My Rise to Fame – Kevin Smokler

Today, I can announce that My new book Brat Pack America: A Love Letter to 80s Teen Movies has just been published and I’m Footloose-dancing which excitement.

Brat Pack America is a nonfiction look at The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Heathers, Real Genius and Dirty Dancing, about where these movies were made and what that said about that moment in America, in pop culture and why they are as loved today as they were then. It's contains about 45 of your favorite movies from the 1980s and a ton of behind the scenes info and trivia. I also talked to some of your favorite actors, writers and directors responsible for these great movies, including the geniuses behind Fast Times at Ridgemont High, House Party and Heathers.

The book also looks great thanks to the team at Rare Bird Books in Los Angeles, my publishers and friends, who have worked so hard to assure it a fighting chance at a bookstore, on a nightstand and in a purse and backpack near you. The cover looks like this

I'll be touring across America this fall and next year in support of the book. See you on the highways and byways of Brat Pack America and on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

The book may be purchased at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powells, Indiebound or your local independent bookstore.

If you've like a signed copy, please order from Booksmith in San Francisco where I will be sending out books personalized to you by me.

Thank your for support, dear friends. Let's make this DeLorean fly.

Me on the Ferris Bueller Soundtrack that Never Was

Smokler on June 11, 2016

John Hughes didn’t think we’d want a “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” soundtrack, so we don’t have one. We can recreate, playlist or bootleg it, but we can’t possess something that never existed. Here’s the open secret of this movie and its soundtrack-that-never-was, three decades later: Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t waste time on something you never had, you won’t miss it.

Read the rest of my essay on Ferris Bueller's 30th birthday and the movie's missing soundtrack in Salon.

I look into true crime movies…

Smokler on August 5, 2015

An actor playing a real-life criminal adds a loud asterisk, not so much for how we then imagine them as John Dillinger or Aileen Wuornos but how we’ll perceive them afterward. The choice to play not just evil but infamy on screen may only extend as far as that movie. But when you look at an actor’s filmography, his or her performance as the engine of a true-crime movie never stays quiet; it always says something about their body of work as a whole.

What happens when we see a performer we recognize in the skin of an infamous person we recognize? The answer is never “It didn’t really matter.” The five outcomes we’ve seen and outlined below are how it did.

Sarah D. Bunting, a writer I admire very much, asked me to contribute to a true crime publication she edits called The Blotter. Given those conditions, how could I say no?

Above then is a piece of an essay I filed called "Criminal Career Moves" i.e. what happens to an actor's when they play a real life thug.

Here the whole bloody thing.

The Breakfast Club and The Luxurious Intimacy of Uninterrupted Time

Smokler on March 23, 2015

Try this: Watch “The Breakfast Club,” think about how much you have to do this week and then consider the last time you spent eight uninterrupted hours with a stranger and emerged the better for it? Maybe it’s by definition a rare occurrence. Or it only happens when we are young and open to it. Or it happens against our will, like when we’re stranded at an airport. Or maybe uninterrupted time in another’s presence, even for the young, the willing or the stranded feels as anachronistic in 2015 as Principal Vernon’s sharkskin suit.

In honor of its 30th birthday this spring, I wrote about The Breakfast Club and uninterrupted time for Salon.

My thoughts on James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time”

Smokler on November 6, 2014

My buddy Ninna Gasensler-Debs who works at the awesome KALW 91.7 Local Public Radio San Francisco (exhale) asked me to appear on The Book Report, which asks local authors about a book that's meaningful to them. I spoke about James Baldwin's essay collection The Fire Next Time which I read last year in residency at Ragdale to get pumped (and better) at essay writing.

They also rendered me as a pen and ink drawing, which was a bucket list item I didn't know I had.

Only 4 minutes long and Ninna did a bang up job with audio production. How often can one speak while scored to with the immortal Nina Simone?

Listen!

“Movie Settings and What they tell Us” My Presentation at Ignite San Francisco

Smokler on July 31, 2014

If you'd like to know what my next book Brat Pack America: Places you Know and Love Thanks to 80s Teen Movies is about, here's the nut of it in five minutes where I explain all.

Thank you to Brady Forrest and Ignite San Francisco who invited me to do this presentation in the spring. Great prep for the 9813 times I'll be doing it next year when I go on tour.

And I want to do more Ignite Events (say what?). This one was so much fun.

Bucket List Item: My Conversation with Long Duk Dong

Smokler on May 21, 2014

Ask someone to quote a line from the ’80s teen classic Sixteen Candles and there’s a good chance it was uttered by Gedde Watanabe. Thanks to “What’s happenin’, hot stuff?” “Ohhh, sexy girlfriend!” and other quotes, his character, Long Duk Dong, lives on in ringtones, comedic folklore, and a debate about whether he’s an offensive stereotype or just a caricature like nearly every other supporting role in the movie. In the years since the portrayal — Long Duk Dong and Sixteen Candles was released 30 years ago this month — Gedde Watanabe has appeared more than two dozen films, played Nurse Yosh on ER, and done voice work on the The Simpsons. To celebrate three decades of the movie, Vulture spoke with the actor about exercise bikes, growing up in Utah, and having his feet tickled by John Hughes.

I interviewed Gedde Watanbe, the actor who played Long Duk Dong in Sixteen Candles, for Vulture. Bucket list item of the biggest kind.

My Piece for 20×2…

Smokler on March 17, 2014

I was fortunate to be one of the speakers at 20×2 this year at SXSW Interactive. The question each of us had to answer in 2 minutes was "What Was The Last Thing You Remember?"

My answer…

What was the last thing you remember?

The Act of Remembering is a half-filled promise, an open loop, the brass ring falling to the ground as the carosuel whirls by. You may remember every detail, but you cannot retrieve it or live it again. Memory gifts you every sense, except touch.

Collective Rememering, we remembering is memory you can touch visit, live with, and wrestle to understand. Momuments, cemeteries, labrynths and sidewalk graffiti all say “We were once here and through, stone, paint and time we have reconciled the past and the future in the silent present.

Remembering can be glue, a golden rope, a circle of held hands. The sharing of memory pull us tighter together than the sharing of money, place, even blood. “We have been here” is the hydrogen of history. We have been here is the same as we have shared this, how we begin any understanding of who we are.

Remembering can be curse. Hyperthemesia is a neurological disorder of not being able to forget anything. Sufferers describe it as being a loud party where every past version of yourself. And you can never go home.

Remembering can also be a mistake. Some things are best left as memories. We keep them slung lighty over our backs so we may live looking ahead.

What if the last thing you remember is that there is no last thing? If our memories stand not in a line but at an intersection, arriving, departing, lingering, then circling back again? If our pasts were a library not a well? If to forget and to remember both meant to live, richly?