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It’s become quite fashionable to dismiss American Beauty. Kevin Spacey became a monster. Some people argue the film hasn’t aged well, and that it is pretentious. Even the logline on IMDB says, “A sexually frustrated suburban father has a mid-life crisis after becoming infatuated with his daughter’s best friend.”

That may all be true. But I still think one part of the movie has been misunderstood from the very beginning. So let’s put all that aside and do as the film’s tagline says and “look closer.”

To say that Spacey’s Lester Burnham is having a simple “mid-life crisis” is not doing the character justice. Because a mid-life crisis and an awakening can look surprisingly similar from the outside. Both might involve quitting a job, buying a sports car, thinking inappropriate thoughts about a younger girl, or just making reckless decisions in general.

The difference is why they happen. One is driven by panic over what’s been lost. The other is driven by a realization that something essential has been missing all along.

Lester points out one of the differences in the very first scene when he states in his opening monologue that he is only 42 years-old. While that is certainly mid-life crisis territory, age itself never seems to bother him. It’s the life he’s built for himself that no longer fits.

I think the scene that illustrates this point best is when Lester asks his teenage neighbor Ricky if he can buy weed from him, and Ricky invites him into his room. Lester sees all the high-end technology that selling drugs can buy, and he tells Ricky that when he was his age, he flipped burgers all summer just to afford a stereo. When Ricky replies that that sucks, Lester responds with one of the more compelling lines in the whole movie: “Actually it was great. All I did was party and get laid.”

I don’t see it as a mid-life crisis because Lester doesn’t seem interested in respect and power as much as simplicity. He wants the simple freedom of being a teenager again. So much so that after he quits his job as an advertising executive, he goes to the drive-thru of a fast food restaurant and asks for an application. When he is told that they aren’t hiring managers, only counter workers, he replies, as serious as anyone possibly could: “Good. I’m looking for the least possible amount of responsibility.”

This is not someone who is trying to prove anything to anyone. He’s simply trying to recover a period of his life when his job wasn’t his identity. When his job was just a way to pay for the rest of his life. And maybe buy a stereo.

The movie frames it as a joke, as even in his interview he points out to the geeky restaurant manager that he has “fast food experience.” But I don’t interpret that as him wanting to be young again. I think he’s just trying to remember what it felt like to enjoy being alive. .

He’s beginning to find it. He is working out, enjoying his new job, and doesn’t have a care in the world. When he discovers that his wife is cheating on him when he sees her and her paramour canoodling at his drive-thru window, he declares himself free of the obligation to his marriage. She is shocked that he isn’t even mad, and that he wants her to be happy. When she tells him to stop pretending, he says, slowly and with conviction: “You don’t get to tell me what to do... ever again.”

Just as Lester’s awakening appears about to bring him the object of his desire, his daughter’s beautiful friend, Angela, he learns another truth: all her bravado about her sexual experience is just that—bravado. She actually is a virgin. Even though she says she still wants to, this gives him pause. Because he only thinks she is the answer to his unhappiness. She represented youth, freedom, spontaneity—the carefree life he remembered before his career, marriage, and responsibilities swallowed him whole.

He really wanted the idea of her.

But once she is revealed as just another insecure seventeen year-old, he realizes that she was not what he was searching for. It becomes clear that, throughout the movie, Lester didn’t really see Angela. He only saw this fantastical image of a goddess surrounded by rose petals. The moment she becomes a real person instead of a fantasy, he stops.

After covering her up and making her something to eat, he asks her if his daughter is happy. When she tells him, “Yes,” he realizes what is really important in life. It’s not the shiny, red car he bought, or the muscles he put on. He looks at a family vacation picture from long ago and realizes just how lucky he really is.

And then he is shot in the head.

After hearing the gunshot, Ricky and Lester’s daughter come running, and Ricky sees Lester slumped down on the table, dead. But when he saw that Lester was smiling, the weird kid who filmed dead birds and plastic bags understands, just like I do at fifty, that this wasn’t just some old guy going through a mid-life crisis. This was someone who couldn’t appreciate what he had until he finally woke up.

People can interpret films in different ways. Some may not be able to separate Kevin Spacey from the characters he played. Some may think that American Beauty is overblown Oscar-bait (It won five) that doesn’t hold up 27 years later. Fair enough.

But American Beauty asked us to “Look closer,” and twenty-seven years later, I finally did.

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In the early ‘90s, my friend Brian and I used to listen to WrestleRadio USA, a weekly radio show on 1410 AM, WMSX. Amazingly, the station was run out of someone’s house in Brockton, MA.

In the pre-internet days, WrestleRadio was a good way to learn about some of the inner workings of the wrestling business, and sometimes they had trivia contests for merchandise and free tickets to shows. Like many sports talk shows, it had a regular cast of callers who phoned in every week to share their opinions on the wrestling world and try to win the prizes. We soon became familiar with names like Jay from Weymouth, Dave from Braintree, and the Democratic Cowboy. If you must know, my pseudonym was “The Heartbreak Kid,” after WWF wrestler Shawn Michaels. I took it because I thought he was cool. Not because I thought that highly of myself.

One week, they were giving away tickets to an upcoming WWF show at the Boston Garden, so Brian and I decided to try to win them. We called in simultaneously—like any good tag team—using two different phones in the same house, which was perfectly normal back then. To our surprise, we actually won the tickets, and had to go to the station to pick them up. Once we found out that it was run out of a house the next town over, the wheels started spinning.

At the time, Brian worked at a Blockbuster Video, and he was able to get his hands on several posters promoting the release of Hulk Hogan’s Mr. Nanny, and he decided that we would see if the show hosts would be interested in using them as contest giveaways. So, we decided to drop them off one day as WrestleRadio was ending.

The posters were merely our way in, as even the staunchest wrestling fan probably wouldn’t be that interested in seeing Hulk Hogan in a tutu. Once we were inside the station, however, we asked the manager if they would be interested in hiring us as interns. They said that they were, but we would need to obtain a radio license in order to work there. For a moment, I thought that was going to be the end of this endeavor, but then we were told that getting a radio license is pretty easy: you just have to pay for it.

The FCC had recently changed its licensing rules. Some licenses still required passing a written exam, but ours was much simpler. We mailed in a $35 check, and a few weeks later a small yellow card arrived in the mail, giving us permission to work in radio. And apparently, if I ever flew internationally, I could legally operate the plane’s radio. Much to my surprise, it was good for life. Not a bad deal for thirty-five bucks.

I couldn’t find mine, but I did a Google Image Search and found Duke Ramsey Keith’s, and that’s a pretty cool name. Anyway, here’s what it looked like:

I thought having that license was the coolest thing ever. I carried it in my wallet and showed it off to everyone. I loved telling anyone within earshot that I could legally work in radio. In the early 90s, it felt like a brush with fame.

The unfortunate thing was that once I started, I didn’t really love the internship. It mostly involved answering the phone when listeners would call in, and I hated talking on the phone. The only other job was bleeping out swears, but these were nice AM radio listeners who never swore, so that really wasn’t an issue. Otherwise, it mostly meant minding the studio while the actual producer took bathroom breaks. They did let us work during WrestleRadio, so that made it a little better.

In fact, the best day I had at WMSX was when Brian and I showed up one day for our internship to find that one of the hosts of WrestleRadio wasn’t there, so the other host, the great Ed Symkus, saw us outside the booth and waved us in. He asked if we would like to join him, not wanting to do the whole show alone. Brian volunteered to man the phones, but I jumped right behind the microphone and became Guest Host for the Week. I don’t remember if I said anything noteworthy or funny, but I bet I was the envy of the Democratic Cowboy for an hour.

I don’t recall how this all ended, but I’m pretty sure I just stopped showing up after a couple months, probably because I got an actual paying job. According to this Wikipedia article, WMSX switched from talk radio to “a Spanish-language tropical music station” in 2001, and then a Christian music station in 2009. It was then sold and moved to Dedham in 2012, where it was rechristened WZBR. It changed formats a few more times and actually stayed in operation until 2024, so that’s a good run for local AM radio. Imagine if it stuck with the tropical Spanish music?

I did try to parlay the experience into a gig on Emerson College radio when I was a freshman. Unfortunately, I had no idea that WERS was an actual prestigious station, and my only real experience was answering phones. I figured mentioning my radio license might give me a leg up. Then I told them I liked Rush, which probably didn’t help. I never heard from them, and my career in radio ended with one hour on 1410 AM in 1993.

But decades later, I am still sitting behind a microphone with my Leaguepodcast pals. I have hosted, edited, appeared on, and shilled hundreds of podcasts over the last 16 or so years, and gotten to interview some really cool people. I don’t know whether that one hour on WrestleRadio stirred something in me or whether podcasting simply became the modern version of what I’d wanted to do all along. Either way, I still get to sit behind a microphone—no license required.

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It was a completely different game back then. In fact, the Home Run Derby I grew up watching wasn’t really the same game we watch today.

The version that first captured my imagination looked like this:

Two players, 9 innings, and everything that isn’t a home run is an out. The winner took home a cool two grand, with the loser getting $1000. The players could also earn bonuses for hitting more than three homers in a row. A fun concept that unfortunately only lasted one season because the host, Mark Scott, passed away from a heart attack at 45.

Today’s Derby rewards power, endurance and, perhaps surprisingly, the pitcher’s ability to keep feeding hittable strikes. Plus, the winner now gets a million dollars, which seems like a lot but considering the salaries of some of these players, it’s not that big a deal

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The Derby is still exciting. Watching baseballs disappear into the night never gets old. But, one change to the rules this year is the elimination of the clock, where batters had 3:00 minutes to hit as many home runs as possible. It made for a faster-paced show, but you couldn’t always admire a majestic home run because there was usually one following right behind it. This year, the players get 20 swings in the first round, and 15 in the following rounds. If they hit it out on their last swing, then they can keep swinging until they don’t hit one out, but there’s no clock, no bonus time, no time-outs to take sips of Gatorade. It should be more relaxed.

And it sounds more like the Home Run Derby that I know. In fact, when we were kids, my friends and I used to go to a little league field and play our own version. Since an actual game of baseball requires quite a few players, and we only had 3 or 4, Home Run Derby was our only option. We weren’t trying to recreate the Home Run Derby we’d seen the night before on ESPN, though. We were trying to recreate the one Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays played in grainy black-and-white. Ten outs. Home runs didn’t count against you. Everything else did. That was the real Home Run Derby, as far as we were concerned. And we didn’t play Home Run Derby because we couldn’t get enough players for baseball. We played it because Home Run Derby was baseball on those afternoons.

One of us would bat, one would pitch, and there were two or three outfielders to retrieve the balls. The only downside was the patch of woods beyond the outfield fence. Any ball hit in there was as good as gone, or at least good for a fifteen-minute search. Otherwise, it was a perfect way to spend a Summer afternoon. We didn’t need much; a couple bats, a couple gloves, and a few balls, although we usually came home with fewer than we went there with.

There was always a fun dynamic when we would play. We were all friends, but sometimes there were arguments over a ball being fair or foul, or if we’d lose track of how many outs there were. I wasn’t the best hitter, but I could throw more strikes than anyone in the group. I also supplied most of the baseballs, since my Dad ran our town’s Little League and always had extras in the basement. Meanwhile, my friends John and Brian were usually the ones competing for the lead, but John understood that Home Run Derby could be as much a mental game as a physical one. He’d constantly try to get Brian angry enough to swing at anything. Whether it worked or not, John usually won our derbies.

But it didn’t matter to me who won (which helped, because I rarely did). We still created some great memories. And hopefully, this year’s official MLB Home Run Derby, without a clock, can capture some of the same magic that Mays and Mantle did, and that we did on those little league fields.

Maybe this year’s Derby will produce another unforgettable performance. Maybe someone will top Josh Hamilton or Mark McGwire or Shohei Ohtani.

I’ll enjoy watching.

But somewhere in the back of my mind, I’ll still be counting outs instead of swings, remembering a handful of kids on a Little League field trying to be Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays.

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When Pleasantville came out in 1998, I thought it was a clever comedy about two teenagers who get sucked into a black-and-white, Leave It to Beaver-style sitcom. It was funny, charming, and visually inventive. I liked it quite a bit, but I don’t remember thinking it was especially profound. It was simply an entertaining way to spend two hours.

