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.”)

name: Philip Anderson, Cinefile owner
primary watching years: 1980-1983

“Hot Stuff”: “This was one of those movies where I hadn’t seen it in years and years, and upon seeing it again recently, it was fucking unbearable. As a kid, I was really taken by the idea of the camera shooting through a two-way mirror in order to catch crooks [in a pawn shop]. I thought that was a great idea for a movie. Dom Deluise and Jerry Reed made me laugh. They just seemed to be having a good time, and maybe that was what I was tapping into, despite the movie.”

“Mad Max”: “Before having cable in my mom’s place, I remember watching ‘Mad Max’ — but actually watching it, just kinda sorta seeing it on my neighbor’s TV next door. I was the next story up, I had a lofted bed and I could see their TV through the window. At that distance, their screen was postage-stamp sized. Now that I’m thinking about it, I’m not even sure that it was ‘Mad Max’. I probably saw the previews at the house of a friend who had cable, and I knew it was on, so that’s how I must’ve though that’s what they were watching.”

the HBO Guide: “Getting the HBO Guide was a real treat for me, because I could comb it over for R-rated movies, or any kind of horror film. Before cable, I would hear stories from friends of mine who did have cable — there’d be films everyone was talking about that I didn’t have access to, and somehow the imagining what the film was made it that much more elusive and exciting. ‘Halloween’ was one of those. Also, anything with an ‘N’ next to it in its synopsis would mean nudity. It made me sit through things I would’ve never watched otherwise. I saw ‘10′ quite a bit based on that, but I wasn’t interested in the film in the slightest; it was too adult for me. I’d sit through 30 minutes of Dudley Moore to see 3 seconds of Bo Derek’s breasts. That to me was a fair price to pay.”

“Alien”“: The cable vs. VHS memories are kinda hazy for me because I was one of the first people I knew to have a VCR. In 1980, my mom worked for a tobacco company in upstate New York, and she would bring back and forth from work a big top-loader from the office. The first movie my mom bought for me for the VCR was ‘Alien’, the original first Magnetic Video release of it. My mom must’ve paid $90 or something like that for it; I had no idea where she knew where to buy it, because it wasn’t common knowledge back then. I had fantasies of putting up a marquee on the roof of our condo’s garage. My bedroom was right over the pitch of the roof; I thought it a really cool idea to want to have a movie theater in my bedroom…I remember the very first time I wrote down a director’s name: Ridley Scott. I wrote it down on a little piece of Belair Cigarette stationary, and taped it to my refrigerator.”

other memories:
- Caddyshack
- Stripes
- National Lampoon’s Animal House
- The Thing
- Escape From New York
- The Private Eyes

final thoughts: “Looking back, cable TV played a larger role than I cared to admit in deciding to live with my mom after my parents’ divorce. My dad didn’t have cable and so it was the only way you I could get to see the movies that I had heard so much about. A custody battle was going on, my parents were warring. Having cable and the ability to rent VHS was definitely a great thing to escape into.
With my friends, we would imitate anything we’d see, the comedies, doing Spicoli impressions from ‘Fast Times’. We were so enamored with those people, those characters.”

With all this recent talk on this blog of cable TV memories, I thought I’d make some of the haziness a little more concrete. Here’s some audio from vintage HBO promos and bumpers that are sure to evoke some Pavlovian responses out of you —

HBO In Space (”Feature Presentation”): This is the “floating in space thing” that HBO would show before almost every single feature film, from sometime between 1983 and the late ’80s. There were three versions: the 60-second flying-through-the-cityscape-and-then-onto-the-floating-HBO-logo version, the 30-second space-only version, and the 70-second one that was a mirror of the 60-second one, only with a short scene of a family turning on the TV and sitting down (shot through a living room window) tacked onto the very beginning. The 30-second one is the one they showed most often, but here for download is the full 60-second version.

