Matinee

“Going to the movies is sort of like going to church for me. When the lights went down I would be as likely to stay for a double feature as I would be to just go home.” – Joe Dante

Much like Tim Burton’s Ed Wood (1994), Joe Dante’s film Matinee (1993) is not only a love letter to cinema, but also a celebration of watching movies – the collective experience of seeing a film in a darkened movie theater with others. However, Dante’s film is more than that. It is also a period piece that recalls the Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought Russia and the United States to the brink of nuclear war. He filters this through a coming-of-age story as seen through the eyes of a boy who lives in close proximity to this volatile situation.

Dante is a life-long movie buff with many of his own films paying homage to 1950s science fiction and horror B-movies, but filtered through the prism of 1960s radicalism. In fact, he got his start working with these kinds of movies thanks to mogul Roger Corman and gradually worked his way up through system until he was directing studio fare like Gremlins (1984) and Innerspace (1987). Matinee is arguably Dante’s most personal film to date, a passion project that he cultivated for years until Universal gave him the money to realize it. The film was given a wide release, but much like Ed Wood, it underperformed at the box office, appealing mostly to fellow cineastes.

Set in Key West, Florida, Gene Loomis (Simon Fenton) and his brother Dennis (Jesse Soffer) are the new kids in town, army brats whose father moves from base to base and is stationed nearby because of the Russian missiles amassing near Cuba. Gene is a big horror B-movie fan that eagerly awaits the Saturday matinee preview screening of Lawrence Woolsey’s (John Goodman) latest offering, Mant! (“Half man! Half ant!” proclaims its posters), an affectionate fusion of The Fly (1958) and Them! (1954), which he has filmed in Atom-o-Vision and will be shown in Rumble-rama – homages to William Castle’s shameless showmanship tactics to get people to see his movies.

Gene befriends a local kid named Stan (Omri Katz) who has a crush on Sherry (Kellie Martin), a beautiful girl in their class. Amidst all of the anxiety over Cuba and the excitement for the arrival of Mant!, Gene also becomes interested in girls, finding himself attracted to Sandra (Lisa Jakub), a socially conscious troublemaker whose parents are peace-loving liberals. The child actors, in particular Simon Fenton and Lisa Jakub, are excellent. Gene and Sandra’s growing interest in one another is sweet and believably handled by Dante.

Dante is one of the best directors of kids as evident in films like Explorers (1985) and the television show Eerie, Indiana. Matinee features a predominantly young cast and he really gets wonderful performances out of them. For example, when we are first introduced to Gene and Dennis their rapport comes across as natural and we believe that they are siblings by their familiar short-hand, like how Gene knows just what to say to good-naturedly scare Dennis. That being said, Gene does care about Dennis, like the scene when he reassures his little brother that their father is safe and everything will be okay. It is a nice, nuanced moment between the boys that Dante directs with sensitivity as he gets us to empathize with these characters. He is able to do this because he identifies with the kids more than the adults as evident from a key line of dialogue that Woolsey says to Gene: “Why, you think grown-ups know what they’re doing? That’s a hustle, kid. Grown-ups are making it up as they go along just like you do.”

Dante expertly shows how kids interact with each other when adults aren’t paying attention, like how they try to impress each other with factoids or the ability to tell a good story or be funny. For example, Stan talks a good game, but gets all tongue-tied when he tries to talk to Sherry. These are smart kids, like how Gene pays close attention to President Kennedy’s speech on T.V. about the aggressive nature of the Russians. Clearly, he’s worried about how this will affect his father who has been deployed near Cuba. Dante is a rare filmmaker that doesn’t talk down to kids, but instead empathizes with them and remembers what it was like to be that young.

Matinee begins with the image of a mushroom cloud from a nuclear explosion, which casts a shadow of fear that hangs over the rest of the film. This turns out to be part of a teaser trailer for Woolsey’s Mant! He is first seen in silhouette a la Alfred Hitchcock, but his pitch is pure Castle. Goodman’s Woolsey is an engaging fusion of entrepreneurial filmmakers like Hitchcock, Castle and Corman, harkening back to an era where ‘50s B-movie moguls invented fantastic sounding yet ultimately cheesy innovations like Thrill-o-rama in an effort lure people away from their T.V. sets and back into the movie theaters. Goodman plays him like a slick cinematic huckster who spends a lot of time dreaming up outrageous premises for movies that are just audacious enough to get impressionable kids to eagerly await their arrival at the local movie theater. The veteran actor does a nice job of showing that under Woolsey’s confident façade are very real doubts that his latest movie will be a bust, but it is this fear that motivates him. Goodman uses his big, warm smile to full effect as he tries to get anyone who will listen to go see Mant!

