#radio flyer 1992

[lalaloobzy]

[will80sbyers]

Vecna is possessing the lady in s3 and the Duffers decided to put this shot with both the bike that is representing Will being kidnapped in s1 as they have said in an interview AND this red "Radio Flyer" cart (the most famous ones of those are called like that)

Then we have Fred that's starting to have his vision in the woods before his death and look they put this again in frame many times

This made me think about a story I have read or seen somewhere where there were two siblings that were playing together and one shoved the other on the ground and the sibling hurt his head on the red cart and died... I need to remember what this story is from because I always associated that cart in movies to that story after I saw that but I don't remember from where 😭

and this makes me think about the idea that Henry could have had a brother again...

Also I've found this movie Radio Flyer (1992) that is about two brothers Mike and Bobby wanting to escape from abuse and one of them (Bobby) dying (I think he was killed by the stepdad but it's like left as a mystery ?) in the red cart... I have to watch it but it also looks like they are working in a shed and it reminded me of Will's shed

[moviesinfocus]

Notebook Reviews: RADIO FLYER

Richard Donner – 1992. Radio Fyler is a solid, though unspectacular fantasy-drama from director Richard Donner and producer Michael Douglas. This had a troubled production and Donner was drafted in after writer David Mickey Evans had been in production for a couple of weeks. The second half is better than the first, but the fantastical elements don’t really fit alongside the darker brutality. It…

[paulcinephile]

Elijah Wood, Joseph Mazzello and others, Radio Flyer (dir. Richard Donner, 1992)

[filmandtvhistory]

February 21, 1992 - Radio Flyer is released theatrically in the US.

The fantasy drama film was written by David Mickey Evans and directed by Richard Donner. It starred Lorraine Bracco, John Heard, Elijah Wood, Joseph Mazzello and Adam Baldwin.

There was a bidding war for Evans’ script between Warner Bros. and Columbia Pictures. Columbia ended up winning by offering Evans $1.25 million which was a big amount for a first-time screenwriter in Hollywood.

[tornbluefoamcouch]

Artista: Hans Zimmer Álbum: Radio Flyer Ano: 1992 Faixas/Tempo: 04/33min Estilo: Soundtrack Label: Giant Records Data de Execução: 23/01/2019 Nota: 6.0 Melhor Música: Radio Flyer part 1

[heavenboy09]

Happy Birthday 🎂 🥳 🎉 🎈 🎁 🎊 To A Very Talented Actor Who Rose To Top Fame Since His Days As A Child Actor as Most Prominent Young Future Stars started out in the Earlier, 70's, 80's,  & 90's Back In The Day.

He made his film debut with a small part in Back to the Future Part II (1989). He went on to achieve recognition as a child actor with roles in Avalon (1990), Paradise (1991), Radio Flyer (1992), Forever Young (1992), The Adventures of Huck Finn (1993), and The Good Son (1993). As a teenager, he starred in films such as North (1994), The War (1994), Flipper (1996), The Ice Storm (1997), Deep Impact (1998), and The Faculty (1998). 

Then in 1999 He was selected from the Chosen Few to play a Highly Well Regarded Role That Would Change His Career Forever.

In December 2001

Based On The Famous Classic Fantasy Novel written by JR. Tolkein

A World Of Fantastic Medival Adventures Arrived On The Big Screen and Became A 1# Sensational Film 🎥 For Years To Come.

In The Role That Would Put Him Back On The Map

As The Titular Character, Frodo Baggins

In

Peter Jackson's

THE LORD OF THE RINGS 💍  THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING 💍

& He continued to play this character until the very end of the Lord Of The Rings Original Trilogy.

