Gary Busey and Charlie Sheen at Thunderdome

Gary Busey and Charlie Sheen are friends of mine. I’ve spent more time drinking and whoring with Gary and Charlie than I have with my own dad, we’re that close. I was at the Thunderdome at Burning Man when the two of them got it on. No, Mel Gibson wasn’t there, but Tina Turner was. This was the night that Busey almost bit off Sheen’s pecker pardon my French. We paid a friend a lot of money to keep his trap shut after he had sewed it back on. This didn’t happen at Thunderdome, though. It happened later when we were just clowning around.

I’ve worked with both men as a dialog coach. I’m Gary’s age and Charlie is twenty years younger than us, so when we’re roistering, there’s always a lot of banter and ragging about our age and his youth, relatively speaking. Charlie just needs one glimpse of gray pubes to set him off on a rant, whereas whenever Gary or I see him pitch face-first into his bag of blow or the ta tas of one of his strumpets because he’s too drunk and/or high to sit up any longer, we’ll hoot at him and badger him until we’re sure he’s totally out and can’t hear us any longer.

Anyway, the three of us were at Burning Man sitting alone at a campfire out on the flats and Gary and Charlie were arguing about which one of them was a bigger asshole than Mel Gibson. Naturally, they both claimed that honor. And then, there next to us in the firelight, stood Tina Turner. Tina, who was born in Nutbush, Tennessee, I kid you not, is five years older than Gary and me. She’ll never see seventy again. She’s dressed in her leathers with the thigh-high boots and bare skin above and by God, whether it was the drugs or the firelight, she didn’t look half bad.

“Why don’t you boys come on over to the Thunderdome and we’ll have this out,” she said.

We all got up and staggered over there and sure enough, there were fifteen or twenty young women inside from a Southern Cal Jewish sorority, and they were wearing t-shirts to prove it.  Gary and Charlie charged in and started abusing them with anti-semitic rants that would have shamed Goebbels, not to mention Gibson. By the time the girls ran out sobbing, Tina had the boys by the hands and was ready to raise one in victory. Before she could do it, though, just to prove a point, the two started in on her, from the standpoint of the N word. She tolerated about sixty seconds of that and then clocked them both hard enough to stretch them out motionless on the sand.

“I’ve spent time with Mel Gibson,” she said to me, “while we were making our Mad Max movie. When he’s sober, he’s a gentleman. I have yet to encounter either of these two motherf**kers in that state, so I can’t make a fair estimation, but I’m inclined to agree with them that they’re both worse than Mel, and award them a tie.”

Busking 1

I’ve been visiting back east and busking on weekends in the city at 7th and 42nd. Come on down and watch me if you like. We can have a meet-up.

I don’t sing or dance, so I present a list of mental illnesses and for $1, I’ll act out the illness of your choice for 2 minutes. (Your money back if you can guess which illness on the list I actually have.)

My current list of choices for you (subject to change without notice, or with an insane cackle):

Reasonable paranoia

Schizophrenia (you choose the voices that I hear in my head)

Alzheimer’s (please don’t keep the money when I give it back to you; that’s part of the act)

Hysterical blindness (50% off: anxious myopia)

Threft palate

The yammers

Wandering eye

Uncalled-for behavior

My mother warned me about men like you

Crab walk

Crab cakes

Lobster tail

Acting like a moron

Impersonating Robin Williams

Turrets (todays featured word: f**k)

Chinese A-string syndrome

Nigerian inheritance mania

Bipolar (each pole for one minute; extra poles, 50 cents per; bipolar-curious, a 3$ bill)

God’s Dog 2

I posted a few words about God’s dog the other day and was met with a firestorm of reader protest. Everyone’s an expert. The French believe that God’s dog is a poodle. The Southern Baptists believe that God keeps hounds in a kennel out behind the house, cared for by an angel named Rastus. PETA has some crazy idea about a neuter and spay clinic just inside the pearly gates.

