Never say die

Imagine you’re bobbing on a lake, floating on an inner tube while watching “Jaws” on a giant inflatable movie screen on the edge of the shore. Just as John Williams’ infamously terrifying score builds to an impending shark attack, the surface of the water you’re sitting in starts to ripple and break. But before you can even wonder what is happening, and just as the people onscreen are running for their lives, an underwater diver grabs your feet and gives you the scare of your life.

Welcome to the world of moviegoing through the demented minds of Harry Knowles and Tim League, two guys from Austin, Texas, who are revolutionizing the way movies are made, marketed and seen.

Knowles is the founder of the powerful “film geek” Web site www.aintitcoolnews.com, which boasts 1.4 million unique readers a month, a number greater than the circulation for Rolling Stone. League, meanwhile, created the Alamo Drafthouse theater chain, where you can either watch movies in outrageously creative settings or order from a full array of alcohol while enjoying everything from new releases to cult classics inside their three Austin locations. These Texan titans have shaken the film industry to its core.

With the impending launch of Drafthouses nationwide, League and Knowles recently devised the Rolling Roadshow, an 11-stop tour in which classic and cult classic films were shown near the locations where they were filmed.

Whether bringing “Goonies” star Corey Feldman to the film’s setting of Astoria, Ore., for a 20th anniversary screening of the film; screening “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” at the base of its most famous location, Devils Tower in Wyoming; or devising wild road rallies for “Repo Man” in Los Angeles and “Bullitt” in San Francisco, the Roadshow offered film geeks throughout the West a chance to see their favorite films in a wildly new way.

“My biggest score ever was taking over an entire actual summer camp, renaming it Camp Hackandslash, and convincing hundreds of slasher-film fans who look like crazy-haired, dark-eye-shadow Goth kids to put on blue summer-camp shorts and play kickball all day before showing an all-night marathon of  movies,” Knowles laughs. “By the time [Freddy actor] Robert Englund and [Jason actor] Ken Kirzinger arrived and looked out at the crowd, they were worried an entirely wrong audience had shown up.”

Yet, while the pranks are what Knowles lives for, these screenings held far greater meaning for cast members like Feldman as they experienced anew how much their films impacted their fans.

“I hadn’t seen ‘The Goonies’ in 15 years, other than recording the DVD commentary track, which was a lot of fun but you’re not really focusing on the movie as much as goofing around,” says Feldman, who at 34 still looks like he could slip back into his teen roles. “To come here and watch the movie on Astoria’s football field, see the Goonies house and drive by all the other places we hung out at is incredible. With the water slides we rode and the tunnels we ran through, it gave us a chance at age 12 or 13 to be like young Indiana Joneses.”

Revisiting the experience

The reason Knowles’ and League’s efforts affect Los Angeles is that the movie industry provides the fuel for LA’s economic engine, and the Roadshow represented their biggest attention-getting move yet. Knowles and his band of Ain’t It Cool insiders have been stunning the industry since 1997, when just a year after launching the Web site they gained an early look at the script for “Titanic” and are generally credited with turning around a sea of negative buzz and helping the film ultimately prove to be not only a Best Picture winner but the most financially successful film of all time.

Now, following them up the coast through Bakersfield, San Francisco and into the heart of Oregon, the pair and film fanatics who joined them shed light on how LA's massive filmmaking industry impacts people on the most profound and intimate levels.

Whether racing through the streets of Los Angeles and San Francisco on movie-inspired road rallies, watching a former ‘80s cult actress enjoy a night of glory after a rough and tumble career, or experiencing the obsession Astoria still holds for the ‘80s film “The Goonies,” Knowles' and League's 11-stop Rolling Roadshow ensured that anyone involved could never think "It's just a movie" again.

"One of the things I love about film is its ability to not be about anything in the world around me, but be a place I can only go to when the lights go down," says Knowles. "You look up at the screen with a crowd of people all gathered for the communal sharing of a story. We may not agree on religion or politics, but everyone can be impressed by a great movie."

