Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 238: The to-do list

Hope that coffee is strong, pally. Looks like a lot of work.

Let's just do this. I'll warn you in advance: this article is more for me than it is for you. This is something I've needed to do for a while now. Might as well bite the bullet.

Last week, I mentioned the vast amount of Ed Wood-related material I still have/want to cover in this series. But exactly how much are we talking about here? Well, the only way to know for sure is simply to list as much of it as I can. Maybe, once it's all laid out in front of me, it won't seem so intimidating. Or maybe it'll seem way more intimidating. Either way, we must proceed. I think a good way to start is to divide the work into various categories.

Powering down: My harrowing struggle with temporary loss of wifi

This is pretty much what it's like in my apartment right now.

It rained very heavily for about 10 to 15 minutes early Friday afternoon in the town where I live, a mid-sized suburb north of Chicago. That was enough to knock out the power for several days. There's still no power there now. I'm writing this from my cubicle at work. I actually commuted into the city on a Saturday for the privilege of being somewhere with air conditioning, hot water, and Internet connectivity. I'll probably come back here tomorrow, too, because the power's not supposed to be back on at home until late Sunday or early Monday. Remember that Louis C.K. routine about how, because of our reliance on technology, we've all lost "the ability to just be yourself and not be doing something?" Well, that's where I'm living, baby. I live alone in a one-bedroom apartment. Without power, this place really sucks. I wish I could escape into Imagination Land or something and be happy just sitting on the couch doing nothing. Just existing. But I can't do it. I suck. Hey, even that kid from The Never-Ending Story needed a book, right? He didn't just sit there and think all that stuff up. See how I had to explain my situation in terms of pop culture references? That's how addicted to media and technology I am. I am as soft as a freshly-made eclair. Hell, it's probably a pretty nice day out there, and I'm inside blogging about my petty problems. Am I not aware that there's an outbreak of the Ebola virus right now? Yes. And that's happening to other people. People who aren't me. I feel badly that people are dying of Ebola, but that doesn't lessen the fact that I can't tweet for a couple of days or even watch a lousy DVD. I have Ed Wood movies to review!

Anyway, this is an opportunity to talk about some of my online ventures which readers of this blog may not know about. I don't think I've mentioned it here yet, so let me give a plug for a project called Both of Them, Mary Worth! I basically took this Mary Worth comic strip, mutated it in a bunch of ways, and made a Tumblr out of it. Here's a recent example, which took the form of a Psycho parody:

Wouldn't you scream under these circumstances, too?

Speaking of Tumblr, if you haven't checked out edwoodwednesdays.tumblr.com, you really ought to. I've put some extra stuff there that's not part of the regular "Ed Wood Wednesdays" series. Think of the Tumblr as being the special edition with unrated, value-added bonus features. I've been tweeting more often lately, too, so maybe you want to follow @Joe_A_Blevins.  I'll try to make it worth your while. And this is as good a time as any to point out some of my past, failed attempts to win YouTube: songs, monologues, impressions, you name it. Nothing really got any traction there, but (god bless me) I kept trying. An example follows:



I guess that's all I really have to say right now. God, I'm bored.

Novel ideas: A comprehensive guide to the books I didn't write

"How you, uh, how you coming on that novel you're working on, huh?"

"Me, I'm a cab driver."

"Working on my novel" is one of the great cliches/lies of the Internet, a statement as comforting to those who make it as it is annoying to the ones who have to read it.

There's a whole Twitter account devoted to people's laughable claims that they're working on novels. This account has recently been turned into a book of its own by Penguin, an impressive feat since it consists only of retweets from supposed authors bragging about their creativity and productivity. Obviously, if you're on Twitter (or any social media site), you're not working on anything, especially not your novel.

And even if you do happen to write a novel, who will actually want to read the thing? Virtually no one. But, still, it's a tempting fantasy. We don't want to admit that we're bank tellers, janitors, or substitute teachers, so we tell ourselves that we're really "writers" and that the things we actually do for money are mere "day jobs." This goes for all the aspiring "artists" and "musicians" out there, too. No one is really fooled by this. And yet the charade continues.

It's hardly a new phenomenon created by the Internet either. In the pilot for the sitcom Taxi in 1978, career cabbie Alex Reiger (Judd Hirsch) counsels newcomer and aspiring art dealer Elaine Nardo (Marilu Henner) on her first day as an employee of the Sunshine Cab Company. When she says she's "not really a taxi driver," Alex responds:

"Oh, yeah, I know. We're all part-time here. You see that guy over there? Now, he's an actor. The guy on the phone, he's a prize fighter. This lady over here, she's a beautician. The man behind her, he's a writer. Me? I'm a cab driver. I'm the only cab driver in this place."

And you can see his point. There comes a time when you should drop the pretension and admit what you truly are.

Well, I'm proud to say that I am most definitely not working on any novels. I wrote one once a few years ago as part of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). It is called Perforated, and it is profoundly unreadable, perhaps even stubbornly anti-readable. I've tried to read it myself and found that this is impossible. (I dare you to get through it.)

Even though 2014 is the first year when I was first actually paid for writing something, I would never ever call myself a writer. I'm not one. Jim Thompson was a writer. Dashiell Hammett was a writer. James M. Cain was a writer. I just work for a market research company. That's the real me, as reluctant as I am to admit it.

But there's a part of my brain that won't stop coming up with ideas for novels. I will confess that I've put myself to sleep many nights thinking about these would-be books, imagining both their composition and eventual reception. I'm never going to actually write any of these books, but I want to get some mileage out of them before consigning them forevermore to the cemetery of expired dreams. So here, for your reading pleasure, is a fairly comprehensive list of my "aborted" novels. I'll give you their titles if I have them, plus a general description of their contents. I'm not including The Secret Testimony of Miserable Souls, my never-to-be-completed second NaNo novel, because I actually did finally make a short story out of that.

NOTE: These are not "joke" ideas fabricated solely for this article. The following are all ideas I legitimately considered fleshing out into novels at one time or another.

THE MARITIME TRILOGY

This is the big one, the magnum opus that would have defined my career as a writer. Vaguely inspired by the writings of Herman Melville (Moby Dick, Billy Budd) and Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter), it's actually three very separate, distinct volumes, published years apart and linked only by the vague thread of "the sea" and those who make their living from it. As such, it only makes sense to discuss these non-books one at a time.

A fitting soundtrack to the book.

The Scarlet Stevedore - This book would run a couple hundred pages and have the same general sense of pacing as a typical romance novel, though the plot is not romantic in nature. I imagined that this would be by far the most popular entry in the series.

As the title indicates, this novel is about the dockworkers who load and unload cargo from ships. Most of these fellows, at least in the book, are brawny in appearance and coarse in manner. But the title character, whose name would have been something like "Adrian," is distinguished by his unsullied good looks, lovingly maintained blond hair, and relatively refined manners. His coworkers don't resent him because he's actually good at his job. Here, the word "scarlet" refers to his rather scandalous lifestyle as well as the bright red scarf he often wears. 

Along the way, Adrian manages to seduce men and women alike, strictly for his own entertainment. Shallow and selfish, he rather enjoys breaking people's hearts. He is not a cruel person, but he does not take life seriously and is amused by those who do. 

The stevedore's fatal mistake is courting a woman who, up to that point, has led a very pious and religious life and has been a faithful wife and mother. Spurned by Adrian, she hangs herself from a rafter in her modest home. As usual, the stevedore shrugs this off. 

But one day, the woman's husband, driven mad with grief and intent on revenge, confronts Adrian on a pier and challenges him to a fight. A lifelong coward, the stevedore backs away until he is standing at the edge of the pier and has nowhere else to go. Assessing his options, he calmly steps off the pier and disappears into the water. No more is seen of the stevedore, but his red scarf does rise to the surface. The end.

You like old-timey ships?

The Sea is a Briny Mistress - This is the centerpiece of the trilogy, and I wanted it to run at least a thousand pages, maybe more. My desire was for The Sea is a Briny Mistress to become one of those difficult-to-read "classics" assigned to bored and resentful teenagers in high schools across America. As such, the plot would move extremely slowly and the language of the book would be very poetic and flowery, with lengthy philosophical digressions. In short, I wanted this book to be a slog for readers so that, when they finished it, they would feel like they had truly overcome something. 

The story concerns a young man who grows up in a shipping town in the Northeastern United States in the 1850s. Everyone in town is very practical and business-minded, but he is intellectual and curious as a child and is always asking impossible questions that the adults in his life cannot and will not answer. Frustrated, he takes comfort in staring at the Atlantic Ocean and develops the fixed idea that this vast body of water must hold some answers for him. 

