by Jay Giampietro
Snow was falling as the secondhand smoke from Dennis’s Marlboro Light blew into my face. “A genius waits twenty years to make a movie because he only wants to do it if he’s gonna leave the audience on the balls of their asses,” he said. “If the critics are right, and I think they are, he dug into his soul with this one and we are about to witness a fucking masterpiece.”
Dennis was the chef at a pub beloved for its fried calamari in my hometown – and nine years my senior, had been introduced to me by my college buddy Matt. Matt and I had been spending our post-graduation year, 1998, watching as many of the top 100 American films listed by the AFI to mark cinema’s centennial as we could – aided in no small part by Dennis – who’d make VHS copies of his laser disc collection for us.
(This bootlegging led Matt to start stealing the VHS display boxes from video stores – so when he had Dennis’s dupes on his shelves, they’d be in the authentic cardboard sleeve. This went so far that a store called WE GOT MOVIES had a significant portion of their shelves covered in white boxes with just the movie title written on it, rather than the sexier cover of say Goodfellas or The Shawshank Redemption.)
After exhausting the American titles and with the burgeoning ambition to become a filmmaker, I wanted to wade into exploring some of the foreign masters I’d heard Martin Scorsese namedrop in interviews.
Matt and I were on his parent’s stoop chatting with Dennis, who rented the upstairs apartment of their two-family house. “Truffaut is delightful and Kurosawa is an inspiration but for me it begins and ends with Bergman and Polanski,” Dennis said. He disappeared upstairs and returned a few minutes later with a list he’d scribbled on a pad for groceries, ranking the order of the Bergman and Polanski titles I should watch, as well as two VHS tapes. “I made these for Matt but if you wanna start getting into the foreign stuff, these would be a great place to start,” he said.
Dennis was a neat-freak illustrator and his hand-drawn labels on the tapes were impeccable – listing the title, director, year, running time, and a quote – usually from the Maltin guide or Siskel and Ebert. Later that night, before putting it into my VCR, I read, “BRIEF ENCOUNTER, 1945, directed by David Lean (86 minutes) ‘Perhaps the finest depiction of romance ever committed to celluloid, SAMUEL A. JULIANO.’”
A minivan pulled up at the sidewalk where Dennis and I were waiting in the snow and the side door slid open, “let’s hurry the fuck up because I don’t wanna be stuck in the front row because my neck has already been killing me from work,” he said.
I climbed in and the the bucket seats were occupied by four of the kind of oversized late middle-aged guys who keep the cholesterol medication industry thriving – quite a contrast to the way Dennis described me, as looking like a Biafran pulled his outfit out of the hamper and needed to wash his hair.
The guy behind the wheel turned his balding head to face me, “I understand you too were a fan of The Dreamlife of Angels.” I smiled. “Yeah. It was great.” “A wonderful picture, the performances of those two young women ripped your heart right out of your chest.” That was my first encounter with Sam Juliano.
As he drove us into the city, rhapsodizing about the movies that would make his yearly top ten list I had the sense that I’d never met anyone quite like him, and I wanted to know him forever.
Sam was Dennis’s moviegoing buddy, a schoolteacher from the town next to where I grew up – and also a partner in obsessive collecting as they’d begun the transition from LaserDiscs to DVDs. And while I’d never met Sam in the flesh before that night in the snow, I’d been turned on by Dennis to his practice of leaving reviews of the movies he watched as the outgoing message on his answering machine.
That summer I dialed Sam and after a beep, “it is Sunday July 26th, and to say that I am shattered would be an understatement. Last night myself, Lucille, my cousin Douglas McCartney and the esteemed Sebastian Marsh attended in Ridgefield Park a 7:45 screening of Steven Spielberg’s technical and emotional marvel Saving Private Ryan, which has reinvented and reinvigorated the war movie and in my opinion is now the frontrunner for multiple major Academy Awards. Hanks’s position as the heir apparent to Jimmy Stewart is now firmly assured and the film currently stands as my number one picture of the year. Anyone looking to get a hold of me, I will be at my parents house up the hill for dinner later this afternoon and have tentative plans to go out to Paramus to catch a comedy called There’s Something About Mary later tonight, if you’d like to join. Thanks for calling.”