“HBO In Space” feature presentation bumper music (MP3)

HBO Movie bumper, late 1980s: This one’s got more plastic pompery, what with the neon glow and the shredding guitar solo. This one got heavy play up until sometime in the mid-’90s. Cinefile employee Damon instantly recognized what this was by name, after only hearing the first few seconds of it from across the store.

“HBO Movie” feature presentation bumper music, late 1980s (MP3)

HBO Movie Marquee & Coming Up Next On HBO, early 1980s: These go back a little further than I can remember. My family got cable in the household in ‘83, around the time the “HBO In Space” thing premiered.

“HBO Movie Marquee” feature presentation bumper music, early 1980s (MP3)
“Coming Up Next On HBO” bumper, early 1980s (MP3)

The Best Time On TV Is HBO, late 1980s(?): Someone in the HBO head offices must’ve absolutely loved the work of painter Piet Mondrian with a passion, for the graphic look that the channel adopted for almost a year reflected a direct rip-off of his aesthetic. Check out the faux pleasure with which the session singer nearly blows a load in his pants over HBO!

“The Best Time On TV Is HBO” promo, late 1980s (MP3)

HBO Video Jukebox, 1981-1986: According to Wikipedia, “a typical episode of ‘Video Jukebox’ consisted of seven or eight music videos and lasted roughly 30 minutes, and the lineup changed in the middle of each month…[i]n the late 1970s (and before the MTV network debuted), HBO was already airing one or two music videos (or ‘promotional clips’ as they were known at the time) as filler in between their feature films and other series. These short clips also carried the ‘Video Jukebox’ moniker. When Video Jukebox premiered as a half-hour series in December 1981, HBO reached more households than MTV (which was launched only four months earlier), so a video that aired on Video Jukebox actually received more exposure than it would on MTV, a claim that would be short-lived as MTV quickly gained more cable markets…[a]t the peak of its popularity in the mid-1980s, Video Jukebox spawned many ’special edition’, including Christmas Jukebox, Country Jukebox, Comedy Jukebox and other editions featuring songs from movies and Grammy winners.” Here’s the brief theme music from both versions of the show’s opening credits through its five-year run.

“HBO Video Jukebox” themes, 1981-1986 (MP3)

No Place Like HBO commercial, early 1980s: I don’t know if this saccharine jingle (done in the popular commercial spot style of the time) was something that only aired on HBO itself, or if it was on network TV at the time, in order to entice new customers to the then-burgeoning subscription service. Kenny Rogers makes a cameo appearance (visual only, not singing) in the montage of folks of various ethnicities plopping themselves down in front of a TV in order to regale themselves with entertainment from the likes of pay cable.

“No Place Like HBO” promo, early 1980s (MP3)

Inside HBO, early 1980s: At the time, most everyone was “new” to pay movie channels, so HBO thought it needed to explain to cable subscriber neophytes exactly how the laws of HBO physics worked. The channel produced a series of animated FAQ-style promo spots that answered such questions as “Why does HBO show things it’s shown before in the past?” and “Why does HBO show movies I haven’t heard of before?” Such questions seem ridiculously quaint now, in light of our current media culture avalanche. Here’s a montage of four of these “Inside HBO” question-answering spots.

“Inside HBO” montage, early 1980s (MP3)

Cinemax Movie bumper, late 1980s: Wikipedia sez: “Cinemax launched in August 1980, introduced by its then on-air personality Robert Kulp. Kulp told viewers that Cinemax would be about movies and nothing but movies. At the time, HBO featured a wider range of programming, including documentaries, children’s entertainment, sporting events, and entertainment specials…Movie classics were a mainstay of [Cinemax] at its birth, “all uncut and commercial-free” as Kulp would say. A heavy schedule of films from the 50s-70s made up most of Cinemax’s program schedule.” Cinemax was often way cooler than HBO for me as a child, mainly because they simply showed a better selection of stuff — AND had the Max Headroom talk show! I remember catching this particular bumper in front of movies that I would watch at a certain friend’s house as a kid; my parents had the HBO cable package, but never wanted to cough up the extra dough for Cinemax.