As soon as he is able, then, he joins the crew of a cargo ship and embarks upon his new life on the ocean. But the people on the ship are, if anything, even more practical and hard-nosed than the people with whom he'd grown up. They offer the protagonist no answers to his questions. The young man becomes even more frustrated and focuses his attention on a fellow crew member, a grizzled, bearded old man who never speaks. 

Years pass in this manner, and ultimately the man gives up on his philosophical pursuits and settles into the reality of his life on the ship. There are storms and outbreaks of scurvy along the way, but these are presented as mere factual events with no symbolic significance at all. 

One calm night, however, the sky turns a rather incredible shade of reddish-orange, and the man temporarily regains at least a little of his old curiosity about the universe. He stands at the railing, staring at the sky, when he is unexpectedly joined by the bearded old man. The young man senses the presence of the older man but does not turn his head to look at him; neither wants to avert his gaze from the sky. "The silence of God," says the young man, "she is deafening." "Aye," says the old man. It is the only conversation they've ever had. The ship sails on towards its next destination. The end.

A Life Asea (or: Elysium on a Tramp Steamer) - After the ponderous tome that was The Sea is a Briny Mistress, the so-called "Maritime Trilogy" would end on a light note with this slip of a book that barely qualifies as a novel and clocks in at only about a hundred pages. It's simply a series of gently nostalgic monologues by an old salt who reminisces about his life, shares some anecdotes about his experiences on a tramp steamer, and indulges in some crude philosophizing about the nature of existence. Though vanity and memory loss make this fellow a less-than-reliable narrator, he nevertheless manages to convey a genuine contentment with his lot in life. I want to note that I first envisioned this book at least ten years ago, well before the 2013 release of the movie Elysium.

CUSTOM OF THE AGE IN THE HOUSE OF INNOCENCE

Edith Wharton, my taskmistress.

In college, I had two consecutive courses in which the career of Edith Wharton was covered in great detail. Along the way, I managed to read most (or a great deal) of what she had written and eventually came to resent her the way anyone might resent a demanding boss, though I got some enjoyment out of the novel Custom of the Country and the short story collection entitled Roman Fever.

I felt that Wharton ended up repeating a lot of the same ideas and themes in her writing again and again, and I decided that I could write a Wharton-type novel myself.

The plot would have centered around a handsome but weak-willed man who meets a beautiful, slightly mysterious woman at a snooty society party. They converse only briefly, and the height of eroticism is reached when his glove accidentally brushes her elbow. He is engaged to be married, for reasons of social convenience rather than love, to another woman; and she has a vaguely scandalous background, so a relationship between them is unthinkable. But, still, they obsess over that one fleeting encounter.

The elbow and the glove haunt their memories. Nothing much else really happens here. They both spend about 27 chapters feeling lousy about this arrangement, and eventually one of them dies. The other considers attending the funeral but ultimately decides against it. The end.

LIFE WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY

This probably would have ended up as a short story, but who knows? I might have padded it out to novel length had I really been overtaken by inspiration.

This is the strange, supernatural saga of an unrepentant, irredeemable criminal (most likely a child murderer) who is given a very lengthy prison sentence and then, defying all natural laws, virtually stops aging. The plot would unfold over several decades, maybe even a century. The world outside changes, but this one particular criminal never does. He leads a very quiet, orderly existence inside the prison and rarely speaks, preferring to spend his time reading, but the other inmates give him a wide berth because there is something deeply unsettling about his very presence.

Prison officials try to suppress the story of the seemingly deathless inmate, but eventually word gets out and he becomes internationally famous. There is a widespread belief that he is the Devil or God incarnate, and cults form in his honor with devotees around the world. Scientists, too, take a keen interest in this most unusual man and demand to study him. I don't know where the plot would have gone from there, but I would have read a lot of Stephen King to get in the proper mindset for this one.

THINGS GOT SUPERPORNY SUPERQUICK

This would have been one of my few attempts at writing something in a purely contemporary vein. I pictured this as the kind of slightly "hip," irreverent novel that might be a minor success in paperback form at chain bookstores.

This would be a sort of modern picaresque novel about a fellow who more or less blunders his way into situations reminiscent of pornographic films, minus even a hint of eroticism. Our protagonist and narrator (calling him a "hero" would be pushing it) is dumpy and underemployed, as are most of the people he bangs in public lavatories and other equally unappetizing locations as he goes about his day.

The weirdest thing about this guy is how blasé he is about all of the unlikely events of his life. The title of the book gives you an indication of his sloppy, informal way of talking. He's fond of adding the prefix "super-" to words, for instance.

This is a tough one to explain in the abstract. The humor of the novel derives (one would hope) from the main character's way of talking, thinking, and behaving. After spending a chapter or so with the guy, the reader would get a sense of what he was like and how he tends to react to things.

THE VERY IDEA OF IT

I don't know why, but I tend to think about The Very Idea of It just about every time I use the bathroom at work. Gross, I realize, but nevertheless true. The title comes from The Very Thing That Happens, a 1964 collection of "fables and drawings" by Russell Edson. I've never seen or read Edson's book, but a copy of it appears in Daniel Clowes' Ghost World comic, and I suppose that sparked my imagination.

My book, The Very Idea of It, would start out as an Agatha Christie-ish mystery: a locked room murder in a stately English home. Chief Inspector Pembroke of Scotland Yard is brought in to solve the case, and he interviews the handful of relatives and servants who were also on the grounds that day. But none of these folks strike Pembroke as suspicious, and no clues are forthcoming. The dead man's will is read, and everyone is satisfied with it. There is no conflict over the distribution of his estate, and no one seems to mourn the dead man at all after a while.

The story quickly fades from the headlines, and Pembroke moves on to another case without having solved the locked room murder. His reputation is slightly tarnished by this but still basically intact.

Meanwhile, however, Pembroke is secretly miserable. A man has been brutally murdered, and yet there's no outpouring of emotion for him, no public or private outcry over this terrible crime. And Pembroke, the supposedly great detective, has been revealed as impotent in the face of evil. He takes to drink. His marriage falls apart. He loses interest in his job and stops showing up at work.

The novel ends with a drunken Pembroke sprawled across the bed in a cheap hotel room, leafing through a folder of evidence related to the locked room murder in a futile effort to make sense of what has happened. He repeatedly mutters to himself: "The very idea of it... the very idea of it..."

The Caballeros; Chuck, Buddy, Elvis, Jerry Lee, and, Richard.

THE LOST CABALLEROS

Perhaps my favorite of the unwritten novels. This one requires a little bit of music history.

In October 1957, Little Richard was so unnerved by the sight of a piece of the Sputnik satellite falling to earth that he temporarily renounced popular music and joined the ministry. In March 1958, Elvis Presley was inducted into the Army. In May 1958, Jerry Lee Lewis suffered a major career setback when the British press made a front page scandal of his marriage to his 13-year-old cousin. In February 1959, Buddy Holly died in a plane crash while on tour. In December 1959, Chuck Berry was arrested under the Mann Act for transporting a teenage girl across state lines for immoral purposes.

And so, in a little over two years, five of the founding fathers of rock 'n' roll music were felled in one way or another.  By 1960, it really seemed like rock music had been little more than a passing fad. Was this all coincidence or were there sinister forces at work?

This novel suggests that these five young men were a victim of a rather outlandish plot by the Central Intelligence Agency (then a fairly new organization) to "reclaim" America's youth by destroying the corrupting influence of rock 'n' roll. One by one, these five men are rounded up by the CIA and told that they have been selected to take part in a top-secret government mission and that their participation is not optional.

They meet in a secret sub-basement deep below the White House, where a CIA agent informs them that they will be going undercover to collect information on communist subversives hiding in the United States. Their cover is that they will be disguised as a mariachi band from Mexico called "The Los Caballeros." Buddy Holly, a Texan, informs the CIA that "los" means "the," so the band's name translates as "The The Gentlemen." Begrudgingly, the CIA changes it to "The Lost Caballeros."

In truth, none of this matters. The CIA just wants to control the lives of the five men for a while and get them conveniently out of the way so that the seeds of their downfall can be planted elsewhere. (Buddy's plane is tampered with; Elvis' induction process is set in motion; even the Sputnik incident is orchestrated.)

Meanwhile, the Caballeros embark upon their manufactured mission and encounter internal problems of their own as they travel incognito through the United States playing mariachi music to smallish crowds. Ornery, money-hungry Chuck Berry becomes the group's leader because no one dares challenge him. Buddy is the naive small town boy who treats this as a great adventure. Elvis is the flirtatious ladies' man, more interested in chasing skirts than hunting reds. Little Richard is the religious one who believes he has a direct pipeline to God. And Jerry Lee is a whirling dervish of chaos never more than a few seconds away from a fight.