&

Besides Other Movies 🎥 He Starred In Later In His Career

He also got into Television Roles 📺 mostly Animated Cartoon Series including 1 of the Original Disney XD's Channel Original Animated Series Based on the Iconic Disney Scifi Movie 🎥

TRON

He Played The Titular Character Named Beck

IN

DISNEY'S

TRON UPRISING

Which aired its last episode of the Iconic Animated Series on January 28th 2013 on his Birthday 🎂

Please Wish This Esteemed Young Actor 🙏 Who has been doing this Job since Childhood a Very Happy Birthday 🎂 🥳 🎉 🎈 🎁 🎊

The 1

&

The Only

MR. ELIJAH JORDAN WOOD 

[fluke-fanzine]

☕️ Today is my birthday and I got to spend the morning with one of the two friends who started Fluke with me way back in 1991. The new book is now available in my online store [LINK IN BIO] or mail $10 cash to me: FLUKE / POB 1547 / Phoenix, AZ 85001 Fluke 19.5: The First Two Years In 1990 in Little Rock, Arkansas, local punk Steve Schmidt set out to be in a band (Chino Horde), host a punk rock radio show on KABF (Adios Amerika) and publish a fanzine (Plaid). While Chino Horde and Adios Amerika achieved greatness in Little Rock and abroad, Plaid never saw issue 1. A year later, Jason White and Matthew Thompson stepped in to collaborate with Schmidt on Fluke issue 1, picking up where he left off with Plaid. Steve had interviews with Fugazi and Plaid Retina in the can, Jason interviewed Tim Lamb (of legendary '80s Little Rock punk fanzine Lighten Up) and Matthew submitted a few writings. They wrote dozens of punk and hip hop record reviews, shot photographs and sought contributors around town. There's content addressing the societal pressures of the Bible Belt onto the youth—military recruiters to religious crusaders and anti-abortionists. While not at shows or skateboarding, the three high school friends created the design and layout at Kinko's in North Little Rock, where local punk and friend Colin Brooks worked. With a very nice "deal" on copies, Fluke 1 was born. The following year, Fluke 2 was published soon after Steve moved to Eureka, California but eventually returning to Little Rock. Issue 2 featured touring bands, including interviews with Lungfish, Ben Sizemore (Econochrist), Bay Area bands Nuisance and Monsula, and Toronto's Phleg Camp. As things progressed, Steve and Jason channeled their energy into Chino Horde while Matthew continued publishing Fluke. Issue 14 (2017) contains 40 show flyers from 1988-1992, all from the one punk club in town. The early '90s Little Rock scene was centered around these shows, with local sweethearts Trusty as the driving force. The show flyers are the centerpiece here, completing Fluke 19.5: The First Two Years. 8.5x11, 108 pages, perfect bound, offset printed book. Wholesale prices available! 🎂 (at Saul's Restaurant & Delicatessen) https://www.instagram.com/p/CkjbparS0Mb/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[dustedmagazine]

Come — Peel Sessions (Fire Records)

Peel Sessions by Come

For a couple years in the early 1990s, Come was the best band playing in the space at which punk, indie and rock’n’roll converged. The “rock’n’roll” was especially prevalent in the band’s singular sound; Thalia Zedek, Chris Brokaw and their bandmates managed to evoke the most dissipated tonalities of the Classic Rock Canon (the Stones’ French Riviera sojourn, Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night-period tours with the Santa Monica Flyers) and carry them forward into the early 1990s, creating a ragged splendor that was distinctly Come’s own. They wrote and recorded two brilliant records, 11:11 (1992) and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (1994), full of terrific songs and a palpably desperate atmosphere. But the songs really took off in their live renditions, in which all the sweat and groggy glory could dazzle, collapse and gather itself for another ascent.

So, it’s decidedly welcome that Come’s two performances on John Peel’s radio show, from 1992 and 1993, have been gathered on this new Peel Sessions release. You get the best of two worlds: a studio-engineered, sonically clear experience you can listen to again and again (if, like this reviewer, you are inclined to do so, repeatedly), and Come doing its grand and simultaneously down-at-the-heels thing, with the raw intensity of real-time performance. The 1993 set has some great moments: versions of “Sharon vs Karen” (a track from the 1994 7” for “Wrong Side”) and “City of Fun” (a cover of the song by the Only Ones, first available on Rob Deacon’s Volume Eight compilation). They’re not widely available tunes, and they both tear the place to pieces. 

But the 1992 session, comprising four songs from 11:11, is the real scorcher. Listeners possessing note-for-note recall of that record will be transported, especially by the performances of “Bell” and “Off to One Side.” The LP versions of those songs are marked by a warped disorientation, a tendency to slide in and out of time and rhythm that complements the doom struck, nightmarish thematics. The band replicates those seemingly ineffable qualities with disarming immediacy and faith to the studio recordings. But none of it feels canned, or overly practiced. The tunes are too good, the playing too forcefully real.     

