Photograph by Matthew Lickona

Don’t think for a minute Ridgemont High was a “tough school” 50 years ago – the tough schools were in other parts of the city. I wouldn’t have lasted five minutes. I would have been terrified.

A dazzling bright morning

Around 50 years ago, I was hanging around with my best friend Bowie in the parking lot before the bell, just killing time. A half-minute’s walk away, a few of our more prominent students were following their usual morning routine, tormenting homeowners on Modoc Street by standing around on their sidewalks and front lawns, sometimes smoking pot and occasionally vandalizing their garage doors and fences with spray-paint (according to news reports).

Photograph by Historic American Buildings Survey H. G. Hanekamp

As we watched the girls, a kid we didn’t know walked up and said, “See that guy over there locking up his car?”

“Yeah,” Bowie said.

“Know what’s in his trunk? Super scary stuff.”

“What,” Bowie said, “you mean — like guns or something?”

“Not sayin’” the kid shrugged. “Just... super scary stuff.”

We all started walking to our first class of the day. “Bet he’s got a really bitchin’ radio, too,” I said. We didn’t think anything more about it — my mind was on the sawdust burgers I was going to have for lunch in the school cafeteria. Just about everybody’s dad had been in World War Two and just about every dad had guns in the house. But I don’t remember ever hearing about anybody else maybe actually bringing one to school in the trunk of his car.

And don’t think for a minute Clairemont High was a “tough school” 50 years ago — the tough schools were in other parts of the city. I wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in one of them. I would have been terrified.

Naked and afraid

There was a time when all of us were terrified – the boys, at any rate, and we never discussed it with the girls so I can’t speak for them. It was the summer before we started 7th grade. One of the oddest things about school back then was the approach to physical education — or rather, to the rituals surrounding it. For PE, we had to change into our gym clothes, do class, strip off the sweaty gym stuff, shower, get back into our civvies, and damply get to our next class. It was standard practice for something like 40 years — I think it was a holdover from World War II — and don’t let us catch any of you little bastards trying to weasel out of it. And then, by the mid’80s, it simply disappeared.

We had a coach who gave us the 1970s equivalent of a stewardess safety instruction talk as far as drying off was concerned: “OK, boys, some of you guys are so damn stupid (here, he pulled a gray towel off of the stack for dramatic emphasis), you don’t even know how to use a towel. Some of you guys, you wipe your ass first (he demonstrated with a vigorous pantomime of toweling his backside) – and then you wipe your face. Jesus Christ. You wipe your face FIRST, and THEN you wipe your ass. OK?”Some of us got it, some of us didn’t.

In addition to gang-showers, the mere act of suiting up proved too much for some of us. We all got an official school district list of items our parents had to buy for PE: gray shorts, gray A-frame shirt, white socks, sneakers, and jockstrap. The jockstrap proved far too much for my best pal, Bowie. He couldn’t make heads or tails of the thing, so he decided to ask our coach for advice.

On the very first day of 7th grade PE, there came a timid knocking on the door of the coaches’ office. They put down their cigarettes and cards and newspapers and racing forms, and one of them opened the door, revealing Bowie, standing there and holding a wadded-up towel over his privates.

The coaches stared, awestruck.

“Uhhhh... coach?” Bowie said tremulously.

“Uh-huh,” the coach said. Here, indeed, was a young lad destined for greatness when he finished his days in junior high and entered Clairmont High’s ivied halls.

Bowie pulled the towel away like a waiter whisking the lid off a chafing dish at La Côte Basque. The coach stared. Bowie had the jockstrap on backwards.

“Can – can I go out like this?” Bowie stuttered.

The coach just shook his head and said, “You can go out that way if you want to...”

Next time we suited up, I noticed Bowie had written “FRONT” in big, black magic marker on the waistband of his jockstrap. Innovate. Improvise. Think outside the box. THAT’s the way Clairemonters find solutions to life’s problems.

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows

Clairemont High is perched on an absolutely stunning piece of real estate overlooking the Pacific Ocean (well, Mission Bay, if you want to be picky). The first time my mom and dad got a really good look at the place was on Parents’ Day when my older sister was starting high school.

“Why the hell would you put a high school on a piece of property like that?” Mom said, lighting up a Kent.

“Putting a high school there is like sticking an insane asylum in Monaco,” Dad said.

