6/9/23
Newsletter #362
The Crack of Dawn
These people who are obsessed with the “good old days,” and “Make America Great Again,” have shitty memories. Human memory is just like that: we remember the good times; and do our best to forget the bad times.
As a poor example, let’s take automobiles from pre-1980. My first car was a green 1968 Volkswagen Beetle. The fact that the car was designed and built by Nazis only amused me (Hitler did get to see one functioning car). But some of the logic in its design was ridiculously old fashioned. I discussed this with a friend yesterday whose family had a ’65 Beetle. To spray washer fluid on the windshield in the ’65 model, there was a rubber foot pump in the car to create the needed pressure. By ’68 the German designers had replaced the pump by attaching a hose to the spare tire to get the needed pressure. However, if you washed your windows too often, you flattened your spare.
I encounter so many people, many of them young, who honestly believe, “These are terrible times we’re living in.” That’s an exact quote from the 35-year-old installer who put in my new toilet. I said, “Are they really? I’ll be in the other room at the computer if you need anything.” As I walked away, he added so I’d understand more clearly, “Biden is a liar.” At some point he did need something, so he and I drove to the nearby Home Depot. As soon as we got in his jacked-up pickup truck, he picked up where he left off. “These are the worst of times” (it’s so Dickensian). Before he could enumerate the country’s present problems – I cut in with, “Were the best of times back when we didn’t have decent sewage? When people just poured their shit and piss right out the window. And of course everything smelled like horseshit all the time. Were those the good old days?” Luckily, we got to Home Depot and he didn’t have a chance to answer. He installed the toilet poorly and it would just start flushing at any time. I got it fixed. All of a sudden, the worst of times became the best of times.
My second car, of all the ridiculous cars, was a yellow Mazda wagon with a Wankel rotary engine. Instead of pistons going up and down, it had a triangular rotor that turned, thus removing the power killing step of turning up and down into spinning. Anyway, it looked good on paper.
The car was powerful, but got crummy milage. I drove it back and forth across the country a couple of times. It rotored its way through the Rocky Mountains without difficulty, but it hated the desert. Instead of a 4- 6- or 8-cylinder internal combustion engine, with their enormous amount of parts and wires, there was only a rotary chamber that looked like a big keg of beer, with three spark plugs on the sides.
When the rotary housing cracked, the car was a useless piece of junk.
For a kid born and raised in Detroit, whose family mostly drove Fords, my fist two cars were a VW Bug and a Mazda Wankel rotary wagon? What was I thinking? In the case of the bug, a big part of the attraction was that it was $600, it ran, and it wasn’t too far away. It was a stick shift, and I didn’t know how to use one, but my dad, who was begrudgingly spending $600 on a car for me, said he’d show me how. It was easy. Everybody used to do it, except the stick shift was on the steering column. “Three-in-the-tree,” as they called it.
This was August of 1974 when I was 16, took the GED and started Oakland Community College (the same time that Mrs. Raimi took a baking class – “Josh! Have some lemon merengue pie!”). So, I was driving along the John Lodge Freeway in my V-Dub with two of my long-haired stoner buddies, and the engine was just winding out. One of the guys said, “Switch to fourth.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Fourth gear.” I said, “There’s a fourth gear?” He nodded and said, “Yeah. ‘Four-on-the-floor.’” Dear old dad had never driven a four-on-the-floor. When I told him, he harumphed and said, “No kidding.” Like, “What will they think of next?”
My dad gave up on Fords – after a really ugly, boxy white 1972 Lincoln.
Then dad moved on to twenty years of Cadillacs, as did my mother. Those were cool cars, and I used my mom’s 1978 Cadillac convertible in my movie, Cleveland Smith Bounty Hunter. In what would be almost the epitome of unacceptable now, the head of the Ubangi tribe, portrayed by Rob Tapert, a redheaded white guy, with a big hat, platform shoes, and bone through his nose, drive up in this car. He gets out and says (with Bruce Campbell looping his line, “Well, what has we got here?”
Kurt Rauf and the art department put spears along the sides of the car, for the sake of reality. Kurt Would go on to be the DP on two of my features.
I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I’d nominate our short film, Cleveland Smith Bounty Hunter (1981), starring Bruce Campbell and Sam Raimi, as one of the most bootlegged movies on the internet. It was a common bootleg movie on VHS long before the internet. To my chagrin and amusement, it is always packaged in, “The Early Films of Sam Raimi” or “The Early Films of Bruce Campbell.”
Today appears to be clear and beautiful. May it be so.