The Users: Glossy '70s Trash TV

I grew up in the 1970s, a precocious child and an avid, advanced reader from the age of 8 or 9. I had a voracious need to devour anything and everything I could get my hands on. After blowing through all of The Wizard of Oz books, every Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mystery, Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Wonka series and James & the Giant Peach, I set my sights on my parents’ vast bookshelf that lined the entire back wall of the living room. And, boy, did I ever get an education.

I was indiscriminate in my tastes, as were my well-educated parents. I read Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist long before I was ever old enough to see the films that were made from them. I read Updike, Mailer, Harold Robbins, Sidney Sheldon. (The Other Side of Midnight was my favorite.) I read Judith Krantz’s steamy Scruples and thumbed through Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex, scrutinizing every detailed illustration. I even read Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, a tome still potent enough to make grown men blush.

One of the adult-themed books I best remember was The Users by Joyce Haber. It was a seamy, tawdry tale of how a clever young hooker infiltrated the Hollywood movie machine and became a major power player, using her wiles and skills in the art of love. The sex scenes were explicit and graphic, and it was said that all the characters depicted were based on real-life actors and moguls of contemporary 1970s filmdom.

Hollywood gossip columnist Joyce Haber

Along with Rona Barrett, Joyce Haber was a doyenne of 1970s movieland gossip, having inherited the mantle from Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, who had wielded a tremendous amount of power with their well-read columns in major newspapers during Hollywood’s classic golden era. So I assumed Ms. Haber knew from whereof she spoke as she weaved her page-turning story of Elena Brent née Schneider, closeted gay movie hunk Randall Brent, billionaire entrepreneur Reade Jamison and the making of a big Hollywood blockbuster called Rogue’s Gallery.

Producer Douglas S. Cramer and Aaron Spelling with Lana Turner 

In 1978, the book was adapted into an ABC TV movie of the week, coproduced by Aaron Spelling and Douglas S. Cramer. Spelling, of course, was already a superstar producer, a former actor (I Love Lucy) who found his niche behind the camera, at that time already the creator of the megahit TV series Starsky and Hutch and Charlie’s Angels. Douglas Cramer was also a successful TV producer, with Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway, The New Adventures of Wonder Woman and the original TV movie version of The Love Boat already under his belt. Together, Spelling and Cramer would team up to produce some of the most memorable and iconic series of the 1970s and 1980s, including Love Boat, Dynasty and Vega$. 

(Joyce Haber happened to be married to Douglas S. Cramer at the time, which may have had something to do with her lucrative TV movie deal for The Users. Later, Cramer and Spelling would also produce the miniseries of Jackie Collins’s Hollywood Wives, which is a better adaptation and a more entertaining guilty pleasure than this version of his ex-wife’s book.)

Jaclyn Smith as Elena Brent—a little too pure!

Not currently available for streaming or on DVD (though lucky seekers may find a bootleg copy uploaded to YouTube), the TV version of The Users is basically a Spelling Productions family affair, headlined by Jaclyn Smith of Charlie’s Angels (the only Angel to appear in all five seasons of the series) as Elena Brent and John Forsythe (soon to be of Dynasty) as Reade Jamison. 

Curtis, Smith and Forsythe: Not the Carringtons or Colbys

The rest of the cast is reminiscent of an episode of The Love Boat, which was famous for giving past-their-prime classic stars a chance to keep working in the medium of television: Oscar winners Joan Fontaine (Suspicion, The Witches) and Red Buttons (Sayonara, The Poseidon Adventure) play the shrewd procuress Grace St. George and sleazy super agent Warren Ambrose. Tony Curtis (Some Like It Hot, Spartacus) is Randall Brent, the former A-list star who marries Elena. Darren McGavin (The Night Stalker) is Henry Waller, gruff and macho author of the book Rogue’s Gallery that’s being adapted into a big film.

Jaclyn Smith's Oscar winning costars: Buttons and Fontaine

Mamas & the Papas alum Michelle Phillips is superstar Marina Brent (whose popularity in the book is compared to the likes of Barbra Streisand and Liza Minnelli), daughter of Randy. Perpetually tanned and laid-back George Hamilton (Love At First Bite) plays director Adam Baker, apparently an amalgam of several hot young directors of the ’70s. Seasoned character actors like the comic Pat Ast (Heat), throaty-voiced Carrie Nye (The Group) and curly-haired Alan Feinstein (Looking for Mr. Goodbar) round out the cast, lending support to the ‘big names.’