Songs that weird and discomfitingly intimate were never going to be hits — but even among music geeks that like to talk about the ebbs and flows of rock’s long narrative, Come flies under the radar. In conversations about the indie rock moment, the Elephant 6 bands’ Beatles obsessions have been widely anatomized, and those much-praised GBV records of the mid-1990s often sounded like expertly miniaturized versions of the Who’s performance at the Rock and Roll Circus. Come’s players weren’t paying tribute or recycling riffs; they were living and writing the songs they had to write. The band’s dissonant and emotionally piercing music was tuned in to a deeper flow of blues that courses through some of the hardest rock, and songs like “Dead Molly” and “William” sutured the early Clinton years to the long crisis of Nixon’s second term. They’re like a secret history of American socio-cultural brownouts. It’s great to hear some of those songs again, in all their gritty sublimity. 

Jonathan Shaw

[rancidtofu]

Before anybody ever grows up, there are magical things, impossible for adults, that can still happen. The reason these things are lost to the grown-up world is simple. In the quick second between the age of 12 and your 13th birthday, the great secrets to them all are replaced in your mind with the thoughts of the opposite sex.

Radio Flyer (1992) dir. David Mickey Evans, Richard Donner

[morethanboomtschk]

Alan Oldham: The Art of Techno Futurism

Alan Oldham is just that – a forward thinking futurist and former radio jockey whose work has long fused the not-so-distant worlds of art and music. Creating illustrations under his own name and spinning under the moniker DJ T-1000, Oldham’s status as a sci-fi visionary has made him one of the most unique and important figures to come out of the Detroit techno movement. “Detroit techno, in my view, was originally about futurism,” he says. “Futuristic black music. Look no further than Juan Atkins for that. A lot of old sci-fi movies and TV shows portrayed a future that had no blacks in it. Detroit techno was a statement that black people would be around in the far future. You can also connect Sun Ra and Mothership Connection-era Parliament/Funkadelic to that aesthetic.”

In the tradition of Sun Ra’s Arkestral manuevers and P-Funk’s explorations of funk’s outer limits, Oldham brings forth elements of science fiction, cultural awareness, higher levels of consciousness and even mythology to forge a sensibility from a future state of existence – with nods to realism interwoven. He believes those talents are innate. “I'm a natural,” says Oldham. “I had an art class in high school, but that's about it. I've been drawing since I was born.” His style – sharp, angular, forward and revolutionary – reflects both the evolution of his craft and his consistency. “My style has matured a bit, especially with my move to paintings,” he says. “But essentially, it's the same as it's always been.”

Oldham began his artistic career as a comic book illustrator, writing for small companies such as Hot Comics, Amazing Comics, Renegade Press, Caliber Comics and a few others. “I started out like everybody else, trying to draw superheroes and trying to get in at Marvel or DC by aping their basic style,” he recalls. “I came up with my own rip-offs of characters, then a few originals of my own. But once I stopped trying to draw like other people, I was able to get in on the indie comics scene of the late ’80s. Anime and manga influences were coming in. It wasn’t so much the basic Marvel or DC styles anymore. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles famously came from that scene, so it was a gold mine back then. Anybody could do anything and it would sell. You could come out with a black and white comic and sell 50,000 copies. We did over 15,000 on Johnny Gambit #1.” - Johnny Gambit is an indie comic book Oldham created at Visual Noise, a studio he put together in the late ‘80s as a place to ink and letter the comic. The name was recently resurrected for an art show Oldham mounted at the Record Loft in Berlin, where he is currently based. Yet in 1986 in Detroit, Derrick May took notice of Johnny Gambit and Oldham’s advanced illustrative style – and he introduced Oldham to the developing techno sound stemming from the Motor City.

