Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies (and why we don't learn them from movies any more) (33 page)

‘This’ was Amazon Prime, Amazon’s streaming service which makes original films, and, through them, Soloway made the critical smash hit series
Transparent
, starring Jeffrey Tambor as a transgender father. ‘They don’t need everybody to watch something, so I can make something that’s very niche-specific, something for women, Jews, intellectuals, queers, not necessarily heterosexual white middle-class men,’ says Soloway.

The way Soloway sees it, the American entertainment business is now divided in two: ‘There’s old Hollywood, that’s owned by traditional corporations. There are your Time Warners and your Viacoms, and all of these organisations where you have the feeling that the people in charge of the decisions are being made on the golf course by old, white golf-y men. Then you look up to the north in Silicon Valley and you think the people in charge of these companies have probably all been to Burning Man and maybe aren’t so good at golf, but are people of a different generation and are able to see without waiting for their ratings and testing results, because they use their instincts.’

Whether or not people at HBO have been to Burning Man, it is clear that TV has become the place for filmmakers and actors who want to tell interesting stories. It is also far more welcoming to women than movies. So many of the actresses who triumphed in film in the eighties, after finding that forty years old was still considered the sell-by date for women by Hollywood studios, have increasingly moved over to TV: Jessica Lange, Kathy Bates, Glenn Close, Sally Field.

‘I remember I was in bed, online, watching Twitter and Facebook blow up when
Orange
is the New Black
started, and watching the critical reviews come in,’ says Soloway. ‘Here was a show featuring ten women in prison and the only guy was the villain. There was nobody mediating the experience of whether the women were pleasing to men. That felt like such a change.’

‘Actors are running now to content,’ says Jeffrey Tambor, the star of
Transparent
. ‘Amazon Prime has Malcolm McDowell, Gael Garcia Bernal, John Goodman – they’re running over there because an actor will always go to a good script. The revolution is here now and those not paying attention will go to the dinosaur area. It used to be the agent saying, “If everything goes well [in TV] you’ll get a movie,” and they don’t say that any more – it’s flipped. And that’s the big surprise.’

This is great, of course. Maybe kids in two generations’ time will dress up for Halloween like Walt and Jesse the way adults today still don proton packs for fancy dress parties. But as great as those shows can be at giving depths to characters and layers to plot, there is also an argument to be made for concision over flabbiness, punchiness over pretension. My test of a great movie is to ask myself two questions:

1. Do I want to see this movie again right now?
   
2. Does it make me view the world a little bit differently?
   

The eighties movies I’ve mentioned in this book fulfil both those criteria and then some. I’ve watched every one so many times they have become part of my mental landscape. But it takes a person with more stamina than me to watch a fifty-hour drama as many times as my generation has watched
Back to the Future
, getting to know its every nook and cranny.

There is something to be said, too, for the collective experience of seeing a movie in a theatre with others, as opposed to watching it on your own on a tablet, tweeting to others, like a vision of dislocative solitude from a dystopian sci-fi novel. It is easy to get sentimental about the excitement of a movie (and alarmist about modern technology), and I’m afraid I’m a total sucker for stories about that.

‘I remember going to see
Ghostbusters
on opening night and it was like a rock concert on Long Island – the line went down the whole street!’ Judd Apatow recalls.

‘One of the great movie experiences of my life [was
48 Hours
],’ Bill Simmons writes.

We went on opening weekend in December (me, my mother, my stepfather and a friend) to the old Avon Theater in Stamford, Connecticut. The crowd couldn’t have been more jacked up – it was about 70 percent black and 100 percent pro-Eddie. If you remember, Eddie didn’t appear on-screen for the first 15 minutes. When he finally showed up (the scene when Nick Nolte’s character visits him in jail), there was an electricity within the theater unlike anything I can remember. People were hanging on every line, every joke, everything. At the end of the scene, when Nolte storms off and Eddie screams, ‘Jack! Jack! (Defiant pause.) FUCK YOU!,’ someone who had already caught a few showings stood up on cue and screamed ‘FUCK YOU!’ with Eddie. And it went from there. The scene when Eddie rousts the redneck bar practically caused a riot. Bullshit, you’re too fucking stupid to have a job. People were doubled over. People were cheering. I’ve never seen anything like it.

