Those Hollywood Nights;

Movie Outings Gone Horrible Wrong

By Geoffrey Reed

A lot of people talk about their love of movies, how cinema has changed their lives,  how going to the movies transports them to another world, where the can escape the doldrums of their work-a-day worlds.  I, dear readers, am one such person.  Whilst a good movie has oft sent me to a magical world of enchantment, I must also report that many a movie night has sent me on an embarrassing comedy of errors that could make for a rich screenplay itself. The following tales of misadventures are true. My quest for a perfect film going experience, as you will see,  did not always have the “happy ending” so many motion-pictures had promised me.

1) 1990- Turner & Hooch; I am house-sitting for a friend & also watching her Great Dane. I have settled in on the living room couch with the dog at my feet.  The movie I selected for that night was the smash hit Turner & Hooch.  I figured the dog would like it as well. I didn’t know how right I was….as soon as the first image of the dog appeared, Sheldon leaped from the ground, and pressed his paws onto the big screen t.v., knocking it instantly off the shelving rack, and smashing it to the ground. As I scrambled desperately around the living room in my bare feet, shards of broken, jagged glass dug into my flesh.  I got over 200 stitches that summer and the howls of Sheldon haunt me to this day. To pay for the t.v.  I had to get a job at Dairy Queen where my alcoholic boss yelled at me every day, and I got a third degree burn on my elbow.

2) 1982  Zapped! I saw this ad on t.v.  It promised a lot of T&A.   I buy a ticket to some G-Rated film, and when the attendant’s back is turned, I sneak into the theater. During the previews, I feel the need to use the bathroom.  I walk through what I think is the bathroom door, and realize it is a stairwell. I hear the door lock behind me. I check the door at the bottom of the stairs….locked as well.  I sit down at the bottom of the stairs and start crying.  High pitch sobbing noises began as snot runs down my face and tears pour out of my eyes at an amazingly pathetic pace.  After a few minutes I wet my pants. The stairwell fills with the stench of urine & childish, wimpy fear.   The second my bladder is empty the song “Jukebox Hero“  starts blaring within the walls of the stairwell.  I have no idea how this happened.  After about four hours, an attendant discovered me and took me home.  I was banned from the theater & my mom wouldn’t let me watch Moonlighting that night.

3) 1988 Moon Over Parador;   When it comes to who a young boy wants be when he grows up, I, like literally millions of other young boys of the 80’s, wanted to grow up to be Richard Dreyfuss.  After watching this romantic comedy, I  took my normal obsession to the next level.  I loved Dreyfuss’s mustache so much. Too much. One evening, I snuck into my dad’s bathroom, and pulled a bunch of his hairs out from his favorite brush.  I rolled them into a makeshift mustache, and proceeded to affix it to my upper lip.  With superglue. It’s hard to describe the feeling of a chemical compound burning a child’s face and inner mouth, (I used a whole tube!) but needless to say it was a night to remember. In the emergency room.  I can grow no hair on that region of my face to this day.

4) 1990 Robo Jox; This was my first year of high school. Like many of my fellow students, I began experimenting with alcohol.  This Sci-Fi flick seemed like the perfect movie to get drunk and laugh at.  As we got out of the car at the theater, I  shoved a bottle of red wine I had stolen from my grandma’s house down the front of my pants & pulled my T & C surf design shirt over the front.  The perfect crime…or so I thought.  As we entered the theater I hear my friend  Stanley shout  “Hey dude! Check out this baseball I caught at the Mariners game!”  A millisecond later,  he chucks a fastball at me! Before I could even lift my hands to try and catch the ball, It makes contact with the bottle I have smuggled down my pants. It instantly shatters and I feel a millions pieces of broken bottle scatter in my trousers & red wine flowing freely down my pant legs.  Another theater banning & another trip to the hospital.

5) 1996 Mr. Wrong;  Let’s face it…in the mid 90’s, aside from maybe Pamela Anderson, no woman was meeting the ideals of  “every man’s dream” more than the amazingly sexy and beautiful Ellen DeGeneres.  Yes…I had her poster on my dorm room wall in college.  When I went to see the crazy, over-the-top smash comedy, I must admit I thought I would be in for some real laughs & some great eye-candy to boot.  I didn’t know how wrong I was.   I rode my bike to the theater on a rainy night in November.  I remember that I stopped at Arby’s and ate  four beef & cheddar sandwiches.  I pulled up in from of the theater and chained my Huffy to the bike rack.  As I was headed to the box office I hear a guy say  “Yo!  Your bike chain just scratched my bike”  I turn around to reply, and almost instantly a huge dude pummels his meaty paw into my stomach.  His punch is so powerful I swear I feel it touch my spine.  I do the only thing I can…vomit onto the ground.  Some of it gets on this guys shoes.  “My Nikes!” He shouts.  To make this long story short, I get thrown in a dumpster, which he jams shut with a piece of rusty pipe.  When I managed to get out in the morning, my bike is scattered in piece around the parking lot. I walk the five miles home, crying the entire way.  I tore down my poster when I got back to my room.

