment Doc’s time traveling train shows up, the logic of all three movies breaks down, just so that Doc and Marty can share one last exchange, and Doc can get his dog back. Final exchanges between the two heroes are fine, and just leaving Einstein to fend for himself would have been a pretty callous fate for the pup. I’ll admit that much. However, a large amount of the tension in the trilogy is predicated on trying to get the DeLorean time machine to work with limitations of pre-1985 technology. Doc can’t get the time machine to work when he first arrives in 1985, but now that he’s a known train robber, he can make one out of a train, no problem.

It’s a set piece. It’s a nice image. The movie still needs a better framework for its ending.

So I went ahead and fixed it. I had planned on just pitching the beats of my alternate ending to Part III, but as I continued to work on it, I just went ahead and re-wrote the last five pages of the script from scratch. Like to hear it? Here it go.

EXT. HILL VALLEY - TRAIN TRACKS - DAY

MARTY and JENNIFER approach the wreckage of DeLorean.

JENNIFER

You’re right. There’s not much left.

MARTY

Doc’s never coming back***.

Marty leans down and among the parts of the car, finds a torn shard of the picture of DOC BROWN at the dedication of the Clock Tower. He examines the picture.

MARTY

(cont.)

I’m sure gonna miss him, Jenn.

She has only a moment to give him an ounce of sympathy, before they are interrupted by the sound of a car approaching. They turn to see an old truck approach. A frail, OLD MAN wearing a suit exits. He looks stern; world weary. He holds a clipboard.

OLD MAN

I feel ridiculous asking this, but are

you Martin McFly?

Marty and Jennifer exchange a worried look. How do they explain the pieces of the DeLorean? Marty still hasn’t put together where he last saw this man.

MARTY

Who’s asking?

The man grimaces and through a limp, approaches. He reaches into his jacket pocket and as Marty and Jennifer both wince, he pulls out an envelope.

OLD MAN

I’ve got a letter for you!

It’s only at this moment that it dawns on Marty although the preceding thirty years may not have been kind to him, it is the WESTERN UNION MAN who brought Marty a message from Doc Brown thirty years earlier. Marty takes the envelope and eagerly takes the envelope.

WESTERN UNION MAN

Sign on line six, please!

Half-way through the envelope, Marty stops to sign the man’s papers. He then goes back to the letter. The Western Union Man continues, but neither Jennifer nor Marty are paying attention, as they look at the letter.

WESTERN UNION MAN

(cont.)

I almost forgot, I’ve got a package as

well.

(beat)

You know, I’ve been working for Western

Union for forty years, and you’d never

know it, but we get a lot of strange

requests. You see, we’ve had that

letter in our possession for nearly

100 years! 95 years, 5 months, and 2

days to be exact.

 (beat)

You weren’t here at the moment we

were instructed to deliver the letter,

but my supervisor figured I better

check again!

(beat)

I nearly asked him who’d be around

to complain, but who needs that kind

of aggravation?

(beat)

I tell ya, the weirder the request, the

more likely the recipient is actually

going to be there to take possession!

Close in on the letter as Marty reads.

DOC BROWN

(v.o.)

Dear Marty…

CUT TO:

EXT. SHONASH RAVINE - 1885 - DAY

DOC BROWN and CLARA observe the wreckage of the train. Marty’s hoverboard floats nearby.

DOC BROWN

(v.o., cont.)

Once again, let me assure you that

I am alive and well. 

DISSOLVE TO:

LATER

The entire town (including SEAMUS and MAGGIE has come out to see the re-dedication     of the ravine in favor of their fallen hero, Clint Eastwood.

DOC BROWN

(v.o., cont.)

I am also pleased to report that we

are completely free of any legal trouble

after our latest experiment…

CUT TO:

INT. HILL VALLEY COURT HOUSE - 1885 - DAY

MAYOR HUBERT officiates at the trial of BUFORD’S GANG. Doc is on the witness stand. It is clear from the looks on the gang’s face and Doc’s pantomime that he is implicating them in the train robbery for which Doc and Marty are responsible.

DOC BROWN

(v.o., cont.)

Although I can only hope Buford’s

gang are never released from their

chain gang.

(beat)

If my calculations are correct, you

will receive this letter immediately

after you returned to 1985…

DISSOLVE TO:

MONTHS LATER

The entire town has come out for Doc and Clara’s wedding, Mayor Hubert officiates and the town has taken the same seats for the event.

DOC BROWN

(v.o., cont.)

Although I hope you will forgive me

if my calculations prove to be incorrect.

I’ve been a bit distracted as of late.

CUT TO:

INT. DOC’S HOME/BLACKSMITH SHOP - 1886 - DAY

Clara is giving birth. The doctor hands Doc his first son, JULES.

DOC BROWN

(v.o., cont.)

Even if the technology were available

to somehow reach you in the future, I

can’t deny that my life has moved on

from trying to rebel against the tyrannies

of the space-time continuum. As it

has been several years since I last saw

you, I can only assume that you have

done the right thing and destroyed

the DeLorean.

DISSOLVE TO:

LATER - EARLY 1890

Doc now has two children, Jules, and VERNE, both toddlers. They wobble around the         blacksmith shop as Doc works off in the distance.

DOC BROWN

(v.o., cont.)

But you can’t keep a good scientist

down.

CLOSE ON

Doc working on a rudimentary television. He’s almost nailed it, over forty years before         we know them to have been invented.

DOC BROWN

(v.o., cont.)

I find any number of ways to keep

myself busy during my semi-retirement.

CUT TO:

EXT. HILL VALLEY TOWN SQUARE - 1895 - DAY

Doc has concocted a rudimentary flying machine and is getting ready to test it. Clara and the boys are watching along with the rest of the town. In the background, construction on the clock tower has been completed.

DOC BROWN

(v.o., cont.)

Sometimes I worry that my work in

the past will have unforeseen consequences

on future events…

Doc’s flying machine takes off and amazes the collected crowd as it flies circles around the clocktower and the town square.

CUT TO:

EXT. EMMETT L. BROWN ENTERPRISES HEADQUARTERS - 1900 - DAY

The blacksmith shop has been replaced by a plant. Doc is master of ceremonies at the dedication of the plant. All around the place are billboards for items that Doc he “invented.” A couple of his flying machines zoom by overhead. We can see it in Doc’s eyes; this is just the beginning.

CUT TO:

EXT. TRAIN TRACKS - 1985 - DAY

DOC BROWN

(v.o., cont.)

But I can’t worry about that anymore.

Which brings me to two requests I have

for you. First: Your future hasn’t been

written yet; no one’s has. Your future

is whatever you make it, so make it a

good one!

Jennifer stops reading and tears up the fax from the future.

DOC BROWN

(v.o., cont.)

And second, see that Einstein gets a

good home. As we discussed previously,

walk him twice a day, and he only likes

canned—

The Western Union Man has returned from his truck. He hands Marty a flat package held together with aging, frayed twine. Marty takes the package and opens it. Is a nice, framed copy of both of them in front of the newly-minted clock. An inscription reads on the bottom: TO MARTY - PARTNERS IN TIME - SEPTEMBER 5TH, 1985. He stares at the picture and fails to pick up with the letter where he left off.

JENNIFER

What should we do, Marty?

He grasps the photograph and puts both it and the letter under his arm.

MARTY

I don’t know. Let’s go see what the

future has in store for us?

She smiles and nods. They join hands and walk back to his truck, leaving the befuddled Western Union Man behind. As the camera pans up, we see the entirety of Hill Valley before us. The clocktower square, Lyon Estates, Hilldale, the High School, maybe even the Lone Pine Mall. Only 1985 isn’t quite how Marty left it. Flying cars are everywhere. His present is a lot closer to the future he saw in 2015. As a flying car zooms into the camera, we:

FADE TO BLACK

THE END

All right, I’ll admit it: I may have gone a bit overboard here. I've also had the advantage of twenty-six years to come up with a different answer. But I think this a) keeps the beats of the ending that work, b) is of a similar tone with the rest of the movie(s) and c) doesn’t leave too many loose ends. Is my head way too far up my own ass to ever be rescued again? Is there another, even better ending for the movie? Do you have an impassioned defense of the original ending? Let me know in the comments.

*We have a real problem, on a societal level, regardless of ideology, of confusing annoyance and inconvenience with injustice. Injustice is quite real, but lets try and reserve that term for prejudice and hatred, not the lady in the office who sneezes too much.

**And by we, I mean “I.”

***Case in point. He does come back, like, thirty seconds from now. I guess he wasn’t thinking fourth dimensionally, but I submit that Marty’s just about the only one thinking fourth dimensionally at this moment.

We’ll Always Have Manhattan: Rethinking My Love for Woody Allen’s Movies

I may be over Woody Allen.

I know, I know. I was surprised, too. There was a time when Manhattan (1979) was far and away my favorite movie. I loved everything about it. I was in love with the knock-off music they used for the DVD menu, for crying out loud. 

The release of his movies, which have long-since stopped attracting the attention that other, more toy robot-centered studio flicks currently enjoy, were practically a religious holiday for me. It helped that one could count on a new entry in the canon each year. When I lived in Stillwater, which never ran his movies at the local Carmike, I would venture out to Tulsa to be sure to catch the movies for the week they ran at the AMC Southroads. Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), Whatever Works (2009), Anything Else (2003). You name it. I was there. If you made a pie chart of Allen’s box office gross in Oklahoma, a very clear sliver of the circle would be me and whoever I talked into being my date for the evening. All right, there were rarely dates, but a fella can dream, can’t he?

I know, I know… There’s a certain amount of ugliness that can orbit around Woody fandom. He did marry the adopted daughter of his longtime girlfriend, Mia Farrow. That’s… pretty undeniably not great. Worse still, one of the children he adopted with Farrow maintains that he sexually abused her. This is terrible, but he insists the abuse never occurred and charges were not brought against him. This isn’t an article about his unsettling personal life. I don’t know what to believe about the more heinous accusations against the man, and believe me, I’ve given them their due consideration.

This is more about how his films and I have parted ways. People have been saying that his movies suck for years. I had written off Bill Maher as an asshole* when he devoted a “New Rule” to his assessment that any movie Allen made after Annie Hall (1977) was lousy, and that actors needed to stop clamoring to work with him, but for years I believed the guy made more entertaining fare at a faster rate than anyone else working in film. 

Then came Café Society. Circle Cinema has been running the movie for weeks, and I’ve been meaning to go the entire time. I finally got to a screening** and… And…

The movie is fine. It’s not one of his punishingly dour dramas, of which there are a few, but something didn’t connect for me. Maybe its that he decided to shoot on digital for the first time***. It might be that, with a budget of $30 million, Allen’s most expensive film was destined to be become his most distant. Ultimately, though, I think it’s mainly because I’m over his movies. I’m certainly over his stock characters.

The main character, Jesse Eisenberg**** professes his love for Kristen Stewart despite having a wife and child at home. He isn’t the only character in the movie that sleep-walks through cheating on their spouse. First, and this may make me sound like a square, but there isn’t an ounce of romance to infidelity. His characters blithely, almost mindlessly opt for cheating on partners often guilty of no transgression against them whatsoever. I’m not sure what time in my life I might have found that appealing, but it certainly isn’t now. 

Then there’s the whole murder thing. While Allen deals deftly in Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) with the notion of an otherwise-respectable person morally accepting the fact that he is responsible for a murder, but he deals with the subject again in Match Point (2005), and here again he touches on it with the amount of focus normally reserved for a vine*****. I’m fairly convinced that Allen killed a hobo in the mid-80s and has been so far unsuccessful in working out his angst over the topic through his screenplays. Regardless of whether or not Woody is secretly a serial killer, the theme has moved from intriguing to decidedly not universal.