“Clairemont ain’t Monaco,” Mom said, shaking out her match. She never hesitated to correct my dad when he was wrong. Apparently, he was wrong a lot. And not even Dad’s samurai sword, Luger, and Nazi dagger locked up in the garage could make Mom think twice before she straightened him out.

Madame, the cameras have arrivd

“Hello, Villa Montezuma.”

“Hi, this is Dave Wiener from Clairemont High.”

“Nice to hear from you, Mr. Wiener; what subject do you teach?”

“Well, actually, I’m in the 11th grade and I’m wondering if I might arrange to shoot a student film there in the Shepard house?”

“Sure – what dates are you thinking of doing this?”

Pick up the phone, talk to a human being – it was A Long Time Ago In A Galaxy Far, Far Away...

I often went to the downtown Central Library at Eighth and E, where I sat for hours reading old public domain short stories looking for anything I could make into a Super-8 movie (I made several during my school years).

I was in 11th grade when I found one of the best stories I ever ran across in my endless hunt for material. It was a very old story about a man who murders his best friend for a great deal of money. I updated it to the ’70s — I lacked the resources to do a period piece — but thought that if I filmed it in that grand old house, it would make a nice connection to the actual age of the story. And I knew two guys who would be perfect — a leading-man type and a character-type. Even better, they both had their own cars. I didn’t — I must have been one of the last kids in my class to get a driver’s license, which is how I found out what it was like to be a leper in the 12th Century.

(Bowie had a Chevrolet Maverick, listed for $1,700, which Bowie’s dad had bargained down to $1,500. But before the salesman showed them the Maverick, he first tried to steer them onto “a real honey of ride. I’ve got a fantastic bargain for you here,” he promised. “A beauty. Incredibly low mileage, practically new tires, and it’s safe as Fort Knox, nothing’s gonna hurt you in this car. Massive V-8 engine that’s got power like you can’t believe. And luxury? This vehicle is the epitome of luxury.” He stood up. “It’s in the back, c’mon, gents…” It was a hearse. And it was cheap. Bowie was lucky to get the Maverick.)

Meanwhile, back at Villa Montezuma, they were fine with the idea of a student film, so I lined up three weekends in a row.

Half a century ago, no paperwork, registrations, permits, or certification letters were required; those were the salad days of student filmmaking. I’m willing to bet that there were more student movie-making enthusiasts in the 1970s than ever before or since; we were all going to be Francis Ford Coppola. It was ridiculously time-consuming, painstaking work — but completly absorbing and fun beyond description.

We were decades away from digital recordings on cell phones. We were even years away from videotape. Everything was shot on acetate film that had to be chemically processed and then assembled into a movie on an editor/viewer with a splicer and cement. And if you wanted to add sound to your movie, you had to have a magnetic stripe applied to the side of the finished film print and then use a “Sound Super-8” projector to record the dialogue, music, and effects — just like a dubbing studio.

Stills from the author’s 11th grade film, shot at Villa Montezuma.

The two guys I had in mind were Bowie, my best friend, and Jesse. Jesse had matinee-idol good looks, a blonde sex-bomb girlfriend, and a classic ’70s ‘stache. A leading man. He could even act.

Bowie was a fantastic actor, born to play character roles. The leading light of the Clairemont High Drama Department, he was just as good at comedy as he was in straight roles. In fact, he was so highly-regarded, when a friend of ours got his girlfriend pregnant, they named the baby after Bowie. Eat your heart out, Paul Newman.

I knew I could do it in three weekends, maybe even less. And I figured a total of, say, fifteen cassettes of Kodachrome Super-8 film. Yeah, that’d probably do it. Box of donuts every morning, pizzas after each day’s wrap shot. Good old Mom and Dad, they always bankrolled my movies, as long as I didn’t go too far over, say, a hundred bucks, including pizzas and donuts and film.

And, since the victim in the story gets shot, I already had the perfect hand prop – dear old Dad’s Luger.

My Lilli of the lamplight, my own Lilli Marlene

Then as now, the Luger was one of the most prized and collectible firearms of all time. The only reason we still had it out in the garage was because of a disappointing visit to a gunsmith shop over on Morena. Dad’s idea was to fund my college tuition (at least in part) by selling the gun for the best price he could get. So one Saturday, we packed it up and took it over to a gunsmith, just down the street from what was one of the best Italian grocery stores in the city. (Alas, “La Gioia” is long gone, and the gunsmith’s shop has changed hands more than once.)

“This street is Axis Headquarters,” Dad said as he drove. “Und zo, ve must speek here only der eeenglish - it vill be safer zis vay, ja?”