I use the term “black & white” both literally and figuratively, as there is no color in Pleasantville, and the values of the townsfolk are also pretty black and white (mostly white.) Everything has a right answer and a proper place. Also, the weather is sunny and 72 degrees every day, the fire department only exists to rescue cats stuck in trees, and the sports teams never lose, or even miss a basket. Everything is quite pleasant, in fact.

But is it really? Watching it again nearly thirty years later, I realized I had been watching the wrong movie. The jokes were still funny. The performances were still charming. But this time, what stood out wasn’t the comedy. It was the fear. The fear of change. The fear of people who didn’t fit in. The fear of books, art, new ideas, and a world that refused to stay the way it had always been.

Maybe it wasn’t just a comedy.

Maybe it was a warning.

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The first crack in Pleasantville’s perfect world comes when Reese Witherspoon’s Mary Sue decides not to follow the script, and takes Paul Walker’s Skip up to Lover’s Lane. This Mary Sue takes the basketball captain to the hoop. Skip, clearly weirded out by his first sexual encounter, drives home and sees a single red rose in the bushes outside his house. Not only is it a cool metaphor because he has been de-flowered, but it is also the first hint of color in a world that never knew any.

It isn’t long before other splashes of color start showing up around town, as Mary Sue has started a sexual revolution all by herself. She even has a heart-to-heart with her TV show-Mom, played by Joan Allen, and teaches her the ins-and-outs of self-stimulation (I know that’s not her real mother, but it’s still kind of weird.) Allen also becomes colorized after a little sexual healing.

Despite his intention to play by the sitcom’s rules, Bud also begins to incite some change by encouraging some of his fellow teenagers to start reading books like Catcher in the Rye and Huck Finn. Bud also helps Mr. Johnson (Jeff Daniels), the town soda jerk, discover his artistic voice by giving him an art book after Johnson expresses an interest in painting.

The color metaphor is often mistaken to be just about race or sexuality. That is part of it, but it is also compassion, curiosity, creativity, passion and independent thought. That is why Mary Sue doesn’t instantly become colorized when she has sex. It actually happens after she falls asleep reading D.H. Lawrence, something that Jennifer in the real world never would have done. Bud himself goes color when he punches out a local bully who was terrorizing his mother. He doesn’t become colorized because he rebels. He becomes colorized because he finally stands up for someone else. So, doing something against your character. something good, can help you see the world differently, and essentially give you color.

The movie does a good job of portraying both sides of the story. Although a lot of the Pleasantville residents who remain in black-and-white are angry and resentful of all of this change, William H. Macy, who plays Bud and Mary Sue’s father, is just sad. He isn’t angry. He isn’t cruel. He’s simply grieving the loss of the only world he has ever known.

The rapid changes begin to spark riots in the streets of the town. The black-and-white residents begin burning the library books that they deem inappropriate. Johnson’s soda fountain is ransacked and his art destroyed. A colorized Bud is thrown in jail for his role in all of the chaos, when clearly all he wanted was for people to see the world in color. But fear always looks for something, or someone, to blame.

In the climactic scene, Pleasantville mayor, played by J.T. Walsh (in his final appearance) calls a special town meeting, where he basically puts Bud and Johnson on trial for painting a colorful mural on the side of the diner. While the mayor dictates that only black and gray paint colors can be used, Bud finally pushes him until the mayor loses his composure—and, with it, his black-and-white certainty.

In 1998, I thought this was a metaphor for 60’s counter-culture, and the 50’s-style sitcom was a clever backdrop, but all these years later, I see it as more than that. It’s not about the 50s or the 60s. I think it’s about what happens whenever people become convinced that yesterday was better.

Watching Pleasantville today, it’s hard not to recognize echoes of our own world. Arguments over immigration, transgender athletes, education, voting rights, artificial intelligence, even the books children should read all have something in common: they aren’t really arguments about the issues themselves. They’re arguments about change. About who gets to decide what comes next, and how much of yesterday we should try to preserve.

To me, the lesson of Pleasantville isn’t that the past was bad. It’s that a world without change eventually runs out of color. The challenge isn’t choosing between yesterday and tomorrow. It’s figuring out how to carry the best parts of yesterday into a tomorrow that’s inevitably going to look different.

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It was easy for me to look at this job as just another step in my progression: movie theater employee, video store clerk, and now tape digitizer. The truth was it wasn’t really intentional. I just needed a job and they needed someone for the holiday rush. And maybe I would have gotten better with more time and training, but the reality was I kind of sucked at it. It may sound like I was doing a noble thing, preserving cherished memories for people, but it was actually agonizing. For example, a six hour tape that is full of Friends reruns takes six hours to digitize, so it’s not like I was transferring a couple tapes of the Smith’s trip to Disney World and then giving them a flash drive and calling it a day. While Ross and Rachel were fighting on one computer, I had to work on another family’s memories, and while that family trip was digitizing, I had to start on a bar mitzvah on another computer. The guy who trained me suggested I use a notebook to keep track of all of the customers we had. I found it kind of ironic that our job was updating old technology, and this guy was using a spiral notebook to keep track of everything, but I guess it helped him. He got a lot more work done than I did.

It was really a question of motivation. I was in my early 40s at this point, so my dreams of Hollywood weren’t really at the forefront of my brain, but I still just didn’t find this work particularly engaging. My mind would sometimes wander when I would come across a tape that had a birthday party on it, and the date and time stamp would be on the screen. I would imagine how old they were now, what they were doing, and if I could possibly steal their identity, since I now had their name and date of birth. I never did it, of course, but that’s how bored I was.

I was about to simply walk out one day when I was transferred to a different department. I was put in front of a bank of VCRs to do the actual bulk transferring. This wasn’t all that much more exciting, but I think my experience and fondness of VCRs made it more palatable. Then one day, I digitized a recording of The Matrix that someone had made off TNT and I realized something:.

We used to like to own things.

And I don’t mean just buying them. I made a recording of Clue because I liked it so much that I wanted to be able to watch it whenever I felt like it. This person probably felt similarly about The Matrix at some point - although they probably should have labeled the tape so they wouldn’t have to pay to have it digitized years later. But back then, if someone gave a movie a permanent place in their collection, it was significant. And like your collection of books and music, your collection of movies said something about you as a person.

Not necessarily about your tastes, but about what you thought was important. What you didn’t want to lose. A movie collection wasn’t a list of your favorite movies. They were maybe movies that you didn’t even really like, but were reminders of things you had lived through, like first dates, birthday parties, or bad movie nights with friends. Your collection was a list of the movies you couldn’t bear to live without.

That’s really what the job taught me. Whether it was your daughter’s fourth grade recital or The Matrix, at some point, it meant enough for someone to hit “Record.” When I recorded that bootleg of Clue, I was saying, “I want this available whenever I need it,” because it mattered.

Obviously, people have digital libraries, and physical media is still available, and piracy is rampant, much the same way it was when I hooked up two VCRs back in the 90s. It all just seems less important somehow. I bought a bunch of movies on the Google Play app a few years ago, figuring Google will never go anywhere. They soon discontinued the app and moved everything to Youtube. I think my movies are still there somewhere, but I haven’t looked for them, and I probably won’t, because those movies are most likely available on some streaming service or another if I want to watch them. It was just nice knowing that, like my distorted copy of Clue, they would be there if I needed them.

Just like the home movies I digitized. Maybe the customers would watch them now that they had digital copies. Maybe it would become a yearly tradition to relive those memories. Or maybe they wouldn’t. Maybe they were just happy to have them in case they needed them.

What’s important is that I realized we weren’t really digitizing tapes.

We were digitizing decisions.

Somebody decided a birthday party was worth keeping. Somebody decided a family vacation was worth keeping. Somebody decided a recording of The Matrix off TNT was worth keeping.

The tape itself wasn’t important.

The decision was.

It was proof that, at one point in somebody’s life, that moment mattered.

And maybe that’s all our collections ever were.

Thanks for reading. Don’t forget to like and subscribe, listen to the podcast, and buy me a coffee if you are so inclined. Every little bit helps keeps the lights on, so I don’t have to go back to digitizing home movies.

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One of the highlights of the trip was visiting the Art Institute of Chicago, the very museum where Ferris, Sloane and Cameron go to look at “priceless works of art.” I’m sure Ferris would be delighted to know that the museum even offers a Ferris Bueller Tour.

Probably like a lot of people my age, that was really all I could think about while walking through the halls: “These were the Chagall windows that Ferris and Sloane kissed in front of” or “This was the statue that they all posed in front of, folding their arms.”

And standing in front of Georges Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, I couldn't help but think about Cameron Frye staring into the painting forty years earlier.

How is it that this teen comedy about skipping school has become part of our culture decades later? And why is it permanently etched in my brain?

Well, I have a theory on that.

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I was too young to see it in theaters, but once it hit video stores, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off became hugely popular with kids my age. It was one of those movies I rented over and over and eventually had it memorized.

Ferris was confident, funny, had a beautiful girlfriend, and somehow managed to skip school nine times without consequences.

At eleven years old, skipping school felt like a mortal sin to me—right alongside staying out after dark or saying “hell” in front of an adult.

And Ferris didn’t just skip school. He did everything you weren’t supposed to do. He embarrassed his principal, lied to his parents, stole his friend’s father’s Ferrari, impersonated the Sausage King of Chicago to get into a fancy restaurant, and somehow ended up catching a foul ball at Wrigley Field.

After years of “One to Grow On” messages during Saturday morning cartoons and Knowing Is Half the Battle PSAs after G.I. Joe, here was a guy who openly rejected all of it.

How could I not admire him?

Over the years, I’ve heard-tell about deleted scenes that would have made Ferris far less likable. Apparently there were harsher rants to the camera and moments that made him seem more selfish or entitled—like calling his father to ask where his savings bonds were so he could finance the day off.

And honestly, the movie already gives you hints of that. Ferris lives in a wealthy Chicago suburb, has loving parents, a nice house, and a devoted girlfriend, yet still can’t bring himself to simply go to school. A lot of people probably saw him as spoiled.

But I didn’t think about any of that when I was eleven. I just thought he was what the school secretary called him: “A righteous dude.”

And I wasn’t alone. I think a lot of us wanted to get away with the things Ferris did—not because we were criminals, but because we were tired of being told exactly how we were supposed to behave all the time. And I honestly think Ferris Bueller inspired some of my own minor acts of rebellion once I got older, like taking a couple extra free passes from the movie theater I worked at, or putting aside a new movie at the video store. Not big stuff. Just enough to make life a little more interesting. It moves pretty fast, after all.

But the older I get, the more I realize I never actually wanted to be Ferris. I was much more like Cameron.

Most of us probably were. Slightly afraid of authority. More anxious than we wanted to admit. Careful. Nervous. The kind of person who would absolutely panic if a friend borrowed my father’s Ferrari.

And there’s one line in the movie that has always stuck with me.

While talking to the audience about the Ferrari, Ferris casually says:

“I caught Cameron digging the ride once or twice. It’s good for him. It teaches him to deal with his fear.”

Then he immediately moves on to talking about how “choice” the car is. But that line always resonated with me. Because Cameron doesn’t just admire the Ferrari. He has obviously taken it out himself. He says his dad knows the mileage, but Cameron knows it, too, because he has driven the car without permission and worried about putting extra miles on it. He’s touching something he’s not supposed to touch, and doing something he’s not supposed to do.

That’s the whole point.

The Ferrari is beautiful and untouchable—like everything else in Cameron’s house. Ferris even describes the place as a museum where you’re not allowed to touch anything.

And Cameron does. And of course it goes badly. At the end of the movie, Cameron destroys the Ferrari. Even when Ferris offers to take the blame for it, Cameron refuses. He even tells Ferris that he “let” him take the car out that morning. Ferris thinks that he manipulated the whole outing, but Cameron points out that he could have stopped him, that he had a say in everything. It is the only time in the movie where it is pointed out that Ferris could be stopped at all.

This New Cameron finally decides to confront his father, not just about the car, but about how he is treated in general, completing the real character arc of the film. Because Ferris Bueller’s Day Off isn’t actually about Ferris. Ferris doesn’t change. Everyone around him does. His Principal. His sister. Cameron.

Ferris is just the disruption that forces them to move.

And maybe that’s why the movie stuck with me. Not because I wanted to become some charming rule-breaker who could outsmart the world.

I just wanted to dig the ride once or twice.

