In which I’m as tall as Arnold Schwarzenegger

I used to be about five feet 10 inches tall. And I used to write about movies.

What do those two factoids have in common?

What if I threw in a third factoid: I’m as tall as bodybuilder-turned-actor-turned-governor-turned-tabloid-fodder Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Or at least I used to be. Or Arnold used to be.

Confused yet?

Even though I’ve written about weightier subjects for most of the last 20 years, the first dozen or so years of my journalism career were devoted, primarily, to feature and entertainment writing. Besides writing for the now-defunct Muncie Evening Press, I wrote for some Indianapolis-based entertainment tabloids, Hot Potato and The Alternative, and some fan-published magazines.

I also tried to write once for a nationally-distributed entertainment magazine, but my submission — an in-depth review of an early, unused script for the 1989 “Batman” movie — earned me a cease-and-desist letter from Warner Bros., the makers of that movie. That’s a story for another day though.

For a guy writing about books, music and movies in a town the size of Muncie, I was pretty ambitious. I requested and received opportunities to do phone interviews with directors like John Carpenter (“Halloween”) and George Romero (“Night of the Living Dead”). I got to interview Julie Walters — now better known as Mrs. Weasley from the “Harry Potter” films — early in her career.

I also went on press junkets, in which studios flew entertainment writers to big-city screenings of upcoming movie releases. They put us up in a hotel, screened the movie for us and let us interview, in brief fashion, the stars. Sometime I’ll tell you about getting to meet Nick Nolte that way.

But it was at one of those press junkets where I got the opportunity to meet Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Now, this isn’t the Arnold Schwarzenegger we all know today. This was in 1982, and Arnold was publicizing “Conan the Barbarian.” He had been in a couple of movies by that time, but the Arnold that would be the stuff of action movie legend — “The Terminator,” “Commando,” and many more films — hadn’t happened yet.

This Arnold was still a fairly unpolished guy. I mean, he was dressed up for the press junket, in a suit and tie. And he was unfailingly polite. But I remember him as being rough around the edges, even in front of the press. He was outgoing and friendly but maybe a little louder than you would expect of a Hollywood type. I also remember he seemed flirty toward the female journalists in the group.

These press junkets are run like an interview factory. Arnold and co-stars Gerry Lopez (a surfer-turned-actor who played Arnold’s sidekick in the movie) and the gorgeous Sandahl Bergman (a dancer-turned-actor who was also seen in “All That Jazz”) were brought into a hotel room rented by the movie company and seated for 20 or 30 minutes with a group of four or five entertainment writers. Each writer threw out a couple of questions, in turn. I mostly found myself hoping that the only interesting questions wouldn’t be asked by somebody else first. Once that session was done, the writers were herded to another room to interview the next cast member and a new group was brought in.

The TV interviewers got one-on-one time with the actors but they were all cursory interviews, really. There’s not much time for an in-depth discussion in 20 minutes.

I don’t remember a lot about the interview with Arnold that my group conducted. Questions were asked and answered and it all sounded a lot like the kind of stuff you see on TV and online to this day. Yes, making the movie was a lot of fun. Yes, the cast got along. Yes, the stunts were a challenge.

But what I do remember was thinking, “Wow. Arnold is just about my height, maybe a little taller.”

Yes, it’s a strange thought to come away from the interview with. But Schwarzenegger — who was, with “Conan,” just beginning to build a larger-than-life image — was already being marketed as a big guy. Certainly he was “pumped up,” to quote Hans and Franz, but height-wise he seemed like a normal guy.

Arnold’s height has been the subject of some conjecture over the years. In researching this blog entry, I found an Internet site, www.arnoldheight.com, that takes a tongue-in-cheek approach to solving the mystery of just how tall he is. The site speculates that the actor is somewhere between five feet nine and six feet two. But if offers photographic evidence — mostly by matching Arnold up against some famous c0-workers — suggesting that the actor, who claims to be six feet two inches, has perhaps — ahem — fibbed a bit about his height.

