Hi, ha ha, it’s Burl! Would you like a taste of determined
and consequence-free grooviness? Simply pop Van Nuys Blvd. into the old VCR machine, and you will
be confronted with the very welcome sight of the Crown International logo,
immediately followed by the even more welcome sight of a vintage Chevy boogie
van booting down the road with Bill "The Pom Pom Girls" Adler at the wheel! Adler here turns out
not to be playing the sullen loser or half-hearted bully he essays in the other
C. I. releases that feature his high-pated greaser’s mug, no! Instead he sits
proudly atop the cast list and serves as our representative naïf on a journey
into the anachronistic fleshpot of Van Nuys Boulevard itself!
Adler plays Bobby (of course!), a car mechanic living in a
small town somewhere in the American southwest! He’s got the fastest van in
town, a good job, and a naked girlfriend waiting for him in his trailer; but he
yearns for something bigger, flashier and more exciting, though as yet obscure
in his dim imagination! A television news broadcast about the San Fernando
Valley’s famed cruise strip, Van Nuys Boulevard, brings his dream into sharp
relief! Here is what he has been waiting for: a community full of people as
aimless as he, and moreover devoted to externalizing their aimlessness every
Wednesday night by driving pointlessly up and down the same stretch of road,
hooting, hollering, and revving their engines at random! The appearance of a ball-busting,
cruise-hating cop in the broadcast does nothing to stifle Bobby’s enchantment:
he takes off for Van Nuys there and then, leaving his gorgeous girlfriend, his
trailer, and most of a beer behind! The disco theme song carries us through
Bobby’s journey: “I got my wheels in motion… my love machine… Van Nuys!”
As this gruelling number finally ebbs, Bobby stops his van, apparently to
observe a beautiful sunset; but no, he’s reached the rim of the Valley already
and is staring downward at the glittering, blithesome crosshatches, eyes wide,
grooving on the pulsebeat of humanity that is spread out before him like an
invitation card from God Himself! Ha ha, Van Nuys!
This being an updated, smaller-scale and less ambitious
reworking of American Graffiti, as so many of these films are, there are
more characters to meet, seemingly chosen at random! The film’s Fonz figure is
“The Chooch,” the ponkiest guy ever, who drives a souped-up old hot rod and shares both the Fonz’s
mercurial personality and tendency to refer to himself in the third person!
Meanwhile, elsewhere down the strip, helping put the Van in Van Nuys Boulevard,
Moon and Camille are driving around in their mean blue boogie machine, looking
for action; and Greg, a ginger-haired suburban jerk with a maniacal laugh (a
close cousin to grinning Bobby from The Van), is cruising around with
his disposable buddy, looking for a beautiful girl he’d dreamed about three
nights running! Hanging above them all, just as in Malibu Beach, is a big neon sign reading “Pleasure!”
Eventually, after being tossed into the same jail cell by
Officer Al Zass, all of these characters form a kind of fun-gang! They ride
roller coasters, disco dance, pair up, argue, kiss and make up, and they laze
on the beach as a pig breaks loose and charges frantically up and down the
sand! There are plenty of shenanigans, and then, after a surprising character
shift by The Chooch – he scraps his denim vest, sells his hot rod, dons a pink
flowered shirt and re-christens himself Leon – matters come to a head in the
form of a drag race between Bobby and Moon! They’ve fallen in love, but also
have fostered a fierce van rivalry that only a race can settle; and preferably
a race that ends with a van rolling in slow motion down a steep, rocky hill!
Van Nuys Blvd. is a strange animal, predicated as it
is on the notion that a person can be drawn to Los Angeles without any grand ambitions
of movie stardom, but simply from a need to drive up and down a particular one
of its streets! It’s a movie about the need for community, as are so many of
these pictures; but this one is more up front about it than most! The ensemble
cast hearkens back to its 1974 Lucasfilm
template, and, like that picture, Van Nuys Blvd. doesn’t forget
that “ensemble” is French for “together!” There’s great comfort in watching
disparate strangers drifting together into an unit, opposing, as it does, the
expansive, outward drift of just about everything else in nature, from the continents
to the universe itself! Even if the alliance is as shaky as the one in Van
Nuys Blvd., the natural impulse is to hope it holds together, and to feel
gratified when it does!
The sport of cruising, too, is given more play here than I’d
seen in any film since the George Lucas hit, and some of the reasoning behind
this gas-wasting activity presented itself! At the tail end of a fuel crisis,
with the emergence of such fearsome overseas bogeymen as OPEC into the public
consciousness, the practice of expending fuel to go nowhere must have felt like
a joyful booting of sand into the face of these obscure threats to the SoCal
lifestyle! It was natural, if reflexive, to make movies celebrating this, and
to drive your car to the drive-in to watch them: fuel consumption and exhaust fumes
be darned! They didn’t know then what we know now, of course, and these days,
even in Los Angeles, cruising is probably frowned upon as a filthy, needless
and destructive activity! So documents like Van Nuys Blvd. have greater
archival value as every year goes by, and, if they’re as aggressively
inconsequential as that film is, they’ll always be fun to watch! I give this
marvelous peccadillo three cases of lockjaw!
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