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I Was an Easter Bunny For The Chamber of Commerce

By Bill Newcott Photos by Scott Harrison

Huntington Park Daily Signal, March 24, 1978

            I stood at the corner of Pacific Boulevard, watching him work his way through the crowds of Easter shoppers. On an otherwise gray afternoon, his white fur and tall, pointed ears made him stand out like a beacon, attracting the dozens of small children who ran towards him, arms outstretched.

           Particularly at this time of year, only the Easter Bunny could distract so many busy customers and merchants.

           “Gosh,” I thought. “If only I could be the Easter Bunny!”

           But then, why not? Being a local reporter doesn’t bring that many privileges, but it does enable you to catch the ear of the folks at the Huntington Park Chamber of Commerce, who enlist the Easter Bunny to hop down the city’s main drag every year.

           And so it happened that, one afternoon this week, I sat in the Chamber offices chatting with Larry Brown, the regular man in the bunny suit.

           We had just arrived from off the street, where he had been performing his duties handing out candies. Now I was preparing to don the suit.

           “It’s a fun suit to wear,” he said. “When I’m out there, I’m constantly waving, trying to act like a bunny, bouncing around.”

           Brown, a Jaycee who actually works as a bartender in Downey, had warned me that the suit had certain limitations comfort-wise. He was right.

           I placed the huge rabbit’s head over my own.

           “What do you say to the kids?” I asked. “Does the Easter Bunny have a voice? I didn’t think rabbits could say anything.”

           “This one does,” he answered. “‘I say things like, ‘Hello there, buddy!’ And I change my voice.”

           I tried it. My “Hello there, buddy” seemed less than satisfactory.

           But now it was time for the big step. The rabbit test, if you will. I thought of my colleague Bob Burns, the Daily Signal reporter who specializes in writing first-person experience stories, like riding along with cops or paramedics or having himself hypnotized.  I thought of all those investigative reporters on television who do things like have themselves committed to mental hospitals.

           “HA!” I thought as I stepped off the elevator. “Just let those guys try dressing up in a bunny suit!”

           Actually, things started on a downbeat. At the corner of Pacific and Zoe stood a woman handing out religious tracts. She took one look at the bunny suit and began verbally abusing it.

           “This is a terrible sight in the eyes of God!” she screamed. “Here is a man dressed up like a bunny! Ain’t got NOTHIN’ to do with Easter!”

           Distressed by this unexpected fire-and-brimstone assault, the Easter Bunny hopped out of there as quickly as possible. She was still yelling, but remained on her corner.

           Brown was right about the conditions in the bunny suit. For one thing, in order to see, one must peer down through the bunny’s mouth. The eye holes are placed too high up to be useful, as all that is visble through them are the sky and some rooftops.

           Brown stayed with me all the time, as did two members of the Huntington Park Police Explorer post, Louis Cabrera and Hector Aragon. The two Explorers are relative newcomers to the post. All the veterans were conveniently in San Diego this week, well out of reach of Bunny Patrol duty.

           “There’s been some kidding, but nothing mean,” Aragon said. Then he admitted, “It’s a little embarrassing.”

           It didn’t take long for every kid on Pacific Boulevard to see the bunny coming and head in his direction. Visually isolated from the world in the massive bunny head, I could only hear the patter of hundreds of little feet headed my way. I needed Brown and the Explorers to direct me to the kids.

           “Here’s one behind you,” Brown said. “And here’s a little girl in a green coat. Oops — don’t trip over this nice little boy.”

           If kids stood too far off, I would have to pull the whole bunny head back in order to see them through the mouth. And if they were too close, well, forget it.

           The best practice, I found, was to simply take a piece of candy in my hand and hold it in the general direction of a voice. It was sort of like dropping a baited hook into murky water. If someone bit, fine.

           In terms of the kids, the toughest part of being the Easter Bunny is dealing with children who are frightened to death by the massive head and glaring eyes.

           “Take the candy. TAKE THE CANDY!” the mother says, firmly grabbing her child by the forearm.

           “No…noooooo!” the child whimpers pitifully.

           The Easter Bunny leans forward, trying to help, but looking to the child like a Macy’s Parade balloon gone rogue.

           “Here, fella!” the bunny says in a nasal chirp. “Here’s some candy for you. Take it! TAKE IT!”

           There is probably some formula to figure it out, but for every foot the Easter Bunny advances towards such a child, the wider the child’s eyes and mouth gape in mounting horror.

           “NOOOOOOOO!” the child screams. “Get me away Mommy! Get me away from it!”

