Categories
Cinema Summer of 1989

Field of Dreams, Major League, Roy Hobbs, and The Necessity of Revisionism

I’ve decided to start posting chapter drafts of my manuscript about the summer movies of 1989. In light of our current quarantine situation, my writing has become nothing but a chore. I know many won’t read these pages, but if you do, please share your thoughts. I hope writing once again becomes the distraction rather than the chore. Today, let’s talk baseball, specifically Field of Dreams and Major League (and The Natural).

On the previous episodes of THE LAST GREATEST HOLLYWOOD SUMMER: The Preamble / Chapter 1: Die Hard on a VHS Tape / Chapter 2: Nostalgia and the Ghastly Beauty of Ill-Advised Hollywood Cinema / Chapter 3: The ‘Burbs, Bill & Ted, and Heathers: Success and Failure in the Suburbs

No sport aligns with the magic of cinema quite like baseball.

Though the credits for Barry Levinson’s The Natural claim nothing more than inspiration from a novel by Bernard Malamud, I believed in miracle home runs, exploding light ballasts, and rolling blackouts. I found and read the novel, in which I learned that it had been inspired by the real-life incident of Phillies star first baseman Eddie Waitkus. “Inspired by” and “based on” resonated in the same frequency as “this happened—look it up.”

As adults we want to believe that magic happens, but our hope has been snuffed out by the suffocating unexceptional. Kids just believe in magic – and their expectations for the miraculous survive even the inevitable crushing epiphanies about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. (Meanwhile, Phoebe Cates is still destroying childhoods with her Gremlins monologues.) It’s only after they’ve been forced out into the world, told to grow up, be adult, file those TPS reports, that the magic dissipates. Only the worst type of child would hope for nothing more than the dust and decay of Cinéma verité and Italian neo-realism[1]. Perhaps the one overwhelming exception to adult-onset miracle renunciation belongs to the realm of sport, where impossibilities become more commonplace. The Miracle on Ice. Minneapolis Miracle. Monday Night Miracle. Music City Miracle. Bluegrass Miracle. The Miracle at the Meadlowlands. Memorial Day Miracle. Miracle on Grass. Miracles happen with such frequency that I can’t help but wonder if we should consider a rebranding.

In “Can’t Anybody Here Write These Games? The Trouble With Sports Fiction,” author Dick Francis suggests that baseball is the most appropriate sport for the genre of sports fiction because the pace and easily applied symbolism make it the ultimate conduit for metaphor – both the athlete and reader or, in this case the viewer, have the opportunity to reflect upon the passage of time between pitches, between innings, and the simplicity of the American Dream played out in head-to-head competition. Anyone can pick up a bat and a ball and become a folk hero by playing a game hallowed by the lack of artificial temporal limitations. 3 strikes, 3 outs, 9 innings—come what may.

As a result of this miracle conditioning, it wasn’t until an embarrassingly advanced age (last week, more or less) that I questioned exactly how much of The Natural’s storyhad been true. Assuming a certain amount of poetic license, no one would have believed those events had taken place exactly as depicted, but I also wouldn’t have claimed they hadn’t.

Teenage pitcher Roy Hobbs bests a Ruthian slugger nicknamed “The Whammer.” (Maaybee.) Teenage pitcher gets shot by lunatic fan. (Reasonable. Lots of crazies out there.) Wounded but recovered phenom anonymouslyreturns to baseball at age 35, reborn as a power-hitting outfielder and becomes one of the best hitters in the game. (Without steroids?) Survived 16 years with a bullet lodged in his stomach? (I’m not a doctor, but I’ve existed in the same room as my wife while she watched 15+ seasons of Gray’s Anatomy and ehhhh… I’m skeptical.) Post-surgery, aforementioned 35-year-old rookie clubs a home run to win the pennant with blood oozing through his jersey – cue cascade of electricity and swelling Randy Newman score. (This happened. You can’t tell me otherwise.)

It turns out that truth was stranger, but far less capital-D Dramatic than The Natural. The events that inspired Bernard Malamud’s 1952 novel had just unfolded in newspapers around the country three years prior to its publication. Fact and creative inspiration coalesced in interesting ways. Malamud’s interpretation said a lot about how we process the fantastical to make it more real than reality. The VH1 Behind-the-Scenes “The Natural” plays more like a gender-swapped Taxi Driver than inspirational sports melodrama.

On June 14th, 1949, 19-year-old Ruth Ann Steinhagen shot Philadelphia Phillies first baseman Eddie Waitkus in room 1297A of Chicago’s Edgewater Beach Hotel. Her teenage infatuation, recently transferred from matinee heartthrob Alan Ladd, took the form of something far more unsettling than the simple, unfortunate twist of fate found in The Natural. Ruth Ann’s obsessions ran deep, her actions fiendishly premeditated. The teenager demanded her mother set a place for Waitkus at their dinner table and taught herself to speak Lithuanian. (Waitkus’ parents had emigrated from Lithuania). In her diary, she wrote: “Phils are losing. I bet it’s none of Eddie’s fault,” before closing out that day’s entry with “I’ll be glad you’re dead, you rascal you” – which is actually, almost verbatim, the title of a Fleischer Studios Betty Boop cartoon from 1932 called “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You” featuring Louis Armstrong singing “You Rascal You.” Ruth Ann’s father forced her to attend a psychiatrist; but if you take The Snake Pit (1948) as representative of mid-century psychiatric treatment, Ruth Ann’s progress (lack thereof) should come as no shock, pun intended.

Sidestepping her parents’ efforts, Ruth Ann stole off on her own. She purchased a .22 caliber rifle (no—we definitely don’t need stronger gun laws) and spent her entire savings renting a room at the ritzy hotel where the visiting Phillies would be staying on their trip to Chicago. She paid the bellhop five dollars to leave a note in Waitkus’s room that said “It’s extremely important that I see you as soon as possible. We’re not acquainted but I have something of importance to speak to you about. I think it would be to your advantage to let me explain it to you.”

Waitkus called upon Ruth Ann at 11:20pm that evening. She pulled the rifle from the closet and said, “For two years, you’ve been bothering me and now you’re going to die.” She intended to kill herself and join her idol in death, but after putting a slug in his right lung she called the hotel operator to report her crime. She knelt over her fallen idol and held his hand until the police and paramedics arrived. Waitkus required two blood transfusions and six surgeries. He missed the remainder of the 1949 season but returned to the Phillies the following year. An All-Star in the two campaigns prior to the shooting, Waitkus received some purely sympathetic MVP votes for his 1950 season but never again matched the output of his prime in 1948 and 1949. Robert Redford’s Roy Hobbs restarted his career at age 35; Waitkus quietly retired and withdrew from public life due to anxiety and depression self-medicated with alcohol. In 1961, he suffered a nervous breakdown and separated from his wife. He returned to baseball as a hitting instructor for Ted Williams’s baseball camp in 1966. Tragically, however, Eddie Waitkus died in 1973 from esophageal cancer (likely connected to the surgeries and hospitalization required to save his life) – at the time living alone in a boarding house in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.

Ruth Ann Steinhagen’s part in Eddie Waitkus’ story reads like Dashiell Hammett pulp noir, the stuff of dangerous dames and dark alleys. One can clearly imagine the scene in a posh hotel room, the compassionate assailant kneeling over the pool of blood pouring from the chest of her fallen baseball idol, her spontaneous change of heart the narrative twist saving him from death before she’s carted off to jail by a sympathetic police detective who put a five-spot on the Cubbies that afternoon.

Roy Hobbs’s on-the-field fictional heroics, considering what’s happened since the release of the film, might not feel all that fictional. In Game 6 of the 2004 American League Championship Series and Game 2 of the World Series, Curt Schilling pitched through an ankle injury that had required last-minute surgery. Boston Red Sox team doctor Bill Morgan sutured Schilling’s loose ankle tendon back into his skin. The blood on his sock was the result of his stitches pressing against the sutured tendon causing the wound to ooze. Schilling became a Boston folk hero (before his post-career indulgence in radical politics rapidly eroded that legacy). In the moment, Joe Buck, the game’s play-by-play announcer, remarked: “Like a scene from The Natural, Schilling climbs the mound and prepares to take on this Yankee lineup.”

With real life narratives like these it’s easy to understand why baseball fans are willing to believe in the improbable, or even the impossible. The fictions of cinema are often more grounded than the legends born of real-life events. 1993’s Rookie of the Year, exempted. The magic of baseball blurs so willingly with Hollywood’s dream factory. Both baseball and the movies are in the business of mythmaking. As mentioned, of the major American sports, baseball remains the only game not governed by a clock. Yogi Berra famously said, “It’s not over ‘til it’s over.” No matter the score, no matter the odds, baseball, by its nature, creates a sandlot for miracles.

From even the earliest days of the film, baseball captured the hearts and minds of cinemagoers through comedies of errors and tales of its legendary figures. A quick count tallies at least 29 movies made about baseball before 1930, including two adaptations of “Casey at the Bat.” That’s not to suggest that capturing the sport on film has ever been an easy task – just that the pace and romanticism transcend genre and audience demographics.

My dad passed down tall tales about Mickey Mantle, Denny McLain, and Luis Aparicio, just as I’ll share stories about the heroes of my 1980s-era Detroit Tigers: Alan Trammell, Lou Whitaker, and Tom Brookens’ mustache[2]

The sport has a long history of producing crowd-pleasers such as A League of Their Own (1992) and The Bad News Bears (1976) but also critically decorated dramas. Pride of the Yankees (1942) earned 11 Academy Award nominations. The Stratton Story (1949) won for Best Screenplay. Bang the Drum Slowly, (1973), The Natural (1984), Bull Durham (1988), and Moneyball (2011) all earned nominations, but, alas, winning none. All these stories, with the exception of The Bad News Bears, were based (some more loosely than others) on real characters and events. Even The Bad News Bears could be considered the distillation of every kid’s Little League baseball experience through the generations. During my last year in little league, a kid named Jared handcuffed himself to the dugout fence and sang Christmas carols and we had to play without a right fielder. By accident or design, he didn’t have the key to free himself – his mother had to drive home to find it.

The critical and $48 million commercial box office success of The Natural ushered more roundball into the multiplex. Bull Durham (1988) and Eight Men Out (1988) immediately followed. From 1988 until the mid-1990s, Hollywood had a vicious case of baseball fever, the symptoms of which peaked in April of 1989 with the release of Field of Dreams and Major League only two weeks apart. One; a male weepie about fathers, sons, and magical redemption; the other a broad and occasionally crass (but good natured) update of The Bad News Bears for the professional sector. These two beautiful extremes of baseball cinema played at multiplexes simultaneously during the Summer of 1989, and Field of Dreams, especially, took the field at just the right time.

Released the year prior, John Sayles’ Eight Men Out had detailed the 1919 Black Sox scandal. We knew all about D.B. Sweeney, John Cusack, Charlie Sheen, and the rest of the White Sox team that conspired to throw the 1919 World Series. As a result, we’d been indoctrinated into a club that bemoaned the unfair ban of Shoeless Joe Jackson from baseball. Joe Jackson stepped out into the late 1980s as a retro-pop icon, lending an extra brick to the foundation of Field of Dreams.

