the groundhog day project

I was going to move on from Stand By Me after yesterday but as I was posting the blog entry and the film was ending, a detail caught my attention. And, having looked again at the book, it stood out. At the end of the film, narrator Gordie explains: As time went on we saw less and less of Teddy and Vern, until eventually they became just two more faces in the halls. It happens sometimes. Friends come in and out of your life like busboys in a restaurant. I heard that Vern got married out of high school, had four kids and is now the forklift operator at the Arsenault Lumber Yard. In the book, Vern "was killed in a house fire that swept a Lewiston apartment building in 1966... Someone fell asleep in one of the bedrooms with a live cigarette going. Vern himself, maybe, drifting off, dreaming of his pennies. They identified him and the four others who dies by their teeth." The story of The Body takes place in 1960. So, Vern died when he was only about 18. He married no ...

And then, there's Gordie. Opening scene, now a couple decades older (and I was surprised to learn that Richard Dreyfuss would have only been about 3 years older than Gordie would have been. Of course, in the book, Chris doesn't die in the mid-80s. He dies in 1973. When he and Gordie would only be 25-26 years old. The film does specify on the prop newspaper that Chris died September 4, 1985.) and sitting in silence, contemplating. We see the headline and know he's thinking about death, maybe a friend, maybe a family member. We don't know who Chris Chambers is. We don't yet know who Gordie Lachance is. CUT TO the past and it has long struck me that narrator Gordie saying "I was living in a small town" instead of "I lived in a small town" like he was just passing through. But, he is just passing through this time and place like any of us are. What happens now, what happens here--is finite, specific. Before he even gets to that line, we get...

Stand By Me still hits, emotionally. Even right off, the score is not particularly powerful, certainly not famous, but I recognize it immediately, and I know who Christopher Chambers is in that newspaper headline. I didn't know that first time I saw this movie what that headline was about. And, I also didn't realize that Castle Rock shouldn't be in Oregon, but I guess when they were adapting the novella, the only other marker of geography was Portland and Portland, Oregon was more well known than Portland, Maine. I didn't know Castle Rock at all. (Though it is part of The Dead Zone , which had already had a film version, I wouldn't see any of that movie until one night in a bed and breakfast in Dublin, Ireland in 1987. I wouldn't get to reading stories like "Mrs. Todd's Shortcut", "The Sun Dog", "It Grows on You", Cujo , The Dark Half , or Needful Things until at least a year or two later. That last one I would read on our...

Today's film is a little bit of a cheat like Highlander was. While I saw Stand By Me in the theater, it was not really a fixture in my movie life until I was a teenager and I bought my own copy on VHS. But, then this was a movie I would watch time and time again, only in my 20s. And, I even ripped it off a little bit--or paid homage to it, I suppose--in my second novel. Actually, I think that was more ripping off--or paying homage to-- It actually. There was even a battle between kids throwing kids at each other. The thing is, speaking of my writing, I often snagged bits of setup or stylistic things from Stephen King. For example, in my... I want to say fourth novel-- (None of these have been properly published, by the way. I had a few of my novels available self-published for a bit about a decade-and-a-half ago, but no longer. I recently did a re-edit of what's probably my best writing--a novel called Clubhouse Blues , which I'm sure I've mentioned in this b...

(This will be the first time I've gone with a made-for-TV version of a story for this blog. Sure, I watched TV shows during that first Groundhog Day year, but I also watched Groundhog Day on those days. And, I watched 12 Dates of Christmas and 12:01 , Ollie Hopnoodle's Haven of Bliss , but I also watched Groundhog Day on those days. Today's entry, perhaps, opens up some more possibilities for the future.) I The thing that always bothered me about Kubrick's The Shining was the casting of Jack Torrance. Now, since I haven't made it clear the last few days, I love The Shining . I think it is one of the greatest horror films ever made. But, I have read the book, and I longed (prior to the TV miniseries version in 1997) for a version that might offer up a Jack Torrance who did not seem a little bit crazy from the get go. After this version--I'm watching that miniseries today--I'm not so sure that I long for it as much. The miniseries has its problems, of...