I’ll probably still see his movies as they are released, although I may not make a point of seeing them in the theaters. I’m intrigued by his upcoming Amazon TV series Crisis in Six Scenes, but I’m not holding out a lot of hope. He is advancing in years, but I still hope he has a few more films like Midnight in Paris (2011)****** in him before he either retires or passes away. He may yet be able to surprise us; it’d be pretty terrific if someone near the end of his career could still try new things. It would mean there’s hope for the rest of us.

*Maher is an asshole, and an increasingly unfunny one at that. It’s a strange assessment for me to come to, as I essentially agree with most of the things he says.

**It was only as I wrote this article that I realized I somehow missed one of Allen’s movies, 2015’s Irrational Man. Apparently I’ve been over his movies for a couple of years now and never realized it.

***My quest to defend the virtue of real film may be doomed, but it does not mean that it should be surrendered. 

****Thankfully, he wasn’t playing Lex Luthor. The guy isn’t always miscast.

*****Vine is still a thing, right? Should I have used snapchat instead? Will someone please tell me which references are hip with the youths of today?

******Man, I really love that movie, but even it seemed like it was pandering to me in a weirdly specific way. Also, I may be going a little over-board on the footnotes this week.

The biggest electric train set any boy ever had: On Making Movies

For the first time in nearly fifteen years*, I’ve directed a movie.

Why so long between filmed projects? 

I tried for a couple of years after Really Good Man to put together other projects, but they never came together. My inability to be in the correct headspace to follow through is the only real reason I can come up with to explain these project’s inability to get off the ground. Eventually, I became content with never shooting another frame again. The gap between available resources and my own minimum expectations for my work always seemed too wide. With novels, I could send Orson Welles to the red planet and back, but with film I could barely get Tulsa’s one-and-only superhero across the street without taking on an Ahab-like air of obsession.

Still, I had always said that, after RGM, I just didn’t have an idea for a movie that I could reasonably produce for almost no money.

That’s probably mostly true. I never did have a produceable idea, until I recently had the opportunity and means to make an educational filmstrip, but with just enough James Whale (or Carl Laemmle, depending on your level of attachment to the auteur theory) to make things interesting.

Kaz Kirkpatrick is both the star of the video and a sharp-eared, world-class sound man. Here he is pictured, alongside a publicity still of Bela Lugosi from the 1930s. Eagle-eyed readers will realize that Mr. Kirkpatrick is the one on the left... er... right. Kaz is on the right. Right?

After writing eight pages of script, coordinating two half-days of shooting, and buying a post production facility/paper weight/Macbook, I’m once again the proud papa of just under a reel’s worth of pretty good** footage. 

Jack Burgos, the hero of the piece, during a contemplative take. The crown and shirt are mine.

And here’s the thing: it was comforting to be back at the helm again, perhaps insidiously so. Between finally exercising again those parts of my brain that can plan out just how much coverage I need to shoot in order not to give me a headache in editing, to the simple act of making costuming decisions*** made me feel like I was once again putting every groove and synapse of my brain to good use.

Multimedia projects might be too much trouble and not enough payoff, but when it works, it is sweet. After the two days of shooting, I slept like the dead. I had felt as if I had exhausted every ounce of usefulness out of the day, and my body couldn’t argue. 

Filmmaking may not be a drug, but I have a feeling I’m off the wagon regardless. I want back in, and I don’t intend to let a decade and a half pass before I get back behind the camera.

Now I only need to figure out how to get that done… Maybe I need to do a reverse Orson Welles****. Start with movies, and THEN move on to radio. Yep. That might just be the ticket. More on that later.

In the meantime, please take a look at the fruits of our labor. The film is intended as an introduction for potential new members to our writing critique group, Nevermore Edits. If you take that caveat into consideration, the video is pretty entertaining. I hope you enjoy it.

*Longtime visitors to the site will remember The Adventures of Really Good Man, but if you haven’t taken a look at it, find all four parts of the tenth-anniversary edition here. I’m pretty proud of it, all things considered. For those of us who were involved with the movie, it’s a pretty cherished memory of our high school years. I’m probably more proud of that quality than anything else.

**Or Really Good. See? I can make the jokes, too.

***All right… When you see the video, you’re going to realize that “costuming decisions” basically consisted of choosing a wide array of hats. Sue me. I wanted every character to have a distinct silhouette.

****Which, incidentally, was my nickname in high school.

Can You Spare A Minute To Talk About The (Writer's) Bible?

I wonder how much I can get into this without spilling the beans on the semi-secret project I’ve been working on, but suffice it to say, I’ve been reading a lot of bibles lately.

A writer’s bible is an interesting beast. Predominantly used for television series*, it attempts in a few pages to define the parameters of a show.

A writer’s bible almost always features a breakdown of the main (and some recurring) characters. There is often a brief discussion of the pertinent events that led up to the pilot, which might influence episodes to come. As the primary audience for these tomes are prospective freelance writers for the the series, it can also feature a breakdown of what type of stories the producers have zero interest in buying.

It can also help keep the regular writers of the program on the path they originally set out. In practice, however, a bible is a case study in early rules made to be broken, or obvious mistakes that had to die in order for a show to find its eventual greatness.

Some shows never really had a real bible. Some, like The West Wing, were so tied into the voice of one creator, that there wouldn’t be a lot of traffic from freelance writers**, and Larry David once boiled down the rules of writing for Seinfeld to the commandment “No Hugging, No Learning” before he went on to create a show that eschewed scriptwriting all together.

Many show bibles are available to read online, and here’s just a few of the more interesting.

~The writers guide for Batman: The Animated Series is an interesting artifact of the series birth in the wake of the Burton-directed feature films. Little did the show know that it would surpass those earlier entries in the bat-canon and become the definitive version of The Dark Knight for many.

~The bible for The Real Ghostbusters is an interesting artifact in how it wants to turn its episodic entries away from its cinematic progenitor. For that matter, it’s also a stark reminder in how those years leading up to Ghostbusters II cemented the fact that Slimer had become not only the star of show, but the franchise as a whole.

~The most useful of the publicly distributed writer’s bibles came from the far-flung reaches of the final frontier. In the 90s, various Star Trek bibles were in wide distribution, largely due to the franchise’s unusual open-submission writing policy. While opening the flood gates in this way likely lead to a lot of cranks shuffling their ramblings over to the Paramount lot, the process did yield some terrific episodes (like “Yesterday’s Enterprise”) and gave careers to some truly wonderful writers like Battlestar Galactica’s Ronald D. Moore. An early version of The Next Generation’s bible can be found here. This pre-dates the open-call policy, echoes the bible for The Original Series, and goes to great lengths to tell the reader what type of stories the show doesn’t want to do, and that they are only interested in submissions from established TV writers. Most people view the early years of TNG as the nadir of the franchise’s writing, but far be it for me to draw connections between the two situations. 

The producers simplified things greatly for both Deep Space Nine and Voyager, perhaps in hopes that the more valuable freelance writers would preternaturally be able to write the better, more produceable Star Trek stories, and would only need a general reference volume for names, locations, and backstory.

And before you ask, yes. Somewhere out there, conceivably on a set of 3.5 floppies or spiral-bound notebooks, are my twelve-year old attempts to put together teleplays for Voyager and Deep Space Nine. They were going to make me a huge TV writer before I turned twenty. It is one of my deepest fears that they might eventually see the light of day.

Most people wanted to be sports or music stars when they were kids. Maybe they wanted to be something important like a lawyer or government official. A few might have wanted to be something useful, like a plumber. I, on the other hand, wanted to be a mid-level script writer working on the Paramount lot. Are you like me? Is there a show you always wanted to write for, but for want of a time machine, can’t? Let me know in the comments.

* Although other long-form, no-end-in-sight stories, like comic books use some version of the document.

**Also, Sorkin—genius though he was—would throw the show’s continuity out the window and just wing it (pun accepted, if not intended).

Cheat Week, Part 4: Somedays you just can't get rid of a bomb.

I've been posting for nine weeks straight, and there is a temptation to say my recent viewing of the third season of Batman (1966-1968), and specifically the odious episode "Nora Clavicle and the Ladies' Crime Club*" for my inability to put a coherent thought together this week.

It may that simple. I have committed myself to a weekends' worth of consumption, and probably need such a period to recharge my batteries. The truth is, I've got a lot of projects in the hopper nearly ready. Book 3 of my Orson series is proceeding along nicely, if slowly. I did manage to figure out the title, though: The Once and Future Orson Welles. I've also begun developing another project that I'm not quite ready to talk about, but will start to move Party Now, Apocalypse Later into more multimedia projects as time goes on. For this blog, I do have some thoughts (read: an ongoing identity crisis**) about this year's election. I'll also probably move on from my recent entries about local movie theaters, and get into that other phenomena of cinephilia: creation. I may yet read a book again and offer a review or three. Watch this space for more.

* The entire year, while fortified by the refreshing addition of Yvonne Craig as Barbara Gordon/Batgirl (one of the only contributions of the show to the ongoing Batman-mythos), is stagnated by a pervasive cheapness, and an episode like "Nora Clavicle..." wherein a villainous women's rights activists usurps Commissioner Gordon's position, and hires only women to staff the police department. As they trade cooking tips and fret about ruining their outfits, the city descends into chaos. The crisis is only neutralized by Batman, Robin, and Batgirl, guiding an army of robotic mice via the use of penny whistles. Oy. 1968, am I right? Sure, it had the Apollo 8 moonshot, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Planet of the Apes. But there was a lot to complain about, too! Like wars, the entire city of Chicago, and the tragic unfunny-ing of the Caped Crusaders.

** Settle down. I'm not voting for Donald Trump, or for that matter anyone whose name doesn't rhyme with Smillary Blinton.

Movie Theaters of Days Past: Part Five of Five: Village Movies 8 (Just off of Memorial near 71st) ALSO: The theaters that didn’t, couldn’t or wouldn’t make the list.

Note: I went to these movies from 1990 through the first week in July, 2016.

First things first: an editorial note about last week’s entry. My father mentioned a particular outing to the Sand Springs Cinemark that went down in family history, and I would be remiss if I didn’t mention it in this series:

The movie: Gladiator (2000). We’re watching the movie, and it’s fine. One of the other theater goers (we came to call him “Cletus”) leans over to his progeny (we came to call him “Little Spud”) and says loudly so that we all hear him over the carnage and savagery of Rome, “Now, you understand boy, they’re all bad guys, ‘cause they have false Gods.”

The pronounced eye roll my pop and I shared has echoed through the ages.

Now, on with this week’s final entry.

Photo Credit: Lauren Grubb via cinematreasures.org

Maybe Movie Theaters are passé. A movie theater is the first date with the one you marry, or the one that got away. It's surprise outings with your parents when you are kid that you still remember twenty-five years later. It's the only place where you can enter when it is light, time bends, you have no awareness of the outside world, and when you exit, night has fallen in your absence. But, let’s be honest. Home video technology has advanced to the point where the only good a movie theater is a shared cinematic experience. This can be good and bad. I recently went to a 75th anniversary of Citizen Kane, and the film took on a whole new life in front of an audience, some of whom had never seen it before. On the other hand, see the above incident with Cletus and his spawn.

The memories of these places have been on my mind a lot lately. Movie Theaters are now built more as recliner showrooms than movie houses, but I long for the movie theaters of my youth. Some are still plugging along, more or less. Others have been (likely permanently) lost to the sands of time. Over the past few weeks I explored the older, perhaps less-loved movie theaters of this town I call home. Join me, won’t we?

For this week’s entry, I closed out my travelogue* of the lower theaters by stopping by the Village Movies 8.

Movies I memorably saw here in the past:

Star Trek: Generations (1994). I’m ten years old, and I had acquired the screenplay to the forthcoming movie at a Star Trek convention six months earlier, so the movie held no surprises for me. Kids, that’s exactly the kind of thing we had to do back in the day if we wanted a film ruined for us before opening weekend.