Knowles often waxes poetic about films, pointing out that while most people say things like "it's just a movie," some people change their entire lives based on what they see or hear in a cinema. He's met women who joined the FBI because they admired Jodie Foster in "Silence of the Lambs," and another woman who restarted her big-city life in the bucolic seaside town of Astoria, Ore., because she wanted to live in the town of her favorite childhood movie, the 1985 comedic adventure film "The Goonies."

 "People travel halfway around the planet to Tunisia because of 'Casablanca,' or when they go to Mt. Rushmore are they going just because of the presidents' faces or because Cary Grant pretended to run across it in 'North by Northwest'?" asks Knowles, who goes on to outline how he gained an entire life philosophy from films. "You see your favorite films over and over again, the same way that some people read certain books over and over and over — they want to revisit the experience."

Indeed, Knowles estimates that he's seen his favorite film, the 1933 version of "King Kong," more than 1,000 times, and. judging by his general enthusiasm, you've got to believe even that claim. His giant passion for the medium matches his own famously oversized body (which he caricatures on his site), and his excitement seems to make him nearly leap out of the wheelchair a broken ankle has forced him to endure throughout the nearly three weeks of the tour.

Part of the reason for his excitement is the location he's sitting amid: the tarmac of a small airport just outside the town of Shafter, Calif. Shafter is a tiny burg about 12 miles out of the hell known as Bakersfield, the kind of place most people would normally never give a second thought to — if it weren't the location of one of the most iconic scenes in film history.

"We're just outside the cornfields that Grant was chased through by the crop-dusting plane that opened fire on him in Hitchcock's 'North by Northwest,'" explains Knowles. "And even better, Tim [League] arranged for the man who flew the plane in the movie to come talk about chasing Cary, and we've got three other crop-dusters buzzing in and out of the airport to fly over the crowd and let them pretend to run for their lives."

For the Roadshow, a good deal of the fun is the nearly insane effort its attendees have to make to see the films involved. I had to take an afternoon bus to Bakersfield and then a regional bus to get dumped off on the side of a nearly barren road a half-mile away from the airport in an absurd parallel to Grant's being dropped off in the middle of nowhere just before the plane attack. A long walk later, I was coming face to face  with not only Knowles and League but the enormous, drive-in-sized inflatable screen that they inflate while blasting  the opening song of the epic film "2001: A Space Odyssey."

Even that is nothing compared to the effort it took fans to see Sergio Leone’s Western classic “Once Upon a Time in the West,” which was shown in the desert heart of Monument Valley, Utah, or the tour’s grandest adventure: a screening of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” at the base of its iconic location, Devils Tower in Wyoming. The surreal effect at each stop is that you, the audience, are a part of something greater than simply watching the film. You are now part of it, experiencing a power that even Knowles finds hard to grasp, a power that helped him overcome troublesome early years through the magic of fantasy.

“A few months before I started in February 1996, I had an accident where I got hit in the lower back and wound up paralyzed below the waist. So I couldn’t go to the movies and was practically having DTs over it, just jonesing to go,” recalls Knowles as the crop-dusters roar overhead and the crowd roars with equal approval in the distance. “As a result, I kind of went crazy about hooking up with people on film newsgroups and was finding that a lot of people had really great information from working on films, going to test screenings and reading all the different magazines.

“I cultivated a group of people who were writing and we were in the right time and right place with the right personality to get attention, because right then is when people everywhere thought pimply faced kids living in their parents’ basements were going to change the world through the Internet. And the people we were scaring just happened to be movie studios and multinational corporations.”

The reason why Knowles and his cronies scared them by the summer of 1997 was that the movie industry was falling through a disastrous period akin to this past summer’s load of flops. Studios had long thought they could pass off cinematic crapfests like “Speed 2: Cruise Control” or “Batman & Robin” onto an unsuspecting public if they just marketed the films cleverly enough.

But that summer, the old formulas suddenly ceased to work and the bad movies bombed. As Ain’t It Cool’s reputation spread, so too did the blame for the failures fell upon them.