           The mother takes the candy from the bunny and promises to give it to the child later, when he feels safe.

(continued below)

             What probably scares the children most are the frozen facial features of the bunny; that permanent, fixed grin on the bunny’s face.

            I must admit it even me put off a bit. I could imagine crossing Pacific Boulevard in the costume and getting hit by a bus, but no one would bother calling an ambulance because I’d be lying there with that great big grin on my face.

           “Nah, he’s fine,” the bystanders would say. “I mean, look how happy he seems.”

           After about 20 minutes, the costume begins to take its toll on a person. Perhaps the bunny’s worst enemy is an itchy nose. One is simply doomed to live with it. There is no way the Easter Bunny can discreetly stuff his hand into his mouth and shove it in far enough to scratch the nose inside.  

           But there is one thing even worse than that: Being an Easter Bunny stranded on the street with no candy. “You’re almost out,” Brown said. Shocked, the Easter Bunny stopped dead in his tracks and held his candy basket up to his mouth for a better look. Sure enough, there were only four or five little chocolate bunnies left, and here came a crowd of about 15 kids!

           Now way out. In 10 seconds, the remaining candies were gone. I pictured a hundred little Elmer Fudds chasing me with shotguns ready to make wabbit stew.

           But they didn’t.

           “Sorry, kids,” Brown said. “No candy left. Come back on the boulevard tomorrow!”

           There wasn’t one word of complaint from any of them. They didn’t even turn and walk away. In fact, they still wanted to meet the Easter Bunny!

           Of course, no one could see the shocked expression behind the bunny’s grinning face as dozens of little kids and their mothers stood around to shake hands (or paws), even after the candy was gone.

           “Happy Easter!” the Easter Bunny squeaked. “Happy Easter, everybody!”

[billnewcottblog]

The Secret Cry Of The Caregiver

(AARP the Magazine, April-May 2012)          

 It’s the one wedding vow that can really come back and bite you in the butt: “In sickness and in health.”

On your wedding day, the phrase conjures up visions of tiptoeing into a sundrenched bedroom with lunch on a tray, of tipping cough medicine into a tablespoon and lovingly placing it to your spouse’s smiling lips.

           What you don’t expect it to mean is crouching in a neon-lit hospital treatment room and holding her head to yours, trying not to faint yourself as a technician inserts a large needle between her ribs to suction two liters of fluid from around her lungs. What you never imagine in a million years is endless hours in countless waiting rooms, or friends and relatives second-guessing your medical decisions, or your boss and co-workers hinting, suggesting, or just flat-out saying that you’re somehow not carrying your weight around the office.

           No, you don’t expect “in sickness and in health” to mean any of that. But it does. And it should. Because words, especially those words, mean something.  And more people are learning the weight of those words every day.

           Across America, 43.5 million people—nearly one in five adults—are caring for a loved one age 50 or over. Most of us are tending to parents, but the older we get, the more likely we are to be caring for a spouse. As you’d expect—largely because our culture has told us to expect it—the overwhelming majority of caregivers are women. But four percent of them are men caring for their wives.

           One hot summer afternoon in 2006, I joined the four percent.

           The day before August 6, all we knew was that my wife of 30 years, Cindy, had discomfort in her abdomen. The day after August 6, we knew she had clear-cell ovarian cancer. Chemotherapy worked for a while, but less than six months later the cancer was back, and one Friday evening, after office hours (trust me, you never want your oncologist to ask you to come in after everyone else has gone home on a Friday) we sat there and heard the verdict: Cindy’s condition did not involve “a cure scenario.”  

           This is where the violins should start to play and we cut to a montage covering the three years that followed: How I sat by Cindy’s side through virtually all of her chemotherapies; how I kept track of the dozen or so drugs she was taking each day, especially her pain killers, to make sure she didn’t overdose; how her back pain became so torturous I had to wake up and rub the bottom of her spine several times each night; how I took a train home from the office each day to make her lunch when she was too weak to get down to the kitchen; how I prayed with her, encouraged her, and held her through her long, courageous battle.

           On the other hand, well, who cares? Like just about every other guy I know who has ever found himself caring long-term for a sick wife, I find lists like that at best distasteful; at worst self-serving. Certainly, when I was in the midst of it all, the last thing I wanted was to sit down and share the intimacies of my life with anyone.    

And that’s why I envy women. Studies show that women who are caregivers instinctively share their emotional burdens with friends, and when that proves insufficient they reach out to support groups. Guys, on the other hand, can’t help but try to fix everything on their own. They knit their brows, hunker down, and go about the business of caregiving with the solitary determination of Thomas Edison toiling over his first light bulb.