Dante regular Dick Miller and filmmaker John Sayles show up as “concerned citizens” that object to the “cheap, sick” thrills of Woolsey’s movies, which only intensifies the public’s interest in Mant! Miller and Sayles look like they’re having fun playing uptight conservative types who seem to be protesting a little too much. Their “confrontation” with Woolsey is a real treat to watch. Another Dante regular, Robert Picardo, plays the local movie theater’s nervous owner who frets over the installation of Woolsey’s Rumble-rama when he’s not worried about the possible Russian invasion. Cathy Moriarty has a plum role as Woolsey’s world-weary girlfriend and leading lady. Her dry, caustic asides in response to her boyfriend’s relentless campaigning are very amusing.

The origins for Matinee can be traced back as far as 1989 with a screenplay by Jerico Stone (My Stepmother is an Alien) that was more of a fantasy in the vein of Popcorn (1991) with the intention of making a haunted house movie, but Dante wanted to mix cinematic horror with real-life fears. However, no studio was interested in the project and so Joe Dante acquired a development deal with Warner Brothers. He had a couple of different writers work on the script. Ed Naha (Dolls) introduced a character that was a washed-up horror movie star – not a filmmaker – that came to the town to make a personal appearance. When Charles S. Haas (Gremlins 2: The New Batch) came on board, he and Dante decided to set the story during the Cuban Missile Crisis and changed the actor to the Lawrence Woolsey character. They also conducted a lot of research on Florida in the early 1960s in order to authentically recreate 1962.

Dante managed to find independent financing from European investors and arranged for Universal Pictures to distribute Matinee. However, the closer they got to principal photography, it became evident that the financiers didn’t have the money. Dante and producer Mike Finnell approached Universal production chief Tom Pollock, who had already invested a certain amount of money, and asked if the studio could finance the film’s $13 million budget. The executives agreed and treated it as a standard comedy even though Dante saw it more as an indie film.

The production shot on location over 10 weeks in Key West, the Universal Studios lot in Orlando, and Cocoa Beach, which still resembled Key West during the spring of 1992. For Mant!, the movie within the film, Dante wanted to make it as period accurate as possible, telling the effects people, “Don’t do deliberately cheesy effects. Do effects that are pretty much the way they would have been done at the time.” The filmmakers shot it on the cheap over five days.

Matinee received positive reviews from mainstream critics. Roger Ebert gave the film three-and-a-half out of four stars and wrote, “There are a lot big laughs in Matinee, and not many moments when I didn’t have a wide smile on my face.” In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin praised, Mant!, the movie within a movie: “Collaborating with the screenwriter Charlie Haas, who wrote Mr. Dante’s sly, underappreciated Gremlins 2: The New Batch, he turns Mant into a perfect evocation of this era’s absurdly solemn, pseudo-scientific horror style. It’s a wonderfully nostalgic treat.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “B+” rating and Owen Gleiberman called the film, “a witty and affectionate homage to the sci-fi trash of yesteryear,” and felt that Dante “appreciates both the tackiness and the awe.” The Los Angeles Time’s Peter Rainer wrote, “at its best it’s a ticklish nut-brain romp—a crazy quilt of grade-Z horror spoofs.” In her review for the Washington Post, Rita Kempley wrote, “Still, it’s Goodman who makes Matinee run with the alleged reliability of a Maytag. Half huckster, half hero. All heart!!! So gratifying only chuckles can describe him.” Finally, the Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote, “The glory of Dante’s comedy in this movie and others … is that it suggests poetic parallels without insisting on them.”

Dante expertly takes us back to a time when the world was on the brink of nuclear war with fantastic attention to period detail, including retro hairstyles, what people wore and even the way people spoke. Of course, there are spot-on references to movies of the day, like one the kids watch entitled, The Shook Up Shopping Cart, a sly nod to the goofy live-action Disney comedies with a man who is transformed into a shopping cart via a spell and stars an then-unknown Naomi Watts. It’s such a spot-on spoof that you half-expect Dean Jones to make an appearance.