Naturally, a woman comes between them at one point. Specifically, Buddy meets and falls in love with a young lady named Riley Switch, with whom he carries on a chaste, sweet courtship. He even writes a song for her, a tune he thinks will be a smash hit: "Riley Switch/Riley Switch/You done make my heart a-twitch." Later, he finds Riley in bed with Elvis in the motel where the Lost Caballeros are staying, setting up an epic Holly-Presley fistfight. Later, Buddy changes the lyrics of his song ("Riley Switch/Riley Switch/She's a low-down cheatin' bitch."), then discards them altogether and uses the melody for a song called "Peggy Sue."

I was toying with the idea of having the entire story be told by an elderly Jerry Lee, who is supposedly writing his memoirs from the Missouri ranch where he has retired.

THE GELDED GIFTHORSE

Never got too far with planning this one, but The Gelded Gifthorse was to be a savage parody of young adult (or YA) novels in general and ones about horses in particular. The "hero" is Trevor, a dishwater-dull lad of 11 or 12 whose parents are so bored with him that they send him to live with his aunt and uncle who have an estate in the country. There are no other children on or near the estate, and Trevor spends much of his time in the stables, carrying on one-sided conversations with the horses. After a while, he is given a steed to call his own: a sullen, broken-down gelding named Toby who is just about ready for the glue factory.

Trevor puts a lot of time and effort into bonding with Toby and even invents an elaborate fantasy life for the two of them, but the disgruntled, phlegmatic animal is having none of it. In the climax, Toby kicks Trevor in the head, leaving him simple-minded. The uncle considers shooting the horse but ends up shooting the boy instead.

GAMESHOW! (or: CA$H AND PRIZE$)

This is not a "novel," per se, but rather a themed collection of short stories. The idea for this took hold in my mind when I bought an album of TV game show theme songs. Looking over the track listing, I noticed that the titles of these programs often suggested danger, drama, conflict, and intrigue. Some of them sounded almost like vintage spy novels. But these names could be applied to all kinds of situations. So Gameshow! would consist of stories called "Password," "To Tell the Truth," "Jeopardy!," "The Wheel of Fortune," "Let's Make a Deal," and more.

None of these would have any direct connection to the shows for which they are named. The titles would just serve as inspirational starting points. Maybe "Password" is about a double agent with a lousy memory who forgets an important phrase he's supposed to say at a crucial time. Or "To Tell the Truth" might be a humorous story about someone who is forced by circumstances to tell an uncomfortable truth about himself in a social situation, perhaps meeting his future wife's parents for the first time.

Anyway, this book would have been a chance for me to indulge in my love of game shows without actually writing about them.

THE BIG BOOK OF ROCK 'N' ROLL FABLES

This is one of the more recent additions to the roll call of books I'll never write. Like Gameshow!, it's another collection of short stories built around a single theme. In this case, the idea would be to write an alternate-universe version of rock history, one incident at a time. The stories would be wildly fictional, but the characters would all be drawn from reality. "Crazy Man Crazy," for instance, is about the declining years of Bill Haley, arguably rock's first superstar; it would have been written in the style of Cormac McCarthy. "The Lost Caballeros" (see above) might have been reborn as a short story for this collection, too.

And best of all might be a twisted tale called "The Last Sullivan Show." In reality, The Ed Sullivan Show ended in 1971 after 23 years of presenting some of the biggest names in entertainment, including Elvis and the Beatles. In my alternate timeline, however, it ends in 1978 when Ed reluctantly agrees to have the Sex Pistols on his show. The story builds to an incredibly violent and bloody climax with Ed Sullivan and Johnny Rotten fighting each other to the death on network television.

PINK FLAMINGOS

Yes, this is a novelization of John Waters' 1972 cult classic movie about the battle between two families for the title of "the Filthiest People Alive." But it's not what you're thinking. Most novels based on movies are artless, mercenary hack jobs that merely take a film's script and turn it into clumsy prose. It's not so much writing as it is reformatting. But I wanted Pink Flamingos to be a genuine, honest-to-goodness satirical novel. It would actually be written in the style of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and would treat the events of the movie as if they were absolutely real.

THE DULLARD TRILOGY

I never really got as far as imagining the plots or characters of these novels. The general idea, however, was to write a series of books with the most boring and uninviting titles imaginable. They'd be "normal" novels on the inside, whatever that means, but the titles and covers would make them look like unimaginably tedious textbooks. I have decided to call this a "trilogy," but the series would have gone more than three books if I could have come up with more titles for them. For now, the trilogy consists of Ice Floes of Norway, The Lost Art of Scrimshaw, and The Mating Habits of Migratory Seabirds. You have no idea how much pleasure I've taken in imagining people's bafflement over these non-books.

TROLLEYTOWN FROLICS: The Making and Unmaking of an American Classic (and other pseudo-reference books)

An example of the fictitious Trolleytown Frolics comic strip. There are so, so many more.

I'm just wild about pseudo-documentaries, mock biographies, manufactured histories, and utterly fraudulent reference books, so there's a whole file drawer in my brain devoted to such projects.

The most dominant of these is probably Trolleytown Frolics: The Making and Unmaking of an American Classic, the story of the creation and development of a comic strip that debuted in the 1930s and is still (supposedly) running today, even though its original creator is long dead. Loosely inspired by the sad saga of cartoonist Percy Crosby, Trolleytown Frolics is the story of how an artist has his creation basically stolen from him, leaving him broke and insane. His comic strip passes from artist to artist over the years, with each transition taking it further away from its roots. New characters are added, others dropped, and the gentle whimsy of the early days evaporates over time.

The current version of the strip is churned out by an assembly line of anonymous writers and artists, and the cast is a confusing jumble of human and animal characters, only a few of whom actually date back to the Great Depression. With newspapers in decline, the very existence of the strip is now in doubt.

I was much more interested in the Trolleytown Frolics saga several years ago, when I wrote and (crudely) drew dozens upon dozens of examples of the strip, mostly from the later "bad" days of the feature when it had become a pale clone of Garfield. My ardor has since cooled, but I still have a thick folder filled with Trolleytown Frolics strips, most drawn in ball point pen or pencil on lined notebook paper. In addition, I still occasionally draw characters from the strip -- Rabbit Sam, Thirsty Lad, Mean Maxine, Sadie Nightingale, Skippy the Wonder Boy, and Uncle Penguin -- on any scrap of paper that lands in my possession.

I have a couple of other false history projects, too, but nothing so well-documented or baroque as the history of Trolleytown Frolics.

One is the saga of the most tampered-with television series of all time. It starts in the late 1950s as a frothy domestic comedy called Oh, Those Lembecks! and ends in the early 1970s as a gritty cop drama simply called Lembeck. Never really a hit, it stays on the air mainly due to network politics and the exchange of favors among the top brass. Over the course of 13 years, this television show inadvertently manages to reflect all the changes in television programming over the course of an extremely volatile period of American history, not just shifts in audience taste but in morality as well.

Without intending to do so, the producers of Oh, Those Lembecks! managed to create the perfect document of mid-Twentieth-Century American popular culture. Along similar lines was the story of a Martin and Lewis-esque comedy team and their rise and fall in show business. I can distinctly remember typing up a complete timeline for this duo, including various milestones in their career.

THIS IS US AT THE LAKE HOUSE

These five friends reconvene at Copco Lake every 5 years.

Considerably more straightforward and sincere than most of my proposed novels, This is Us at the Lake House was directly inspired by the Five-Year Photo Project, in which a group of five friends recreate the same vacation photo once every five years at California's Copco Lake.

I don't know why exactly, but I was truly fascinated by these otherwise unremarkable photos and what they conveyed about the nature of time and its often devastating effect upon our lives and our bodies. I made a collage of the mens' faces to show how they changed over the course of 30 years. That collage was essentially going to be my "outline" for the novel, which would have spanned the years from 1980 to 2010.

I tried to avoid learning anything about the real-life guys and their lives. I wanted to make up all that stuff on my own. Judging these five men solely by their faces, I developed character profiles for each of them.

The central character is a smart, sensitive guy who acts as sort of the Kevin Arnold/Gordie Lachance of the group. He notices and remembers things more than the others do. Then, there's the unshakable zen master, the one who simply accepts whatever happens to him and is fond of quoting fortune cookie messages as if they were profound philosophical statements.

There's also a shy, nerdy guy who acts as a sort of sidekick/tag-along to the group and never feels like he quite belongs among them. He's nicknamed "Me, Too" because of his overuse of that phrase.

And then there's "Bulldog," a short but scrappy fellow who makes up in loyalty what he may lack in refinement. He's always there when you need him, and he is very protective of the rest of the group.