The rest had already been in place for generations.

Every young athlete understood the symbolic importance of “catch” with a father figure. If it wasn’t “catch,” it was another activity built on engaged and connected silence. It doesn’t even have to be sport. Board games, knitting, stamp collecting, you name it—if you can do it with a parent, in silence, and experience a deepening of that relationship, you’re “having a catch.”

Fathers often struggle with words, especially in movies; they excel at silent understandings happening in the background of shared activity. In Field of Dreams, we (as in children aged about 8-15), the children of men, finally understood the greater subtext. We likely hadn’t experienced loss in the same ways as Ray Kinsella; there would still be an emotional disconnect even if we understood at our highly advanced age the nature of the human condition. Any older and we might have felt cynicism about the film’s intentions. Any younger and that glimmer of recognition when Field of Dreams drags us through its emotional gauntlet disappears. I opened up to the movie because it was about baseball. I might have even recognized that it wasn’t really about baseball. “Catch” could have been skating on a frozen pond or shooting hoops in the driveway (see: 1991’s Father of the Bride). The spiritual tentacles of baseball, however, winding as they do through the generations, give the act of “catch” more resonance.

Field of Dreams represented my first experience with the kind of sincere melodrama trademarked by Frank Capra in the 1930s and 40s. The omnipresence of It’s a Wonderful Life might have left residues of earnestness, but those Capra films couldn’t and wouldn’t resonate with a pre-teen like a contemporary film about baseball starring Kevin Costner – aka Crash Davis of Bull Durham – who even by 1989, and with another baseball movie yet to come, had become a folk hero of his own.

Though I’d been brought up in a household that regularly watched classic cinema, the pace and language of depression-era melodrama felt alien and prevented the kind of investment required for the message to take hold. While Universal horror films and the Marx Brothers formed my earliest forays into classic film, I didn’t really foster appreciation for other genres until I became a proper video store junkie in high school (boasting membership cards to four different rental establishments). Field of Dreams, on the other hand, tapped into feelings I’d just begun to unpack. It made us feel smarter and more adult than we were. Just like hitting a baseball, timing was everything.

There’s a short period during a child’s development as a movie watcher when they first become receptive to a broader range of genres and styles. I met 1989 with open arms and 1989 embraced me in return. I’d become a sponge, accepting everything that played in a mainstream theater. Before the time of the Internet and before I cared to read published film criticisms and develop my own individual tastes, I existed in a bubble created by the opinions of family and friends.

My palette wasn’t entirely discerning. Certain movies—the ones that we owned and watched on an infinite loop—became permanently etched into my virgin grey matter. Not just the famous lines of dialogue and narratives, but also impressions about how that movie had been broadly received. Field of Dreams was, according to those memories, universally loved by everyone who’d seen it.

Only recently I began to read considerations that ran contrary to that relationship. It’s useful to note that even canonical films like Lawrence of Arabia, Citizen Kane, and Casablanca cultivate both widespread love and vitriol. People are human. Certain skeptics watch a popular film aiming to dislike it and publish clickbait on the Internet. These universally beloved films inspire the loudest, most reactive negativity because that fuels clicks of disbelief and online engagement, whereas humdrum positively curates silent nodding. Most of these hot takes can be dismissed as the ravings of half-literate word-count fillers and search engine optimizers.

Field of Dreams, however, inspires thoughtful vendettas like few other films of that summer. One especially reactive article called it the worst baseball movie ever made[3]. Some of the more considerate criticisms, like David L. Vanderwerken’s “Reading Race in W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe and Phil Alden Robinson’s Field of Dreams,” however, caused me to pause and completely re-evaluate my history with the film.

Reevaluation was one of my stated goals when I first set out to watch all major American 1989 movie releases for this project. Would 1989 hold the same sway over me more than 30 years later? I thought I knew the answer to that question beforehand, but Field of Dreams forced me to come to terms with how my own expanded frame of reference would alter my affection for films I’d long considered indisputable classics.

Can nostalgia and relative enlightenment co-exist? And what is our responsibility when it comes to compartmentalizing nostalgia to see childhood favorites for what they really are? As a ten-year-old in April of 1989, I couldn’t have been expected to recognize that Field of Dreams “whitewashes” the history of baseball. I was too busy forming emotional bonds and discovering how movies made me feel. I encountered new favorites on a daily basis. These films arrived during formative years when objective evaluation becomes entangled with the art of experience and emotion. Nostalgia doesn’t prohibit reevaluation, but it does complicate the ability to overwrite those initial experiences, especially regarding films that have been viewed so many times as to become flickering wallpaper.

Field of Dreams would require homework beyond just a re-watch – namely a reading of the source material in order to understand Vanderwerken’s damning assessment that the novel and the film espouse “nativism” through its purportedly racist protagonist who idealizes a time before the integration in professional baseball. Going beyond my exposure to the film should help re-orient my understanding for the filmmaking process and the choices made to adapt the source material. My affection for Field of Dreams suddenly felt like a burden, a transgression for which I had to answer. The novel revealed layers behind the film that I’d never imagined, starting with the film’s J.D. Salinger problems. In 1989, Salinger would have been as fictional to me as his ersatz cinematic replacement Terrence Mann.

In W.P. Kinsella’s novel Shoeless Joe, the character of Ray Kinsella attempts to “ease the pain” of legendary author and recluse J.D. Salinger. Kinsella doubles down on the metafictional aspects of the narrative by creating a playground in which Ray Kinsella, a creation from J.D. Salinger’s own fiction greets the author by saying, “I thought you might want to meet one of your own characters.” Ray and his twin brother Richard (not appearing in the film) were characters in Salinger’s short story “A Young Girl in 1941 with No Waist At All” and again in his most famous novel, Catcher in the Rye. Taking the self-referentiality one step further, the Kinsellas’ father was also a baseball catcher. For W.P. Kinsella, the terms “fact” and “fiction” have very little value in Shoeless Joe; he’s writing fables on top of fables on top of fact and this limits how we can interpret the narrative.

In order to adapt Kinsella’s novel, director Phil Alden Robinson had to make many changes to the source material to appease studio executives who viewed Field of Dreams as an impossible project. Transfixed by the fantasy of a rural farmer that builds a baseball diamond to appease voices only he can hear, the filmmaker had to rework the screenplay, shift the focus, and eliminate all mentions of J.D. Salinger. After the release of Shoeless Joe, the famously reclusive author declared that he’d sue anyone who used the character of J.D. Salinger in an adaptation of the material. Hence, the shift from Salinger to American civil rights activist Terence Mann, played by James Earl Jones. Changing the character from a white author to a black civil rights journalist was a deliberate sidestep motivated by the need to avoid litigation with J.D. Salinger.

This otherwise progressive conversion of a white-written character to a black man in the script creates a problematic scene in which the black James Earl Jones waxes romantically about the place of baseball in America.

The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game – it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again.

The speech, oft celebrated and quoted by fans, became an iconic moment in Field of Dreams, and James Earl Jones is rightfully proud of his performance – even if the words do indeed reflect a kind of nativistic ideology, per Vanderwerken’s criticism, that glosses over the sordid history of race in baseball and America. As a middle-aged black man in 1989 (especially a civil rights activist), the character of Terence Mann should have been keenly aware of the Negro league and pre-integration luminaries like Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, and Oscar Charleston – players who never got their shot at the big leagues because of the color barrier. As the collection of dead, white baseball players surround Mann as he makes his impassioned plea to Ray Kinsella, it’s impossible to overlook the fact that this magical Iowa cornfield has curiously concerned itself with easing the pain of ballplayers with a specific skin color. Even Gil Hodges gets a roster mention from a wide-eyed Archie Graham (played by Frank Whaley), but Hodges’ teammate, Jackie Robinson, is conspicuously absent.

These elements cannot be ignored from a modern perspective. The film and the novel trade in confused small-town Americana wish fulfilment. In Kinsella’s novel, Salinger gives a speech similar to Mann’s. He says that people will come “longing for the gentility of the past, for home-canned preserves, ice cream made in a wooden freezer, gingham dresses…” As Vanderwerken describes, Salinger used similar nostalgia language to explain how the banning of The Catcher in the Rye affects him. “Maybe banning or burning my books could become an annual event in these uptight little communities, like re-creating the first flight at Kitty Hawk.” In these passages, Salinger unifies censorship and the gentility of the past just as Terence Mann conflates the color barrier and the beautiful history of baseball.

In as much as Field of Dreams appears to desire a return to the days of white baseball and places potent nostalgia in the mouth of a black writer, it’s muddied by the Capra-esque spirit of the film. Frank Capra made films about an ideal “America” that never was. He drew upon Depression-era themes to convey “fantasies of goodwill” in films like Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, You Can’t Take It With You, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It’s a Wonderful Life. His films celebrate the individual over the callous institution and give cause to idealism. In World Film Directors: Volume One, he said, “My films must let every man, woman, and child know that God loves them, that I love them, and that peace and salvation will become a reality only when they all learn to love each other.” And while it’s not a Capra film playing on a television in the Kinsella household during Field of Dreams, his regular leading man, Jimmy Stewart, makes an appearance in a clip from Henry Koster’s Harvey (1950) – a purposeful inclusion that speaks to a non-denominational need for faith in things we cannot necessarily see. The magic once again mingling with the mundane. (Jimmy Stewart was in fact Robinson’s first choice for the role of Archibald Graham.) In Field of Dreams, the role of the pooka, a 6-foot-3.5-inch white rabbit, was played by a baseball diamond and all of its spectral inhabitants.

W.P. Kinsella and Frank Capra were not storytellers that reflected the way America was; they’re creating glossy fantasies about the way America never was. In Capra’s films, a congressman sways the cold hearts of politicians with an impassioned filibuster, an angel gives a suicidal banker a new lease on life by showing him the ways his town would have suffered without him. Even though these films are not overtly religious, there’s a spirituality in their fundamental moralism – the triumph of the underdog, courage of the Everyman. God isn’t in the details; it’s in the lives of honest, simple folk who believe in a common good and embrace their eccentricities.

In the creation of these mythological realities, the artist’s frame of reference becomes the lens through which the audience views the world. Born in Palermo, Sicily, Frank Capra emigrated to the United States with his parents and six siblings. They settled in the East Side of Los Angeles (modern Chinatown), which Capra later called an Italian “ghetto.” Capra’s father picked fruit. Frank sold newspapers and eventually went to college against his family’s wishes. After graduating, Capra taught mathematics at Fort Point as a second lieutenant in the Army. Due to illness, Capra received a medical discharge and spent the next few years living in San Francisco flophouses and hopping freight trains to explore the American west. He worked as a movie extra, played poker, took odd jobs to survive before fibbing his way onto a movie lot working for Walter Montague at Fireside Productions. It was for Montague that Capra filmed his first short, “Fulta Fisher’s Boarding House,” in 1922. Despite experiencing the worst of America, Frank Capra went on to direct films that offered bittersweet miracles to the masses and, like baseball, reflected the potency of the American dream.

