Movie Heaven

I was sitting at my laptop a couple of days ago, working on things, and I put on Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes' album, "Havin' a Party". The music took me back to the movie "Between the Lines", a 1977 story about an idealistic underground newspaper in Boston, staffed by writers and editors in their 20's, which is being sold to an establishment publisher.

I saw it during the summer of 1981. My first wife had, through her superior work in the University of Oregon's Journalism graduate program, earned an internship at The Oregonian.

She lived with her brother and sister-in-law in Portland and I stayed in Eugene, studying for a comprehensive examination in Modern American Drama and taking a course in German for Reading Knowledge.

I went to visit my wife one particular weekend. She had to work on Saturday. I decided to go to the movies.

Going to the movies in 1981 was a substantially different experience than it is in 2007. For one thing, the 1970's, especially pre-Star Wars, had been a fertile time for independent movie making. Studios were still willing to produce low budget, or "small" movies that explored human matters on a more intimate scale.

In addition, the multi-screen movie houses were still a relatively new phenomenon and single screen theaters still were doing good business, many of them screening independent films. The best thing about movies in 1981: the double feature. Oh! How I miss double features! The two art houses in Eugene showed many double features. Cinema 7, in Eugene, changed its bill twice a week. Often, I could see one double feature during the week and another on the weekend. When I lived in Spokane, 1982-84, the Magic Lantern also screened the occasional double feature.

On this particular day, in Portland, in the summer of 1981, two different theaters were showing double features. I can't remember the theaters' names, but one, downtown, was screening a festival of Overlooked Films and their double feature that day was "Between the Lines" and "Head Over Heels"(retitled "Chilly Scenes of Winter"), both directed by Joan Micklin Silver and both featuring John Heard.

Let me digress. One actor who seemed to suffer from the demise of the "small" movie was John Heard. I had enjoyed him as the dark romantic writer Jack Kerouac in "Heart Beat". Then, in both "Between the Lines" and "Head Over Heels", like in "Heart Beat", he played characters failing in love and conflicted by dilemmas outside their love lives. In "Between the Lines" he plays Harry Lucas, an ambitious reporter, unsure what to do about the newspaper going straight who is romantically involved with the newspaper's photographer (Lindsay Crouse), but cannot bring himself to full involvement in their relationship. He's not an entirely sympathetic character in this move, nor in "Head Over Heels" where he plays the son of two very eccentric parents and who has had an affair with a recently divorced woman (Mary Beth Hurt) and continues to pursue her despite the fact it's hopeless.

Maybe it was because I was in my twenties. Maybe it's because I was academically ambitious but deeply unsure of myself. Maybe it was because somewhere deep inside I felt my marriage slipping away. Maybe it was because I harbored a deep sense of seeing myself soon in a futile pursuit to stay married. And maybe, despite that, I was, at a hidden level, not so sure I wanted to be married. Maybe it was my own ambivalence about love and ambition and my own insecurity that Heard played so well that drew me to him. I loved him in these movies. I looked forward to a long life of watching him be featured in future films.

In early 1982, my wish came true. John Heard played a drunken Viet Nam vet named Alex Cutter in "Cutter's Way". His friend Richard Bone (Jeff Bridges) sees a murdered woman dumped into a garbage can in an alley and Alex becomes obsessed with finding the killer and comes to believe a Santa Barbara oil tycoon is behind it. It's not a perfect movie, but whereas John Heard had been quieter and, at times, introverted in the other movies, in "Cutter's Way" he is driven, even maniacal. Heard thrilled me with his fire and versatility.

John Heard's career since has been primarily has a character actor. He's solid. But I miss him in starring roles.

Back to that July day. After I saw "Between the Lines" and "Head Over Heels", I took some kind of dinner break and went out Hawthorne Blvd. and saw "The Return of the Secaucus 7" and "Tell Me a Riddle". I'd seen "Secaucus 7" before and have now seen it well over a dozen times, but not in the last twenty years. It became a defining movie. It was the first time I'd seen characters my own age struggle together with what it meant to be young adults in the late 1970's. These old college friends, reuniting for a weekend in New England, confirmed for me that the questions I had about my life and my relationships were far from being mine alone. I suddenly felt a part of a larger world of idealistic twenty-somethings whose lives were moving in different directions and who wondered how long they could keep alive their high hopes for changing life for the better.

"Tell Me a Riddle" could not have been a different movie. Melvin Douglas and Lila Kedrova play an elderly couple who have grown far apart, but through a cross country trip to San Francisco to visit their granddaughter (Brooke Adams), they not only learn that Eva will soon die, they find their love again. The movie transported me out of my concerns with being twenty-seven years old and took me deep into the struggles of old age, the physical struggles, yes, but more so the struggles of love and desire. I suppose at some level, I thought that these conflicts somehow flattened out with age, that whatever else old age meant to the body, that to the heart it meant contentment, of having the love conflicts of youth in the past. I found out differently and was deeply moved.

Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes' music provided the soundtrack for "Between the Lines". The song that defined this day of movie heaven for me was "I Don't Want to Go Home".

After I watched the last movie, I picked up my wife from work. She loved movies and I could hardly wait to tell her about this day of movie heaven. I was really stoked.

She was uninterested. Bored. Distant. I couldn't figure it out. I thought maybe she was just tired from a long day of copy editing. Home, for me was in Eugene, and I thought maybe our separation during the week had chilled our relationship a bit.

I thought, if staying here a few more days could invigorate things, I don't want to go home.

What I didn't know was that she didn't want to go home either, but in a very different way. She no longer wanted to share a home.

I hear Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes now and those movies and John Heard vividly come back to me. It was the best movie watching day I've ever had.

Looking back, I can also see that whatever heaven the movies brought me, I was about to descend into hell in my first marriage.

I would never grow old with my first wife. My idealism about marriage was soon to be shattered. Nothing I could do would persuade her to stay with me. The insecurity I had while
married would multiply.

What a bittersweet day.