Thanks for reading. And remember, “a person should not believe in an -ism, he should believe in himself.” Also, don’t forget to like and subscribe.

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I never read the book, but the movie is a pretty interesting take on Wallace (Jason Seagal) and how he dealt with fame and success after the release of his book Infinite Jest. Since he committed suicide, it seems not so well.

The basic premise is that Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg), a writer for Rolling Stone, hears that this Infinite Jest book is basically Shakespeare, and is rather annoyed at the praise, mostly because he just released a book to mild apathy. Lipsky then reads the book and discovers that it is that damn good, and asks his boss if he can interview Wallace for Rolling Stone, and follows him for a few days as Wallace is wrapping up his book tour.

Lipsky has a sort of puppy-love for Wallace even before meeting him, basically because he wants that level of success and respect. He quickly realizes that even David Foster Wallace doesn’t actually want to be David Foster Wallace. He is very nervous, slightly ornery, and very self-conscious about how he will come across in Lipsky’s article, mostly because he is afraid of sounding like a self-righteous douche. He is, in fact, anything but, as he generally is portrayed as a kind of lonely guy who lives in the middle of Nowhere, Illinois with his dogs. He enjoys writing, but isn’t really all that concerned if anyone likes his books. Obviously, Lipsky is the complete opposite, and can’t wrap his head around why this beatnik doesn’t care about anything.

There’s a funny scene where Lipsky asks Wallace why he wears a bandana all the time. Wallace’s answer is that he used to sweat a lot, and it kept the sweat out of his eyes, and it eventually just became a type of security blanket.

It’s a perfectly reasonable (if not very sexy) response, but Wallace is nervous that he will come off as being a little high-and-mighty, like some super-genius who is too good to comb, or even wash, his hair. Again, that is not even close to being true, but Wallace is so worried about being perceived as pretentious that he is completely neurotic about it. He is not too worried about his writing being accepted by the public, but he definitely doesn’t want the public to think he’s a prick. I kept wondering if he would just be more relaxed if he just allowed people to think he was pretentious.

Lipsky, after being pressured by his boss, asks Wallace about the time he was institutionalized years earlier, because the common belief was that it was because of a heroin addiction. Wallace is incredibly insulted by this, citing that the only addiction he’s ever had was television (which is depicted very hilariously in the movie. He actually got rid of his TV, but will watch it anytime he is near one.) He tells Lipsky that he was just incredibly unhappy, so unhappy that people assumed he turned to heroin to make himself feel better. Wallace admits that it wasn’t drugs or a chemical imbalance that caused him to be institutionalized, but the realization that he had “lived an incredibly American life,” where he thought if he worked hard and was successful, everything would be ok, and that just ain’t true.

In all honesty, the movie does gloss over Wallace’s many foibles to tell the story they wanted to tell. Things like sleeping with his students, excessive drinking - which is mentioned but not really focused on - and even stalking women that he was attracted to. Definitely the actions of a lonely man, but I guess being a TV addict just made him more relatable.

Wallace compares his depression to a person jumping out the window of a burning building because the perception that burning to your death is worse than falling to it. The real reason he was so unhappy, at least the way I understood it, was because he had broken up with his girlfriend. It’s never made explicit, but Wallace gets very angry at Lipsky for hitting on his ex right in front of him, so I made the leap that he just wasn’t over her. Truly, that’s probably the one of the best reasons to be unhappy that’s ever been. Loneliness is certainly a more plausible reason for depression than, “Fame was too much for me, man.”

Wallace’s theory on loneliness, however, was that technology was going to keep getting better and better until it was going to make being alone “more pleasurable.” The crazy thing is that the movie was set in 1996, and I don’t know if Wallace ever said that in real life, but the movie came out in 2015, when it was already becoming more pleasurable to be alone, and Tiktok wasn’t even a thing yet. Wallace jokingly tells Lipsky that he is going to have to leave the planet to get away from all of the technology, which is, of course, exactly what he did.

I think the reason this movie spoke to me, though, was because I could see both sides of the coin. As a schlub who wrote a comic book that I wish sold better and hosts a podcast that I wish more people listened to, I could identify with Lipsky. You put your heart and soul into something you really love, you want people to like it as much as you do, and maybe make a little salad at the same time. However, as my life has gone on, and I've met some people who have succeeded in the fields that I tried to succeed in, I can also see a little bit of Wallace's point. He's a regular guy suffering from depression who happens to be blessed (or cursed?) with great intelligence, but all he really wants is to be regular, and have someone to talk about his day with when he gets home.

I admit that I don’t know much about the real David Foster Wallace (although he apparently taught at Emerson for a little while in 1991, so I guess I just missed him.), but if he’s anything like some of the professionals I have met, I do understand him. No one gets into comics or podcasting or starts a Substack because they want to become rich. They just have some creativity to spare and a need to express themselves, one way or another. I doubt that Wallace wrote a 1,000-plus page novel figuring that it would be The One. You could say he just got lucky, although considering how it ended up for him, you would probably be wrong.

As I said, however, I do understand Wallace on some level. I have enjoyed creating things, but I really do not enjoy marketing those things. He really didn't like his book tour. He didn't seem too happy to be featured in Rolling Stone. But he did seem to like having Lipsky around to talk to, and that's pretty much all anyone could ask for.

Of course, having said that, please like and subscribe to this Substack, and if you are willing and able, consider becoming a paid subscriber. I swear the money doesn’t go to heroin.

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It echoed through schoolyards everywhere in 1984. The line, uttered by Bill Murray in Ghostbusters, probably delighted young boys all over the country. The movie was released in early June, but even by the following September, we were still talking about it. Some even had t-shirts with that ugly green ghost on it, who had been christened Slimer, even though he is never named in the movie. My mother wouldn’t allow such a thing to be worn to school, but I remember a lot of kids had them.

The funniest part about the whole phenomenon was perhaps the fact that it was basically a throwaway line in the movie, and Murray had way funnier lines that we could have quoted. But, what can I say? Kids just loved slime back then.

Even beyond my school, the movie was a huge success that some say redefined what a blockbuster could be. It combined comedy, action and horror, and the studio could market it to kids and adults, thus maximizing the box office potential. The term “busters” was suddenly everywhere, as was the red circle with the line through it. I feel like marshmallows even experienced a rise in sales, but that may have been a rumor.

I don’t recall the first time I saw Ghostbusters, but it was one of those movies I saw a few times in the theater and then taped off cable when we had one of those free HBO weekends to try and lure custoomers. Remember those?

I may have been too young for a lot of the bawdy jokes, but that didn’t bother me. I loved the fact that these guys had simply thrown together a ghost-catching business, and there they were, eating Cheez-Its while debating different kinds of spirits and comparing supernatural energy to giant Twinkies.

I eventually realized was that the original Ghostbusters never really felt like a franchise movie. The Ghostbusters weren’t superheroes or chosen ones. They were just regular guys starting a business, eating junk food in the office while trying to figure things out as they went along. The ghosts and special effects were memorable, but what made the movie stick was how grounded the characters felt underneath all of it.

Over time, kids moved on. Ghostbusters 2 was a bit of a disappointment, and the various cartoons that spun off of it somehow made it feel less special. In my mind, it was a movie not really meant for kids, but now the studio was marketing it to them with not one, but two cartoons, one of them calling itself The Real Ghostbusters, even though none of the characters from the movie were in it. My young brain just couldn’t process all of it. Plus, it wasn’t really forbidden fruit anymore, so my interest waned.

However, when I was 18, just after graduating high school, I would go to my friend John’s house, and Ghostbusters would be playing on HBO nearly every day. After a couple of viewings, I asked him why HBO kept showing it. He surmised it was because it was the ten-year anniversary.

It may have been my first real experience with nostalgia. By then, Ghostbusters wasn’t about slime anymore. It wasn’t about cartoons or merchandise or hearing kids quote a line on the playground. The hype had faded away, and what remained was just a genuinely funny movie.

Watching it again at eighteen, I realized it was actually better than I remembered.

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Years later, when Hollywood began rebooting nearly every franchise from my childhood, an all-female Ghostbusters was announced. I didn’t think it was necessary, but the cast was talented and I hoped it would be funny.

Unfortunately, it just didn’t work for me, and not because of the female cast. There were many reasons, really. Because of the liberal use of ad-libbing during production, the humor felt a little low-brow. The shoe-horned cameos just took me out of the story entirely. And yes, the fact that the Black character was once again the only non-scientist in the group did bother me. Did they not think Leslie Jones could pull it off?

Some of the backlash surrounding the movie was ugly and ridiculous, and I wanted no part of that. I was mostly just disappointed by it in general. The movie didn’t make me love the original any less. It mostly reminded me that what I loved about Ghostbusters couldn’t really be recreated.

I thought the hoopla was over once again, but a few years later, there were more Ghostbusters movies. Ghostbusters: Afterlife in 2021 and then Frozen Empire in 2024 continued the storyline of the original movies, with Murray, Dan Akroyd, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts and Sigourney Weaver all returning to reprise their roles, and the descendents of Harold Ramis’ Egon were the heroes. Audiences were happier with these two installments, and there was an expectation that there would be more on the way.

I never saw them, and probably never will. I mean, I keep watching every Star Wars movie and Disney+ series they release, but more Ghostbusters sequels don’t interest me.

To me, they had crossed the streams.

Ghostbusters already found me at exactly the right moments in my life: once as a kid swept up in the hysteria, and again as a teenager rediscovering the movie underneath it.

I didn’t need the franchise to keep growing.

I had already been slimed. That was enough for me.

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Back in the day, my friends and I were mix-tape people. We made them, we traded them, and we listened to them. I listened to them a lot, in fact. Probably more than the actual albums I took the songs from.

This was the 90s, so while we were all primarily buying CDs at this point, our cars still had tape players. So the best way to listen to CDs while driving was to copy them onto tapes. But it seemed kind of boring to just copy a whole CD, especially when each one probably had at least a few songs that were busts, or maybe only a few songs that were any good. So it made sense to put the good songs on a tape so you wouldn’t have to fast-forward over songs you didn’t want to hear.

But a tape was also usually 90 minutes long — or 60 if you went that route, but why would you? So you could fit 18 or 20 songs on a tape if you wanted to fill it. It made sense to us that if you really liked a band, you’d fill a tape up with their best songs. And you could arrange the songs for the best sound quality. For example, Rush released the guitar-heavy Counterparts in 1994, but their previous album, Roll the Bones, while featuring some great songs, was a bit tinny, so if you were making a Rush compilation, you couldn’t put a Counterparts song next to a Roll the Bones song or it would be blown away.

Ok, that sounded a bit nerdy.

Still, we were mostly creative people, so making a mix-tape went beyond just collecting a band’s greatest hits. We would make tapes with a bunch of our favorite songs and include clips from shows and movies we liked (usually nerdy ones, like Star Trek), edited in between the songs. Sometimes the clips would relate to the song they preceded, sometimes they were random, but hopefully they were funny. I mean, who wouldn’t want to hear a Homer Simpson quote before “Alive” by Pearl Jam?

Sometimes the tapes themselves had a theme, and sometimes they were just a bunch of songs we liked. And if you were making the tape for a friend, you would try to add songs they weren’t familiar with or didn’t already own to expand their horizons a little. We all basically listened to the same bands, so that was hard, but once in a while you could find a diamond in the rough.

The point is, they weren’t something you dashed off in an afternoon. If you promised someone a mix-tape, it took time. Even if it was just a bunch of songs you thought they’d like, they still had to play well with each other. If a song ended on a hard note, the next song had to start fast. A song that fades out at the end? That might be a good place for a clip before the next song.

And there were unwritten rules to be followed. For instance, no more than two songs per band, and they had to be on separate sides of the tape. And a cool name for the tape — usually another movie quote — had to be assigned to it. Just like a real album.

And obviously, if you liked a girl, giving her a mix-tape was a definite sign of your intentions. You might as well have named the tape “I Want to Have Sex With You.”

Now it is sounding really nerdy, but that’s what we did.

Sadly, most of my mix-tapes have long since been lost to time, much like the cars I played them in. I’m not too sad about it now, because that’s just what happens as we get older.

But here’s where this post gets really nerdy: I recently found a couple of the inserts from mix-tapes that were made for me back then. If you’re too young to know, the inserts — or inlays, or J-cards? I didn’t know that was what people called them until I googled it just now — were basically the covers where you could list the songs and, if you were really feeling it, add some cover art. I assume, for nostalgia purposes, I had saved the inserts but thrown out the tapes. I guess the inserts take up less space?

