Lucking Out - James Wolcott [48]
Screening chatter didn’t entirely run into negative territory. That wasn’t the norm. Once Pauline invited me to tag along to a screening of a movie that the studio didn’t seem to know what to do with, set in Baltimore, 1959, and featuring a large, shiny cast of mostly unknowns. Mark Johnson, who, I believe, lived near Pauline in the Berkshires (or perhaps his mother did), was one of the producers of the film and hoped Pauline could rescue it from being dumped at the dog pound, should she have any enthusiasm for it. Since I had grown up near Baltimore, conversant with its local customs and dialect, Pauline figured I’d be interested in the film and could serve as tour guide. The movie was, of course, Diner, directed by Barry Levinson, an ensemble scrapbook in which the memories seemed slightly blackened at the edges, vignetted by the passage of time. The movie seemed weirdly ajar at first, with a car accident staged as a prank that made Pauline wonder aloud where this thing was heading, but when the male buddies took up their familiar positions in the diner booth and began razzing each other, exchanging insults and riffing like a handful of young comics after hours, Steve Guttenberg and Daniel Stern sparring as if they were going to be doing this for the rest of their lives until they ended up on parallel cabana chairs in Miami Beach, Pauline was helplessly laughing, and in thrall. “What’s that they’re pouring on the French fries?” she asked as the camera panned the diner counter. “Gravy.” “They put gravy on French fries?” “Oh, yeah, beef gravy. Though chicken gravy is also an option.” The classic diner that I had gone to as a teenager at the corner on Route 40 (banally replaced by a McDonald’s) served gravy over fries, and I just assumed growing up that it was the national custom. I filled Pauline in on the supreme importance of every particular regarding the Baltimore Colts—who Gino was (Gino Marchetti), and what made the play-off game with the Giants so epochal—and the mythic tackiness of the Strip, where so many of Maryland’s young men had lost their innocence and wished they could get it returned, along with the money they had wasted. “Where did she come from?” Pauline wondered in amazement as Ellen Barkin bared her first crooked smile, and Mickey Rourke, who had shone in a small, instrumental part in Body Heat, proved he had the murmurous charm and insinuation of a romantic, applying little touches to his scenes with Barkin reminiscent of Brando trying on Eva Marie Saint’s white gloves in On the Waterfront. Pauline wouldn’t be the only critic to praise Diner, but her going to bat for it before anyone else had seen it kept it from being bottom-drawered as just another coming-of-age film, a nice try. Absent that screening, Diner would have died an obscure death, rediscovered for its qualities only after its rediscovery was too late to do anybody any good.
On another occasion a screening was set up for Pauline of a film that was causing much deeper jitters for those concerned, one that was far more unpeggable and unsynopsizable; she assembled a larger posse for this sneak peek because she thought it would be fun. It didn’t start out fun. A severed ear in a grassy field, where the ants seem to be having a picnic. The deceased owner of that missing ear tied to a chair, the squawk of his suddenly come-alive walkie-talkie making everyone jump in the screening room. A ritualized sado-mazzy episode witnessed through the bright crack of a closet door. Given how pre-chewed every movie is now, with scripts leaked to the Internet and bootleg footage popping up on popular sites, enabling bloggers and tweeters to condemn a film as DOA even before baptism,