In the Summer of My 14th Year
In the summer of my 14th year (I’ve always wanted to use that style opening but have never had the chance)…anyway, as I was saying, it was sometime early in June when I was 14. I was out of school for the summer (cue Alice Cooper), having somehow survived my freshman year of high school. One day, Dad said he’d like to go to see a movie over the weekend. Mom and I said that sounded like a good idea and we suggested we should go to the earliest showing on Sunday, knowing already which movie we were going to take in: A Bridge Too Far.
A Bridge Too Far had been getting a lot of good reviews and the previews I had seen before other movies looked like it was fairly realistic. The movie was based on the book of the same name by Cornelius Ryan, who had another great WWII book-movie combo in The Longest Day. Indeed, A Bridge Too Far was probably one of the most realistic depictions of combat until 1998 when Tom Hanks saved Private Ryan and set a new standard in realism.
But when we arrived at the (now-defunct) Showcase Cinemas on Secor Ave. Dad said, no, he didn’t want to see A Bridge Too Far. He wanted to see another one, one that neither Mom nor I had heard of and didn’t even sound interesting. I got insistent – whiny, really – that I wanted to see A Bridge Too Far. The previews were cool and it wasn’t going to be in the theaters much longer… this was when home VCRs were still a few years in the future and if you missed it in the theaters, too bad. Dad said no, and he used his definitive, end-of-discussion tone.
For those of you who never had the opportunity to meet James Thomas Erskine, he was a bit larger than life, or at least, as large as life. He had a certain presence about him. It wasn’t commanding, but you always knew when he was in the room. You also have to understand something about his decisiveness. It was…well…decisive, and pretty much final. He was a professional firefighter and a Lieutenant on the Toledo Fire Department. When you’re in that position, you have to be able to rapidly assess and take control of a chaotic situation and start calling the shots. When you do, you have to give clear, unambiguous orders. Moreover, you damn well better be right because you are sending or leading your people into harms way, in a way that few people outside public safety services can truly fathom. Sadly, even when you are clear, unambiguous and right, things sometimes go very, very wrong. Dad’s decisiveness, while not intransigent, was rarely compromised, and that held true at home, as well.
I was heartbroken that I wasn’t going to see the movie I wanted to see and was going to have to spend 2 hours watching some stoopid movie Dad wanted to see. As Dad bought the tickets, Mom and I had a quiet sidebar conversation. She wanted to see A Bridge Too Far, too, and she had also not heard of this movie to which we were about to be subjected. We both thought it odd that this WWII combat veteran who was fascinated by all things WWII combat was seemingly uninterested in a really good WWII combat flick.
When the stoopid movie Dad insisted on seeing was over, we emerged from the theater into the familiar warmth of the bright summer sunshine. Chronologically, it was only about two and a half hours after we entered the cinemas. Physically, we were still on Secor Ave. in Toledo, Ohio; we were still driving a 1974 AMC Matador to our home at 568 Colima Drive; they were still my parents and I was still their son. But the universe as I knew it had changed. An astonishing magnitude of change. Completely and irrevocably.
In those 121 minutes in the theater I witnessed things that only a few people up to that point had. Forces of good and evil, battling for supremacy using both swords and spaceships. Creatures of impossible form – dozens of them – intermingling with humans and each other. Sentient computers, some able to create holographic messages. My 14-year old brain was wracked by how real it all was and how much I admired my new heroes and reviled a new set of villains (and let’s not forget one young lady’s really nice figure and jiggly breasts, giving me, or at least lending to, my penchant for brown-eyed brunettes).
The year of my 14th summer was 1977 and the movie that Dad wanted to see and that Mom and I had never heard of was, of course, Star Wars.
There are bigger Star Wars fans than me. But there are few who were born after 1970 who will understand how profoundly that movie changed things for those of us who went in to see it with no knowledge of what we were about to see. Those born later will have had some exposure to light sabers, R2-D2, C3PO, the Millennium Falcon, etc., through extensive merchandising. Kind of like people born after 1990 are considered ‘digital natives’ and have no idea what life was like before the internet.
These musings of astonishing changes to the universe were brought about by seeing Episode 8: The Force Awakens. I’m glad that the acting was solid, even if the story was a bit derivative. After seeing Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, I left the theater thinking that the acting was so utterly horrid that I wouldn’t being shelling out any more cash to subject myself to it. And I didn’t. I never went to see the 2nd and 3rd episodes, and only caught parts of the 3rd at home when Brian was watching.
To illustrate my disgust and disdain for the abysmal directing of some very good actors, I had the following conversation on Facebook with one of my friends:
Me: I knew that it wasn't worth a second look when I left the theater thinking that the best actor in the whole movie was Yoda.
KD: R2-D2 carried every scene that he was in.
Me: What?! No way. He was sleep walking through his lines! I have it on good authority that he was hitting the oil bath between every take and his reflexes were almost a microsecond slow through the whole shoot.
KD: He was the only professional on the set! (I heard Liam Neeson asked him for some pointers.) Those ugly rumors about him hitting the oil bath were spread to cover up the fact that he was calling his agent, trying to get out of his contract.
So anyway, the series seems to be back on track and all is well in the post-1977 universe.
May the Force be with you.
R2D2 is the best actor in every notable Star Wars movies. Don’t know what you heard about the oil bathes but it isn’t true. World class actor.