One Person’s Art?

Recently in my various social-media feeds, I’ve been seeing celebrations of the 30th anniversary of that seminal piece of cinematic art, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

Really. Did you really think, back in 1989, that 30 years later we’d even REMEMBER that movie? Of course not. Yikes.

Funny you should mention that…

Thanks to the vagaries of the Dartmouth Plan — whereby students have to spend the summer after their sophomore year in school, meaning that a more traditional fall-winter-spring term would be open during their sophomore or junior years — I spent January to March of 1987 living and working in Los Angeles. My mother got me a job in the mail room of the now-defunct De Laurentiis Entertainment Group production company (and an awesome set-up living over the garage of a producer friend of hers who lived right on Sunset Boulevard…it was cush) and I spent every morning surfing in the Topanga area before driving to work for the day. It was a great way to spend the winter and I had a blast.

The job mostly entailed sending out one-sheets (aka: posters) and other advertising materials for the various films DEG had going at the time, coming up or in the recent past. And at at the time, DEG was in mixed territory. They’d had some hits — Blue Velvet, Crimes of the Heart — but they’d had a lot of misses — films starring people like Dirk Benedict, Steve Guttenberg and Shadoe Stevens (really). What was especially hilarious to me was that so many of the movies they were making at the time were obvious ripoffs (sorry…homages). They made The Bedroom Window which was an obvious stab at Hitchcock’s Rear Window, and Million Dollar Mystery was a bald-faced ripoff of It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (oh, but with the tie-in that a moviegoer could win the money). Yawn. And they wondered why there was still concern about the viability of the company…

But in the winter of 1987, everyone at DEG was excited about their upcoming film, the one that was going to cement the company as a force in Hollywood. It was called From The Hip and it starred — trumpet blast! — Judd Nelson. Yes, THAT Judd Nelson: the card-carrying Brat Pack member known mostly as Bender from The Breakfast Club. And that winter we all, even us lowly mail room folks (really just two of us: me and a guy named Brent, as I recall) got to attend the big premiere. When we emerged from that momentous event, everyone from the company stood around gushing about how great the movie was and how much they enjoyed it.

Me, I thought the film sucked from soup to nuts: the story, the acting, the directing, the sets…everything. It was awful. Just God awful. Opting for discretion (and to keep my job), I kept my mouth shut — though I did tell my mail room coworker the next day what I thought.

What’s funny about it — and here’s where we finally come full circle back to that magnum opus that set Keanu Reeves onto his path of success — is that at the same time all the muckety-mucks upstairs at DEG were so excited about From The Hip, they were also pooh-poohing another film that was coming up. That film? Evil Dead II.

That’s right: One of the biggest cult films of all time and a film that launched a thousand copy cats, and all the execs at DEG were tripping over themselves to show that thing  as much disdain as possible. I don’t like horror flicks, but it was a movie that anyone who didn’t live in the bubble of a Hollywood executive office could tell you was going to make money and be a success. No, I didn’t think it was going to become such a cult classic, but I knew it was going to be better than that piece of crap into which they’d put all their eggs. Meanwhile, the flick those schmucks thought was going to make their careers? Twenty-two percent on Rotten Tomatoes and a Worst Actor Razzie nomination for Nelson. And that is why DEG is no more.

But Evil Dead II wasn’t the only upcoming DEG film those DEG execs mocked. Another one they couldn’t be bothered with? You guessed it: Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

So here I am in 2109, seeing posts (okay, let’s be honest: they’re ads) for the next installment (30 years later) of a movie that was incubating at the Hollywood company I spent a winter working for in the mail room. And all I can think of is: I wonder what happened to Judd Nelson…and all those execs who should have known better?

Detour to the Past

After spending my birthday weekend back home at Plum Island, I drove back to Annapolis on Monday. Perhaps thanks to an overnight snowstorm (we had six inches or so on the island; 10 or so in town), traffic was light and I enjoyed one of the easier Newburyport-to-Annapolis drives I’ve ever had.

Given the quick time I was making, I opted to cross Connecticut on I-84 and then head south to Westchester County before crossing the Hudson River at the Tappan Zee Bridge. This monstrous engineering marvel was a prominent part of my youth and I wanted to see the new version that had opened recently.

And an impressive new marvel it is. If you’re at all into big projects, I encourage you to check this bridge out. Very, very cool.

Another reason for taking this detour was so I could once again swing through the old neighborhood in which I grew up. Yes, it’s true: a large chunk of my youth was spent in Orangeburg, N.Y., on the western shore of the Hudson and just south of the T.Z. Bridge.

My father had settled in the area after returning from World War II. At the time, it was known as Shanks Village, formerly Camp Shanks, through which he had both embarked for the European campaign and returned to the States. After graduating from Dartmouth, he went to Columbia Journalism School on the G.I. Bill and lived in Shanks Village with his first wife. Then he and a handful of other men in the area bought a bunch of land near Shanks Village at the base of Clausland Mountain, and that’s where they built the neighborhood where I spent the majority of the first 14 or so years of my life.

I drove up the hill I’d trudged up and down to and from the school bus for a lot of years and realized a few things. One, it really was a great sledding hill (back when the area had real winters). And two, the forest behind my house was a really great place to wander as a kid.

Anyway, I parked at the top of the hill (known to us as “The T”) and looked up at my old house — a house my father had built. It was the same shade of red, and it was surrounded by huge evergreens that had been Christmas trees that we then transplanted outside. One tree in particular was a good 70, 80 feet high, and I had helped plant it. That felt kinda cool.