Maybe the most interesting and dynamic character is the one guy who's a wild card: possibly brilliant, possibly insane, possessed of great talent and potential but also dogged by a fearsome self-destructive streak. His life is much more up-and-down than those of the other guys, but he keeps making it back to the lake house every five years, right on schedule.

There are marriages, divorces, successes, and failures along the way, and through all of these calamitous events, the five men still find the time to meet and reconnoiter at the lake house they once knew as teenagers.

PRESCOTT, WEST PERTUSSIS

I'll end this survey (for now) with a sentimental favorite. I read Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio as an adult and realized that it would have had a profound effect on me when I was 14 or 15. As an adult, however, all I could think to do was parody Anderson's book and the characters and stories contained within it. I can remember coming up with ridiculously frumpy names for the townspeople, like "Hearth Haverbrook" and "Mercy Pumpkinquaver."

Here's a representative example of the text, one of the few cases where I actually bothered to write something down for a potential novel:

     Boredom is an inevitable fact of life in Prescott, West Pertussis.  A layer of dullness covers the town like a fine, even coat of whitewash on a good picket fence.  It is the kind of place where the prevailing form of birth control is apathy and dreams regularly go unfulfilled without significant protest.
     To Chalk Whitcomb, Prescott was simply "regular."
     "Yes, sir," he'd often remark, "what we have us here is a "regular American town," and all who heard this statement were inclined to agree, for Chalk knew of which he spoke.  In his capacity as editor-in-chief of the Prescott Morning Bee, Chalk Whitcomb had diligently chronicled the goings-on in the town, such as they were, for some thirty years.  No one in Prescott, not even the Reverend Milksop, was better acquainted with the very heart and soul of the town than Chalk.
     The summers are hot here in Prescott.  Winters cold.  Middling in between.  The town went for Roosevelt in the last election and seems poised to go for Taft in the next. Does it matter that both Roosevelt and Taft died decades ago? It does not.

And that'll just about do 'er. If I ever abandon another novel, I'll add it to this article.

Parallel lines: Same basic story, two different movies...

A few years back, a daffy but intriguing theory made the rounds on the Internet claiming that The Blues Brothers (1980) has the same basic plot as The Sound of Music (1965). It sounds implausible at first, but then you start to examine the evidence and it almost adds up. Jake and Elwood, like Maria, are sent on a mission by a nun, assemble a musical group, sing some songs, run afoul of Nazis, and have to make a hasty retreat from their big show at the end. I searched for an attribution for this particular theory so that I could give its creator the proper credit. All I could really find, though, was this fairly recent blog post and a 2004 A.V. Club interview with Blues Brothers director John Landis, who discusses the issue candidly:

O: There's kind of a long-running thing on the Internet comparing the original Blues Brothers and The Sound Of Music, on a point-by-point plot basis. Were you aware of that? 

Elwood and Jake Blues

JL: No, but that's funny. I think you could do that with any movie. I saw Galaxy Quest and A Bug's Life, and both of those films are completely, plot-point-by-plot-point, a movie I made called ¡Three Amigos! 

O: Did you bring that up with anybody involved with those films? 

JL: No. People don't understand this: Ideas are important, but they're not essential. What's essential and important is the execution of the idea. Everyone has had the experience of seeing a movie and saying, "Hey! That was my idea!" Well, it doesn't mean anything that you had that idea. There's no such thing as an original concept. What's original is the way you re-use ancient concepts.

And he's right. There are a finite number of basic stories out there, and writers have been doing variations on them for generations. But, still, it's interesting and illuminating to see the parallels between stories and how the same essential idea can be executed (Landis' word) in very different ways in very different settings. We're all probably familiar with the notion that Hollywood movies come in pairs. It happens every year: two films with very similar subjects and ad campaigns are released within a very short span of time. Buzzfeed has done a nice roundup of these so-called "twin movies." That's just part of the motion picture business. What's more intriguing, though, is when these plot similarities occur among films that are released years or even decades apart and are not all that similar on the surface. Here, then, are some of the strange cinematic doppelgangers I've noticed.

NOTE: None of this is meant to imply plagiarism or copycatting on the part of any directors or screenwriters. I'm just pointing out some interesting connections between dissimilar movies Readers should know that SPOILERS abound in this article. Proceed with caution.

Se7en (1995) and No Country For Old Men (2007)

Morgan Freeman and Tommy Lee Jones are cops who have seen too much for too long.

The common thread: A grizzled old lawman, disillusioned and reaching the end of his career, suddenly finds himself confronted with a criminal unlike any he's ever known, a seemingly unstoppable psychotic killer who operates by his own twisted moral code. While the old-timer is justifiably wary of this extremely dangerous criminal, a brash younger man directly and heedlessly challenges the killer, with tragic results both for himself and his wife.

What do you do when you've spent a career in law enforcement and have only seen the world around you get worse in the time you've been on the force? Do you surrender before what's left of your soul is destroyed, or do you keep fighting against longer and longer odds? 

That's the conundrum facing Detective Lieutenant William Somerset (Morgan Freeman), a homicide cop in some unnamed metropolis in David Fincher's Se7en, and Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), a sheriff in a West Texas border town in Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men. "I feel overmatched," says Ed Tom, and it's likely William would agree. These battle-scarred veterans think they've seen it all, but they're proven very wrong by two of the most terrifying psychopaths in screen history. 

For Somerset, it's John Doe (Kevin Spacey), a sanctimonious self-styled avenger who cruelly tortures, mutilates, and (usually) kills his victims for their perceived sins. For Sheriff Bell, it's Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a merciless black-clad bounty hunter who believes in Destiny and Fate and will kill people on "general principle" even if there is no material gain to him. Doe and Chigurh are shadows, phantoms, seemingly impossible to trace. They're only spotted when they want to be, and generally, those who see them are sorry they did. So confident are these men that being in the middle of a police station (Chigurh is once arrested, Doe turns himself in) does not even hinder their plans.

Se7en and No Country: Two doomed couples.

We should definitely be afraid of these men, yet in both Se7en and No Country, there is a brash young guy, essentially decent if a bit bullheaded, who is not nearly scared enough. In Se7en, it's Detective David Mills (Brad Pitt), Somerset's cocky new partner. Mills is no stranger to violence, having worked homicide in other cities, but he soon finds himself out of his depth here against John Doe. 

Over in No Country, meanwhile, we have welder and hunter Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin), who very foolishly decides to run away with $1 million he finds at the corpse-strewn site of a drug deal gone very wrong, thus incurring the unholy wrath of Chigurh. Moss is not unfamiliar with violence either, having served in Vietnam, but he's no match for Chirugh. 

Both Mills and Moss taunt the killers, the former in person (Mills says Doe is "a movie of the week, a fucking t-shirt at best"), the latter over the phone (Moss says he's going to make Chigurh his "special project"). Without revealing too much, our headstrong young men soon learn these threats were ill-advised. What's especially fascinating to me is that in both films, the young man has a justifiably worried young wife -- Gwyneth Paltrow in Se7en, Kelly MacDonald in No Country -- who ends up as collateral damage in the escalating war. These women pay dearly for the mistakes of their respective husbands, but not before expressing their worries to the older, supposedly wiser men (Freeman and Jones), who ultimately cannot help them.



Further similarities exist. Both Somerset and Bell have developed deadpan, morbid senses of humor to cope with their work. Each does a bit of narrating in their stories. Both, astonishingly, comment on the ironic expression "a crime of passion." When another cop in Se7en describes a murder as a crime of passion, Somerset responds, "Yeah, just look at all the passion on that wall." And in his opening monologue from No Country, Bell describes the actions of a killer he helped convict and execute: "Papers said it was a crime of passion, but he told me there wasn't any passion to it." 

Weirdly, like Desperate Living (1977), both films use the corpses of dogs as ominous omens. In both films, the disillusioned lawman is advised against retirement by another man closer to his own age. In Se7en, it's R. Lee Ermey's police captain. In No Country, it's Barry Corbin as a former deputy who was handicapped in the line of duty. But ultimately, the decision rests with the men themselves. Bell doesn't want to "put his soul at hazard," while Somerset reluctantly agrees that this world, while not "a fine place," is still "worth fighting for."

Groundhog Day (1993) and The Music Man (1962) 

Bill Murray and Robert Preston adjust to small town life... eventually.

The common thread: A know-it-all cynic travels to a quaint small town for reasons that are purely professional, but he unexpectedly finds love and humanity there and ultimately decides to stay there permanently.

They have it all figured out, these guys. They know all the angles. They've done it all before. Traveling salesman Professor Harold Hill (Robert Preston) and TV weather man Phil Connors (Bill Murray) are middle-level hucksters and hustlers whose insincerity goes straight to the marrow. They're what you'd call "genuine phonies." Each has attained a measure of local or regional fame: Hill as a conman extraordinaire whose escapades are enviously discussed among his fellow peddlers, Connors as a quip-slinging media celebrity whose jokey forecasts provide comic relief from the news of the day. They're both rather impressed with themselves, yet they've not really amounted to anything. Neither one really matters worth a damn. Were they to be run over by a bus, they'd likely go unmourned. 

