Month: September 2025

My Take on Summerville 1970, an Adaptation of My Novel Today, Oh Boy

/ wlm3 / 1 Comment

poster designed by Gil Shuler

Given that my novel Today, Oh Boy inspired David Boatwright’s and Paul Brown’s short film Summerville 1970, I won’t pretend that my critical assessment of their movie possesses the clear-eyed detachment that disinterest fosters.  

On the other hand, the number of authors who hated film adaptations of their work is legion.  For example, Gore Vidal considered the adaptation of his novel Myra Breckenridge “not just a bad movie [but also] an awful joke” and Donn Pearce, the author of the novel Cool Hand Luke, hated its screen adaptation. “They did a lousy job,” he said, “and I disliked it intensely.”  Other unhappy authors include Ken Kesey, Stephen King, and PL Travers.  Like I say, a lot of authors have hated films based on their works. 

Therefore, my admiration of the project was by no means guaranteed.

That said, I loved Summerville 1970.  

photo credit Joan Perry

Shortly after David Lynch’s death, Caroline and I watched a documentary about Lynch’s transition from painting to movie making.  In the documentary, he described a revelation he experienced at film school: it suddenly occurred to him that he could make “moving paintings” rather than merely “moving pictures.”  

In other words, Lynch attempted to render each scene of his movies so visually interesting that each still could be frozen and stand alone as a painting.  

Like Lynch, Boatwright is also a painter, and like Lynch, studied at the American Film Institute in LA. Summerville 1970 is a “painterly film,” rich in color and artistic in layout.

For example, check out this photograph Caroline took of my cameo appearance during the premiere Friday night.

When Caroline showed the shot to me, she said, “It looks like a painting.”  

“Wow, yeah, that looks like it could have been painted by Hopper,” I said.

 “Or [Thomas Hart] Benton,” she replied, which indeed is more accurate.

One of the most vexing problems a short story writer and short film creator faces is having to constrict action within a confined space and time. David does a terrific job of compressing the events of poolroom chapter of the novel into a fluid narrative that doesn’t have one second of down time.  The movie has, as all good stories must, a beginning, a middle, and end. Crisply edited, the plot unfolds efficiently with a disquieting subtle sense of foreboding.  Of course, any work of fiction requires conflict, and in addition to the central physical conflict of rednecks attacking a hippie, we have other conflicts as well: a developing high school crush, the vet’s anguish, and the lost basset hounds’ wandering.[1]

To simplify matters, David took four of my characters – Rusty Boykin and Ollie Wyborn, the co-protagonists, and Jill Birdsong and Sandy Welch, the female leads – and fused them into two characters, i.e., into a single male and a single female.   In the film, the character Rusty is actually more Ollie than Rusty. For example, in Summerville 1970, Rusty, like Ollie, hails from Minnesota and knows karate.  On the other hand, like the Rusty of the novel, cinematic Rusty has embraced the counterculture of the late ’60s and early ’70s.  In the novel, Ollie is a conformist who wants to attend the Air Force Academy. Because the film is limited to fifteen minutes, these changes make a lot of sense. 

The Jill Birdsong character of the movie closely resembles Jill of the novel, only she’s less straightlaced and less shy, though the character does maintain a quiet shyness, nevertheless.

Olivia Brooks, the actress who portrays her, is superb, as is Thomas Williams, who plays Rusty.

Not only do the main characters shine, but the minor characters do as well. Patrick Basquill’s Bobby Ray Bossheen exudes mindless menace, and his two redneck cohorts, the twin brothers Andre and Remy Levesque, come off as authentically belligerent, not-too-bright country boys. In addition, David Mandell is a stabilizing force as the compassionate bartender who attempts to maintain peace. Jill’s wisecracking friend Nanci played by Sara Rudeseal is spot-on as well. 

My favorite character of all is David Boatwright’s invention, a Viet Nam vet who tells a horrific war story to the bartender and later breaks up the fight outside the tackle shop. The actor, Logan Marshall Green, makes the vet’s PTSD seem all too real as he draws heavily on his cigarette with shaking hands, knocking back whiskey after whiskey as he shares his horrible memory of a situation that brings to mind My Lai.

In addition, the costumes, sound, and editing are all superb.  It’s truly a pleasure to watch, and I hope you get a chance to see it.

BTW, here’s a LINK to a review of Today, Oh Boy that provides a link to its Amazon and Barnes and Noble pages. .  Rumor has it that it might be screened again at the Terrace for the general public.  Fingers crossed. 

[1] I got the idea of writing Today, Oh Boy after listening an audio book of Joyce’s Ulysses.  The basset’s actual name is Hambone Odysseus Macy, but the kids who find him on the side of the road dub him Mr. Peabody.  He is the Ulysses character in the novel who wanders all over Summerville to finally making his way home safely to his family.