In the nearly 30 years since my encounter with Arnold, I’ve met a number of actors and TV personalities. I’ve found that many of them are kind of on the small side, probably because TV and film cameras make most of the general population look like hideous, hulking creatures. The camera adds 10 or 20 or 50 pounds, all of it ugly.

As for me, I’m shrinking in my declining years. I’m not sure I’ll ever measure five feet 10 inches again, even on a good day.

And if I’m shrinking, one can only imagine that Arnold is, nearly 30 years on, experiencing the same effect.

I used to be five feet 10 inches tall. Maybe, just maybe, Arnold can make the same claim.

Not that he’d want to.

Summer nights watching the skies

I’m not sure I’ll be up after midnight tonight to try to catch the Perseid meteor shower. I haven’t even found any real indication online that we’ll be able to see it around here.

But the idea of staying up late and being out under the Hoosier summer sky really takes me back.

When I was a young adult, my friends and I were night owls. Most weekends, when I didn’t have school or work, I was up all night, greeting the dawn with the satisfaction of a night spent in the company of buddies — and the first twinges of a hangover. But we didn’t spend those nights outside. We were more likely to have spent our evening and night moving from restaurant to movie theater to midnight showing to somebody’s house, where we stayed up late watching TV and chattering like geeky monkeys.

Back then, nighttime wasn’t a time for falling asleep exhausted from a day of obligations. It was playtime.

But even years earlier, when I was growing up, I loved the summertime night sky.

I fell asleep each night with the window in my upstairs bedroom open. I usually placed my bed where I could see out the widow. Since we lived in the country, my view was of the cornfield across the road, the railroad track on the other side of the field and the night sky above.

I’ll forever associate the mournful sound of a train whistle, the rustle of wind among cornstalks and the deep, dark blue of a country sky.

I still remember seeing “shooting stars” — maybe the Perseids, although I’m not certain — out my window on moonless nights. They were more than a show. They were my nightlight.

(Note: The photo above is not out my childhood window. It’s an iPhone picture I took recently, at dusk, not far from where I live today.)

iPhoneography: Indiana State Fair Part Two

Yes, the people watching at the Indiana State Fair is wonderful. But what about those wacky signs?

First things first, though: My friend Andy Tooze today uttered the wittiest and most literary remark that will be heard on the fairgrounds this week. Maybe any week.

I spotted a guy wearing a T-shirt with a reproduction of a book cover for John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men,” noting that wasn’t a typical T-shirt among fairgoers.

“Perhaps he’s here to see the rabbits,” Andy replied.

And what about those signs?

Yes, we all know about the corndogs and lemon shakeups. But what about this?

Gotta say “Hot Beef Sundae” sounds more like a male revue than fair food.

Now here’s a tempting offer:

I don’t think they really mean a burger made of baloney. Fried baloney is awesome enough.

How’s this for enticement?

Uh, no thanks. I’ll just wander over to the horse barns.

And last but in no way least is this statue, which might be the strangest, kinkiest, dirtiest way of advertising corndog sales ever. Ever.

That is just all kinds of odd. Happy dining!

 

iPhoneography: Indiana State Fair

I try to get to the Indiana State Fair at least once every year. I really enjoy fairs because my son loves the rides. For me, it’s the people watching and the photography opportunities. Not the rides. Definitely not the rides.

Monday’s state fair visit was a good time: Not too hot — the fair in 2010 was blisteringly hot — and the rain arrived only a little while before we were due to leave anyway.

The change in weather gave me the opportunity to capture the fair under both pretty blue sky and ominously gray sky.

Here’s the pending storm perspective on the Ferris wheel:

The sky made the drop tower look like Mordor from “Lord of the Rings.”

Little things at the fair catch my eye. The rubber ducks carnival game, for example.

Dreams in a cardboard box: Captain Action

So the TV was on today and there was a commercial for Squinkies.