In essence, for women in crisis, life is one big episode of The View. For men, it’s more like 24, with occasional channel switching to Wipe Out.

As the months wore on and Cindy went through the deceptive ups and devastating downs of cancer and its inescapably inhumane treatments, I found myself decreasingly willing to discuss the ordeal with anyone. We were already spending hours a week consulting specialists. Other than that, my longest conversations about what was happening to Cindy were private ones between me and God, and for all the comfort and encouragement those chats gave me, The Lord was understandably silent regarding such matters as whether or not Avastin should be the drug of choice for a patient presenting symptoms of stage four ovarian cancer.

           For me, the only escape from the maelstrom was in not talking about it.

           A distressing number of men give caring for their sick wives the old college try, then turn on their heels and leave. It was that well-known fact that probably led Cindy to beg me to sign over all our property to her in a new deed. “Don’t worry,” she said, “if you’re still here when I die you’ll get everything back, anyway.” On paper it was insane for me to comply, but I quietly did. It was a simple way to “fix” yet another problem.

The best days of those three years were, unexpectedly, provided by Cindy herself. Barely four months before the end, nearly doubled over from constant pain, Cindy traveled from Washington, DC to California, where she was the radiant mother of the groom at our son’s wedding. Not five minutes after Cindy’s oncologist relayed, over the phone, the news that he was discontinuing her chemotherapy for good, she rolled out of bed exclaiming, “Well, life goes on—let’s go make dinner for the children!” As our family sat around the dining room table on her last birthday—less than two weeks before she died—we suddenly realized Cindy was not with us, but was in the kitchen, icing her own cake.

            The viewing before the funeral was in our home. When it was over I kissed Cindy goodbye, closed the casket lid, and headed wordlessly upstairs. From our bedroom window, I watched our sons and some friends carry the coffin outside, heard the heavy thunk of the hearse door, and listened as it rolled away, the tires crunching over leaves that had fallen in a freak July wind storm that morning. I thought of Cindy lying on her back forever, and in a moment of insanity I wondered how I’d ever be able to rub it for her now. The caregiving instinct, I discovered, dies hard. I buried my face in a pillow. And for the first time, I gave voice to the caregiver’s secret cry.

Everyone couldn’t have been nicer. For weeks friends and relatives took my hand and mumbled soft words of condolence and sweet tributes to all they thought I’d done for Cindy. I smiled, thanked them, and walked away. I felt a bit badly about hearing all that when it was Cindy who had done all the hard work of dying. It was like complementing the guy who built the frame around Van Gogh’s Wheatfield With Crows.  

On my first day back at work, a lovely woman I’d known for the better part of a decade sought me down in the hall, her face creased with sorrow. “I didn’t even know your wife was sick,” she said sadly.

I looked at her and smiled softly. “That’s more like it,” I thought.

April, 2012

A considerably shorter version of this article appeared in AARP the Magazine and on AARP.org

[billnewcottblog]

Grownup Love: Eight Movies

Contrary to what Hollywood might have you think, love and romance aren’t just for kids. Here are eight truly engaging grownup movie love stories from 2017:

The Big Sick (Ray Romano and Holly Hunter)

The focus is on a young couple (Kumail Nanjiani and Zoe Kazan), but the real treasure in this big-hearted comedy is the relationship between the young woman’s parents, whose years of marriage enable them to negotiate with fiery grace the stormy waters of a family crisis.

Darkest Hour (Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas) The world is crashing down on Britain’s new Prime Minister, and he’s on the brink of drowning in a sea of self-pity. But then comes Winnie’s wife Clemmie, who gives him precisely the kick in the pants he needs to keep calm and carry on. These two envelop each other like a London fog.

  The Dinner (Steve Coogan and Laura Linney) All is not well for Paul and Claire, sharing a very agitated dinner with Paul’s brother and sister-in-law (Richard Gere and Rebecca Hall). The two couple’s sons have committed a heinous crime, and the four must decide whether to turn the kids in or leave it at “boys will be boys.” At the heart of the crisis is that perpetual tension moms and dads feel between being parents and partners.

The Exception (Christopher Plummer and Janet McTeer) He’s the German Kaiser and she is his Empress—and in the early years of World War II, exiled to The Netherlands, they rule over an estate that’s nothing more than a sumptuous prison guarded by Nazi soldiers. She’s determined to soften his sense of humiliation, sustaining a veneer of pomp and pageantry for the man she loves. He, in turn, casts upon her his undying—if occasionally gruff—affection.