I Am Legend (2007). I went to a number of movies at this theater during the dark, grim days of my brief attendance at Law School. The memories of which movies I saw during this period (aside from I Am Legend) have become hazy, but the ability to run away from a life perpetually out of control sticks with me quite well. 

Today:

The Village 8 Movie theater, for the multiple hands that the theater has gone through, it has gone largely unchanged after a cursory glance. The theater closed recently, but a theater owner who had just closed another venue elsewhere in town and has upgraded the individual theaters with the remaining bits of his now defunct first-run theater. As such, it was a surprisingly modern set-up for a second run house, and I would really recommend you give the place a shot.

Oh, yes. There was also a movie involved in this little outing:

I saw The Boss starring Melissa McCarthy. It was fine. Ghostbusters is funnier. C’est la vie.

Final verdict: 

The Movies 8 is fine. I can say without any thread of doubt that it is the nicest second-run theater in town. New amenities and the latest projection systems (again, film would be nice, but I get now that might be an unreasonable request) mean you get an experience close to some of the newer first-run theaters in the city. 

But that isn’t the point. These posts have been an attempt to look back and get some sense of feeling that these theaters once brought me. I largely did get to visit those feelings, but with so much of the core business of movie theaters, I find myself missing the experience of going to the movie theater when I was younger, and those feelings will likely never come again.

You know what? I don’t really have too much more to say about this theater. The entire time I’m sitting there while Melissa McCarthy goes through her faux Martha Stewart routine (more on that later), I can’t help but think about all the theaters I can’t go to because they are no longer there. I really want to talk about them. So I will.

Photo Credit: Lauren Grubb via cinematreasures.org

Woodland Hills Cinema 6

Right across the street from the Movies 8, no less. Even when it was running, this probably wasn’t the greatest movie theater in town. In fact, I can only remember seeing one movie there in particular, but it was a doozy. Begging and pleading throughout the summer of 1992 yielded a screening of Batman Returns that was equal parts thrilling, horrifying, and… formative**.

The theater lay abandoned for years after it closed in 2001.  And then they tore it down and put in a Wal-Mart Supercenter. Some people just have no respect for the proper use of commercial real estate.

Photo Credit: Lauren Grubb via cinematreasures.org

Fox Four

A smaller theater that spent most of it’s last days as a second-run house. Large fabric murals of Superman and Indiana Jones remain in my head as testament to the last time the place saw a face lift. Aside from seeing The Empire Strikes Back (1997 Special Edition) there, the theater’s main claim to fame was its proximity to the late, great Novel Idea bookstore. If there is such a thing as heaven, one hopes a second-run theater and a book store are within walking distance of each other. Now, the bookstore is a Dollar Tree, and the theater has been converted to a gym and tanning salon. Not quite the caustic insult of a Wal-Mart, but still disappointing.

Photo Credit: Lauren Grubb via cinematreasures.org

Fontana 6

This one might yet be a bright spot, one possible opportunity to bring a movie theater back from the brink, although it is probably the least personally memorable on the list. For the life of me, the only movie I can firmly pinpoint seeing at the theater was the leaden Carrot Top vehicle Chairman of the Board (1998). Yes, you read that right. Had it not been for my father and I, the reported box office receipts of $181,233 would be an even $181,230.

A church now runs the space, and I can’t help but wonder if the congregation were to ever fall on hard times, the space might yet be converted to its truer purpose.

Photo Credit: Lauren Grubb via cinematreasures.org

Annex 7

Ah, the Annex 7. I won’t even get into all the movies I saw at this theater, before it so callously had the nerve to disappear in the late ‘90s. If I ever found myself trapped in the past***, the first place I would go is to the Annex 7 to catch a screening of…anything. I’d see any movie there, if given half the chance. When I think of where I fell in love with movies, it was in this place. Like many theaters in this list. It isn’t quantifiably anything special, but it is one of the most special places in the world. And it’s gone.

I will mention one movie I saw there. It is the late spring of 1990. I am nearly six years old. I have already nearly worn out my VHS copy of Back to the Future Part II (1989), and my imagination is aflame with how great the promised third movie will be. Then, activity. Sudden. Unfathomable. Dad is coming home early from work, and we are then going…somewhere. In the pit of my stomach, I feel like a doctor’s visit is in my immediate future. 

No. We go see Part III. The only thing better than Back to the Future is brand-new, surprise Back to the Future. That particular alchemy of positive things has never occurred again. Even on the inevitable day Universal gives into the immovable forces of the modern movie marketplace and remakes the original movie, something will be lost in translation. It is one of my fondest, and clearest childhood memories.

But did it really go away? It was most certainly demolished in the efforts to revitalize the Southroads area in the late 90’s. But the 41st and Yale Vintage Stock stands at its old location. I get most of my DVDs and Blu Rays here. Old habits die hard; I just can’t stop getting my movie fix from this location.

There are plenty of other Tulsa theaters that come to mind. The Park Lane Twin at 51st and Sheridan, which was subsequently gutted to become a campus of the now-defunct Wright Career College. The Eastland Mall 6, that was sadly swallowed up by the collapsing mall around it. Even the Promenade 8 disappeared in front of the newer (and now decaying) Regal Promenade 12.

Are there any disappeared theaters that tug at your memories? Let me know in the comments.

*I had originally intended to include the Admiral Twin Drive In, but as my home of Oklahoma has been dubbed by meteorologists as “fundamentally indistinguishable from fire,” that trip may have to wait until the fall. There may be yet another entry in the offing!

**Thank you, Michelle Pfeiffer. I’m so proud that I didn’t have to look up how to spell “Pfeiffer.”

***Which, for the record, has yet to happen to me.

Movie Theaters of Days Past (Part Four of Five): Sand Springs Cinemark (On Charles Page Blvd. near the abandoned K Mart)

Note: I went to these movies during the week of July 11th-15th.

Movie theaters can leave one oblivious. A movie theater is the first date with the one you marry, or the one that got away. It's surprise outings with your parents when you are kid that you still remember twenty-five years later. It's the only place where you can enter when it is light, time bends, you have no awareness of the outside world, and when you exit, night has fallen in your absence. Sometimes the world outside of the movie may need a little more attention paid to it.

The memory of these places has been on my mind a lot lately. Movie Theaters are now built more as recliner showrooms than movie houses, but I long for the movie theaters of my youth. Some are still plugging along, more or less. Others have been (likely permanently) lost to the sands of time. Over the next few weeks, and perhaps intermittently if other inspiration will not be sated until a post is written, I will be exploring the older, perhaps less-loved movie theaters of this town I call home. Join me, won’t we?

For this week’s entry, I ventured farther than I have or will for these entries, to Sand Spring’s Cinemark theater. Of all the houses on this list, this is probably the one I went to the most growing up, as my grandparents lived in Sand Springs while I grew up, and outings to “the show,” as Grammy would—and likely still does—call it.

Movies I memorably saw here in the past:

Addams Family Values (1993). 

Star Trek: First Contact (1996). After my parents picked me up from the screening, I called it “the best two hours of my life.” They laughed and said that I was “young, yet.” I’m still not sure I get the joke. Two hours?

For some reason, I have the strongest memory of seeing the Joe Pesci/Danny Glover stinker Gone Fishin’ (1997) during a summer (not unlike this one) that I committed to the idea of seeing everything that came out. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that J.J. Abrams wrote it? Look it up.

I have some vague recollection of seeing Batman Forever (1995) there during its particular summer. It may have more to do with a much stronger memory from the same period of being stuck in line at the concession stand while staring at the character poster of Robin from the film, which to this day appears as if Chris O’Donnell really wants to punch everyone in the face.

I’m pretty sure that the last movie I saw there was Bryan Singer’s X-Men (2000). I saw it with Chris Moore and Bill Fisher. Chris insisted it would be cheaper to see it there. Even then, it felt like a bit of a schlep to make the trip. Later that year, my grandparents moved away from Oklahoma. Outside of this blog series, I haven’t had a reason to go there since.

Today:

I didn’t even know it was going to rain on July 14th. But, in the attempt to get to the end of my little movie theater travelogue, I ran out for an early matinee.

Of all the theaters I returned to, this one seemed to have changed the least, and in a truly surprising turn of events, I bought my ticket while still outside of the premises. Inside the doors I saw the crane game that I had a legendary run on in the summer of 1997. My grandmother may still have the Jurassic Park mug that I acquired from the highlight of my career.

The only thing to have changed since the last time I was there is the neighborhood. In days past, the Sand Springs Goldie’s was located caddy-corner to the theater. It’s long gone. The local K Mart was just down the road, and it recently closed. The entire shopping center has that neglected feel that I’ve come to notice surrounding most of the older theaters. If the burger joint were still there, it might have stayed my theater of choice for the past fifteen years.

By this time in my adventures, the thought of another bag of popcorn to accompany me in my escape from reality makes my stomach turn. Having just had breakfast, I opt to avoid all of the available concessions and suffer through the movie unsalted, unhydrated, and uncaffinated. Its fine; the theater is cool enough, and the seats have been upgraded in the fifteen plus years since I was last there. Also, there was going to be more than enough water by the end of the morning.

The movie was fine (more on that later) and the projection system is the same just-too-bright and just-too-clear digital projection that I’ve railed against in other entries. The movie also took place largely in Hawaii. During the course of the screening, I thought I heard thunder and figured bad weather would somehow figure into the film’s plot. It never came; I put it out of my mind. I probably shouldn’t have.

This is part of the problem and wonderful thing of the times I have spent in movie theaters. The world melts away. Those rows of seats and the images flickered on the screen exist outside of time. You can avoid most anything in there. Sadness. Worry. Violent storms.

Which is why I missed out on most of the storms of July 14th. The thunder in the movie was real thunder! Never even occurred to me. On a fun note, my car was emerged in about a foot and a half of water. So the end of my moviegoing experience ended with me wading into lake Sand Springs to get to my car. It feels like, even a month later, that my brown shoes* are still wet.

Oh, yes. There was also a movie involved in this little outing:

I saw Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates. As my week progressed, I definitely moved out of the arena of movies I wanted to see, but hadn’t gotten the chance to see, and moved into the territory of “Well, I’m already at the theater, I might as well see something.” I may have laughed a handful of times, but if you saw the trailer, you probably laughed as much as I did. It was another example of perfectly talented people phoning it in, maybe just for the free trip to Hawaii. For the life of me, I don’t understand why Zac Efron has been elevated from “man in stock photo” to comedy star.

Final verdict:

The Sand Springs Cinemark is a nice place. Clean, cool, with good prices and amenities for a first run theater. Worth the drive, if you are in the mood, but I would caution you: the parking lot is secretly a crater and becomes a massive body of water after any degree of rain.

Next week:

I bring the series to a conclusion with the final theater I visited in my week off, before I also offer some thoughts about the theaters I could not visit because either a) they’ve been lost to the ravages of time or b) it’s hot as balls out there.

*I own one pair of brown shoes and one pair of black shoes. When I wear them, their lace are never tied. Deal with it.

Movie Theaters of Days Past: Eton Square (51st and Memorial)

Note: I went to these movies during the week of July 11th-15th.

Movie theaters are essential. A movie theater is the first date with the one you marry, or the one that got away. It's surprise outings with your parents when you are kid that you still remember twenty-five years later. It's the only place where you can enter when it is light, time bends, you have no awareness of the outside world, and when you exit night has fallen in your absence.

Your time in a movie theater doesn’t have to be communal either. Some might think me weird for being all-too-willing to go to a screening on my own. But some of my best thinking is done in those moments before the trailers begin when all is darkness, aside from the projection of softball trivia questions and orders to check in with the concession stand. I’m never more pumped than when I walk away from my seat as the end credits play behind me. This is true, even if the movie is lousy. The music over the end credits of any movie is universally great.

