BY TODD GARBARINI
I
cannot stress how much I love the cinema of the 1970s. There’s never been
another decade like it. Having grown up during those years watching Disney
outings in a long-gone local drive-in and children’s fare in double features
indoors, the sudden and unexpected release of Star Wars in the summer of
1977 only whetted my appetite for similarly spectacular yarns. With the release
of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Superman: The Movie
(1978), Moonraker (1979), and The Black Hole (1979), my childhood
sensibilities weren’t disappointed. If anything, they were spoiled. There were
many low-budget films of the period as well, films that were relegated to 2nd
billing following A-listed titles at local drive-ins and for the most part
these films rarely, if ever, saw the light of day beyond their short
silver screen lives. If they were lucky, they would appear on a local
television station during a 2:00 am broadcast, or on HBO in its infancy.
Record City is an extraordinarily obscure film,
one of the last from American International Pictures (A.I.P.), that only came
to my attention last year. It was shot in 1977 reportedly on video and then
transferred to 35mm for theatrical exhibition, more than likely in regional
drive-ins. Probably done for reasons of cost than for any visual aesthetic, for
the uninitiated the result is fine. I wonder how often this practice was put
into place. Alfred Hitchcock used his Alfred Hitchcock Presents
television crew to lens Psycho (1960) in 1959 (although that was still shot
on 35mm), and six episodes of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone were initially
shot on video due to cost considerations and later transferred to 16mm,
although they all suffered from a very underwhelming clean “video†look. Record
City opened at the long-gone Rialto Twin in Rialto, CA on Wednesday, September 6, 1978 with
zero fanfare, with Bud Townsend’s Coach starring Cathy Lee Crosby on the
screen next door. It’s an obvious clone of 1976’s Car
Wash with
the locale moved from a corner car spa to a corner record emporium, an old auto
store redressed as a fictitious record store for the film.
Record
City is owned by Manny (Jack
Carter, an actor whose career spanned over seven decades) who owes the Mafia a
lot of dough. Eddie is the manager and comes at attractive women faster than
you can scream “Harvey Weinstein!†Eddie is played with considerable
licentiousness by Michael Callan, an actor I recall as Father Tommy Connors in
the “Santuary†episode of T.J. Hooker in 1985, although that
character, amazingly enough, wasn’t a pervert – at least not that we know
of. Danny (Dennis Bowen of Van Nuys Blvd. (1979) and Gas Pump Girls (1979) fame) is a store
associate with all the charisma and confidence of a fifth grade boy who tries
his best to ask out cashier Lorraine (Wendy Schaal who would go on to Where
the Boys Are ’84 (1984) and the horrendous 1985 outing Creature) on
a date. Ruth Buzzi of Laugh-In appears for good measure, and a there is
a frequent gag of a man as old as the hills who keeps fainting at the sight of
an attractive woman, as his wife (Alice Ghostly, a veteran actress of over five
decades in film and television) tries her best to resuscitate him.
For those of you who remember Sam Grossman’s wonderful
The Van (1977), that film’s star, Stuart Goetz, appears here in a
strange sequence where he gets advice from The Wiz (Ted Lange in a charming and
zealous role) about how to make it with women. The Wiz even sings a song and one
of the film’s saving graces is the inclusion of an upbeat and catchy original
score that was even pressed as a soundtrack
album on Polydor Records. Ed Begley, Jr. and a creepy partner conspire
to rob the place (instead of the Bank of America right across the street??) and
Sorrell Booke appears as a policeman who patrols the store from inside the
men’s room, of all places. Even Rick Dees plays a (here’s a stretch) disc
jockey who dresses as a gorilla (!) from the insipidly named radio station KAKA
(really??) and stages a talent show in the streets which features Gallagher and
his famous hammer. Perhaps the movie could have benefitted from that instead?