When I first came to Hollywood, a friend of mine who's been out here for a long time suggested I should find an angle to use when I pitched myself as a writer.
The Big Chill is a farce, a despicable shallow movie that purports to be about radical veterans from the sixties which is like asking a dead muskrat to make a molotov cocktail. It is cloyingly sentimental stupor of cliches. Who can picture any of these ACTORS as real people who brao anvely fought police, exposed the power structure running the country, helped stop a genocidal war, and won for African Americans the rights to vote, go tat o any bathroom they wanted to have more opportunity to go to college, buy a house in any neighborhood unlike zoned redlined n. places like Levittonw Ny. We could go on and on. BigChill gives people were there or wish they were there a nice fake tourist tour. it'stoo bad that the vast talentsof actors likeJeff Goldblum. kayplace and kevin klein are so WASTED. But ithink that is becausethe screenwriter and director were wasted from the getgo. Kasdan, what demo do YOU ever go to? As for Jaws it is an old time movie that tells a story. The only philosophy coould be the 'morall' of the story my uncle charlie who never finished high school theorized after spending FIVE years stubbornly wading through Mobdy Dick. My parent were thrilled that he thought he knew the moral. Each year they askekd and he replied, 'I aint finished yet but I think i know.' Finally he said he'd finished Moby Dick.'My college educated two MA parents chuckled, 'So ok Charlie, is the moral you thought it was?" 'Yes" he answered. " So what's the moral, Charliel." He looked them straight in the eye and said, "You gotta be kind to animals."
Just out of curiosity, are you from the same generation as the characters in the Big Chill? I'm not, so I can't really say if it's accurate in that respect or not, but I'm also not convinced that any of the characters were supposed to be "radicals" in the sense you're talking about. I think part of the film is about how easily they fell away from the values that they had professed, at least, to believe in only ten or fifteen years earlier. The question of whether it's an accurate depiction is an interesting one, I think. I like the Moby Dick story too. As Melville wrote in that book, "There is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces." To me, that sounds like your uncle Charlie.
I am a veteran of the sixties.If have any interesst,google my name and find the date march 13,2019 and you can HEAR five veterans of the San Francisco State strike reading our work about the strike, including Judy Juanita, a Black Panther party member who wrote a wonderful novelVirgin Soul and two excellent books about Oakland Ca ( Panther birthplace). You can also find a chapter from a novel I am working on on the website of SHAPING SAN FRANCISCCCO, a political/community organizatin led by Chris Carlson who has several about SF kind of cultural community histories. My piece is about a specific incident where myself and another protester were arrested for "operating a soundtruck without a license.
and yes even given what you say, many fake movies were made about the sixties AND the Vietnam war. It was about people who I call 'the tourists " who went to antiwar demonstrations and gave money to Gene McCarthy and took drugs as the'cool" thing to do andor danced naked at Altamount. But they risked nothing where as myself and others risked our lives and careers. And we lost many good people, many murdered by the police and/dor government agents. Most of the stories have NOT been told, no matter kind of bullshit limited teachers in film mand especialy MFA and Departments of Englishs will tell you. Since most are not of the workingclass or spent time in the working class, they know zilch . Nowsk some of my friends say that th spate of films like theBig Chill were put out deliberatly to give people the impression that wor mosts of my generation were political naifs, dillletantess playing at revolution. i wont liee, there ws ofsome of it, but nowhere NEAR the totality. i know scoress of sixties people who went on to become dedicateed teachres, lawyers, social worker, np workers, ecologists, scientists, writers and painters- all retaining our antiraciss'ssst and antiwar commitments. Now we can be mentoring elders although it seems that your generation is benefitting from many of our sectarian, male hiearchical, antigay mistakes in. that a good chunk of the current movement not only welcomes but includes among its leaders LGBT people, especially transgendered comrades which to me is terrific because it shows how what once was completely unspoken and forbidden even on the left is now way more not only OUT but LEADING and enriching willing listeners' world view.
This all makes a lot of sense - thanks for sharing. I agree with all the parts of this that I'm educated enough to agree with. The only thing I'd note is that I may be a bit older than you assume (my guess is that you're a decade or so younger than my parents, who were born in '39 and '42) and unlike a lot of this kids today I don't have any impression at all that folks who were political in the '60s were political naifs or ineffective. I think at least some of that impression comes from a bit of a lack of political history on the part of some young people today, along with a sense (shared by a lot of generations when they are in their teens and twenties, and certainly by me when I was at that age) that they know better than everyone who came before. As I came of age though, and received my own political assumption, I always understood the folks from the '60s to have been both extremely politically savvy, and effective in their methods.
I was born in 1945. I have a poem about it called Mitosis, exploring Holocaust time births and what it meant to moter and child. There was a mix in terms of political savvy AND effective. Some had a lot of savvy. More were idealistic. Evenmore were cynical; i know I was but I had a certain disadvantage/naivete- I was a serious cynic and a serious romantic not thebest combintkation in the world. The people in my generation made many mistakes and some paid with t heir lives ( more true of black brothers and sissters as well as Latino and NativeAmericans than white sstudentss.