The memory of these places has been on my mind a lot lately. Movie Theaters are now built more as recliner showrooms than movie houses, but I long for the movie theaters of my youth. Some are still plugging along, more or less. Others have been (likely permanently) lost to the sands of time. Over the next few weeks, and perhaps intermittently if other inspiration will not be sated until a post is written, I will be exploring the older, perhaps less-loved movie theaters of this town I call home. Join me, won’t we?

For this week’s entry, I ventured to Eton Square 6. Of all the first-run, non-art house theaters in Tulsa, it has been around the longest. It makes do with cheap prices and less-than state of the art amenities. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Movies I memorably saw here in the past: 

Home Alone (1990). I also remember seeing Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992) at the same theater after what only felt like a few weeks interval. It may have been the first time in life that I got the sense that life—or at least movies—tend to repeat themselves.

The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993). At the age of nine, I didn’t like the movie very much. I was also an idiot back then. That is, I’m still an idiot now, but for entirely new reasons. Anyway…

The Lion King (1995). I get the feeling that any kid’s movie in the 1990s led me to this place.

Today:

I haven’t been back to this theater since the 90s, I think. Entries from cinematreasures.org confirm my memory that the theater closed in 2000, but has since reopened. It’s sort of an encouraging notion that a theater can fully disappear, but then come back, even though the other closed theaters in town have been since converted into all sorts of soulless wonders like a Walmart Supercenter or a TGI Fridays, but more about those sad thoughts in another entry.

I remember the parking lot being bigger. Much bigger. But the apartments of fairly new construction must have filled what could previously handle many more theatergoers.

The box office is inside the lobby. It occurs to me now that I can’t think of any movie theater in town (outside of the Cinemark at Tulsa) that uses the designed outside box office consistently. The AMC Southroads does a little bit, but I can’t remember the last time I went there and hadn’t bought my tickets weeks in advance.

The lobby looks no different than it did back in the day, which is encouraging. I half expect to find large cardboard cutouts to be on display, asking me to meet the various cast members of The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Oh, also. They have a pinball table in the lobby. This may be my favorite theater in town now. It’s a “Striker Extreme,” a soccer-themed table, made by the fine people at Stern. It’s seen better days, but is still quite playable and only costs 75 cents per round. The full-service restaurant attached to the Warren is nice, but this place is starting to give it a run for its money, amenities-wise.

Also, and I think we all really need to have a conversation about this, especially if anyone working in the movie theater industry is reading this. The Eton Square cinema has, and is more than willing to serve me, unsweetened iced tea. In a cup with ice and everything. I don’t know why this particular commodity is missing from the usual movie theater fare, but it always annoys me when it becomes clear that the only form of orange pekoe I can consume at most theaters is laden with enough sugar to make it chemically identical to a Mountain Dew. I’m tired of just getting a bottle of water when it comes time to wash down my bag of popcorn salt and kernels. I’m so old and tired, I may have just become the Andy Rooney of Tulsa movie theaters.

The theaters themselves are plenty odd. For the back half of the theater (I have a hard time imagining anybody ever sits in the front half if they don’t have to), they have ripped out every other row of seats and replaced them with tables. It’s actually an interesting solution to the problem of concession.

My first choice of seat was… ahem… wet. So I moved, and I was much happier. Aside from that one problem and the ongoing scourge of crystal-clear digital projection, the theater was kept in the low sixties (the temperature at which the people from my home planet are most comfortable) and I think unless I’m dead set on partaking of the Warren, then this may be my new first-run theater of choice. 

Oh, yes. There was also a movie involved in this little outing:

I saw The Legend of Tarzan. Shot with the certain misty production-designed panache that Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) made fashionable and Avatar (2009) made de rigueur, the film is an inoffensive action piece that nearly completely disappears from memory the moment you exit the theater. Of note, I completely didn’t notice that Margot Robbie played Jane until I collected my thoughts just now and did a quick IMDB search. Not for nothing, that’s a fair indication that she may have a longer career ahead of her if I don’t automatically notice that the thought “oh, Margot Robbie is in this movie” doesn’t immediately come to mind. Also, my surprise to learn that both the character and actions of Samuel L. Jackson’s character are taken from history were somewhat akin to the title card at the end of Bloodsport (1988), that claimed the film was based on a true story. Otherwise, the film will probably be forgotten pretty quickly. If you look at the box office returns, then there’s something to the notion that people largely forgot the film before its release date. 

Final verdict:

Eton Square may be the neglected step-child of first run theaters in Tulsa, but it still has value. Is there a new release you only kind of want to see? Then its lower prices may be ideal. It’s amenities are (almost) nicer than you would think, but there are a few unique things that will likely keep me coming back for any number of matinees in the future.

Next Week:

I venture out to the untamed wilderness that is Sand Springs. The sea was rough that day, my friends, but I lived to tell the tale. Although, if the election continues to go along its current path, I may have some thoughts on that topic.

Movie Theaters of Days Past: Circle Cinema (Just off of 1st and Lewis)

Note: I went to these movies during the week of July 11th-15th.

Movie theaters are essential. A movie theater is the first date with the one you marry, or the one that got away. It's surprise outings with your parents when you are kid that you still remember twenty-five years later. It's the only place where you can enter when it is light, time bends, you have no awareness of the outside world, and when you exit night has fallen in your absence.

When I was six-years-old, after a particularly VHS-laden Christmas, I decided to open up a movie theater in our living room. I placed pieces of paper in the windows letting passers by know our showtimes. Batman (1989) would be shown at 10:00. Back to the Future Part III (1990) would be shown at 12:30 (after lunch, naturally). At 2:45? Batman again, naturally.

Nobody ever came by to partake of the theater, disappointing child-me and being the best possible end result of me inviting strangers to watch videos in our house. My efforts to get my nascent movie house listed in the paper along with the supposedly more legitimate cinemas didn’t get past the earliest stages.

The memory of these places has been on my mind a lot lately. Movie Theaters are now built more as recliner showrooms than movie houses, but I long for the movie theaters of my youth. Some are still plugging along, more or less. Others have been (likely permanently) lost to the sands of time. Over the next few weeks, and perhaps intermittently if other inspiration will not be sated until a post is written, I will be exploring the older, perhaps less-loved movie theaters of this town I call home. Join me, won’t we?

For this week’s entry, I ventured to Circle Cinema, Tulsa’s only non-profit, supposedly art house cinema. 

Movies I memorably saw here in the past: 

While I don’t have any first hand memories from its initial run* in the 1920s-60s, or from its run as an adult theater in the 1970s, since its renaissance in recent years I’ve partaken of several special screenings of older movies and a few movies that aren’t played anywhere else, including:

Blue Jasmine (2013) 

Halloween (1978) for a rather disappointing screening, the reasons for which I will get into in just a bit.

Fargo (1996) for a 20th anniversary screening.

Weiner (2016). This was just a few weeks ago, and man, could I go on and on about what a fascinating garbage fire I witnessed there, but that is an entirely different blog entry.

Today:

The men's room proudly displays a poster for Moonraker (1979). I’m not sure if the choice aims to bolster its its the popcorn-movie bonafides, or a statement about where the outer space-themed films of Roger Moore rank when its totem is placed less than three feet away from a urinal. Either way, just the sight of the poster amused me to no end.

Outside of the toilet facilities, the theater is kind of a knock out. Modern amenities are practically carved out of the skeleton of the theater’s glory days, giving the whole place a feeling almost as if it sprang forth from the exposed brick all around you. It is almost as if the place won’t, can’t be anything other than a movie theater. Even in the days when it slummed as a porno theater, it had to play with shadows and light. I like that, somehow. Even when the world seemingly moved on, this place would live its purpose.

Even with the unalterable core at the heart of Circle Cinema, it experiments with other things. While there are often a plethora of movie posters (some signed) on the walls, on this particular day they are all taken off the walls in anticipation of a renovation of one of the smaller screening rooms. The lobby is also host to occasional art exhibitions. While the place knows that it always was and always will be a movie theater, it can’t help but wonder what it would be like to be an art gallery. And the only art gallery in Tulsa that serves White Castle sliders. I like that, too.

There is a one drawback to the place, and it is a factor I’ll likely keep coming back to in these pieces. Each of the screening rooms at Circle uses digital projection; not a single room uses a film projection system. Complain about the prequels all you want, but the big legacy Lucas left us before selling everything to Disney was insisting on digital projection systems. They are a drag. There’s a lifeless, antiseptic quality to it. In most larger theaters, it’s a presentation I can get used to. At Circle, many of their screenings are just projections off of a blu ray player. This was especially sad when, at a special screening of Halloween, I realized that I could have gotten almost the same exact experience at home, and there I could have taken my shoes off, or paused the movie if I needed to pee. That realization has led me to beg off going to some of their screenings of other classics. 

It’s a nitpicky thing for a place doing such wonderful work, but maybe I dream of the slight danger of a reel breaking in the middle of a movie. Maybe its just me, but I need that air of uncertainty in my leisure time.

Oh, yes. There was also a movie involved in this little outing:

I saw Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made. Whoo, boy. I’ve got a lot of thoughts about this film. As the man who was once the boy that would conquer Hollywood with nothing more than his intermittently reliable wits and a camcorder, the movie struck a chord. 

In fairness, that chord often led me to mutter, “Jesus, guys. Move on.”

While the documentary delves into the making of the lions’ share of the subject’s efforts to cobble together a shot-for-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark, the main thrust of the narrative deals with their attempt, over twenty-five years after they “finished” their movie, to film the one scene** they could never finish. The level of obsession these people had for their project is something I might be able to call commitment, if it weren’t for the fact that they spent their time (and, admittedly, their love) making a movie that was made quite well before. Say what you will about my occasional forays into filmmaking, but I was absolutely making my own movie. I also never almost lost my job over it. Maybe that makes me a sell-out, but if these guys could make an original film, I would have been far more sympathetic to their plight.

Final verdict: 

Circle Cinema is kind of a small miracle of a place. In a town all-too eager to throw away theaters older than thirty years, this place not only still fulfills the function for which it was originally built, but thrives in the endeavor. They show the movies that no one else in town will show. Still, they are also not so inaccessible that they are above more entertaining fair. Their upcoming screening of Evil Dead 2 seems like it would be a good time for all. I do wish that they were equipped for actual film projection, but as I continue through this project, I get the sinking feeling that film projection has died out. Long live George Lucas.

*Again, I can’t confirm or deny that I have enjoyed a long lucrative career as a time traveller. I do acknowledge that there is a significant amount of circumstantial evidence to support that hypothesis.

**The sequence where the Nazi flying wing explodes.

Movie Theaters of Days Past: Part One of FIve: Searchlight Cinemas Super Saver (Mall 31; 31st and Sheridan)

Note: I went to these movies during the week of July 11th-15th.

Movie Theaters are holy places. Maybe they don’t lead to profound theological truths* but they certainly do house the moments that matter. A movie theater is the first date with the one you marry, or the one that got away. It's surprise outings with your parents when you are kid that you still remember twenty-five years later. It's the only place where you can enter when it is light, time bends, you have no awareness of the outside world, and when you exit night has fallen in your absence.

The memory of these places has been on my mind a lot lately. Movie Theaters are now build more as recliner showrooms than movie houses, but I long for the movie theaters of my youth. Some are still plugging along, more or less. Others have been (likely permanently) lost to the sands of time. Over the next few weeks, and perhaps intermittently if other inspiration will not be sated until a post is written, I will be exploring the older, perhaps less-loved movie theaters of this town I call home. Join me, won’t we?

For this week’s entry, I ventured to Searchlight Cinemas Super Saver, one of only two second-run theaters left in the city. 

