CineFile Video

name: Josh Fadem, Cinefile weekend shift
primary watching years: 1989-1996

“Don’t Tell Her It’s Me”: “Some movies I watched just because they were on. I never liked that Guttenberg movie — but I always enjoyed watching it, even though I never thought I would. I’d never recommend that one to anyone — his career was over at that point. If I reference [the movie], no one laughs. You know how when you mention ‘Police Academy’, someone will laugh at the mention of it, but if you mention ‘Don’t Tell Her It’s Me’ in an anecdote, no one knows what you’re talking about. I don’t know if HBO was regional, or if my friends and I were the only ones who caught it, but no one seems to have really seen the movie — as much as I have.” (Editor’s note: this film has recently been re-titled on an MGM DVD release as ‘The Boyfriend School’.)

“Moon Over Parador” & “Big Business”: “Two different movies that both have the main actors playing multiple characters. ‘Moon Over Parador’ was another one no one seems to have ever heard of.”

HBO: “My father would occasionally say ‘Okay, this month we don’t have the money for HBO’, so he’d cancel it, and then it would become a big deal to go over to my grandparents’ house, because they’d still have it. What would get me really excited was the HBO pre-movie bumper, the tracking shot through the town into the HBO logo in space. That fanfare was always really exciting, making me think ‘Oh, this is gonna be an exciting night watching a movie with my cousins at my grandparents’ house.’ Sometimes it wouldn’t be awesome, but it got me pumped up. ‘Feature Presentation’ were two big words I didn’t know as a kid, but HBO taught me…Stand-up comedy on HBO was another big thing. Any one of those specials HBO would show, I’d watch. The opening bumper for the stand-up specials in the late ’80s was equally as exciting as the HBO In Space. It was an insanely sped-up stop-motion thing, of a camera mounted on the hood of a car going through city streets.”

the “HBO Guide”: “I was obsessive about the HBO Guide. It was a big deal to me to get the new one at the beginning of every month. Kwik Trip is a conveinence store chain in the Midwest, and they carried the HBO Guide; around ‘89, I’d bug my mom every month to take me to get the new issue. I collected them too; I kept a stack for a year or two straight. I don’t know why you would collect such a thing — ‘Look, I got the one with ‘Awakenings’ on the cover!’ First sign of OCD. Of all the things to collect, that’s what I decided to collect? I still have them stacked up in a big box back home in Tulsa. The HBO Guide would have listings for both HBO and Cinemax. I didn’t have Cinemax, and I really wanted it. They had some more shittier-looking action movies, ones with hotter girls, dumb kung fu stuff. My friend and I would really be into karate movies. I remember him telling me that ‘Bolo Yeung rules!’ There was a period where I was really into anything with Bolo as the lead, or Billy Blanks, Cynthia Rothrock, Don ‘The Draon’ Wilson (who was always a real bore to me).”

the Encore channel: “Came out in ‘90 or ‘91, I remember. It sounded like the coolest channel, they had the gimmick of ‘They only show movies from the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s,’ they weren’t going to show current stuff. I was most excited by the ’80s stuff, hoping I wouldn’t catch something ‘boring’ from the ’60s or ’70s, but occasionally I’d get suckered into older stuff, like ‘Butterflies Are Free’ with Goldie Hawn, or ‘Breezy’ with William Holden and some young girl. When Encore came around, I first started to say to myself ‘I’m a movie watcher. I like watching movies.’ I got disappointed around ‘96, when Encore just started showing everything, giving up on the original gimmick.”

’80s comedy actors: “There were a lot of actors who, because of the movies that played a lot on cable, I thought were bigger than they actually were in the long run: Ted Danson, Howie Mandel (who were both in ‘A Fine Mess’), Christopher Lloyd (who was in ‘Walk Like A Man’…with Howie Mandel), Tom Selleck, Shelley Long, Tom Hanks (who somehow stepped over and made it big. He’s a good actor, but could just as easily be where Ted Danson is now).” Didn’t Ted Danson have some recent long-running sitcom, though? “Before ‘Becker’, there was a big chuck of time where it seemed like he didn’t have anything. Every two years, it seemed like he’d only make an appearance on ‘Frasier’.”

other memories:
- Taxi Driver
- The Lady In White
- Teen Wolf
- The Gate
- Troll
- They Live
- “Three Stooges” shorts
- “Police Academy” movies
- Student Bodies
- Ruthless People
- Full Metal Jacket (”I always thought it was an easy-to-watch movie as a kid, before I had any sense of Stanley Kubrick as the director, as an important guy to watch. At the time, I just thought it was cool.”)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 6th, 2007 at 4:53 pm and is filed under My Cable Daze. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.