But still, armed with a haughty contempt for the common people (whom they consider to be gullible rubes), these men travel for business reasons to quirky little small towns where life has slowed to a crawl. While Hill goes to River City, Iowa to convince the folks there to buy uniforms and instruments for a boys' marching band he claims he'll direct (a scam he's pulled time and again), Connors travels to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania to (once again) cover the annual Groundhog Day festivities there. For both these men, these trips are merely stops along the way to bigger and better things.

Winthrop speaks!

These trips will turn out to be anything but routine for our charming rogues. Phil Connors gets caught in an inexplicable time loop, causing him to relive the same day (February 2) over and over again. Harold Hill must get deeply involved in the lives of the people in River City in order to sell them on the idea of the brass band, but he also has to work overtime to maintain his dubious cover story against increasing skepticism. 

The bottom line is that both Phil and Harold have plenty of quality time to spend in these jerkwater burgs and plenty of chances to get up-close-and-personal with the townspeople. Phil becomes a confessor/therapist to some of the local yokels (including Rick Ducommun) and eventually turns into an all-purpose Mr. Fix It, attending to problems in Punxsawatwney wherever they occur, be it a kid falling from a tree or some ladies in need of roadside assistance. Harold, likewise, is able to draw a sad, fatherless little boy named Winthrop (Ron Howard) out of his shell, and he turns four constantly-arguing men on the local school board into an inseparable barbershop quartet. 

Throughout all their misadventures, our protagonists have goofy sidekicks who act as chorus figures or sounding boards. Both such sidekicks are played, incidentally, by comics well-known for innumerable appearances on late night TV talk shows. Groundhog Day's Larry (Chris Elliott) is a cameraman Phil's worked with for years and who has accompanied him on this road trip to film his report on Groundhog Day. The Music Man's Marcellus Washburn (Buddy Hackett) is an old colleague of Harold's, an ex-traveling salesman who has since gone straight and carved out a life for himself in River City.

Our heroes' redemption means nothing if they don't also find true love. Fortunately, Groundhog Day and The Music Man have that covered. Their leading ladies -- TV producer Rita (Andie MacDowell) and town librarian Marion (Shirley Jones) -- are easily the most intelligent, principled, and well-read characters in their respective movies. The heroes, thus, have to become better people in order to win them over. At first, both Phil and Harold are seeking the company of... uh, less discriminating ladies. Harold sings "The Sadder But Wiser Girl for Me," his ode to fallen women. Phil initially searches for -- and finds -- a woman he can charm with a few good pickup lines. 

But both of these men see the error of their ways and fall in love with women who are both idealized and idealistic. One of The Music Man's catchiest numbers, "Shipoopi," sings the praises of "the girl who's hard to get," while Groundhog Day has its famous "slapping montage" showcasing all of Phil's many, many unsuccessful attempts to win the heart of the fair Rita. These women have high standards. Marian's mother thinks her daughter is looking for "a blend of Paul Bunyan, Saint Pat and Noah Webster," while Rita reads Phil a laundry list of the qualities she is seeking in an ideal mate. Rita is Phil's shipoopi... but he can win her yet!

Similar types in Groundhog Day (left) and The Music Man (right): goofy sidekick, idealistic love interest.

Blazing Saddles (1974) and Oz the Great and Powerful (2013)

Great pretenders: Cleavon Little and James Franco are unlikely but effective heroes.

The common thread: In the late 1800s, a confident young man barely escapes death and winds up, more or less by happenstance, in a strange new place he is expected to save from dangerous invaders. Using his wits and enlisting the help of the citizenry, he's able to accomplish this daunting challenge through an outlandish, large-scale plot designed to fool the bad guys. Along the way, he acquires a troubled, down-and-out sidekick, whom he helps to redeem.

These places are in trouble. Rock Ridge needs a new sheriff. Oz needs a wizard. And these guys can't arrive a second too soon either. Their help is desperately needed. It's a good thing neither Bart (Cleavon Little) nor Oscar (James Franco) had anything better to do. Bart, a black railroad worker, has been sentenced to death by hanging after hitting his idiotic and racist boss Taggart (Slim Pickens) on the head with a shovel. Oscar, a third-rate traveling magician and a first-rate ladies man, is dodging the irate strongman husband of one of his (many) sexual conquests. These guys are living on borrowed time. 

Jim and Finley: Sad sack sidekicks.

In each of these unpromising lives, a highly improbable miracle suddenly occurs. In Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles, the unscrupulous attorney general Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman) convinces his state's imbecilic, philandering governor (Brooks) into appointing Bart the new sheriff of Rock Ridge as part of his plan to destroy the town so he can run the railroad through their land. In Sam Raimi's Oz the Great and Powerful,  Oscar leaps into a hot air balloon that is then whisked off by a tornado to a strange and exotic land far away. After some close calls, he is deposited safely in a river bed in this unfamiliar yet beautiful terrain.

The people of Oz knew a wizard was coming to save them from the Wicked Witch, who has been terrorizing the land with her army of flying howler monkeys. Similarly, the people of Rock Ridge knew a replacement sheriff was coming to save them from Lamarr and Taggart, who have been terrorizing the town with their army of rustlers and marauders. Bart and Oscar both find themselves in trouble quickly, but both come up with clever ways to get out of tight spots and impress those around them. (Oscar uses a dove from his magic act to distract one of the monkeys, while Bart pretends to take himself hostage in order to escape the racist wrath of the citizens of Rock Ridge.) 

Soon, too, each of these men acquires a sidekick. Arriving at the sheriff's office in Rock Ridge, Bart finds a prisoner in the drunk tank -- whiskey-soaked ex-gunslinger Jim (Gene Wilder) -- hanging upside down from the cell's top bunk. When Bart asks if he needs help, Jim casually replies, "Oh... all I can get." Bart helps Jim and the two become fast friends and allies. In Oz, likewise, Oscar finds a forlorn winged monkey named Finley (Zach Braff) entangled in some plants and about to be devoured by a lion. Using more of his magic tricks, Oscar saves Finley, who quickly becomes his loyal servant and companion.

Oscar's risky scheme is put into action.

Eventually, Bart learns about Lamarr's sinister scheme to take over Rock Ridge, just as Oscar comes to find out about the plot of a witch named Evanora (Rachel Weisz) to rule the land of Oz. The simple folks of Rock Ridge don't seem very formidable compared to the thugs (including Klansmen and Nazis) enlisted by Lamarr and Taggart. Oscar, too, isn't given much to work with; the people he's supposed to protect are mainly farmers and tinkerers. Under these circumstances, Bart and Oscar rely on what they do best: faking it. If you can't beat 'em, they decide, then trick 'em. Their plans, though far-fetched, are effective. Bart has the citizens make a perfect copy of Rock Ridge to use as a decoy. Once the bad guys are lured to the fake town, Bart uses dynamite to blow them up from afar. Over in Oz, Oscar and his subjects put on what is essentially a large-scale magic show using fireworks and a projector to trick Evanora and her sister Theodora (Mila Kunis) into thinking that they're dealing with an immense and powerful god. 

I should point out at this juncture that the conclusions of Blazing Saddles and Oz the Great and Powerful are both very similar to those of  ¡Three Amigos! and A Bug's Life, the same films John Landis mentioned at the beginning of this piece. A group of citizens are being oppressed by bullies, so a hero leads them in a high-risk scheme to frighten the bad guys away. In all instances, the communities win their freedom at the end.

The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Back to the Future (1985)

Dorothy Gale and Marty McFly travel a long way... without really leaving town.

The common thread: A frustrated adolescent, antagonized by local authority figures and finding little help at home, travels a great distance through fantastic means...without actually leaving town. In this new yet somehow familiar place, our protagonist encounters alternate versions of people he (or she) already knows and must help these people accomplish certain tasks and reach their full potential before returning home.

Shape-shifting villains Miss Gulch and Biff Tannen.

It's frustrating being a teenager living in a small town where nothing seems to happen and the adults don't listen to your problems. Dorothy Gale (Judy Garland) and Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) know that all too well. 

Dorothy lives in a desolate Kansas farming community whose wealthiest landowner, vindictive spinster Almira Gulch (Margaret Hamilton), despises her and singles her out for punishment. This is a problem, as Miss Gulch has a great deal of authority and wields it cruelly. At the start of The Wizard of Oz, she plots to deprive Dorothy of her most-prized possession and only companion, her Cairn terrier, Toto. Dorothy's adoptive parents, Aunt Em and Uncle Henry (Clara Blandick and Charlie Grapewin), are useless to her in this situation. They're too involved in their work to listen to her problems, and they can't stop Miss Gulch either. 