The Lovers (Tracy Letts and Debra Winger) Decades of marriage and raising a son have taken their toll on Michael and Mary—in fact, they have each taken secret lovers. But then one day their old fire rekindles and the pair starts cheating on their lovers…with each other. For all involved, it’s a mess; for us, it’s a reminder of how easily the fires of passion can burn in unexpected directions no matter what your age.

  Maudie (Ethan Hawke and Sally Hawkins)

Canadian folk artist Maud Lewis and her husband Everett are just 34 and 40, respectively, when they marry. But life ages you faster in remote 1930s Nova Scotia and Maud, crippled with arthritis, and Everett, a stuck-in-his-ways fish seller, have lived lifetimes of hardscrabble existence before they find each other. We watch them grow genuinely old, leaning on each other, filling in each other’s empty spots, sharing an almost invisible, yet undeniable, affection.

Paris Can Wait (Arnaud Viard and Diane Lane)

Ignored by her way-too-busy hubby (Alec Baldwin), a neglected wife accepts a quick lift from the South of France to Paris. In the hands of charming Viard and sexy Lane, the one-day jaunt becomes a days-long voyage of flirty, romantic discovery.

 Wonder (Owen Wilson and Julia Roberts)

Lots of parents divvy up the good cop/bad cop routine, but the tactic is particularly fraught when you have one child born with a heartbreaking facial deformity and another who senses she’ll spend her entire life playing second fiddle to her “special” brother. Wilson and Roberts capture not only that profound parental dilemma—but also the couple’s fierce devotion to each other, a necessary ingredient to undergird the family’s determination to endure.

[billnewcottblog]

Grownup Love: Tracy Letts Gets Real

By Bill Newcott

Do not adjust your set; those two people in a passionate clinch at left are indeed a middle-age couple—Debra Winger and Tracy Letts, to be specific, in their new movie The Lovers.

Romance for movie characters over 40, which until just a few years ago was as rare as mafia musicals, has made some significant advances of late. But few of those characters have the sizzling hots for each other the way these two do, and that’s one of the reasons Letts agreed to make the film.

“I like that it’s about middle-age people; that they’re allowed to express themselves through sex and love and romance,” says Letts, 52.  “It seems so often that when you see middle age people in movies they’re parents—the story isn’t even about them. They’re done. They’re done with life. They’ve reached a point where they’re settled, they’re comfortable. Their life struggle is over.

“That’s not the case with me, and it’s not the case with anybody I know!”

In The Lovers, Winger and Letts play Mary and Michael, a long-married couple who, while they remain cordial, have drifted into affairs that they barely keep secret from one another. Then one morning they wake up, sense a twinkle in each other’s eyes, and hurl themselves into a passionate cyclone of athletic sex, midday rendezvous, and furtive phone calls. In essence, they are cheating on their lovers. It’s the kind of plot one could imagine director Nancy Meyers (It’s Complicated, Something’s Gotta Give) setting inside the glass-walled decorator homes of some super-rich, uber-beautiful high achievers. But Mary and Michael are anything but glamorous. They work in cubicles. Michael’s girlfriend drives an absolute junker.  

Writer/director Azazel Jacobs says he wanted to show two people who made the kinds of decisions most middle-age people have made.

“They’ve made the right choices,” he says. “They got the kinds of jobs you want if you’re raising a kid; they moved into the right kind of neighborhood for a family, and their home is the sort of home you’d want to have for family life.

“What I’m trying to show is how sometimes you make all the right choices and still find yourself in a situation that no longer feels right.”

Read Bill Newcott's Four-Star Review of The Lovers

Letts, one of Hollywood’s busiest actors, has finished more than six films over the past year (he’s also a celebrated writer, having won a Pulitzer Prize for his play August: Osage County). He thrives on that kind of schedule—and suspects the characters in his new film might have fared better if they’d found some positive ways to focus their energies.  

“I really didn’t think about it until I saw the movie,” says Letts. “But I watched these two characters and I thought, ‘Gee—there really isn’t a lot going on for these two outside of their extramarital affairs.’ Their jobs seem dead-end, we don’t see them with friends, their community looks a little two-dimensional.

“The only energy you see is the energy they’re putting into their affairs. Well, you’ve got to put your energy somewhere, don’t you? Otherwise you just sit there.”  

May 12, 2017

[billnewcottblog]

The 10 Best Movies You Didn’t See in 2017

It’s the time of year when everyone weighs in on all the best movies of the year – and it’s also the time of year when some really good films from earlier in the year get lost in the shuffle.

