THE SCREEN: Greasy Kid Stuff
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
whose greatest need is to be able to exercise their own decision-making in responsible freedom. We all know ~he tragedies of families where parents treat thei: grown offspring like children. In...
...But later as he sits in a Cadillac El Dorado for which he's about to pay cash, one of the Crickets reminds him admiringly, "You always' Said you'd have a El Dorado before you was twenty-one, Buddy...
...It's the fifties own idea, seen often in movies of the time, of how a New York love nest should look...
...Despite Vatican II for the most part the Churoh's sLructure still systematically treats its members like children who simply need to be instructed and directed, whose human capacities are hence minimized r~ther than maximized...
...These responsibilities of the baptized must be built into the very structure...
...The new pope cannot perform this staggering work alone, nor can the rest of responsible Christians wait upon his initiative...
...Everything about it was--well, you might say--weird...
...To the shocked retort that Church leaders are appointed by and responsible ~o God, the calm response is, "Of course they are...
...The thing that saves The Buddy Holly Story from its over-indulgence in fifties nostalgia is that it's a small enough production to be held together by a single performance...
...John Travolta occasionally gets to show some charm that is in scale with the original musical...
...all responsible leadership shoul:l be so rightly understood...
...Bishops, pastors and people must work creatively to put shared responsibility into action, custom, and law at every level--now...
...Having preached his Good News about a truly human existence by his own lived example, Jesus cottld then speak it in words that carried authority and credibility...
...Paul...
...I don't know how close all this is to the facts of Buddy Holly's life, but the movie's attempt to touch all bases with Buddy leads to some interesting inconsistencies in his personality...
...The new pope will have to encourage and insist vigorously upon a full systemic humanization of all the Church'sstructures---andthus also its spirit--from the international to the grass-roots level...
...But elsewhere this Grease is busting at the seams of the original...
...In far too many ways the Catholic Church resembles such a domineering parent...
...Buddy also marries a Porto Rick-an, with whom he lives blissfully in a two-story apartment with a bank of studio windows on one wall and a working fireplace...
...Her British accent makes her ridiculous in this reprise of Americana...
...Even record company executives were all angels in those days...
...but the record exec immediately chases after him to give in...
...The result is that it stuffs more into this little musical than it was ever meant to hold, and the whole thing comes apart...
...The conservative picture of Holly's private life makes sense more fully the radical effect his performances had on the public...
...As Pope Leo the Great stated in 451 A.D., "The leader of all he elected by all...
...The people who did that original stage version seemed'to realize this, too...
...But just as the divinely sustained responsible leadership exercised by a senator or president is one that is responsible to the people it serves, so too should that of Church leadership be...
...And the whole idea of being nostalgic about the 1950s was the most weird of all...
...On the grass-roots level the parish people must inform themselves, deliberate, make decisions---and take the consequences...
...The only trouble is that these two qualifications cancel each other out...
...When he does come to New York, he walks out of their first meeting because the director of the record company won't let him produce his own records...
...Essentially the movie attempts to improve the original Grease with extra added attractions like this...
...A decade after Grease first appeared, nostalgia for the fifties---for "hoody" guys and girls in circle skirts with poodles appliqudd on them--is an idea whose .time has come...
...COLIN L. WESTERlmECK, JR...
...The structural pattern must be reversed, and soon, lest the Church find itself another tragically shattered family...
...But when Busey sings Holly's songs--"Peggy Sue," "That'll Be the Day...
...Their first song is a Les Paul and Mary Ford tune to which the skaters glide on as if it were Muzak...
...A~ the same time safeguards against a dehumanizing tyranny of the mob must also be built into the structure--that too is part of systemic humanization...
...And when you add Holly's white socks and gimses with half-plastic, half-wire frames, he becomes what the fifties themselves used to call a "geek" (a term no doubt lifted from carnival jargon, but having special connotations of a goof and a freak-somebody really out of it...
...The greatest scandal of 1978 is the super-secret election of the pope, which really ought to be super-public and super-partioipatory...
...Travolta apes the fifties in a way that is reminiscent of the stage version and pleasantly campy...
...With his curly hair, lanky frame and gaps between his teeth, Busey looks pretty square...
...As the seventies have made it increasingly clear that the sixties didn't work out either, :the fifties .have begun to look rosier in retrospect...
...The parents gape, the radio sponsors cancel, and the kids go wild...
...It is another attempt to appeal to nostalgia for the fifties, which it also idealizes grossly...
...AN APPEAL---The Chol-Chol Foundation of Washington, D.C., "is seeking to mobilize people.., so that all men together may strive for a better world...
...That's hard-driving Buddy, the man who had a vision of destiny...
