The Great Hamilton Film Book Expedition

Before the internet came along, a film enthusiast had to learn more about cinema via books. And for a film enthusiast in a small town, the choices were often marginal. The local book store mainly stocked the annual reference guides of Leonard Maltin and Steven Scheuer. The “film” sections in the public and school libraries largely consisted of star bios, and glossy coffee table overviews with little context. As for collections of film criticism, there was one volume each by Pauline Kael and Stanley Kaufmann. Even so, thanks to this small reservoir and through combing titles in video stores and TV Guide, I had learned quite a bit about film- enough to impress women at cocktail parties maybe, but still I hungered for more knowledge. You don’t know what you’re missing if you don’t know what to look for.

One day in Grade 13, a step was made to change that. This was a sunny Friday in November. School was closed that day for students as it was the teachers’ Professional Development Day. Early in the morning, I hopped into the Dodge Colt for a little professional development of my own: by hunting for film books in downtown Hamilton. 

This was during that pivotal year where I returned to high school at age 20 and took a full Grade 13 course load to upgrade my average, and gather whatever experience I could towards that single-minded goal of getting into film school the following year. During those ten months, I also buffered my portfolio with two plays (one went as far as the semi-finals in the Sears Drama Festival) and most importantly, the feature-length dramatic video, The Broken Circle, which I wrote and directed.  

As far as I was concerned, any school assignment or extra-curricular activity could be a stepping stone to that goal. For instance, whenever I could get away with it, I’d make any English creative writing assignment film-related. My big oral presentation in French class was about French cinema history. And during my spare time (what there was of it, with all of this going on, plus full-time shift work to pay the bills), I would read to learn more about what other films were out there, that I wasn’t able to see… yet.

My first stop was Limeridge Mall. I started the day’s pick with the current editions of Roger Ebert’s reviews and the Mick Martin-Marsha Porter video guide. The Martin-Porter book differed from the other paperback-sized reference books in the day, as in the back, they also published filmographies of actors, writers and directors. (Maltin would start doing that a few years later, although not as comprehensively.) Further, at one of the several record stores, I had bought Tangerine Dream’s three latest albums: Optical Race, Tyger, and Livemiles. These cassettes would play incessantly in the car, at home, and during nights spent at the print shop. They became the soundtrack to my life that year, and fuelled a lot of my creativity. (One piece from Livemiles would be used in the movie.)

After hitting up the stores and having lunch there, I went down the escarpment to McMaster University’s book store. There, I found some more works which would be well-thumbed for years to come. 

Perhaps the most important find at Mac was Rick Schmidt’s Feature Filmmaking at Used-Car Prices. The timing was perfect for acquiring this book, because in November I was already planning The Broken Circle, which would commence shooting the following February. Schmidt’s book has been since updated for changing times (Extreme DV at Used-Car Prices), and for my money remains the single greatest general-purpose guide an aspiring filmmaker can have. 

A few chapters exceeded my requirements (ie- distribution, or building my own cutting suite, since I was editing on video at the community cable station), but the book’s general tone was influential. It filled you with “gung ho” inspiration about making your little masterpiece, yet it offered a realistic look at the obstacles you’d face on the way. (At the very least, you had to sacrifice such valuable things as time, job or extra-cirricular commitments, and relationships, if the project meant enough to you.) Mr. Schmidt’s volume was immeasurable for this first-time movie maker, and would also be read cover to cover while preparing any of my subsequent cinematic “epics” over the next ten years.

Further historical research would also be found in Georges Sadoul’s twin volumes, Dictionary of Films, and Dictionary of Film-Makers. They were only current up to 1971, but they became immeasurable resources, especially for world cinema. In those days, I could largely only see foreign films on TVO or the French channel (hopefully they had French subtitles that I could read). These books introduced such masterpieces as Ermanno Olmi’s Il Posto, or Renoir’s The Little Match Girl. 