One of the inserts was for a tape my brother made me for my high school graduation. There was a loose “freedom” theme to it. At least that’s what I got out of it, since he actually included “Freedom! ’90” by George Michael, which may be a little on the nose. It was an excellent tape that followed all the rules — clips, cover art, no repeat artists on either side, even a cool title: “Slimeball in a Sea of Puss,” an insult from one of our favorite movies, Midnight Run.

It was a masterwork, so I decided to make a Spotify playlist of the songs and share it with him. He texted back immediately, asking if it was the digital version of the mix-tape he made for me, even remembering the year (1994). I responded that it was, but “unfortunately, the Kelly song from Cheers was not on Spotify.”

I’m glad I could share this walk down memory lane with him. We talked later about the art of the mix-tape: the editing, the thought that went into it, tailoring it to the recipient. But also the loss of the clips. To me, they were the real genius of the mix-tape. The clips didn’t make the playlist. Sure, I could probably find them on YouTube, convert them to MP3s, and add them to Spotify as podcast tracks before inserting them into the playlist.

But I’m not that nerdy.

The Spotify playlist is incredibly convenient, easily accessible, and will never get twisted up in your tape player, but it is not the modern-day mix-tape. Because nothing is. Mix-tapes were a product of their time, and they introduced me to a lot of new songs I may not have known about otherwise, while also providing me with a lot of joy. But that time has passed, and that’s fine. I still have the songs.

I’ll just have to imagine the Homer quote.

Thanks for reading, as always. Please like and subscribe, or send me some love on Buy Me A Coffee. I also have a podcast that could use some lovin’, and a comic.

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If you liked that one, or even if you didn’t, here’s another story form my days as a projectionist at that college. If you didn’t click the link, the opening line that one of my jobs was “facilitating” film showings. I thought it was a cool way to describe it on my resume, but most of the time it wasn’t all that cool.

There was a 640-seat auditorium in the building where most of the screenings took place, which gave them a certain sense of importance. At the time, students didn’t have easy access to many of the assigned films, so attendance was usually strong.

The real complication was that the Dean of the college was an older gentleman who liked the idea of showing movies on actual film. So the school still owned several 16mm projectors.

Showing a movie on 16mm was a process.

You had to thread the film from the supply reel through the projector gate and onto a second reel in the back known as the take-up reel. As the movie played, the take-up reel collected the film. Afterward, everything had to be rewound onto the original reel so it could be returned to the university film library properly.

This was a lot more serious than forgetting to rewind a video store rental.

Most feature films arrived on three or four reels, each running roughly thirty to forty minutes. That meant using two projectors side by side and switching between them during the movie.

The signal for the switch was what projectionists called a “cigarette burn”—a small white circle that briefly appeared in the upper-right corner of the screen near the end of a reel. Once I learned of this, I could not watch movies the same anymore. I always saw the cigarette burn until theaters started using digital projectors.

Still, if you timed the switch correctly, the general audience never noticed. If you timed it poorly, everyone noticed.

For films longer than two reels, things became trickier.

While projector #2 played reel #2, I had to rewind reel #1, load reel #3 onto projector #1, thread it in the dark, and make sure the lamp and sound were off so I didn’t accidentally blast random frames and noise into a packed auditorium.

It was a juggling act. But when it went well, I felt strangely proud of myself.

The students probably never noticed. But I always did.

These screenings were the hardest part of the job, which is why one of my first requests for the department was a DVD player. Once we got one, I quietly switched most screenings to DVD. I never mentioned that to the Dean. What he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. Besides, this wasn’t film school.

Still, a few titles weren’t available on DVD yet, and one of them returned every year like a tax bill.

It was a special educational cut of Nicholas and Alexandra, the historical epic about the fall of the Russian royal family. The original film ran over three hours, but the university had acquired a shortened version on 16mm for classroom use.

The Social Science department screened it every November. Which meant every November, so did I.

I dreaded those days every year, but one year was worse than the others.

Everything began normally. I set up the two projectors, threaded reel #1, dimmed the lights, and started projector #1.

Then I zoned out for a few minutes, having already seen enough of Nicholas and Alexandra for one lifetime.

When I looked back, I saw the take-up reel wasn’t turning.

Film was pouring onto the floor.

In a frenzy, I tried spinning the reel by hand, but several feet had already piled up around my shoes. Worse, the reel change was only minutes away, which would require both hands.

When the cigarette burn appeared, I let go, shut off projector #1, and started projector #2.

The movie continued.

I then dragged out a third projector and hurriedly loaded reel #3, since projector #1 was clearly finished for the day. Somehow I got it ready in time and made the second reel change without disaster.

Meanwhile, reel #1 lay beside me in a heap like cinematic spaghetti.

When the Russian Revolution finally ended, I dropped to my knees and began winding the tangled film by hand. It had to be rewound properly so it could be shown again the next day. Mostly, though, I wanted to throw it in the trash.

As I sat there wrapped in loose film like a mummy, someone knocked on the projection booth door. It was one of the professors. I expected criticism. Maybe a complaint about a rough transition or a slight delay.

Instead, he looked down at me kneeling in the pile of film and said:

“Matt, that was the best screening we’ve ever had. Thanks.”

Then he closed the door and walked away.

Even though I could have used some help at that moment, it instantly became the best screening I ever had.

I never projected movies at my movie theater job. I never physically pressed play on anyone’s VCR when I worked at Video Showplace. But that day, hundreds of students watched a near-flawless screening because I kept the thing alive through panic, luck, and stubbornness.

A few years later, the film library finally made me a VHS copy of the edited Nicholas and Alexandra, and I never had to run it on 16mm again.

But that time, I facilitated it. And for once, I actually knew exactly what that meant.

Thanks for reading, as always. Please check out my podcast, and if you feel like contributing in ways other than subscribing, you can Buy me a Coffee. Also, feel free to drop me a line or comment if you happen to have old film screening stories.

Keep on keepin’ on.

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Sometime in 1985, my family got cable. I was nine years old, and it felt like the world suddenly got bigger. I don’t know if kids today can fully grasp what a big deal that was. Maybe they could if they went from six streaming services—one of them barely working—to a hundred overnight.

With cable came MTV. And with MTV came professional wrestling.

Wrestling didn’t just entertain me—it imprinted on me. It gave me heroes, villains, and a clear sense of right and wrong. And at the center of all of it was Hulk Hogan, a blond, tanned superhero who seemed invincible and spoke directly to kids like me. For a while, I believed every word of it.

But belief is a funny thing. You don’t always lose it all at once. Sometimes it fades slowly, long before you can explain why.

With MTV came the Rock ’n’ Wrestling Connection, my first real exposure to professional wrestling. It paired Cyndi Lauper with WWF good-guy wrestlers in a battle against the forces of evil - basically, bad guy wrestlers. It all escalated at a Madison Square Garden event called The War to Settle the Score, broadcast on MTV to massive ratings. The main event featured “Rowdy” Roddy Piper challenging WWF Champion Hulk Hogan.

After Piper was disqualified due to outside interference (in reality, Piper refused to let Hogan pin him), he and his ally Paul “Mr. Wonderful” Orndorff continued the beatdown. Lauper tried to intervene, Piper and Orndorff threatened her, and suddenly Mr. T jumped the guardrail and chased them off. That moment set the stage for the first WrestleMania—and created a lifelong wrestling fan in me.

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By that time, Hulk Hogan was the guy. Tanned, blond, and billed as having 24-inch biceps—his “pythons”—he was a real-life superhero who told kids to train, say their prayers, and eat their vitamins, his so-called “three demandments.” Fans ate it up. To his credit, Hogan played the role expertly and helped ignite a wrestling boom unlike anything seen before.

But it hadn’t always been that way.

In the late ’70s and early ’80s, Hogan was a villain, feuding with heroes like Andre the Giant around the world. While working for the then-WWWF, Hogan asked for time off to film Rocky III. WWWF owner Vince McMahon Sr. hated the idea of wrestlers breaking character to appear in movies and refused. Hogan decided to quit and do the movie anyway.

That decision paid off. After the exposure from Rocky III, Hogan could write his own ticket in wrestling. He became the top star in the AWA until Vince McMahon Jr. lured him back with more money and a plan to expand the rechristened WWF nationally using cable television. Hogan was to be the cornerstone. McMahon bought up smaller promotions for their TV timeslots and raided talent from those who refused to sell. The AWA didn’t survive.

For the ensuing years, Hogan ruled wrestling, headlining sellout after sellout—including WrestleMania III against Andre the Giant, still one of the largest indoor crowds in wrestling history (despite WWE’s famously inflated numbers). Hogan faced a rotating cast of villains, but the matches grew painfully formulaic: the comeback, the “Hulk up,” three punches, a boot, a leg drop, maybe a body slam if the opponent was fat, and then the posing. If you’ve ever seen any athlete cup their ear to the crowd, this is where they got it from.

The formula became so ingrained that Vince’s mantra backstage was simple: No matter what happened during the bout, in the end “Hogan must pose.” And why not? The money kept pouring in.

But the cracks were forming—at least for me.

As I entered my teenage years, Hogan’s act felt stale. I gravitated toward the more athletic, less preachy “Macho Man” Randy Savage. So did the WWF. In 1988, Hogan and Savage were put together to form the “Mega-Powers” tag team, and Savage briefly took the top spot while Hogan left to star in No Holds Barred, playing—showing his range—a heroic professional wrestler named Rip Thomas.

The movie flopped. So they brought the film’s villain, Zeus (played by Tiny Lister), into WWF storylines in an attempt to squeeze out more money.

By 1990, Hogan’s act was undeniably tired. He dropped the title to the Ultimate Warrior at WrestleMania VI—though not without theatrics that suggested he’d be back. He then starred in Suburban Commando, another box-office dud. True to form, by WrestleMania VII, Hogan was champion again, defeating Iraqi sympathizer Sgt. Slaughter in one of the more bizarre and tasteless storylines of the era.

A year later, the cheers were softer. Merch sales dipped. Vince McMahon was under investigation for steroid distribution, and Hogan—39 years old and very much emblematic of the problem—was asked to step away. But when WrestleMania IX struggled to sell tickets, Hogan returned, wasn’t even booked in the main event, and still walked out champion. And yes, at the end of the night, Hogan did pose.

Three months later he was gone again, but this time, Hollywood didn’t want him either. Mr. Nanny bombed. Thunder in Paradise lasted one season. In 1994, Hogan jumped to the rival promotion, WCW, with heavy creative control, brought his friends along, and initially boosted business—until fans started booing the same tired act.

So WCW did the unthinkable in 1996: they turned Hogan heel. Training, prayers, and vitamins were gone. Enter “Hollywood” Hulk Hogan.

It worked—briefly. WCW overtook WWF on the strength of Hogan and the nWo. But Hogan still couldn’t let go of the spotlight. He constantly beat fan favorites, spray-painted them, and even brought back the Ultimate Warrior just to get his win back. He made more forgettable movies. WCW soon spiraled.

By the late ’90s, WWF was pushing fresher stars like “Stone Cold” Steve Austin and The Rock, while Hogan felt very obsolete. The old formula no longer worked.

Until nostalgia kicked in.

After Vince McMahon bought WCW in 2001, Hogan was brought back home in early 2002. At WrestleMania X-8, Hogan faced The Rock in a battle of ages—and the crowd lost its mind. Suddenly, it wasn’t “Hogan must pose,” but “Please, Hogan. Please pose.” It was a great moment, and it marked the peak of his late-career run.

Then came the scandal.

In 2015, secretly recorded audio - during a sex tape, mind you - surfaced in which Hogan used racial slurs repeatedly and admitted, “I am racist to a point” in regards to his daughter’s black boyfriend. WWE cut ties immediately. Hogan later sued Gawker for publishing the tape and won $140 million, bankrupting the company in a landmark privacy case. Being racist had never been so profitable.

He apologized, blamed his upbringing, but in 2024, while campaigning for Donald Trump, made racist and sexist remarks about Kamala Harris, asking a crowd of Trump supporters if she was “Indian” and if she should “bodyslam” her. Subtlety was never his strong suit.