Michelle Phillips: Move over Barbra, Liza and Bette

Hamilton: Too handsome to be behind the camera?

The production values are pure Spelling and foreshadow the look and feel of Dynasty a couple of years later: indeed, Jaclyn Smith and her castmates are dressed by none other than the legendary Nolan Miller, who was discovered by Aaron Spelling while he was working as a Beverly Hills florist. 

Designer Nolan Miller and one of his many beautiful leading ladies

I wish I could say that The Users is a great or even good film; it really isn’t, and the movie bears only the most superficial resemblance to the book, which was a bawdy, racy and incisive look behind the screen at Hollywood politicking and deal-making. The TV movie version obviously had to be sanitized to remove references to blue movies, omnisexual West Hollywood orgies and blow-by-blow descriptions of hot and heavy encounters at Hollywood parties. (If you want that, watch 1975’s Shampoo instead.) Unfortunately, without all of Haber’s trashy (and addictively readable) accoutrements, The Users is nothing more than a tepid soap opera, glossed over with those slick and deft touches of a Spelling and Cramer production.

But the story behind the story is kind of fun—and I recommend you read the book and try to guess who’s who in Joyce Haber’s roman à clef. 

(Bonus, thanks to Brian in the comments below – Joyce Haber and ex-husband Doug Cramer on an episode of the 70s game show Tattletales!)

This is an entry in the Spellingverse Blogathon, hosted by the beautiful and talented Gill of RealWeegieMidget Reviews. I look forward to reading all your posts about Aaron and Company. 

Browsing Through Time with Peggy Sue

If you could go travel back to a crucial time in your past and alter the trajectory of your life, what would you change? Is it possible to change one’s fate and destiny? This is the theme of Francis Ford Coppola’s Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) starring Kathleen Turner and Nicolas Cage.

A change of pace for director Coppola after his epic blockbuster hits The Godfather and Godfather II and the lushly produced but disappointing version of The Outsiders, Peggy Sue is a wistful yet comedic film with an odd charm and metaphysical underpinnings. Here, Coppola assembles a powerhouse cast for a seriocomic and bittersweet film that’s as much about about unresolved issues and dreams that don’t come true as it is about time travel.

On the eve of her divorce from straying husband Charlie (Cage), Peggy Sue attends her 25-year high school reunion, where she suddenly collapses, waking up in the same high school gym in 1960, 25 years earlier.

Kathleen Turner in the title role

“I have come here from 25 years in the future,” Peggy Sue confides in Richard Norvick, the class genius who has become a world-famous inventor by the time of the reunion, played by Barry Miller (memorable as the troubled guy from Saturday Night Fever who falls from the Brooklyn Bridge). Richard shares his own theory of time—Richard’s Burrito, where two ends of space/time time fold in upon themselves and “you can fill it with anything you like.”

When she made Peggy Sue, Kathleen Turner was one of the biggest names in the movies, with a string of hits including Body Heat, Romancing the Stone and Prizzi’s Honor. After her box office mojo cooled, Turner would conquer the Broadway stage and then settle into quirky character roles on film and TV, including a brilliant turn in the John Waters black comedy Serial Mom—another Turner title role.

Peggy and Richard (Barry Miller)

As Peggy Sue Kelcher Bodell, Kathleen Turner has one of her most multidimensional roles, as she must retrace the steps of her teenage life, seeing it now through the eyes of an adult. 

She sees that her soft-spoken mother (a lovely performance by Barbara Harris of Nashville, Freaky Friday and Family Plot fame), with her familiar scent of Chanel #5, is actually an iron butterfly who holds the family together in spite of her sweet and amiable but ne’er do well failure of a husband (Don Murray from Bus Stop and Endless Love). Peggy’s mother warns her not to grow up too fast—and get trapped by man. “Do you know what a penis is, Peggy?” she  asks pointedly. “Stay away from it!”

In spite of herself, Peggy finds herself falling in love with high school sweetheart Charlie all over again, even while telling him, “I’m not crazy enough to marry you twice.” She turns the tables on him and pressures him to make love to her in a parked car in a reversal of 1950s sexual stereotypes.

Nicolas Cage as Charlie, with Jim Carrey, Glenn Withrow and Harry Basil

Charlie is afraid he’ll grow up to be just like his father, selling appliances and chasing women around the store—which is exactly how his life will play out. His long-shot of a dream of becoming a pop star earns him the nickname of “Treble without a Cause,” and Peggy gives him a Beatles song from four years in the future, hoping he can make a success of it, but he changes the lyrics (‘She Loves You - Oooh Ooh Oooh’). “I’ve got the hair, I’ve got the voice, I’ve got the car. I’m gonna be just like Fabian,” he wails. But it is not to be.