I will try and post more of how movies have changed my life in the weeks to come.

…”Do I feel lucky?”

We do, that’s a fact. We’ve got so many Clint Eastwood films here in the store we’ve  given the man his own shelf on the Wall O’ Cool.  Whether he’s The Man With No Name or he’s the .44-Magnum-toting, authority-bucking Harry Callahan, you gotta love Clint.

Dirty Harry is one of my all-time favorite films. Loosely inspired by the Zodiac Killer who terrorized San Francisco in the late ’60s and into the ’70s, this film introduced us to the the ultimate take-no-crap cop: Harry Callahan. The only thing Harry hates more than criminals is, well, everyone else. You definitely do not want to get on the wrong side of Harry’s code of honor.

And then there’s the followup, Magnum Force, in which Harry goes after a rogue group of vigilante cops who are taking the law into their own hands and picking off the bad guys that slip through the system’s cracks. Of course, Harry hates rogue vigilante cops maybe even more than criminals and, well, everyone else. Plus, this is the film that contains one of my favorite quotes ever: “A man’s got to know his limitations.”

One thing I was surprised to discover was just how many Clint Eastwood films he’s directed as well. The Outlaw Josey Wales is just one of those. Josey Wales is essentially The Man With No Name (from his old Spaghetti Western days), only this time around he has a name. After his avenging his family’s murder, Josey Wales is on run as a pack of killers hunts him down. Along the way he picks up a rag-tag group of hangers-on (including long-time girlfriend Sondra Locke, who ended up costarring with him several more times in the ’70s and ’80s) that he feels compelled to protect.

Clint didn’t do another western for 9 years after Josey Wales, not until 1986’s Pale Rider (again directed by himself). As a man known only as “Preacher”, he  goes up against an evil mining boss bent on driving the local independent miners out of the area. The boss hires some killers who work for whomever pays, and he pays in gold. On the other hand, Preacher pays in lead.

Up next we’ve got a couple of political thrillers featuring Clint on both sides of the law. In Absolute Power, he plays a career thief named Luther Whitney who witnesses a murder which could spell scandal for the President of the United States and finds himself in a game of cat-and-mouse with local cops and the Secret Service. Also stars Gene Hackman and Ed Harris and is once again directed by Mr. Eastwood.

Speaking of the Secret Service, In The Line Of Fire has our man playing veteran agent Frank Horrigan who has the unfortunate distinction of having been unable to protect JFK on that fateful day in November 1963. Now, many years later, that failure still haunts him as he’s drawn into a plot to kill the current President. The would-be assassin, a former-CIA agent played with creepy brilliance by John Malkovich, taunts him by phone and teases him with clues, giving Horrigan the chance at redemption he so desperately craves.

In True Crime, Clint is Steve Everett, a boozing, skirt-chasing reporter whose job is on the line when he’s assigned to interview a death row inmate in the hours before his scheduled execution. After just a little research, Everett is convinced that an innocent man is about to die and it becomes a race against time. Of course, when you’re a drunk, a bad dad and you’ve slept with the wife of your boss, who’s gonna listen to you? Costars Denis Leary and James Woods.

And to round things out we have Million Dollar Baby, another film directed by Clint, in which he plays trainer Frankie Dunn who is quick to growl “I don’t train girls!” Of course, when the girl is Hilary Swank and won’t quit showing up at the gym, what’s a cranky old guy to do but take her in? Costarring Morgan Freeman as the gym caretaker and non-cranky old guy. Clint Eastwood also composed music for this one. Is there anything he can’t do?

So that wraps up the Clint Eastwood shrine on our Wall O’ Cool. There were some also-rans that didn’t make the cut, like The Bridges Of Madison County, Blood Work, Flags Of Our Fathers, Letters From Iwo Jima and Space Cowboys, not to mention titles we’re out of right now, like Gran Torino, Unforgiven, High Plains Drifter…. the list really truly goes on and on. Come on in and check it out. We might just make your day.