I’m Joe Valdez, a film historian who writes Video Days. This newsletter tells the stories of how the films of the eighties were made. Articles are 10—20 minute reads and most will include an audio version. Video Days inverts what most movie newsletters and podcasts focus on. I devote roughly ten-percent of my article to criticism and ninety-percent to production history.
For example, you won’t find a greater fan of Francis Coppola than me, but the history of a movie like The Outsiders (1983) doesn’t begin with its director and continue with a study of his camera or editing techniques. The story began with a fifteen-year-old in Tulsa named Susie Hinton who wrote a successful young adult novel, and a decade later, a librarian from Oklahoma whose student petition for Coppola to direct a film version of that novel not only reached him, but sold him. It’s this collaborative spirit that is so often crucial in filmmaking, and often lost in time.
I’ve sourced my articles with newspaper and magazine reporting, behind-the-scenes documentaries and books, and more recently, podcast interviews. Journalists in the eighties provided detailed, ground-level reporting on these films, while authors or documentarians have the benefit of hindsight. Reporting of the time captures what people knew or felt in the moment, while documentary retrospective reveals what they understood with time. Together, they give us something neither could alone.
Video Days is not purely a newsletter for Generation X. For the older readers and listeners, you may have enjoyed these films as much as those of us who were in our youth enjoyed them when they were released, but never knew the stories behind them. For the younger readers and listeners, some of these films exist as memes, if they exist at all. You know the context but haven’t sat with the content. You recognize the signage, but might not know the stories behind the movies of the Eighties.
If we consider that the culture of any given decade didn’t follow the Roman calendar, I’d pin the Eighties to the years of 1982—1992. Take for example a movie released in 1980, but written and produced in the seventies, like American Gigolo. Paul Schrader conceived the film in 1976. Its story drips with urban alienation, a recurring theme in the films of that era. We have an early Richard Gere performance, and the appearance of model and actor Lauren Hutton signals the 1970s. Its fashion and music were cutting edge, but the picture takes place in a country mired in anxiety, not the optimism that would begin to shape popular culture in the Eighties. I’d argue American Gigolo was shaking its seventies off and many films like it needed a couple of years to embrace being of an eighties movie.
At the same time, any conversation of eighties film has to include Pretty Woman. Released in March 1990, it was written and produced in the late eighties. Richard Gere stars again, and his character may still be lonely, but he isn’t dangerous anymore, to himself or those he comes into contact with. This Cinderella tale is part and parcel of the eighties. Consider the shopping spree Julia Roberts’ character embarks on. According to our pop culture in 1990, anyone who believed in themselves could transform their lives and be rewarded with a happy ending. This myth was challenged in the film festivals of 1992, when the concept of free will in low budget, crime and punishment pictures like One False Move, Reservoir Dogs and The Crying Game was replaced by the sense that control of our lives had always been an illusion.
In a recent visit to my childhood home in Houston, the Blockbuster Video I worked at in 1995 was selling carpeting. The videocassettes and concessions were gone to make way for flooring products necessary for the next hundred-year flood of Spring Creek. The films of that era and the stories behind them live on here at Video Days.
