(LOST) BOYS N the 'HOOD

40 years ago, Hollywood came to Santa Cruz

Forty years ago, this month, when Hollywood came to town to shoot a teenage vampire movie, nobody had any idea that The Lost Boys would become a cult phenomenon.

 

Sure, we locals loved it. The production crew was here for a couple of weeks, pouring Hollywood revenue into our hotels and restaurants, and employing hundreds of locals as extras. We loved seeing landmarks like Pogonip, the Boardwalk, and the train trestle over the river mouth up on the big screen.

 

What nobody could have predicted, was (fittingly enough, for a vampire movie) the extensive afterlife the movie would have beyond its original theatrical release — from midnight shows, revivals, and the advent of streaming, with its 24/7 access, all the way to Broadway, where an original stage musical adaptation just won four Tony Awards.

 

Little did we know, back in June 1986, when the movie was shot, what a cultural touchpoint it would become, not only in the annals of both vampire and teen angst movie genres, but as a snapshot of a very particular sort of hip 80s vibe. In which respect, director Joel Schumacher, cinematographer Michael Chapman, and production designer Bo Welch discovered that Santa Cruz was so ready for her close-up.

 

In the story, a recently divorced mom and her two teenage sons move from urban Phoenix to a sleepy California beach town to start a new life. Restless, 17-year-old Michael falls for a girl who runs with a seductive, yet sinister crowd of (literally) drop-dead cool kids who haunt the beachfront Boardwalk at night — and who turn out to be vampires. 14-year-old Sam starts hanging out at the local comic book store, where the owners' two tween sons try to convince him that vampires are running amok in the town, and enlist his aid in stamping out the bloodsucking menace.

 

Although the town is called Santa Carla in the movie, it taps into our early-'70s reputation as the "Murder Capital of the World," and the program of plastering the faces of missing children on milk cartons, to create a sense of real danger beneath the movie's teen comedy overtones. The plot turns on the scheming of glamorous alpha vampire, David, to induct Michael into their biker gang. The tagline — "Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. It's fun to be a vampire." — references Peter Pan, from which the movie gets its title. 

 

And if David is the Peter Pan figure in the movie, Santa Cruz is the Neverland.

 

From the first montage of Mom and the boys driving into town, with "People Are Strange," on the soundtrack, the fabled weirdness of our little burgh is on full display — drummers, dancers, street musicians, at least one snake-handler, surfers, punks, Goths, spikey Mohawks, and a panorama of jeans, leather, wetsuits, granny dresses, combat boots, and other items of trashy gypsy hipster chic. For a pivotal scene during a nighttime rock concert at the bandstand on the beach, the hundreds of locals hired as extras didn't even have to go through wardrobe and makeup — they already looked perfect!

 

Night scenes on the Boardwalk are shot around rippling tongues of flame, as if  bonfires were lit just out of camera range. Life in Santa Carla is one long, non-stop party, framed in torchlight and neon, and powered by jangly calliope music and scorching rock 'n' roll.

 

One particular thing the filmmakers loved about shooting in Santa Cruz was they didn't have to build a comic bookshop from scratch. Enter Atlantis Fantasyworld, operated by co-owners Joe Ferrara and my Art Boy, James Aschbacher. Their original, pre-quake building on Lower Pacific was cavernous; it had been a grocery store in the 1920s, with solid wood plank floors and a two-story high ceiling. When the crew folded back the giant accordion doors out front, they could roll the klieg lights right inside. The huge, freestanding shelving units in the middle of the room could be rolled aside to accommodate the lights, camera, and action of dozens of crew members loitering around the periphery on any given shot. 

 

The only problem was that Atlantis was not actually located on the Boardwalk, as the store in the movie is supposed to be. The solution was to build a replica section of the Boardwalk on the sidewalk in front of Atlantis, a plywood tunnel painted faded Boardwalk yellow, and complete with green benches, and the uber-eerie Laughing Sal automaton chortling right outside the door. When Schumacher decided there should be some graffiti on the wall outside the shop, he wielded the spray can himself. On the first day of shooting in the shop, production designer Welch marveled, "This is a monumental set to put up. You wouldn't even do this in TV!"

For three consecutive weekends, the faux Boardwalk facade was erected out on the sidewalk while the crew shot interiors inside the store. James and Joe auditioned to play the shop proprietors, but they didn't get the parts; Schumacher wanted a burnt-out hippie couple who slumped in front of the TV all day, instead of, you know, actually running the shop. But the two of them do appear in the movie for about six seconds, playing pinball in the background as Sam walks into the store. And the three of us got to hang out on set all three weekends, to discourage people from standing or walking on, or rolling equipment over the merchandise — and also ring up sales to crew members, who spend most of their time on movie sets waiting around to set up the next shot.