In Hill Valley, Marty has problems of his own with two powerful adults. At his school, Principal Strickland (James Tolan) calls him a slacker, warns him he won't amount to anything, and coldly tells him his band will never play at the school talent show and that he should just give up. At home, Marty's weak-willed parents, George and Lorraine (Crispin Glover and Lea Thompson), are just as beaten down by life as Uncle Henry and Aunt Em. George cannot stand up to his obnoxious boss, Biff Tannen (Thomas F. Wilson), who has totaled the family car, which Marty was planning to use for a weekend getaway with his girlfriend.

Luckily, both Dorothy and Marty have at least one friendly adult apiece in their worlds -- kooky, white-haired eccentrics who live well outside of normal society. For Dorothy, it's Professor Marvel, a traveling psychic and conman who has stopped along the way to have some dinner. The only adult who isn't too busy for her, the Professor converses with the girl for a few minutes before sending her back home. For Marty, it's Doc Brown, a mad scientist whose scatterbrained inventions are usually failures. (Doc, like Dorothy, is a dog owner. His pooch, Einstein, has a vaguely Toto-like role in this film.) 

Both the Doc and the Professor are occasionally capable of speaking words of wisdom, but a lot of what they say is well-intended bunk. In both films, there are scenes in which these men make fumbling attempts at "reading the minds" of their young companions. Please watch and compare.

After prologues marked by disappointment and frustration, Dorothy and Marty survive dangerous, cataclysmic events that transport them to strange new places, thus setting their respective plots into motion. In Dorothy's case, a cyclone hits her family's farm and takes the farmhouse -- with Dorothy in it -- to the magical land of Oz, an impossible and exotic fantasy land. At least that's her perspective on the events. In reality, she has suffered a concussion and is hallucinating, never actually leaving her bedroom. 

In Hill Valley, Doc has converted a gull-winged silver Delorean (as eccentric a vehicle for inter-dimensional travel as Dorothy's farmhouse) into a time machine and is demonstrating this fantastic invention to Marty in a mall parking lot when suddenly he is fired upon by angry Libyan terrorists (as pitiless and dangerous a threat as the cyclone), forcing Marty to jump in the time machine and take off. He dematerializes from the mall parking lot and then rematerializes in the Hill Valley of 30 years previous, traveling a great distance while paradoxically remaining in the same space. In an instant, he has jumped from 1985 to 1955! This echoes an observation made by Dorothy in her film about transportation in Oz: "My! People come and go so quickly here!" Fittingly, the first terrain Marty encounters in 1955 Hill Valley is farm country very much like Dorothy's hometown. (He even hits a scarecrow!) The mall has not yet been built.

Both Dorothy and Marty abandon their modes of transport (the farmhouse and the Delorean) and explore the nearest population center. For Dorothy, it's the town square of Munchkinland. For Marty, it's the town square of 1955 Hill Valley. The two movies treat these places very much the same: as bright, cheerful locations that utterly astound our travelers. In Back to the Future, the use of  the song "Mr. Sandman" on the soundtrack in this scene is highly reminiscent of the use of music in The Wizard of Oz, because it helps give the Hill Valley of 1955 an otherworldly, dreamlike feel. The song has no apparent onscreen source. It is not being played by a band or a jukebox. It's just sort of there in the atmosphere. This links it to the similar-sounding "Optimistic Voices" number from Oz. ("You're out of the woods, you're out of the dark, you're out of the night...") Interestingly, "Mr. Sandman" was popularized by the Chordettes, while "Optimistic Voices" was performed by the Rhythmettes. Connections abound!

Lahr and Glover: These guys need help!

It's crucial now to mention that our travelers both encounter familiar faces in these strange locales. Dorothy, for instance, sees "fantasy" versions of people she knew in Kansas. Miss Gulch has become the Wicked Witch of the West. Three of her family's farmhands (Ray Bolger, Bert Lahr, and Jack Haley) have been reincarnated as a scarecrow, a lion, and a tin woodsman. And good old Professor Marvel is the titular wizard who lives in seclusion in the astonishing Emerald City. Marty, on the other hand, encounters younger incarnations of his parents, George and Lorraine, plus Biff, Doc, and even Mr. Strickland, who looks exactly the same. Teenage Biff is the primary antagonist in 1955, filling roughly the same role as Miss Gulch/The Wicked Witch. His goon-like pals are analogous to the Flying Monkeys employed by the Witch. 

Before Dorothy can return home to Kansas, she has to defeat the Witch and help the three farmhands gain the brains, courage, and heart they need to become fully-realized beings. Likewise, before he can go "back to the future," Marty has to defeat Biff and help George gain the courage he needs to ask Lorraine out. (In one of the movie's masterstrokes, both of those goals are accomplished simultaneously when George punches Biff.) After hectic getaway scenes, orchestrated by Professor Marvel and his counterpart Doc Brown, our heroes return home and find that their lives look a lot more optimistic now. They've solved their problems in dreamland, so to speak.

American Graffiti (1973) and It's a Wonderful Life (1946)

Try as they might, neither Ron Howard nor James Stewart makes it out of his hometown.

The common thread: A nice young guy dreams of escaping small-town life and finding romance and adventure in the big wide world, but he is prevented (at the last moment) from doing so and must settle down, get married to his hometown sweetheart, and take an unglamorous but necessary job in the little community where he's lived all his life.

Small towns can be tough to escape. Steve Bolander (Ron Howard) and George Bailey (James Stewart) find that out the hard way in their films. 

In George Lucas' American Graffiti, Steve is a high school graduate from Modesto, CA who is scheduled to fly out East to attend college the very next morning with his good friend, fellow graduate Curt Henderson (Richard Dreyfuss). Steve's a polite, clean-cut young fella who is well-regarded in Modesto. He was voted Class President and got a scholarship from the local Moose Lodge. He sees college as an opportunity to experience life outside of his hometown, including dalliances with women other than his long-time girlfriend Laurie Henderson (Cindy Williams), a cheerleader who's still in high school. He plans to give Laurie the old "let's see other people" routine and then casually skip town. But this idea devastates Laurie, who's built her whole future around life with Steve. They spend a lot of the night arguing, and by morning, Steve has agreed to stay in Modesto while Curt takes off for the East Coast. 

Ron Howard is not aboard this plane.

American Graffiti's famous epilogue informs us that Steve becomes an insurance salesman in Modesto, and the film's sequel, More American Graffiti, reveals that (as expected) he and Laurie married and had children. This wasn't the life Steve chose, but it was the life that chose him.

Young George Bailey's dreams don't come true.

George Bailey can relate. The hero of Frank Captra's It's a Wonderful Life, George is the patron saint of self-denial. Each year at Christmas, we watch him sacrifice his own hopes and dreams for the greater good of those around him. The script of Wonderful Life is relentless in its efforts to keep George living in little Bedford Falls and working at his family business, Bailey Buildings and Loan. As a kid (played by Bobbie Anderson), he joins the National Geographic Society and dreams of traveling the world.

 Like Steve, who all but drools over the college girls he plans to meet, young George plans to have several wives and maybe a harem. Things don't work out that way, though. First, George puts off going to college so that his young brother Harry can attend school. Eventually, George has to take charge of the family business permanently to prevent it from falling into the clutches of mean old Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore). Like Steve, George has a girlfriend (Mary, played by Donna Reed) whose ambitions do not seem to extend past the city limits. Even when George and Mary wed, they are prevented from going on their honeymoon when a financial crisis breaks out. An old injury to his ear, incurred while saving Harry's life as a child, makes him unfit for military service during World War II. Thus, the grounding of George Bailey is complete. 

But like Steve Bolander, George is well-liked in his hometown and will have a long and agreeable life there. We hope. Capra's film ends on a note of extreme optimism and celebration, with the whole town coming to George's aid in a crisis, but Lucas' film is more ambiguous. The last sound we hear before the end credits is the roar of the plane as it leaves Modesto and Steve behind. George -- a man destined never to travel -- believes that the "three most exciting sounds in the world" are "anchor chains, plane engines, and train whistles," but Graffiti shows us these can be melancholy sounds, too.

Where American Graffiti and Wonderful Life really overlap is in their central romantic relationships: Steve and Laurie in one film, George and Mary in the other. In both movies, it is the woman who truly puts the effort into landing a mate, while the man is "busy making other plans," to quote John Lennon. 

