xtcian

7/8/02 Sometimes you go so

7/8/02

Sometimes you go so long without seeing your inspirations that you forget how much you've stolen from them. I sat Tessa down tonight and got her to watch Sixteen Candles, one of the best of the early-80s genre. It was, unfortunately, a network broadcast, which bowdlerized all the good lines, making it a lot less dark and freewheeling than the original - but she dug it nonetheless. In 1983, Tessa was busy reading Anne Sexton poems in her room at Choate while the rest of us were going to the googleplex, so I take it upon myself to fill her in on crucial missing elements of the American experience.

Anyway, I saw some things I'd subconsciously pilfered for The Pink House without remembering where they had come from. For instance, in the bathroom scene where Anthony Michael Hall reveals Molly Ringwald's underwear to an awed crowd, the freshmen all go "ahhhh" in a recoiled fascination. In our movie, the sorority girls do the same thing when Heather Matarazzo shoves the nose ring onto Michelle (at my behest, of course).

In our movie, I envisioned a prop that would marry Pink House past and present: a lawn jockey. The 1929 Pink House would have a lawn jockey with a horse tied to it, and the present-day house would have the same statuette painted rainbow colors with toilet paper strung on it. Of course, "Sixteen Candles" has a nice panning shot at the beginning of the party sequence... of a lawn jockey, crap strewn all around it. Tessa vetoed the lawn jockey from our movie, saying it had too many racial implications (I still disagree, but didn't want to press my luck with audiences), but the Pink House lawn still looks quite similar:

The Pink House has homages to other movies there are some very subtle Animal House references (Murray saying "that makes sense" when the Nazis storm the party) and some outright obvious ones (Charlotte's speech to her girls - and to the Pink House residents - is straight out of the Dean Wormer playbook). But I hope these thefts don’t get in the way of the Pink House's overall goal, which is to give off the same feeling of brotherhood that was the benchmark of all the great 80s comedies. I also want it to be quotable, I want people to watch the movie and desire to live there, with those people.

Neil and Bill predicted in 13th-GEN that our particular generation would be an immensely creative one, much like the Silent Generation (born 1925-42) and the Lost Generation (born 1883-1900) before it. So far, our track record has been pretty abysmal, especially where movies are concerned. While codgers like Woody Allen and Boomers like Spielberg get all the screen time they can handle, virtually nobody from our age group has stepped up to create something profound. Only Wes Anderson, M. Night Shyamalan and the Coen Brothers have any visual style (and the Coens are actually baby boomers age-wise).

Only abject cynicism and a commitment to irony could possibly shackle an entire generation to such mediocrity. 30-year-olds who grew up on "Sixteen Candles" and "Ferris Bueller" are painstakingly trying to recreate these movies without bringing anything else to the table except much lamer dialogue and "plot" twists that can be seen an hour and a half away. Piffle like "Can't Hardly Wait" and the other legions of three-word movies ("Down to You," "She's All That," "Whatever It Takes," etc.) have fully destroyed the genre, making possible "Not Another Teen Movie," which was dreadful itself. Peyton Reed's Bring it On is the best of the lot, wonderfully directed, full of great performances and overall pretty delightful, but damned if I can remember one quote from it.

Which leaves me with the hope that we've done something interesting with the Pink House movie, that we're not some derivative, shrill xerox of a bygone era; that we've managed to say something. In "Ferris Bueller," Cameron stares deeply into a Seurat painting at the Chicago Museum of Art, connecting with a small boy made of blurred dots, while the Smiths play softly in the background. It's a gorgeous moment that needs no explanation. I pray we have such ammunition in our movie.