That was the last most of us saw of him. Hogan died in July of 2025 of a heart attack following neck surgery. Some speculate complications, or years of steroid use weakening his heart. I’m no doctor, but if I were, I might list the cause of death as bad karma.

When Hogan died, I read a lot of tributes about what he meant to people. How he inspired them. How he was their hero. And I kept wondering why I couldn’t quite access that feeling anymore. Why I couldn’t just like him the way I did when I was twelve.

The truth is, I think I stopped believing in Hulk Hogan long before the sex tape, long before the politics, long before the lawsuits. I didn’t have the language for it yet, but I felt it. The act grew stale. The posing felt empty. The wrestling business always had to bend back toward him. He would fail in Hollywood and just return to his wrestling throne like it was something that he was owed. Even as a kid, something about it didn’t sit right.

So when the rest finally came out—the racism, the ego, the entitlement—it didn’t feel like a betrayal. It felt like confirmation.

That’s the strange thing about idols. We think we abandon them, but sometimes we’re just catching up to what we already knew. Hogan didn’t ruin my childhood. He just stopped being able to hide behind it.

I still enjoy wrestling. I still watch it, forty years later. Hulk Hogan was the doorway, not the destination. Once I walked through it, I didn’t need him anymore.

I guess that’s what growing up actually looks like.

Thanks as always for reading. Please consider liking, sharing and subscribing. And if you really want to help, I have a few demandments of my own: I have a comic that I wrote, an Ebay storefront that sells some wrestling merchandise, and I do a podcast.

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Today’s post is about Matt Dursin at 50. Let’s see how fun we can make that movie.

I’ve actually felt old for a long time. When I worked at Boston University, I managed a staff of work-study students who were mostly 19 and 20, and even when I was only a few years older than them in my mid-twenties, I would feel old when they didn’t know a movie reference I made or song lyric that I knew. I always thought that I just knew more stuff when I was their age.

One time, Bob Dylan played a free show near BU, and one of my students asked if he was Jakob Dylan’s dad. That really sucked.

As time went on, and I grew much older than the 19 or 20 year olds that I managed, it still stung when I would discover how little they knew, but I wrote it off as youthful ignorance and just figured they would learn as they got older, like I did.

I still didn’t really feel old until I was in my 30’s and I was seeing a chiropractor for my bad back and a physical therapist for a frozen shoulder (both of them, in fact). I started wearing knee pads when I would go for a run because my knees hurt all the time, and I was taking tons of aspirin to deal with constant body aches. I started losing my hair, which didn’t help matters. I was also drinking a lot, but that probably wasn’t related.

I assumed that would pretty much be my life for the next 40 or so years. Then, I spent my 35th birthday in a hospital bed with a horrible lung infection and thought maybe I should change things up. Over the next few years, I started being a little more conscious of what I was eating, wearing actual running shoes for running and sleeping on a decent mattress. Everything except the drinking. I kept that up.

In my forties, all the jokes I would make about being old were no longer funny, because while 40 isn’t exactly old, it’s no longer all that young. A friend of mine put it perfectly on my 40th birthday: “Halfway home!”

That year, David Bowie died just shy of his 69th birthday, and everyone remarked how young that was. How could I complain about being 40? But I couldn’t help it. I just felt damn old. Tom Brady accumulated more yards and touchdowns in his 40’s than in his 20’s, and won 2 Superbowls, even becoming the oldest Superbowl MVP, and all everyone could talk about was how amazing all that was considering how old he is. And he’s younger than me.

I use Brady as an example because I’m from New England, but it’s everywhere. Actors, athletes, politicians, everyone is either too young or too old. People made fun of Joe Biden because he was too old, and so they voted for a creepy old man who was given a cognitive test just for funsies, and he did better than anyone had ever done ever. Let’s face it, It doesn’t matter what age he is, that guy is out of his tree.

But how can you not focus on it? Commercials for colon cancer screenings, erectile dysfunction, “even “homeowners turning into their parents.” How does one not look at that and say, “Yep, that me?”

But I am 50, and I don’t see a chiropractor anymore, and my shoulders are no longer frozen. I don’t need knee pads when I run, but I mostly bike these days, anyway. I drink less. Way less. I physically feel a lot better at 50 than I did at 40. That’s really all that matters.

I think that’s the biggest difference. I have come to terms with all of it. I wouldn’t care if I knew a 19 year-old who doesn’t know who Bob Dyan is. I wouldn’t care if they haven’t seen the same movies that I’ve seen. I probably haven’t seen any of their favorites, either. I’m 50. Who am I trying to impress with my film-going resume? I’m just trying to get through the day.

This not caring thing feels great. I highly recommend it. All I really care about now is that I’ve been waiting years to be able to post this:

Thanks for reading. As always, keep on keepin’ on. By the way, that’s a Bob Dylan lyric.

Nez had a very eclectic career outside the Monkees, which as I said, included filmmaking, and in 1988, he was the executive producer of a movie I loved as a kid, even though most of the gags went sailing over my head. The movie was called Tapeheads. Starring John Cusack and Tim Robbins playing owners of a very small, up-and-coming music video company who end up embroiled in a political scandal, all while trying to help their favorite childhood band, the Swanky Modes, get back into the spotlight. Remember, it was the late 80’s, so not only were music videos still a thing, they were THE thing. When I got cable in the mid-80’s, I pleaded with my parents to get the package that included MTV, because it was really the only reason I saw to get cable (My parents were very opposed to paying for HBO or Cinemax because of the late night skin flicks) Everyone was into music videos, but I had never seen a movie about who made them. The funny thing is, I don’t think I’ve even seen another movie about two young guys making music videos.

Tapeheads is very much a product of the time, so while it may seem very dated, it is still very relevant. It’s really a difficult balance between them. Sure, hair and clothing styles change and music videos aren’t really a thing anymore. But with Tapeheads, I feel like the filmmakers were leaning into it, showing the audience how ridiculous this world could be even while they were living in it. I may have missed a lot of the jokes, but even a 12 year-old me living in the late-80’s knew that it was all pretty silly; the record exec whose window washer uses spit to clean the windows, the rapper selling chicken and waffles or the Menudo concert that never really happened.

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The movie is also pretty relevant to today’s world, especially the political aspect. One of the jobs our heroes are hired to record is a fundraiser event for Presidential hopeful Norman Mart. It turns out that Norman has a little thing for dressing up as the fairy godmother while cavorting with women who are not his wife, and recording it for his later pleasure (I assume). During the event, said woman declares that she is going to use that tape to blackmail Norman, and while making her escape, bumps into Robbins, and while they are recovering, she slips her scandalous tape into his bag, confusing it with all the others.

Robbins and Cusack eventually become an overnight success due to a music video they shot becoming a hit, although only because the band died tragically. After meeting their childhood heroes, The Swanky Modes, in a bar, they decide to help revitalize their career by putting on a live concert broadcast. They have to bump Menudo, but hey, it’s show biz.

In the end, Norman Mart and his henchmen end up at the venue and he gets his hand on the sex tape. Robbins offers to play it to make sure it is the correct one, but instead broadcasts it over the air to all the networks that were ready to show the concert. So, Norman Mart’s sexcapades, including his bare behind, are shown all over the country, thus ending his political career. See how easy it could be to get rid of a sleazy politician? No one in particular, of course.

Ok, I’m side-barring here but here are Norman Mart and our President side-by-side. It’s a little uncanny how similar they look, alm ost 30 years before Trump was elected in 2016. Why do we keep electing old, white dudes in this country?

I look at this movie as the more things change, the more they stay the same; a low-budget indie movie from almost 40 years ago that I only discovered because it was produced by a Monkee, which is about two guys who want to make music videos, is more poignant than a lot of movies being made today. The way the two stars luck into fame by botching a video transfer, the aging band that relaunch their careers by playing a big live show, and obviously the politician involved in a sex scandal. At least none of the women he was cavorting with looked underage. In fact, one of them was played by Courtney Love.

That is actually another fun part of the movie. There are cameos by several famous musicians, including Ted Nugent, Weird Al Yankovic and even Nesmith himself. It’s almost a tribute to the music business itself, at least, as it once was.

MTV no longer even shows videos anymore, because reality TV gets better ratings and brings in more ad revenue. There are plenty of other platforms that could show music videos, but you have to go looking for them. It’s a lot harder to discover new artists without Kurt Loder appearing on MTV News to tell me that they are worth watching. But hey, I can watch hours and hours of Catfish if I want

Tapeheads represents a different time, a simpler time, and at least the way it is portrayed by the movie, a much funnier time.

Thanks for reading. We did a podcast on this movie too, so you can listen to that here and consider becoming a free or paid subscriber, or sending a little my way via Buy Me a Coffee.

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The story of The Rock goes back generations in the wrestling business. You may have learned some of this on Young Rock—if you were one of the few people who watched it—but it begins with his grandfather, Samoan High Chief Peter Maivia, who wrestled in Hawaii before touring the world. At one stop, his daughter Ata met and married fellow wrestler Rocky Johnson. From that union came a son: Dwayne.

Dwayne didn’t head straight into wrestling. Instead, he pursued football, even playing defensive tackle for the national champion Miami Hurricanes in 1991. After graduating in 1995, he went undrafted by the NFL but was picked up by the Calgary Stampeders of the Canadian Football League. Two months later, he was cut. He returned home famously with just seven dollars to his name—a moment he would later commemorate by naming his production company Seven Bucks Entertainment.

Dwayne asked his father for help. Despite misgivings about his son entering the wrestling business, Rocky agreed to train him. After a short period, Rocky reached out to his contacts in the World Wrestling Federation and got Dwayne in the door. By mid-1996, Dwayne was wrestling for the WWF, and by November he made his pay-per-view debut with a major push as a future star under the name Rocky Maivia.

Young male fans, however, didn’t embrace Rocky the way the WWF had hoped. He was soon turned heel, and that’s when things clicked. Freed from the forced smile, Dwayne flourished. He dropped the last name, began referring to himself in the third person, and became simply “The Rock.” He popularized phrases that entered mainstream culture—“SmackDown” even made it into the dictionary. He was so entertaining, his popularity exploded to the point that the company had no choice but to turn him back into a good guy.

By late 1999, Johnson was a multiple-time champion when the WWF’s top-grossing star of all time, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, stepped away for neck surgery. The Rock filled that void and enjoyed one of the most financially successful runs in company history. That popularity opened doors beyond wrestling. After small television roles, he made his film debut in The Mummy Returns (2001), followed by starring roles in The Scorpion King, The Rundown, and Walking Tall. Hollywood saw a ready-made action star—but wrestling wasn’t finished with him yet.

When Johnson took time away to film movies, he often returned as a conquering hero, and fans were ecstatic. But as the absences became more frequent, resentment set in. As I mentioned in my John Cena post, wrestling fans can be possessive. They didn’t like that The Rock wasn’t on TV every week. In August 2002, while defending the WWE Championship against rising star Brock Lesnar, Rock was heavily booed. He left again, but returned in early 2003 for WrestleMania season—this time as a heel. Not just any heel, but a smug, wealthy Hollywood jerk.

He manipulated the audience so effectively, however, that they actually cheered him again. At WrestleMania that year, he retired his longtime rival, Steve Austin, then a month later, he disappeared once more.

Because of the law of diminishing returns, Rock’s appearances grew less impactful. After a 2004 run as a babyface, he shifted to sporadic appearances. He even sued WWE for the rights to use the name “The Rock” in films, eventually dropping it altogether and becoming simply Dwayne Johnson. He starred in action films, comedies, and action movies that are basically comedies, like the Fast & Furious franchise. Over time, he shed the stigma of being a wrestler doing movies and became just a movie star.

In 2011, he returned to begin a two-year storyline with John Cena, WWE’s crossover star at the time. Cena, still a full-time wrestler, had criticized Rock in interviews for coming back for big moments while calling wrestling his home, only to disappear to Hollywood. The two traded barbs, and in 2012 Rock defeated Cena in the main event of WrestleMania in what WWE billed as a “Once in a Lifetime” match. Because this is pro wrestling, they ran it back a year later. This time Cena won, and Rock endorsed him as the face of the company—a symbolic passing of the torch, even though Cena had already held that role for years. It seemed like a clean ending, especially after Rock tore his abdominal and adductor tendons off his pelvis, requiring triple hernia surgery that delayed production of Hercules. Many assumed no studio would risk hiring him if he kept wrestling. In his early 40s, it looked like time to hang up the boots.