W.P. Kinsella was born in Edmonton, Canada in 1935 – a fact that highlights the cross-cultural potency of “America’s pastime.” The years during which Kinsella presumably developed the baseball philosophies that would become the novels Shoeless Joe (and The Iowa Baseball Confederacy and nearly 40 other short stories) took place just before and perhaps during the dismantling of the Major League Baseball color barrier. It wouldn’t be a huge leap to suggest that Kinsella felt similarly about baseball in 1945 as I did about baseball in 1989. For the record, the 1945 Detroit Tigers defeated the Chicago Cubs in a seven-game series. Hal Newhouser won games five and seven for the come-from-behind series win – twenty months before Jackie Robinson would take the field for the first time as a Brooklyn Dodger on April 15th, 1947.

The movie (nor the novel) depict the black influence on baseball. The infamous “Black Sox” were white. The major league players romanticized by these characters, also all white. In “Of the Tortoise, Baseball and the Family Farm Fantasy and Nostalgia in W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe,” Donald E. Morse writes: “Within the improbable art of his postmodern metafiction, Kinsella’s magical baseball field functions as a precise metaphor for describing a pure ideal world founded on nostalgia rather than power and sustained by love rather than money.” Nostalgia comes creeping back into the conversation and our subsequent ability to read the absence (or ignorance) of race in works of fiction becomes complicated as a result of the nostalgia and metafiction seeping through Field of Dreams’ cornfed pores.

Only 11 Negro League players had been elected into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame by 1989. (This does not count Jackie Robinson and Hank Aaron, who played the majority of their careers in the MLB.) And it took an impassioned speech by Ted Williams in 1966 before they inducted the first, Satchel Paige, in 1971.

Similarly, my personal nostalgia for the cinema of 1989 doesn’t contain an ideal cross-section of the landscape. In naming my “favorite” films from 1989, you wouldn’t find much diversity because my frame of reference was dominated by a slate of mainstream films made by white male filmmakers. That doesn’t mean that diversity didn’t exist. I didn’t watch Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing until I was well into my teenage years, but that doesn’t mean I don’t now hold the film in the highest regard. If you asked me to name the 10 “best” movies from 1989, I’d place it near the top of the list (and certainly ahead of Field of Dreams). If Field of Dreams reflects the nostalgia of its author and its character, as Morse describes, it cannot also be a perfect reflection of history or truth. Nostalgia is more personal and far less objective, but it’s more than just a fondness for a bygone era that fuels the film’s emotional melodrama.

When Ray’s long-dead father, John Kinsella, steps forward after a game, stripping off his catcher’s gear, the focus of the film becomes even more specific than a favorite historical baseball player, idol worship, or regrets about a failed cultural revolution. The sequence of events – the field, the players, the writer, Moonlight Graham saving Ray’s daughter from choking – funnels toward this reunion. Ray Liotta as Shoeless Joe clarifies the method to the corn’s madness. “If you build it – he will come,” he reiterates. The “he”wasn’t Shoeless Joe. “Ease his pain,” “Go the distance,” aren’t nudges to help curmudgeonly writers or aged doctors; these were all steps toward patriarchal reconciliation, toward repairing an irrevocable wound so tightly bound with nostalgia and regret that the two emotions had become indistinguishable.

“I just want to thank you for putting up this field… and letting us play here. I’m John Kinsella,” he says, extending a hand to Ray as his family stands at his side.

“Wanna have a catch?” Ray asks.

Field of Dreams makes a point to differentiate between non-believers (those who can’t see the baseball players) from the believers, much in the same way that we can separate those that choose to see miracles in our everyday lives. It labels the pragmatic brother-in-law the villain and the fanciful farmer plowing under his livelihood the hero. It champions the rebels, but not the realists – a framework that aligns with the comparison to Capra’s band of moral crusaders and outsiders. Our sympathies lie with the confounded and irresponsible farmer who takes a daring leap of faith because we, too, can hear those same voices. We’re always confined to his experience, through his point of view. We want him to satisfy the voice, untangle the mystery, and follow this chain of events to its illogical conclusion. It’s not our money. It’s not our farm. And it’s most definitely not our numb posteriors driving from Dyersville, Iowa to Boston, Massachusetts to Chisholm, Minnesota and back to Dyersville – which, by the way, is a 3,156-mile drive of approximately 48 hours – all based on a voice in the corn that sounds more like it’ll murder Ray with a corn thresher than resuscitate the spirit of his long dead father.

All of this goes back to something that’s been nagging at me throughout this entire conversation. What responsibility do we have as movie watchers to revise our original experiences and interpretations of films with bright red ink? As I researched the various criticisms of Field of Dreams, the magic created by my original experiences began to crumble even as I formed counterarguments and reasons why the film’s imperfect handling of race doesn’t actually detract from the movie’s spell. I forged on despite an uncertain resistance. It wasn’t that I felt opposed to the argument. I just wondered if, in a book about the contemporaneous 1989 experience, a 21st century re-evaluation was outside my scope. Maybe my role in this drama was best served as a believer, someone who can see the magic, rather than someone who can’t. Acknowledging imperfection in a work of art doesn’t render that art any less significant. The truth remains—Field of Dreams was and remains an important film for a great many people—of all races and socio-economic backgrounds.

In August of 2021, Kevin Costner stood in the middle of a temporary baseball field, cut into a field of corn on the same Dyersville, Iowa farm and introduced the Field of Dreams game. “Tonight, thanks to that enduring impact that that little movie had, it’s allowed us to come here again, but now on a field that Major League Baseball made. We’ve come to see the first-place White Sox play the mighty Yankees in a field that was once corn. It’s perfect.” Visibly emotional, the actor had to take a breath before he continued. “We’ve kept our promise. Major League Baseball kept its promise. The dream is still alive.” In this instance “the dream” represents the belief in miracles, just as in the movie. It was a miracle the movie got made and therefore a miracle that it struck a chord with audiences in 1989 and continues to endure today. It’s a miracle the site has survived to host a professional baseball game in 2021 (having been postponed from 2020 due to the Coronavirus). “Is this Heaven?” he asks the crowd. “Yes, it is.”

In the TV introduction, Costner narrates: “Come to our Field of Dreams and play ball,” he says and walks through the corn and onto the newly constructed MLB-ready diamond. He walks slowly, strolling the outfield, taking in the crowd, the carpet of green grass, holding a baseball and a pair of sunglasses. The crowd is still. They and Costner might as well be having a catch. Silence and understanding. And then players from both teams, following, emerging from the corn just as the ghosts in the film. Some run up to Costner and shake his hand. They are not one color.

The film’s shortsightedness makes it more complicated, more worthy of healthy conversations about race and representation. Ultimately, I located my center and came to an important conclusion about how we watch and internalize movies.

Neither the movie nor the novel answers questions regarding the origin of the voice. Blind faith in the inexplicable causes Ray to undertake drastic steps to appease the voice’s demands. The faith practiced by Ray Kinsella disregards religious assignation. The singular faith in Field of Dreams belongs only to Ray and his family, who stands by his actions even as those actions portend madness. Outside the deus ex auto-machina finale where hundreds of cars flood into Dyersville with the understood expectation that they would save the farm by paying to watch ghosts of baseball legends play baseball, the drama remains focused on Ray’s human experience. He’s out of his element on a farm. He regrets that he never made amends with his father and that he and his wife’s progressive dreams of 1960s died along the way to 1989. He worries he’s amounted to very little. The magic that intervenes in Ray’s life takes a more mystical and personal form than the communal Capra fantasies. One man’s desire to do right, to think outside conventional, accepted wisdom inspires others to a greater good. In Field of Dreams, the wrong made right is only personal.

A closer reading of Field of Dreams and Shoeless Joe requires us to accept these very localized implications of the narrative. Spiritual resurrection in the form of dead baseball players, fathers, and doctors has been tailored to fit Ray’s life – and Ray’s life alone. The author that Ray seizes from his reclusion helps facilitate his faith in change and redemption from the embers of failure. Moonlight Graham performs the Heimlich on Ray’s daughter and disappears. Ray’s father removes a catcher’s mask and has “a catch,” thereby ameliorating the burdensome guilt that has gnawed at Ray throughout his adult life. The voices, the baseball players, and especially the return of John Kinsella cannot be seen as universal; they’re products of Ray’s faith and naturally limited frame of reference. If – and the metafictional nature of the novel’s construction backs this up – the events in Shoeless Joe and Field of Dreams represent a projection of the narrator’s wishes, it could be perceived as just as hypocritical to include Negro League players as it was to give a civil rights activist a speech about the glory days of the sport. The character of Ray Kinsella would have known very little about these players. They weren’t part of his experience, they couldn’t have been projected into the magical stalks of corn, any more than I can return to 1989 and claim devotion to Do The Right Thing, a movie with which I’d yet to become acquainted.

As much as inclusion and representation matters in cinema, this isn’t a film that’s striving for a sense of one-to-one representative reality. Phil Alden Robinson has one goal in mind – and that’s conveying a universal story about faith and a father-son relationship. He uses baseball and the fractures of generational divide to achieve that end. It’s more than fair to comment and even criticize Field of Dreams for its failure to represent the realities of the Major League Baseball color barrier. If any pains needed to be eased or rights wronged, there were hundreds of baseball players that never even had the chance to play an inning in the field because of the color of their skin. But that is not the novel that Kinsella set out to write and it was not the adaptation that Robinson made.

Donald E. Morse addresses this charge against Field of Dreams by citing Walt Whitman. In “Song of Myself,” Whitman observed “…do not call the tortoise unworthy because she is not something else.” This would be akin to downgrading Major League for not fostering spiritual growth. Criticizing Field of Dreams for its lack of inclusion is absolutely fair, crucifying it feels like a personal vendetta. The race of the fictional writer esteemed by Ray Kinsella makes perfect sense as a black man since Ray and his wife have been rendered as loosely drawn leftovers of 1960s activist movements. They’re championing his radical literature at a school board meeting, and his wife (played by Amy Madigan in full firebrand) screams herself out of the room in defense of Terrence Mann’s relevance. The decision to cast James Earl Jones had as much to do with his exceptional ability to read heavy-handed, sentimental screenwriting as it was a reaction to J.D. Salinger’s threats of defamation proceedings. While casting James Earl Jones might appear a little tone deaf due to his impassioned baseball speech that ignores the color barrier, it’s also a definitive act of inclusion, of casting a person of color in a role specifically written for a very specific white man.

Phil Alden Robinson could have navigated the potential issues by including anonymous black baseball players among the teams of players that emerged from the cornfield. Merely including them without a specific roll call may have resolved the discrepancy between the movie’s obligation to acknowledge the unfair treatment of these athletes and the limited perspective of a 40-year-old white male who grew up in a time before widespread dissemination of information about the Negro leagues. Giving potent, nostalgic dialogue to James Earl Jones doesn’t “break” the movie because it doesn’t detract from the otherwise universal themes of the film. Appreciating a time when athletes took the field solely for the love of the game isn’t a racial issue; Terrence Mann could have easily said those very same words about athletes in any league of any color. Money has supplanted “the love of the game” across all professional sports (and even collegiate ones as well). That said, I’m not altogether sure these minor changes would satisfy the film’s critics. There’s huge gap between “Field of Dreams could have better handled race” and “race broke Field of Dreams.”