If you’re not already totally lost, you must have a kid or grandkid who is still young enough to be in the demographic for toys.

I can’t with utter confidence explain what Squinkies are. We don’t have any in our household but they appear to be squishy little plastic figures that come in about a thousand variations so your kids can collect them all (of course).

What really struck me about this commercial was that it was for Squinkies for boys. The spot featured comic book character versions of the squishy little figures. So while they still looked like something that would be lost in every nook and cranny of your couch within a couple hours of purchase, the makers are obviously trying to appeal to the male subset of toybuyers.

Which makes me think of my childhood and the dawn of the action figure.

While Barbie and her legion of high-heel-wearing imitators beat them to stores by several years, the action figures of my youth changed the play habits of a couple of generation of boys — all of a sudden, it was okay to play with dolls and please call them action figures by the way — and made millions for a few toy companies.

Hasbro launched the GI Joe line in 1964 at a time when little boys were still re-enacting the battlefield exploits of their fathers in World War II and Korea. The 12-inch figures introduced millions of little boys to machine guns, sandbags and footlockers.

I loved my GI Joes and my Johnny Wests (the latter an old west action figure) but for me there was no toy that compared to Captain Action.

Introduced in 1966 by the Ideal Toy Company, Captain Action was unusual in that his schtick revolved around becoming other heroes.

Somehow Ideal and GI Joe developer Stan Weston worked out character licensing agreements with Marvel and DC Comics as well as King Features Syndicate, the company that owned the rights to many popular newspaper comic strips.

So Captain Action, who wore a black and blue unitard and jaunty cap in his everyday mode, slipped into the costumes of other superheroes when needed. Captain Action could be Superman, Batman, Captain America, Spider-Man, the Lone Ranger and several other heroes.

The business dealings necessary to make this happen were above my head at the time and still seem kind of improbable, but even as a grade-schooler I knew that Captain Action was special. Like Barbie, he had a limitless supply of outfits. Unlike Barbie, Captain Action could go out and kick evil butt when he slipped into Superman’s spandex or the Lone Ranger’s chaps.

And if heroes are only as good as their villains, Captain Action was great. His bad guy was Dr. Evil. No, not the “Austin Powers” baldie. Captain Action’s Dr. Evil was a bug-eyed, blue-skinned alien of some kind with — get this — an exposed brain. That’s right. The top of his skull was missing and his pink brain was right there for all to see. Kind of makes you wonder why Captain Action didn’t put an end to more of their clashes by sticking his finger in Dr. Evil’s brain and stirring.

While Dr. Evil’s exposed brain might have been his oddest feature, his wardrobe was likewise offbeat. This baddie wore a Nehru jacket, sandals and a medallion on a gold chain.

Yeah, I know. But believe me, as a kid, you didn’t think about how unlikely that outfit was. Plus — exposed brain. Kind of trumped everything else.

My Captain Action figures didn’t survive many, many hard days of play. unfortunately, and neither did Captain Action as a toy in general survive changes in the toy market. The good captain never got a second wind in a smaller size, as GI Joe did, and couldn’t sustain the licensing agreements that made him so unique. With the nostalgia business in mind, new Captain Action figures were released a few years ago but couldn’t possibly thrive in today’s toy market.

But who knows? Maybe Captain Action and Dr. Evil are still out there, waiting for their comeback. All the captain needs is a few good costumes to borrow and all Dr. Evil needs is a bike helmet.

It’s the end of the world as we know it

Do we all have end of the world jitters? Or is the apocalypse just a passing fad in books, TV and movies?

I just saw “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” with my old pal Steve Warstler (hey Steve!) and we were impressed with how good the movie was. The story is straightforward and compelling and while the human characters are nothing special, the apes — particularly Caesar, the sympathetic chimpanzee who in the original films led an ape rebellion — were astounding.

