The Travolta/Cage Project Bonus #2 The Best of Times (1981)
One of the many fascinating elements of Travolta/Cage and The Travolta/Cage Project, my multi-media, half-decade long chronological exploration of the complete filmographies of Nicolas Cage and John Travolta, has been confronting just what a savagely sexual beast Nicolas Cage was at the very beginning of his career.
In 1983’s Valley Girl Cage’s dreamy punk is introduced as a vision of masculine perfection running majestically on the beach while a gaggle of admiring teenage girls ogle his perfect body, gorgeous face and impressive, tragically temporary pompadour. In Valley Girl, Cage isn’t just an unusually handsome young man blessed with a pouty, androgynous beauty; he’s a fucking hunk. He’s a goddamn new wave Fabio, a teenage sex bomb with a soul positively vibrating with passionate intensity.
That’s nothing compared to the way that the young actor billed as Nicolas Coppola is blatantly sexualized in The Best of Times, a 1981 comedy pilot that suggests what Laugh In might look and feel like if it was aimed at teenagers and written and produced by senior citizens who were fired from The Andy Williams Show for being too old-fashioned.
Name a more iconic duo!
It’s a show about those crazy kids today, with their video games and pinball and rock and roll cassette tapes with the Fatty Checker doing the Limbo Twist that feels like it was conceived solely by hardened professionals in their sixties and seventies for whom the world of young people is a mystery they frankly have no interest in solving or even exploring.
Watching The Best of Times I was reminded of the classic Mr. Show sketch No Adults Allowed, a “kid’s show” whose cast is made up of what are obviously cranky adults just barely pretending to be children. Only in The Best of Times the “kids” are real kids but the words and sentiments they are expressing are very palpably the condescending nonsense of hacks who long ago forgot the entirety of their own adolescence, and with it any sense of the complicated emotional geography of teen life as it is actually lived as opposed to how it is portrayed on Bazooka Joe comic strips.
The exquisite madness begins with the George Schlatter-Executive Produced show deciding to cast, as its Andy Hardy figure, a sweet-natured everyman audiences would be able to see themselves in and want to hang out with every week, a young Crispin Glover. Crispin Glover!
The soon to be craziest motherfucker in American film is cast adorably against type here as a fictionalized version of himself, also named Crispin, who breaks the fourth wall so that he can rap with the audience about how grown ups have it all wrong about ordinary, average, everyday kids like him, Crispin Glover.
Poor Crispin is cursed to live his whole life in the “Kids” number from Bye, Bye Birdie. He complains about parents bugging him at home, teachers hassling him at school, the cops riding his ass when he drives his car and how EVERYONE thinking he’s on the dope.
He delivers an earnest miniature monologue directly to the camera about how his generation is misunderstood and under-estimated and ends it with the failed pilot’s idea of a kicker. He leaves us with the totally teenaged words, “I’ve got to go! The gang is at the 7/11 store and they’re out of quarters!” which is funny, because the kids, with their Pac-Man these days! Who can understand it!?! And the rock music with the bleep bloop synthesizers and the crazy jungle rhythms! Oy! What happened to Benny Goodman? And that nice Doris Day?
Cage is introduced doing push-ups on Venice Beach wearing the tiniest pair of short shorts I have ever seen. If Cage’s short shorts were any shorter his penis and testicles would be fully exposed. He’s not just scantily-clad and barely legal/underage: he’s nearly naked. He’s a greased-up slab of quivering muscles who is sexualized more shamelessly and aggressively than any other cast-member, male or female, including special guest star Jackie Mason.
Cage’s first scene as a television actor is even more ferociously focussed on the 17 year old neophyte actor’s jock physicality. In it Cage, once again wearing only slightly more than nothing, is thrusting and gyrating in a manner at once athletic, aggressive and nakedly sexual while rhapsodizing about a favorite film.
“Remember Rocky! What a movie!” he yells at a geeky friend understandably a little weirded out by his pointless intensity (even at the very beginning, Cage was way too intense for no discernible reason), and also more than a little aroused by his friend’s nearly naked form. “The best scene was when Sylvester Stallone began hitting that side of beef! Remember! He kept hitting that side of beef! Just smashing it with his fists! Smash! Make it all bloody! Sure did a job on that beef! Yo!”