On an episode of The Movies That Made Me podcast, hosted by Josh Olsen, Steven Canals (co-creator of Pose and a queer person of color) discussed the family dramas that impacted his young life and influenced him as a storyteller. He said, “These stories are not particularly queer and many of them are centering white families. And so I think that might be surprising to some folks, but the reality is that story is story. If you’re telling a story that leads to the universal truth, you’re going to find things that are salient.” In Field of Dreams, Ray’s story is Ray’s story, but Ray’s story also conveys universal truths about faith, the miraculous in the everyday, and the fractured connections between family.

If Field of Dreams would have been made just five years later, the ways it failed to highlight the historically disgusting treatment of players of color may have been fixed. So much necessary information came flooding into the mainstream about the Negro baseball leagues through the MLB Hall of Fame and Ken Burns’ documentary during this time that a change in perspective would have been welcome and damn near unavoidable. Throwing aside the whole film because it stumbles in this respect doesn’t do the film justice, nor does it allow for the topic to be a relevant conversation about the handling of race in Hollywood.

Celebrating the ways in which Field of Dreams inspires people of different backgrounds while simultaneously discussing how it fails to accurately portray the divided history of baseball would go much further toward proper historical representation. It would also help marry the ideas that nostalgia can be both that gooey, untouchable experience and the means by which one can view those same movies with more evolved sensibilities. Our opinion of Field of Dreams considers each of our experiences watching the film. It’s impossible to divorce those earliest experiences – nor should it be necessary to deny how a film made us feel at ages 10, 30 or 60. We foreground different elements at different stages of our life. The best movies continue to evolve and change just as we do. Nostalgia’s highly influential, but neither is it immutable nor erasable. Whether we eventually come around to seeing Field of Dreams as emotionally manipulative schmaltz that gets Shoeless Joe all wrong (he’s a left handed hitter from South Carolina and not a right-handed hitting Italian American), doesn’t overwrite those first memories created at a time when we just didn’t care about those things.

And then there’s the unwavering, unimpeachable ironclad perfection that is Major League.

First, a detour. My parents owned a tech-laden van that we used primarily for long road trips, of which we took many, including my youth baseball tournaments all over the Midwest. My dad worked for the city of Detroit (read: not exactly flush with liquidity), so this should tell you how much he valued gizmos. Modern doodads made my father giddy like he’d just received his long-backordered leg lamp, and this black Ford road warrior wielded an array that would have been the stuff of childhood dreams—if it hadn’t literally been parked in my driveway on four wheels. Two TVs (one larger one facing the first pair of rear seats and a small one between the back row), a VCR that could send video to either TV, and an original Nintendo console.

(I’ll omit the part where someone cracked open the van shortly thereafter and stripped out all of the gizmos and doodads.)

Coincidentally, Iowa was among those far-flung baseball-related destinations. We played in a national tournament of some sort and visited the Dyersville Field of Dreams. During these trips and in between games (there was much parking-lot idle time over the course of a baseball season filled with rain delays), we’d fire up movies in the back of that Batvan to pass the time. It should come as no surprise that our team’s favorites were Batman and Major League, an R-rated comedy from a now bygone model of 1980s filmmaking that also, in its own way, fed the baseball as American Dream metaphor. Anyone can play, anyone can win, and anyone can become a folk hero.

David S. Ward, however, isn’t channeling Frank Capra’s sentimentality or Roy Hobbsian Waitkusian Ruthiness with his team of has-beens and never-will-bes; he’s looking back at the history of baseball and collecting the misfits that found fame for one reason or another. His Fictional Cleveland Indians reflect a more down-to-earth brand of eccentricity.

The Pirates’ Dock Ellis pitched a no hitter in 1970 while on LSD. Jim Bottomley received a cow from fans as a retirement present. He named it Fielder’s Choice. “Spaceman” Bill Lee once told MLB officials that he’d never smoked dope, he’d only put marijuana in his pancakes. In 1951, St. Louis Browns’ owner Bill Veeck put 3’7” Eddie Gaedel into a game against the Detroit Tigers with the number “1/8” on the back of his jersey. Detroit pitcher and Rookie-of-the-Year Mark “The Bird” Fidrych would talk to the baseball, manicure the mound with his hands, and throw balls back to the umpire because “they had too many hits in them.” Hall-of-Famer George “Rube” Waddell wrestled alligators in the off-season and wore a red shirt underneath his jersey in case a fire engine drove by the park, at which point he’d abandon the game and chase after the truck to help however he could.

Just to name a few.

The characters in Major League feel homely in comparison – but they’re all general composites of historical personalities. Dennis Haysbert’s voodoo-practicing Cuban slugger Pedro Cerrano was shaped by Latin ballplayers like Orlando Cepeda (who believed each bat only had one hit in it) and the super superstitious Alou brothers, Felipe, Jesus, and Matty, who emigrated from the previously untapped baseball hotbed of the Dominican Republic. (The public’s lack of exposure to Dominican culture fostered misguided rumors of voodoo practice.)

Major League’s voodoo, of course, is a colorful bit of mumbojumbo. Ward said, “I didn’t want him sticking pins in things. I wanted him to have a little voodoo character that could appease the voodoo gods.” David S. Ward made Jobu, the rum-loving figurine that held the keys to hitting a curveball, a part of the story from the earliest drafts of the screenplay. Nobody, especially Ward, believed that Jobu would ultimately become a pop-culture icon, spawning Twitter accounts, t-shirts, and quotable dialogue (“Yo, bartender! Jobu needs a refill!”). 

Players like third-baseman Roger Dorn (Corbin Bernsen) and catcher Jake Taylor (Tom Berenger) come from the game’s contemporary archetypes. As per Field of Dreams’ thoughts onnostalgia, baseball fans of a certain age would wax romantic for an era in which ballplayers just loved to play. Dorn’s on the backside of his career. He’s made his money and now he only cares about cashing checks and keeping his face pretty for endorsement deals. He represents the athlete who’s lost his fire. Jake Taylor’s a former star, now a fringe Major Leaguer hanging on to the last days of his youth, the inverse of Dorn in that he carries on despite wonky knees and a career that’s eviscerated his social life. When the Cleveland Indians send him an invite to spring training, he’s playing in Mexico and thinks he’s being pranked by some guy named Tolbert. He’s the everyman character that represents our competitive idealism in the modern era of baseball. The grown man playing purely for the game itself, but also fearful of facing adulthood, a condition required by his impending retirement.

And as for the film’s centerpiece, Rick “Wild Thing” Vaughn, Charlie Sheen’s wedge-headed California Penal League pitching prodigy comes directly from a baseball legend you may not have known about. Ward based his most memorable character on a pitcher by the name of Ryne Duren. Duren, who pitched during the 1950s and 60s, looked like an accountant and wore Coke-bottle eyeglasses to correct his vision bordering on legal blindness. Reportedly his prescription called for 70/20 in his right eye and 200/20 in his left. Batters feared standing in the batter’s box against Duren; his spectacles suggested he had no idea if his 100-mph fastball was going to end in the batter’s ear or the box seats.

Duren’s legend began in a tiny Wisconsin town called Cazenovia where his high school coach wouldn’t let him pitch for fear that he’d kill somebody. Duren made his major league debut in 1954 for Kansas City. Traded to the Yankees three years later, he pitched a no-hitter for the Denver Bears in his first outing and became a minor-league sensation – a factor that actually delayed his return to the major leagues. He became an integral relief pitcher for the New York Yankees teams of the late 50s, but he was also a bit of a showman – which draws the direct line between Duren and Rick Vaughn. When called upon by manager Casey Stengel, he wouldn’t use the bullpen gate – choosing instead to hop the fence and begin a long, slow walk to the mound with a blue warm-up jacket covering his pitching arm. During warmups he’d intentionally throw the first one 20 feet over the catcher’s head and gradually work back to the strike zone.

Long-suffering 1989 Cleveland Indians fans would have taken great pleasure in witnessing the miracle season enjoyed by their team courtesy of Hollywood magic. The worst-to-first leap enjoyed by the fictional Indians has become less miraculous in recent years. Major League franchises have enjoyed 13 such seasons since 1990, beginning with the 1990/91 Atlanta Braves. Even if Cleveland hadn’t finished higher than fourth in their division since 1968, fans would have taken a measure of solace in the film’s depictions of greedy owners, prima donna free agents and the underdog story of the misfits that beat the damn Yankees and won the division.

Major League works first as a screwball comedy, but also as a kind of love-letter to the blue-collar, industrial city of Cleveland. The film opens with shots of the Cleveland skyline, barges and monuments backed by Randy Newman’s “Burn On.”

Cleveland city of light, city of magic
Cleveland city of light, you’re calling me
Cleveland, even now I can remember
Cause the Cuyahoga River
Goes smokin’ through my dreams

That Newman’s song opens Major League is a recall to Cleveland’s darkest days. The Cuyahoga River, which runs through the city, has caught on fire from industrial waste pollution at least 13 times between 1868 and 1969. The 1952 fire caused the most destruction ($1.3 million in damages), but the 1969 fire caught the nation’s attention. On June 22nd, 1969, oil-slicked debris was ignited by sparks from a passing train. The fire reached heights of five stories, destroyed a bridge, and lasted for nearly 30 minutes. Coverage of the fire brought national attention to the Cleveland area and increased pressure on the government to regulate the waste disposal practices of industrial manufacturers. As a result, Congress passed the National Environment Policy Act on January 1, 1970 that took the first step toward establishing the Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Water Act (1972).

Randy Newman would become better known for his more chipper cinematic hits such as “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” for Toy Story. In 1989, however, Newman wasn’t an omnipresent soundtrack artist. The choice to use “Burn On” has as much to do with its status as a Cleveland song as it does the tone and historical significance; it feeds into this sentiment of Cleveland and the Indians rising from the ashes of legendary failures. If producers had just wanted a peppy song about Cleveland to kickstart a baseball movie about a lovable band of rogue baseball players they might as well have just chosen Ian Hunter’s “Cleveland Rocks” (the future theme to The Drew Carey Show) or the Michael Stanley Band’s “My Town” (the video for which actually seems to have influenced the look of Major League’s opening sequence).

In many ways, Major League’s high-concept premise works as a functional counterpoint to Field of Dreams. One wields fantastic realism and the other reality-based fantasy. Though the movie feels like an 80’s movie from start to finish – a loose and rambling structure based on vignette-style comedy foregrounding an impossible, feel-good premise – it also fosters a timeless hope and fantasy of a pure professional baseball game played for the love of competition – and overcoming insurmountable obstacles laid in their path. Their new team owner intends for them to fail and attempts to sabotage their success at every opportunity.

The first cut of the film set up Margaret Whitton’s Rachel Phelps as a deviously motivational figurehead. She’d removed their hot tubs and commercial airliners as a well-intentioned means for prodding the team to victory. After lukewarm test screenings, the film was re-edited (along with a couple of added scenes) to place her as a more traditional and adversarial villain. The 11th-hour rework succeeded because, like Roger Dorn, the caricature fed the fan’s conception of the soulless professional owner who doesn’t value winning as much as the dollars in her pocket and a beachfront condo in Miami.