Sowing Discord: The Death of Charlie Kirk

/ wlm3 / Leave a comment

When I taught high school English and attempted to explain to students how karma works, I employed the analogy of dropping a pebble into a still pond. If the pebble was positive, a pearl, let’s say, the expanding concentric circles spreading outward would promote positivity.  

There’s a Liberty Mutual commercial that effectively illustrates this phenomenon:

A man notices a young girl’s doll has fallen out of her stroller and retrieves it for her. 

The girl’s mother, seeing him rescue the doll, later moves a man’s coffee from the edge of a table where it is in danger of falling off. 

A customer who witnesses the mother’s benevolence is inspired to carry an elderly woman’s groceries . .

Of course, if it’s not a pearl but a turd you drop into a still pond, the expanding karmic circles are going to be negative:

You cut someone off in traffic.

The driver tries to run you off the road, shoots you the bird, screams inaudibly from his pick-up.

You get home to discover your dog has gotten into the trash, having strewn garbage everywhere, so you yell at her, then bop her on her nose with a rolled up magazine . . .

For whatever reason, very early in his young adulthood, Charlie Kirk decided to drop out of college and become a culture warrior, to redress what he feared was a takeover of white culture by brown people, third world immigrants, and lovers who did not share his sexual orientation. To wage this battle, he became a provocateur, a master of manipulating social media platforms like TikTok, and therefore, he became rich and famous and influential because disaffected white males could identify.

Alas, unseasoned young people, like his followers, like his assassin, are susceptible to hyperbolic messaging, are easily influenced.

Not surprisingly, he created enemies, essentially because he broadcast outrageous, often racist and misogynistic statements like “Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, Sheila Jackson Lee [i.e., Black women] do not have brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s slot.”

If you’re a public figure and are dropping asteroid-sized turds like that into the karmic ocean of public discourse, you’re going to make enemies. Being provocative is dangerous, especially when your message reaches millions in a country where assault weapons are as easy to purchase as Sudafed.

Of course, I wish Charlie Kirk were still alive, and I’m thankful that his murderer, a Mormon gone bad, has been apprehended.  I pity Charlie Kirk’s wife and children.  To celebrate his death is ghoulish.

On the other hand, I find it chilling that in the United States of America that by merely quoting postmortem a political operative’s views you find objectionable can get you fired from a public university.

That is  – to coin a phrase – un-American, the antithesis of conservative, a word, unmoored from its etymology, that is now for all intents and purposes a synonym for reactionary. 

And, by the way, wouldn’t it be nice to have a president who rather than stoking anger would try to bring us together as a nation?

Hurry Up, Grim Reaper, Do Your Blankety-Blank Job, Dammit!

/ wlm3 / Leave a comment

Arnold Böcklin, The Plague

I hesitate to admit it, but searching for telltale signs of Donald Trump’s imminent demise, I squandered way too much time last weekend following threads on X as I obsessively pored over grainy telephoto shots and videos of that shambling wreck of a human being.  

Oh, yay, his mouth is drooping, look his foot’s dragging, that’s hand’s bruised, his eyes unfocused, his speech slurred––unmistakable signs of life’s impending cessation! C’mon, Grim Reaper, get it on! Deport the bastard to that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns!

But alas and alack, on Tuesday Trump reappeared in his cartoon character’s red, white, and blue outfit flanked by toadies to announce that he’s transferring his sci-fi-ish Space Command from Colorado to Alabama because Colorado allows mail-in voting.

Why, you may wonder, would a lapsed Buddhist like I-and-I misdirect his karmic energy in wishing that a fellow human would cast off his mortal coil?

My answer is “duh.”  Wouldn’t it have been peachy keen if Hitler had croaked before he implemented the Holocaust?[1]

Trump is evil.  Yesterday, for example, wasting tax payer money and Defense Department jet fuel, he ordered a flyover to drown out the voices of ten of Epstein’s victims as they pleaded for Congress to expose the names of pedophiles to help appease the horrible wrongs they have suffered.  

Trump’s flyover demonstrated peak bully behavior.  Here’s an adjudicated rapist who has bragged that his celebrity status allows him to “grab pussies” and to enter beauty pageant dressing rooms to ogle teenaged contestants, etc., etc., etc. to lord his testosteronic power over the powerless.

Then immediately, after the press conference, he called the Epstein affair “a Democratic hoax.”

Oh, and the cowardice of the Republican Congress who have jilted the Founding Fathers for this putrid attention whore so they can cling to their power and its accompanying perks.

Perhaps these self-proclaimed Christians, these hollow men, like Mike Johnson, should pause for a moment from thumping their Bibles and open them to Mark 8:36:

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

Again, alas and alack.

[1] By the way, the Smithsonian has now closed an exhibit that showed how the US turned away Jewish refugees during WW2.