“When I went to Wayne State University years ago, there was a place on campus called Student Center,” Oldham remembers. “We all used to hang out there between classes. Some semesters I had long gaps between day and evening classes, so I was there a lot. I was drawing Johnny Gambit at the time and I would have my art supplies with me. Derrick May used to work at this video arcade right off campus on Woodward, and lived a block away from WSU, so I began to run into him. I had known Derrick since we were kids, by the way. Like 10-11 years old. Anyway, he was coming through Student Center when he saw me working on Johnny Gambit. He said he was starting this new label and he asked me to do the label art for it. He offered me $50 for both sides, so I did the designs. $50 was a lot of money in 1986. The record turned out to be ‘Nude Photo’ b/w ‘The Dance’ and it turned out to be very famous.”

It would become the first of dozens of album illustrations for the Detroit techno community. “Derrick had this buddy who needed a logo for his label called KMS,” says Oldham. “So he brought Kevin Saunderson down to Student Center one day, and I met him. I ended up doing the first KMS logo, the one that’s on ‘Truth of Self-Evidence,’ ‘Bounce Your Body to the Box,’ etc. And it just went on from there.” - Oldham was landing gig after gig. In 1987, one of those gigs brought him to a different world: radio. An intern at WDET (a Detroit Public Radio station) the summer prior, he was then offered his own show, which was aptly called “Fast Forward,” holding true to Oldham’s futuristic approach to life. “Fast Forward” had become Detroit���s first-ever all-electronic radio program and ran between 1987-1992. Oldham had a graveyard shift initially – 3 AM to 6 AM – but his audience was vast, as he played everything from classic favourites to burgeoning techno beats from colleagues and friends.

Some of the music given to him for his radio show was from Jeff Mills and Mike Banks, who had just formed Underground Resistance, and they recruited Oldham for yet another gig – this time in the area of public relations for the newfound collective. “Jeff Mills was another childhood friend,” Oldham describes. “Mills lived down the street from this kid I used to draw with. This kid’s dad had this high-rise at 1600 Lafayette that we used to gather at to play Monopoly every week and Jeff was in the group. Years later, Jeff had hooked up with Mike Banks to form UR. By this time, I had my radio show on WDET, and they used to feed me reel-to-reels and white labels to play on the air.

“By 1991, UR was getting stronger and they needed PR help. I minored in English and learned to write press releases in school, so I started doing that for UR for gas money. We were all crammed into Banks’ mom’s basement. Rob Hood was in the group, too, designing flyers, pasting up stuff. This was pre-Mac, of course.”

Oldham’s involvement with Underground Resistance led to his introduction to DJing. “When Jeff left UR in ’92 and they had an Australian Tour all lined up, Banks asked me to be the replacement tour DJ,” he says. “Everybody had code names in UR, so that's when DJ T-1000 was born. I went at it with gusto, ’cause it was my big break. And that was that.” - However, the development of DJ T-1000 also led to the temporary demise of Oldham’s comic illustrations. “Once I got into DJing and traveling every weekend and making music, doing comics took a back seat,” he says. “But with the slow demise of the music business as I once knew it, I’m back to the first love, making comics and art again.”

His travels and constant connections resulted in Oldham creating art for an impressive roster including Derrick May, Miss Djax, Ben Sims, Richie Hawtin, Astralwerks, Third Ear Recordings, Opilec Music, Steve Bug, Cisco Ferreira (The Advent), Delsin Records, AW Recordings and many others. “Because of my work for Djax-Up-Beats, robots have become a theme in my artwork,” Oldham says. “People know me for that, so I decided to continue the theme in my big canvases. Big booties, stiletto heels, spaceships and robots.” Oldham’s art garnered international attention through the DJs and labels, especially in Europe, where there was (and still is) a deep fascination with Detroit techno. “When I started emphasizing on doing gallery shows in Europe, the techno art got even more popular,” he says. Although he felt something special stirring out of the Detroit techno movement, Oldham knew his calling was overseas. “All that interest from Europe… for me, just the chance to get out of Detroit and see the world and make so many international friends was a very big thing, and still is,” he says.

Today, Oldham travels the world showcasing his art, as well as his music. He continues to spread the futuristic message of Detroit techno on an international level through his talents. “My number one goal with both my art and music is to impact my audience in a positive way,” he says. “No negativity, just mood and cool. I’ve got paintings hanging in people’s homes and studios, and my music in their iPods. I want to push my aesthetic out there and leave my mark.”