Movies I memorably saw here in the past: 

Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993)

Jetsons: The Movie (1990) (May have been the last first-run movie I saw there)

Small Soldiers (1998) (The only movie I ever abandoned before the end credits. Sorry, Joe Dante)

One blissful day in 2000 when, on a 50 cent Tuesday I saw Toy Story 2, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, and what I can only hope is a better film than the last one I listed, all in the course of a day.

A screening of The Scorpion King (2002) in the summer of its release that I abandoned before the scarce coming attractions began either to engage in some sort of adolescent debauchery or drama elsewhere. I honestly can’t remember which.

A screening of Tomorrowland in 2015. The flood of memories from that screening in some small way led to the blog series you are currently reading.

Today:

The Mall 31 seemed like an abandoned idea twenty years ago, and much to its credit, has not decayed much beyond that time.

There used to be a great arcade and a game shop there. The arcade went vacant for the better part of ten years, and is now a low-rent furniture shop. In "Right" I described a corner in Stillwater that had nothing but a strip club and an abandoned used car lot as the place where capitalism went to die, but I may have been secretly thinking of this place. The game shop is still in operation, but it has seen better days. I buy a package of Monty Python Fluxx and quickly make my way back to the theater.

The box office for the theater must have been abandoned some time in the 1990s. I can’t remember the last time I bought tickets at any theater outside of the building. Makes sense, too. I can’t imagine having to work in that little booth with the high summer sun never moving away from the box office window on its journey from east to west. Just can’t imagine why they keep building these outside box offices.

The lobby is sparse (hardly surprising for a second run theater on a Monday at 1 PM) but surprisingly clean. Further developments won’t be that encouraging.

Back in the day, the corridor leading to each theater was a borderline psychedelic   tunnel of rotating lights. In that ongoing need to equate the movie theater experience with some sort of reality-bending experience, this place used to sell the illusion. Now, there’s just a normal hallway. I can’t express my disappointment at the change. Walking to my screening is such a banal experience now. I wonder if I somehow imagined its bright, colorful precursor. If it was real, I can’t help but wonder what became of the old hallway. Does someone have that contraption in their house connecting their breakfast nook to their den? Why isn’t that hypothetical person my best friend?

Now, imagine if they turned the lights on! Photo by John Wise. Source: johnwise.com

The illusion of stepping into the past almost comes back when I enter the theater. There’s an ambiance to current movie theaters that is distinct, yet hard to define. After much consideration, I can only guess it is some sort of carefully curated lighting and paint job that is meant to evoke the feeling of a movie theater from an even more bygone, classic era. Instead, while clean and comfortable, the mise en scene only soaks the place in an Epcot-esque counterfeit quality. This theater doesn’t have any that. Close your eyes, imagine a movie theater you went to in the early 90s. That’s the kind of place I found myself in.

The seats must have narrowed in the intervening years. Each armrest snugly bunched up against either of my sides. There can be no other reasonable explanation.

Ahem.

I wish I could say that the strange time capsule of a theater I entered had eschewed the ravages of time. Unfortunately the flying saucer like water stains on each and every panel of the ceiling introduced a brief feeling of dread, before I remembered the admission price and put the possible airborne pollutants out of my mind. Disrepair was the order of the day; of the feeble-looking speakers, one appeared to be taken from one of the employees old home sound system.

And another thing: throughout the entire experience the air conditioning was blasting, but the place — while cooler than the Satan’s sweat lodge that has replaced Oklahoma — couldn’t have been cooler than 85. MAC BOYLE DOESN’T DO HEAT.

Oh, yes. There was also a movie involved in this little outing:

I saw The Nice Guys from famed director and screenplay over-writer Shane Black. The movie was delightful, made only the more so by the fact that of the four people in the theater (including myself) at the beginning of the movie, I was the only one still sitting at the end. Apparently, the others didn’t find the comedic teaming of Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling to be all that nice. Their loss.

Final verdict:

The place has seen better days, and is in a location that doesn’t attract any real retail TLC. The print I saw today looked sort of bleh digital, but I could have sworn that I saw Tomorrowland here very recently with a 35mm print. If this is the theater in town that could be used to play 35mm movies regularly, it is not being used to its maximum potential.

Next Week:

I go to Circle Cinema, Tulsa’s premiere art house/not for profit theater. They have White Castle sliders and art exhibits! It’s a good thing.

* They do lead to theological truths, but that is a topic for another blog, and somebody reading this is going to take umbrage with that first sentence, so peace, everybody. Peace.

Let's Talk About Ghostbusters, Shall We?

WARNING: Some spoilers ahead.

All this week I went to various older movie theaters, catching matinees and jotting down my thoughts as I went. I’ve got a solid five weeks worth of blog entries out of my little travelogue, and I meant to put the first part of the series out this week…

But my movie theater pieces will start next week. I really want to talk about the last movie I saw this week.

Ghostbusters (2016) is fantastic. It is easily the best movie of the summer (and I spent the last week seeing pretty much everything), and it is without a doubt far superior to the depression shit show a direct-sequel Ghostbusters III would have been had it come to pass.

It’s bright, colorful, and occasionally startling*. The special effects are on point. It’s filled with awesome variations on the original gadgets, and several cool additions to the arsenal. It’s also a completely workable adventure story about four unlikely heroes saving the City of New York from imminent disaster.

In short, it is everything that a Ghostbusters movie needs to be.

Which also means that it was undeniably and consistently funny. Deal with it.

Now, I’m not going to say that the only possible reason you could have to dislike such a film is that you are so blinded by your misogyny you can’t see two feet in front of your face. You’re just going to have to deal with how much you hate women on your own time. 

Okay, some of you may be so attached to your childhood memories of the original that you worry this film will somehow break down the purity of those memories. Let me reassure you. Somewhere around the time that I heard the familiar whine of a proton pack booting up, I felt like a kid again and that feeling didn’t let up until the final post-credits scene**. The movie won’t ruin your childhood; if you’re lucky, it’ll bring you back to it. 

There may be a few quibbles with the movie, but they are so minor as to not warrant reference here. Go see Ghostbusters. Go see it twice.

That all being said, Hollywood: Please don’t remake Back to the Future. I don’t think my mortal human heart could take it.

*Anybody who insists that the original Ghostbusters is actually scary is lying, or was a child when they first saw it and has refused to develop beyond that point in the ensuing thirty years.

**Speaking of that post-tag scene: While I really hope the mentioning of Zuul isn’t meant to telegraph the jumping off point for their next adventure, an amusing exchange happened after the scene that works as a perfect microcosm of the bullshit controversy this movie has attracted just for existing.

Just as the scene ended, one girl, no more than seven years old screamed out with geekish delight, “THAT’S THE VILLAIN FROM THE FIRST MOVIE!”

Immediately, some meathead douchebag right around my age turned his nose up and said, “Uhh… Actually, Zuul was the villain in the second movie.”

This is the problem with guys like this. They’re not only assholes; they’re wrong. For a flash, I thought about defending the child, but then I realized: both she and the movie didn’t need me to defend it. Just go see it.

The Great Music Purge of 2016

I bought a new computer. It’s a wonderful thing. I feel like my whole life, which was bogged down by the sludge of malware, is now moving just a half second faster.

But there is a downside, and it always is tied to the music.

It’s probably been nearly a decade since I last illegally downloaded an anything, but that shit doesn’t really transfer from iTunes enabled computer to iTunes enabled computer. So every time I get a new machine, I have to drag out one spindle of CD-R’s I burned in the winter of 2007 if I want to keep them.

As I combed through my musical autobiography, something started to happen. I wanted to de-clutter. I wanted to make my electronic life more streamlined. I was more than a little ashamed of my past musical choices.

“Bring Me to Life” was the first time I showed any sign of resistance. It became clear fairly quickly that anything I got off of Daredevil - The Album was not something I was going to need unless I suddenly found myself in 2003 again. If time travel is ever discovered, it’d be a Serling-esque twist if that was the only year to which I could travel. One imagines that Ben Affleck feels the same way. The rest of the album didn’t fare much better. I lingered, if for only a moment, on the love ballad “My Immortal,” but then I realized I can still do that song in Karaoke without looking at the screen. It’s in my head now. There’s no deleting it. Also, whatever happened to Evanescence? Don’t answer that. If we say their name three times, they may come back.

“Clocks” by Coldplay. I may have gotten a little ornery on this one. I mean, its an okay song. I may be squarely on the side of Gwyneth in that whole debacle. It may have something to do with my affection for Shakespeare in Love, which is a completely different confessional blog.

“I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” by Aerosmith. The last time I didn’t immediately skip over this song when listening to my larger music library, George W. Bush, hell, maybe even Bill Clinton was in the White House. Most of the few remaining tracks I had from Armageddon: The Album met similar fates. Except “Remember Me” by Journey, because a) I’m fickle and b) Journey.

Eventually, after the third or fourth track from the soundtrack to Revenge of the Sith I really started to question why I was memorializing anything from three movies I don’t care for. I since bought the soundtrack to The Empire Strikes Back, so I’ve got the main fanfare. What else would I need from this album? 

I kept the Gary Jules and Tears for Fears version of “Mad World” but deleted any other version of the song. Limewire users couldn’t be choosers, back in the day. That’s also the only reason that I was the proud owner of an entire Dane Cook album, I swear.

“I Want to Spend My Lifetime Loving You” by Marc Anthony from the soundtrack to The Mask of Zorro. The same thought that went through my head with the aforementioned Aerosmith song occurred to me at that moment. In fact, when you think about it, its the same song with a little bit of Latin guitar thrown in there.

There were songs that drew different responses from me, too. I deleted the only song by John Mayer I have ever owned, “Slow Dancing in a Burning Room,” only because I had apparently bought the song from iTunes in the years since. I really don’t know why I did such a thing, but life is full of little mysteries. In other news, Ronny Jordan’s soft jazz “The Jackal” will never be deleted. Ever.

I had the title theme from the 2002 stinker Halloween: Resurrection in the library for the longest time. I figured why don’t I just get the John Carpenter original. So I did. Life hack: If you can get past the dread-inducing qualities of Carpenter’s synth-heavy score, its percussive qualities can jump start your productivity like none other.

The cleansing is now complete and I can hit shuffle on my music without wincing now. It’s the little things, you know? Before I go for the week, though, we probably need to have a discussion about my most egregious offense. A track from the soundtrack to Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me that had Dr. Evil singing the Joan Osborne song “One of Us” to Mini-Me. Look, I could try to say that someone tried to sneak that track into my music library as a prank, or I could insist that it was 1999 and no one knew what the hell they were doing. One of those might even be true. Ultimately, I just have to own up to my own shitty music tastes. I’m trying to get better. Please help me.

The Flea Marketer's Tale

The Tulsa Flea Market, held at the Tulsa Expo Center, is mysteriously one of the few naturally occurring phenomena that doesn't really change. When I was a kid, it was a treasure trove of toys and knicknacks from an era before I was done. Before George Lucas re-flooded the market with items in the mid-nineties ahead of the prequels, the Tulsa Flea Market was the only place nerd larvae like myself could find Star Wars toys. Now, it is a perfect time capsule of the tchotchkes of my own youth. You may not be able to go home again. But occasionally you can find the various pieces of the past available for negotiable prices. I periodically go back to that hallowed place that time forgot, and I thought I'd share some of my recent observations.

• As I'm buying two packs each of cards from The Rocketeer, and Batman (1989), the guy at the booth says: "Don't chew the gum." My first response? "Oh! I don't chew gum!"
• Can you imagine what twenty-seven year old bubble gum is like? Well, it has the consistency of plaster, has an aroma like what you would expect a ressurrected mummy to smell like, and vaguely whispers the word "doooooooom" as you open the package. How does it taste? I have no idea; I've never chewed a piece of gum. No, really.
• Note about those trading cards: I'm now the proud owner of a photograph of what appears to be TV's Arli$$, Robert Wuhl, threatening Tim Burton with a baseball bat. The things you find in these places, I tell ya...