With the weather and it being that quiet week in New York City between Christmas and New Years, Sam found a spot near the Lincoln Square Theater where The Thin Red Line had booked a late December run in order to qualify for that season’s Academy Awards.
At the time Terrence Malick was kinda like cinema’s JD Salinger, having gone off the map entirely after releasing Days of Heaven in 1978, but he had been regularly being name-checked and referenced by Quentin Tarantino and Harmony Korine, the two primary movie heroes of my college years – leaving me to feel like he was someone I was supposed to like. When I watched Days of Heaven in that first furious year of movie gouging – I believe I’d rented a VHS copy from my local West Coast video and my memories are tinted by the brownish green hue from the copy guard of those New Yorker video tapes – I knew I liked the vibe, but I’m pretty sure it went over my head to an extent. But I’ve watched it over a dozen times since and it’s one of weathered sweatshirt kind of movies that I know I can throw on whenever I need to be compelled and enveloped in familiar comfort.
Premiere magazine did a cover story on The Thin Red Line and the hype was suggesting Adrien Brody, who was a relative unknown, was going to become a major star off of its success. Saving Private Ryan had left me feeling battered and my burgeoning cynicism was a little put off by the overt emotional clarity of its plot and ending, “earn this.” So if I was rooting for one of these end of the millennium World War II movies, it would have been Malick’s.
Once inside the theater Sam made a bee-line for the ticket counter and bought seats for everybody – I tried to offer him some cash but he refused to accept, as he would every subsequent time we’d see a movie together, saying “these monies come out of a budget I have set aside for such things.”
The theater was crowded and as we rode the escalator up toward our theater there was a palpable tension in the patrons who were riding down next us. A kid around my age looked at us and said, “are you seeing The Thin Red Line? It’s horrible. A waste of three hours.” The grumbles of the unhappy patrons increased as we got close. That’s the only moviegoing experience I can recall where I was so ominously forewarned on my way into the theater.
I know I caught onto what the movie was doing pretty quickly and sincerely enjoyed it – but the theater was packed and I was aware of that acute sense of being surrounded by restless people having an experience they wish would end.
Rewatching the movie for this piece – despite my initial enthusiasm it’s the only Malick movie I’d never revisited – his earth worshipping cinematographic still entrances, and the interior monologues and character hopping wasn’t as meandering as I’d recalled, so I’m still not sure quite why it bombed that night.
It seems like almost every actor who wasn’t in Saving Private Ryan wound up on Malick’s call sheet – Nick Nolte in “GODDAMNIT” God Mode. Woody Harrelson blows his ass off with a grenade. Brody, whose performance was edited down to a series of wide-eyed expressions leaving him to resemble one of the abused rabbits from the cartoon Watership Down. The future Christ, Jim Cavaziel, whose through-line is the most prominent in the ensemble, starts the movie off hiding out among native island children whom he has circle a stick with their foreheads before setting off to race like stumbling soused winos. And Sean Penn as the nihilistic sergeant with a heart of gold, who during the uphill battle sequence, risks his life to deliver morphine to a doomed infantryman whose innards had been shredded by machine gun fire, leaving him howling in view of his terrified company, all of whom are expecting the same fate.
Ben Chaplin provides a thread of tender-eyed romanticism and has significant sequences ruminating and flashing back on the love which was destined to leave him – a thin shouldered, beautiful blonde wandering in a field which is as much of a Malick hallmark as his accelerated low angle approach shots that render the natural world with wonder.
“The cocksucker should have stayed retired,” Dennis said while lighting a smoke as we stepped out onto the curb.
Sam, who now considers The Thin Red Line one of the best movies of 1998, was to my recollection, lukewarm. “It may yet make my top 10, I will have to revisit, but this first viewing left me a little cold,” he said.
The rest of Sam’s friends, the group of men whose bickering I would come to know and love and be obsessed by over the next decade during Sam’s Tuesday night Pasta Night dinners – all hated the movie.