Computer-generated effects can be cool and leave us cold at the same time. There’s the “uncanny valley” effect, of course, in which digital images that look kinda human but not quite creep us out. But no matter how good the effects are, the characters created by CGI are only as good as they are written and acted.

The smart script makes Caesar so sympathetic — orphaned in infancy, raised in a loving home, torn from his surrogate father (James Franco) and bullied until he rebels — we can’t help but root for him to throw off the shackles of human oppression. And Andy Serkis — who also performed Gollum in the “Lord of the Rings” movies — gives Caesar a foundation that goes beyond just a performance to layer special effects over.

But one thing I noticed before and after the movie was the number of apocalyptic, end of the world stories that are coming out. Attached to the “Apes” movie were trailers for a couple of them, the most memorable of which was “Contagion,” in which Matt Damon plays a man trying to survive an outbreak of a deadly virus.

The trailer for “Contagion” notes that most people touch their face several times each minute (and thus expose themselves to every germ their hands come into contact with). I don’t know if that’s true, but just the suggestion was enough to make me wish I had a bottle of hand sanitizer in my cupholder.

There’s quite a slate of end of the world movies on tap, chief among them, at least in my mind, “World War Z,” based on the terrific Max Brooks book about a zombie apocalypse. I’ve heard that a movie version of “The Passage” is going to happen, and it’s only a matter of time until the camera-ready trilogy of books — two out so far — in “The Strain” trilogy gets filmed. While “The Passage” left me cold, I’m loving “The Strain” books.

Of course, the original “Planet of the Apes” movies came out when the US was slogging through a seemingly endless war in Vietnam and turmoil on the home front. And the likes of “Earthquake” and “The Towering Inferno” and other big-screen disaster movies premiered during this same stressful period.

Maybe the books, TV shows and comics like “The Walking Dead” and movies like “Contagion” and “World War Z” reflect our collective feeling of unease. Maybe they’re just capitalizing on audience interest.

Either way, pass the hand sanitizer.

Michael Connelly and Mickey Haller

For some reason — maybe because I’ve seen previews for the new “Conan the Barbarian” movie — I’ve been thinking about when I met Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1982, when he was promoting the original “Conan” movie.

But then I watched the movie adaptation of Michael Connelly’s “The Lincoln Lawyer” tonight and decided that Arnold could wait.

The movie version, out on DVD, features Matthew McConaughey as Mickey Haller, the Los Angeles lawyer protagonist of Connelly’s book. The title comes from the defense attorney’s practice of maintaining office hours from the backseat of a Lincoln piloted around LA by Haller’s driver. The rolling legal suite is a cool, only-in-LA idea that demonstrates Connelly’s knack for nice character touches.

The movie’s pretty good. McConaughey isn’t necessarily who I pictured when I imagined Mick Haller, the canny attorney with a clear sense of right and wrong and an even clearer sense of what a jury will believe. However, McConaughey does a nice job with the role, which is a more internal, instinctive hero than most you’ll find in movies these days.

But the movie, entertaining as it is, doesn’t compare to Connelly’s books. The former LA newspaper reporter has written about two dozen books in the past 20 years. Several are about Haller. Most are about Harry Bosch, a veteran cop with more than a few dark shadings to his personality. Both characters are driven by a sense of justice, even if they approach that ideal from different paths at times.

The movie can’t capture the best part about Connelly’s characters: Their thoughts, their obsessions, their preconceived notions that they sometimes realize they must overcome. Bosch in particular is such a hardcase he would be very nearly unlikable if he really existed and you met him in person. But Connelly makes Bosch human and relatable because he lets us into his head. We see LA’s murder victims through Bosch’s eyes and feel his outrage at the very idea their deaths might go unpunished.

Haller is a more easygoing character than Bosch but also more clever. When confronted with a client who is guilty beyond reasonable doubt, he doesn’t throw up his hands and walk away. But he does ensure that justice is done.