For all of Woolsey’s bluster and the specter of nuclear war that looms large over the proceedings, there is a real humanistic streak that runs through Matinee. Dante clearly has affection for these characters in the way he gives them little moments that flesh these people out so that we care about what happens to them. For example, the heart-to-heart Woolsey has with Gene is one of the best scenes in the film as he explains his love for making monster movies and the appeal of going to the movies. The scene features some of Goodman’s best acting and is a wonderful tribute to the love of cinema. Matinee shows the power of the medium and its ability to transport an audience to other worlds and tell fantastical stories that allow people to forget their everyday lives and fears for a couple of hours.

SOURCES

Brew, Simon. “Joe Dante.” The Den of Geek. February 21, 2008.

Brownstein, Bill. “Matinee Recalls Horror Movie-Maker’s Gory Glory Days.” Montreal Gazette. January 29, 1993.

Erickson, Glenn. “Joe Dante.” DVD Talk. May 11, 2010.

Hinman, Catherine. “It’s A Wrap for Matinee.” Sun-Sentinel. June 18, 1992.

Kelley, Bill. “Matinee Director Joe Dante Loves the Hokey Nostalgia of B-Movie Thrillers.” Sun-Sentinel. February 14, 1993.

Kenber, Ben. “Joe Dante Takes Us Back to Matinee.” Yahoo! September 13, 2011.

Eerie, Indiana

When Eerie, Indiana debuted on American television in September 1991, it was well-received by critics who favorably compared it to Twin Peaks, albeit for kids. However, I always felt that a better analogy for this clever, short-lived show was that it was actually Friday the 13th: The Series for kids. Like the protagonists in that supernatural-themed program, the main characters in Eerie – two young boys – investigated bizarre happenings and collected artifacts from their adventures. The latter was much more light-hearted in tone than Friday the 13th, but still had a creepy undertone reminiscent of episodes of the classic era of The Twilight Zone.

Eerie, Indiana was the brainchild of Jose Rivera and Karl Schaefer, both relatively inexperienced in the realm of T.V. at the time (Rivera had done a handful of episodes for various sitcoms, while Schaefer had even less experience) but they capitalized on the flood gates of weirdness that Twin Peaks broke open during its brief tenure to push through a quirky show reminiscent of The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries but if written by Stephen King. However, the look and feel of the show is indebted to filmmaker Joe Dante who not only directed the first episode (and four others) but also acted as creative consultant for the series. It is easy to see what drew him to the project as the suburban setting, with child protagonists encountering fantastical events, are all hallmarks of his career.

NBC originally aired Eerie Indiana on Sundays at 7:30 pm. Unfortunately, network executives didn’t know what to do with the show and after 13 episodes and rescheduling it was retooled, lasting only six more before being cancelled. It has been 20 years since the show first aired and it still holds up well while also providing nostalgic memories for anyone who can remember a time when fairly adventurous programming managed to find its way on the air if only for a short time.

Dante really sets the overall look and tone for the series with the first episode, entitled “Forever Ware” (a sly nod to the classic science fiction novel The Forever War by Joe Haldeman perhaps?). Marshall Teller (Omri Katz) is a 13-year-old boy whose parents have moved from New Jersey, “just across the river from New York City,” where he loved that it was “crowded, polluted and full of crime,” to the wholesome, squeaky clean suburbs of Eerie, Indiana. Sure, it looks like a cross between the all-American Lumberton in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) and the cookie cutter neighborhood in Edward Scissorhands (1990), but Marshall isn’t fooled. He can see past the façade and realizes that the town is in fact the “center of weirdness for the entire planet,” where the local mailman is packing a firearm, a lady hangs her laundry to dry which includes a strait-jacket, and a graying Elvis Presley emerges from his home to pick up the daily newspaper. And in a nice Lynchian touch, a crow can be seen perched on the town sign with an eyeball in its mouth. And this is all conveyed in the prologue!

Marshall’s family is introduced to the neighborhood by Betty Wilson, an AVON lady/Stepford Wife hybrid with two sons (Bert and Ernie – har, har) that peddle ultra-efficient Tupperware called Forever Ware. Betty’s eager to not just sell Marshall’s mother (Mary-Margaret Humes) some of her containers but invite her to become part of a small circle of friends. However, when one Betty’s sons slips Marshall a cryptic note, he decides to investigate with the help of his next-door neighbor Simon (Justin Shenkarow). They soon uncover a rather sinister plot that won’t make you look at vacuum-sealed plastic containers the same way again. Of note is Dante’s trademark mix of horror and humor through the eyes of young kids.

