The Idolmaker Vs. Eddie and the Cruisers

I'm not sure if I saw The Idolmaker when it came out, but I wanted to because all my friends did, and talked about it a lot. I even remember the theater where it was playing in Westwood, and the cardboard life size stand ups through the window in the lobby painted in gold lightbulbs. There was an excitement around The Idolmaker that made me feel like I was missing out on an experience more than a movie. It was before I turned into a teenage film snob and had the poisonous thought everytime I saw a creative interesting movie that this would be the last one and that there were only so many great stories that could be told and given how many movies had been made by the eighties this was finite.

I thought The Idolmaker was going to be a great movie like A Star Is Born, that was my first favorite. My friend, Sean Barth, would sing the lines, "I gotta story to tell," like his life depended on it. Then, Lisa Kurstin, and a couple of other girls would get into the act, and it became a must-see movie, but I'd missed out on opening day weekend, and a couple of weekends after that, and you had to be quick in L.A. to be in the know on a movie, and I'd missed out. Well, The Idolmaker came up in a group text with Sean Barth and Josh Mills the other day, two people familiar with the film, and Sean being its biggest fan/advocate/worshipper. He wrote a text saying how excited he was to see it was streaming and he was going to watch it with his wife, who'd never seen it. "I wonder if it will stand up," he wrote, and I paraphrase. I knew how much he liked it and should've been happy he was happy to see it, but I couldn't do that.

"Stand up?!?" I wrote and I'm afraid I startled him through our high beam tele-electronic communication devices like I often do with my criticism, but I said it sincerely. I may have missed the first run, but I was clearly let down by it, so I must've seen it somewhere, even if it was on Z channel, which it would've been. Given the hype, I would've made a point of watching it but except for the posters of the Idolmaker's pop sensation, Caesare, plastered throughout the city on a PR campaign 2/3 through the movie, I had no memory of seeing it. Still, I felt bold enough to say to The Idolmaker's biggest fan that he didn't have to worry about "his movie" standing the test of time, because it had nothing to stand on. I wrote this comparing it to Eddie and the Cruisers which is my Idolmaker, and a movie I'd throw in the same basket, so I was getting pompous on Sean by comparing The Idolmaker to Eddie and the Cruisers. Sure, it's a B-movie but so is The Idolmaker no matter what my expectations were at 11 years old. but it pains me to call Eddie and the Cruisers a B movie it's so close to my heart.

Josh Mills gave me a You Tube link, knowing I don't stream, and I watched The Idolmaker last night, from beginning to end. I did this not only for myself but for Sean Barth, because I'd hurt him through my critique, and I couldn't even clearly remember seeing it. It was one of those films passed down to me through cultural transmission, and for the kids in my grade - and I stress grade - it was a movie we'd all remember. It may have been forgotten by those a year or two younger than us - it was that specific. I had a lot of mixed feelings watching it last night, but The Idolmaker was better in a B movie way than I was giving it credit for largely for capturing the look and feel of the early '60s, so I'm writing this blog out of a penance for Sean. But before I'm too repentant let me also add I'm not entirely ready to go back on my original critique.

For starters, the 11 songs that fill the movie are all forgettable, and it's laughable that the record industry thought that there'd be at least a couple of hits from it like on Grease or Saturday Night Fever. The music was hackneyed at best, and if it's supposed to show the Idolmaker who pens them as brilliant it fails, but I'm not sure it is trying to do this. It wants us, the audience, to think he's talented, and that if it wasn't for his looks, he wouldn't be such a loser in the music business, but he doesn't seem that talented. His dancing is hammy, and the songs are too. This was a core dilemma that Eddie and the Cruisers solved, because Eddie was a rebel rocker with a poetic vision that was linked to Rimbaud's Season in Hell and how I learned of this book. He was ahead of his time and the songs were memorable - especially Dark Side.