“Cinemax Movie” feature presentation bumper music, late 1980s (MP3)

Here’s the start of a new series we’re calling “Cable Daze”, profiles of what films stick out the most in the minds of each Cinefile employee from the early days of their cable-TV watching, and why.

name: Sebastian O’ Brien, Cinefile day shift
primary watching years: 1981-1984

“Doctor Detroit”: “I found myself amused by Dan Ackroyd’s main character because he’s an alter ego super-villain, plus he’s a pimp! And one of his ‘girls’ is Fran Drescher, who I always had the hots for. It’s not a good movie, but it’s got a lot of entertainment value to it. Have you ever seen ‘Doctor Detroit’? God, I wanna watch ‘Doctor Detroit’ now! The more I think about it, the more I like it, still. It was a colossal bomb that nobody liked.”

“The Last American Virgin”: “The single most-watched movie by me on cable, sheerly because it had boobs. As a kid, you’d know exactly which parts of the movie had the boobs in it, and you’d sit through the whole thing just for those moments.” Did the legendary soundtrack to this film (Blondie, The Cars, Devo, Journey) rub off on you as a music fan? “At the time I was listening to heavy metal. Journey was in a ton of those movies, and if you’d asked my 13-year-old self, I would’ve said ‘Journey is for fags!’, but I like Journey’s music now because of that association. Those movies turned me onto the band’s charms.”

“Looking For Mr. Goodbar” (WARNING! Spoilers ahead…): “I was shocked and disturbed by this one when it was randomly on one night when I was watching with my dad, when I visited him at his house. It’s got a lot of sex, and then it ends in horrible violence. Diane Keaton plays this swinging ’70s slut girl, who goes around fucking ever guy she can find — until the last guy who she fucks stabs her to death while a strobe light is going. It was the first time I’d seen anything like that. I didn’t even understand that you could make a movie like that! She was ‘Annie Hall’, you know? ‘Annie Hall’ getting stabbed to death while fucking a guy. It ends on her dead face, staring off into space as a strobe light is going! It might as well have been a snuff film.”

other memories:
- The Toy
- Halloween III: Season Of The Witch
- Trading Places
- The Golden Child
- House
- Troll
- Night Shift
- the “Vacation” movies
- the first few “Police Academy” movies (”I remember thinking Michael Winslow, the guy who made all the noises, was hilarious.”)
- Blame It On Rio (”The titillating 13-year-old horniness factor…”)
- Howard The Duck (”Saw it at least 5 or 6 times…”)
- The Hitchhiker, TV series (”Do you remember ‘The Hitchhiker’? It was the sexy horror anthology show that hinged around this mysterious guy that would wander from town to town, a la Bill Bixby in ‘The Incredible Hulk’? Somehow it always involved sex and monsters.”)

summation:
“Cable came into prominence during my adolescence, and it was a metaphor for the magic disappearing from my world. When I was a little kid, I loved going out to the movies. The ritual of it was a big deal, especially going out to see R-rated films (the first one I ever saw was ‘Alien’.) I would brag about it to my friends and they’d go “Oooh, you saw an R-rated movie?!” But since cable had R-rated stuff on all the time, it diminished that, because anyone could see one just by staying up late.

The whole transient nature of movies being on whenever, catching bits and pieces of them, diminished my awe of film. It’s like getting cake everyday for dessert; it’s not special anymore. Also, something I didn’t realize at the time was that everything on was pan-and-scan, and I literally wasn’t getting the same thing as in a theater. I really do love going to the movies; it’s like my church, with the movie presented to me the way they wanted it to be presented. Even with high-def DVD, I’ll still be going out to the movies.

Cable’s strange because even now, you don’t have a choice. You’re at the whim of these programmers. Who are they? Who were the people programming cable? How does it even work? I have no idea.”