Even at that young age, all movies mattered to me. If the Sadoul books at Mac satisfied my passion for art-house film, my hunger for grindhouse cinema was satisfied with a trip down to the much-missed Silver Snail on King Street. At last, I managed to get my hands on a copy of Michael Weldon’s classic Psychotronic Encyclopedia Of Film. This  remains one of the true bibles for cult cinema, with its copious capsule reviews of fantasy, biker, rock-n-roll and JD movies.  I’ve always happily lent out books to anyone who was interested, but I put a “no lending” clause on Weldon’s. I simply was using it too often (and it was literally falling apart from overuse).

The last leg of the Hamilton tour was off-topic, but no less memorable. Before leaving town, I cased the used book stores on King Street, including a second-hand shop on the south side (now long gone) which was run by an elderly couple. A lasting memory of my several trips to that store was that behind the counter, sat a rocking chair next to a floor lamp. My last purchase in Hamilton was here: a whopping one dollar for a copy of a Star Wars comic book (issue #18).  The man behind the counter was shaky, frail, and took a long time ringing in the one-dollar sale. This filled me with melancholy on the way back to the car, and in the journey westward as I drove toward the fading horizon line, listening to Tangerine Dream’s Tyger on the tape deck. Already Tangerine Dream was creating cinematic moments in my head. I can’t listen to “Alchemy of the Heart” on that album without thinking of that man.

The spree wasn’t done yet, in theory.  It was a Friday night, and there were still a couple of hours more to shop. On the way home, I made a pit stop in The Telephone City to visit an old haunt, The Brantford Bookworm. Memory causes me to believe that I left the store empty-handed this time, but I do recall sitting in the parking lot, still thumbing through the Weldon book, with the dim outside light dimly providing the only illumination for the car interior. (I guess I couldn’t wait to get home to read!)

I spent many years paying for this one amazing year (both financially and psychologically). One of the misgivings I now have about those nonetheless incredible ten months, is that I should have saved more money. (Of course working all kinds of weirdo hours, seldom being home, and eating out all the time sure didn’t help.) However, this Friday excursion was one frivolous expenditure I still do not regret. These texts would prove invaluable to me this year and beyond. They’re still here, sitting in the shelf to my left as I type this. 

Thoughts of Late Night TV While Thinking of Gerry Rafferty

Music conjures images in our minds; songs are road maps to our private caches of memories.  When we hear a cherished tune, we instantly recall the time we first heard it, or a time and place with which that piece is most synonymous with our individual experience. Thus, the opening sax riff on Gerry Rafferty's hit 70's song "Baker Street" will always conjure for me the beginning moments of the all-night show "The Cat's Pajamas", as that familiar instrumental intro was heard while a camera panned the blue night cityscape of Buffalo New York.  Gerry Rafferty was formerly in Stealers Wheel, who made the AM radio chestnut "Stuck in the Middle With You", before doing his own well-received LP's, which gave us the hit singles "Right Down The Line" and of course, "Baker Street".  Upon hearing of his passing this week at the age of 63, once again, the familiar strains of the latter song echoed in my mind, as did the comfortable images of those nights I often spent with Barry and the gang on "The Cat's Pajamas".

When I began publishing The Eclectic Screening Room in 2001, it was a deliberate choice for the very first article in the very first issue to reminisce about the bygone days of "The Cat's Pajamas" and the late night movie experience in general.  Since we're once again reminiscing about this show, I only thought it appropriate to reprint that piece for the interweb.  Here it is (slightly updated):

God, I miss The Cat’s Pajamas.

Film fanatics 30-plus years of age living in a city or town probably had access to at least one late show host. Back in the days when watching the tube after midnight didn’t mean sitting through incessant infomercials for exercise machines and salad spinners, instead you had some guy introducing the 12:30 AM broadcast of It Came From Pluto. And maybe in order to pay for the plumbing at the station, he unabashedly plugged a nearby pizzeria, whose staff hoped that their cheap advertising would reap revenue from orders by the stoned-out teenagers with the munchies who were watching because they had already seen the episode of "Tales from the Darkside" on Channel 12.

