Formative Film 15/16 -- 'Network'/'Rocky'

Movies were changing in a very concrete way, and the contrast between these two pictures shows us what happened.

Network

Dir: Sidney Lumet

Prod: Howard Gottfried, Fred C. Caruso

Scr: Paddy Chayefsky

Phot: Owen Roizman

Release date: Nov. 27, 1976

Rocky

Dir: John G. Avildsen

Prod: Robert Chartoff, Irwin Winkler

Scr: Sylvester Stallone

Phot: James Crabe

Release date: Dec. 3, 1976

Lakeside Twin Theatres

4655 Harlan Street

Wheat Ridge, CO

The New American Cinema movement that began with Bonnie and Clyde in 1967 was dazzling. Thanks to uncaring parents and lax ticket-sellers, for a decade I could see a lot of things I was way too young to see over at our local Arvada Plaza movie theater, a 20-minute walk from our house. The films were revelations, difficult and strange in a way that was a lot more bracing and appealing than the kids’ movies of the day. I devoured them all without flinching.

Then came Jaws in the summer of 1975. Everyone saw it, and it became the number-one of topic of conversation until the fall; the next summer, we all went to see The Omen. These were good old genre pictures writ large, throwbacks to B movies with A movie budgets. Ten years of bold experimentation were winding down, and crowd-pleasing extravaganzas hearkening to the tried-and-true clichés of the Studio Era were in the air.

The Lakeside Twin was a very nondescript, functional duplex of a movie theater. Now that I was old enough to drive, I scorned taking girls to my childhood movie theater. At the same time, “my” car was my mother’s 1969 Volkswagen Beetle, called the Skunkmobile due to its black paint wearing off in nice, white longitudinal stripes along the top of the vehicle. The Skunkmobile did not really have any uphill power, so when I took girls out, I always had to choose places that could be reached by a level route. The Twin was far enough from home, but not impossible to get to.

I already knew about Chayefsky, one of the most legendary figures from the live TV era, which I’d just missed out on. Network was wonderful — dark and canny, relentlessly downbeat, a Swiftian scream of satire directed at TV, the medium that had propelled Chayefsky to face in the first place. It was also a classic New York film, full of tough, hyperarticulate performers not afraid to mess around with contradictions. Watching them act was just as enthralling as absorbing the subject matter. I wanted to do that. I could do that. I was going to be an actor, preferably William Holden.

(One of my favorite memories took place in the NYU dorms the night Network premiered on network television; during the famous "mad as hell" scene, everyone in lower Manhattan opened their windows at home and screamed out into the street. It was hilarious.)

Meanwhile, my girlfriend was bored. My enthusiasm for whatever film I watched has always been quite complete; I generally walk around talking like the characters for an hour or so after and require a long debriefing. Thanks to our cinephile mother, were raised to observe and analyze movies in detail.

This night, my beloved was having none of it. I looked at realized that, beautiful and sweet though she might be, she didn’t like to discuss movies and would have to go. I dumped her. (She did let me know that she had only been seeing me out of pity.)

The next week, I got up the nerve to ask another girl out, and Rocky was on the bill.

In the time long before online fan clubs and aggregation reviews, buying a movie ticket was a crap shoot. You had word of mouth and one or two newspaper reviews to go on. We were swept away by the energy and heart of Sylvester Stallone’s breakthrough effort about a boxing underdog and his girlfriend.

Now, Rocky is built on the foundations of the boxing-film subgenre, and I hadn’t watched them — Golden Boy, Champion, Kid Galahad, and Body and Soul — yet. Once I did, I realized how by-the-numbers Stallone’s script was. Here was the chipper striver, embodying the American dream by coming outta nowhere, a Cinderella boy making something of himself, and discovering the important things in life as well. It was corny, easy to swallow, easy to root for. It was a premonition of the simplistic 1980s. We bought it, but the star-spangled chauvinism would get old fast.

THAT night, my date and huddled in the car after the show as a wet snow swirled around us. Were we making out? Hell no, we were discussing the movie. We drove over to Goodberry’s at Wadsworth and Ralston for some coffee and cinnamon rolls, and we stayed together through high school.