And what do you know, the gunsmith was an elderly German guy who found the Luger quite fascinating.

“You vant zis reconditionet?” he asked.

“Well,” Dad said, “I’d like it cleaned up and put in shape to use safely – “

“Ja, sure, no problem.”

“ – and I’m wondering if I could get an estimate of what it’s worth?”

“Thinkink of selling?”

“Yeah, I’d like to.”

The gunsmith looked over the pistol carefully, then his face fell.

“Ach,” he said, “vell, ze problem is zis piece, see here?”

We looked — he was pointing to the one silver part on the entire black pistol.

“Zis here,” he said with a sigh, “iss not original. A replacement part, you can see ze milling marks; probably, I don’t know, but probably made in zum haste during the end of things.”

“So – “ Dad started.

“Zo, it ain’t worth a shittin’ thing. But I can clean it up und it can be used mit assurance.”

Which he did. And a couple of weeks later, Dad drove it and me out to a shooting range where we took turns squeezing off about a dozen rounds of 9mm Parabellum.

“Now watch it,” he said, “because this kind of pistol has a real kick — it’ll jump up when you shoot it.”

He was right. It did. And you can take my word for it when I say that dear old Dad — Bronze Star, Patton’s Third Army — would never let me and my buddies anywhere out of the house with that thing. We used it for rehearsals in my garage — under Dad’s supervision, making sure it was unloaded — so Jesse and Bowie could really get a feel of what it was like to heft one as they moved around, delivering lines. For the actual filming, we used a plastic replica. (If memory serves, the magic shop in Clairemont Square ordered it for us from one of their amazing specialty merchandise catalogues — that place could get you just about anything.)

An actor prepares

I was at the Clairemont High auditorium heading backstage with Bowie to re-block a few shots now that we had scenes in the can from the Villa Montezuma. Just as we walked through the curtains, we saw a blouse on the floor and there was Tim, a friend of ours from drama class, with a really cute girl. She was in her bra, giggling, pulling Tim closer to her with one hand around the back of his neck. Her other hand was working on the clasp.

They both looked over at us and just grinned, then went back to what they were doing.

“Uh, you know,” Bowie said, entirely shattering the romantic atmosphere, “if we could just walk back here, any teacher could do the same thing.”

The girl, still giggling, let go of Tim, snatched up her blouse, and slipped it on as she trotted off. Tim just shrugged and headed for the stage door.

I turned to Bowie and said, “Uh, just checking — you do realize that the bra was about to come off? You do realize that, don’t you?”

Bowie rolled his eyes and said, “OK, Dave, let’s try and get back to the blocking, OK?”

Just us, the cameras, and those wonderful people out there in the dark

Bowie was over at my house in the kitchen with me and my dad, who was scrounging sandwich makings from the fridge. Bowie spent a lot of time in our kitchen; once, my dad went to bed while Bowie was busy looking through the refrigerator for snacks.

“OK, guys, g’night,” Dad said. “Try not to fall asleep in there, Bowie.”

Early the next morning, Bowie stopped by to give me a lift and was rummaging around in the refrigerator when my dad wandered in, disheveled and still in his PJs.

“Holy Christ!” Dad yelped. “Jesus, didn’t you even go home? When I went to bed, your ass was hanging out of the refrigerator, and it’s still hanging out of there this morning! Did you two idiots spend the whole night eating?!”

So, anyway, getting back to Dad scrounging a sandwich. The front door of our refrigerator was completely covered by a big poster Mom had taped up a few days earlier titled “The Molds,” a grisly, full-color guide to the most common household molds. Mom thought it was hilarious.

Between bites of his salami sandwich, Dad asked, “What’s your lighting kit?”

“Well,” I said, “two 500-watt quartz photofloods and some flags and reflectors.”

Dad was an electronics engineer. “The flags and reflectors are no problem, but remember – that wooden house has wiring that’s old as dirt, and you don’t want to blow any fuses. Never plug those lights into the same outlet; try to get them on two different circuits, and hope for the best.”

Bowie pointed to the poster on the refrigerator. “How can you eat with that thing right there?” he asked.

Dad took another big bite, shrugged, and said with his mouth full, “Know your enemy.”

Behind the scenes

Taking dad’s advice, I would often stop between takes in the chill of our Villa Montezuma shoot and dash over to the wall sockets where I had plugged in the lights. Acting on dad’s instructions, I grabbed each wire where it joined the plug and then pressed my hand against the socket plate. “If they’re cool,” Dad said, “you should be fine. But if the fucking things get warm, shut it all down and find other power outlets. It’s a crude check, but effective.” We were lucky during the whole shoot — nothing was warm.