‘There’s that gag in
Coming to America
about the [black characters’] hair leaving a [grease] mark on the sofa,’ says John Landis. ‘If you saw the movie with a white audience, that scene got a little laugh – a scandalised laugh, but a laugh. But if you saw it with a black audience, they went crazy! It was terrific!’

These are collective experiences future generations simply won’t have because the kinds of movies that will make it to cinemas won’t inspire that same kind of love and excitement. It’s fun to talk about box set series on social media with friends and fellow fans, follow critics who live tweet the shows. But it’s not quite the same. What we’ve gained in fifty-hour dramas on prestige cable channels, we’ve lost in ninety minutes of pure pleasure in local cinemas.

But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from eighties movies, it’s that you should never end on a downer. And there is nothing to be down about! Even if there is never a Hollywood studio movie that affects people the way
Ghostbusters
or
Back to the Future
did, we still have all these wonderful, hilarious and deeply formative movies they made in the eighties that we can watch for ever. A friend asked when I started writing this book if I was worried that writing about eighties movies would make me sick of the subject. This was a fair question: after all, this friend had been to university with me and saw first-hand how studying for a degree in English Literature made me incapable of reading a novel if it wasn’t written by Jilly Cooper for three years after graduation. With apologies to my university tutors, the same has not happened with this book, which conclusively proves that
Coming to America
has more depths than
To the Lighthouse
. Indeed, writing this book has achieved what I heretofore would have thought was impossible: it has made me love these movies even more.

The man who is lucky enough to share a home with me spent nine months dwelling with a strange creature who lived in a tracksuit and was incapable of fitting conversation with him (or washing herself) into her busy schedule of watching about six hours of eighties films a day, only emerging to bark out some catchphrase from
Three Amigos!
at him (like I said, he is a lucky, lucky man). In fact, just typing ‘
Three Amigos!
’ has made me need to watch that movie again, so excuse me for a few minutes. (This, actually, was a very common problem in writing this book: every time I typed out a film’s title, I had to go watch the movie again, which explains why it ended up taking so long to write. Sorry, editor people, but such are the obvious risks when you commission me to write a book that entails the typing of words like ‘
Tootsie
’, ‘
Ghostbusters
’ and ‘
Moonstruck
’ repeatedly.)

In August 2014 I emerged from my tracksuited pit of unwashed eighties movie-watching long enough to get on a train to east London and go to an outdoor screening of
Back to the Future
, held by the company Secret Cinema. It was easy enough to find my way there from the station: I followed the hundreds and hundreds of groovy-looking twenty- and thirty-somethings all dressed like Marty McFly, Lorraine Baines, Biff Tannen and Dr Emmett Brown. The venue was mocked up to look like 1955 Hill Valley, replete with the Baines’ house, Hill Valley School and Lou’s Café. The wide-eyed adults wandered around delightedly, their faces split with excited smiles, thrilled by this Disneyland for sentimental adults. Actors played the parts of Doc and Marty, and spectators followed them around as excitedly as if they were, not just Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox, but actually Doc and Marty. People happily braved a spot of London summer rain for the joy of watching this movie, which they’d all seen at least a hundred times before, outside and with other fans.

My boyfriend and I went inside Hill Valley School, got yelled at by ‘Mr Strickland’, the school principal, and danced to the band at the Enchantment Under the Sea dance, who started playing ‘Earth Angel’ just as we arrived. I had come partly to observe the event for this book (and partly because, duh, of course I was going to go to this), and ended up being completely swept away by it. I looked around at all the other thirty-somethings around us, dancing on a drizzly London night, under the looming Westfield shopping mall building, with the same faraway look in their eyes that I had as we all imagined that we were Lorraine and George and would now be happy for ever and ever and I thought, Aha. Here you are, my people. You were around me all along.

