Hidden Flick: Intermission Part III

It was an old amphitheatre that was going to be torn down and replaced with gawdknowswhat—the owner just couldn’t say. “I had a few offers to do something with the place, but I couldn’t part with her. She’s special,” said…well, the owner just prefers to remain anonymous, almost like the Stranger, aka the Cowboy Narrator, played by Sam Elliott, in the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski. “Sarsaparilla for all my friends,” as Elliott channels Barfly’s Mickey Rourke in another cinematic dimension.

Meanwhile, I turn down Riverside’s ADHD on my iPod to hear the rest of his tale.

He seemed to get misty-eyed when he spoke of how long he had owned the tiny outdoor venue—it had been used for concerts by no name acts for years, with seats up front, and then a lawn, which stretched out far and wide in the back, all leading up to a lot where patrons could park, walk through the entrance booth, and go find a seat, a seat on this night, not to catch a concert, or hear any music whatsoever from any band, but to see a series of films in what is now known as “my little Hidden Theatre at the end of the road,” according to the owner, a gracious chap on this refreshingly mild early-fall eve.

We enter, once again, the Hidden Theatre to see a special edition of Hidden Flick: Intermission – Part III. Lo and behold, it’s one for the ages, and certainly a film to herald the crack of fall’s dawn or, in this case, the opening of hockey season. Yes, this week during our first third season intermission, we take a look at the puck o’ power, Slap Shot.

Directed by George Roy Hill, the film starred Paul Newman in an unlikely stint as a brutal, foul-mouthed anti-hero (ahh…another common theme in these Hidden Flicks) who somehow leads a motley crew of ice-skating marauders to infamy and victory. Oh, and Ol’ Cinematic Blue Eyes was joined by probably the most homicidal yet hysterical bunch of oversized kids hiding ‘neath the jerseys of punky self-righteous—the glorious Hanson Brothers who stand head and shoulders and taped glasses above all other pretenders to the Goon Throne. If the Dude is King, then the Hansons are his Enforcers.

What is noticeable right away is that Paul Newman is not playing any type of rebel character like he’s ever canvassed before. Indeed, even though his career was full of down-on-their-luck, sorry ass figures—from the convict in Hud, to the train-and-bank robbing cowboy criminal in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and on to his two best roles, late in his career, the loser lawyer looking for one last chance in The Verdict, and the ancient pool shark momentarily willing to hand over his cue as sword in The Color of Money—he never played a character like the boozy has-been in Slap Shot.

Part of the appeal of the film, at the time, was the excessive filthy language. No one had really heard such frank and outrageous dialogue on the screen before. It made many of the early ’70s attempts at gritty street films look like fairly watered-down urbanese in comparison. Well, they hadn’t heard any of this jargon in a so-called mainstream movie, but this was not a popularist film by any stretch of the jaded Hollywood-cracker standard.

Post-Star Wars, this wretched thing was considered an attempt to Richard Pryorize some of the adult content in films, but it worked on a different level all together. The script was a motherfucker, and written by a woman with a very keen ear for dialogue, Nancy Dowd. Characters in the ensemble cast were handled with astute accuracy by Hill at the helm. Action flowed like these actors really were a minor league hockey team based in ‘Charlestown’, who womanized, drank, played cards and pranks and a mean game on the ice when their remaining brain cells showed up, along with their heavy felonious vibe.

Most importantly, women were presented in numerous variations of Zen detachment that sort of opened the door to such searing bits of cinema like the fantastic Jill Clayburgh in An Unmarried Woman—a film with concepts so foreign to my young mind that it scarred me but good, man. But in a real way, youknowwhatImean? (You should see the scar, bro. Dig it—it’s better than Quint’s, Jaws’ Captain Ahab: “Anyway, we delivered the bomb.”)

Hidden Theatre owner comes over to my rug on the lawn with the largest goddamn beer I’ve ever seen. Jesus wept. Some strange girl nearby smiles, but I just say, “Hey, man, thanks. I don’t drink much anymore.” “Oh, no, man. This shite is for me,” he says, indicating his massive mug of homebrewed horror. “This…THIS is for you.”

If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing… Too right, you bastard.

And so the Merry Prankster hands me some dessert, which I appreciate since I’ve been eating salty food, and taking drinks from a monstrous soda, and jaysusHcrist!! Fuck me. When did Phish start playing a 45-minute Light?! This is bad ass porno funk, just like the old days. What the FUCK? When did I end up in Cali? What happened to the movie? “L.A. Woman…” I drift off into the interstellar overdrive, and Cactus drops a bomb.

Meanwhile, Porcupine Tree’s The Incident plays somewhere on my time-traveling iPod.

– Randy Ray