Johnny Depp's best friend never saw him coming... 

• I saw a little kids to another table, who in turn saw a Michael Jackson in-his-military-style-jacket doll and for the better part of five minutes tried to draw his father's attention to it. "Dad, look! A newscaster! A newscaster! Dad, look!" I'm still trying to figure that one out.
• Then again, some aren't interested in negotiating. One merchant had a copy of Bob Kane's autobiography "Batman and Me." I asked the price, and he said ten bucks. Originally sold at 15, it seemed like a rip off.
• It's just now occurring to me that the Tulsa Flea Market is where all the items from the fabled Batmania of 1989 went after they left the shelves of Wal Mart. It also explains why I'm such a repeat customer.
• Every time, every time I'm there, I see one older man with a booth that is nothing but a massage table. Extending the mystery, nearly every time I walk by his booth, he has an eager customer on the table. I'm not sure if you need a license for that sort of thing, but man, I hope he has some kind of credentials if anyone starts asking questions.
• I wish I still had a VHS player. For that matter, I wish a place lousy with VHS tapes might have a machine able to play them for sale.
• A man with a pink mohawk and a tattoo that read "heretic" inquired as to the identity of a loose action figure. The dealer plead the fifth, explained, "If it's weird, I sell it. Doesn't mean I know what it is." The fact that I knew it was Rat King from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles line, and I didn't need to Google it to find out. Sign number 358 that my day job is completely incapable of using my real skills in any meaningful way.
• I find the typewriters in a flea market like flocks of bird somehow know to go south in the winter and back again in the spring. Two Smith Coronas and an Underwood lured me to the far end of the inhabited tables... But against all odds, I walked away without adding to my already stellar arsenal of antiquated machines. I must be slipping in my old age.
• It's comforting to know that the past is safe in flea markets. I can't wait to go back. There's still a whole lot of bubble gum for me to throw away.

10 Months Studying Under the World's Greatest Zen Master OR How I Became a Dog Person

I presented the following at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Stillwater this morning.

###

Until last year, I had never owned a dog.

Growing up, we had a gold fish named Zach Morris who lived to the ripe old age of forty-eight hours, and an African Grey parrot -- creatively named "Bird" -- that my sister and I weren't allowed to touch, not because she cost more than my first car, but because the creature hated kids, had talons like a sharpened number two pencil, a vice-like grip, and an eagerness to use both.

But I liked dogs. Really, I did. But after three years of marriage, and thirty years of having nothing to show for that affection, my wife felt like I needed to prove it.

Weeks of browsing the websites of humane societies and animal shelters passed before a shared Facebook post emerged from the mist. Someone had found a stray Great Dane/Labrador mix. They had contacted the owner, and they had had enough of her frequent escape attempts. The poster didn't have room for another dog, so the stray's next stop would be a shelter, and from there...

Well, at any rate, we sprang into action. Taking off early from work ahead of the Martin Luther King holiday, we went to go meet the Facebook friend-of-a-friend.

After a few pleasantries with the human in question, this lumbering, gangly, jet-black-except-for-the-grey-snout monster came out of the house's sliding glass door. From there, she immediately sauntered next to me, rubbing next to my leg, as if to say: "Hi there! I know we've just met, but I've decided we're best friends now!"

She then proceeded to fall on her back, legs akimbo, informing me beyond all doubt that: "If we're going to keep this 'best friends' thing going, I think it's time you learn of my fondness for belly rubs."

Which brings me to the first lesson I learned from this Buddha by way of a Labradane, this I Ching that could be mistaken for a small horse:

Never be afraid to be friendly; it costs you nothing. At the same time, it never hurts to set a few ground rules, especially where belly rubs are concerned.

We took her home within the hour, and promptly renamed her CJ Cregg, after Alison Janney's character on The West Wing, as befitting any tall lady destined to be the boss of any room she walks into.

While we were initially quite smitten with our recently adopted 5-year-old, we weren't prepared for how much of a spaz she would turn out to be. Long were the evenings where, somewhere between sleep and reality, she would twitch, kick and flail at nothing, without a single concern for the fact that she was the size of a velociraptor.

She possessed an Olympic-sized, fury-filled phobia of rabbits, but she wouldn't take that terror lying down. Her quest to bring their kind to justice shifted the balance of power in our neighborhood, and the hoppy little guys still whisper her name in fear to this day.

That first night she stayed with us, nervous of her new humans and surroundings, CJ considered the small army of toys we had purchased for her. She ignored all of them, except one: a twelve-inch squeak toy in the shape of Chewbacca the Wookiee. While CJ might have been our pet, Chewie was hers, and if you ever squeaked the thing in front of her, she would make her gentle disapproval known.

Now, I'm willing to grant that in that little ball of fur she saw some latent memory of a litter she cared for in years past, or that her softer Labrador jaw may have opted for the softest of the toys we made available. But I like to think that she was just really into Star Wars. It's a theory that only gained strength after she eschewed every tennis ball and bright red chew toy on the market in favor of only Star Wars toys, including plush representations of Yoda and an Ewok. Not only was she a Star Wars fan, our dog turned out to be a bit of a collector, and she was really only interested in the Original Trilogy. Just as it should be.

In short, she was quickly teaching me the second lesson she felt important:

Don't be afraid to be a weirdo; your people will find you one day.

As my office was closest to home, it fell on me to go home each day and make sure that CJ got the... ahem... outside time she needed during the day.

The procedure did not vary much day-to-day. I pull up in the driveway, and the sound of my engine immediately sends a wave of activity through the house. Blinds would rustle as if they had come to life on their own, and then a free-floating grey snout pokes out through the exposed section of the window. If anyone tried to break and enter at my house, the sight of CJ might have intimidated them away pretty quickly, but if they were willing to rub her belly, she'd probably help them load up the electronics.

I would enter through the front door to be met with a greeting that was the perfect cross-breed of pouting and impatience. From there I moved as quickly as I could to get her leash attached, and we were out the door. In a flash of kicking, spring-loaded legs CJ would conduct the pressing business of the afternoon, check every inch of the backyard's perimeter (the ongoing threat of bunny attack was something against which she remained ever-vigilant) and then promptly found the sunniest spot of the yard in which she could luxuriate.

The thing is, my lunch was pretty short. In the span of forty-five minutes I had to drive home and back to the office, and make sure CJ was taken care of. Also, I needed to, you know, ingest food so that I wasn't a walking, grouchy corpse before three in the afternoon.

There was never enough time. The ritual descended into chaos most days. In one particular instance, there was some crisis at work that needed my immediate attention (spoiler alert: it turned out to not be an emergency and it didn't need my attention), I was behind in my writing, I was in a not insignificant amount of pain that would soon lead me to my second surgery in as many years, I was hungry, I was tired, I was grouchy, and I really had to use the bathroom.

And the damned dog wasn't remotely interested in coming back inside.

I wished I could explain to her what was at stake. I wished I could tell her that all of this sunshine is great, but if I don't get back to my day-as-scheduled, and I mean right now, then the entire planet is likely to implode without me!

As crazy as that thought may sound, I'm sure it sounded even loopier to the neighbors when I stopped wishing I could explain my dilemma to her and started actually verbalizing it.

She took all of my words, curved her eyebrow in a way only she could and, after a fashion, said:

"Hey dad, I know you're really busy and everything. I don't understand what the hell it is you think is so important about those glowing rectangles. You call them computers, but for my money, they're broken squeaky toys. That's fine--we can continue that argument later.

"But I'm worried about you. Sunny days are a finite resource; I don't know how many we have left. I do know this: For me, this backyard is enough. It's pretty great. There are trees, and it is often free from dirty bunnies. For the next ten minutes, I think it should be enough for you, too. In ten minutes, I'll be a good dog and come back inside, but for right now I think we need to sit here and be quiet."

She then barked and licked her paw like a cat might, just so that I could know she was serious.

She made her point. I stayed out there for twenty minutes. Work would wait, and CJ managed to drive home yet another lesson that I'm still working on, you know, actually learning:

Sometimes all you need is grass beneath you, and sunshine above; although, to reach that particular level of nirvana, it helps if you're allowed to pee in the backyard.

The writing of this sermon has been hard; harder than you'll ever know. I'm inching towards the end now, and I have to get into what I've known this whole time, and what many of you have already suspected: This story doesn't come complete with a happy ending.

We only had CJ for about nine months before she started slowing down. Always a fussy eater for a dog her size, she got even fussier still. The Vet was at a loss to understand her rapid weight gain coupled with her stubborn refusal to eat. I internalized the mystery in front of us to mean that I had snuck her one too many pretzels in an ongoing campaign to buy and maintain her esteem. We kept going back and forth to the vet's office twice, even three times per week to get to the bottom of the matter. It had to be so demoralizing for her. Even though it was doing a number on Lora and me, CJ never lost her poise. I'm sure there was a lesson in her subdued reaction to prolonged poking and prodding, but I've yet to figure it out.

Then, after she even refused to -- under any circumstances -- take the pills meant to treat her mysterious symptoms, the vet finally got a clear read on the issue.

And, well...

My wife and the vet cried, I must have had a blank expression, as I really couldn't perceive much beyond the faint but persistent ringing in my ears. CJ, true to form, yawned in response to the news.

We took her home. From then on, we wouldn't struggle with the pills. Our days would be filled with treats, extended time up on the human bed, howling at nothing in particular, and ever-vigilant patrol of the ongoing rabbit plague.

That next day, I brought home Wendy's for lunch. I'd say it was the kind of culinary choice people make when confronted with sadness they don't yet know how to put into words, but it's eighty percent of my diet on a good day, so I'm really at a loss for excuses. Knowing the curative and restorative powers of flame-broiled beef, I also got our ailing pooch a bacon cheeseburger...

And I have to tell you, words will fail to assist me in describing the expression on her face:

This creature, who beyond a tummy ache couldn't have a conception of her impending fate, saw that cheeseburger in my hand and had a verifiable, theological revelation. In that moment, she knew one thing beyond a shadow of a doubt:

Heaven is real, and it had bacon on it.

Seizing the moment, she snatched the burger from my hand and led me on a chase through the house that ended only when CJ realized that she couldn't swallow the thing whole, and needed my help to tear it into chewable pieces.

It was another lesson she was trying to teach me, although she may have been too preoccupied to know that she was teaching me at that moment:

A cheeseburger is a luxury fit for Kings; and yet, it is always important to chew your food.

We had several good days during that time. Long gone were the people that kept her as an outside dog because actually caring for a pet was too much of a drag. She was loved, and she didn't need treats to know it.

But it didn't last.

The grim news from the vet came to pass. One more visit to her office still had to come.

Even though it seemed at that moment like we failed her somehow if we couldn't keep her happy and healthy for more than ten months; even if it seemed like everything was ending in that moment, she still had one more lesson she needed to teach, or more importantly, remind me of, before she had to go.

We sat in the vet's office, numbness the only human quality I could reach for. Another family passes us in the waiting room, and without any thought as to the circumstances of the moment, CJ trotted free of the hold I had on her leash and promptly sniffed the butt of the other family's German Shepherd. She had to be in such pain at that moment, and more than a little scared, but when I first met this dog ten months earlier, she made it clear that you should never be afraid to be friendly. On that last day, she made one final point that still vibrates through my head all of this time later:

Don't be afraid to be friendly, but remember this above all else: It's never too late to be friendly.

CJ Cregg the Puppy passed away a little over six months ago, and I wish I could tell you that I've internalized all her lessons and become a better man for all the heartache it cost.