Every metropolitan centre big or small had some local celebrity who flirted with the cathode ray tube- maybe you saw this guy at some hardware store’s grand opening at a shopping plaza. He wasn’t some packaged-up host like the syndicated pre-sold musings of Zacherly or Elvira- he was a real human being, someone who was talking to you that minute from across town or the nearby metropolis. He seemed to be in the same room that you were- the congenial face in the box was a rare stranger that you allowed in your home on regular intervals. You may never know this person in the flesh, but night after night it was comforting to know that they were on the opposite end of the transmission, sharing this moment with you. My late-night movie watching experience of this nature begins and ends with Barry Lillis, the host of "The Cat's Pajamas", which ran in the mid-to-late 1980s on WGRZ-TV, Buffalo's NBC affiliate.

Well after Johnny Carson said good night, one would just be able to put a ham and cheese bun in the oven before sitting down to see a camera pan of the blue snowy city with the opening sax solo on "Baker Street", which was the call to form. Barry (also TV 2’s veteran weatherman) would appear as the affable host, introducing the old movies and TV shows. In between reels, he would also plug Mike’s Subs for the hungry insomniacs, and then another gentleman would pop up with a news brief about an accident down on Main Street. Then a still of slumbering cats perched in a crescent moon would appear as "Journey of the Sorceror" or Steely Dan’s version of "East St.Louis Toodle-oo" played. Then we were transported back to the show. Sometimes even the odd newsreel or serial chapter would pop up unannounced to fill some airtime before they began the morning daypart. With such a busy programming schedule, it was little wonder that a 73-minute TV-movie (remember when TV-movies used to be this long? used to be good?) would actually fill a two-hour timeslot. Of course, the impromptu scheduling was time-approximate anyway, but to ensure that all of their intended entertainment did unveil, the second feature would likely be shown without commercials.

ABOVE: Barry Lillis

Friday and Saturday nights were the busiest of all- in between the standard plugs for Mike’s Subs, as well as giveaways (one time the love scene early in The Hustler was given a Brechtian notion when a subtitled appeared: "We have our winner- please hold your calls"!) and reading fan mail (yes!) sometimes the movies were secondary. One busy Friday night, the 74-minute It's a Gift took up two-and-a-half-hours! Nonetheless, they followed with Million Dollar Legs... uninterrupted (although sometimes the Cat’s Pajamas logo would appear if there was a delay in changing reels). This loose scheduling would drive prime-time programmers mad. Truthfully, this kind of practice on The Cat’s Pajamas was not at all upsetting. Usually, the movie you were watching was just another facet of the entire package. The point is, to all of those insomniacs, lonely people, babysitters, janitors and security guards, this show was a nightlight with a lot of warmth. These people were our friends!

Early in 1986, Barry turned the reins over to Randi Naughton, a ravishing brunette who would have "Randi’s Pajama Party" on Friday nights, and, like her mentor, would read fan mail (often from Ace & Rob- forerunners of Wayne & Garth), hawk Mike’s Subs and have contests. However, the other six nights had become host-less. The programming, nonetheless, did not change. Theme nights started; Mondays showed kung fu flicks, and Sunday night was science fiction-horror night. Each night, the festivities started with a cartoon still of a cat dressed as Dracula or Indiana Jones (or whatever was relevant), married to a cheery voice-over (announcing the theme of the evening):

"Welcome to The Cat’s Pajamas, the all-night show on TV 2! Sit back and relax with your favourite movies and old time TV shows! Each night of the week, it’s a different theme! And tonight, it’s...
SCIENCE FICTION HORROR NIGHT!"