As Charlie Bodell, Nicolas Cage, nephew of director Coppola, is either adorable or annoying, depending upon your point of view. He affects a comedically nasal, adenoidal voice that brings to mind a bad impression of Marlon Brando, but in my opinion, the character is quite endearing, sweet and guileless. Cage’s performance is soulful and engaging; as quirky and charismatic in its way as his upcoming role opposite Cher in Moonstruck. 

Peggy is a little rusty at cheerleading practice.

Peggy Sue’s grandparents, beautifully played by Maureen O’Sullivan (the original Jane from the Weissmuller Tarzan movies and Mia Farrow’s mother) and Leon Ames (Judy Garland’s stern but loving father in Meet Me in St. Louis) believe Peggy’s story, revealing their belief in the reincarnation, the paranormal and psychic phenomenon. In fact, Peggy’s grandfather takes her to his masonic lodge meeting, where they conduct a weird ritual to send her back to her own timeframe, replete with a harpist’s rendition of “Beautiful Dreamer” and legendary classic film actor John Carradine (The Ten Commandments) performing the ceremony.

Catherine Hicks and Joan Allen

Suffusing the entire film is an air of melancholy, and between the laughs you’ll find a few moments that may bring a lump to the throat: Peggy “remembering the future,” missing her unborn children; reuniting with her obnoxious sister who obviously had died young, played by Coppola’s daughter Sofia (later to find her own niche as a director rather than actor). When Peggy returns to her own time, it is discovered that her near-death experience was due to an attack of tachycardia, and paramedics had to restart her heart.

Somewhat of a cross between Grease and blockbuster time-travel hit Back To The Future (made the previous year), Coppola's Peggy Sue effectively evokes the period with the music (including “Tequila” by The Champs and “I Wonder Why” by Dion and the Belmonts) cars (“Dad bought an Edsel!”)  and fashions of the day (designed by Theodora Van Runkle). 

Soulmates through time—Charlie and Peggy: "Is, was and always will be."

Viewed today, the film is nostalgic in other ways, too, as we see a few of the cast who went on to greater fame after this film: Jim Carrey before he rocketed to superstar status;  multiple Oscar nominee Joan Allen (The Crucible, The Contender); comedian Wil Shriner; Catherine Hicks (7th Heaven, Marilyn: The Untold Story), and a young Helen Hunt (As Good As It Gets) as Peggy’s teenage daughter.

Is time travel possible? That’s always a very interesting question. Peggy Sue Got Married is an entertaining exploration of that timeless theme.

This is an entry in the It's In The Name of the Title Blogathon hosted by RealWeegiemidget Reviews and Taking Up Room. I look forward to reading them all.

Lemmon and Dennis: An Unlikely Screen Dream Team

When I think of iconic screen couples, so many come to mind. Gable and Harlow. Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford. Tracy and Hepburn. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis (now that was chemistry!).

Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis are not among them. (Lemmon and Matthau, yes.) But maybe they should be. 

I tend to think of Lemmon chiefly as a light comedic actor in films like Bell, Book and Candle, Some Like It Hot and The Fortune Cookie. (Though, on the other hand, he did break my heart in Days of Wine and Roses.) Dennis brings to mind heavy drama, stürm and drang, with the anxious, neurotic and damaged characters she created for movies like The Fox, Come Back To The Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean and of course, her Oscar-winning turn as that very high-strung young housewife in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

Jack Lemmon as George Kellerman

Sandy Dennis as Gwen Kellerman

In Neil Simon’s The Out-of-Towners (1970), both play against type to enact the misadventures of George and Gwen Kellerman, a pair of hapless and harried travelers from Twin Oaks, Ohio, on an unfortunate trip the New York City. Here, Lemmon is intense and complicated as the uptight, controlling (and occasionally explosively angry) husband, while Dennis ironically gives one of her most engaging performances as his dutiful, ‘go with the flow’ spouse who wants nothing more than to make her husband happy and support his choices. (Though she loses her cool once or twice as well!)

A New York story that depicts The Big Apple as sprawling, tough and hard-as-nails, The Out-of-Towners lampoons every negative stereotype about the city that never sleeps, and about the rigors of travel in general. (Writer Neil Simon was, of course, a lifelong New Yorker himself.)