The Big Chill is a farce, a despicable shallow movie that purports to be about radical veterans from the sixties which is like asking a dead muskrat to make a molotov cocktail. It is cloyingly sentimental stupor of cliches. Who can picture any of these ACTORS as real people who brao anvely fought police, exposed the power structure running the country, helped stop a genocidal war, and won for African Americans the rights to vote, go tat o any bathroom they wanted to have more opportunity to go to college, buy a house in any neighborhood unlike zoned redlined n. places like Levittonw Ny. We could go on and on. BigChill gives people were there or wish they were there a nice fake tourist tour. it'stoo bad that the vast talentsof actors likeJeff Goldblum. kayplace and kevin klein are so WASTED. But ithink that is becausethe screenwriter and director were wasted from the getgo. Kasdan, what demo do YOU ever go to? As for Jaws it is an old time movie that tells a story. The only philosophy coould be the 'morall' of the story my uncle charlie who never finished high school theorized after spending FIVE years stubbornly wading through Mobdy Dick. My parent were thrilled that he thought he knew the moral. Each year they askekd and he replied, 'I aint finished yet but I think i know.' Finally he said he'd finished Moby Dick.'My college educated two MA parents chuckled, 'So ok Charlie, is the moral you thought it was?" 'Yes" he answered. " So what's the moral, Charliel." He looked them straight in the eye and said, "You gotta be kind to animals."
Just out of curiosity, are you from the same generation as the characters in the Big Chill? I'm not, so I can't really say if it's accurate in that respect or not, but I'm also not convinced that any of the characters were supposed to be "radicals" in the sense you're talking about. I think part of the film is about how easily they fell away from the values that they had professed, at least, to believe in only ten or fifteen years earlier. The question of whether it's an accurate depiction is an interesting one, I think. I like the Moby Dick story too. As Melville wrote in that book, "There is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces." To me, that sounds like your uncle Charlie.
I am a veteran of the sixties.If have any interesst,google my name and find the date march 13,2019 and you can HEAR five veterans of the San Francisco State strike reading our work about the strike, including Judy Juanita, a Black Panther party member who wrote a wonderful novelVirgin Soul and two excellent books about Oakland Ca ( Panther birthplace). You can also find a chapter from a novel I am working on on the website of SHAPING SAN FRANCISCCCO, a political/community organizatin led by Chris Carlson who has several about SF kind of cultural community histories. My piece is about a specific incident where myself and another protester were arrested for "operating a soundtruck without a license.
and yes even given what you say, many fake movies were made about the sixties AND the Vietnam war. It was about people who I call 'the tourists " who went to antiwar demonstrations and gave money to Gene McCarthy and took drugs as the'cool" thing to do andor danced naked at Altamount. But they risked nothing where as myself and others risked our lives and careers. And we lost many good people, many murdered by the police and/dor government agents. Most of the stories have NOT been told, no matter kind of bullshit limited teachers in film mand especialy MFA and Departments of Englishs will tell you. Since most are not of the workingclass or spent time in the working class, they know zilch . Nowsk some of my friends say that th spate of films like theBig Chill were put out deliberatly to give people the impression that wor mosts of my generation were political naifs, dillletantess playing at revolution. i wont liee, there ws ofsome of it, but nowhere NEAR the totality. i know scoress of sixties people who went on to become dedicateed teachres, lawyers, social worker, np workers, ecologists, scientists, writers and painters- all retaining our antiraciss'ssst and antiwar commitments. Now we can be mentoring elders although it seems that your generation is benefitting from many of our sectarian, male hiearchical, antigay mistakes in. that a good chunk of the current movement not only welcomes but includes among its leaders LGBT people, especially transgendered comrades which to me is terrific because it shows how what once was completely unspoken and forbidden even on the left is now way more not only OUT but LEADING and enriching willing listeners' world view.
This all makes a lot of sense - thanks for sharing. I agree with all the parts of this that I'm educated enough to agree with. The only thing I'd note is that I may be a bit older than you assume (my guess is that you're a decade or so younger than my parents, who were born in '39 and '42) and unlike a lot of this kids today I don't have any impression at all that folks who were political in the '60s were political naifs or ineffective. I think at least some of that impression comes from a bit of a lack of political history on the part of some young people today, along with a sense (shared by a lot of generations when they are in their teens and twenties, and certainly by me when I was at that age) that they know better than everyone who came before. As I came of age though, and received my own political assumption, I always understood the folks from the '60s to have been both extremely politically savvy, and effective in their methods.
I was born in 1945. I have a poem about it called Mitosis, exploring Holocaust time births and what it meant to moter and child. There was a mix in terms of political savvy AND effective. Some had a lot of savvy. More were idealistic. Evenmore were cynical; i know I was but I had a certain disadvantage/naivete- I was a serious cynic and a serious romantic not thebest combintkation in the world. The people in my generation made many mistakes and some paid with t heir lives ( more true of black brothers and sissters as well as Latino and NativeAmericans than white sstudentss.