In this uncommon instance, the test screenings produced a beneficial outcome. That’s not to say that Willie Mays Hays being escorted out of his barracks for being a Spring Training-crasher, only to smoke a couple of punks like they were standing still in bare feet and pajamas wouldn’t still provide the same laughs. Like The Bad News Bears before it, Major League gained non-quantifiable appeal by “stickin’ it to the man.” It’s no secret that “stickin’ it to the man” has provided thrills from the very origins of cinema. Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp character had its roots in the notion that “the man” was there to be object of the “stickin’ it.” In rendering Phelps a literal and figurative cardboard cutout, Major League created a clear adversary standing in the way of the Indians’ success that had nothing to do with the Yankees or Pete Vukovich’s cartoon-villain facial hair. The off-the-field stakes became greater than the on-the-field competition. And it had to be – this assemblage of discarded athletes couldn’t have hoped to compete on a level playing field. The moral victory eclipsed the value of the game itself, which you may recall was only a game to determine the champion of the division, not the World Series. (You only learn that they lose the World Series in the unremarkable 1994 sequel.)

Major League also had the benefit of that 1989 release date, the last year before competitive imbalance really took hold of the sport. In just a few years, the suspension of disbelief required to accept that a team with a minimum payroll could compete against the New York Yankees would have made Ward’s comedy feel more like fantasy wish-fulfillment, a re-imagination of the slobs (or nerds) vs. snobs movies of the 1980’s such as Revenge of the Nerds, Animal House, Pretty in Pink, etc. That slim margin for acceptance makes a world of difference during the final, winner-take-all game.  When Lou Brown calls Rick “Wild Thing” Vaughn in from the bullpen to face his nemesis with the game on the line, Major League inspires more than just laughs. It flips a switch and creates one of the finest fictionalized baseball contests ever captured on film.

The standing crowd belting out “Wild Thing” as the former California Penal League flamethrower sets his rigid gaze on the mound. We’re invested emotionally. In fact, David S. Ward takes credit for real-life closers adopting signature anthems. After Major League’s release, Phillies’ closer Mitch Williams immediately started using “Wild Thing” for his walk-out music. But it wasn’t commonplace until Trevor Hoffman began stepping out to AC/DC’s “Hells Bells” and cemented the tradition into the modern era. Since Hoffman, relievers have used all manner of sonic preludes ranging from Jay-Z’s “Big Pimpin’” (Armando Benitez) to “Stranglehold” by Ted Nugent (Huston Street) and “Stand Up” by Steel Dragon (Joe Nathan). Yes, that’s right. Joe Nathan used a song by the fake hair-metal band in Mark Wahlberg’s Rock Star.

Few have lived up to Hoffman’s precedent, and none have equaled Rick Vaughn’s entrance in Major League – precisely because it felt perfectly organic and duly earned in 1989. This moment still causes those stomach butterflies to race even though the outcome has been set in stone for decades. Rick Vaughn’s eyesight and wildness began as a throwaway joke, one of dozens tossed out during the Indians’ spring training introductions, but when he spins around on the mound to face Vukovich’s slugger – there’s no trace of comedy. Rick Vaughn’s gaze channels our competitive nature, our identification with the underdog. The insecure part of all of us cheers these fictional humans because the movie does more than pay off a gag; Major League makes us a believer in the miraculous, something the greatest baseball tales have always done.

Maybe Roy Hobbs and Eddie Waitkus never actually won a game with a monster home run into the light ballasts, maybe Shoeless Joe Jackson never emerged from an Iowa cornfield, and maybe the Indians (the Guardians as of 2022) will never again win the World Series, but no small part of us wants to believe in everyday magic even as evidence to the contrary assaults us on all fronts. Baseball, and sport in general, rekindles our child-like wonder and movies about sport need to see the magic in a cornfield, in whatever form it takes.


[1] Film movement that contended with the economic and moral hardships in post-World War II Italy and often depicted the scarred national psyche through everyday boredom, poverty, oppression, injustice and desperation. Start your day with a soothing cup of disillusionment. 

[2] They won’t care about any of it until I mention the mustache, at which point they’ll demand a Google Image search. Since I assume you weren’t a Tiger fan in the 80’s you should probably go ahead and Google that now, too.

[3] The author clearly had not seen Ed (1996)the heartwarming story of a pitcher played by Matt LeBlanc and his ballplaying chimpanzee mascot.

Categories
Cinema Summer of 1989

The ‘Burbs, Bill &Ted, & Heathers: Success and Failure in the Suburbs

I’ve decided to start posting chapter drafts of my manuscript about the summer movies of 1989. In light of our current quarantine situation, my writing has become nothing but a chore. I know many won’t read these pages, but if you do, please share your thoughts. I hope our communication causes me to get back to writing. I hope writing once again becomes the distraction rather than the chore.

On the previous episodes of THE LAST GREATEST HOLLYWOOD SUMMER: The Preamble / Chapter 1: Die Hard on a VHS Tape / Chapter 2: Nostalgia and the Ghastly Beauty of Ill-Advised Hollywood Cinema

the 'burbs, bill & ted, heathers

When discussing the greatness of the cinematic year of 1989, it’s easy to get lost among box office sensations and high-profile sequels. When I piled up my stack of movies and rewatches, Batman and The Last Crusade loomed large, but I most looked forward to films like Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, The ‘Burbs, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Troop Beverly Hills, and Heathers, movies that represented widely varying degrees of success but have endured as testaments to the ways in which Hollywood (and its periphery) dared to entertain us when it seemed like they didn’t have anything to lose.

Let’s set the scene. February. Cloudy with a good chance of Rain Man topping the box office. 1989 wouldn’t boast a $10 million opening weekend until The ‘Burbs on February 17th, a release that also comes with the 4-day weekend asterisk.

Pop quiz: Was Joe Dante’s The ‘Burbs was a successful film?

Obviously not. Please make these questions harder so I don’t lose interest in your quizzy little book.

That’s harsh, but fair. You could learn a thing, like what Gene Siskel’s mustache had to say about The ‘Burbs: “The script would like to be a horror film, a comedy and a commentary on suburban living, but it doesn’t hit any target.” The LA Times’ Kevin Thomas called it a “grimly unfunny comedy,” an “endlessly labored spectacle” with “no discernible point…” Vincent Canby, my favorite critical curmudgeon warned that The ‘Burbs was “as empty as something can be without creating a vacuum.” All those famous film guys just corroborated your gut reaction that The ‘Burbs failed. By the way, Richard Corliss’ said that The Adventures of Baron Munchausen reeked of “corporate flop sweat.” (Those kooky film critics!)

Most of the reviews seemed to disregard Joe Dante’s specific tonal intentions. On top of that, Hollywood has proven itself incapable of selling or packaging dark comedies to inspire critical acceptance and commercial attendance. The successful ones tend to straddle other more marketable genres such as general, broad comedy (The Addams Family, 1991) or thriller (The Manchurian Candidate, 1962). Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964) remains one of the few examples of a black comedy that registered with critics and audiences. Then again, there were plenty of Bosley Crowthers who called Dr. Strangelove “the most shattering sick joke I’ve ever come across.” He didn’t mean that as a compliment. The gold standard might just be Danny DeVito’s The War of the Roses, released in December of 1989, which capitalized on the anticipated reunion of Romancing the Stone’s Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner and received widespread acclaim for its “outstanding nastiness” (Janet Maslin) and “bitter, unrelenting comedy” (Roger Ebert). Its undeniable, runaway success was good for merely 12th on the year, however, behind such decidedly non-dark laughers like Look Who’s Talking; Honey, I Shrunk the Kids; and Parenthood

As opposed to broad comedies, black (or dark) comedies rely on tone and performance rather than showy situational set pieces and out-of-context quotable dialogue, both of which play better in quick promotional trailers and talk show clips. If you Google “black comedy,” the search engine spits back some obviously acceptable entries like Heathers, but also includes some mixed messaging like Kick-Ass, Hot Fuzz, and Birdman (or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance). It’s no wonder that John and Jane Q. Netflixer don’t really have a firm grasp on the language of gallows humor when not even the almighty Google can supply a handful of proper examples. And speaking of Netflix, curiously enough, the genre has gained significant traction on TV and streaming with offerings like Fargo, Barry, Succession, Search Party, and Dead to Me, which calls into question everything I just wrote. Perhaps the long-format storytelling and character development smooths down the rougher edges. Do serialized television and movies become broadly successful financial hits because or despite the black humor elements?

When in doubt, return to the roots.

Though black humor can be traced back to Aristophanes (the 5th century BC), Jonathan Swift’s 1729’s satirical essay “A Modest Proposal” is probably the most known and most taught example. Swift declares that in order to solve the dual problems of hunger and overpopulation, we should start eating all the extra babies. The beauty of Swift’s essay is that he goes out of his way to support the thesis with logical nutritional and economic arguments. “A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food…”

In his book American Dark Comedy: Beyond Satire, Wes D. Gehring composites Darwin and Freud in his reading. He says that comedy is a defense mechanism against inevitable death (from Freud) as a result of man’s understanding that life is nothing more than a haphazard series of luck in the form of evolution (Darwin). The surrealism of the form suggests an externalization of subconscious disorder. American writers, in particular, “appear more articulate about it” as a reaction to the unfortunate realities about the “anything is possible” promise of the American dream.

The existential philosophers Sartre and Heidegger loom large over humor derived from our godless, irrational world in which we cannot depend on other humans and anguish is a universal phenomenon. Funny, right? Look no further than that wholesome All-American director Frank Capra, who said his own Arsenic and Old Lace was a demonstration of the fact that comedy and tragedy are so closely aligned it doesn’t take much of a push to “send the dramatic see-saw from tears to giggles and back again.”

In Arsenic and Old Lace, a pair of old Brooklyn biddies poison lonely elderly men with elderberry wine and arsenic and their nephew (who believes himself to be Teddy Roosevelt) buries the bodies in the cellar to stop the spread of yellow fever. Arsenic shares the same structural DNA with 1989’s The ‘Burbs and Heathers (which wasn’t even given the decency of a proper theatrical release), although the latter films paint their humoristic wordplay with horror movie tropes to punctuate the tragedy. 

American humorist Brian P. Cleary perfectly captured the nature of dark comedy when he said, “A good friend will help you plant your tulips. A great friend will help you plant a gun on the unarmed intruder you just shot.” Let’s translate Cleary’s statement into cinematic terms. “A good friend will help you plant your tulips” equals romantic comedy or period drama. Self-defense against an intruder recalls any number of thriller or horror films (Wait Until Dark, Dial M for Murder, Halloween, etc.), but black comedy is the scene where two friends flounder through the maneuverings of planting a gun on the supposed intruder’s turgid corpse. You and your comically inept friend become the murderous anti-heroes or heroines of your own story. That’s black humor. That’s The ‘Burbs, or at least some of The ‘Burbs, or perhaps the The ‘Burbs living its best conceptually suburban sprawly life.