This article was published on the Red Bull Music Academy website in November 2014. Written by Ashley Zlatopolsky.

[browneyedfloozy]

literally no one asked for this but I’m gonna do it anyway. here is my definitive ranking of joe mazzello’s movies, in no particular order. (I’ll add to it as I watch them)

let’s get the easiest one out of the way first

Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)

do I even need to say anything about it???? joe mazzello cured my depression with this movie not really but yknow he came pretty damn close my boys are all great and it’s all I’ll be able to talk about for the next 39 years. 

77/10 mazzellos

Jurassic Park (1993)

dinosaur baby. adorable. plus jeff goldblum and rad dinosaurs. I based an entire party with themed snacks around this movie and it was amazing. (joe was invited but he has a very busy schedule. it was understandable that he couldn’t make an appearance.....)

12/10 mazzellos

Radio Flyer (1992)

DO YOU SEE THIS LITTLE BABY. worth it for the amount of overalls he wears alone. also like a really good movie? will probably make you cry.

10/10 mazzellos

Three Wishes (1995)

pretty sure this is the same shirt from the previous picture. angsty joe is adorable. worth noting that patrick swayze is lookin like a snacc in this movie. weird ending tho I did not get it (I also stopped paying attention for part of it sorry joe)

4.5/10 mazzellos

Jersey Girl (1992)

okay, let me level with you. joe’s in this movie for like a total of 4 minutes. but he’s freakin cute. an alright movie if you like rom coms (which I do)

5/10 mazzellos

Raising Helen (2004)

let’s get this one out of the way while we’re at it. he’s in the movie for like 2 minutes but it is a pretty great 2 minutes. not a bad stand alone movie. worth noting that it seems like all the kids in this movie went on to do some other cool stuff

6/10 mazzellos

Wooly Boys (2001)

pretty sure this movie was about gay cowboys but I could be projecting?? worth it for joe’s DAMN SUNGLASSES ALONE. you know the ones. probably would have made me cry if I was paying just a tiny bit more attention

7/10 mazzellos

The Social Network (2010)

we all know this is a great movie. “fuck you flip flops”??? FUCKING ICONIC. joe only enhances the experience of this movie. 

8.5/10 mazzellos

Simon Birch (1995)

I’m gonna be honest, I thought this movie was going to be dumb. NEWS FLASH IT’S NOT (watch the movie he says news flash) listen. tiny lil heartthrob joe crackin jokes and playin baseball is all any movie really needs. yes it made me cry. 

9/10 mazzellos? are we gonna rate it that high?? I guess we are.

Dear Sidewalk (2013)

look at him. go watch this movie. adorable. I’m in love. 

8/10 mazzellos

UNDRAFTED (2016)

are you even a joe mazzello fan if you haven’t watched this movie yet? fucking hilarious and I hate sports movies. he wrote, directed, produced, and starred in it please go support him!! also worth it for all the eye candy on screen?? 

11/10 mazzellos

[deaky51]

joseph mazzello

Radio Flyer 1992

[thebossiswrongasrain]

Top 10 Favorite Movies

So that’s if its in writing it’s official (not any official order)

1. Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)

2. The Goonies (1985)

3. Radio Flyer (1992)

4. 10 Things I Hate About You (1999)

5. Undrafted (2016)

6. Avengers: Infinity War (2018)

7. Wedding Crashers (2005)

8. IT

9. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)

10. Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982)

[watusichris]

“Border Radio”: Where Punk Lived

Some years back, I wrote notes for the Criterion Collection’s edition of Allison Anders’ first feature Border Radio for the Criterion Collection. Tomorrow (June 3), Allison will gab about punk rock with John Doe, Tom DeSavia, and my illegitimate son Keith Morris at the Grammy Museum in L.A. in observance of the publication of the book we’re all in, More Fun in the New World (Da Capo).