 

Forty years on, watching the movie again, I was surprised at  how short it is (89 minutes), how remarkably uncomplicated by any multiple plot threads, and what a conventional horror-movie finale it has — especially if you buy into the subtext of youth yearning to make community with their found tribe. Still, it captures as  evocative moment when Santa Cruz was (or was pereceived as) a fun and funky little beach town Neverland, with no delusions of metropolitan glamour. Those were the days, all right.

 

 

 

Above, upper right: Lost Boys call sheet

 

Above, left: Joe and James in Atlantis, with faux Boardwalk set visible outside the front door

 

Above: James and Joe at work, you know, running the shop, between takes 

 Right: 2 random onlookers fooling around on the set

PIRATES & PENANCE

 

Malinin and Sandokan: Profiles in Courage

 

What do triple toe-loops on the ice and pirates in tropical Southeast Asia have in common? Well, not much, except they were both at the top of my TV watchlist during last week's frigid winter storms.

 

After a long day at the keyboard, I like to chill in front of the tube at night, with a purring cat and a glass of wine, and having opted out of the news cycle to preserve what's left of my mental health, I found myself drawn into the figure skating competition at the Winter Olympics. At the same time, I happened upon Sandokan: The Pirate Prince, an 8-episode, Italian swashbuckler now streaming on Netflix.

 

For a week, I was madly channel-hopping between the two (although there are a thousand ways you can catch up with any Olympic events you might have missed), so that the two programs became almost inextricably linked in my brain. Both offer equal opportunities to cheer triumphs, commiserate with losses, cheer on underdogs, and explore complicated personalities. And both came loaded with plenty of drama.

 

Sandokan caught my eye, because, you know, pirates, even though I'd never heard of anybody in the cast, or the source material it's based on, a series of Victorian-era adventure novels by Emilio Salgari about a Malaysian pirate battling the English during the Age of Empire. And after a fairly ripping first episode, it almost lost me as it threatened to devolve into typical romantic fodder about a hunky pirate captain and his hostage, a snippy, entitled young beauty flinging insults and vitriol about to maintain her moral superiority — in short, all the tropes I wanted to subvert when I wrote my pirate novel, The Witch From the Sea, about a woman who becomes a working member of a pirate crew for the freedom of the open seas.

 

But the heroine, Marianne, soon drops her attitude, and gets drawn into the larger story of colonialism, attempted genocide, rebellion, and liberation. (Indeed, while there's a decent amount of shipboard action, these pirates are less interested in plunder than in battling English invaders who would steal their resources and enslave their people.) There's also the evolving mystery of pirate Sandokan's true origin, and heroic destiny. Along the way, we meet salty pirates, exotic natives, spirited women, and a plethora of sinister antagonists, including the corrupt English consul (Marianne's father), and an opium-smoking British naval captain out to hunt pirates, and the ruthless, sybaritic local sultan, with a taste for torture, both of whom have designs on Marianne.

 

Sexy Sandokan is played by Turkish-Albanian actor Can (pronounced "Gian") Yaman, a formidable presence with a searing gaze, who can twirl a scimitar like a cheerleader's baton. It took a while to warm up to Alanah Bloor as heroine Marianne, but she becomes more interesting as the story gains traction. I especially liked the dance-as-foreplay motif in which their romance evolves over a couple of elaborate set pieces, a formal ball at the consulate, and later, a Lunar New Year celebration in Singapore.

 

Meanwhile, over at the Olympics, most of the drama for Team USA centered on skaters who didn't quite live up to expectations. Champion ice dancing pair Madison Chock and Evan Bates "only" won silver, and there was some whining about a French judge whose scores might have elevated French pair Laurence Fournier and Guillaume Cizeron to the top spot. Yes, the Americans skated beautifully, but so did the French; I loved the precision of their Rhythmic category performance to Madonna's "Vogue."

 

But the story of the event — possibly of this entire Olympics — was 21-year-old figure skater Ilia Malinin, from Fairfax, Virginia. The son of two Russian figure skaters, Malinin, nicknamed the Quad God, is a star on the tournament circuit; he's like the Simone Biles of figure skating, doing amazing things on ice never before attempted, let alone achieved, by any other human, like the insanely difficult quadruple axel, and back flips. 

 

He and his Team USA cohorts had already won gold as a team. But, heavily favored to take gold in the individual event, he stunned the world with a poor performance, falling down twice in his final routine. The crowd cheered him on, anyway, but as he came off the ice, completely out of medal competition, and composed, but obviously disheartened, his father and coach exchanged a few words with him, but did not hug him. There wasn't a person in America, probably the world, that didn't want to give that kid a hug right that minute, except his dad. Fortunately, his other trainer stepped up and enveloped him in a massive embrace. A few minutes later, when the expected second-place winner, Mikhail Shaidorov,  from Kazakhstan, realized he'd been elevated to gold, Malinin trotted over to give him a congratulatory hug. Shaidorov was overwhelmed, and they held on to each other for a few minutes, the only two people in the entire arena who understood what the other was going through.