“God bless Hollywood for screwing up so badly, because their reaction and over-reaction to all that wound up creating a point where things kind of got crazy and people started focusing on us,” Knowles recalls. “And with ‘Titanic,’ it’s hard to calculate what I did other than convince the press to hold off from attacking the film by saying this could be a great one. It made them shut up and give the film a chance to find an audience, which is what happened.

“The studios tried to artificially recreate our sort of buzz, but I haven’t let them because ultimately I really read the script and check out the casting and director choices before I start promoting a film as special,” he continues. “We discovered ‘Lord of the Rings’ a year before the public did and plugged the script of [major cult classic] ‘Donnie Darko’ four years before it was made.”

A 50 pence bet

As “North by Northwest” faded away, the screen deflated and the crowd of 300 film fans dispersed, it was time to hustle back down to Los Angeles, riding a tight fitting 3 a.m. Greyhound through the dead of night. There was no rest for the wicked, as that very Saturday afternoon, the Roadshow was hosting a scavenger-hunt-style road rally through the seamiest streets of LA in honor of the 20th anniversary of the cult classic “Repo Man.”

The rally’s prize was to win the classic car from the movie, a 1964 Chevy Malibu that in the movie housed space aliens in its trunk. The goal was to follow written and verbal clues from a CD, in search of four other Malibus, with the first person to find all four winning the movie car.

Yet, since the movie centered on comically sleazy repo men who prowl the worst streets of LA, the devious mind of League sent participants through what could most charitably be called the devil’s tour of LA — a succession of alleys, bridges and near-abandoned buildings which all seemed to feature an assortment of crack addict camps and heroin shooters. Best of all, the four alleged Malibus were in actuality spray-painted silhouettes of the cars, hidden among the most graffiti-strewn walls of the city.

“This tour was really a continuation of the things we were doing in Austin area, doing roadshows for five years, and we talked about making them more over the top. This year we thought we had resources and crew available to take time off and run tour while still operating theaters back home,” explains League, who runs the Drafthouse empire with his wife, Karri. “The hardest part for all this was getting permission from different places. We wanted to show ‘The Shining’ where it was shot at the Hotel Overlook in Oregon, but they weren’t all that thrilled to get a new round of publicity calling it “The ‘Shining’ motel.”

For my own run through the urban jungle, I was lucky enough to team up with an actual actress from “Repo Man” and a whole host of other ‘80s underground films named Jennifer Balgobin, who played Debbie the female punk in “Repo.” She was also about to be a surprise addition to that night’s reunion of the cast with “Repo” writer/director Alex Cox.

For Balgobin, the chance to take part in the road rally and the night’s reunion brought back a flood of memories. A Brit of Indian ethnicity, she had left England at 17 after telling her friends that she would make it to the big screen within five years.

“I bet them 50 pence on that, and ‘Repo Man’ came along exactly five years later, hit London and they saw it,” Balgobin fondly recalls. “I was a disco queen who was into Donna Summer, not punk, but I had to drive [‘Repo’ actor] Dick Rude to the set and he created the Mohawk for the movie and everything seeped in afterwards.”

Balgobin recalls that director Cox kept a loose and friendly vibe on the set, allowing the actors to improvise freely with what was already a wild script. The $1.5 million budget and the surrounding nascent era of independent films also added to the special spirit involved and created a film that was an instant obsession for some people, such as one USC student she met who saw the movie 13 times in the theater during its initial run.

She kept going in the indie-film circuit, working with Cox on two more films and building a friendship that lasts to this day. While the residual payments from her string of oddball film roles have been a “great” income source, she eventually outgrew her Mohawk stage and dropped out of acting seven years ago. Yet in the past year she has again felt the tug, and at the reunion she was surrounded by autograph seekers who helped her realize that even supporting roles in unusual movies can touch people’s lives.

