Summerfest '08: "Corvette Summer"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 20:15:00 GMT

Regular Screengrab readers know that I am not one to go for cheap nostalgia. I don't view the world through rose-colored glasses, and I usuallly think that any line of reasoning that ends with 'things where better when I was a kid' come not from any real aesthetic position, but from an unwillingness to admit that one has gotten older and that the culture has moved along since we were teenagers. I'm especially not nostalgic about the 1970s; I spent most of that decade being pretty easy to please. If it came with a cape or a mask, and I could enjoy it while eating a bowl of Apple Jacks, it was okay with me. However, every once in a while, there's a piece of cultural driftwood that floats past that grips me with a strange sense of longing for the good old days, and today's Summerfest 2008 entry is one of them. Maybe I'm just becoming a softie because this is the penultimate installment of Summerfest '08 -- a feature in which I profile a movie with the word "summer" in the title that you can use to kill an hour and a half while you're waiting for your car to get detailed -- or maybe there's something deeper at work. It's hard to say: the big draws of this week's movie, Corvette Summer, are vintage cars and Mark Hammill, and I'm neither a gearhead nor a Star Wars fan. Maybe it's just my longtime crush on Annie Potts. But whatever the case, we're going to plunge head-first, for the second-to-the-last installment of Summerfest 2008, into a movie which represented the very last moment Mark Hamill was given any on-screen presence in anything but a Star Wars movie, and the very last moment Danny Bonaduce was even remotely taken seriously.

Summer's ending, as all things must. But with only two more Summerfest screenings to go, we're going to see it out with a bang! Join me for a look at 1978's Corvette Summer!

THE ACTION: It's 1978, and like every high school kid in 1978, Kenneth W. Dantley Jr. is obsessed with two things: hot girls and fast cars. Being an out-of-it chunkhead, he can't do much about obtaining the former, but in pursuit of the latter, he takes a shop class, and as his final project, instead of building a bird feeder or an ashtray, he comes up wih a custom-designed 1973 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray. Unfortunately, Kenny is in the habit of befriending ill-meaning douchebags like the weaselly Kootz, under whose care the tricked-out 'Vette is stolen. Kenny, anxious to get back the car which got him his first-ever A grade, heads off on an epic trip from Los Angeles to Las Vegas; along the way, he runs into mobsters, lowlifes, ne'er-do-wells, and Vanessa, who describes herself as a "prostitute-in-training" headed to Vegas to hit the major leagues of whoring. We're apparently meant to find this flattering. Once he actually arrives in Sin City, he falls in with a bunch of other head-in-the-clouds gearheads and the tone of the movie shifts and becomes less an outrageous teen comedy and more a deadly-dull weekend with the kind of fanatic auto enthusiasts that you find at car shows embarrassing their wives. It's a testament to the quality of the movie that the star who's lasted the longest is the car itself, which is still shown at classic auto shows all over the country.

THE PLAYERS: Aside form the Corvette, the big star of Corvette Summer is meant to be Mark Hamill. Coming off the huge success of Star Wars, producers were jumping all over him, offering him all sorts of heartthrob roles under the assumption that he was going to be Hollywood's next bankable young star. Our condolences to everyone who didn't know how that was going to end up. Ironically enough given that he was playing a kid totally obsessed with tricked-out sports cars, Hamill's career -- and life -- were almost brought to an end a few months before filming this movie, when he was involved in a serious and nearly fatal car accident. Hammill recovered quickly enough to put Corvette Summer in the can, and he sported the scars in the two Star Wars sequels, so he physically recovered, but his career never did. Elsewhere, the slimy goofball Kootz is played by a post-Partridge Danny Bonaduce, not yet in his transsexual prostitute/celebrity boxing phase, but well into his not-having-a-career phase. The biggest find of the movie -- or so it seemed at the time -- was the young, vivacious, and beautiful Annie Potts, who was nominated for a Golden Globe for best new find, and only five years later would be playing a semi-matronly role in Ghostbusters.

SUMMER FUN: The movie starts out with Hamill still toiling away in shop class, so it definitely makes you earn your summer fun as you have to put up with a good half of its runtime being set in his somewhat dreary southern California high school. As the movie progresses, though, it hits you with the good times one after another, as Hastar wars; ghostbusters; Hamill gets (and loses) his dream 'Vette, runs into a hooker with a heart of gold, takes a road trip to Las Vegas, and gets menaced by a chainsaw-wielding organized crime syndicate thug. You know, all that fun stuff that happened to everyone in high school.

HAWAIIAN SHIRTS: Not surprisingly for a movie that is set for half of its 105 minutes in southern California and the other half in Las Vegas, Hawaiian shirts abound, on big fat party animals and elsewhere. Everyone from shop teachers to parents rock the tropical look, and when the action shifts to Vegas and arriviste Mob thugs and classic car enthusiasts enter the picture, we actually begin to approach the tipping point where we hope that someone in a Brooks Brothers suit wanders on screen just for balance. Even Luke Skywalker himself, who wears a pseudo-Fonzie blue-jeans-and-white-tee combo for much of the movie, once or twice rocks this sort of goofy off-teal Hawaiian number that makes us mistake him for Ralph Malph. I wish he'd hung onto it for Return of the Jedi.

BIKINI PARTY TIME: Curiously enough for a movie that is set for half of its 105 minutes in southern California and the other half in Las Vegas, bikinis are very few and far between. We get a few shots of them in generic SoCal beach scenes, and there's also a few walk-ons by spangled showgirl two-pieces during the film's Vegas scenes, but for the most part, bikinis are nowhere to be found. However, Corvette Summer does feature a number of shots of a 25-year-old Annie Potts in a SCUBA wetsuit, which, for my entertainment dollar, is almost as good. Unless you're a total gearhead who likes watching 'Vette porn, Corvette Summer mostly serves as a cautionary tale of what could have been with the pretty young actors, but there are worse ways to spend a Wednesday afternoon in August.

The Screengrab : danny bonaduce

Summerfest '08: "Corvette Summer"