...The male lead was so rubberboned and long-necked that he was a caricature of a fifties "greaser...
...I.t is not adequate that this be done by the leave or the magnanimity of a progressive pastor...
...The movie opens with Holly and the Crickets doing a local radio show from a roller rink in Lubbock...
...But John Travolta, who plays the male lead in the new film version of the musical, is more an idealization of a greaser than a caricature of one...
...The persons entrusted with the election of the pope shoed be a group representative of all the baptized--laity, religious, priests, bishop~-~osen by them, and (this is extremely important) responsible to them...
...The soul brothers dance in the aisles, and Buddy goes on tour with other black performers...
...The first New York company to whom Buddy sends a demo simply releases it, thus giving him a hit record before he's even left Lubbock, Texas...
...As St Paul says, "all authority is from God...
...The heady excitement of the sixties, which had been based on a reaction against the fifties, still lingered on then...
...Americans have begun to wish that they had left well enough alone, and nostalgia for the fifties has become a centrist notion rather than an eccentric one...
...There was no racial conflict, for instance, as we see when Buddy (Gary Busey) and the Crickets (Charles Martin Smith and Don Stroud) are the first white group to play the Apollo Theater in Harlem...
...The same sort of structural exercise of decisionmaking responsibility from below must also be put into action---and into canon law--on the diocesan, national and international levels...
...That's carefree Buddy, the boy with music in his soul...
...Maybe Baby"--his lips draw back baring his teeth and his eyes become fixed in a way that suggests perfectly the emergence of demonic rock-and-roU from the straight-arrowbood of the fifties...
...Then Holly decides to try out one of his own tunes for the first time in public...
...One number that he sings and dances with his pals on bleachers near 1 September1978:564 the beginning has this quality especially...
...Back in Lubbock at Sunday dinner before he's made it big, when his parentsask him about the future, Buddy says he's never given it a thought...
...Olivia Newton-John has the pretty and pert looks that idealize a fifties girlfriend appropriately, and on top of that she's an international star from Australia who will boost overseas sales...
...It wants to overwhelm us not only with nostalgia, but--just to be on the safe side--also with stars, production numbers, the works...
...The lynchpin of the movie is Besey's performance of Holly's songs...
...We need in Catholicism a "hier-archy," a "rule of the holy," in the sense that all the baptized are called "holy" by St...
...Despite such contradictions, what holds movie together where Grease comes apart is one performance, Gary Busey's...
...From-the-topdownward must now become from-the-bottom-upward...
...Compared to the original, the Hollywood version of Grease is in fact a Roman Circus, complete with a BenHut chariot race between two dragsters near the end...
...The characters were weird...
...And while they appeal for funds to build schools, increase food production by technical assistance and to alleviate extreme poverty, the chief aim of this ecumenical, taxexempt organization "is to feed hungry children...
...The performers playing them were even more weird...
...The fifties are, in memory, that period when life was without serious conflict...
...The songs were weird...
...Contributions should go to: The Chol-Chol Foundation for Human Development, 4936 Loughboro Road, N.W., Washington, D.C...
...The only thing the movie-makers decided to leave out are the small but real pleasures of the original...
...GREASYKIDSTUFF 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 When I first saw Grease, eight or ten years ago, it was an off-heat little musical playing in a run-down theater on the Lower East Side...
...20016 Commonweal: 565...
...The total effect is of a clean-cut, normal boy of the period...
...This is the awesome task the new pope has before him: to reverse the flow of responsibility...
...She's as ridiculous as the contrivance that brings American Bandstand to a sock-hop at Travolta's high school, so he can do an encore of his money-making dance numbers from Saturday Night Fever...
...we do not need a "higher-archy...
...Why The Buddy Holly Story succeeds any better than Grease is in some ways hard to tell...
...Soon the man is coming into his recording studio deferentially to ask whether Buddy can spare some time to talk to him, and to mumble his thanks to Buddy for producing so many wonderful records for the company besides his own...
...As in Vatican H, he will have to reach outside of the prese~ curiatand hierarchical Establishment to marshal the talents needed for this massive task...
...The first thing the new pope needs to undertake is the elimination of the College of Cardinals as a body of Church leaders appointed solely from above...
...The Church--and that's all of us--"should go and do in like manner...
...Being reminded of the days when anything someone did in public had that kind of effect really is enough to make you nostalgic...
...That is what this movie is really about, and what makes its idealization of Holly's life offstage right...
...Grease has moved from off-off Broadway to Broadway, where it is now the longest-running show, and then on to Hollywood, where it has been made into a blockbuster as well...
...The theater was defini.tely in a weird place for a theater...
...they must become part of canon law, not to be overturned by some new pastor or bishop...
Vol. 105 • September 1978 • No. 17