**********

“You can’t expect other people to create drama for your life—they’re too busy creating it for themselves,” a punk groupie says at the conclusion of Border Radio. And the four reckless characters at the center of the film certainly manage to create plenty of drama for themselves. In the process, they paint a compelling picture of the Los Angeles punk-rock scene of the 1980s: what it was like on the inside—and what it was like inside the musicians’ heads. Border Radio (1987) was the first feature by three UCLA film students: Allison Anders, Kurt Voss, and Dean Lent. The subsequent work of both Anders and Voss would resonate with echoes from Border Radio and its musical milieu. Anders’s Gas Food Lodging (1992), Mi vida loca (1993), Grace of My Heart (1996), Sugar Town (1999), and Things Behind the Sun (2001) all draw to some degree from music and pop culture. (She quotes her mentor Wim Wenders’s remark about making The Scarlet Letter: “There were no jukeboxes. I lost interest.”) Voss, who co-wrote and codirected Sugar Town, also wrote and directed Down & Out with the Dolls (2001), a fictional feature about an all-girl band; and in 2006, he was completing Ghost on the Highway, a documentary about Jeffrey Lee Pierce, the late vocalist for the key L.A. punk group the Gun Club. The three filmmakers met at UCLA in the early eighties, after Anders and Voss had worked as production assistants on Wenders’s Paris, Texas. By that time, Anders and Voss, then a couple, were habitués of the L.A. club milieu; they favored the hard sound of such punk acts as X, the Blasters, the Flesh Eaters, the Gun Club, and Tex & the Horseheads. The neophyte writer-directors, who by 1983 had made a couple of short student films, formulated the idea of building an original script around a group of figures in the L.A. punk demimonde. Border Radio—which takes its title, and no little script inspiration, from a Blasters song (sung on the soundtrack by Rank & File’s Tony Kinman)—was conceived as a straight film noir. Vestiges of that origin can be seen in the finished film. Its lead character bears the name Jeff Bailey, also the name of Robert Mitchum’s doomed character in Jacques Tourneur’s 1947 noir Out of the Past; its Mexican locations also reflect a key setting in that bleak picture. One sequence features a pedal-boat ride around the same Echo Park lagoon where Jack Nicholson’s J. J. Gittes does some surveillance in Roman Polanski’s 1974 neonoir Chinatown; Chinatown itself—a hotbed of L.A. punk action in the late seventies and early eighties—features prominently in another scene. Certainly, Border Radio’s heist-based plot and the multiple betrayals its central foursome inflict upon each other are the stuff of purest noir. But the film diverges from its source in its largely sunlit cinematography and its explosions of punk humor; Anders, Voss, and Lent also abandoned plans to kill off the film’s lead female character. In casting their feature, the filmmakers turned to some able performers who were close at hand. The female lead was taken by Anders’s sister Luanna; her daughter was portrayed by Anders’s daughter Devon. Chris, Jeff’s spoiled, untrustworthy friend and roadie, was played by UCLA theater student Chris Shearer. The directors considered another student for the lead role of the tormented musician, Jeff, but Anders, in an inspired stroke, suggested Chris D. (né Desjardins), whose brooding, feral presence animated the Flesh Eaters. After being approached at a West L.A. club gig and initially expressing surprise at the filmmakers’ desire to cast him, the singer and songwriter signed on, and he helped recruit the other musicians in Border Radio. (A cineaste whose criticism often appeared in the local punk rag Slash, Desjardins would later write an authoritative book on Japanese yakuza films and write and direct the independent vampire film I Pass for Human. He is currently a programmer at the Los Angeles Cinematheque.) John Doe, bassist-vocalist for the celebrated L.A. punk unit X, and Dave Alvin, guitarist and songwriter for the top local roots act the Blasters, had both played with Chris D. in an edition of the Flesh Eaters. Doe—taking the first in a long list of film and TV roles—was cast as the duplicitous, drunken rocker Dean; Alvin makes an entertaining cameo appearance, essentially as himself, and wrote and performed the film’s score.Texacala Jones, frontwoman for the chaotic Tex & the Horseheads, does a hilarious turn as Devon’s addled babysitter. Iris Berry, later a member of the raucous all-female group the Ringling Sisters, portrays the self-absorbed groupie whose observations frame the film. Julie Christensen, Desjardins’ vocal partner in his latter-day group Divine Horsemen (and, for a time, his wife), essays a bit part as a club doorwoman. Seen in