For the uninitiated, Ray Peterson (Tom Hanks) finds himself in an unrestful staycation because he hears strange happenings in his new neighbors’ basement. His neighbors are the reclusive, mostly unseen Klopeks who dig around their backyard at night and peer out of windows mysteriously. Despite his wife’s insistence, he refuses to leave the house for his vacation and leave the Klopeks alone because they’re probably fine and just regular weird and not serial killer weird. In the thankless role of 1980s housewife, Carrie Fisher carries herself with royal grace and dignity. With the assistance and encouragement of his other nebby neighbors, Art (Rick Docummun) and Vietnam vet Mark (Bruce Dern), Ray finds menace and evil suggestion at every turn. An old guy with the toupee disappears. The dog digs up a femur. Ray has chainsaw nightmares. Rick finds toupee guy’s toupee in the Klopek’s mail after he invites himself in for a meet and greet. As this is the best version of cinematic Tom Hanks, Ray’s mania increases. He becomes more desperate to prove that the Klopek’s are crazed murderers and justify his paranoid, para-militant, borderline schizophrenic behavior. Behavior that we, as viewers, totally support because goshdarnit there’s got to be something up with those neighbors! Unamerican! Uncivilized! They probably eat borscht because they like it – and not just because they got beets in their weekly CSA farm share and don’t know what else to do with Satan’s root vegetable.

The more poignant question might be whether or not The ‘Burbs is actually a black comedy… or just farce in a horror wrapper. You wouldn’t call Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) a black comedy because chiaroscuro and lighting flashes. The same applies to The ‘Burbs, which dabbles less in Swift’s tongue-in-cheek comedic stylings than broad humor, albeit broad humor about homicidal foreigners next door.

Critics disagreed on its merits, but largely throttled it. Audiences remember a Tom Hanks flop that temporarily curtailed his soaring career in the wake of Big (1988). A quick look at the box office numbers suggests another reality. The movie cost $18 million to make and recouped twice its budget at the domestic box office and $49.1 million internationally. While short of a staggering success, it’s hardly the bomb we’ve come to know. It likely made a little money for Universal, but that’s little consolation for Joe Dante who got saddled with a supposed flop after a successful run through the 1980s.

Joe Dante will always be most widely known for Gremlins, but I’d argue that The ‘Burbs fuels his most devoted fans, reacting according to Newton’s Third Law. For every negative reaction about The ‘Burbs there is an equal and opposite reaction. About The ‘Burbs he said in an interview for the Toronto International Film Festival, “It was roundly vilified when it came out, but it seems to have weathered quite well.”

The ‘Burbs represents a quintessential cult film experience. Maligned and misunderstood at the time of its release, Joe Dante’s film shoehorned cannibalism, demonology, and body snatching into mainstream cinema under the guise of suburban slapstick starring new Hollywood darling Tom Hanks, Bruce Dern, Carrie Fisher, and Corey Feldman. Five years prior, Hanks shepherded a coke-snorting donkey to a $40 million domestic box office share, so none of this subject matter should come as much of a shock. After the success of Penny Marshall’s Big, the actor responded with a series of eccentric choices not befitting a newly anointed box office wonder boy, including, in order of release, Punchline, The ‘Burbs, Turner & Hooch, Joe Versus the Volcano, and Bonfire of the Vanities.

For The ‘Burbs, however, those Hanksian expectations proved damning. Big fans, charmed by 28-year-old Elizabeth Perkins knowingly having sex with a pubescent boy, flocked to The ‘Burbs and found their expectations for wholesome family entertainment put through a PG-rated wood chopper. Collective mainstream audiences are notoriously short on memory and attention and oddly myopic.

Cult movies that come through the Hollywood system happen largely because of unmet expectation. Good – even great – movies suffer the misapplied judgment of audiences and critics that come face to face with a movie they just can’t quite wrap their heads around. The term “cult” applies to movies of all shapes, genres, and abilities – but glossy, high functioning cult movies from within the studio system arise because people get swept into a movie for reasons other than the movie itself. Studios have never figured out how to sell a wicked comedy. Universal, for what it’s worth, actually does a pretty good job with this trailer The ‘Burbs, but you’ll note how it foregrounds most every slapstick sequence in the film.

It wasn’t too long ago that the box office life of a movie depended on more than an opening weekend. Raiders of the Lost Ark, for example, became a huge hit for Paramount despite their inability to advance market the film. In Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer, Tom Shone says, “…and while the film would eventually take in $209 million, more than any film in Paramount’s history until that point, it did so under its own steam and in its own time, chugging around at the $1.5 million-a-week mark for the best part of the next year…” Raiders of the Lost Ark made only $8 million during its opening weekend. Recall that The ‘Burbs made $11 million in its first weekend. More than Raiders. (More than Big.)

Patience waned in the intervening eight years for a couple of reasons. Sure, there were more theaters available for exhibition, but there were also more movies competing for those cushy multiplex venues. For a specific point of comparison, fewer movies were released in June of 1981 (prime movie season) than were released in The ‘Burbs’ February of 1989.

Secondly, the home video release window had narrowed. With sell-through movies becoming increasingly more common (they were virtually non-existent in 1981), studios began to explore ways to cash in on the new demand for home video. Successful movies saw their theatrical runs shortened to capitalize on VHS sales. Likewise, exhibitors rushed slagging performers out of theaters to decrease competition for presumably more successful enterprises.

Raiders of the Lost Ark would never have had the opportunity to hang around in theaters for more than a year making about $1.5-2 million per week. It would have been ushered onto sell-through home video, thus clearing the path for another movie to open big. In March of 1982 after 10 months in theaters, Raiders still played on more than 600 screens.

Even though the winds of change had started to reconfigure the cinematic landscape, some movies still managed to take the market by surprise, if only on a smaller scale. Released the same day as The ‘Burbs, February 17, 1989, a little Orion Pictures teen comedy arrived in 1,196 theaters across the United States. Critics had already panned the film. It starred a 25-year-old actor who’d last appeared in a supporting role in Stephen Frears’ Dangerous Liaisons and a 24-year-old tertiary Lost Boy. The biggest star? A controversial, counterculture comedian best known by the wider populace for his “seven dirty words” routine, George Carlin.

I didn’t have the pleasure of seeing Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure in the cinema. It snuck into cinemas with little marketing, when most movies appeared in theaters as an afterthought – yet this teen comedy about California dimwits placed third behind The ‘Burbs and Rain Man (in its tenth week of release). Unlike The ‘Burbs, however, Bill & Ted‘s audience grew.

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure represents a typical 1980s filmmaking methodology. Easy to market and easy to read from an audience’s perspective. An inherently absurd high-concept that falls apart after any amount of scrutiny – yet the viewer’s entertained enough by the movie’s pure joy of existence (and puerile historical gags and references) to bother with anything as tedious as how Bill and Ted irrevocably rewrite history by creating a bromance between Socrates and Billy the Kid… or how the fate of the world hinged on a single oral history report.

The film also – and this is perhaps the most important aspect of Bill & Ted’s success as it supposedly bests a notorious failure like The ‘Burbs – celebrates its title characters’ positivity rather than sneering derisively at their inferior intellect. Consider the fundamentally different approaches between Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and the vapidity of Dude, Where’s My Car? (2000), a certain Bill & Ted descendant. Despite their slacker wrapping, Bill S. Preston Esquire and Ted Theodore Logan were given agency that turned caricatures into fully rendered and even relatable humans. A movie in which two failures have already saved the world with the power of a transcendent guitar riff – but first must overcome the minor hurdle of getting an A+ in an oral History exam by traveling back in time to collect figures of historical interest. It’s like borrowing the 1927 Yankees to win your kickball game – if upon that kickball game the fate of the world hinged.

Like The ‘Burbs, contemporaneous critics struggled with Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. As Chris Williams of the LA Times wrote, they saw “a glorification of dumbness for dumbnesses’ sake.” The New York Times’ Vincent Canby called it “painfully inept.” The Washington Post’s Hal Hinson: “undernourished.” With all due respect to these writers on cinema, they got it royally wrong, dudes. Some of that can be credited, once again, to expectation. Into that theater they brought the burden of every other inept comedy about moronic ne’er-do-wells upon which they’d been forced to opine.

Professional film critics would also have to think long and hard before enthusiastically recommending a movie about dumb characters in a high-concept movie full of logic gaps and impossible scenarios. Can you ever imagine Bosley Crowther writing a glowing review for Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure? Moviegoers, however, have not been saddled with the onus of career-justifying negativity. The ‘Burbs and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, like the best pure entertainment, present a fantasy version of the real world unblemished by our physical, grinding realities.

But we’re told that one succeeded while the other one failed.

The characters’ intelligence doesn’t post an artificial barrier to their success. In many instances stupid characters arrest the narrative as the result of an inability to move the plot forward. Momentum occurs despite a lack of agency. Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter boast tremendous on-screen chemistry, as if they’re acting as displaced halves of the same brain. Together they’re incentivized – because the fate of the world – to achieve an A on their oral report and score with some bodacious medieval babes. You could analyze Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure from dozens of different directions, but the success of the film relies on the synergy of the actors.

Though lacking in book smarts (Caesar will always remain “a salad dressing dude[1]”), Bill and Ted demonstrate quick wits and even an ability to manipulate the logic of the film, thereby outsmarting the viewer that’s assured himself of his superior intelligence because he knows a thing or two about Napoleon. The most magnificent moment in the film undermines that supposed viewer superiority.

Early in Excellent Adventure, Ted’s dad asked Ted about the missing keys[2], but the boys have no clue as to their whereabouts. Later, when Bill and Ted need to rescue their historical figures from jail, they wish they had those very same keys. After a pensive moment, Bill exclaims, “If only we go back in time to when he had them and steal them then.” “Well, why can’t we?” Ted asks, suggesting that after the report, they’ll just go back in time, steal the keys, and put them outside the police station. Presto! The keys appear behind the very same sign – but it’s not technically magic (movie magic, maybe) – it’s our “dumb” characters riffing on the physical laws of the time-travel film and manipulating audience expectation. They might not know how to pronounce “Socrates” correctly, but they’re clever enough in a crisis to manipulate the spacetime continuum.

“Hey! It was me who stole my dad’s keys!” Ted exclaims.

When I revisited Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure for the first time in many years for this chapter, I worried it wasn’t going to hold the same spell over me. I found myself dissecting the movie to see what held it all together. I focused on the time travel fallacies and questioned why any of it worked at all. I’m happy to report, none of it mattered. Sure, there’s that issue of nostalgia to consider. Could I ever really rewrite my longstanding opinion of a movie I watched dozens of times as a younger me?

I found myself drawn to the ways the movie manipulated expectation. Arriving in theaters months before the release of Back to the Future II certainly helped. Once Back to the Future II began diagramming parallel timelines and warning about time paradoxes, Bill and Ted might have had a harder time casually solving their own conundrums with the pinky promise of future time travel. The scene with the keys, for example, or the early meeting of the two pairs of Bill and Teds (which according to Back to the Future’s laws might have made the universe implode). Unlike testy critics, a viewer will only care to pick apart a narrative if they’re not entertained to distraction. Pure entertainment doesn’t require the “how” or the “why;” it just requires a willing ignorance, an embrace of our own dumbness as viewers. Regarding Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, I’m happy to glorify my own dumbness if it means I can still experience childlike euphoria while watching movies.