The Villa Montezuma fit the story like a glove; the old Queen Anne-style interiors gave this intimate little murder story the feel of an episode from Rod Serling’s horror/thriller series Night Gallery. The sunlight was filtered and distorted by the old, wavy windows and I did my best to get those odd lighting effects into as many shots as possible.

The last weekend of filming, good old Jesse had to lie down on the wooden floor for about two hours, playing dead as we got his last scenes.

“It’s fucking ice-cold down here, you know,” Jesse said.

“Hang in there, man, and I’ll line these shots up as fast as I can.”

“Well, if a rat starts chewing on my balls, I’m yelling CUT!”

Young Americans

One morning I was getting a jacket out of my locker, anticipating the joys of my next class with my favorite teacher, Mrs. Randall (please do remember that the names have all been changed). Bowie walked up.

“Hey, a girl over there in the lunch court just showed me some tabs with little moons on them.”

“Is it acid?” I asked.

Bowie nodded. “Said she took one and in the middle of class her teacher turned into a Tasmanian devil.”

My thoughts were elsewhere. Who cares about LSD? I’m going to Mrs. Randall’s class! I flew on winged feet to her room. Mrs. Randall, as you’ve probably guessed by now, was a devotee of the popular “Braless Look” of the 1970s.

Of course, boys like me (I wasn’t the only one! I swear!) deserved a caning from the Headmaster rather than an eyeful of Mrs. Randall, and I count myself fortunate that I attended high school when and where I did. Otherwise, it would have been: “Wiener, go and wait for me in my office. I will join you shortly and we shall discuss, in some detail, your atrocious and disgusting lack of attention to your lessons.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You are a dirty little beast and will come to no good end; how I pity your poor mother and father.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Don’t tell me what I’m doing; I don’t want to know.” — Frederico Fellini

Once the movie was edited, I had a “dupe” made at the lab – a copy, just a single strip of film with no splices. Magnetic striping was then applied along the edges so I could record the soundtrack directly onto the Super-8 film, using a projector that could both record and play back (just like a tape recorder). It was a beautiful Eumig Super-8 sound projector my parents bought me for my birthday a couple of years before. When we were filming, I used a cheap Radio Shack cassette recorder to tape the actors; this was called a “wild track” because it wasn’t synchronized with the film. We listened to it just before we recorded the dialogue with the sound projector so that Bowie and Jessie could remember exactly how they had delivered their lines during filming. Again, crude but effective. It all sounds ridiculous, but this was one of the only ways we could make a sound movie back then – there were other ways, but they were much more cumbersome (and a lot more expensive).

The most ridiculous – and fun – part of the whole process was setting up an improvised dubbing studio in Mom and Dad’s living room (with a screen at one end and the sound projector at the other), where we would record the soundtrack just like we were doing an old-time radio show.

We had a card table with all our sound effects laid out and Dad’s hi-fi was stacked up with old LPs, ready for the music cues. I used Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, which I’d heard one day on the way to the downtown library on J.D. Steyers’ classical radio show on KFSD-FM. I used mom’s cups and saucers and silverware to provide sound effects when things like that were handled in the movie. We opened and closed the front door to make the sound effects when Jesse and Bowie entered the Villa Montezuma. And there was a gunshot at the climax – the murder. We made this by slapping a leather belt onto my mom’s wooden piano bench. (She was very understanding when it came to my movie-making). Crude — very crude — but yes, effective.

As I was piling up most of Mom’s pillows and old blankets trying to acoustically isolate the little microphone area Bowie said, “You think all this is really going to work?”

“Hey, Fellini does it,” I said.

There was a beat and we both said, “You ain’t Fellini.”

I entered the movie into the Mesa Community College Super-8 Film Festival. It actually won a prize, a big doorstop-sized chunk of Lucite in the shape of the number eight with my name and the movie’s title (Vengeance) on a little brass plate, glued to the Lucite.

It was the high point of my filmmaking career.

Endstick

Dad passed away about 20 years before Mom. When she was in hospice care, I cleared out her house, but I never found Dad’s Luger — something she despised about as much as Dad. She must have found some way to get rid of it. Even odds say the thing ended up at a pawnbroker somewhere Downtown, years and years ago. Who knows?