walk-ons are such local rockers as Tony Kinman, Flesh Eaters bassist Robyn Jameson, and punk hellion Texas Terri. The Arizona “paisley underground” transplants Green on Red and the local glam-punk outfit Billy Wisdom & the Hee Shees were captured in live performance. Those seeking punk verisimilitude could ask for nothing more. Border Radio had a torturous, piecemeal production history worthy of John Cassavetes. Shooting took place over a four-year period, from 1983 to 1987. Begun with two thousand dollars in seed money, supplied by actor Vic Tayback, the film scraped by on money given to Voss upon his 1984 graduation from UCLA, a loan from Lent’s parents, and cash and film stock cadged here and there. Violating UCLA policy, the filmmakers cut the film at night in the school’s editing bays, where Anders’s two young daughters would sleep on the floor. The film’s lack of a budget forced Anders, Voss, and Lent to shoot entirely on location; this enhanced the work, as far as the filmmakers were concerned, since they sought a naturalistic style and look for the feature. Lent’s Echo Park apartment doubled as Jeff’s home, while Anders and Voss’s trailer in Ensenada served as his Mexican hideout. The storied punk hangout the Hong Kong Café (whose neon sign can be seen fleetingly in Chinatown) was utilized, as were the East Side rehearsal studio Hully Gully, where virtually every local band of note honed their chops, and the music shop Rockaway Records (one of the few punk stores of the day still around). Befitting the work of film students on their maiden directorial voyage, Border Radio evinces the heavy influence of both the French new wave of the sixties and the New German Cinema of the seventies. The confident use of improvisation—the cast is credited with “additional dialogue and scenario”—recalls such early nouvelle vague works as Breathless. The ongoing “interview” device immediately recalls Jean-Pierre Léaud’s face-to-face with “Miss 19” in Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculin féminin, while Shearer’s shambling comedic outbursts are reminiscent of the sudden madcap eruptions in François Truffaut’s early films. The work of the Germans is felt most in the great pictorial beauty of Lent’s black-and-white compositions; certain striking moments—a languid, 360-degree pan around Ensenada’s bay; an overhead shot of Chris’s foreign roadster wheeling in circles in a cul-de-sac—summon memories of Wenders’s and Werner Herzog’s most indelible images. (Lent would go on to work as a cinematographer on nearly thirty pictures.) Though the styles and effects of these predecessors are on constant display, Border Radio moves beyond simple imitation, thanks to a sensibility that is uniquely of its time, spawned directly from the scene it depicts so faithfully. Though putatively a “music film,” very little music is actually on view in the picture; mere snatches of two songs are actually performed on-screen. The truest reflection of the period’s punk ethos can be found in the restlessness, anger, self-deception, and anomie of its Reagan-era protagonists. In Border Radio, one can see what punk rock looked like, all the way to the margins of the frame: in the flyers for L.A. bands like the Alley Cats, the Gears, and the Weirdos taped in a club hallway, in the poster for Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein and the calendars of L.A. repertory movie houses tacked on apartment walls, in the thrift-store togs and rock-band T-shirts (street clothes, really) worn by the players. But, more importantly, the shifting tragicomic tone of the film, the energy and attitude of its musician performers, and the uneasy rhythms of its characters’ lives present a real sense of the reality of L.A. punkdom in the day. Put into limited theatrical release in 1987, by the company that distributed the popular surf movie Endless Summer—a film that offers a picture of a very different L.A.—Border Radio was not widely seen and later received only an elusive videocassette release through Pacific Arts (the home-video firm founded, ironically enough, by Michael Nesmith of the prefab sixties rock group the Monkees). With this Criterion Collection edition, the film can finally be seen as the overlooked landmark that it is: possibly the only dramatic film to capture the pulse of L.A. punk—not as it played, but as it felt. (Thanks to Allison Anders for her invaluable contributions.)

[quasar1967]

Cinefantastique #90

Aug 1992

This issue includes the following: articles on Afraid of the Dark, Batman Returns, Stay Tuned, the Lawnmower Man, the Evil Dead saga, and more; previews of Pet Sematary Two and Universal Soldier; a production article on Honey, I Blew up the Kid; a letter by Frank Darabont; reviews of The Lawnmower Man and Radio Flyer. Evil Dead III cover painting