In an interview on the DVD, Connelly echoes something Stephen King has said. He’s not so worried about movie versions of his work getting the characters wrong and messing up the storylines because the books are right there, on the shelf, uncompromised and waiting. Not unlike his characters.

One more thing: I haven’t been to LA in what’s going on 20 years now. But the city that Connelly and Robert Crais, in his Elvis Cole/Joe Pike books, portray is the one that I knew, from the precarious houses on hillsides to the rambling concrete highways. If you’ve ever been to LA and want to recapture it or have never been and want to know what it’s like, Connelly’s books give you a view from the backseat of Haller’s Lincoln.

Okay. Soon we’ll come back to the topic of Arnold and the most lasting impression he made on me: His height.

These books are kid’s stuff – and that’s high praise

What did you read when you were a kid?

I read everything I could get my hands on, starting with comic books but then graduating to Whitman books like those in the photo. Out of all the Whitman kid-oriented books I had, those are the three that survive today. I had quite a few more, including a “Star Trek” book that taught me what counting coup was.

And considering how much I love libraries now, it made perfect sense that I read everything in my school’s library – even some things that probably surprised Mrs. Jeffers, the beloved school librarian. Bullfinch’s Mythology? Heavens yes. Sammy Davis Jr.’s “Yes I Can?” Yes I did. Bound volumes of classic newspaper comic strips like “Terry and the Pirates?” Of course. I was a kid, after all.

As much as I loved books as a kid, I think it’s possible there’s more good literature for kids today. While my tastes and voracious reading habits took me far beyond the Hardy Boys books, today there’s a wealth of great stuff for kids to read.

I hope to come back to this subject at some point, so I’ll only name two series now. You might have heard of one and you might not have heard of the other, but they’re both great.

And yes, I read these relatively new books as an adult. And I still loved them.

First, the books you’ve probably heard of. Suzanne Collins’ “Hunger Games” trilogy is being made into a movie to come out early next year, so if you haven’t read the books yet you might want to. They’re riveting tales of about a future USA where the oppressive government makes teenagers from the impoverished country’s disparate and desperate districts compete in an annual fight to the death. The books are full of winning characters and great action and might – I know, I know, this is heresy – be better than J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books.

The series you might not have heard of is Nancy Springer’s Enola Holmes series. Enola is the younger sister of Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes. Enola, an ungainly, intelligent young teen, goes off on her own when her mother disappears. As the series progresses, she tries to solve the mystery of what happened to her mother even as she solves stand-alone mysteries in each book. Not to mention her efforts to keep out of the clutches of her brothers, who – in their well-meaning way – want to turn her into the docile young gentlelady that Enola does not want to be.

While the Enola Holmes books are fine for elementary-school-age readers (and older, obviously), “The Hunger Games” and its two sequels are pretty strong stuff and emphasize, as do the later Harry Potter books, the harsh reality of war and rebellion. I know elementary-age kids who love them.

Of course, just because there are so many good new books for young people doesn’t mean you shouldn’t dip back into the classics. In future blog entries I’ll probably throw around names like Robert Heinlein and Edgar Rice Burroughs.

And there’s always “More Tales to Tremble By.”

Grocery shopping, man style

When you were a kid, was a trip to the grocery store fun for you?

Oh man, it was for me.

People who know me know that I still like a reasonable amount of store stops. There’s something appealing in checking out grocery stores, department stores, big box stores, little locally owned shops, the whole enchilada. I like seeing what’s new. I am always startled by the mid-July return to stores of back-to-school supplies but I love all those fresh notebooks and folders and pencils. I love the onset of Halloween season and could spend hours looking at every possible variation on masks and decorations.

But even grocery shopping is fine with me and has been since I was a kid.

I spent a lot of time going to grocery stores with my dad. He was the primary grocery shopper in my family. In fact, I have almost no memory of my mom in the supermarket. She wasn’t a big shopper in any way. Clothes shopping just about pushed her over the edge.