One of the funniest and somehow saddest scenes in American Graffiti occurs when Steve attends a dance at his old high school, which Laurie still attends. They've been bickering about Steve's plan and are not in the greatest moods, to say the least, when they're suddenly asked to lead a dance. Now, the spotlight -- a very literal (and bright) spotlight -- is on them, and they have to pretend to be a happy couple for the sake of appearances. On the dance floor, undulating slowly to "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," Steve and Laurie quietly continue arguing, and a great truth about their relationship is unexpectedly revealed. She had to make the first move at every crucial step in their romance because he was too scared, while he hasn't bothered to remember even most basic facts about their courtship. This might well be a turning point for both of them. Note the conflicting emotions on display, with a weeping Laurie telling Steve to "go to hell" as she holds onto him as tightly as she can.

George Bailey's life is also forever changed when he decides to attend a dance at his old high school. There, he sees Mary for the first time in years, and together they have one of cinema's all-time great first dates. He, Mary, and everyone else at the dance wind up falling into a swimming pool underneath the gym floor, and they keep dancing anyway. Typical of the movie's insistence on preventing George from having too much fun, though, his father dies this very same night, and he has to leave Mary's side to be with his family. Years later, Mary makes another attempt at wooing a now-embittered George by reminding him of that magical night they once shared. This scene, set at Mary's family's house, is probably the dramatic highlight of Capra's film. Like the scene in American Graffiti, this one has a lot of contradictory emotions at play: love, attraction, anger, and sadness, and they all come to a boil in one tear-filled embrace.

One more factor linking these two films is their historical connection to major American wars. These conflicts occur off-screen but are crucial to the films' subtext nevertheless. In his book Cult Movies, critic Danny Peary astutely pointed out that It's a Wonderful Life lets us see two different versions of Jimmy Stewart: the chipper and upbeat prewar Stewart and the hardened and more cynical postwar Stewart. Capra's film was released after World War II, but many of its events are set before the war in Europe. America was a different place after that war, and Stewart's changing demeanor reflects that. 

A great deal of American Graffiti's emotional power comes from a knowledge of history the audience has but the characters onscreen do not. The film was released in 1973 but set over ten years earlier in 1962. (The poster's famous tagline: "Where were you in '62?") America had undergone cataclysmic change in those ten years. John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X were all assassinated. The Vietnam War escalated under JFK's successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, and soon young men from across America were being drafted, never to return. The epilogue informs us that this was the fate of Graffiti's most-innocent character, Terry "The Toad" Fields (Charles Martin Smith). 

But on this innocent night in 1962, all of these events are still in the future. We know what's in store for them, but they don't. They're still more or less living in the 1950s. Most of the songs on the famed American Graffiti soundtrack are from that decade. Life is about to hit these kids hard, just the way it hit George Bailey hard. Fitting, then, that both movies end with nostalgic hymns to days gone by: the traditional "Auld Lang Syne" in It's a Wonderful Life and the Beach Boys' "All Summer Long" in American Graffiti.

High school dances prove pivotal to the couples in American Graffiti and It's a Wonderful Life.

National Lampoon's Animal House (1978) and MASH (1970)

Tim Matheson and Peter Riegert enjoy golf, as do Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland.

The common thread: Against the backdrop of a very staid and rigid institution, a group of fun-loving anarchists and misfits face off against some uptight, hypocritical snobs who want to force our heroes to conform and obey the rules. Needless to say, the snobs are not only defeated but utterly humiliated in the conflict.

Officially, the inspiration for National Lampoon's Animal House was a series of articles Chris Miller had written for the Lampoon magazine about his hard-partying days as a fraternity brother at Dartmouth in the 1960s. But as I see it, the true precedent for John Landis' Animal House was established eight years previously by another freewheeling, anti-authoritarian comedy, Robert Altman's MASH, based on Richard Hooker's 1968 novel about his experiences in the Korean War. 

By the time the Lampoon film reached movie theaters, a smash-hit sitcom (M*A*S*H) spun off from Altman's movie had been running on CBS for six years. Universal Pictures demanded that Landis include at least one recognizable star in his cast, and that task went to Donald Sutherland, who had top-lined Altman's film and become a star in the process. Animal House doesn't really take specific story beats from MASH so much as it takes its overall episodic structure, rebellious attitude, and certain basic archetypes among the cast. 

In both films, our fun-loving slobs embark upon a heroic quest for hedonistic pleasure, putting them in direct conflict with a powerful institution -- the United States Army or Faber College -- that wants to suppress and control them. MASH kicks off with an ironically-appropriated quote ("I will go to Korea.") from President Eisenhower and pompous military music on the soundtrack. Animal House starts much the same way, showing us the moronic quote ("Knowledge is good.") at the base of a statue, later decapitated, of Faber College's founder, Emil Faber, accompanied by appropriately stately music adapted from Brahms' Academic Festival Overture. 

From there, the films introduce us to a pair of freshly-arrived newcomers. In MASH, it's surgeons Captain Pierce (Donald Sutherland) and Captain Forest (Tom Skerritt). In Animal House, it's college freshmen Larry Kroger (Tom Hulce) and Kent Dorfman (Stephen Furst). All four of these characters will be referred to by nicknames throughout the film. Pierce and Forest are called "Hawkeye" and "Duke," while Kroger and Dorfman become "Pinto" and "Flounder." Chummy, familiar nicknames are key to the male bonding in both stories. 

At roughly the end of the first reel in each movie, our newcomers meet a shaggy-looking, dark-haired, hard-boozing "wild card" character. In MASH, it's "Trapper John" McIntyre (Elliott Gould), first seen drinking a martini, complete with an olive. In Animal House, it's John "Bluto" Blutarsky (John Belushi), first seen guzzling beer and casually urinating outdoors. When we first meet him, McIntyre is a man of few -- or no -- words, anticipating the often-non-speaking Blutarsky. (Landis has cited the mute Harpo Marx as an influence on the character.) These characters' lack of verbal expression makes them seem especially savage. 

Go-betweens: Colonel Blake and Robert Hoover.

At the opposite end of the scale are the "go-between" characters in these films: relatively responsible and sane fellows who are supposed to be setting a "good example" for the other men but who are too passive to accomplish much and mostly just let chaos reign, even taking part in said chaos themselves because, hey, it's fun. In MASH, we have the unit's commanding officer, Colonel Blake (Roger Bowen), while in Animal House, we have Delta's chapter president Robert Hoover (James Widdoes).

Gould and Belushi: a couple of animals.

MASH and Animal House have numerous parallel escapades: a "golf" scene, a "road trip" scene, a "peeping Tom" scene, etc. Naturally, both films have tasteless sequences that queasily mix death and sex. MASH has its infamous "Last Supper" scene in which a Polish dentist (John Schuck) plans to commit suicide because he thinks he's gay (a plot point that anticipates a great deal of gay-panic humor in the Lampoon film), while Animal House has the scene in which Otter (Tim Matheson) plans to take advantage of a young woman's death in order to score easy sex from her roommate. 

Both films dare to mine laughs from racial (or, depending on your vantage point, racist) humor with deliberately-offensive black characters. MASH has a hulking football player known as "Spearchucker" Jones, while the heroes of Animal House venture to an all-black music club and run away in panic from the glowering clientele they encounter. To top it off, both films end with large-scale public events attended by all the characters. Both events descend into farce: a wild football game in MASH, an even wilder homecoming parade in Animal House.

No film about rebels would be complete without some villains to rebel against. There are only two out-and-out baddies in MASH: Major Frank Burns (Robert Duvall) and Major Margaret "Hot Lips" Houlihan (Sally Kellerman). But these two characters are memorable enough to inspire a whole slew of antagonists in Animal House.  

In the M*A*S*H television series, Frank Burns (as played by Larry Linville) is a foppish fool. Robert Duvall's Burns is considerably more serious and more threatening. His various negative traits are split up among three of the authoritarian creeps in Animal House. His glowering, humorless nature and devotion to the rules found a home in the character of Dean Wormer (John Vernon). His sadism, treachery, and foul temper were inherited by Douglas C. Niedermeyer (Mark Metcalf). And his completely hypocritical moral piety was adopted by Greg Marmalard (James Daughton). Burns puts on a big show of praying and reading the Bible in front of his rowdy tent-mates, but he's also carrying on an extramarital affair with Margaret. 

Likewise, Marmalard decries the Deltas' molestation of women while he's receiving an unsuccessful hand job from his date. The stunned expression Burns wears as he's carted away in a straight-jacket foretells the unflattering freeze frames and unpleasant fates assigned to Doug and Greg at the end of their film.

MASH's Major Frank Burns (top) anticipates three of the villains in Animal House (bottom).