 

But having lost the gold in penance, Malinin found redemption. The hottest ticket at the Winter Olympics is always the Exhibition Gala on the last night, where skaters present routines out of competition, with no mandatory elements, and do whatever they want. Malinin skated to the song, "Fear," by a rapper called NF; dressed in jeans and a dark gray hoodie, he confronted darkness, disillusion, and crippling self-doubt, landed every masterful jump and flip (on a single blade, fer cryin' out loud), and emerged triumphant.

 

 

And here's the thing: no one will ever remember the disappointing free skate that landed him in 8th place instead of on the podium in the men’s individual competition. But no one will ever forget his exhibition program — it may become the defining image of this year’s games.

WILL POWER

Life initiates Art in graceful, passionate Shakespearean rhapsody, Hamnet

 

The words of William Shakespeare speak so directly to the heart, and to one's lived experience, that no context is needed. You don't require supplemental notes or background material to get swept up in the reckless joy of young love in Romeo and Juliet, the naked ambition of Macbeth, or the fatal hubris of King Lear.

 

So, the idea of creating a semi-fictional backstory on the events of Shakespeare's life leading up to and including the writing of his masterpiece, Hamlet, may seem superfluous, at the very least, if not downright foolhardy. Nonetheless, such was the conceit of Maggie O'Farrell's recent bestselling novel, Hamnet, now brought to the screen with extraordinary passion, delicacy, and restraint by filmmaker Chloe Zhao.

 

The story begins with the meeting of Will (Paul Mescal), educated son of a country glovemaker, hired to tutor a neighbor's sons in Latin, and Agnes (pronounced An-yis) (Jessie Buckley), from another country family nearby, who is rumored to be the daughter of a forest witch. Will is driven to write from the vastness of his soaring imagination. Agnes is a child of nature, an expert at herbal lore and remedies, who keeps a pet hawk. Their handfast marriage produces three children, and evolves to accommodate Will's frequent trips away to London, where his playwriting leads him.  

 

Their only son, Hamnet (an impish and tender Jacobi Jupe), is known to have died unexpectedly at age 11, the seminal incident through which Zhao and O'Farrell (who adapted the screenplay together) imagine the psychological forces that fueled the writing of the play. Most of us don't need any more reasons to admire Shakespeare's words, but the snippets from Hamlet that waft through the film, in rehearsals, or, ultimately, onstage at the Globe, filtered through the lens of the playwright's overwhelming grief and guilt at not being there during the crisis, are delivered with such heartbreaking fervor and immediacy, and feel so starkly expressive, it's like hearing them for the first time.

 

Mescal is particularly effective as Will directs the actor playing the part of Hamlet onstage, or takes the part of the ghost of Hamlet's father himself, bidding his son his final, heartfelt adieus. Also pretty great is Noah Jupe, as the young actor playing Hamlet onstage. Especially in the play (and the film)'s transcendent final moments, when Agnes is there to share in the redemptive power of what Will has created. (For an extra layer of resonance, Noah and Jacobi Jupe are brothers in real life.)

 

(The only scene that doesn't quite work in this regard is when Will, at a moment of profound despair, peers over the edge of a dock above the Thames and murmurs the first few lines of "To be or not to be . . . "  Is he just reciting these lines from the play because it's just such an atmospheric setting? Or is he supposed to be making up this brilliant speech on the spot, intact, without a single misplaced word?)

 

Will is the one with the gift for verbalizing his feelings, at least on paper, and onstage. But it's Agnes whose visceral experience of the story's deep emotions carries the movie, and Buckley's performance is absolutely fearless. The childbirth scenes are harrowing and compelling, the first when she goes alone into the forest to give birth within the giant, gnarled roots of an ancient tree, and the second, in a room with a midwife and a stool, when she delivers infant Hamnet and his stillborn twin, Judith, whom Agnes coaxes and bullies back to life through sheer force of will. Soft-spoken, a little saucy, and uncompromising, she is the movie's beating heart.

 

 

Zhao, also listed as co-producer and co-editor, must get most of the credit for the movie's look, tone, and sensibility. Some twilit interiors are so dim, you can barely see what's going on, as are exteriors in dank, perpetually hazy London. (Don't try watching this on a home screen, kids, it needs space!) But the scenes in Agnes' beloved forest are always vibrant and alive.

 

In particular, that gigantic tree on which Zhao's camera so lovingly feasts in the movie's opening moments, comes to represent the entirety of nature in all its scarred and towering nobility.