My trips to the store with my dad, however, were real treats for me.

I have only vague memories of Marshall Carter’s Madison Street Market. It seemed big to me at the time, but judging by the KFC now occupying its former location it must not have been all that big. My only distinct memory of it was that it seemed to be built on two levels. It seems like you had to step down to get to the rear of the store.

I loved going to Jack Gommel’s butcher shop. (I love seeing Mr. Gommel behind the butcher counter at Marsh these days too.) My dad and I would start at one end of the L-shaped butcher counter, buying baloney and bacon (when we didn’t have a supply from our own hogs) and hamburger (when we didn’t have a supply from our own cows) and the like. We made our way, shuffling along the butcher case with the other shoppers, from beginning to end, then ducked down the aisles to pick up the random canned or packaged good.

Dad and I often went to Marsh or Wise or Ross too, but Gommel’s stands out in my memory, as does the Eavey’s grocery store just off South Madison Street. Eavey’s was a favorite stop for me because of the magazine rack near the elevated office at the front corner of the store. I would peruse the magazines and comics there while Dad wheeled his cart around the store.

The magazine memory, of course, is somewhat unrelated to grocery shopping and more closely connected to the glimpse of the forbidden that Eavey’s magazine rack offered. Because there, on an upper row, were the kind of men’s magazines that most boys wanted to get a look at. They had names like “True” and “Man’s Life” and usually featured stories about hardy men surviving bear attacks and blizzards and brutal Pacific islands during World War II.

I spent most of my time at Eavey’s with my head whipping back and forth from the magazines to the aisle nearest me to make sure my dad wasn’t walking up behind me.

That’s because, in addition to grizzly mauling stories, the magazines featured cheesecake photos of models. The bikinis the women wore were probably modest compared to what we see today.

But take my word for it: They represented something you didn’t see every day in Cowan or Stick City. Even though Playboy and its imitators were in existence even then, those were beyond my grasp and my expectations.

The men’s magazines – and monster magazine and comics – in the rack at Eavey’s, however, were just an added bonus that helped ensure that any time my dad headed toward his pickup and asked if I wanted to go to the grocery, I was ready.

I wanted my MTV (back then)

Other than a tendency to waste an entire weekend watching a “Real World” marathon when my family was out of town, I haven’t watched MTV in a while. I still catch a few minutes of the channel’s annual movie awards show, which is silly fun, now and then. I might try “Teen Wolf,” which looks intriguing, when I have a spare minute. But the reality TV genre that “The Real World” spawned doesn’t appeal much.

And there doesn’t seem to be much on MTV these days besides reality shows. Same for VH1, which used to be a showcase for the videos that MTV had already abandoned but is now consumed with shows about celebrity wannabes and never-gonna-bes.

But the purpose of this blog entry isn’t to criticize MTV today but to remember MTV back then.

After all, the channel’s 30th anniversary is upon us.

Okay, let’s think about that for a minute. Thirty years.

Holy crap, we’re getting old.

I still remember vividly the heyday of music videos in the 1980s. Like every young adult at the time, I turned in to see every lame and cool video that premiered. My friend Brian and I practically raced to his apartment to watch the premiere of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video in 1983.

And the VJs. I loved the VJs. How cool was J.J. Jackson? How cute was Martha Quinn? How amazing was it to realize Nina Blackwood appeared in Playboy?

Although some of the videos are painful to watch now, they seemed like milestones at the time. How cool it was to see some of the biggest hits of the day come to life. Oh, and the David Lee Roth videos too.

While I enjoyed MTV, I think I liked the overnight videos show that aired on TBS even better. For five or six hours, the channel showed back-to-back-to-back videos interrupted only occasionally by commercials.

I stuck with MTV for years, even after videos were being replaced by programming. I loved the game show “Remote Control,” loved Jon Stewart’s show and the aforementioned “Real World.”

Of course, it seems like a million years ago now. But it’s been only 30 years.

Only 30.