Part of what makes Eerie, Indiana work so well is how it takes things that kids deal with while growing up and give them a slightly sinister, supernatural spin, like going through the ordeal of getting braces in “The Retainer,” which sees a hapless kid beset by a prototypical retainer created by an orthodontist cum mad scientist (played with relish by Vincent Schiavelli) that allows the wearer to hear what dogs are thinking and it ain’t pretty. Marshall and Simon uncover a canine revolution where dogs demand, “Down with Kibble!” and “No more Stupid Pet Tricks!” and “No more neutering!” The only thing that appears to be stopping them is “the mystery of the doorknob,” as one dog puts it. While these scenes are played for laughs because of the sheer absurdity of the concept, it does remind one of how poorly dogs (and animals in general) are treated in pounds/shelters and are regarded in our society.

Omri Katz plays Marshall like a budding Fox Mulder, anticipating the inquisitive FBI Agent and his show, The X-Files by two years. He is smart and able to jury rig gadgets to help in his investigations. He also does all kinds of research with Simon’s help and what they find out only confirms their suspicions. For example, in one episode they discover that the shape of the Bermuda Triangle perfectly mirrors the shape of Eerie. Marshall and Simon have the passion of conspiracy theorists only their paranoid fantasies turn out to be true! Katz and Justin Shenkarow play it straight most of the time as the bulk of the show’s humor comes from the outrageous people they encounter and the darkly comic situations they find themselves in.

“ATM With a Heart of Gold” places more of an emphasis on Simon as he befriends an intelligent ATM machine that Marshall’s father (Francis Guinan) invented. The machine’s interface features a computer avatar that’s a cross between Max Headroom and a Ken doll known as Mr. Wilson. Simon is just a kid who wants to belong and have friends because his home life is so crappy. In one scene, we see him walk towards a drab, earth-toned colored house where we can hear his parents arguing and fighting within. No wonder he wants to hang out with Marshall and investigate flights of fancy. Shenkarow does a nice job of conveying the longing Simon has for friends and how this leads him to befriending Mr. Wilson. This also blinds him to the machine’s creepy malfunctions. Pretty soon Simon learns that you can’t buy friendship and that money won’t solve all your problems.

Robert Altman regular Henry Gibson and Dante regular Dick Miller make an appearance in the Dante-directed episode, “The Losers,” and seem to be having a blast playing men responsible for all the recently disappearing items in Eerie. There are some nice visual gags in this one as we get a look at a few rather famous missing items found in their lair, chief among them a pod from Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and the sled from Citizen Kane (1941). This is definitely a more playful, whimsical episode and it is great to see veteran character actors like Gibson and Miller playing such pivotal roles.

I always enjoy Halloween-themed episodes of T.V. shows and Eerie, Indiana does not disappoint with “America’s Scariest Home Video,” which pays homage to the Boris Karloff 1932 horror film The Mummy as Marshall and Simon are stuck babysitting Simon’s little brother only to have the mischievous tyke transport himself into a horror film on T.V. and the Mummy in the film appearing in the house. The fog-enshrouded night and decrepit monster always make me think of John Carpenter’s The Fog (1980) minus the scary pirates from beyond.

In 1990, co-creator Jose Rivera was working on an idea for a horror anthology show set in a high school that would have been a teenage version of The Twilight Zone. Meanwhile, co-creator Karl Schaefer had an idea for a modern-day Tom Sawyer story. An agent got the two men together and they merged their ideas to create Eerie, Indiana. Schaefer described the show as “a twisted, modern fairy tale.” Rivera grew up loving fairy tales and wanted to impart notions of magic realism into suburbia, “that beneath the veneer of malls and crossing guards there lurks a deeper reality of something just slightly off-centre.”

He and Rivera picked Indiana because it had the image of “being a benign, harmless place to live.” They also asked Joe Dante to direct the pilot episode and with him convinced the executives at NBC to air the show. Schaefer said that the network liked the central character Marshall but they had to be convinced that the concept of the show would work because it was so different from NBC’s usual fare. In retrospect, Dante considered Eerie, Indiana a dream project because he was there at its inception and was then asked to stay on as a creative consultant. As a result, he even had a hand in casting Omri Katz. The producers originally wanted “this geeky kid,” according to Dante, but he felt Katz was more authentic and the young actor was cast. Dante was obviously taken with Katz as he subsequently cast him in his next film, Matinee (1993).