Yet he still appears in WWE today, even serving on the company’s Board of Directors—a role that inspired a new character: The Final Boss. He wrestled in the WrestleMania main event in 2024, now such a massive Hollywood star that he dictates his own schedule. As a third-generation wrestler, some say the pull is in his blood. Others echo Cena’s old criticism: that he always says he’s here to stay, only to leave again—or that he comes back for the money and to support a company he’s now financially invested in. For what it’s worth, Cena later apologized—out of character. Once Hollywood came calling, he realized how hard it is to juggle both worlds, even if returning to hear the crowd roar is still thrilling. Maybe it’s okay to never truly walk away.

I know for a fact that sometimes Johnson comes back just for the joy of it. In 2015, my wife bought us tickets to a WWE house show at TD Garden in Boston. A house show has no cameras—just wrestlers performing for the live crowd. The Rock was filming Central Intelligence in Boston, and my wife, who follows him on Instagram, was convinced he’d show up. I, thinking I knew everything about wrestling, gently told her there was virtually no chance. He was busy filming. He doesn’t wrestle anymore. And certainly not without cameras.

She held out hope.

Mid-show, comedy wrestler Bo Dallas was in the ring, preaching his “Bo-Lieve” rhetoric, when suddenly the arena heard: “If ya smelllllll…” Out came Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. After filming all day, he stopped by just to hear the crowd chant his name. He filmed the fans on his phone, hit Bo Dallas with the Rock Bottom and People’s Elbow, and left to a thunderous ovation.

My wife still reminds me she was right—that he showed up just for us.

I think she’s half right.

There were no cameras. No storyline. No real money at stake. He had already filmed all day and didn’t need to be there at all. But he walked through that curtain anyway, just to hear the crowd

Hollywood is easier than taking bumps every night. You’re unlikely to tear an abdominal muscle playing the Tooth Fairy. But there’s no substitute for standing in front of thousands of people who want you there right now.

That’s why he keeps coming back. Not for the money. Not for leverage. Not because he can’t let go.

Because once you’ve heard that roar, you never really stop chasing it.

He’s reached superstardom in both worlds, but there’s only one place where the reaction is immediate, unfiltered, and alive. And whenever he chooses to step back into it, the fans will scream.

They always do.

They always will.

Because he’s The Rock. And we smell what he’s cooking.

Thanks for reading. Drop me a comment if you have a favorite Rock moment oir quote. And be sure to like and subscribe if you haven’t already. We can’t all afford $500 shirts like The Rock can.

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Most movies weren’t like that. Studios assumed people wouldn’t buy tapes outright unless it was a beloved Disney title released for a limited time before going “back in the vault.” So video stores paid $70 to $100 per tape for the privilege of renting them. The logic was that VHS tapes could be copied — a scam I figured out pretty quickly — and studios still needed to afford things like paying Jim Carrey $20 million to talk out of his ass.

I bring this up because I worked one of those video stores, a small hometown shop called Video Showplace. We had a customer who came in every week and asked about upcoming releases. If he liked something, he requested that we order an extra copy for him — at the $70–$100 wholesale price. He paid in literal wads of cash from his dry-cleaning business. When I started there in the mid-’90s, I was told he was basically covering my salary. Over the years, he must have spent thousands on VHS tapes. I sometimes wonder which landfill they’re resting in now.

If you’re under thirty, the whole concept probably sounds absurd: people left their homes, walked into a store, browsed shelves, chose a movie, then returned it a day or two later — rewound, ideally.

At the risk of sounding like Dana Carvey’s grumpy old man on SNL: that’s the way it was, and we loved it.

Well — mostly. The returning part was less beloved. And late fees were just as miserable from behind the counter. I was nineteen, making $5.25 an hour, and it wasn’t fun telling someone who already knew they’d kept Titanic three extra days that they now owed ten dollars. The only upside of being that young was that I could always say, “You’ll have to talk to the manager.” That part, admittedly, was sometimes fun — especially when the manager wasn’t there.

Once, a guy returned a movie late and gave me a sob story about his kids kicking it under the car seat. Against my boss’s orders, I cut his late fee in half. We’re probably talking under twenty bucks. He kept pushing, clearly hoping I would say, “Eh, don’t worry about it. Life happens.” Or maybe even, “Fine! Just shut up!” He paid the half — and a few days later I got called into the owner’s office for a lecture on why we don’t cut late fees. Lesson learned: being the nice guy doesn’t always pay.

Video Showplace wasn’t part of a rental empire. It was a mom-and-pop operation, and the pop — Mike — insisted the only thing separating us from Blockbuster was customer service. He believed people came to us for recommendations and conversation.

One of my coworkers had a strategy to avoid that entirely. No matter the movie, he’d say, “I haven’t seen it, but I’ve heard it’s very good.” Some customers caught on and started asking why he even worked there since he apparently never watched movies.

Mike wasn’t wrong, though. Some customers just wanted the hot new release, but others genuinely liked hearing our opinions. As the resident film guy, I loved recommending favorites — even when they didn’t land. I once suggested Pulp Fiction to a customer. When he returned it, he told me he wasn’t a fan because he needed “a good story” and didn’t like “killin’ for the sake of killin’” Then he asked for our porn book.

Yes, that was the other thing separating us from Blockbuster: we rented porn. Nasty, low budget, 80’s (70’s?) porn. I assume, anyway. Honestly, I never rented one. But we have several customers who did, and if you wanted an “adult title,” you’d quietly ask for “the book.” We’d hand over a binder of titles, you’d pick a number, and we’d retrieve the corresponding tape from behind the counter — all stored in plain brown boxes. Occasionally a kid would ask what was in the boxes, and you’d have to invent an answer.

Some customers weren’t picky. “Just grab me any one,” they’d say. I respected that honesty. Each clerk had a method. My coworker who never watched movies just reached back and grabbed whatever box his hand touched. My friend John tried to match titles to personalities (“Hmmm, you look like you might enjoy Backside to the Future.”) I always chose my favorite title: Mean Little Bitches. I never watched it. I just loved the name.

It’s probably even harder now for someone under thirty to imagine renting a porno from a store — and then returning it. We had a regular who came in with a portable oxygen tank, which made those rentals feel risky. Another customer we called the Man-Child looked about twelve. When he asked for “the book,” I laughed — until he showed me his ID. Twenty-one. I apologized. Mostly because I was a little jealous. I wonder if he still looks as youthful all these years later, or if our bad porn aged him.

We had nicknames for our customers — usually the difficult ones. (“The Drooler” was not a favorite.) But there were plenty we genuinely liked. Sometimes we’d rig the weekly drawing so one of them would win and we could chat more. If someone was nice, we’d occasionally hold a new release for them, although that was against store policy. John and I made it a goal to “cross over” socially with certain regulars. We even got invited to a Halloween party once.

The job was a strange portal into people’s lives. One regular surprised me when he returned a movie and called it “one for MST,” referencing Mystery Science Theater 3000. I had no idea there was a fellow bad-movie connoisseur hiding in plain sight.

Another couple came in together constantly — one of those pairs who looked oddly alike. One day she came in alone to remove him from the account. Soon after, he returned with a new girl and had to open his own. I think they even asked for the book.

I have another memory of a child who would come in regularly with his parents named Colin. I only knew his name because his Dad would constantly be admonishing him, “Colin, stop bothering the man” when he would ask me questions. One time Colin brought an R-rated movie up to the counter and asked me if it was rated that “because of the lady parts. Because I’ve seen the lady parts.” Honestly, that day, Colin wasn’t bothering me.

I sometimes miss that job. At the time, I complained constantly about customers. Now I see it differently. I loved talking movies, even when my tastes didn’t line up with theirs (one of my favorite movies at the time was Natural Born Killers.) Back then, I took it personally if someone disliked something I loved — or loved something I didn’t. Working that counter cured me of that. People like what they like. You can’t charge them a late fee for it.

There aren’t many places left where you can stand around and argue about movies with strangers for $5.25 an hour. The stores are gone. The tapes are gone. Most of them probably are sitting in the same landfill as that guy’s thousand-dollar VHS collection.

But for a few years, they were ours. And we loved them.

Thanks for reading. If you were forewarded this, maybe because you’re Colin, please subscribe to get all my posts straight to your Inbox. And if you’re a subscriber already, consider becoming a paid subscriber, for less than what I got paid to work at the Showplace. Also, you can check out my podcast, and lend your support by purchasing some nostalgic T-shirts and such from my store here. And remember, “Be kind. Rewind.”

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And those characters were never more fun than in 1986’s Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home—a.k.a. “the one with the whales.”

Whether you were a Trek fan or not, you probably knew this movie. It grossed $133 million, far more than the previous three entries, and remained the highest-grossing Trek film until the J. J. Abrams reboot era. Adjusted for inflation, it would land around $265 million today. For a mid-’80s genre film, that’s serious business."

Much of its success came from how grounded it felt. You didn’t need to know Klingon politics or transporter mechanics. Most of the story unfolds in 1986 San Francisco, as the crew travels back in time to retrieve humpback whales—extinct in their century—to answer an alien probe threatening Earth. It’s a classic fish-out-of-water comedy with light environmental messaging. Yes, it nods to whale hunting and “Save the Whales” culture, but it never gets heavy-handed. Star Trek often used futuristic scenarios to portray contemporary social issues. And to portray the green aliens as the sexiest.

As a ten-year-old, I wasn’t thinking about themes. I just loved watching Kirk and company stumble through the 20th century. Some jokes went over my head—like Kirk telling Gillian he thought Spock “did a little too much LDS.” I knew it was wrong from context, but only later did I appreciate the hippie undertones of Spock’s tunic and headband.

The film also sidesteps the usual time-travel clichés. When McCoy and Scotty hand over the formula for transparent aluminum, McCoy worries they’re altering the future. Scotty shrugs: “Why? How do we know he didn’t invent the thing?” It’s a wink at the audience—and proof the movie never takes its paradoxes too seriously.

Even as a kid, I appreciated the lighter tone and the chemistry. Over forty years, that appreciation has only grown. I love a good space battle as much as anyone—and no one’s kicking Ricardo Montalbán’s Khan out of bed—but director Leonard Nimoy and producer Harve Bennett made a conscious choice: high stakes, no photon torpedoes, no villains. They were right. The box office proved it.

But money isn’t why the film endures. It’s remembered because it’s accessible. I could have taken my mom in 1986 and she would’ve enjoyed it without knowing a thing about Starfleet. We even owned the VHS—a rarity in my house—because it was “priced to sell.” I pretty much wore the tape out. That kind of repeat viewing sinks a movie into your bones.

Years later, when I saw it playing at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, I jumped at the chance, and I asked my friend & fellow podcaster Claynferno if he wanted to go see it with me (In fact, if you’re looking for knowledge of Star Trek, and other nerdy stuff, hit up his Substack.). An arthouse screening of Star Trek is rare, but The Voyage Home feels like it belongs anywhere. The theater was packed. I have a fond memory of buying fruit roll-ups at the concession stand, which was an odd but enjoyable treat from my childhood, and Clay remarking that I was probably eating the same thing the first time I saw the movie in 1986. To paraphrase Terence Mann in Field of Dreams, the memories were so thick, we had to brush them away from oour faces.

Forty years later, I could open Paramount+ and enjoy it just as much as I did on VHS. Some people remember it for the cultural ripple effects—Greenpeace reportedly saw a boost in donations after its release. Others love the humor of future explorers navigating our “primitive” world.

I love it because it captures these characters, even Spock, at their most human—curious, compassionate, funny, and capable. That’s something that resonated when I was ten, resonates now, and probably always will.

Thanks for reading. If you want a little more on The Voyage Home, Clay and I and our fellow space cadet John Hunt covered it back during our pandemic Watch-Along phase of the podcast here. if you want to support my work, you can also check out my revamped eBay storefront here. They may not use money in the 23rd century, but we can all use some in this time period.

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He broke into the business in late-’60s Canada after being expelled from school for carrying a switchblade, which already tells you a lot. He started as a jobber—wrestling shorthand for “the guy who loses”—and eventually landed in the American Wrestling Alliance in Minnesota. There, a happy accident cemented his persona: his friends played him to the ring on bagpipes, the announcer only knew his first name, and “Roddy the Piper” was born.