The Idolmaker's character is much more ambiguous than Eddie Wilson. He wants to be famous, but there must be at least ten lines about him balding in his late twenties and that being the kiss of death for a pop star. And in spite of his talent (?), we're not led to believe The Idolmaker wants anything but the American dream - to make his first-generation Italian parents proud of him, even if his dad is a gangster. So, the movie could've painted him as an immigrant's son wanting the American dream, finding it, and then wanting artistic salvation, but it doesn't do this. The Idolmaker is no Eddie Wilson because he doesn't really seem to want to do anything but make it, even though there's a line or two on a dinner date with a fellow publicist about how Tommy B, his first discovery, is too stupid for his songs. "Is that because he's your substitute personae," the publicist should've asked, but she didn't.

The Idolmaker doesn't tackle the central question of who is the protagonist and what's in it for him? He becomes a PR genius, of sorts, and this alone drives him on, but is it to make his creations more famous than him, and then to control them, out of a kind of jealousy? It's hard to tell but the movie inches towards this dark portrait, in spite of its lightness. I kept wanting the Idolmaker to be a tortured ugly man who must find these pretty boys to take his place and that it's through them he finds his creative spirit, but the movie doesn't do this. It just kind of wallows in his fame as songwriter/impresario/PR genius, who is single mindedly obsessed on fame, but there is no fall from grace, or redemption. There is nothing for The Idolmaker, but a suburban manor.

And yet, I enjoyed watching it. I wasn't sure if it was entirely for the nostalgia of my friends who loved it or for who I was when it came out and what it meant to my friends, or what it meant to be a moviegoer in 1980, when the world was unfolding before me, and I was dreaming of my teenage life, that had barely begun. Ray Sharkey gave a great performance, I think, and though I'm angry that his character wasn't better written, that doesn't mean he didn't do the best he could with the script and the songs. He squeezed as much life out of the role as possible, and without him there wouldn't have been a movie, though Peter Gallagher is bizzare as Caesare. I'll give him a thumbs-up for a truly weird performance, but it does verge on camp. I don't think Gallagher did anything so ambitious ever again and may have followed this up with Summer Lovers, a movie I watched way too many times on Z channel.

There were a couple of cringey and/or nightmarish scenes of Tommy B, the Idolmaker's initial hitmaker. He practically rapes a 14-year-old girl in a car, after his first gig. The Idolmaker breaks it up only to give her this horrible speech about "What did she think she was doing?" and basically, blames her for Tommy B.'s atrocious behavior, before making her swear never to tell anyone about it and gives her a signed record to shut her up. Then, he chastises Tommy, but it doesn't seem to be coming from a moral position but as a business proposition, because they are on the verge of making it through bribes to local radio stations. I'm really not sure what the movie was trying to say except that anyone could have a hit record if they had the right look, voice, song, and charisma, and a PR machine, but it wasn't saying this cynically. In some ways, The Idolmaker was ahead of its time in seeing that America was obsessed with an almost "reality TV" like star not really good at anything, but I don't think that's what the filmmakers or screenwriters were trying to say, and I guess why it's a B movie.

The only character that has any emotional depth is Caesare the busboy living with his grandma and a good Italian kid until the Idolmaker gets his claws on him. There is something of a shattered toy in Peter Gallagher's expression, as he plays an innocent with no character or identity in real life, forced to take on the conceit of a rock n' roll star with animal sexuality and intrigue. I think if the movie went deeper here it would've been an interesting study in identity since he was about the age when a lot of teenagers have an identity crisis and want to be someone else, but in this case, he's being trained to be someone else, and the end result is weird. He is a manipulated doll in the Idolmaker's world, which should be tragic, but it's impossible to feel anything for these characters, and maybe that's the problem with the film. It doesn't really tell the story of rock n' roll except from a PR side, which is a behind the scenes study in reading the zeitgeist.

Eddie and the Cruisers are the zeitgeist. We may not feel anything for the characters because it too is a B movie, but we feel the story and it's clear - Eddie is a visionary and he's on a path to immortality through an early death that his bandmates don't understand, save "Wordman," who writes his songs. The Idolmaker covers the same early '60s terrain as Eddie and the Cruisers and maybe does this just as well, but the myth is harder to understand. Unless you want to be an agent, which many of my friends wanted to be, but that is a very L.A. child thing to want to be and doesn't reek of an archetypal myth.