Smokler - Brat Pack America A Love Letter to 80s Teen Movies

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Copyright 2016 by Kevin Smokler

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Set in Minion

Book design by starling

ePub ISBN: 978-1-942600-92-3

Publishers Cataloging-in-Publication data

Names: Smokler, Kevin, author.
Title: Brat Pack America : a love letter to 80s teen movies / Kevin Smokler.
Description: Includes bibliographical references. | First Trade Paperback Original Edition | A Vireo Book | New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA: Rare Bird Books, 2016.
Identifiers: ISBN 978-1-942600-67-1
Subjects: LCSH Teenagers in motion pictures. | Teen filmsUnited StatesHistory and criticism. | Motion picturesUnited States. | Nineteen eighties. | Popular cultureHistory20th century. | Motion pictures and youth. | BISAC PERFORMING ARTS / Film & Video / History & Criticism
Classification: LCC PN1995.9.Y6 .S66 2016| DDC 791.43/652055dc23

To teenagers now, who love these movies as we did, but also have Ferris Buellers and Breakfast Clubs of their own.
Room in the DeLorean for all.

Contents

Back in Time with the Power of Love

I t broke my heart that I couldnt visit Hill Valley. It seemed like such a nice town to grow up in, even if itd had a run of bad luck since 1955. Still, I was pretty sure that if I stood near the clock tower right as the high school let out, Id see Marty McFly rolling by on his skateboard. Id yell, Hey, McFly, but in a nice way, and thank him for being a weird kid from a weird family with a pretty girlfriend and a band and a mad scientist for a best friend. If I could visit Hill Valley, California, which I guessed was somewhere around the bend in the states elbow, I could tell Marty McFly, When Im seventeen, I want to be just like you.

I was only twelve in the summer of 1985 when Marty, via a DeLorean filled with plutonium, traveled back in time. By December, Id seen Back to the Future fourteen times and learned that Hill Valley, seemingly the most realistic part of a movie overflowing with imagination, was just as made up as the flux capacitor. My family had taken a trip to Southern California to escape the Michigan winter, and, on a Universal Studios tour, we stopped at the Hill Valley clock tower wedged in between the shark from Jaws and a black glass office building with employees leaving for lunch.

Wheres the real Hill Valley? I asked our tour guide. Id seen enough entertainment news segments on TV to know that movies were made in giant empty rooms with smooth cement floors called sound stages, or the outdoor version of that called a studio lot. You wheel in flat pieces of wood resembling gazebos or doctors offices and youve got yourself something called a set. Since theres no way they could fit an entire town inside one sound stage or on one studio lot, the Back to the Future set pieces we were looking at now must be based on the real Hill Valley. And this guy leading our tour would know where it was.

They made the movie right here, all of it. This is Hill Valley, our tour guide gushed.

I wanted to push him off the tram. Hill Valley wasnt anything but planks and paint and movie make-believe. It wasnt even based on a real place, because I asked that, too, and our tour guide smiled at me the way a bully does before stealing your Halloween candy.

Apparently, twelve-year-old me couldnt visit Hill Valley because I just had.

Still thinking that growing up sucked, I was dropped off by my parents the next day in Pasadena to visit a friend from summer camp. Wanna see Doc Browns house? he asked me, right after I arrived. While I tried to explain to him that Doc Browns house was probably a pile of lumber being giggled at by a stupid tour guide named Trent in khaki shorts this very minute, my friend dug two bicycles out of his garage. Soon he had us racing north through his neighborhood, around a golf course and under an overpass to 4 Westmoreland Place in the center of town. There, near the junction of the 134 and 210 freeways, stood the Gamble House, a historic landmark designed in 1908 and open to the public.

Its also the exact spot where Doctor Emmett Brown marches furiously downhill, arms filled with blueprints, and bellows, So tell me, future boy, whos president in 1985? And Marty McFly answers, Ronald Reagan, which Doc thinks as crazy as the idea of Jerry Lewis being Vice President.

We acted out the whole scene right there. I even got to be Marty. That winter afternoon on the gentle slope of the Gamble House lawn marked the first time Id ever stood in the precise spot where both a favorite movie scene happened and, by extension, where the actors, director, and crew had brought it to life. If I were a Civil War buff, this would have been visiting Antietam, Gettysburg, and Appomattox Court House, all on one historic patch of grass in Central Pasadena.

Except when visiting a Civil War battlefield, you stand where important events happened long before you were born. Being in that spot, where the narrative of history changed, collapses time, shrinking in our minds the distance between then and now. On the other hand, when we return to our elementary school playground or the site of our first kiss, were dropping in on our own history years later. Visiting those same places in the present not only collapses time, but also memory.

A pilgrimage to where a beloved movie moment was filmed does all of that and more. It not only races us back to the first time we saw that movie, but enables us to enter the movie itself. A fan can play Marty McFly on a hill in Pasadena, or insult a pretend llama named Tina at Napoleon Dynamites house in Preston, Idaho, or fake an orgasm at Katzs Deli on the Lower East Side of Manhattan like Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally . Theres actually a sign in Katzs Delicatessen above the very table where that faked orgasm happened.

These hills, houses, and delis are not built movie sets like the Hill Valley clock tower, but places where ordinary people live, work, eat, and pass through every day. They are also the exact spots where moments of our shared cinematic consciousness became real. When we visit these movie places, it collapses not just time and memory, but the distance between reality and imagination, between familiarity and the dreams of directors, screenwriters, actors, and crew. If we care enough about the movie to visit those places, its likely the dreams of that movie have become ours, too.

This is a book about movie places. Specifically, a movie like Back to the Future and a place like Hill Valleythe teen movies of the 1980s and the places, real and imagined, where they happened.

A lot of time has passed and a lot of movies made since Marty McFly and the Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller and the Heathers came to theaters and changed the way pop culture portrayed teenagers. More than a few books have been written both singing their praises and asking with irritation why, thirty years later, anyone still cares, other than the nostalgic fans who were teenagers back then.