These 10 extraordinary films might not get mentioned at awards time, but you’re cheating yourself if you don’t check them out:  

 10)   A Ghost Story

You know, it’s weird, I didn’t even LIKE A Ghost Story when I saw it in July. But David Lowery’s moody, dark, even languid contemplation of the meaning of eternity did something that no other ghost movie ever has – it actually haunted me.  Even with star power like Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara, you may find it hard to sit through A Ghost Story, with its long, silent passages and meticulously composed images, but you’ll never forget it.

9)  Wilson

With LBJ, Planet of the Apes, and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Woody Harrelson had perhaps the biggest year of his career. But don’t forget Wilson, his ingeniously subversive film about a man who lives utterly without filters. Harrelson’s Wilson is funny, he’s sad, he’s infuriating…he’s an instant classic.  

  8)  Mr. Roosevelt

Writer/director/star Noel Wells’ first film is about a struggling young comedian who returns to her home town of Austin to deal with a family tragedy. It’s also an introduction to a filmmaker/star we’re going to see a whole lot of. The premise is frothy, but the film is brimming with smart and soulful observations of how we are all, at one time or another, on the outside looking in.

7)  The Journey

Two of the screen’s great character actors, Timothy Spall and Colm Meaney, take us for a ride to remember in The Journey. They play opposing poltical leaders from Northern Ireland, and they spend most of the movie in the back seat of a car, angrily trying to broker a peace agreement. But first they have to come to terms with each other. It’s a searing personal drama with a powerful historical context.

 6)  Breathe

If you didn’t see Andrew Garfield in the true story a British polio victim who changed his life — and the lives of thousands more — by inventing a portable ventilator, you missed one of the most inspiring films of the year. As always, Garfield creates an immensely lovable character — and as his ever-loving, always-encouraging wife, Claire Foy makes the perfect Wife Worth Living For.

5)  Norman

Back in February there was Oscar buzz for Richard Gere’s mesmerizing presence in this movie about a mysterious Manhattan fixer. But 10 months is an eon in Awards consideration time, and not many voters even remember how fantastic he was in the role. It is, quite simply, the best performance of Gere’s long career, and that’s saying a lot.

4) The Lovers

One of the year’s best grownup love stories was this charming, only slightly twisted tale of a long-married couple who are each carrying on an affair — but when their marital spark gets unexpectedly reignited, they start cheating on their lovers with each other. Tracy Letts and Debra Winger are funny and heartbreaking in a romance for the ages.

3) My Name is Emily

This sweet, engaging Irish film came and went last Spring like vapors on the lakes of Killarney, but the story of a young girl traveling cross-country in search of her estranged father remains one of the most pleasant surprises of 2017. Writer/Director Simon Fitzmaurice — a quadriplegic who directed his actors by casting his gaze on an electronic keyboard that tracked his eye movements — created a fragile, lovely tale of surpassing sweetness. As small films go, Emily is a small wonder.

  2)  Wakefield It’s always a sure thing that Bryan Cranston is going to give a superb performance. And he offers one of the best of his career in this overlooked film from last May. Cranston plays a successful New York businessman who one day decides to just drop out of sight, hiding in the upstairs loft of his garage for nearly a year. From his window perch he watches the world in general – and his his wife and children in particular – go on without him.  It’s a fascinating, thought-provoking film for anyone who’s ever wondered: What would they do without me?

1)  Maudie

Critics are justifiably blown away by Sally Hawkins’ performance in the new film The Shape of Water – but I say her finest performance of the year was in this gem of a film released last June. In Maudie Hawkins plays the Canadian folk painter Maud Lewis, a severely arthritic artist who lived out her years, even after she gained worldwide fame, in a modest cabin with her husband,played by Ethan Hawke. Theirs is the sweetest of love stories, and Maudie is a testament to the fact that the spark of human genius can arise in the most unlikely of places.

[billnewcottblog]

Six Tasty Thanksgiving Flicks

There's only one time when it's OK to combine the words "Movie" and "Turkey" — and that's when you're talking about great Thanksgiving movies. Here's my list of favorite films (in no particular order) in which the fourth Thursday in November plays a featured role.

Rocky (1976)

It's on Thanksgiving that the struggling fighter Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) goes home for dinner with his friend Paulie (Burt Young) and finally convinces Paulie's sister Adrian to go out on a date with him. Well, actually, it's Paulie who forces the issue, by pulling the turkey that Adrian is baking from the oven, throwing it away and insisting that the two go out. What follows is Rocky and Adrian's impromptu visit to an ice rink, and in one of the loveliest first-date scenes ever filmed, we witness two people, unsteady on their feet, awkwardly and inevitably slipping into love. In 35 years as a writer, director and actor, Stallone has hit his share of sour notes — but not this time. In all the Rocky films, right through his thoroughly satisfying coda in 2006's Rocky Balboa,Stallone always got the chemistry between Rocky and Adrian sublimely right, and it all began on that Thanksgiving night when Paulie threw out the turkey.

 Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

Woody Allen's story of three sisters and their romantic misadventures bridges three Thanksgivings, and each observance provides a benchmark for the women's various relationships. There are the usual Allen-esque complications — illicit affairs, treacherous deceits and lots and lots of neuroses, particularly on the part of Woody's character Mickey, the ex-husband of Hannah (Mia Farrow). As with lots of Allen movies, the family's annual gatherings sound more scripted than familial, but there is still a ring of authenticity, thanks largely to the reassuring presence of Maureen O'Sullivan and Lloyd Nolan (in his last role) as the girls' parents.

 Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (1987)

Anyone who has ever endured a seemingly doomed voyage home for the holidays will find this John Hughes comedy at once hilarious and vaguely disturbing. Steve Martin is the family man and executive who just wants to get home from Manhattan to Chicago in time for Thanksgiving dinner; John Candy is the effusive shower curtain ring salesman who somehow becomes joined at the hip with Steve as the short intercity hop rapidly devolves into an abyss of transportation modes that variously break down, take wrong turns or simply burst into flames. To repeat the gags is to ruin them (but do remember the line, "Those aren't pillows!"), and at times Hughes slathers on the pathos with a spatula — but really, isn't sentiment what Thanksgiving is all about?

 The Ice Storm (1997)

It's hard to ignore this one, but although the story unfolds on a Thanksgiving weekend, it's not really a movie you'd want to gather the kids for after the Macy's Parade. Ang Lee's scorched-earth study of suburban life in 1973 introduces us to an alcoholic businessman (Kevin Kline), his distraught wife (Joan Allen) and their nymphomaniac daughter (Christina Ricci). There's adultery, drug use and a crippling ice storm that freezes everyone into one way-too-cramped situation. The cast is uniformly perfect, and Lee's portrait of a culture where taboos are tossed aside like lingerie is as chilling as its title.

 The War at Home (1996)

Why Emilio Estevez didn't win an Oscar for his heartbreaking performance as a traumatized Vietnam veteran enduring a disastrous Thanksgiving at home is one of the great shames of Award-dom. Estevez directed the film — with his real-life dad Martin Sheen and Kathy Bates as his parents — and he crafted a painfully intimate portrait of a family at the end of its rope. The final scenes of The War at Home are as powerful a 15 minutes as you'll ever spend watching a movie.

 Alice's Restaurant (1969)

The most famous Thanksgiving dinner of the 1960s gets the big-screen treatment from director Arthur Penn — who'd just made history with Bonnie and Clyde — in this quirky rendering of Arlo Guthrie's subversive song.  Arlo plays himself, narrating the story of how, after a "Thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat," he and a buddy were arrested for dumping Alice's garbage along a roadside. It's hard to imagine today that Alice's Restaurant was considered terribly edgy back in the turbulent '60s. It's interesting to note that many people in the film (the song is based on an actual run-in Arlo had with the law) played themselves, including the original Officer Obie and the judge who convicted Arlo based on the evidence of "27 eight-by-ten color glossy photos." That spirit of good-natured coexistence runs through an antiwar film undoubtedly made to prick a nation's conscience, but which survives as a warm evocation of a time long gone.

[billnewcottblog]

10 Scary Good Halloween Flicks

The Shining

Stephen King didn't much like Stanley Kubrick's version of his novel about a haunted hotel, and I have to admit I found myself at first insufficiently terrorized by it when the film opened in 1980. But the older I get, the more I appreciate the movie's relentless creepiness, its steadily mounting atmosphere of dread, its uncanny sense of being buried alive in a wide open space. Jack Nicholson's normal-to-nutso transformation offers much more nuance than I gave it credit for, and Shelley Duvall's awful awakening to her hubby's case of stark raving crazies should have earned her an Oscar nomination. Cite virtually any scene from The Shining, and I'll show you a film that tries to copy it.

Psycho

Is there any director more rewardingly manipulative than Alfred Hitchcock? He spends the first 45 minutes of Psycho getting us invested in the story of a young woman who's on the run after having stolen money from her boss — then he abruptly kills her in the most shockingly stark murder scene ever filmed. And then what does he do? He introduces us to a whole new cast of characters, knowing full well we'll have a queasy suspicion that he could do away with any of them at any moment, as well. Even without that shower scene — which may have changed the direction of movies forever — Psycho would stand as a landmark horror movie. As it is, it borders on deliciously unbearable.