And finally, the name on what had been our mailbox still says “Smith.” I don’t know if the the current residents share our all-too-common last name, but I thought it was pretty cool that in a neighborhood built by Gene Smith, along with the Gwilliams, the Thompsons, the Lunds, the Landreths, the Ulrichs and others, at least one original name remained.

On Impermanence

Christmas Day was a glorious day on Plum Island. A cloudless sky of powder blue, brisk northwest wind and chilly temperatures made it the consummate winter day in coastal northern New England. It was a perfect day for a walk on the beach.

While walking on the beach, I passed by a sand dune my family used to own. I still remember listening in on the phone call when I was 5 or 6 years old — it might be the oldest memory I have — when old Mr. Walton, the owner of the small hotel and cottages we used to rent each summer, called to tell my parents he was retiring and wanted to offer them the business. My parents, each of whom had successful careers going in New York City, were in no way going to become hoteliers on a decrepit little island in Massachusetts, but they were interested in the empty lot at the south end of Walton’s property.

Fast forward 40-plus years and there have been a lot of changes. Walton’s got sold to a couple named the Syrenes (I believe that’s how they spelled their names) who sold off the cottages and upgraded the hotel a bit. More in line with their probable motives for buying the place, they built themselves a huge house onto the south end of the hotel. Plum Island transformed over the years into a much more upscale place, with most of the cottages becoming big showpiece houses (a conflicting process, it must be admitted, my parents were one of the first to prompt) and the island itself becoming more of a destination.

The Syrenes later sold the hotel and the big-ass house to Jeanne Geiger and her husband (he of the Aeropostale brand and fortune). She was deep in the throes of her bid to remake Plum Island into some kind of “The Hamptons North,” so they turned the hotel into a boutique joint named “Blue,” complete with driveways full of those little blue, glass pebbles you put at the bottom of an aquarium, and bought damn near all of the other available commercial properties on the island.

Jeanne Geiger died in a tragic accident, I believe at the house, and over the ensuing years her husband sold off most, if not all, of their other properties on the island. The hotel went to a company in nearby Amesbury, Mass., that manages other high-end, boutique resorts in places like Cape Cod. Blue is now once again open for business and the prices are insane.

On the south side of the lot my parents bought was an asshole who over the years turned his house into some sort of suburban New Jersey mafioso’s home, complete with statuary, an all-encompassing lattice work surrounding the place and a gazebo on the dune in front. He also encroached onto our property at least a couple of times before, in a fit of supreme arrogance, he tried to take the lot by adverse possession. I am not shitting you.

My parents were a hell of a lot kinder than I would have been. Things went to court and they allowed the encroachments to stay (in exchange for a pittance in cash) and also negotiated that the asshole would have right of first refusal should the time ever come to sell.

And all through the years, that time apparently never came. My parents always held out the idea that someday they’d build on that lot. It would be a smaller place than our family home just up the street, and it would be right on the beach overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. Never mind that the lot was too damned small to ever really build on, or that the environmental laws were never going to allow construction on such a dune (although truth be told: if you grease the right palms in Newbury, you can build whatever you want wherever you want; zoning and environmental laws are really just suggestions in this town). And never mind that Dad was never going to leave the current house, even for one on the beach; the man was set in his ways, as many of you know.

Anyway, late in her life I used to bemoan to my mother the fact that she and my father had never really invested in the great stock market run-up of the ’90s –– despite the fact that Dad, a business reporter for the New York Times, was a peerless predictor of what the markets were going to do, and Mom, thanks to her business, had plenty of cash to spend. And Mom would always counter, “I know, but we invested in real estate.” To which I would always hold up this unbuildable lot on which they’d been paying taxes for decades and say, “Yes, badly.” (Yes, I realize I was being a bit of an asshole myself. I just thought they should have been able to live more easily than they did late in their lives, that’s all.) Mom always used to talk up investing in land, often citing Will Rogers’ dictum that “they weren’t makin’ any more of it.” I think she believed in the permanence of place, and I’m sure the events of 1929 were still very fresh in her and my father’s minds. The Great Depression was not an abstract notion to them but a very real event through which they lived. And it all started with a stock market crash. So she invested in land as a result.

All of this history lesson ran through my head as I passed by the dune on Christmas Day. My father sold the lot a year or two after my mother passed, and the current owners, like many of those whose properties are right on the beach, have piled up car-sized boulders at the front of the dune, an effort to bulwark the island against the Atlantic Ocean that has, since the winter of 2012-13, been ferociously nipping at homes along several stretches of beach.

The irony, of course, is that in the case of this lot, Mom was investing in a sand dune on a barrier-beach island –– the very definition of impermanence. And today’s current beachfront owners aren’t just tossing pebbles before a tsunami, they’re accelerating the everyday erosion that’s endangering other homes on the island.

Anyone who thought Plum Island was permanent was a fool. Barrier-beach islands are designed by Mother Nature to move. We get to enjoy our time, however long or short, as residents/caretakers of the island, and when the ocean comes to collect the rent, well, it’s time to go. Plum Island, my family’s dune, we ourselves…it’s all such a short stay.

I’m not being morbid, but that impermanence was front and center on Christmas Day as I saw the rocks the current owners had placed to protect the dune emerging from the sand. And impermanence in general has been front and center as I’ve wondered what will become of my family’s house (in which my brother is currently living), what will become of Further, and what will become of me. The walking-on-the-beach-on-Christmas-Day version of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” (by my father’s favorite poet, no less) I guess.

Still, it was a gorgeous, gorgeous day.