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Piper wasn’t a big man by wrestling standards, so he compensated with his mouth. He could dismantle opponents on the microphone so effectively that fans believed he belonged across the ring from much larger wrestlers. As a heel, people paid good money just to see him get hit for the things he said and did—sometimes spectacularly so, as with the infamous Jimmy Snuka coconut incident.

That gift made him invaluable to Vince McMahon, who cast Piper as the perfect antagonist to Hulk Hogan during the WWF’s Rock ’n Wrestling expansion with MTV. Piper main-evented the historic first WrestleMania in 1985 alongside Paul Orndorff against Hogan and Mr. T, then boxed Mr. T at WrestleMania 2—a worked match Piper later admitted he wished had been real.

By 1987, Piper was at the peak of his popularity. After returning from a hiatus to thunderous cheers, he seemingly retired following a Hair vs. Hair match against Adrian Adonis at WrestleMania III. (I use “retired” loosely; wrestlers mean it about half the time.) What matters is that night changed his life anyway.

Backstage, Piper met John Carpenter.

Carpenter cast him as the lead in They Live, a slow-burn sci-fi horror film about alien control, subliminal messaging, and a society lulled into compliance. Piper plays Nada, a drifter who discovers special sunglasses that reveal the truth: billboards bark commands, money declares “THIS IS YOUR GOD,” and some people are very much not people.

What’s striking now is how restrained Piper is. This is not Roddy Piper unleashed. He’s quiet, watchful, almost weary—until flashes of his wrestling persona break through, like when he insults an alien’s face “falling into the cheese dip back in 1957,” or delivers a short-arm clothesline that detonated my 13-year-old brain in the theater.

The famous bubble gum line—“I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass, and I’m all out of bubble gum”—was reportedly something Piper had written for wrestling promos. Carpenter saw it and knew exactly where it belonged.

And then there’s the fight.

The legendary alleyway brawl between Piper and Keith David—ostensibly about putting on a pair of sunglasses—was expanded because Piper used his wrestling instincts to help David sell it. It’s absurd, brutal, funny, and perfect. Wrestling logic applied to cinema, without winking at the camera.

As a kid, I liked They Live but didn’t quite get why Piper barely talked. Wrestlers in movies usually just play themselves—Jesse Ventura, Hulk Hogan, The Miz, take your pick. As an adult, it’s obvious Carpenter wanted something different. Piper delivers it. He proves he can act without relying on volume.

Despite dozens of later roles, They Live remains the high point of Piper’s acting career. Wrestling always pulled him back—sometimes for money, sometimes for nostalgia. In later years, he spoke openly about the physical toll of the business and the likelihood that he wouldn’t live long enough to enjoy his pension. He died in 2015 at 61.

Even now, Roddy Piper is mostly remembered for being loud—for bagpipes, insults, and bubble gum. That version of him is real, but it’s also incomplete. They Live works precisely because Piper doesn’t play the caricature; he plays a man waking up, and that restraint is what gives the film its weight. It’s proof that he didn’t need wrestling to be interesting—wrestling just happened to find him first. Plenty of wrestlers have crossed into movies, and plenty have played themselves. Piper disappeared into one, showed exactly how much more he was capable of, and then the door quietly closed. That, more than being rowdy, is the legacy that actually matters.

Thanks for reading, as always. Please do all the things to support starving Substackers. And if you want to hear a little more about They Live, my podcast mates and I covered it here:

Now get some bubble gum!

Then I did the thing creative people are always warned not to do (because it’s “a distraction,” apparently): I went down the Kristi Noem rabbit hole.

Who is this person who stood in front of a press corps and tried to justify the killing of a man in cold blood, in front of multiple witnesses who were recording the whole thing on their phones? She came off like someone ordered to toe the company line while quietly praying no one asked a question she couldn’t answer. Not quite a deer in headlights, not as bad as Gregory Bovino—but clearly rattled, and clearly sticking to the script: Pretti was armed and planning to kill people.

Then, after her initial statement about the killing of an American citizen by border patrol agents, she pivoted and asked the room, “Any questions about the storm?”

Just. Wow.

No thanks, Kristi. I’ll check my weather app for that. Your people just killed a man, and I want to know why.

With no investigation and mounting evidence to the contrary, Noem was shoved in front of cameras to defuse a disaster—and she looked like a dope doing it.

So who is she? And how did she end up this high in our government?

According to her Wikipedia page, Kristi Noem was born November 30, 1971, in Watertown, South Dakota, and raised on the family ranch in nearby Hazel. She rose quickly, becoming South Dakota Snow Queen her senior year of high school.

She attended Northern State University the following year—apparently 80% white and 72% affluent, stats that were probably similar in 1990. She didn’t graduate. In March 1994, her father died in a farm accident, and she returned home. That obviously sucks—but her daughter Kassidy was born just weeks later, meaning she was at least eight months pregnant when she left school anyway. Plenty of people don’t graduate on time and finish later, but here’s where it gets odd.

Her Wikipedia page notes that she “added a hunting lodge and restaurant to the family property,” which doesn’t exactly scream financial struggle. It also mentions her four siblings moved back to help expand the family business—honestly, sounds like the pitch for an FX series. Later, Noem claimed her father’s death inspired her political career, particularly her push to repeal the estate tax, which she said caused major financial hardship for her family. Others dispute that. Given the company she keeps now, I’m inclined to believe she exaggerated.

She took classes at Mount Marty College, South Dakota State, and online through the University of South Dakota, finally earning a bachelor’s degree from South Dakota State in 2012—six years after she had already been elected to the South Dakota House of Representatives.

If you live in South Dakota, I apologize for this, but: what the fuck?

Noem won her state House seat in 2006 with 39% of the vote. She served until 2011, sponsoring just 11 bills, including two expanding gun rights. Fast forward, and there she was telling the public that Alex Pretti—a registered gun owner—deserved to die because he was armed. Ironic, no?

In 2011, still working toward that degree, she moved up and was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. She finally graduated in 2012 after receiving college credit for her time in office, which she counted as an internship—prompting the Washington Post to dub her the nation’s “most powerful intern.”

She served in Congress until 2019 and behaved exactly as you’d expect: opposing abortion, climate change policy, Obamacare, stem cell research, and—let’s be honest—probably non-white people. She supported Trump’s 2017 Muslim travel ban, which suspended refugee admissions and barred entry from seven Muslim-majority countries.

South Dakota doubled down and elected her governor in 2018, then again in 2022. She actually received more votes than any gubernatorial candidate in state history. Personally, I’ll stick to seeing Mount Rushmore in pictures—I don’t plan on visiting that shithole state.

As governor, she went hard on abortion, even stating she wouldn’t make exceptions for a ten-year-old rape victim who traveled out of state for an abortion. Rape, incest, IVF—none of it passes muster for Kristi. She’s a real peach.

And this isn’t just ideological disagreement—her tenure has been full of controversy. In 2024, several South Dakota Indigenous tribes banned her from their lands, meaning she’s barred from roughly 20% of her own state. And all they wanted was an apology after she falsely claimed Mexican cartels were using tribal lands to traffic drugs. No evidence, of course—but why let facts ruin a good scare tactic?

There’s more: her Trump-style COVID response (South Dakota saw one of the nation’s worst outbreaks in 2020), deploying the National Guard to Texas for border theater, the infamous “Meth. We’re on it.” campaign, and this gem from Wikipedia: at a 2023 NRA forum, Noem bragged that her two-year-old granddaughter owned a shotgun, a rifle, and a “little pony named Sparkles.”

So here’s the point. This is a powerful, elected official—a Trump loyalist clearly punching above her weight class. I mentioned earlier that she wasn’t “traditionally educated,” and while degrees aren’t everything, they’re not nothing either. There are currently 23 members of Congress with only a high school diploma or GED, which honestly bums me out. At least Kristi eventually got her piece of paper.

But education aside, there’s something to be said for life experience. I can’t help but wonder how much she really absorbed growing up on that ranch as a mother in her early 20’s. Not that more schooling or experience would magically turn her into a decent human being—but watching that press conference, especially her breezy pivot to the weather, I couldn’t shake the feeling: this woman has no idea what she’s talking about.

It reminded me of a storyline from the final season of Cheers, where Woody—the lovable hayseed from Indiana—runs for office. Frasier bets Sam that he could put a chimpanzee on the ballot and get 10% of the vote…or better yet, put Woody on and win. The stunt works too well, and Woody ends up elected to Boston City Council.

I can’t help thinking something similar happened with Kristi Noem. Not an actual bet, but a calculation: nice face, “values,” won’t rock the boat. South Dakota voters bought it—for twenty years.

Now, amid scandal and public outrage, Democrats and some Republicans are calling for her removal. And honestly? I hope she’s impeached. It would be a useful lesson: charm and religious buzzwords only take you so far. Eventually, you need an original thought.

And it would be especially funny if Trump hung her out to dry.

Particularly since I’d bet good money they slept together at least once. And if they didn’t, it’s only because she wouldn’t—and that’s exactly why he’d toss her aside now.

Thanks for reading. Sending good vibes to anyone being oppressed by ICE. We’re with you.

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I was dating a woman at the time, Alyssa (not her real name.) She was not what I would call a creative person, but she sure thought her shit didn’t stink, with her 18 earrings (9 in each ear. When she took them out to clean them her ears looked like small colanders) and her tongue piercing, which at the time was a choice. We had been through our rough times but were still hanging on, and when you’re 22, you think the person you’re with is the person you’re going to be with forever.

I was working in a video store at the time while still searching for a job, and sending out screenplays and also entering screenwriting contests because I think someone had told me that was a good way to get noticed in Hollywood. I was coming up empty in all of these endeavors. Because of my dia-bee-tus, I had to find a job that offered health insurance, so “video store clerk” wasn’t going to cut it, but I also figured, “If I sell a screenplay, I’ll be set!” I know now how stupid that seems now but I was 22 and thought I was Tarantino.

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After a pretty crappy interview for a job at some corporate office, I was complaining to Alyssa that there was no way I wanted that job even if they were to hire me (probably for data entry or something terrible.) I still thought I had a shot at selling screenplays, so that was where I wanted to put most of my focus, but she didn’t see it that way. I remember her exact words were: “Why don’t you get a real job?” In my mind, she might as well have added, “Ya bum!” at the end of it.

I should point out that this person had finished exactly a half-semester of college, was working as a cashier at Homegoods, and could barely read. I’m not joking. She once told me that when she is reading a book and she doesn’t understand a word, she just skips it and keeps going. The book she was reading at the time was Practical Magic. If she skipped over words she didn’t know, I estimated she probably read about 60% of it.

I know this all sounds very mean, but she wasn’t really a good person. She had cheated on me a few times and wasn’t at all remorseful about it. I don’t know why I put up with it all, but I guess I was just glad someone would date me.

That September, I took a part-time job at Harvard University, while still working at the video store. Even though it was part-time, I still thought it was cool to be working at a prestigious university. I was also enjoying the hustle and bustle of Harvard Square, which was quite a step up from the suburb where Alyssa lived (and rarely left.) Still, when I told Alyssa that I had taken the job, her response was, “You’re still going to keep looking, right?”

She was really happy for me.

About a month later I received an email from a co-worker at the video store, expressing her attraction for me. I was flummoxed, as nothing like this had ever happened to me. I was seriously considering her “offer,” but figured I’d give Alyssa one more try, for old time’s sake. I remember being in her room and while not explicitly telling her about the email, I posed a kind of “Where are we going?” line of questioning. She gave me a very flippant “We’re fine.” response and went to bed, and I decided that would be that. The next day I broke it off. I tried to remain friends, but a few weeks later she stopped by my house with a new, shorter haircut, and gave me a Ziploc bag with a lock of her hair. Needless to say, the “friends” thing didn’t last much longer.

I’m not saying that she somehow prevented me from becoming a screenwriter with a couple comments, but it didn’t help my self-esteem at all, which was already pretty low. And it certainly pushed us closer to breaking up, so in all honesty, I can’t say it was a bad thing. Even if I had told her that I wished she would have supported my creative side a little more it wouldn’t have mattered. She was just hoping that I would graduate and get a “real job” and make decent money and we would get married and I would take care of her. I mean, she probably shouldn’t have dated a Film major if that was her goal, but I definitely should have broken it off after she cheated on me, so I guess we both made mistakes. I did feel a little bad for ostensibly trading her in for the younger model, but what can I say? The new girl put out.