The face-value absurdity of Joan of Arc commandeering an aerobics class or Genghis Khan attacking a sporting goods store on a skateboard, Beethoven simultaneously tickling two electric keyboards. Napoleon throwing a tantrum at a water park called Waterloo. These remain simple gags – albeit gags graced with rapid-fire abundance and an ingenious high-concept wrapper.

Director Stephen Herek had a solid, but unsung movie career before the studios got ahold of talents and ushered him into routine, forgettable fare. He began his career with Critters, Bill & Ted, Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead and The Mighty Ducks (all crowd pleasers) before taking on more “grown-up” films like Mr. Holland’s Opus, Rock Star and Holy Man. The pace of those so-called dumb entertainment movies just agreed with him. Not every filmmaker treats populist or “dumb” entertainment with the kind of respect required for two idiot savants to turn the tables on the viewer.

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure cost $10 million in 1989 and returned $40 million. Both Bill & Ted and The ‘Burbs cleared $30 million dollars above production budget. These types of numbers don’t figure marketing or standard studio overhead, and I know that box office success is just a number, an artificial barometer for cinematic success. To trace the studio valuation of a film and consider how the fundamental production ideology shifts from one generation to the next, one absolutely must follow the money.

When was the last time you heard someone call Bill & Ted a box office bomb? Still not bad for two idiot teens from San Dimas, California that surprised us all with a deceptively smart, super dumb movie back in 1989. Perception and expectation shape the legacy of any movie. Those initial opening-weekend responses can take generations to overcome.

And now you’re probably asking, “But didn’t you mention that stone cold classic Heathers way back in the beginning of this chapter?” I’m so glad you asked. What was your impression of Heathers back in 1989? Did you love it like everyone else did?

Trick question.

Nobody saw Heathers in the theater. If you did, I congratulate you on your incredible luck and foresight, which stands head and shoulders above my feat of seeing UHF twice theatrically. Heathers appeared on only 35 screens in the U.S. on March 31st, 1989, making a total of $263,000 in its first week of release. And it’s not as if New World had prepared a word-of-mouth grassroots campaign to boost business. The movie dropped down to 26 theaters the subsequent week – even though its per theater average remained higher than anything except the box office champion Major League.

Despite good word of mouth and reviews, New World failed to provide any kind of promotional push. Calling Heathers a failure based on box office numbers would be a disservice. It didn’t even have the opportunity to fail. It’s not a very telling comparison, but one I’ll dare to make anyway. Heathers made more per screen in its opening week than every 1989 weekly box office winner until Pet Sematary opened on April 21. Box office numbers rely on so many factors outside the movies control that it’s futile to judge merit – but it is useful when considering trends, marketing efficacy and studio ineptitude. New World wasn’t just inept – it was legitimately bankrupt… but it did own Marvel Comics, so it had that going for it.

Co-founded by Roger Corman and his brother Gene in 1970 (following their departure from AIP), New World Pictures, Ltd. became the last national low-budget film distributor. Devoted to making low-budget films by new talent, New World launched the careers of Jonathan Demme, Jonathan Kaplan, Ron Howard, Paul Bartel, and Joe Dante. They also acted as the U.S. distributor for foreign films from Ingmar Bergman, Fellini, and Kurosawa. In 1984, the company split into New World International, New World Television and New World Video – the purposes of which should all be self-explanatory. In 1986, they acquired Marvel Entertainment Group, the parent company of Marvel Comics. It would later attempt to acquire toymakers Kenner and Mattel.

In 1988, the year that New World premiered a little film called Heathers in Italy, the company fended off Chapter 11. In 1989, New World began selling itself piecemeal to investors. Would Heathers have become a box office hit with full studio support? I enjoy the hypotheticals as much as the next fellow, but it’s hard to see Heathers getting studio support – even in 1989. But if not in 1989, when? The ‘Burbs didn’t survive the grinder with superstar Tom Hanks. What hope did Heathers, with its fresh-faced Christian Slater and Winona Ryder, have of financial success?

By the time I became aware of Heathers it had already become a VHS success story. Heathers never registered as a failure, like The ‘Burbs for example, because it didn’t appear on pop culture radars in order to be pre-maligned. It had no stigma to overcome. When teenagers discovered it many moons later, Christian Slater and Winona Ryder had become teen icons. It appeared in video stores as if by magic, free of expectations or critical derision. It became an important personal discovery to everyone that picked up on that VHS box on a whim.

What does “success” mean for a film’s ongoing legacy? Our notion of success shifts as time grinds away at a film’s critical and commercial imprint. Heathers left no box office footprint but isn’t considered a failure. The ‘Burbs made money and has crawled its way to cult status but can’t totally shake that original impression. Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure endures as a kind of comedy classic despite a negative critical reaction. Expectation and success hold hands in the darkened theater when no one’s looking.

Universal wanted to market Big‘s likable manchild Tom Hanks in promoting Joe Dante’s black suburban comedy. Audiences went in expecting and wanting something other than it received. What did anyone expect out of teenage dimwits Bill and Ted? Or a VHS box featuring teal and hot pink and four hot girls dressed in black?

Studios hadn’t yet focused their production dollars solely on sure things. They liked to play the long shots, too. The ‘Burbs and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure were new intellectual properties, one released by a big studio (Universal) and one released by the relatively minor Orion Pictures. The one with the big star and big studio had big expectations. The one with little stars and a little studio had hopes, but low expectations. The latter also had the benefit of upbeat positivity rather than a wicked sense of humor.

Let’s scrobble all the way back to that initial question: Was The ‘Burbs a failure? (Not really.)[3]

Bonus question for extra credit: Was Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure a success? (Totally.)

Bonus bonus question for posterity: Did you see Heathers in a theater? Iron a scout patch onto your favorite shirt.

The disparate fates of these three movies highlighted something unique about the movie marketplace as it approached the end of the 1980s. Big studios, mid-sized production companies run by studio escapees, and little guys all jockeyed for theatrical real estate. Mid-major studios such as Orion, Geffen, and New Line, co-existed alongside the MGMs and Universals. They also had more leeway when it came to waiting and seeing. The majors had increasingly less patience with disappointing box office receipts. If a film didn’t meet expectations during its opening weekend, it would disappear to make room for another movie, another lotto ticket that might hit big.

The sequels and franchises had just started to mark the landscape with increasing frequency, but they weren’t considered tentpoles, not yet, and they hadn’t become the focus of the majors. R-rated comedies, black and otherwise, were still considered potential moneymakers. The quick hook for movies like The ‘Burbs portended a certain kind of future for the cinematic marketplace. The majors started to focus on the inherent market instability in producing new intellectual properties without an established audience. Not even proper movie stars could guarantee success. It wasn’t that this had ever always been the case, but as studios became cogs in larger moneymaking machines, such as Columbia’s sale to Sony for $3.4 billion in September of 1989, only sure things began to make sense.

In the meantime, however, The ‘Burbs, Bill & Ted and Heathers could all co-exist and find their success in their own time. These specific market conditions wouldn’t last for much longer, but we weren’t wise enough to see where it was all headed. It’s an impossible thing to say we were better off in 1989. Any such claim burdened by the exclusionary perspectives of those that lived it at the expense of those that didn’t. We can only look backwards and appreciate the moment that gave us these three enduring comedies. We can point to these examples as great movies they wouldn’t make anymore, our parents walked uphill both ways, binge-watching TV shows doesn’t allow you time to anticipate and appreciate the time that went into making it, Napoleon is a short, dead dude and Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife.

That about sums it up.


[1] For years I heard this line as “solid dressing dude,” and honestly this works just as well as “salad dressing dude” because that Roman toga really does offer a certain untapped appeal as an alternative to my day-to-day wardrobe of jeans and a t-shirt (hoodie, weather dependent).

[2] Chekhov’s Missing Keys

[3] The ‘Burbs made more opening weekend. It opened in more theaters and made more money per theater. After five weeks in release, The ‘Burbs disappeared. Bill and Ted remained excellent for another four weeks, only surpassing The ‘Burbs box office gross in week 7. The final tally? Bill & Ted: $40 million in 9 weeks. The ‘Burbs: $36 million in 5.

Categories
Cinema Summer of 1989

Nostalgia and the Ghastly Beauty of Ill-Advised Hollywood Cinema

I’ve decided to start posting chapter drafts of my manuscript about the summer movies of 1989. In light of our current quarantine situation, my writing has become nothing but a chore. I know many won’t read these pages, but if you do, please share your thoughts. I hope our communication causes me to get back to writing. I hope writing once again becomes the distraction rather than the chore.

On the previous episodes of THE LAST GREATEST HOLLYWOOD SUMMER: The Preamble / Chapter 1: Die Hard on a VHS Tape

Chapter 2: Nostalgia, Hot to Trot, and the Ghastly Beauty of Ill-Advised Hollywood Cinema

I’d like to pre-empt this particular conversation with a little thought about nostalgia. The word “nostalgia” has been scapegoated by critics as a determination of derivativeness. Label something “nostalgic” and you’ve condemned it to a combative and somewhat abbreviated shelf life. The anti-nostalgists play whack-a-mole with any perceived dwelling in the past, while the the pro-nostalgia camp futilely attempts to explain the difference between nostalgia, reference, and just plain creative laziness. Here’s your cheat sheet: one’s a bygone story; one’s a nudge and wink; and the other uses a nudge and a wink as a stand-in for originality. And then there are the people who are still slinging Bon Jovi mullets and Slippery When Wet cassette tapes. They’re still making cassette tapes. It’s not exactly the battle over Roe vs. Wade, but there’s a war raging and it’s coming for our right to feel gooey, irrational benevolence for movies like, say, Hot to Trot (Michael Dinner, 1988). (You didn’t think I was headed for Bobcat Goldthwait, did you?)

In a New Yorker article based on a speech he gave at the Jewish Book Council, Michael Chabon – a writer who has himself been the target of such criticisms – fires back, “Nostalgia is a valid, honorable, ancient human emotion[1].”

Nostalgia isn’t the offense. Nostalgia’s the result. Preying on nostalgia, selling “stuff” based solely on the purpose of stroking the id, that’s where it turns on itself, a snake consuming its own tail. Franchises trade heavily in the latter two elements. James Bond, Star Wars, Star Trek, etc. call back to old familiar tropes all the time. South Park masterfully skewered this empty brand of referential nostalgia with Season 20’s “Member Berries” – small purple berries that speak in nostalgic phrases and words without any context. When they speak to Randy March they recycle Reagan-era talking points. “Remember AT-ATs?” “Remember Chewbacca?” “Remember Slimer?” The berries induce a kind of complacent contentment, but Randy stops eating them when the Member Berries begin queueing up less palatable talking points among the innocent pop culture baubles. “Remember when there weren’t so many Mexicans?” “Remember Chewbacca again?” “Remember when marriage was just between a man and a woman?”

Chabon’s nostalgia isn’t the “stuff” of regurgitation – it’s the actual connection to a thing or a place or a person. I don’t want Battle Armor He-Man in my life any more than the next fellow who doesn’t even know He-Man came in variant featuring a breast plate that spun upon contact and displayed varying degrees of chinked armor. I’m nostalgic for the feeling I first had when I made Beastman punch the living daylights out of He-Man and that flimsy hunk of plastic rotated to display armor dents and OH MY GOD THAT’S MAGIC!

