It’s what I want to see in a movie, not a bunch of generic catalog models. So plenty of the marquee names at the time were balding, flabby, middle-aged, puffy, wrinkly - in other words, human. This was before the cut-throat culture of the ’80s emerged, where we now throw human beings away like Kleenex. In the ’70s, many of the biggest stars were people who had come up decades earlier. And then there’s the casting, which I’m sure younger people find ridiculous, but I’ll defend to my dying day. Angry, rebellious, critical…a renegade,” as though he were reading a review about his one man show and putting too much stock in it. Scott, the hot steam! It’s blocking our escape!” which sounds almost like it came out of an old comic book or a radio show…and then there’s an earlier moment in the script when Scott describes himself to a colleague as “The best kind. A couple of my favorite clunkers are “Dr. Now, I’ll grant that some of the melodramatic dialogue has not aged well. Incompleteness requires you to use your imagination, the same thing that makes the original King Kong still effective. But to me that has become part of the charm. It almost looked like theatre to me, if you know what I mean. By this stage, Hollywood cinema had undergone so many technological special effects breakthroughs, and so many big budget blockbusters had come and gone, that this former benchmark in the history of the industry now looked kind of cheap and cardboard. It was almost like Adam seeing his own nakedness for the first time. This light first dawned for me around 20 years ago when, after not having seen the film in many years, I caught it on the short-lived Fox Movie Channel. Obviously, I “get” how younger people see it. I will always be able to see this movie, at least in part, with the eyes of a seven year old, and as someone who recalls a time when a movie like this was the last word in Hollywood magic. And while camp tributes usually come from a place of affection, it would be kind of nightmarish for me if I was somehow responsible for provoking gales of cruel laughter from an audience that assumed I was ridiculing the film as “bad”. I often cite it as my second favorite movie after The Wizard of Oz. The only new thing I could bring to it would be my own characterizations, and how much time do I want to devote to being a Poseidon Adventure Frank Gorshin? Issue B) is that, well, I kind of revere the movie. Starting with the Mad Magazine parody “The Poop-side Down Adventure.” There have been numerous camp stage productions of The Poseidon Adventure in recent years. For camp is the natural way to approach it, and I have two major issues with the camp approach. Hence the first option, the live show, probably came closest to fruition and I had several conversations with one of my favorite performers about a collaboration, and I even had a venue in mind, but ultimately I was irresolute about doing it on the grounds of tone. The last few approaches would involve lots of media and sharing of clips, which isn’t really my thing, and would involve rights issues. The Poseidon Adventure is so important to me that I contemplated numerous different ways of celebrating it this year, including: a live show wherein myself and an actress would enact the screenplay performing all the parts a live screening of the film which I would introduce with remarks (perhaps to take place on New Years Eve) a podcast talk or slideshow, or maybe a Youtube video. So this will be the omnibus trunk post that lays out the story, with links to more in depth posts about the various players in it. At this point, I have written about nearly everyone who speaks a line in the movie as well as many of the behind the scenes players. I call this the “proper post”, because my previous one was sort of “back door”, I worked it into a review of the egregious 2006 remake Poseidon, then repurposed it for Travalanche back at a time when the focus of this blog hadn’t expanded to all of show business, though I had already written about several of the principals of the film (a couple of them had been in burlesque and vaudeville, for example). 50 years ago today marked the release date of the first movie I ever saw in a cinema, The Poseidon Adventure.
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