Three Beautiful Things 07-20-2022: Another Reunion Project, Debbie and I Drink Hammerhead, *The King of Marvin Gardens* and Movies from 1968-1975

1.  Today I accidentally unearthed a spreadsheet of contact information for the KHS Class of '72 that I didn't remember I had. How did I find it? Well, I was going to go to work on creating my first ever Google Sheets spreadsheet and when I clicked on the Sheets icon in my Google directory, I found the spreadsheet. Looking it over, I found contact information I could have made good use of about four or five months ago and I discovered mailing addresses and email addresses that are obsolete.

So, this is my next project. I will get the 50th reunion registration slips back from Diane and go to work updating and expanding this spreadsheet in preparation for keeping in touch with classmates about next summer's All-Class Reunion to be held July 21-23, 2023.

If you are a KHS grad and reading this blog,  BLOCK OUT THAT JULY, 2023 WEEKEND and plan to come to Kellogg for a fun-filled weekend.

2. I'd let them chill for a couple of days and, today, I popped open two tall boys of Hammerhead Ale and split them with Debbie. Today, the Hammerhead seemed to me to have a subtle roasted nut flavor underlying the Cascade hops, almost as if the Crystal Malt triggered that flavor. Debbie thought her beer had a hint of cloves and I loved that idea. This is what makes drinking craft beers fun -- Debbie and I almost always have slightly different experiences with our beer and it's fun to try to describe those differences to each other.

3. I got to thinking tonight, after watching the 1972 Bob Rafelson movie, The King of Marvin Gardens, that if I could own a little theater or host film festivals in another venue, among the first movies I'd screen would be small budget movies made between about 1968 and roughly 1974 (pre-Jaws). Some film historians regard this short period of time as a renaissance in USA movie making. I know that I love to watch movies from this period, especially ones like The King of Marvin Gardens. The screenwriters, directors, and cinematographers of these movies see movies as a vehicle for exploring troubling aspects not only of human characters, but of the culture of the United States. 

So, let's say I had access to a small movie house and let's pretend that there were people interested in coming to these movies. The audience would be made of viewers who do not go to movies to escape life's discomforting realties, but want to explore and discuss the movies' difficulties, the ways they complicate the idea of The American Dream, the innovative ways they are photographed, their sharp and often intricately structured screenplays, and the complex and often unlikeable characters they feature. 

Thanks to the movie curators at Criterion, I have a six disc collection of movies from this time period coming to my front door early next week, entitled America Lost and Found: The BBS Story. (BBS is the production company that brought these movies into being.)  In my dream (or is it a nightmare?) film festival, I  feature four movies from this collection along with a documentary that BBS produced.  Here's the list of movies:

Easy Rider

Five Easy Pieces

The Last Picture Show

The King of Marvin Gardens

Hearts and Minds 

Hearts and Minds is the lone documentary. Its subject matter is the war in Vietnam. 

If the film festival didn't pan out, but I thought there was an audience for a double feature, I'd screen The King of Marvin Gardens with another great Atlantic City movie that came out in 1980, entitled Atlantic City. In spirit and production values, it's akin to the those "renaissance" movies made between 1968 and 1975.

I wrote out this dream of hosting movie screenings because this evening I watched The King of Marvin Gardens and I wanted to talk about it. I didn't want to assign it stars or give it a thumbs up or a thumbs down. I didn't want to discuss whether other people liked or didn't like the movie.

I wanted to talk about the movie's troubling characters: a depressive, existentialist low key overnight FM talk radio show host played by Jack Nicholson; this character has a brother, played by Bruce Dern, who is an extroverted con man, always on the hustle, always lying, hustling, scheming, and trying to make his deluded vision of the American Dream a reality. I wanted to talk about the two women in the Bruce Dern character's life. The older of the two is a bipolar middle-aged former beauty queen and prostitute, played by Ellen Burstyn and the younger is her stepdaughter, played by Julia Anne Robinson. (Robinson's life ended in 1975 in a house fire in Eugene.) Together, these four characters are a combustible blend of oddness, fragility, perplexity, desperation, uncertainty, and disaffection. 

I also wanted to talk about Laszlo Kovacs' work as the Director of Photography. Kovacs' work, much like that of Gordon Willis in movies like The Godfather and All the President's Men, is superb in low light environments. Visually, we see mounting evidence of the decay and decline of Atlantic City. Kovacs, on occasion, gives us long views of the boardwalk that give viewers the sense of Atlantic City being like a Monopoly playing board. His work with empty spaces, whether on the shoreline or in a performance hall with no audience helps reinforce the inward emptiness of the movie's characters and the way their lives seem headed nowhere. 

Not having fellow admirers of this kind of movie to talk with, I did the next best thing. I went to the World Wide Web and read essays about The King of Marvin Gardens and about low budget, non-escapist movies made when I was in high school and college.

And then I wrote about these movies in this blog post!