Then in 1987, the weeknight programming would consist of an old television show, followed by only one movie at 3 AM (broadcast without commercials, or at least the famous default: showing "Cat’s Pajamas" bumpers while reels changed). Soon even Randi would disappear from the Friday night line-up, and then the writing shouted from the wall. In the fall of 1989, Chamber of Horrors was shown on the Friday of Labour Day weekend, and it was all over. After that... infomercials!

The same instance when I moved away to university, the Cat’s Pajamas became a soft-focus memory. Symbolic, maybe; poetic, perhaps; but certainly this affair ended with an irony for which most Hollywood screenplays starve. It’s another way in which life reminds us that nothing is permanent except for memories. Barry even stopped being the weatherman (in 1997) and went on to be a respectable voice in the community with his co-founded Kids Escaping Drugs campaigns (one had seen advertisements of this very thing in between his on-air plugs for submarines), and most significantly, becoming an ordained minister in Niagara Falls! The Cats Pajamas is probably something he would prefer to leave behind.

It may sound like mush to be whining about a late-night show of yesteryear when -even though infomercials do persist on many stations- Showcase, Bravo and specialty stations still show movies in the wee hours. But it doesn’t take long to see how often they recycle their programming. The worst offender of this of course is the A&E 4 o’clock movie- just how many times does one need to see The Angel and The Badman (one of John Wayne’s lowlights)? Even so, all of this programming misses the point. Where is the spontaneity? Where is the voice from the other end of transmission?

The Cat's Pajamas provided a good history of non-silent, non-subtitled cinema seven nights a week: it was as likely to find Penny Serenade as it was When Tae-Kwon-Do Strikes. Besides the communal warmth, another appeal of The Cat’s Pajamas was the wealth of nostalgia for any persuasion: Cary Grant in Room For One More, a trio of Vincent Price movies on Halloween night, It's A Wonderful Life after "Saturday Night Live", almost complete catalogs of movie series with Blondie, Charlie Chan, Bomba The Jungle Boy and Abbott & Costello; W.C. Fields addressing the ball, Ice Castles, David Janssen TV series, The Rose, Mario Bava movies, a 1944 newsreel showing how the Allies are doing, early-70’s made-for-TV thrillers with Cloris Leachman, John Wayne B-Westerns, kung fu flicks with Bruce Li, Bruce Le, etc., "Our Gang" shorts, Papillon, a chapter from a 1932 serial with Bela Lugosi’s name way down in the credits...

It at least felt like Barry and the gang were in my living room sharing memories over the nostalgia on the air. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t being shown Gone With The Wind. I would just as easily see an equally worthy gem as a diverting turkey. Yet I was witness to artifacts of other parts of cine-culture which are still vital to history, if we are not to believe the faceless specialty channel’s doctrine that cinema began in 1985,. But where are these titles now? It’s like the mournful melody of Don Henley’s song "The End of the Innocence" (which coincidentally was popular during the time of The Pajama’s final sigh), like the 30-year-old former dragstrip king driving his old car down Main Street seeing the empty buildings- catacombs of what used to be his youth. Did we outgrow those flickering images? Are they not important anymore?

Today, surrogate companionship is more prevalent than ever, but now it's with laptops and Youtube. In an age of computer video games, downloading from the Internet, seeing Anthony Robbins with the same suit every night, and getting voicemail instead of a live person on the phone, it is no wonder we’re becoming just as impersonal as a machine. But at least I can remember a genuine feeling of community- knowing that I was sharing something with an actual human being on the other side of the screen.

The film has ended. On screen, TV-2 emits a cartoonish-still of a sun rising behind tall buildings. They’ve put it to music by something from George Benson’s “Breezin’” LP. Turn your head. Through the crevice between the drapes the ashen sky is now magenta. Communion has ended. The 325-lined sunrise has transported you back to a physical one. Take your fuzzy slippers off the footstool. Throw the aluminum foil in the trash. Go to bed. Dream.