When I called to check his answer machine review the following day I got a kick out of being added to the roll call, “and we were joined by Jason Giampietro, a good friend of Dennis’s who found the movie poetic and the cinematography stunning, and while I was not as much of a fan of the movie as he was I can’t say I wholeheartedy disagree with him on the latter point…”
A few days later I went on a date with a girl who was visiting NY from California that I’d picked up at a Brit-Pop party to go see Shakespeare In Love. That was another icy night driving around the city.
The following morning I woke up to discover my mother had passed away suddenly and unexpectedly at the age of 53.
At the wake Dennis pulled me away from the casket and brought me toward the back of the room to find Sam with his hand extended, “Jason, what a horror. I’m so sorry. If there’s anything you need. Movies. DVDs…”
I remembered being touched that he’d showed up – but as I would come to know him over the following years, that’s who Sam is, an open-hearted friend who shows up and offers his generosity even to someone he’d only met once before.
A few months later I attended my first of Sam’s Oscar Night Parties – and after seeing he and Dennis go berserk, damning Harvey Weinstein, after Shakespeare in Love upset their beloved Saving Private Ryan in the Best Picture race – I promised myself to return every year, with a camera.
And as Sam’s family grew I’ve been blessed with a friendship that started from that snowy night with Malick and has now lasted more than half of my life.
Wonderful essay. Terrific remembrance piece. I’m flattered that I figured so prominently in your well constructed text.
For the record: the conditions that we were in for that initial viewing of The Thin Red Line really put me and a lot of the crowd in a horrible mood. The place was too tight to sit comfortably, the heat was way too high (to the point of sweating) and this made the viewers restless with a film that bordered or exceeded 3 hours. Hence, the bad reaction to the film.
Since that night, I have rewatched (several times) The Thin Red Line and, not do I only think it’s better than Saving Private Ryan, but consider it an existential masterpiece about war, the existence of god, and the adherence of faith.
It makes sense that there was an issue with the theater! Like I said in the piece, I don’t recall ever walking into a movie with the vibes of the people leaving the previous screening being so off
I didn’t put this in the piece, but the other foreign VHS you gave me was 400 Blows!
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What a beautifully written, heartfelt tribute – so in keeping with the spirit of this film festival. Makes me wish I lived in New Jersey!
Thank you Marilyn! Yes we had many many fun times with Sam at Pasta Night and dozens upon dozens of great moviegoing experiences over the years!
Jason, WONDERS IN THE DARK has existed since late 2007, so we are approaching 17 years as a site. While Facebook and social media have substantially diminished film blog sites, some, like ours, continue with moderate success. The Allan Fish Online Festival, The September Horror Festival, and the year-end Best Lists remain the high points. We’ve had some unique reviews, essays, and pieces that have focused on real-life events, but your remarkable, irresistible remembrance of our first theatrical viewing of THE THIN RED LINE will rightfully take its place in our Hall of Fame. It’s a marathon reflection that would have surely had Allan in stitches, and it sets the record straight on how our position on THE THIN RED LINE went full circle after that first viewing. This was not the first time I changed drastically on a film. My beloved HOPE AND GLORY is the most shocking, but also, THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION and some others immediately come to mind. Your essay made me laugh, reflect, and even shed a few tears. There are aspects I forgot, but some others had me vigorously nodding. Your memories were acute, and your physical holdings amazing. This will always be cherished. I can never thank you enough for saying all those over-the-top kind things about me, and be rest assured the feeling is mutual.
This is so kind my friend!! You are the best!
Perhaps next year I will write about our war over AI.
Also you and Dennis deserve credit for being the first people who deemed Weinstein a villainous cretin! And Marsh, that night of the Oscars when Shakespear in Love triumphed, demolishing plate after plate of lo mein.
“JASON you say you like movies but you didn’t see Finding Brian?”
An absolutely delightful memoir. I wish I could have been there. I enjoyed reading this tremendously.
Thank you Duane!
Jay, thanks a lot for this lovely heartfelt trip down memory lane. I didn’t know the full story and your entire write-up feels like a movie script. Then again, with Sam, Dennis and yourself, it makes sense it feels like a movie. You should direct this film.
Thank you Sachin!! Yes there is definitely a movie to be made about the pasta night days, this is just the tip of the iceberg!