A Sweet Summer

It was 11:30 PM on June 30th, 1979. My friends and I had just come out of the last showing of the movie “Meatballs”. The concrete was giving off its last bit of heat and a sense of quiet was descending on the city I lived in at the time. Sweet warm air surrounded us and we were giddy. We had just seen a movie directed by Ivan Reitman which was funny, sentimental, and just enveloped its audience with warmth. We all aspired to be filmmakers and we were just taken by the deep whimsy we had just experienced. It was a wonderful night; a night that for us was almost perfect. A great movie with great friends followed by clubhouse sandwiches at the 4 Brothers Restaurant. It was heaven.

It was summer at the end of the seventies. We would all wait for weeks for the advent of the summer movie season. The former excitement once consumed by Christmas was now shifted to the offerings that Hollywood would present to us. Going to the movies was an amazing experience. Long lines of excited audiences filled with movie fans talking excitedly about what they were about to see. There was a reverence for the movies, an electricity that attracted as an attractor and as almost a salt lick to those craving entertainment.

It was a heady summer. Titles released that summer included Apocalypse Now', 'Alien' .'Monty Python's Life of Brian', 'The Muppet Movie' ,'Phantasm' ,'Moonraker' ,'The Amityville Horror', ' The In-Laws', 'Rocky II' and of course “Meatballs”.? For those of us who truly loved the movies it was amazing. The lines that emerge leading to the box office served as an accelerator for excitement and anticipation. The tickets were uniformly $4 and for some reason the popcorn was fresher and the soft drinks were sweeter. The multiplex had yet to take a firm hold on the business of exhibition, and Hollywood still possessed a modicum of independent thought.

It was a glorious summer. Life was good and the movies were entertaining and amazing. As I headed home in a Datsun B210, I looked out on the valley filled with lights and relived the movie I had just seen.? When I was not watching movies, I was working as an usher at a local two screened downtown theater. I was working when “Alien” was released and every evening I would glimpse into the auditorium when the chestburster scene would fill the screen. I loved watching the audience react to the abject horror they were seeing on the screen in front them. After my shift had ended and I was cleaning up, I often explored the basement as at least fifty years of posters and pressbooks had been carelessly tossed aside.

I had hope that this sweet season of moviegoing would endure forever.

The summer of 1980 offered some wonderful movies, ”The Shining'', “Raging Bull”, “Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back”, “Airplane”, “The Fog” and of course “Caddyshack”, ”Used Cars” and “Private Benjamin”. Things though were about to change and, in my mind, not for the better. A change in our society was about to take place and the audience

The psyche of the American people was impacted by the marathon that was the Iran Hostage Crisis. A sense of fatigue in America took hold. In November of 1980, Ronald Reagan won the presidency, replacing a good man but a na?ve politician, Jimmy Carter. America wanted quick answers.? After Reagan was inaugurated in January of 1981, things started changing. It was slow at the start. The first four summers of the Reagan era offered some pretty great moviegoing, but you began to feel that change was coming.

In 1983, Paul Brickman’s brilliant movie “Risky Business” was released. A breakthrough role for a very young Tom Cruise but at the same time a harsh indictment of where society was heading. Brickman was intent to provide a perspective on the hyper- materialistic narrative of Ronald Reagan-era 80s. Brickman saw the shifting of heroes like John Wayne and Neil Armstrong to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Brickman was appalled that the wish for a kinder society was now focused on obtaining an MBA and making a fortune; society began to be focused on the worship of materialism and money. By the late 1980’s, the pursuit of money had become a foregone conclusion. Comparing” Porky’s” and its singular pursuit of sex, to Risky Business, where making a buck becomes the guilt-free alternative to the uncontrolled lust that had driven most teen movies.

The whimsy and lightheartedness I witnessed in “Meatballs'' became a rarity. The numbers earned at the box office were now a major marketing tool. The stories began to change. The greatness of E.T. was wrapped in a blanket of financial profitability, not on the substance of what was a very sweet story. John Wayne began to fade into the sunset and the movies began to change forever. The show was depleted in favor of the advancement of business.

Because of deregulation, movies start becoming thought of as a simple commodity. The idea of a standalone movie event was diminished in favor of feeding an emerging cable pipeline. The Reagan Revolution promised voters that the principles of conservatism could halt and revert the social and economic failing so the generation prior. Reagan gained power by making the statement that societal reform was the problem, not the solution. The nation at the time was shaken, unsure of itself and did not know where it was going.

In focusing on making it easier for companies to make money, the Hollywood studios soon found themselves being shaped solely by the driving mantra of make money. In doing so a sense of myopia slowly descended on movie making. The lack of having a higher ideal or a commitment to serve all audiences has led us to the confusion we are facing now.

The summer of 1979 haunts me because in that sweet summer...there was so much right …..