But my dog dying so soon after she came home with us was kind of a bummer. I know! I was surprised, too. It felt like grief, I suppose, but I guess it had to be different. Dogs die all the time, and I probably should have been ready for it. That idea seemed pretty silly the instant I wrote it, but it pales in comparison to how silly I've been behaving in the months since.

I've been busy. Some might say -- cough, my wife, cough -- I've been so busy that I've been ignoring those pesky things that often crop up in the wake of tragedy and disappointment -- I think you humans call them "feelings." What's more, it feels like I've been doing my damnedest to ignore the things CJ tried to teach me while she was still here.

I still need the maximum allowable dosage of caffeine in the morning before friendliness is anywhere on the agenda.

As I'm growing older, I worry I'm, despite CJ's stellar example, becoming that most odious of things: normal. I'm fighting that development with everything I've got, but I think it's going to take a lot more than Star Wars toys to stay ahead of that ongoing struggle.

A cheeseburger isn't some sort of divinely manifested mana. For me, it barely qualifies as lunch.

I can't remember the last time I took that time for lunch to simply marvel in the wondrous serenity of a field of grass and clear skies. I know it's been at least six months.

I suppose sermons are meant for you, the people sitting out there, to bring you all to some greater understanding, or at the very least bring you closer to more profound questions. I hope there are some notions that CJ brought to my attention that might help you in your search for truth and meaning, but I'd be lying if I didn't say this one was aimed at one particular attendee of this service: me.

As of the end of this sermon, I'm going to be more or less on vacation, and I intend to take my own lessons to heart. I'm not going anywhere, but I think I may try to reach out to some old friends. I'm going to sit in my backyard and remember how much my dog enjoyed being out there. It goes without saying that I'll probably ingest a few cheeseburgers, but I may actually try to enjoy them.

In short, I will remember the interdependent web of existence of which we are all a part, and as that's an ongoing process, it's probably time for me to get another dog.​

Cheat Week, Part Three: You Open This Door With The Key Of Imagination

I originally promised myself I would only make "Cheat Week" entries every month. I managed to go over two months since the last one, so I've got that going for me. 

A lot of fun stuff will be coming from Party Now, Apocalypse Later in the weeks and months to come. New blogs (a series on old movie theaters?), multimedia projects (radio shows would be a natural progression, no?), and maybe even a frank admission/prolonged panic that I have no idea what to title my next novel. But I have to work on those things. That takes time. Thus, another cheat week. 

Also, I spent a sizable portion of the weekend with some good friends playing pinball at Cactus Jack's in OKC. Seriously, they have a Twilight Zone table. How was I expected to get any work done this weekend when my hero Rod Serling kept heckling me to fill the gumball machine. 

See everybody next week! 

Yee Haw

I went to a Wild West show last night.

For those of you now patiently awaiting some kind of a punchline here, there really isn't one. I went to a Wild West show.

"Why?" is a fair question. The outdoors (in June, no less), animals larger than me, and an array of porta-potties* the only sign that I haven't fallen into the nineteenth century like Twain's Connecticut Yankee. It isn't exactly a 20th anniversary screening of Fargo at the Circle. It's a little outside of my comfort zone.

Well, after eight and a half years I've come to a very important realization about the job-I-do-because-I-like-to-afford-food. Work is pretty dumb. It's a necessary activity. If we all stopped working, the world would descend into some kind of Ayn Rand fever dream from which there would be no escape. Plus, that previous crack about the food thing. But, taking away its utilitarian trappings, work is pretty dumb. I've got my distractions from the drudgery. You're reading one of them now. Life is not made up of last year's performance appraisal, or the next round of promotions. It's something deeper; it's something else.

In the past year, I've really started enjoying talking to some of my coworkers, especially if we're talking about anything but work. So, when my cubicle mate told me she was playing Annie Oakley in a Wild West show, of course my first instinct was to politely decline, and then find the other engagement that will keep me from going...

That instinct was wrong. Just because other people don't try to put Alfred Hitchcock in charge of the A-Team in the space of 55,000 words**, doesn't mean I shouldn't be interested in their outside activities. Hell, I'd like them to be interested in mine; it's only fair.

So west I went. To Pawnee, Oklahoma and Pawnee Bill's Wild West Show.

And, no jokes, it was really cool.

Between the exploding wagons, death defying stunts***, and pure magic with a lasso, the performers at the show aimed big, and delivered.

Then there was quick-shooting Annie herself. Thundering around the arena during the introductions, I heard children cry out, as clearly and unironically as they could, "Wow! She is really fast!" This wasn't mechanized, pre-packaged spectacle slowly oozing out of a cathode tube****, this was legitimate wonder at a thing actually happening.

This was before she brought out the guns. Let me tell you, Annie Oakley and I are buddies, but I'm going to be very, painfully careful not to piss this person off in the future. Twenty shots, not one missed. Stationary targets, moving targets, moving targets that should have been stationary. Shots straight ahead, shots over-the-shoulder with only a mirror as a guide. It was a sight to see.

I don't know if I'm going to become a horsemanship and trick shot afficionado from here on in, but I'm glad I went. As I return to my spaceships and DGA lists, I encourage all of you too look up from your cubicles once in a while and find out what your fellow indentured servants are up to. There's a wealth of interesting stuff out there, and it sure as hell beats the Thursday morning staff meeting.

* A term that may have so rarely been put into print, that the pluralization rules are the last true American frontier.

** You'd be shocked by how many plot ideas I get from trying to come up with ridiculous examples to prove other points.

*** Seriously, some of these people were doing things on horses that should only be depicted through the use of computer generated imagery.

**** Cathode tubes? God, how old am I?

I'm the horrible pale ghost that haunts Annie Oakley. 

These aren't the cards you're looking for...

I hate greeting cards. I mean, I hate them. Nothing frustrates me more than combing through the aisles of CVS looking for the pre-packaged sentiment that will never make me sound like I've become a being of pure saccarhine, like a caller into that "Delilah" radio show with training in calligraphy.

Each year, from my father's birthday in April, all the way through my sister's birthday in September, I periodically launch onto the breach of the greeting card section. Regular cards always suck. Funny cards...? Well, they suck too. Crom, protect me from "funny" cards. And if you don't, then to hell with you.

Then I broke the matrix. I love greeting cards now. They are my third favorite thing to shop for, right after books and cholesterol.

How did I do it? How did I learn to love the long-distance social interaction that had so thoroughly defeated me in the past?

Easy. I started doing it wrong.

Birthday cards weren't getting across the idea that I was thinking about loved ones on their birthday. Father's and Mother's day cards were barely getting across the idea that I remember I still had parents. I had to look further. 

I had to start buying the wrong cards. For one mother's day, I decided my mother had worked hard to be born in this country, and it was about time someone acknowledged it. Bingo: She received a "congratulations on attaining your citizenship" card. At some point in the future, someone will be receiving congratulations on passing their driver's test, even if they did so over forty years ago.

Now, to be fair, there are pitfalls. Over a year ago, I bought a "Sympathies for the loss of your Son" card that, while it seemed hilarious and foolproof at the moment I bought it, persists to this day in being unable to find its appropriate moment. Most sympathy cards are dangerous, especially where pets are concerned. No one wants to get that card. This is supposed to be fun, not an unfortunate reminder of mortality. This can seem like a method for getting out of work during special occasions. It isn't. If you're lazy, the correct card is still available.

Father's Day 2014? You've never lived until you've bought a Bat Mitzvah card from a Walgreen's in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.

CASHIER

I didn't even know we had batmitzver cards here... 

ME

Well, it's for my father. 

Another year I got him a quinceañera card. It appears I very much want to celebrate my father's burgeoning adolescent womanhood, while still honoring our eclectic (and non-existant) cultural heritage.

Mom's birthday this year? Let me tell you, your average Hallmark store has a wide array of strangely specific cards. The more specific to a religion that is not your own, the better. Unless my mother was recently ordained as a Priest in the Catholic church, my birthday wishes for her in 2016 are going to be befuddling for sure. I may only be able top that one if Hallmark starts publishing a line of "Greeting Cards for the occasion of your Scientology Auditor's 47th birthday." You have a year, Hallmark! Get to work!

The rest of the family joined in on the fun. My parents celebrated my thirtieth birthday with a card that celebrated my commitment to play an active role in my children's lives (I am childless) and extolling the proud example I am serving for the rest of the African-American community (...). I'm waiting for the day when I get an anniversary card with Batman telling me that I'm 5-years-old now, and "getting to be a big boy."

Anyway, that is how our family has managed to interrupt the doldrums of otherwise obligatory interactions. Do you have any strange family traditions? Tell me about them in the comments. Hell, I might just adopt them.

REMEMBER: Party Now, Apocalypse Later is now hosting guest blogs. We pay competitive rates, and are interested in all sorts of material. Send your stuff to submissions@partyapocalypse.com and get into business with us!

Guest Blog #1: Fat Blogging by Malea Marx

Today is a new day for Party Now, Apocalypse Later Industries. We're going to start periodically posting guest blogs here. Today, or first guest post is "Fat Blogging" by Malea Marx. Malea writes with a raw, uncompromising voice that both you and I can only hope for. I'm thrilled she is our first entry, and you will be too. You can also check out her tumblr here.

How do you get in on the guest blogging action? I'm so glad you asked. We'll pay for guest blogs, and all you have to do is send your post to submissions@partyapocalypse.com in order to be considered. If you've been reading the blog up until this point, you know what kind of posts I like. I'll entertain anything in the same vein. I'll also entertain posts that will are completely different, that I'd never be able to write in a 1000 years. Send me your best, and if you have that Party Now, Apocalypse Later something, I'll send some bucks your way!

Now, enough about the opportunities on the site, on with our first guest blog:

Fat Blogging by: Malea Marx

Have you seen the Calvin Klein ads with their first “plus size” model? To be fair, Calvin Klein hasn’t labeled her as such, but many sources have. Her name is Myla Dalbesio. She is 5’11” and a size 10. She’s absolutely stunning.

There is nothing about this photo that I have a problem with. She’s beautiful, and, in my opinion, pretty much has the ideal female form. Long limbs, hourglass shape, full breasts, collar bones to die for, and we’re not even talking about her face.

But this isn’t about her.

We’re inundated with messages about what appearance is appropriate. Too short, too tall, too fat (is there any such thing as too thin according to the media?), too scrawny, too muscular, too dark, too light, too something. If we don’t fit this fabled idea of what a body should be, it’s because we’re not trying hard enough. God forbid we be overweight. A little chub is bad enough, but when we approach the O word, there’s clearly something wrong with us.

Here’s the thing: I’m a fat girl. I don’t think I’ve ever posted a full picture of myself online. I could say it's because I'm concerned with online safety or privacy, but that would be a lie. The truth is, seeing pictures of myself is somewhat startling. I still think of myself as I was in high school (23 years ago) at 180 pounds and in amazing shape. I participated in four sports, played the quads in marching band, was involved in a ridiculous number of extracurricular activities, and was just generally fit and active. Instead, from 2000 to 2005, I doubled my weight. Since then, I have hovered around 375 pounds.

Even though I lived it, it’s astonishing to think that a person could gain 180 pounds in five short years. This breaks down to about 36 pounds a year - three pounds a month. That sounds like a lot. I had to eat at least 5,000 calories a day to pack on that much weight, right? Using loose math (there is no solid scientific answer as to how many calories one must eat in order to gain a pound), that’s only about 280-370 extra calories a day. One candy bar over. Twenty-four too many potato chips. One cup of yogurt for a midnight snack. A quarter of a pint of Ben and Jerry’s at the end of a terrible day.

Here’s what people don’t understand. I didn't get this way just because I like food. I didn't get this way just because I blew out my knee, had it reconstructed, and could no longer play sports or be active like I had always been. I didn't get this way because I was lazy. It’s something else that people, including myself, often can't see.