Thanks, Barry. You were a true friend.

MAGIC AND LOSS: Goodbye to the Uh-Ohs.

What exactly did we call this previous decade? The 2000's? The zero-zeros? The double O's? The O-Os? Well, considering the simpletons in power for most of the time, and the fear in which we commonly live, I'd prefer to call it the uh-ohs. And as we wave our handkerchiefs to these past ten years, while we usher in a new decade, I'd prefer not to eulogize them with any kind of "best of" lists which seem to be the recent trends in the blogosphere and beyond, but rather I'd like to do a "before and after" kind of test. ESR has been in existence for almost the entire decade- indeed it was early 2001 when I finally became serious about doing the publication after spending much time in the backburners of my mind. And in many cases, the changes in lifestyle and technology have occurred alongside its publication.

Movie watching in general has changed dramatically. In the analog past, I would steal time on the weekends in front of our wonky two-head VCR. Now, being able to watch a film has never become more convenient. I no longer need to stake a flag in front of the TV to watch something perhaps only of interest to one in our household. With the birth of the portable DVD player (which I still take everywhere with me), and even with an iPod, I can fill those hours of downtime (usually in transit) by getting caught up on research. However, because a one-way commute seldom lasts as long as a feature, I'm given to watching films in fragments, rather than enjoying them in a complete session like I always did.

Over the past few years, we've also seen a dramatic dip in public movie theatre attendance. The reasons for this are numerous: inflating costs to have a night out; earlier street dates of DVD releases prompt people to wait to see it on video; and of course, Hollywood would like to blame it on piracy, but the majority of the generic crap they put out these days hardly warrants a night out (let alone a top ten list). Locally, we lost a lot of our bragging rights four years ago when our repertory cinema chain closed. And even though a couple of those theaters re-opened, albeit singly, it was the end of that era. However, in comparison, my theatrical moviegoing has not changed. Ironically, it is more prevalent than ever, once one includes attendance at such independent venues as Trash Palace or The Loop Collective. If anything, the widespread jeopardization of the theatrical experience has only enforced my desire to support non-mainstream venues from not having a similar fate.

And it wasn't until the year 2000 that I even had a computer at home. Prior to receiving that Mac 2SI with a whopping 68 megabytes of hard-drive space, I still wrote everything longhand, and today can barely write a legible sentence upon spending untold hours pecking away at a keyboard. And rather than store back issues of ESR on a pile of 1.4 MB floppies, now I can carry the entire series (and more) on a USB key! Yes, technology has improved- Alvin Toffler was right in his "smaller is better" prophecy.

With YouTube, torrents and other digital advances, any information we seek can instantly become available to us, but in the meantime, we've lost that feeling of discovery and accomplishment after spending so much time researching or uncovering something in the analog years. We've never had it so good, but we've forgotten what it's like to enjoy it. Ten years ago, I used to travel with -wait for it- a walkman that played cassettes! And now instead of carrying around a few tapes, we can put several days' worth of music onto an iPod. And of course, such a volume of choice perhaps decreases our patience, allowing us to flip to something else on a whim. With each new advance, some tradition obviously becomes replaced, but in this ever-increasing age of gentrification, we are in fear of becoming as mechanical as the gadgets we cling to.

The older we get, we creatures of habit become nostalgic for a way of life that has passed us by, and it seems with each year we lament over something else that has left us. In 2009, I was rather saddened to hear that my old stomping grounds Centre For The Arts has moved to a new location, and because of those circumstances, no longer rents space. Admittedly, in the past, I bemoaned the poor attendance of many screenings I held there, and stopped renting the space for shows once I was recruited to Trash Palace. And although it was no longer economically feasible for me to do other shows there, I missed the "film club" aspect that developed among the regular attendees, who sadly did not migrate with me to Trash Palace. But for all that, I sincerely miss those days- loved the centre's cozy environment and creative vibe. "Beatnik Movie Night".... sigh.....

