the groundhog day project

Perhaps the lesson of The Idolmaker is that whether you're the one being used or the one doing the using, there's hope for you in the end. But, with new accusations of sexual harassment and abuse from men in power virtually every day lately, I figure those men get to the back of the line when it comes to hope. Seriously, the scene with Tommy Dee and the 14-year-old girl in the car is on and I see on my phone that Twitter is blowing up with comments about Trump supporting Roy Moore, implying that all of Moore's accusers are liars. It's like some sick sort of poetry. This is a movie in which the protagonist, the hero of the story, blames a young girl for being alone with his artist (though, he yells at Tommy Dee afterward, he then offers to hook him up when he wants a woman, so there's that), bribes DJs and (sort of) magazine editors for airplay and good press, yells at the woman he's with (and has already come on to), calls women "god damn broads",...

Women have been a plot device for male entitlement for as far back as stories were being told, as trophies for creepy behaviour, as the spoils of war, as the property of men, as the maiden-in-waiting for her adorable coercive, overly-persistent prince-charming. (Meagher 2015) Vincent Vacarri is not a nice man. He is our protagonist in The Idolmaker but he is not a nice man. In fact, he is at times an awful, awful man. Tommy Dee gets a young girl to accompany him to his car, ostensibly to get a copy of his record before it is officially released, and he tries to get more than that. We don't know how old Tommy Dee is, but he seems to be somewhere close to the age of the actor playing him--Paul Land was 23-24 when The Idolmaker was filmed. However old the actress in the scene is, Vincent says her character is 14. When Tommy Dee demands more than just a thank you, she kisses his cheek. He calls that sisterly, and goes for more. Vincent comes to her rescue. But, does he reprimand...

My first thought upon turning on The Idolmaker is that even more than we watched the movie when I was a kid, we listened to the soundtrack. On vinyl. And, that gets me thinking about other soundtracks we listened to a lot. Somewhere in Time 's soundtrack was one of them, and I don't think I mentioned John Barry's score at all last week while watching that one. There was the soundtrack to Grease 2 , which will come up in this deconstruction sometime in the next month or two, probably. (The pace of this thing is not out of hand, exactly, but it is increasingly slow.) And plenty I'm forgetting. I remember a 45 single of "All Time High"--that's the theme to the James Bond movie Octopussy , which is also going to show up in this deconstruction at some point. And, outside of movie soundtracks, there were musicians from the 50s, stuff my parents liked. And, seriously, Tommy Dee (Paul Land) starts singing "Here Is My Love" and I still know the lyrics....