ISSUE #137
BEAM FROM THE BOOTH | GRAND RAPIDS FILM SOCIETY
[EDITED BY: SPENCER EVERHART & GRIFFIN SHERIDAN]
Welcome back to BEAM FROM THE BOOTH, the official newsletter of the GRAND RAPIDS FILM SOCIETY!
TONIGHT (4/13) at 8:00PM, we’re kicking off our multi-event series showcasing the original Star Wars trilogy with a screening of A NEW HOPE — and tickets are going fast! Get yours at our website now, and be sure to arrive early to find your favorite seat in Wealthy Theatre before the big-screen show begins.
And now, returning to Beam, is GRFS organizing committee member and frequent newsletter contributor David Blakeslee with a reflection on how the original film’s release in 1977 had an impact on a formative time in his life. You can find his essay, along with another Community Spotlight feature, below!
WHEN STAR WARS WAS MY SAFE SPACE
[BY: DAVID BLAKESLEE]
The first time I ever heard about Star Wars was at Flaming Rat Records, a music shop that used to operate out of the Towne & Country Shopping Center on the corner of Kalamazoo and 44th Street in Kentwood. It must have been early June 1977, just as I was wrapping up my sophomore year of high school, an exercise in wretchedness that’s mostly evaporated from my memory other than a few highlight experiences having nothing to do with my academic endeavors. I was going through an exploratory phase of uncoupling from my previously-held middle school identity as a comic book collector. This was way before such a public profile was considered socially survivable in the way it’s become in recent decades — a time when I saw no advantage, only avoidable risk, in presenting oneself as a geek, or a nerd, or any variation on that theme. My pathway toward some level of stability and security in the savage peer group I’d landed in was to transition into a new “rocker” persona, replacing my Captain America t-shirts for Kiss belt buckles and Led Zeppelin patches on my denim jacket.
As I idly flipped through bins of LPs trying to figure out what to squander my meager weekly allowance on, I overheard a conversation between two guys who worked the counter talking about this new kick-ass movie that one of them had just seen. He was raving about how mind-blowing it was, recounting an opening scene where this massive spaceship roars down on the audience from the top of the screen in pursuit of a smaller enemy scrambling for its life; laser beams blasting and the theater shaking from the loud rumble of its interstellar overdrive. His coworker nodded in rapt amazement as he went on to describe other bits from the movie that caught my attention, though I can’t remember what all he said in any particular detail. But his enthusiasm was infectious, and I instantly resolved to go check it out for myself as soon as I could find my way to the theater. The six bucks I had set aside for a new record were now repurposed, and the sales clerk never knew that his word-of-mouth endorsement had cost the Flaming Rat a sale.
My first viewing of Star Wars took place a few days later at a theater that used to stand next to a pinball arcade called Funway Freeway at the western edge of Woodland Mall (now where the current Phoenix cineplex now stands). I went with a friend, and we were as blown away by the spectacle as we expected to be. It didn’t take long for Star Wars to become a massive socio-cultural phenomenon unlike anything else I’d ever been personally involved with. The movie was a perfect concoction for my tastes — adrenaline-pumping cosmic space action, futuristic technology rendered in minute detail, weird alien creatures, wisecracking robots, heroic rebels locked in a showdown with sinister and seductive evil, bombastic explosions big enough to disintegrate entire planets, intimations of a philosophical depth that got me curious to know more about The Force, and — most importantly — a no-BS directness that never felt compelled to slow down the pace. All the appeal that drew me into superhero comics without the deadly stigma of being regarded as goofy kid stuff. Star Wars was pretty much everything I would have ever wanted to see in a sci fi movie: easily accessible, endlessly rewatchable, viscerally satisfying fantasy entertainment that felt like it was making some kind of a defiant statement that I wasn’t quite able to articulate.
That rewatchability drew me in for an indefinite number of theatrical revisits over the course of the next several months as Star Wars continued its indomitable box office run. 1977 was a fateful year in my life; my parents had divorced a couple years earlier, and I was still trying to get my bearings after my mom quickly remarried and forced me into a detestable blended-family situation. I hated my stepdad’s guts, and the feeling was mutual on his end, which led me to move in later that summer with my father, a freewheeling bachelor and business owner who lived near Oakland, California. Compared to the stifling repressed dullness of suburban West Michigan in the 1970s and the vibrant cultural stew that permeated the SF Bay Area at that time, my move across the continent really felt like traveling to a galaxy far, far away.
Even though it was cool to be out on the West Coast, I was still a new kid in my community, stuck in an awkward phase of life. Star Wars provided both an escape from the swirl of confusion I was working through on so many levels, and a continuity with interests I’d had as a precocious reader of the dime-store sci-fi paperbacks that my dad left sitting around our home as a kid (there were also his not-very-well-hidden stacks of Playboy and National Lampoon magazines, which also had their formative influences...but that’s a story for another time).
As I settled into this newest chapter of my life, Star Wars became less of a riveting full-throttle adventure that rattled my existence and more like the familiar comfort watch that it has served as for countless viewers ever since. I watched the movie in different theaters, with audiences ranging from packed houses in the early going to just a few stragglers like myself tumbling in as if to fulfill some inexplicable obligation as the show lingered on. I assimilated the cinematic text across the full spectrum of my youthful consciousness, from straight edge sobriety to oh-so-incredibly-high. I perused the intricate details of George Lucas’s industry-transforming, visionary masterpiece until I had internalized all the scenes, all the sideswipes and rapid-cut transitions, all the corny dialogue, until the wear and tear of the theatrical prints had taken its toll to render the effects not so special, bludgeoned into tattered mundane familiarity.
Meanwhile Star Wars the franchise went on to become a cultural institution and a new benchmark of what popular entertainment looks like on a massive, global scale. As the years rolled along, I went on to admire the Empire Strikes Back’s ability to introduce us to new vistas and characters. I found enough enjoyable fun to make Return of the Jedi tolerable (but sorry, I was never able to reconcile with the Ewoks). Like a good dad ought, I took my kids to see the Special Editions when they hit theaters in the 90s, and later on tried my hardest to focus on the redeeming elements in the prequels. I’ll keep my thoughts on the Disneyfication of the IP to myself for now. Nothing else subsequently released under the Star Wars imprimatur ever galvanized my attention the way that the original did. A lot had to do with how that story synced so seamlessly with the crap I was working through at the time. Star Wars clicked just when I needed it — a story about an orphaned kid who found new purpose in life by trusting his feelings, blocking out the noise, and blowing up evil imperial shit. Inspirational, aspirational, and altogether sensational. Like Bill Murray once crooned, “Star Wars, nothin’ but Star Wars!”
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Until then, friends...