“I was really happy to be there. When I saw it, the role's pretty simple and to see people attached to the character in such a way, I didn't know what they're getting to see. It’s like another person up there, but the actual event was just lovely, it was odd, a lot of thoughts going through my head,” says Balgobin. “The ups and downs are you just living your life. It's your job and it's your life. They're not separate but you cannot put your happiness on the outside in this world. There are days you won't be working and you have to find other ways to find happiness. You can't count on your job to make you happy.”

Never say die

With the “Repo” experience now another fading memory, the time had come to double back to the north and catch an Amtrak up to San Francisco for a special screening of “Bullitt.”

But while League hosted another brilliant scavenger hunt, this time focusing on genuine landmarks of the city that paralleled the mystery in the film, the screening itself was in a nondescript city park and my rally partner was a hopelessly addled middle-aged marketing manager who sparked a joint within three minutes of meeting me and drove around town giggling his way through the “case” while sharing his secret dream of being like the movie’s macho star, Steve McQueen.

The experience that truly mattered was the last of the four stops on my West Coast jaunt: the screening of “The Goonies” that inspired hundreds of Astorians to line up chairs and blankets on the town’s football field after being forced to dance the film’s beloved “Truffle Shuffle” dance — a move the crowd, in turn, forced Feldman to attempt.

Watching with the town’s impressive array of Victorian homes on the hills, the stars overhead and the ocean in the background, the film instantly took its audience back into their childhoods with its depiction of friends engaged in life and death adventure to save their parents’ homes and prove their “Never say die” attitude. It’s no wonder the film has proven to be one of the top 20 bestselling videos and DVDs of all time.

“I’ve never done it before, but it amazes me what you guys remember from the film. I had a line where I said ‘I want a nice wet liquory kiss’, a phrase I made up, but I think  it’s really funny that 20 years later there’s a T-shirt with that word ‘liquory’ on it because it’s not a word,” he laughs as he addresses the crowd before the film.

He took a shot at the dance anyway and displayed a quick sense of humor in dealing with their questions about the film and his career, which was spotlighted before the screening as a series of trailers from his films with frequent ‘80s sidekick Corey Haim played out on the giant screen.

Seeing the top scenes from films that remain popular to this day — “Stand by Me,” “The Lost Boys,” “License to Drive,” and “The ’burbs,” to name but a few — it was suddenly easy to recall that Feldman had a real knack for comedy and a sly sense of sarcasm that put him in good stead before an early ‘90s drug habit sent him into movies that often headed direct to video.

The love continued to pour out from the crowd of nearly 300 fans, who had turned out in even greater force in June for a larger cast reunion honoring the film’s 20th anniversary. At least two fans invited him to run for president, and one woman said she named her nephew after him. But their ultimate dream of seeing a “Goonies” sequel seemed to be an impossibility.

“It’s not looking good at this point. I think it would be a great idea, and many conversations have happened with [“Goonies” director] Richard Donner and [“Goonies” producer] Steven Spielberg, and a good script came close to being made,” says Feldman. “But Warner Bros. doesn’t want to make it without more control and so we’re stuck in the middle, like so many political things.”

But standing before a crowd of fans, having kicked his bad habits over a decade ago in addition to a happy recent marriage, Feldman still is a standard of the rare child star who manages to keep working well into adulthood. He’s working steadily with a recent successful off-Broadway run in a stage spoof of “Fatal Attraction,” CDs and touring with his rock band Truth Movement, an array of voiceover work in animated projects and a much-buzzed new horror comedy called “The Birthday” that appears to put him squarely back in line with some of his best work in “The Lost Boys.”

“It’s been a great ride so far, but although I’ve been doing this for 30 years, I feel like I’ve just begun and have much more to come. Looking back I definitely would have made some better choices on roles in the ‘90s, but everything happens for a reason,” says Feldman. “But faith in God, determination, hard work and belief in never giving up, plus a good sense of humor all help me keep it going. Now I have my wife and child, who keep me even stronger.”

Maybe Feldman will have another shot at bigger stardom some day, and maybe not. But his determination to keep trying shows what Knowles and League have built their careers around: Goonies never say die, and neither does the magic of movies.