Cage/Coppola is yelling all his lines in a weird doubly homoerotic frenzy; consciously or not he’s putting on quite the show for a pal who seems to be questioning his sexuality in a way he never did before watching Cage clad only in a tiny bit of overworked denim while shouting about the pleasure he received watching Rocky punch things in a way that seems unmistakably sexual.
The “pay-off” for this scene is the nerd asking Nick if he ever watches Disney movies. It would be overly generous to consider that a punchline but Cage does not need good material to make an indelible impression. Watching The Best of Times there is an incredible disconnect between the explosive charisma and magnetism of Cage and Glover and the hokum they’re saddled with. It’s like watching a young Marlon Brando waste his time on Saved By the Bell or James Dean pout his way through the lead role in Mac & Me.
The Best of Times saddled two of the most endlessly fascinating lunatics in American pop culture history with some of the hokiest material this side of The Brady Bunch Variety Hour.
Jackie Mason, wearing a look of exhaustion and soul-deep embarrassment only partially attributable to the demands of the role, co-stars as the proprietor of the local convenience store and the The Best of Times’ token grown-up.
That means he’s the fortunate soul who gets to express sentiments like, “You kids have no sense of responsibility! All you think about is money, sex, drugs! I think of it too! The problem is I have no money so every time I think about sex my wife takes a drug! An aspirin, I’m talking about!”
“I think this rock and roll is making you kids deaf!” Mason yells at the teenybopper cast of The Best of Times, to which one rascally whippersnapper retorts, “WHAT?”
A musical set piece follows in which these crazy kids with their video games and rock and roll music and necking down at Lover’s Lane make up a crazy be-bop hip hop rock and roll jazzy tune using only the items available to them at the convenience store.
In moments like this, The Best of Times is so bizarre and so surreal that it borders on avant-garde. The Best of Times subscribes to the curious and wonderful notion that audiences will accept any old random craziness as long as it’s followed or preceded by sequences of teenagers singing and dancing or playing video games or pinball.
For reasons known only to the schlockmeisters behind this wonderful abomination, there’s a big song and dance number about how great it is to be working at the car wash, the car wash, yeah, set to a thematically appropriate theme song from a hit movie: “9 to 5.” Why not set the scene inexplicably set at a car wash to the song “Car Wash?” I don’t know but I do know that Cage struts his way through the “9 to 5” number wearing only a very suggestive pair of overalls.
Then at a certain point Crispin RACES into the convenience store to try to hip Jackie Mason’s depressed shop-keeper about this CRAZY band whose tape he’s just got to have called The Talking Heads. “I got to have it! It’s far out! It’s intense! It’s real!” Glover yells at the future Caddyshack II star in one of the stranger moments in 1980s television and civilization as a whole.
Throughout The Best of Times characters will break the fourth wall to address the audience directly in a manner not unlike Laugh-In. Usually these asides to the camera take the form of blackout gags or “poignant” little soliloquies about the joys and hassles of teen life but late in the show there is a surprisingly emotional, dramatic monologue where Nick addresses the audience to talk about his complicated and ambivalent feelings about the situation in El Salvador and potentially being drafted.
The tonal shift between singing, dancing, wisecracking teenaged idiocy and a young man contemplating going to war could not be more jarring. What the hell were they thinking sticking a dramatic monologue about war near the end of a show that aspires to be Hee Haw for teenagers but lacks the wit and the substance to pull it off?
The crazy thing is that Cage pulls it off. He really does. In spite of everything, Cage manages to inject a note of truth and ambiguity into this hackneyed speech about some of the pressure the kids are under these days that disapproving grown-ups don’t even think about.
Then it hit me: Nicolas Cage is a great fucking actor. Brilliant. Always has been. It can be easy to lose track of Cage’s extraordinary talent in light of the many terrible movies he makes these days, and his many abysmal performances but Cage is the real thing. That’s achingly apparent even in a project as singularly, exquisitely bogus as this.
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