The Bride of Frankenstein

Director James Whale's original Frankenstein was a straightforward affair — you know, gather the body parts, stitch 'em together, pull down some lightning and, voila, "It's a-LIIIIIVE!", followed by peasants with pitchforks. The sequel, though, is quite something else, a masterful mix of horror and sentiment. Boris Karloff infuses his monster with an astonishing level of humanity — witness his sentiment-dripping scene with a blind hermit and his heartbroken reaction to the Bride's horrified scream. The film's unapologetic attempt to humanize the monster, and thus make all the more tragic his ultimate fate, hinges completely on Karloff's ability to convey emotion from beneath a mountain of makeup.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Maybe you had to live through the gnawing nationwide suspicion that communists were everywhere in the 1950s, trying to infiltrate American society, to appreciate the full impact of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It's scary enough upon viewing today, as pods from outer space land in rural California, hatching aliens that become blank-faced, emotionless versions of the humans they kill. But in its day, the political subtext of director Don Siegel's masterpiece was equally disturbing for those who feared the communists and those who dismissed those fears as overwrought. Seldom have science fiction and real life found such chilling resonance.

The Exorcist

Sure, you can laugh about it now, but the night in 1973 when you slunk into that dark theater, informed only by the nervous rumors circulating among your friends, you were seized by a sense of chilly foreboding. Then came Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells theme, and before you knew it all Hell was literally breaking loose on screen, what with the turning head and the spewing pea soup and the unwelcome news regarding what one character's dead mother was doing at that very moment. The Exorcist still informs our vision of what close encounters of the satanic kind should look like, and if you dare to think about it, even now, you realize that those skittish friends of yours back in '73 didn't know the half of it.

Silence of the Lambs

The characters had already existed in book form, and indeed there'd already been a movie made about Hannibal (The Cannibal) Lecter. But when Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal and Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling, a student at the FBI Academy, squared off in director Jonathan Demme's twisted melding of horror flick and police procedural, all bets were off. After it was all over, the shaken audience not only felt they had barely escaped with their own lives; they were left with the sickening sense that the depths to which human evil can sink are, really, unfathomable.

Dressed to Kill

Director Brian De Palma had been cribbing off of Hitchcock for years, and he really hit his Hitchy stride with this story of a serial killer stalking beautiful women in New York City. As his first victim, Angie Dickinson meets an unfortunate end in an elevator. There's no shortage of suspects, including the victim's psychiatrist (Michael Caine), a cop and a high-priced call girl (Nancy Allen). Through it all, De Palma maintains the uneasy notion that anyone could be a killer, if you push just the right buttons.

The Devil's Advocate

Keanu Reeves is a hard-driving defense attorney and Al Pacino is Satan incarnate in this delicious little 1997 morality tale. Impressed with how Reeves' character got a child molester off in Florida, Pacino enlists him to join his unholy law firm in Manhattan. What follows is a devilishly delightful battle of wits as Satan skillfully manipulates the lawyer into deeper and deeper levels of decrepitude — all the while reminding him he's operating under his own free will. By the time he's too deep to dig himself out, the lawyer finds himself knocking on the gates of Hell in a very cool, hideously baroque finale.

Scream

Ingeniously, director Wes Craven resurrected the slasher movie genre by satirizing it in this supersmart 1996 tale of teenagers terrorized by a killer in a ghost mask. The kids, all well versed in the conventions of horror flicks — never tell people "I'll be right back" when you leave a room; never assume the killer is dead, etc. — discover in the course of the evening in question that those old saws are all too true. With a severed tongue firmly planted in its cheek, Scream earns its laughs, and its gasps, honestly.

Peeping Tom

Director Michael Powell was known for lush A-list movies such as The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffman, so when he unleashed this savage little film on unsuspecting British filmgoers in 1960, they never forgave him. It's the truly macabre tale of a handsome young filmmaker who focuses his little Bell and Howell movie camera on terrorized women while impaling them with a sharpened leg of his tripod. We do get to watch as the cops spend much of the film tracking down the killer, but the sheer cold-bloodedness of his crimes — he eventually mounts a mirror on his camera so the victims can watch themselves die — leaves the viewer with a sick sense of complicity. Ecchh.

[billnewcottblog]

When Elvis Died

It seems impossible to believe I’ve been a professional writer long enough to have covered the death of Elvis Presley 40 years ago this week.

