And hellooooooo, everybody! Time to go back down again to the VIDEO STREET VIDEO STORE — return some old tapes and pick up some new ones. It’s a busy week for me as I wrap up teaching kids how to write plays at summer camp, so I only have time now for three videos, as opposed to the usual four.
Despite our smaller haul this week, what we’ve got is still pretty great. So sit back and enjoy! And if you’re new to this here Substack, feel free to go back and check out previous episodes of the VIDEO STREET VIDEO STORE, a regular feature that drops every Tuesday here at Mikes Bonfire. For future episodes, as well as the big show I do, THE MIDNIGHT CITIZEN podcast, be sure to, ya know…
A new podcast drops every Saturday night.
And now, down to bi’ness!
VIDEO 1: BEHIND THE SCENES ON “PRODUCTION 821”
“Production 821” is Warner Bros. code for the 1955 Nicholas Ray film Rebel Without a Cause, and this “making-of” film reel will have you convinced that all of its young stars — and the documentary’s correspondent — went onto have brilliant, drama-free careers on the silver screen for years thereafter.
Celebrity host Gig Young offers theater audiences of the era a glimpse behind the curtain to see just how a film gets shot on location. Today, it can seem pretty condescending in tone, but, really, can you blame the Warner’s publicity department? In 1955, it was still pretty rare for a studio film to shoot largely on location, and, even today, this documentary short is a rare historic document of just how that was done back then. As Young says, the extended caravan of trucks carrying everything from “pins and people” is “a city on wheels guarded by its own police, all just to bring life to a bundle of typewritten pages we call a script.”
As fate would have it, even more historical significance would be added to this short just a month later, when Rebel star James Dean died in a tragic car accident of his own making. Ironically, of course, Dean, in the last interview he gave to promote Rebel, told Gig Young that he hoped kids out there on the road would be more careful, because the person they killed might be him. Spooky.
Anyway, the main focus of this tape is Young’s interview with Natalie Wood, clearly staged for the camera to make the teenage star appear in the most flattering, glamourous light. Sitting with Wood as she lunches outside her trailer reading the trades, Young speaks to the camera and tells the audience that she is a movie veteran, having played “daughter and granddaughter” to every major Hollywood star since 1941. Again, knowing what we know now, Natalie Wood was perhaps the first of Tinsel Town’s long list of tortured teenage starlets, and though she made it out of those early years relatively unscathed, she eventually drowned in a tragic boating accident in Catalina— the circumstances of which are still a mystery to this day. Gig Young, it should be noted, also did not make it out of Hollywood alive. In October 1978, he killed his new wife before turning the gun on himself. The murder-suicide has always been looked at as motiveless. However, when he won his late-career Oscar for They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? in 1971, Gig Young said in his acceptance speech something to the effect of, “I guess when they start giving you awards, they don’t want you any more.” Ouch. Seems a lot like a hopeless depression.
Even though this short was filmed decades before either Wood and Young met their fates, I can’t help but notice a longingness on their faces — something unsaid between them as they play to the cameras and pretend it’s all normal: to be actors in the old-style contract system of showbusiness, where you were never given a chance to stop performing, even if it was just to eat lunch.
VIDEO 2: “ENJOY THE PANORAMIC VIEW OF KNOXVILLE IN THE EVENING TIME”
The 1982 World International Energy Exposition in Knoxville, Tennessee is seen today as the end of the century-long era of the World’s Fair. Since the 1883 event in Paris, nearly every decade until the 1980’s had featured this variety of ambitious happening that was recognized worldwide as a celebration of human ambition and achievement. With visitors and vendors welcomed from all global corners, it’s hard to imagine humanity being where we are now without the innovations unleashed at the World’s Fair. While such achievements as the zipper, spray paint, Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer, and Belgian Waffles may have been invented anyway, their mutual unveilings at World’s Fairs throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century gave them a centralized birth in our common human history. And what’s also notable is that just about every city where a Fair occurred had a lasting souvenir to remember it by. Beginning with the Eiffel Tower in Paris, built special for the Fair in 1883, later Fairs would give Chicago its Ferris Wheel (not the same original Wheel today, but the one at Navy Pier remembers it), Seattle its Space Needle, Montreal its Biosphere, Queens its Unisphere, and Knoxville — yes — it’s Sunsphere.