They can't see the girl who was losing her mind when her nightmares and flashbacks got so bad she couldn't sleep and for whom life is still a major struggle.

They can't see the girl whose family told her she was disgusting, going to hell, couldn't live at home anymore, wasn't allowed to sing in church because she "clearly didn't mean it," wouldn't be allowed to see her nieces and nephews because she would be a bad influence, couldn't use her aunt's pool to throw a birthday party for her girlfriend because her aunt and uncle didn't want their son to think that being gay was okay (though it was frequently used by other family members for similar events), who was forced to go to religion based psychotherapy, a process that reforms gay people after being forced out of the closet at 19.

They can't see the girl who, from the age of 13, was called sociopath, liar, trouble maker, family destroyer when she tried, repeatedly, to get someone, anyone, to listen about the abuse she'd been enduring her entire life.

They can't see the suicidal ideations and attempts, the scars that crisscrossed her arms and stomach and thighs, the pounds of junk food binged because she didn't feel like she deserved to have food that would be healthy for her, the hours of therapy, the weeks of hospitalizations, the bottles of medications.

They can't see the girl who endured practically every category of abuse, and in fact sought it out as a way to try to protect her younger sisters.

They can't see the girl who was so angry at everything that all she wanted to do was scream and be left alone to listen to music, who had been serving as a replacement parent since before she even started school, who took her anger out on her sisters because she was given the responsibility but not the authority to take care of them, who punched through a window to shatter glass into her cousin's face, who stabbed a pencil through a classmate's arm, who thrashed said classmate’s twin brother, who easily dispatched any boy who pushed her too far (other girls seemed smart enough not to start fights).

All people see is the fat.

There's no recognition of the torture and torment that went into every swollen adipose cell. There's no thought given to why those cells got that way. The assumption is that the morbidly obese (do we even need to talk about that terminology?) person is lazy, dirty, slovenly, gluttonous, unhealthy, has no self-control, has no will power, and is generally sub-human.

Obesity is the last politically correct and socially acceptable prejudice. It implies that it’s okay to judge someone for being overweight because it’s obvious they just eat too much. It’s easy to be bigoted when society supports that bias because the individual has no self-control. It’s understandable, and even lauded, when the (unwanted, unsolicited) advice is: “Just exercise!”

Am I saying that I don’t like to eat? Am I saying that I exercise the recommended amount? Am I saying that the calories I ingest are always fewer than the calories burned? Of course not. I’m not unaware of my own shortcomings. I’m not naive enough to think that anyone (including myself) would believe it if I were to claim it.

What I am saying is this: When you look at an overweight person, especially someone as drastically overweight as I am, ask yourself why. The how is simple: it’s mathematics, science, fuel intake versus fuel burned. The why, however, may very well be something you never would have considered.

What Schumaucher's Batman and Robin got right

WARNING: Heresy and rubber nipples lie ahead.

It's 3AM. My stomach is a churning miasma of unsettling notions. Naturally, my mind wanders to the work of Joel Schumacher. They go together like nausea and Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mr. Freeze. Between the rubber nipples and cascade of puns that have become the stuff of legend, Schumaucher's contributions to the legend of the Caped Crusader are uniformally seen as the dark ages for the Dark Knight.

Here's the unfortunate secret that most bat-fans wouldn't dare admit, unless they're waiting for an industrial-sized dose of Peptol Bismol to kick in:

There are some things -- just a few, mind you -- that Joel Schumaucher not only got exactly right with his second crack at Batman, but in fact did better than in any other Batman film to date.

I had to be wrong, so I went ahead and did the one thing I should never do: I re-watched the damned movie. Thankfully, the world is not completely upside down. Batman and Robin is just as bad, if not worse than you remember. The movie is congenitally unable to latch on to anything resembling a story arc for its characters. Every quip falls flat. It's kind of a miracle that even the law of averages wouldn't have given the movie some semblance of wit at some point in the proceedings.

Maybe it is all because the film was more of a toy commercial than it was a major motion picture. I tend to think it was because Schumaucher and company came to the conclusion (perhaps rightly so) that superhero films are for kids. Where they went off the tracks and never bothered to look back is determine that because these films are for the under-15 crowd, then it doesn't matter if the film sucks. It doesn't so much matter that the film is bright and campy and doesn't take itself too seriously. It's of far more importance that the film just sucks.

And yet, as I watched the movie again today, there they were, those few scant things that, while they hardly elevate the film in any measurable way, do show some semblance of awareness for what Batman is and can be.

1) The Batman does not kill.

Quick. Go watch every Batman movie, and then go read every Batman comic in existence. I'll wait. Done? Notice anything? The main theme people come away with is that in publishing, Bruce Wayne is bound by a particular code, springing from his origin at the end of Joe Chill's gun. Put simply: The Batman does not kill.

Except, no one bothered to inform the various screenwriters who have handled Warner Brothers' number one franchise. In Batman (1989) Bat-Keaton specifically tells Jack "I'm going to kill you," and he damned sure he puts a grapelling hook to good work to get the job done.

In Batman Returns (1992) Bat-Keaton again dispatches Louie De Penguin with a carefully orchestrated wave of bats and a steep fall. Don't even get me started on the circus strongman that blew up real good for the capital crime of asking Batman to hit him.

In Batman Forever (1995) Iceman-Batman flung Billy Dee Tommy Lee Jones from a tall height* even after Robin O'Donnell learned the important lesson of sparing one's enemies.

In Batman Begins (2005), Bale-Bat does go out of his way to not directly kill Ra's-al-Gon-Jin, but he's pretty content to not save him, when he had plenty of time and resources to do so.

In The Dark Knight (2008) Bale-Bat returns to fling Billy Dee Tommy Lee Eckhart from a tall height** after spending the entire movie not killing Ledjoker, despite literally everyone being fine with that possibility.

In The Dark Knight Rises (2012) Batman drops a thermonuclear bomb into Gotham Harbor, thereby ensuring that the next seventeen generations of Gothamites can look forward to a litany of thyroid problems, if they're lucky.

And most recently, in Batman v Board of Education: Dawn of the McMuffin (2016), Batman's antipathy for guns didn't get translated to the other 807 plot points, because Batfleck is more than content to drop a few no-names in the pursuit of... Kryptonite? Barely a month out of seeing the movie, it already feels like a blur. 

Sense a pattern here? Batman and Robin is the only post-Adam West cinematic outing where Batman does not kill. One point for Schumaucher and company. Brings the score to 787,231 to 1, but at least it won't be a shut out.

2) Who is Batman?

By the time the fourth film in the series begins, everyone should know. It doesn't take much to find out. Alfred Pennyworth, Vicki Vale, Jack Napier, Selina Kyle, Oswald Cobblepot, Max Schreck, Dick Grayson, Edward Nygma, Harvey Dent, Chase Meridian, Ra's Al Ghul, Rachel Dawes, Lucius Fox, Coleman Reese, Talia al Ghul, Bane, Selina Kyle (again), Non-Robin Gordon-Levitt, James Gordon, Clark Kent, and Diana Prince. Through the course of the Bat-films, all of these characters have figured out Bruce Wayne's secret. Here's the question: are there any other characters in the Batman universe? Outside of Bat-mite and Aunt Harriet, does anyone not know?

There's only one film where Bruce Wayne's secret identity isn't sussed out by the villains or his girlfriend (or some mixture thereof). Which film is that? You guessed it. Batman and Robin. Yes, Barbara Wilson trips over the truth***, but I'm grading on a curve here. Give me a break.

3) At least they didn't run out of money.

I don't think anyone is going to get this far into this blog post and get the idea that I'm actually defending the core of this movie. It's a completely wrongheaded cluster of half-baked almost-ideas, packaged into a cheap sausage casing of '90s fashion. It's the cinematic equivalent of haggis, although saying that does a grave disservice to a sheep's stomach filled with food you wouldn't otherwise want to look at.

But at least they, you know, finished the movie.

It's not neccessarily high praise to say that Warner Brothers didn't just cut their losses and release a rough cut of the turd they had in the oven, but it does make it, fundamentally better than other fourth entries in superhero franchises. Superman IV (1987) is content to just use the same footage of Christopher Reeve flying towards the camera, and has a climax that confirms the long-heard suspicion that Mariel Hemingway can breathe in the vacuum of space. It's important to keep things in perspective. 

There are a lot of other examples from there. The villains' origins are -- if goofy -- more or less correct. The mythos isn't contorted to make it so that Mr. Freeze is the one who pulled the trigger on Thomas and Martha Wayne, even if that would've been one hell of a flashback. The Schumaucher movies also make Gotham City appear as if it may have the actual scope of a major metropolitan area, even if that city might be a maddening mish mash of Greek statues. In retrospect, Burton's movies look like they take place on a remaindered set from a dinner theater production of Our Town. The movie tries to be funny, which isn't the worst thing in the world. Batman can be funny. Adam West as Batman is funny. The problem is that the movie only tries, and forgets to bring the laughs. It is an important distinction.

So, maybe Batman and Robin is the worst. Making movies is hard. We can't imagine what they might have been up against, and even if Schumaucher's myopia is to blame, there are far more serious sins in the world. Don't believe me? Go watch Superman IV: The Quest For Peace one more time.

* A lot of falling deaths in these movies, no?

** Sound familiar, no?

*** Again, it's not like a lot of deductive reasoning is applied; she uses an infinite amount of password tries to unlock an interactive CD-ROM.

The Weekend is Nearly Over - Thoughts on a Writing Convention

All heroes must be tested. It is an undeniable truth that has been ingrained into the DNA of storytelling since Odysseus first met the Cyclops. In our collective quest to become known as writers, we at Party Now, Apocalypse Later, Nevermore Edits, Inkubus Publishing, and A Murder of Storytellers must also be tested. Ours will be an arduous reckoning, and comes at the Oklahoma Writer's Federation Incorporated* annual conference in Oklahoma City. Not all of us may get out alive. A continental breakfast is also provided.

The weekend is fraught with dangers unseen. The agent you've scheduled time to pitch with may think your stuff is "smart" but maybe "too smart" for their market. I mean, there's no reason that the children's market isn't ready for a densely plotted trilogy of books centered around Orson Welles saving the world, but whatever. 

The agent may flee your pitch session, having suddenly become ill. I'm not going to use any names on this one, but I know for a fact some variation on this story happened both this year and last.

The vast majority of the weekend may be consumed with the politics of writing far more than the writing itself. Seriously, we're local authors trying to get better at our craft and maybe, one day, make it big. Stop treating it like it's House of Cards fantasy camp. People flexing their egos only for show ought to be flogged. And caned. And then shamed. Repeatedly.

You might try your hand at the contest. You may win something and feel vindicated. You may win nothing and feel slightly discouraged. You may win nothing and get a critique back on one of your submissions that read, in brilliant fortune cookie fashion, "Your reputation as a writer will be very poor indeed." At the time of this writing, the contest winners have yet to be announced. I may yet change my tune.

It can be a frustrating, discouraging experience for many. Maybe it needs to be. Maybe it doesn't have to be.

Ultimately, I'm left with one question: So what? So what if it's frustrating? So what if it can be demoralizing? If a less than productive weekend is going to cause you to fold up your sails and put up in the harbor forever, then something else would have stopped you before too long.

Remember, if you put pen to paper and plan to keep putting pen to paper, you belong among the other writers. If you're out there, come next year. Good things will happen. I have no idea what they may be, but they will happen. I guarantee it. No matter what happens, don't buy into the hype, and don't listen to the harshest things you think about yourself. Tomorrow, get back to work on the writing. Don't let any more time you could spend working on your craft slip away; the weekend is nearly over.

*OWFI: It's like wi-fi, except it hurts. Ow. Ha.