“Write something about Elvis,” ordered my editor Bill Godfrey.  So here’s the piece published in the Downey, California, Southeast News and Daily Signal August 23, 1977, as 22-year-old Bill Newcott tried to make some sense of the Death of The King.

  All That’s Left is the Crying

Nobody Believed Elvis was 42; He may as well have been 90

 By Bill Newcott

Pat Boone said it best.

 “Now,” he said last week, “We’ll never have to know what it’s like to know an old Elvis Presley.”

Elvis was 42 when he died last week. But he may as well have been 90. Nobody believed he was 42 anyway. We were always shocked and dismayed to see pictures of him in recent years, his infamous weight problem giving genuine basis to fears, once joked about, that he might literally burst through his clothing. To his fans, the bulges and health deficiencies simply did not exist. Elvis could not be a sick man. They would not let him.

The very week he died, the National Star, one of this nation’s chief purveyors of cheap shots, was featuring a cover of a rotund, Buddha-like Elvis. On the day he died, a former bodyguard was telling a Chicago newspaper his story, still unproven, that Elvis was a drug addict.

But to those who loved Elvis, and to those who saw him as the embodiment of modern music, the attacks and the snickering were as a moustache painted on the Mona Lisa. They were incidents of disrespect born of ignorance.

To the millions who bowed to Elvis as their mentor, the man never advanced a day beyond the 21 years of age he was during that first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. To mention Elvis and age in the same sentence amounted to a non sequitur. Elvis could not get old. They would not let him.

Elvis’ career was, it seemed, a long series of return engagements. Under the careful guidance of Colonel Parker, Elvis would burst upon the scene, then disappear for almost a year. Then he would burst back, bigger and brighter than ever. All those who grew up with him would suddenly experience a rush of memories. And they would scream. And cry. The audiences screamed up until the very last. Now all that’s left is the crying.

As a vocalist, Elvis was a sadly underrated stylist. Exciting as rock-and-roll singer, Elvis was also a baladeer of the first rank. When singing rock he had a tendency to swallow words, often cutting off entire syllables. But with a ballad or gospel song, Elvis turned, almost literally, into a different performer.

His voice had the ability to maintain a continuous phrase, or make incredible leaps. When singing rhythm and blues, he often had a raspy, tinny sound. A ballad, though, he would take lovingly and mold into a landscape of melody and unexpected vocal emphasis. Somehow, his tone became fuller; his lungs seemed to contain more air.

In concert, Elvis struck a disturbing figure. Toward the end, he was singing in a different city every night. According to some, he was suffering from exhaustion. He didn’t know where he was.

He would stalk the stage, whipping the microphone behind him like a leopard’s tail. The program was set; the same every night. He’d run straight through the gamut of his greatest hits, almost like a medley, sometimes singing only half a stanza of one before launching into the next selection. He had too many hits. He had to sing them all. They were expecting it. He forgot the words. The audience laughed. Elvis laughed. He somehow got back on the track. The medley was over. So was the show. He should have slowed down, but he didn’t. They wouldn’t let him.

Perhaps the single worst song Elvis ever recorded was “Hound Dog.”  A watered-down lyric hung limply on a rock-and-roll progression, it became, unwittingly, Elvis’ trademark. He had to sing it wherever he went. In the last years, he would seem to sing it as poorly as he could, sometimes doing the whole song on a single note, at other times without moving his mouth. He ridiculed the song, performing it as a ballad. But it was no use. He could never drop “Hound Dog.” They wouldn’t let him.

The Russians, in recent weeks, complained that the capitalist system had ruined Elvis Presley, a man who went from driving a truck to being one of the wealthiest and best-known entertainers in the world. The rationale, most likely, had something to do with the Soviets’ unique ability to maintain their artists, regardless of their brilliance, in a consistent state of paupership.

But no capitalist system caused Elvis Presley to die at the age of 42. Nor was it his heart. And, despite what some people would love for us to think, not even drugs did Elvis in.

Youth killed Elvis Presley. Physical youth, that is, and this society’s preoccupation with its preservation.  An overweight middle-aged man with a family history of heart disease ought to be very careful. But even as the magazines tabulated each new bulge, each new bag under his eyes, Elvis continued to feed his fans’ unyielding conviction that he was still that kid on Ed Sullivan. As long as his fans would not let him age, Elvis would not allow himself to.

And so he died. He had sold a quarter of a billion records, and he will probably sell that many more. RCA Records stands to make yet another fortune off of post-mortem Elvis fans.

So, in a sense, Elvis will never die. They won’t let him.