NOTE: Speaker ON-CAMERA is one of the bunch of random ‘street people’ we found hanging around the San Francisco, California BART STATION, Market St. @ Montgomery, early 1980s, who were willing and eagar to talk to a video camera. Many were probably ‘escapees’ from Napa Mental facility, which President Reagan opened and emptied around this tine period.
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More on background of EMERALD CITIES (91 min, ©1983), EXCERPTED FEOM, “The Old New Dark Ages, by By Keith Phipps
The 1983 film opens with a short interview with a San Francisco woman in a Santa hat who cheerily states, “I believe that by 1984, things will be similar to George Orwell’s book.” Most of the first act takes place in Trona, an unincorporated community located next to a dry lake bed. A place where no grass grows, Trona turned into a boomtown during the heyday of a nearby borax-mining operation. But as anyone who’s driven through the barren, oppressively hot place on their way to nearby Death Valley can attest, that boom ended a long time ago. Trona now looks like the last place on Earth anyone would live by choice.
In Emerald Cities it’s home to a woman named Z (another woman named Z, that is, played as in A Man, a Woman, and a Killer by Carolyn Zaremba) and to her father, a man who “likes to be called Ed” (Nylund again) who spends 363 days a year drinking outside a ruined-looking but apparently still functional gas station. The other two days a year Z works to keep him sober since it’s then that Ed plays Santa for the residents of Trona.
Actor Kelly Brock Boen and lead Ed Nylund/Santa, Trona Mill.
Most years, at least. This year threatens to upend that tradition. Speaking to the camera as the film opens, Z seems to have grown disenchanted with Trona life and with her father, saying of Ed, “He prides himself on the fact that he raised me all by himself. But I know that I was raised by TV.” Then she turns to face a small color set whose images have faded to green and starts to soak in the media of the day, which includes images of Reagan, talk of nuclear war, footage of mushroom clouds, more San Francisco interviews about Santa Claus, cowboys, a hypnotist, and one man’s memories of Christmas (actually Schmidt narrating family photos).
It’s TV that’s shaped her, but Z wants more; at the least she wants another TV. But Ed sees things differently, launching into a drunken, but kind of beautiful monologue, inspired by his failing set. “You look at that and you’re seeing the Emerald Cities of America, and of the world,” he tells her. “You get up there and you’re up in the… and you’re an astronaut, you know, and you’re looking down at this stuff. And you see all these Emerald Cities spread out. That’s the American dream. And that’s what we’re going for. There’s a certain amount of hope involved.”
But Ed seems to be the only character in the movie who finds hope in what he sees on television, one tinted emerald or otherwise. To watch Schmidt’s film is to revisit an especially dread-filled moment in a seemingly escalating Cold War, one in which talk of MX missiles filled the nightly news and the apocalypse always seemed one push of the button away. And if the end was near, we knew we’d first learn about it while watching TV.
The apocalypse was heavy in the cultural zeitgeist then, be it the fireball visions of the landmark TV movie The Day After, the post-nuclear wasteland of The Road Warrior or the songs on the radio. Apocalypse pop was practically a New Wave sub-genre. In 1983, Men At Work scored a top 10 hit with “It’s A Mistake,” whose widely played video ends with a soldier starting World War III by pressing the button while attempting to stub out a cigarette. That same year, the German band Nena would release “99 Luftballoons,” which imagined a similar scenario set into motion by peaceful protestors sending balloons in the sky. It became an English-language hit in 1984, the same year Ultravox released “Dancing With Tears In My Eyes,” whose lyric describes a couple embracing as they await a nuclear explosion. The song’s video, released years before Memento, plays the events in reverse chronological order, a device that makes the events seem sealed by fate. The ending has already been written long ago. It’s just a matter of when we’ll get there.
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EMERALD CITIES reviews, Cast, & TRAILER from MUBI:
A no-budget 80s dystopian film about an existential, drunken mall Santa? Count us in. This ultra-dark American comedy, which predates Repo Man but shares its tone, is infused with end-of-the-world anxieties about total nuclear annihilation and is tuned to the sounds of Flipper and The Mutants.
MUBI REVIEWS (scroll down)
Mohnish Singh ****. "Emerald Cities" is a quirky road trip that feels like it was filmed on a budget of loose change and leftover film reels. Rick Schmidt captures the chaos of 80s America with a bizarre charm, where conversations feel like they’re improvised by your odd neighbors. It’s weird, rambling, and surprisingly endearing, like if your favorite indie band made a movie instead of an album. Not polished, but definitely a hidden gem for those who dig offbeat cinema.”
See FULL Restored movie here: https://bynwr.com/videos/emerald-cities
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