MASH's principal villainess, "Hot Lips" Houlihan, switches sides during the movie and by the end is rooting for the heroes in the climactic football game. Animal House solves this problem neatly by splitting "Hot Lips" into two people: Babs Jansen (Martha Smith) and Mandy Pepperidge (Mary Louise Weller). We meet both of them at an Omega rush party early in the film where they serve as "nametag hostesses" for the male villains. Judgmental Babs refers to "Pinto" and "Flounder" as "a wimp and a blimp," and Landis cannily shows her -- but not Mandy -- giggling at this mean-spirited remark because he's setting Mandy up for redemption later in the film. Mandy is actually dating one of the bad guys, Marmalard, but not sleeping with him. (She's already been deflowered by "Otter," one of the good guy Deltas.) Even when Mandy gives Greg that infamous hand job, she's wearing rubber gloves. 

Meanwhile, the irredeemable Babs, who represents the worst qualities of "Hot Lips" Houlihan, pines for Greg and schemes to become his girlfriend.  The last time we see her is at the apocalyptic homecoming parade, where her dress is ripped off and she's left standing in her underwear in the middle of a crowded street. This is very, very similar to the MASH scene in which "Hawkeye" and the gang arrange to expose and humiliate Margaret by lifting up the flap of the tent where she's showering.

Babs Jansen (top) and Margaret "Hot Lips" Houliahan (bottom) suffer the same fate.

Phantom of the Paradise (1974) and Shock Treatment (1981)

Swan (Paul Williams) and Farley Flavors (Cliff De Young) are rich, successful, and not to be trusted.

The common thread: Two men vie for the affections of pretty, talented Jessica Harper. One is a hapless bespectacled nerd. The other is a mysterious and powerful tycoon and media magnate. The magnate schemes to make Harper a star while having his geeky rival disgraced and locked away.

It started life as a direct sequel to 1975's The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but by the time Shock Treatment limped into theaters in 1981 it had undergone several title changes, cast departures, and script revisions and ended up as something barely resembling its predecessor. In fact, Jim Sharman's oddball film bears a much closer resemblance to another 1970s rock movie musical, Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise (1974). These films, all released by adventurous 20th Century Fox, comprise something of a trilogy and have overlapping cult followings -- Phantom and Shock being like smallish, yet inhabited planets orbiting Rocky Horror's sun.

Let's ignore that sun for a while and explore those small planets. While conceived and written entirely independently of one another, Phantom of the Paradise and Shock Treatment look enough alike to be first cinematic cousins. Both are love triangles in which the mutual object of affection is adorable, apple-cheeked Jessica Harper. In Phantom, she is aspiring singer Phoenix. In Shock, she is suburban housewife Janet. Both women, though good-hearted, are ambitious and (almost) able to be swayed into a sinful, decadent life by the promise of stardom and wealth. 

Trying to preserve Harper's integrity are two hopeless dorks. Phantom's hero is Winslow Leach (William Finley), a struggling songwriter who pays the bills by planning backup piano for a repugnant Sha Na Na-type nostalgia act called the Juicy Fruits. His counterpart in Shock is Brad Majors (Cliff De Young), Janet's befuddled (and possibly unemployed) husband, who has accompanied her to a television taping. 

The respective villains of Phantom and Shock, Swan (Paul Williams) and Farley Flavors (also Cliff De Young), are introduced in very similar ways: both are first glimpsed sitting in darkened booths high above the audience, reacting with pleasure at a kitschy opening musical number ("Goodbye, Eddie" in the first film, "Denton USA" in the second), which has provoked the proper response from the tacky, tasteless audience of mindless wannabes. These are secretive and powerful men who rule media kingdoms and have sycophantic lackeys at hand to do their (copious) dirty work.

Truth and fiction side by side: Jobriath and Beef.

Condemnation of the mass media and its audience are key themes of both films; these movies are brutal in their depiction of those who produce and those who consume pop cultural junk -- game shows, pop records, soap operas, etc. Phantom is largely concerned with the music business, while Shock is aimed at television, but they both present us with grotesque parodies of media celebrities. 

In Phantom, besides the Juicy Fruits (who later end up as an Alice Cooper-type "horror rock" outfit called the Undead), an androgynous, preening rock star named Beef (Gerrit Graham) who actually does resemble real-life glam rocker Jobriath, and Swan himself, a high-living potentate modeled after Phil Spector. (In earlier drafts of the script, the Swan character was actually called "Spectre.") 

Meanwhile, over in Shock Treatment, we have Bert Schnick (Barry Humphries), a sinister, pale-skinned game show host pretending to be blind for audience sympathy and Nation and Cosmo McKinley (Pat Quinn and Richard O'Brien), two European actors pretending to be doctors for the sake of their reality-based TV show, Dentonvale, a medical soap opera with real medicine apparently being dispensed by two totally unqualified quacks. In both films, the audience simply adores all of these terrible people, largely because they've been conditioned or brainwashed to do so.

A great many plot points and key motifs are shared by Phantom of the Paradise and Shock Treatment. Just as Swan has Winslow framed for drug possession and imprisoned in Sing Sing, Farley arranges for Brad to be committed to the faux-hospital on Dentonvale, where he will be "cared for" by Nation and Cosmo. Both Swan and Farley take over the lives and careers of Jessica Harper's characters, keeping them dazed and disoriented with drugs while preparing them for a truly sinister climactic show with secret underhanded motives. 

The nerdy hero of each film manages to escape from imprisonment and disrupt that show, confronting the villain live on stage in front of a frenzied audience. Being media satires, cameras and monitors are omnipresent in both films. The characters in Phantom and Shock are always being taped, a process facilitated by the fact that both films occur within artificially-made entertainment complexes: Swan's lavish new "rock palace," The Paradise, and Denton's cavernous DTV studios. Also, there is a great deal of attention paid in these films to the signing of contracts, with all the Faustian baggage that goes with it. In these movies, if you sign on the dotted line, you're making a pact with the Devil.

Jessica Harper attracts nerdy guys like Cliff De Young (top) and William Finley (bottom).

The Muppet Movie (1979) and Boogie Nights (1997)

Kermit the Frog and Mark Wahlberg hope to break into show business.

The common thread: A naive but uniquely talented newcomer, who is especially admired for one part of his body, is "discovered" and thus joins the exciting but treacherous world of show business, where he meets a number of eccentrics and outcasts with whom he eventually forms a sort of surrogate family.

If you were to give me unlimited money and resources to produce a film, there's no doubt about the one I'd make: Muppets Boogie Nights, a successor to Muppets Treasure Island (1996) and The Muppets Christmas Carol (1992). I know what you must be thinking. What could the Muppets possibly have to do with Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights? In my opinion, plenty. Both The Muppet Movie and Boogie Nights, at heart, are about flawed, incomplete individuals who find meaning and fulfillment through performing and through kinship with one another. A showbiz family is is not a traditional nuclear family, but The Muppet Movie and Boogie Nights assert that it can be every bit as valid and valuable a social unit, perhaps more so.

Dom and Burt, pals both onscreen and off.

How wonderful that Kermit the Frog (Jim Henson) is discovered in The Muppet Movie by a talent agent played by Dom de Luise, friend and frequent costar of Burt Reynolds, who plays porn director and center-of-the-universe Jack Horner in Boogie Nights. 

Many of the roles in Anderson's film would be ideal for the familiar Muppet characters. Kermit would be Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg), the guileless up-and-comer with an especially valuable body part. While Dirk's claim to fame is his enormous member, Kermit's is a pair of extra-long frog legs, which attract the unwanted attention of Doc Hopper (Charles Durning, another longtime costar of Burt Reynolds). Every theatrical troupe needs its leading lady. In Boogie Nights, it's Amber Waves (Julianne Moore). In The Muppet Movie, it's Miss Piggy (Frank Oz). 

Elsewhere, spacey Muppet valley girl Janice (Richard Hunt) would make an ideal Rollergirl (Heather Graham), and gofer Scooter (also Hunt) would make a fine substitute for errand boy Scotty (Phillip Seymour Hoffman). The neurotic, sad-eyed Gonzo the Great reminds me a great deal of poor, pathetic Little Bill (William H. Macy). I can just imagine him coming home to find that one of his chickens has been unfaithful to him. Best of all, Fozzie Bear was born to play the part of Brock Peters (John C. Reilly). If John C. Reilly were a Muppet, he'd definitely be Fozzie. They even sort of look alike. And the default Reilly character (the one he plays in most of his films), a sweet but too-eager sidekick who's just a little slow on the uptick and who wants to be liked so much that his desperation is palatable, is the very heart and soul of Fozzie Bear.

To give you a visual idea of what Muppets Boogie Nights might look like, here is a cast chart that matches up the famed Henson puppets with the characters from the P.T. Anderson film they'd be playing in my proposed remake.

Partial cast for a Muppets/Boogie Nights crossover. Fer sher.

Hollywood, make this happen. You know where to reach me.