I realized pretty quickly that no human could answer my questions on this matter, so I spent one year figuring the thing out for myself. 365 days in a row, I took a different dog down to St. Canisius on Main Street. All possible breeds, sizes, colors, and conformations. Watered and well-fed. Each day I locked a dog in and left it there for 24 hours.

Only one dog did not soil the church. If you want to know which one, in case you ever need to pray to Him or Her for some pet-related reason, send $100 cash or money order to my P.O. box in Keokuc.

A hint: at the command to speak, this dog goes arf, not woof.

Have there always been “summer movies”?

Summer Glau was born in 1981, so in that respect, no.

If time is a construct introduced by humans because they don’t have the ability to see the totality of action in an absolute universal sense, then yes. Everything has always been and will always be, including summer movies.

In the more limited sense of U.S. cinema, my thoughts before turning to Google:

Before television, movies were produced and released in a constant flow. There were seasonal inflections caused by the advent of holidays such as Christmas. Whether release considerations went beyond that, I don’t know. But I doubt it.

With television came the concept of TV summer reruns. It may be that the studios regarded this fallow TV period as a time to introduce especially attractive movies. No data in my memory bank on this.

Also, in the late 50s and early 60s, the first baby-boomers entered their teen years. Hence, movies like Where the Boys are (1960) and the Funicello/Avalon beach-blanket movies, such as Beach Blanket Bingo (1965), were made. Perhaps these youth-targeted movies were introduced in the summer months. Could be wrong.

The summer movies that I’m considering here are seasonal offerings aimed at a youthish demo. Summer blockbusters are a whole different animal, from both marketing and genre perspectives, targeted even more tightly at the teen demo, with, also, the world market in mind. Summer blockbusters were invented with Jaws in 1975.

Finally, off the subject, I’m thinking of adults who are recently out of school and in the workforce and who now no longer have a clear concept of “summer,” as their year blends together for them with a vacation or two thrown in at arbitrary times – as opposed to youth free from school for several hopefully halcyon months. For such adults, if there were summer movies, perhaps now there aren’t, at least until kids of their own come along.

Turning to Google:

So much for my thoughts above. “Where the Boys Are” is a classic movie about summer, but its release date was three days after Christmas. “Beach Blanket Bingo” was released in April. So movies about summer and movies released in summer are two different things. Wet Hot American Summer (2001) came out in the summer. Random? Endless Summer (1966) was released in August in Japan. Ok. I know nothing about the relationship between “release” and “opening,” or why a movie would be released first in Japan. You can explain all this to me in a comment or guest post. Or not.

Now I’m thinking that there is no special seasonal-release category for summer movies (movies released in the summer), only for “summer blockbusters.”

There have not always been summer blockbusters. “Jaws” represents a change in Hollywood’s business model. Gone with the Wind (1939)  was released in January. Ben Hur (1959) in December. Old-fashioned blockbusters.

So, bottom line, there have not always been movies about summer  that were released specifically in summer; but there have always been movies about summer – a summer-movie genre. Let me see if I can turn up some titles from the 30s and 40s.  Blondie Takes a Vacation (1939). Summer Bachelors (1926). Say, here’s a summer-camp movie rated 8.9 in IMBD: Thrill of a Lifetime (1937), with Ben Blue, Judy Canova, and Betty Grable. Uh oh. Frank Nugent in the NYT: “You have, in point of accuracy, an insipid concoction of sour japes and flat romantics which Fanchon (of Fanchon & Marco) has strung together like one of her old stage shows at the Roxy.” Oh, well. Would movies about county fairs count?

Who could have guessed, back in the day, that the drive-in would go away. Sitting out under the stars on the benches in front of the concession stand, we automatically classified whatever we were watching as a summer movie.

Which brings me to a treasure trove of summer-movie lore: the page that is displayed when you Google “summer movie memories.” For example, seven New Yorker essays on the subject. Based upon this veritable landslide of summer-movie nostalgia, to mix my metaphors, there have always been summer movies.