Bacon Gravy

Sheila O'Malley at The Sheila Variations shows the love to the beautifully preserved time bubble that is Barry Levinson's Diner, where the Baltimore Colts of the Unitas era represent Paradise Lost and color television is still at the primitive stage (disgruntled shopper, apropos of Bonanza: "The Ponderosa looked fake"). Few rookie casts have gone on to greater glory. Mickey Rourke, Ellen Barkin, Timothy Daly, Steve Guttenberg, Daniel Stern, Paul Reiser--they were all so young then, so unmarked, their performances fresh and unforced and unencrusted with mannerisms and protective armor that would later creep in for some. (As the critic Stanley Kauffmann would later lament, at some point Ellen Barkin stopped acting and started being a sex-bomb.) It was also the movie in which Kevin Bacon's six degrees of separation shot out its branches. (True, he debuted in Animal House, but when nothing much else came his way afterwards, he turned to stage acting in NY. It was Diner that let loose the actor beneath that prankster grin and gave us the Kevin Bacon that has slivered his way into the film canon.) As O'Malley recounts, this is an unassuming classic that was nearly left for dead, the victim of premature burial.

When the studio execs first saw Diner, they didn't want to release it at all. Nobody got it. There were no stars in it. Nothing seemed to happen. Diner was going to be shelved. Paul Reiser, who played the mooch Modell ("You gonna finish that?") says in a behind-the-scenes documentary I watched:

There's a story that Barry always told afterward when the movie came out, how executives didn't know what to do with it, the studio guys, and they watched a rough cut of it, a screening, and they said, 'Look, like that scene in the diner when they're arguing about the sandwich - why doesn't he just give him the sandwich and get on with the story?' And Barry said, 'Because there is no story. That is the story. The fact that they're hocking each other for 15 minutes over a sandwich is the story.'

In the middle of this back-and-forth with the studio, someone showed a copy of it to Pauline Kael. At this point, there wasn't even a release date. It couldn't be seen anywhere. Not in New York, Los Angeles or anywhere else. But she wrote a glowing review in The New Yorker - of a film that no one, at that moment, could see.

I was at that screening, invited by Pauline not only because-because but also because I grew up near Baltimore, could serve as an interpreter to its strange tribal ways, from the lackadaisical tassel-twirling on The Strip to the all-permeating mythos of the beloved Colts to the fine delicacies of Maryland cuisine.*

What are they pouring on the french fries? Pauline asked.


"They put gravy on french fries?"

"Oh yeah. It tastes really good."

At first the movie didn't quite click. The rhythms seemed disjointed, the staging of the fake car wreck didn't quite work, there was a sense that we might be witnessing yet another Americanized version of Fellini's I Vitelloni gone askew, but then came the diner-booth scene where the characters converged and fell into place and the hilarious argument over the sandwich escalated into a guy spat and from then on Rourke and his smooth moves seemed to contour the entire movie to the bittersweet fade. How could people not love this movie? we wondered when it was over. What's wrong with them?

One of the things I miss about "back then" is the freedom of seeing something once in a cherry moon with no preconditions, no expectations, no knowledge of what's in store, no movieblog drumbeat trying to push you this way or that based upon pirated script pages or leaked scenes, of being able to unwrap something with your own eyes that didn't have a mob of fingerprints all over it. I saw Blue Velvet under those conditions, without shock absorbers, and I'm still getting over the direct impact of seeing Isabella Rossellini staggering bruised and naked across the front lawn.**

*I was also reviewing movies then for Texas Monthly.

** "Preparation for the scene in Lumberton, N.C. last year produced a strange reaction from the townspeople. The day rehearsals for the nude scene took place, a crowd - carrying lawn chairs and picnic baskets - gathered outside a local house on a tree-lined street to gawk at the filmmakers. No one knew Isabella would be nude. ''These people had brought their children and grandparents,'' she says. She went into the crowd to warn that it was a scene they might find offensive. They wouldn't listen - many were munching away on hard-boiled eggs - but seeing was believing. ''After the third take,'' she says, ''they were all gone.''