Sadly, the Sunsphere did not quite cement itself as iconically in the revered minds of the world’s citizens the way those other monuments did. If it was seen at all in pop culture in the decades that followed, it was often a joke, as on a 1994 episode of The Simpsons, when Bart and friends excitedly travel to Knoxville to see the sphere, and are only disappointed to find that its interior has become storage and a wig shop.
The diminishment in culture of the Sunsphere that was shown on The Simpsons does not necessarily reflect its actual life post-1982 World’s Fair. I believe that a lot of this misrepresentation of a failed monument is due to Knoxville being the last to host the Fair, and, erroneously, the reason for its discontinuation. There is also certainly blame for its portrayal in media as a laughing stock to be attributed to a coastal elitism and the castigation of a mid-size southern city that has become acceptable in our culture. While it’s true that the Sunsphere became something of a hot potato for Knoxville in the 80s and 90s, it has enjoyed a continuous life where the city’s people and those they host can come to enjoy a 360-degree view of a truly important, if not always appreciated, southern city. They can see the Tennessee River which helped to power an entire region, brought it into the twentieth century, and built a bomb that helped our nation win a war. They can see the Smoky Mountains, the most-visited of America’s national parks. And they can see the University of Tennessee, which turned out such important American authors as Cormac McCarthy and James Agee, and also gave my grandfather his education.
Sure, it may look like a golden mushroom, or yes, even a stubby, unsettling phallic shape rising from the urban landscape. But I prefer another nickname that was once given to it — “God’s Golf Tee”. Wasn’t this the idea of all World’s Fairs? That God teed us up — brought us all together — so that we could then mount that tee with a ball, and drive humanity forward?
I know, I know. That sounds pretty phallic in itself. Anyway, onto the next one…
VIDEO 3: SELL CRAZY AT GAME CRAZY
Long-time fans of THE MIDNIGHT CITIZEN podcast will know that I love a good training tape — particularly one of the retail video store variety. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I’m a nostalgia masochist and I like to bask in the not-so-fond-memories of watching them as a new employee to virtually every one of these stores that was around in Birmingham, Alabama at the turn of the century. I can remember vividly (and with much trauma) being shut into the back room at Suncoast Video, Blockbuster Video, Game X-change, et. al — hot, cramped environments that smelled like Cheez-Its and feet — and being forced to watch these obnoxious corporate training tapes. Clearly, they were made by stiff-shirted suits trying to be hip — narc-types who told you how to “break all the rules” while, at the same time, telling you how, exactly, to break them. These “training” sessions always ended with the desensitized assistant manager coming back into the room, ejecting the tape, and telling you to forget everything you just learned.
That being said, I do have a certain reverence for these tapes — especially now, some 20-years removed from when this one was made, when the great shopping center meccas of our suburban landscape that stores like Game Crazy once filled are shuttered shells of a once bustling economic clime. With a general malaise that creeps in the atmosphere of the few brick-and-mortar stores that remain, it’s a pleasant experience to watch these tapes and remember a time when corporations were actually, well, trying….
While this Game Crazy training video is full of lame jokes and impractical sales-pitch scenarios, you kinda have to appreciate the effort that went into making it. It appears like an actual, serious attempt to speak to the 19 and 20 years old who had just been hired.
Well, that’s it for this week’s VIDEO STREET VIDEO STORE! Again, be sure to, ya know…
A new episode of the VSVS drops every Tuesday throughout the summer, and, of course, be sure to check out THE MIDNIGHT CITIZEN, your late night broadcast from Birmingham, AL, hosted by me, Mike Boody, every Saturday night. Keep your eyes open!
VIDEO STREET VIDEO STORE -- Episode 4