We found wonder and magic everywhere when we were kids, from the most mundane events (You mean I can send in six box tops from my Mini-Wheats plus $1 and I’ll get a Bad Company cassette single in return?!?) to the truly remarkable, like gazing up a full-size skeleton of a Tyrannosaurs Rex and coming to terms with our puny, insignificant lot in time and space.

Here’s what I find to be the most interesting part of embracing nostalgia – we don’t have to have experienced something to be nostalgic for it. Each ping of nostalgia is a tiny trip back into the past to experience or relive something that cannot currently be.

My wife and I have developed an attachment to Horn & Hardat automats. The walk-in, self-serving vending machine/dining room popped up in New York and Philadelphia starting around 1902 and disappeared completely in 1991. We’ve never set foot inside one, but we’ve romanticized the idea of the automat. We cannot relive what it felt like to receive freshly cooked meal components through mail slots, but we can imagine, and maybe we were just born in the wrong era? But then again, I’ve never fancied myself confident enough in my prowess to call myself the greatest anything, let alone the greatest generation. That’s just not Gen X’s strongest trait. Orienting one’s own existence within time and space in relation to the heyday of the automat seems mildly shortsighted.

Due to the wealth of culture, information and programming at our fingertips in a connected world, we have the ability to conflate our documented history into a finite window. Our learned nostalgia for these connections before our time, the ones we could not possible experience firsthand, cannot hold up emotionally against the active connections we make with the people and places and things of our childhood. These resonate most deeply.

Nostalgia’s not a dirty word. Nostalgia can save the world by giving people a perceived place of order and familiarity among chaos. These feelings of loss inspire us to tell stories without irony. They inspire novels and movies and all kinds of earnest longing for disappearing culture. Each subsequent generation needs a tether to the past, else they’ll only understand or know the world immediately around them. Nostalgia, in this respect, forms an identity, which in turn fosters a generational community. Our parents walked up hill both ways. We watched R-rated movies, unsupervised, at the age of 7 because who was around to stop us from watching Beverly Hills Cop? Or the other five hours of afterschool game shows and soap operas that kept us latch-key kids company?

Now, returning to Hot to Trot — what insane studio executive allowed such a movie to happen? And better yet, why do I feel a fondness for it?

An idiot son played by Bobcat Goldthwait inherits half a brokerage and a talking horse, much to the dismay of his heinous, bucktoothed stepfather (classic 80’s jerk, misogynist, antagonist Dabney Coleman). The talking horse gives the idiot son stock tips. Idiot son gets rich. Horse tells idiot son to buy stock in a company that produces orgasmic oats. It turns out the oats are contaminated and the company goes bankrupt. Idiot son abandons his half of the brokerage. In order to get back in the red, the idiot son decides to race the talking horse. To be clear – horse racing has never been a part of this movie, except for the passing mention that Dabney Coleman owns racehorses. Idiot son then bets his horse against Dabney Coleman’s horse and all his other horses. So even if he wins the race, what does he have? Not money. Not the brokerage. He has more horses.

Love or hate the 1980s, here’s the best example for both sides of the argument: Hot to Trot felt like just another day at the movies and not something completely insane. It’s Francis the Talking Mule meets The Secret of My Success meets the Marx Brothers’ A Day at the Races starring Bobcat Goldthwait. A completely unnatural film cocktail that should have been shot down immediately by any kind of studio exec who wasn’t completely addicted to cocaine. But they were, so we get Hot to Trot.

I’d like to point out that the budget for Hot to Trot exceeded $9 million. This movie includes original music from Danny Elfman. It also involves the cost of a total reworking and re-recording of the horse’s dialogue. Originally voiced by Elliott Gould, test screenings found the film lacking in laughs so Warner Bros. hired Saturday Night Live writer Andy Breckman to punch up the dialogue and John Candy to be the new voice of the horse. Candy discarded the dialogue and improvised his lines anyway. This explains quite a bit, but the fact remains that Hot to Trot was never going to recoup its budget. Would you like me to name some contemporaneous films that cost less than $9 million to make?

Look Who’s Talking cost $7.5million and made close to $140 million at the domestic box office. Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure? $6.5 million. Heathers? $3 million. I’m not out to shame Hot to Trot, because I enjoy what it represents. A rather large sum of money spent on a movie of no consequence and low box office expectations. Raiders of the Lost Ark only cost two Hot to Trots. Two.

During the 1980s studios took bigger risks on smaller movies.  Some of them, like Hot to Trot were wildly irresponsible gambles, but the point is that they took them. They invested in wildly creative ideas and star power and less on brands. (That was just around the corner.) To put this in greater perspective with our current era of moviemaking, all of the top 20 grossing movies of the 2010s are a remake, a sequel or part of a planned franchise. Every single one. Only six of the top grossing films from the 1980s were a sequel, remake or part of an established franchise and four of those six belonged to the original Star Wars trilogy or Indiana Jones. (I’m not counting Tim Burton’s Batman as a franchise entry. Despite the comic book origins, sequels were not planned and the character had been dormant for 30 years. Few expected its massive success, but I’ll get back to Batman in a couple of chapters.)

A surefire way to induce cerebral hemorrhage – play ‘guess which certifiable classic films wouldn’t be made today under the modern studio system’? Nobody greenlights Ghostbusters – a $30 million movie about eccentric paranormal experts. Back to Future’s future would have been in jeopardy. The alternate timeline: $20 million dollar original idea from Robert Zemeckis whose only prior box office success had been Romancing the Stone – another original concept that probably doesn’t get made in the 21st Century – gets thrown into the reject bin because it’s too expensive for upstarts Netflix and Amazon and not bankable enough for $50 million of Universal’s money. Just consider how many of your favorite movies they’re just not making. (I’ll give you a clue: it’s all of them. They’re not making any of your favorite movies.)

I’ve focused on the massive juggernaut hits because these names resonate. Considering that we might live in a world without Back to the Future or Ghostbusters stirs emotions, but it’s exactly these types of successes that created the blockbuster culture in which we live. The downside to tasting this kind of success means that studios want their tentpoles to make $300 million dollars at the domestic box office, not including the international ticket sales and merchandising which skews most heavily to these bankable action and comic book franchises. Instead of stepping up to a roulette wheel with a bunch of small- to medium-sized bets, studios place two bets on each spin: $100million on red and $100million on black.

It’s easy to forget that every single original idea comes with risk. Now studios want the reward without the risk.

Back in 2010, Dave Itzkoff interviewed Mad Men creator Matthew Wiener in the New York Times about contemporary media culture, “It’s a bummer to see movie after movie where so many talented people get together and so much money is spent, and they’re just bland, lifeless, familiar, fake. I’m not a superhero, it’s not one of my interests. It’s O.K. for it be a fraction of the entertainment that’s out there, but it can’t be everything… something happened that nobody can make a movie between $500,000 and $80 million. That can’t be possible.”

The greatest casualty of this kind of tentpole filmmaking becomes the mid-budget, mid-aspiration adult-oriented cinema. Dramas, dark or R-rated comedies, offbeat thrillers, adventure films – things that can’t be sold to the average moviegoer in 10 seconds or less. Francis Ford Coppola made four of the best films in cinema history and he can’t get a movie financed. His last movies, made in 2007 and 2011 were financed by his wine business. It’s not just that bottom line cost of making the film, however, that provides the sticking point for movie studios – it’s the promotion, which even for tentpole productions of which everyone is aware sometimes costs 50% of the production budget. It just costs more to promote a movie that’s not already a brand[2].

In 1997, The New York Times ran an article based on industry hysteria that the cost of the average Hollywood movie had risen to $60million. Sherry Lansing, chairman of the Paramount Motion Picture Group said, “I’m horrified at these numbers. They don’t make sense. We’re killing ourselves[3].” (In 2007, by comparison, the average movie cost $106.6 million.) Despite this forgotten panic, take a look at a snapshot of the top grossing films of 1999. Only Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace and Toy Story 2 were reboots or sequels. Theatrical audiences were treated to (quality debatable) original thrillers (The Sixth Sense), original adult comedies (Runaway Bride, Big Daddy), science fiction (The Matrix), and horror (The Blair Witch Project). There was also Universal’s re-imagining of The Mummy, which recast the hero of the story as an Indiana Jones-type and turned the old horror classic into a matinee-idol adventure film.

Looking specifically at the early months of 1989, The ‘burbs, Kickboxer, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, and Major League stand out as well-regarded projects that wouldn’t have been made. All of which were mid-budget entertainment intended for adults; original R-rated comedies, expensive flights of fancy, and martial arts spectacles. Argue all you want about the merits of the individual films; my point is, however, that many people really like these movies and continue to value their existence.

As a slice of the available Hollywood offerings in the late 1980s, they represent the width and breadth of the ideas that studios were willing to bankroll. They represent risk. The modest success or minor failures of these films seemed like acceptable returns. You win some you lose some – but the studios would come to view each modest success as a failure and each minor failure as an unacceptable loss. In the new success or failure infographic, Hot to Trot would have been filed next to the instructions for hara-kiri.

The process hasn’t changed. Not really. What’s changed is ownership. Starting in 1989, massive conglomerates began adding movie studios to their faceless, corporate entities. Instead of David O. Selznick, filmmakers have to answer to the board of Comcast. They’re minor cogs in a massive moneymaking machine. It’s not worth doing unless you’re talking Scrooge McDuck money.

Consider the “great” movies we’ll pass along to our kids or future generations. I know I’m biased due to the years during which I came of moviewatching age but I can’t think of more than a handful of post-2000 films I wanted to share with my daughters, but I couldn’t wait to put Back to the Future in front of them. Objectively great movies come from all eras of moviemaking, but let’s face the facts here – the most pure escapist fun happened in the 1980s.

Once upon a time, movies captured the hearts and minds of entire cultures and didn’t rely on formula and familiarity. How else can you explain a film staying at #1 for consecutive months (not weeks!) as in the case of Ghostbusters or Beverly Hills Cop or Raiders of the Lost Ark? I had the opportunity to see these movies four or five times over the course of a theatrical release. Of course, there’s that aforementioned home video release window I discussed earlier, which would decrease box office longevity in short order, but that’s exactly why 1989 stands out among its surrounding years. Not only did 1989 showcase both the spark of creativity that drove invention during the 1980’s, but it’s also the last gasp of theatrical box office longevity before the gap between theatrical release and purchase for home consumption narrows significantly. It also served as a harbinger for the future of the Hollywood box office with four sequels in the Top 10 domestic receipts. In as much as we can subjectively declare 1989 to be the best of all Hollywood summers, it’s important to acknowledge that it also, in many ways, represented the beginning of the end for the mid-budget blockbuster. The big studio rollercoaster paused at the apex and then inched down the decline before a final, wild ride to the finish.


[1] https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-true-meaning-of-nostalgia

[2] http://flavorwire.com/492985/how-the-death-of-mid-budget-cinema-left-a-generation-of-iconic-filmmakers-mia/2

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/05/movies/average-hollywood-film-now-costs-60-million.html