The reason I – sorry, WE – love movies such as
Back to the Future
,
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
,
Trading Places
and
Ghostbusters
is because they are sweetly specific in their references and completely universal in their humour and stories, whether it be about parents, friendship or money, and that’s a key combination and one that won’t ever change. One question I did get asked a lot when writing this was why I like eighties movies so freaking much. The simplest answer is also the most honest: because they make me happy. I think – hell, I KNOW – they make other people happy, too. I hope this book has captured some of that.

Obviously, the only way to end this is with an eighties film quote and, when it comes to eighties films, you’re spoilt for choice for quotes. Originally I thought I might go for ‘I guess you guys aren’t ready for that yet – but your kids are gonna love it.’ But it didn’t really make sense (not that that has ever stopped me from using an eighties quote before). Then I considered some timeless life advice: ‘If someone asks if
you’re a god you say YES!’ But then I thought, The hell with it, let’s go for the obvious jugular here and use the quote that sums up the message of this book, which is that movies are changing and it’s easy not to notice it – with added Ferris: ‘Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.’

THE END

EIGHTIES MOVIES I DIDN’T LOOK AT PROPERLY IN THIS BOOK THAT YOU REALLY NEED IN YOUR LIFE

20
Weekend at Bernie’s

The second greatest Andrew McCarthy film, and that is high praise.

19
Little Shop of Horrors

Rick Moranis singing! Of course you want to see this.

18
The Blues Brothers

You probably haven’t seen this for a while. You should rectify that.

17
Spaceballs

Lone Star, Dark Helmet, Pizza the Hut – it’s a rare day that I don’t make some reference to
Spaceballs
, and it’s an even rarer day that someone recognises it.

16
Young Sherlock Holmes

A truly great teen adventure film and that it isn’t better known is definitive proof there is no God.

15
Desperately Seeking Susan

Feminism, fashion and Madonna.

14
Three Amigos!

The Singing Bush! The Invisible Horseman! This film has what its director John Landis calls ‘a real commitment to silliness’, and songs by Randy Newman to boot.

13
A Christmas Story

A Christmas film staple in every American home, and it should be in everyone’s home. Like
Radio Days
, but without the sentiment.

12
Parenthood

Cheesy? Yes. Conservative? Damn right. But it’s also really funny, really sweet and it’s got Jason Robards, Tom Hulce, Dianne Wiest, Martha Plimpton, Keanu Reeves, Rick Moranis, Steve Martin, Mary Steenburgen and Joaquin (then Leaf) Phoenix all being brilliant in it. Come on.

11
St Elmo’s Fire

It causes me physical pain that I haven’t written about
St Elmo’s Fire
in this book. Please ease that pain for me by promising to go and watch the film, OK?

10
The Flamingo Kid

A too little known Matt Dillon film, featuring Hector Elizondo as his father, and a truly classic 1960s soundtrack.

9
The Accidental Tourist

Not as good as the book, no – but how could it be? William Hurt was made for the part of Macon Leary, the sad, repressed writer.

8
The ’Burbs

Crazy and dark, in a great way. I miss funny Tom Hanks.

7
Stand By Me

It would be too sad to watch poor River Phoenix as a sweet little boy if this film wasn’t as great as it is.

6
Bull Durham

Yeah, I love eighties Costner, but he is acted off the screen here by a young Tim Robbins. A great funny and sexy sports film.

5
Troop Beverly Hills

A movie about Girl Scouts, shopping and the importance of shoulder pads. Shelley Long at her best.

4
Planes, Trains and Automobiles

After Molly Ringwald, John Candy became John Hughes’s film muse, and this is the pair at their finest.

3
Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure

Another movie to be discussed in depth in this book’s inevitable sequel.

2
Field of Dreams