John Belushi, Sissy Spacek, and a supercharged kid's comedy all compete in a crowded September 1981 weekend
Plus a camp classic is born with one of the biggest performances of the year
It just plain feels better doing these newsletters this way.
While it seems like it would be easier just to publish one title at a time, the truth is that I like the first format, publishing one or two weekends worth of titles in each issue. I think part of what makes this interesting is looking at the way things crowded up against each other in the marketplace, and if you’re breaking things up, you don’t really get that same context.
If you’re a subscriber and you have access to the archive here, then you can see the way I’ve condensed every month of 1980’s titles onto one newsletter page per month. The archive is the final version of each of these things, and I reserve the right to update those as I discover titles I missed the first time around. Ultimately, I think the one month per page format is best, but it takes too long to put one together for me to wait and publish the whole month at once.
A weekend seems just about right, especially when it’s a weekend like the one we’re discussing today. We’re three weekends deep in the month now, and it feels like a lot of big titles landed all at once.
SEPTEMBER 18
Continental Divide
John Belushi, Blair Brown, Allen Garfield, Carlin Glynn, Tony Ganios, Val Avery, Liam Russell, Everett Smith, Bill Henderson, Bruce Jarchow, Eddie Schwartz, Harold Holmes, Elizabeth Young, Ron Dean, Frankie Hill, Mike Bacarella, Marji Bank, Christopher Lowell, Frank Noel, Zaid Farid, Rai Rogers, Jack Decker, Ben Rawnsley, Dave Adams, Dallas Alinder, Ronald W. McLeish, Chuck Bailey, Yana Nirvana, Joe Wright, Tim Kazurinsky, Robert Biggs, Frank Heinrich, Paul Matthews, John Larson, Norm Tobin
cinematography by John Bailey
music by Michael Small
screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan
produced by Robert Larson
directed by Michael Apted
Rated PG
1 hr 43 mins
A hard-boiled Chicago newspaper reporter meets a crunchy granola eagle expert and they somehow fall in love.
While his name is not front and center on the film’s poster, make no mistake: the stink of Steven Spielberg was all over this thing.
At this point, Spielberg was just starting to become cemented as the icon that he is, and he was just getting Amblin off the ground as a company. Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins had been kicking around the business, writing The Sugarland Express, The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings, and MacArthur. Clearly, they had a rapport with Spielberg, because he brought them in to work on Close Encounters of the Third Kind when one of his first choices didn’t work out. Corvette Summer was all theirs, with Robbins directing from their script, and they were already hard at work on Dragonslayer when Steven Spielberg read this script by a young writer named Lawrence Kasdan. He asked Barwood to produce the film for Robbins to direct, and he bought the script specifically for Amblin to make. Even thought the company had been around for over a decade, technically, they hadn’t actually produced a movie yet. Spielberg had executive produced a few films for filmmakers he believed in, but this was different. This was a film that Amblin found and developed and brought to the screen, a test run for their still-new relationship with Universal.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Last '80s Newsletter (You'll Ever Need) to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.