Earlier in the year, I attended this big sale by The Toronto Film Society, which was unloading his impressive library of books, magazines, press kits, etc. And the Saturday morning our friend David and I spent was truly a moment of discovery. While I'm happy that I managed to buy a gym bag's worth of books, magazines and videos for a mere twenty bucks (including, be still my heart, two of the old annual program guides for Elwy's Saturday Night At The Movies), I was also saddened, because it meant the end of an era.

Retrospectively, I am reminded of a passage in Larry McMurtry's book, Walter Benjamin At The Dairy Queen, which I read this summer, where upon visiting an archive of old books, he truthfully laments that most of them will never be read again. Once I revisit some of these old ephemeral newsletters or heady magazines from the 1950's, I share his thoughts about how these pages stand for something that will only be resigned to shelf space in some private collection. Over the summer, we had gotten whispers of a film inventory sale previously owned by the late owner of The Nostalgic Cinema. And although someone else beat us to the punch and we turned away empty handed, this experience was another reminder that we can't go home again.

Memories, pages, and flickering movie images all become emblematic of the past that is otherwise unattainable to us. As we usher in a new decade, with an ever-changing way of life, we still can uphold our histories.

Where Were You on April 7th?

2009 marks a silver anniversary of sorts. It was 25 years ago, where yours truly had officially proclaimed cinema as his primary interest. As superfluous as it may sound, it was indeed January 1, 1984 where I began wearing my newfound devotion on my sleeve, commencing with logging in notebooks every movie I had seen from that date forward. In a series of Hilroy 3-ring workbooks, I would devote one line per film: its title, year of release, rating, and primary leads, all preceded by date said film was viewed... and I was adamant about using only one line per title. So on July 21 1985, when I jotted down Who is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?, I hardly had room to fit Dustin Hoffman.

This practice was kept continuously up until some time in 1999. It is a routine I wish I still kept. Not only was writing down the title a good way to commit to memory what one has seen, but more importantly, these pages turned into a veritable diary. Over the years I had always meant to write diaries, but thank my lucky stars I didn't, for fear of them being read by others and a greater dread of reading back about whatever now-trivial problems I would have whined about in those pages all those years ago. Instead, these movie entries act as a surrogate diary, made only accessible to me, just like one should be. Each line acts as a hitching posts to a more vivid memory. Leafing back through these pages for the first time in years, it easy to recall what was going in my life at the time I had viewed whatever film. For example, a 1987 entry for a Saturday afternoon viewing of The King of Marvin Gardens helped me remember that that was the day I was caught in a flash rainstorm earlier that day while driving on Highway 3, and developed an ear infection. Okay, not a pleasant thing to remember, but you get the idea.

Since 2007, I have been writing titles of films I had viewed down in the bottom line of each day in my planner, but still have to prod myself to remember to do it. But when I flip through these old notebooks, it is interesting to see the different patterns of my viewing experiences, based upon what was made available at the time. For example, one cluster of lines would have a lot of titles I would have viewed while "Six Gun Heroes" was still on WQLN, or on CBC Saturday morning, and of course, those many entries made possible by the rich programming of "The Cat's Pajamas" on TV-2. And naturally, these thin workbooks indirectly chronicle my progression from aimless teenager to a twentysomething existentialist, from university to college, from being friendless and single to being in love... quite the epic graduation from teenage misfit to, well, adult misfit.

Let's see now, April 7....
1984: San Francisco / In Old Chicago / Stalag 17
1985: The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
1986: Grand Hotel
1987: Kentucky Fried Movie / Now Voyager
1989: Bloodsucking Freaks / Maxiumum Overdrive
1990: W.C. Fields shorts / The Snake Pit / Hangover Square / Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism / The Perils of Pauline
1991: Hellzapoppin
1995: A Child is Waiting
1996: The Ten Commandments
1997: Unhook the Stars