The film’s other main character: “Is that a beautiful city?” “That is a beautiful city.”

Famous for his witty, lightning-fast dialogue that’s funny and human and honest and relatable all at the same time, Simon treads into more serious territory here than many of the comedic plays that made him famous. This is an edgier, darker story than the feather-light Come Blow Your Horn or Barefoot in the Park, or even his hilarious mismatched buddy comedy The Odd Couple.

Here, Simon crafts a hilarious and often terrifying comedy of errors, using Murphy’s law to plot an unbelievably bad trip for the Kellermans. Anything that can go wrong, does. First there’s a delay in landing the plane, then the flight is diverted to Boston due to bad weather. A crowded claustrophobic train from Boston to New York becomes a cattle car. When they arrive in the city there’s a garbage strike, a transit strike, a heavy rainstorm; the hotel did not hold their reservation. Gwen steps on a bottle and breaks the heel of her shoe; the couple is robbed at gunpoint. And so on.

Comedy is not the wheelhouse of Method actress Sandy Dennis, but as Gwen Kellerman she has impeccable instinctive timing, and many moments, mostly priceless reaction shots, that make you laugh out loud. Harvard-educated Lemmon, who won his first Oscar as the insecure but lovable Ensign Pulver in Mister Roberts, depicts what is his darkest character to date in George Kellerman, a seemingly mild-mannered salesman who is triggered by circumstances into rage and utter despair. (Later, Lemmon will a second Academy Award playing an even darker character in Save the Tiger.) Interestingly, both Dennis and Jack Lemmon studied under Herbert Berghof and Uta Hagen (Respect for Acting) at the HB Studio in New York and even appeared together in an Off-Broadway play years before teaming for this film.

“Two wet, insignificant out-of-town travelers.”

“Oh my God, I think I lost an eyelash.”

“George?? Can you hear me?”

“We could ask Traveler’s Aid...”

“I think I broke a tooth. Yep, there goes my smile.”

At first, it seems that the couple are mismatched to their environment—a classic fish-out-of-water theme, two Midwesterners vs. the Big City. But the travails of George and Gwen point out their mismatched personalities in the way that they deal with the vicissitudes that await them around every corner. Here, Lemmon overplays and Dennis underplays; he rages like King Lear while she assumes inscrutable blank expressions that try to hide her feelings. Their interplay is a joy to watch, though; together, they create a real chemistry and are totally believable as a married couple from Ohio.

Bringing the Kellermans’ urban nightmare to vivid life are a bevy of consummate character actors to lend support and expertly spout Simon’s acerbic dialogue at a rapid-fire pace. Most portray service people trying in vain to calm irate customers; all give unforgettable cameo performances: Ann Prentiss (sister of Paula) as a deadpan stewardess; Billy Dee Williams (Lady Sings the Blues)  from the airline Lost & Found; Johnny Brown as the smiling dining car waiter with nothing but bad news for the hungry travelers; Anthony Holland at the Waldorf Astoria front desk;  Ron Carey (High Anxiety) as a Boston cab driver; Graham Jarvis as a Good Samaritan with an ulterior motive; Anne Meara (mom of Ben Stiller) as a nonplussed purse-snatching victim.

Anne Meara: “You carry a pocketbook in this city, you’re a marked woman.”

Billy Dee Williams as Clifford: “I see no reason to assume it won’t show up.”

Graham Jarvis: “Just tell them that Murray sent you.”

Dolph Sweet, Johnny Brown, Anthony Holland and Ron Carey

Director Arthur Hiller paces the film as a frantic run that keeps you on the edge of your seat and as breathless as our protagonists. (Hiller’s masterful direction provided the engine that also made Silver Streak and The In-Laws such memorably fast-moving comedic sprints.) With his bold and original scoring, Quincy Jones skillfully underlines the urban tension and frantic urgency, and displays a sense of humor, too, adding comic musical counterpoint to the proceedings.

But it’s the Sandy Dennis and Jack Lemmon who hold the entire film together with their outstanding performances and palpable screen chemistry, a seemingly mismatched couple but actually a Classic Movie Dream Team. They are the reason I return to this movie again and again.

 (The less said about the execrable 1990s remake, the better, despite the presence of Goldie Hawn and Steve Martin, whom I love in other films.)

This is an entry in the Mismatched Couples Blogathon hosted by Realweegiemidget Reviews and Cinematic Catharsis. What fun we’ll all have this weekend!