I actually dated the girl who sent the email, Thea (again, not her real name, but she’d probably figure it out if she reads this) for four years. She did have a creative side, and was actually very smart. She had done some theater work, which was something I had never thought about doing, but at one point in our relationship, I saw that a local troupe was looking for actors for a production of Glengarry, Glen Ross, so I decided to audition. I had no stage experience, but I loved the play, and I figured even if I got a minor part, like “Cop,” I would have considered that a win.

There were only a handful of guys there (which is really all you’d need to put on the play), and the director was a young woman who was probably just figuring her own shit out. Since I was the least experienced actor there, I was asked to read a few lines, mostly the role of Lingk, played by Jonathan Pryce if you have ever seen the movie. But I didn’t play him like Jonathan Pryce. For some reason, I played him like Bob Newhart. If you are not familiar with it, I was given the scene where Ricky Roma, the slick salesman, asks him if he has ever taken a dump that made him feel like he had just slept for 3 days. Now picture Bob Newhart responding to that question:

“Have... Have I ever taken… a dump that…?”

I thought it was gold.

After that, I was given a couple more scenes, with one of the bigger characters, Arronow, the salesman, played by Alan Arkin in the movie, who kind of becomes the cuck after the office is robbed. I decided to whip out my Bob Newhart for him, too, just to give the director a different take. I started to get a vibe that maybe she liked it and I would get at least one of those parts. Like I said, not a lot of guys showed up for the audition, so that also gave me hope that I had a shot. This was only Night One of the auditions, however, so the director asked us all to come back for Night Two, when she would make her casting decisions.

I went home and told Thea about it and told her that I thought I had a good chance at getting a part, unless 50 great actors showed up the second night who couldn’t make it on the first. But I was excited to at least be considered.

She responded, “You know, that’s a pretty big commitment. Rehearsals every night for weeks.”

Well, yeah.

“I’ve done a bunch of plays. We wouldn’t be spending any time together while you were rehearsing,” she said, sadly.

Basically, we talked a little bit more, and eventually I was coerced into not even showing up on the second night of auditions. I think part of her felt like the stage was her thing, and I shouldn’t be intruding. But there was another reason that she didn’t want me to do the play. Thea was also undiagnosed (because she never went to a doctor to diagnose her) bi-polar, and I could be a calming influence. I could also be the cause of some of her outbursts, but hopefully more calming than not. Most of the time, if I wasn’t there, who knows what shit she would get up to? So, even though spending some time apart doing a play may have been a good thing (I mean, I wasn’t moving to another country. It was Community Theater two towns over.), she didn’t see it that way and I was convinced to drop it.

The funny thing is, a couple years later, a production of her favorite play, The Diary of Anne Frank, was holding auditions, and I encouraged her to go. She thought she was too old for the role, and maybe for the same reasons about spending time apart, was not going to audition, but I said this was going to be her only chance and she had to do it. The night before, she gave me her final “No,” and I didn’t push. The next morning, she changed her mind asked me to drive her to the audition, and she got the part.

Now, I’m not saying that not doing a small-town production of Glengarry Glen Ross was the cause of me not making it as a Hollywood screenwriter. It probably wouldn’t have mattered at all if I had done it. But think about this, the director of Diary of Anne Frank was so impressed by Thea’s acting that she cast her in an independent film that she was making. Thea and I spent a few weeks in Indiana that summer filming the thing (which is a whole other post). Obviously, the film didn’t open the door to a screenwriting career, either, but you see how these things happen? Maybe playing James Lingk and “Cop” would have given me the acting bug. Maybe I would have done another play and been cast in a movie. Could that have been the thing that moved me to the next level? Who knows?

The point of this whole history of my life is this; one of the tasks in the book The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron is to pick three enemies of your inner creative genius and write a “horror story” about one of them (Ok, I picked two.) While doing this, I realized that these people, despite their discouraging of my creative endeavors, were not to blame for me not becoming the next Quentin Tarantino. They didn’t physically tie me down and tell me not to write and send out screenplays. Neither of them broke my camera and told me I couldn’t make movies. In fact, I probably wrote way more back then than I do now. The only person to blame is me. I’m not saying I would have sold screenplays if I had a little encouragement from my girlfriends. Millions of people have tried and failed at that. But I could have, and should have, done more creative things back then. Eventually, I did write some comics, but I should have been doing stuff like that all along, except I allowed myself to be led astray, and I have no one to blame but myself for that.

But the comic is probably worth a read (Issue #0 is free!). I also am on a podcast, and that counts as a creative endeavor. Please support those, and if you are so inclined, you could buy me a coffee, or check out the stuff in my Etsy store.

Thanks for reading. And remember, you can’t always blame the enemies of your creativity, but you can break up with them.

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This time I’m going to highlight a different journey. However, one that overlaps with Cena’s, as they were in-ring rivals for a few years as top guys in WWE during the mid-2000’s. This post will cover David Michael Bautista Jr., or just Batista, as he was mostly known in wrestling. Or Drax if you prefer.

By all accounts, Dave had a rough upbringing, growing up in a crime-ridden area of DC in the early 70’s. Reportedly, by the time he was nine, there had been 2 dead bodies in his front yard, and another one not too far away (he didn’t kill them as far as I know, but still… scary.) At that point, his mother (his parents had split by then) moved Dave and his sister out to San Francisco, hoping for a fresh start. At 13, he was getting into trouble, and according to his wikipedia page, he was stealing cars. At 13. That is kind of insane to me, but Batista was obviously bigger than I was at that age. His mother sent him back to DC to live with his father hoping a positive male influence would straighten him out, but by the time he was a senior in high school, his Dad kicked him out of the house and he was living on his own. Fortunately, he had discovered the weight room by that time, so he was getting big and feeling himself. He later credited working out with helping him stay out of trouble. His first job when he was 17 was at Olympus Gym in Falls Church, VA. He also started taking jobs as a nightclub bouncer at that age, which is pretty funny because he couldn’t even legally get in, but he could kick people out.

The money was good, and he had 2 young kids at home to feed, so the next thing Dave knew was that ten years had gone by and he was still working at nightclubs. Things started to take a turn when he was arrested after a fight broke out outside the club he was working at and sentenced to one-year probation. One Christmas, he had to borrow some money to buy presents for his kids, and that was apparently the motivation to do something a little more with his life. So, at 31, he decided to try his hand at pro wrestling. For people who don’t know the answer to the question, “How do I become a pro wrestler?” well, it’s like a lot of other things: you go to school.

At the time, World Championship Wrestling (WCW) had a wrestling school in Georgia called the Power Plant, so Dave enrolled in that. The classes were run by a former preliminary wrestler named Sgt. Buddy Lee Parker (If you ever turned on WCW Saturday Night on TBS in the early 90’s, you probably saw Parker being beat up by a bigger star.), who is listed at 5’8” but that’s probably an exaggeration. Parker ran Batista and his other trainees through the ringer, and told Dave that he would never make it in the wrestling business because he had no coordination. Batista hated him so much that eventually he switched to a different wrestling school, one that was affiliated with the WWE and run by Afa of the legendary Wild Samoans. Side note: WCW had suffered some hard financial times by then and in 2001 was purchased by WWE, so it was definitely the right move. Parker was pretty much never heard from again.

After around six months at the school, Afa thought he was ready to move up and called the WWE talent department, and Batista was sent to Ohio Valley Wrestling and to train with the big boys (and that is no exaggeration. As I pointed out in my Cena post, OVW was flush with future stars.) He was rechristened Leviathan, and his gimmick was to basically be big and scary. To get into character, he bought fangs and a big chain to wear around his neck while he wrestled, which his fellow trainees hated because they would accidentally punch it while they were in the ring with him. Remember, these guys are not supposed to hurt each other.

In May 2002, Batista made his debut on WWE television on an episode of Smackdown as Deacon Batista. He was basically the heavy for another wrestler named Reverend Devon, an evil man of the cloth who preached that everyone needed to repent (I think. I’m going by memory and it was a short-lived gimmick.). Batista’s job was to hold the collection box and basically watch and learn from Devon, who was a veteran. The pairing didn’t last too long, and Batista turned on Devon and beat him in a match, and struck out on his own. By the Spring of 2003, he was put in the top heel group Evolution, teaming with fellow OVW alum Randy Orton, Triple H (current COO of WWE) and the man who would teach him everything about looking and acting like a star, the legendary Ric Flair.

In the group, the young, handsome Orton was supposed to be the breakout star, but behind the scenes, as well as in front of the cameras, support started to grow for Batista. He had a cool, quiet demeanor until he stepped through the ropes, when he would just smash his opponents. The company still tried to push Orton as their top guy throughout most of 2004, but by early 2005, it was clear Batista had taken that spot, and in the main event of Wrestlemania 21, the kid from the ghettos of DC was crowned champion, overthrowing Triple H for the top spot.

Over the next five years, Batista was a major star and multi-time champion in the company, but by 2010, in his early 40’s and racking up injuries (He had a legitimate compressed spinal fracture), he took time away from wrestling to concentrate on acting. He got a few small parts in big projects and big parts in small projects before James Gunn pushed heavily for him to play Drax in the Guardians of the Galaxy. Marvel originally had other people in mind, but went with Gunn’s choice, and ultimately decided it was the right one after seeing the finished product. The simple-minded and metaphorically-challenged Drax was the perfect role for big Dave, who had the chops to handle the tragic backstory of the character and the comedic timing to deliver the humorous lines. Drax is also a big-ass, scary alien.

At the time, however, the jury was still out on whether or not Guardians would be a success, or the MCU’s first big flop. With the film scheduled to debut later in the year, Batista returned to the WWE in early 2014, and was pushed as a returning hero. He originally thought WWE would promote the movie while he was appearing on their TV, but since nobody had ever heard of most of the characters, they never even mentioned it. Plus, WWE fans had seen this before, and were not cotton to a guy who had been gone for a couple years immediately being pushed to the top. The fans were instead rallying behind a smaller, hard-working babyface named Danial Bryan, and Batista was booed relentlessly in all of his appearances, even though he was supposed to be the good guy. Dave himself even pushed that he should have returned as a heel, and by March, he was turned, with he and old pal Randy Orton losing to Bryan in the main event of Wrestlemania 30.

Over the next two months, Batista would team with orton and Triple H in the reunited Evolution and drop main events to the up and coming group known as The Shield. By June, Batista, realizing that WWE was not going to hype up Guardians and he would just be losing to everyone, quit the company, citing “creative differences.” By the end of summer, Guardians had become the highest-grossing August release ever, and Dave Bautista, the actor, could pretty much write his own ticket after that. He would go on to appear in several more Marvel films, the James Bond film Spectre, the Dune remakes, Blade Runner: 2049 and many others. He did make a short return to the wrestling ring in 2019 to end his career properly, losing to Triple H in a Career-Ending Match at Wrestlemania 35. Despite age catching up to him (he was 50 by that point), Dave put forth his best effort, but he clearly had outgrown professional wrestling. Still, he wanted to put the final stamp on his extraordinary career and go out on his back, losing to his mentor.

But it certainly was an extraordinary career. Starting in wrestling at that age, he knew he had a small window to succeed, and he worked hard to do just that. When he started feeling the pain of years of taking bumps, he embarked on a new journey, and he was able to bring his experiences in life and in the wrestling business to his roles and became a pretty recognizable star in Hollywood. Although a little less recognizable these days, as he has lost a lot of weight but is leaner than he was as a wrestler. At 56, he says he feels better than ever.

Out of all the wrestlers who turned to acting, Dave Bautista’s is probably my favorite story. He could have stayed a wrestler and made good money coming back a couple times a year for a big payday, but he decided to apply what he learned as a wrestler to his acting roles. And he doesn’t always play the bodyguard or the scary bad guy. Being Drax showed the world what a wrestler is capable of on the big screen. As of this writing, his IMDB lists 12 upcoming projects. Other than The Rock, he might have the most successful post-wrestling career of them all, and I’d put their careers up ainst each other any day. Maybe in a steel cage!

Thanks again for reading. Please like, share, subscribe, and if you got some money from the holidays, consider becoming a paid subscriber, or just buying me a coffee. I also have stuff for sale on Etsy But hey, times are tough for a lot of folks, so you don’t have to give me money. But if you have some free time, i also do a podcast and we talk about movies on there. We even covered Spectre.

Thanks again. Keep on keeping on.

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