Eerie, Indiana was well-received by critics when it first debuted on television. Entertainment Weekly gave it a "B" rating and Ken Tucker wrote, "You watch Eerie for the small-screen spectacle of it all — to see the way, in the show's first few weeks, feature-film directors like Joe Dante (Gremlins) and Tim Hunter (River’s Edge) oversaw episodes that summoned up an atmosphere of absurdist suburban dread. The Hollywood Reporter’s Miles Beller wrote, "Scripted by Karl Schaefer and Jose Rivera with smart, sharp insights; slyly directed by feature film helmsman Joe Dante; and given edgy life by the show's winning cast, Eerie, Indiana shapes up as one of the fall season's standouts, a newcomer that has the fresh, bracing look of Edward Scissorhands and scores as a clever, wry presentation well worth watching." USA Today described the show as "Stephen King by way of The Simpsons," and Matt Roush wrote, "Eerie recalls Edward Scissorhands and even – heaven help it – David Lynch in its garish nightmare-comedy depiction of the lurid and silly horrors that lurk beneath suburban conformity." Finally, the Washington Times’ David Klinghoffer wrote, "Everything about the pilot exceeds the normal minimal expectations of TV. Mr. Dante directs as if he were making a movie, and a good one. In a departure from usual TV operating procedures, he sometimes actually has more than one thing going on on screen at the same time!"

After Eerie, Indiana’s demise, co-creator Karl Schaefer stayed in the genre, writing and producing T.V. shows routed in fantasy and horror, like Stephen King’s Dead Zone, Eureka and The Ghost Whisperer. Jose Rivera also continued to dabble in the supernatural, writing episodes for Goosebumps, Night Visions and Shadow Realm before moving on much acclaim with his screenplay for The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) and adapting Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road for the big screen. Omri Katz worked again with Dante in Matinee and starred in the fun family film about witches, Hocus Pocus (1993) before going back to T.V. with the short-lived but critically-acclaimed, The John Larroquette Show. Aside from a couple of one-off guest spots here and there, he’s largely dropped out of the business, which is a shame. Since Eerie, Justin Shenkarow has worked steadily in T.V. and movies, most notable a regular on the show Picket Fences while also doing a lot of voice work. Joe Dante has found it increasingly harder to get his kind of films made and has also gone back to T.V., directing two episodes apiece for the horror anthology shows Night Visions and Masters of Horror. He has made a new film called The Hole (2009), which is still without a North American distributor (?!).

Eerie, Indiana takes the trials and tribulations of a teenage boy, like his first crush on a girl, and gives them a supernatural spin – said girl gets a heart transplant from another boy that liked her and begins acting like him. The otherworldly aspects allow the show to deal with heavy topics like life and death while still aiming it at kids. However, there are plenty references for adults to recognize and enjoy, like the numerous visual cues to classic horror films and guest stars, like John Astin, from classic film and T.V., that elevates it above typical kiddie fare. Eerie’s influence can still be felt in more recent kid shows like Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Goosebumps, and the more recent House of Anubis. However, none of its offspring could quite duplicate the diversity of Eerie, which wasn’t afraid to end some episodes on a whimsical note, or on an ominous one, or even in a poignant way. And I think this is down to the presence of Joe Dante, who instilled that X-factor missing from other shows of its ilk. Much like what David Lynch brought to Twin Peaks, Dante gave Eerie, Indiana the look and feel of cinema with each episode having his personal touch regardless of whether he directed it or not. This is why the show still holds up today and works whether you’re a young kid or simply young at heart.

SOURCES

Farrell, Peter. “Imagination Runs Wild in Eerie, Indiana.” The Sunday Oregonian. September 15, 1991.

Fitgerald, John. “Off-Centre.” Globe & Mail. October 12, 1991.

Mink, Eric. “Strange Goings-On in Eerie, Indiana.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch. August 19, 1991.

“New T.V. Show Set in Mythical Indiana Town.” Associated Press. June 13, 1991.

Sharbutt, Jay. “Eerie Follows Twin Peaks Lead.” Boston Herald. November 2, 1991.