Mid-week in San Francisco’s Upper Haight, wet fog is soaking into our bodies, causing involuntary shudders, teeth clattering inside our skull. We know we are bones because we can feel them turning to ice in real time. This being California, we possess no coat thick enough to ward off the city’s insistent cold.
It’s the early 1980s, maybe even before the first chain store arrived in the former hippie enclave, now the preferred hang of rude street punks, whose sudden threatening motions shake spare coins from passersby. We stare them down. Fuck off, posers. We earned our cash kissing ass on the break-neck breakfast shift at a mean little diner on Market Street. We’re going to the movies and maybe getting a martini at the Zam Zam (Persian Aub Zam Zam), if the surly bartender feels like serving us. (Sometimes, he develops an instant dislike for reasons unknown, so no go. Hit the bricks.)
Near the end of Haight Street, before it dead ends into Golden Gate Park, lives The Red Vic, one of the city’s smaller and more eccentric repertory cinemas. It’s somehow connected to the funky bed and breakfast down the block, but we don’t know how and would rather not imagine. Someone named “Sunchild” somehow acquired the Victorian in the seventies, painted it red, and filled it with psychedelia, an ode to the mythic “Summer of Love,” complete with a Peace Cafe and Global Village Center that we wouldn’t be caught dead in. The only thing we hate worse than hippies are Deadheads, the latter best described as a sub-species (emphasis on SUB) of the former.
The Red Vic sprung to life in 1980. Naturally it was started by a collective, because there were a lot of them hungover from the seventies. We later joined one that supported independent film producers (but that is a story for another post). It was probably a really good model for local activism, like-minded individuals coming together to make something vital happen. Divorced from the patchouli stink of the times, it might be an approach worth reviving (after the coming crash).
The Red Vic is famous for showing a handful of the same films on the regular. According to Wikipedia, the space debuted with a screening of The Hippie Temptation, a CBS-TV documentary about The Summer of Love made in August 1967. They will show the program annually until the lights go out for good in 2011.
We have seen Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude at The Red Vic multiple times, but the film we really come out for is The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, which seems to play once a month. Or at least it feels that way. We cannot access it anywhere else (it won’t arrive on home video until 1991), so whenever it screens we usher another virgin into the Technicolor world of a despotic piano teacher (Dr. Terwilliker) on the eve of his great triumph, wherein 500 boys will play an original composition he wrote for a massive two-tiered piano designed to accommodate their 5,000 fingers.
The only film Dr. Seuss, who wrote the story, screenplay, and song lyrics, was ever involved in, the 1953 musical flopped when it first appeared. The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther panned: “For this strange and confused fabrication of the dreams of a 10-year-old boy, who is staging a psychic rebellion against his male piano teacher’s tyranny, is not only abstruse in its symbols and in its vast elaboration of reveries but also dismally lacking in the humor or enchantment such an item should contain.” Seuss referred to the film as a “debaculous fiasco” and left it out of his official biography.
Decades later, however, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T makes perfect sense to us. Today, the song that opens this post is sadly more relevant than ever, given the preponderance of bullies who believe they have the right — just because they wear wallets near the “hearts” — to boss and beat the rest of us around.
When he falls asleep practicing piano, the movie follows young Bart Collins into his subconscious, a bizarre Seussian landscape wherein he is the first boy to arrive at Terwilliker’s Happy Fingers Institute and directed toward “cell number one” to await the arrival of the other 499 boys who will together play the world’s wackiest piano.
Bart’s mother, Heloise, has been hypnotized by Terwilliker, acting as his second and smoothing the final details before the grand opening. When Dr. T’s influence appears to wane, she is kept in a “lock me tight,” a gilded cage at the top of a winding staircase.
Bart enlists the aid of Mr. Zabladowski, a plumber hired to install sinks ahead of a vital inspection. Eventually Bart is thrown into the basement where all non-pianists are kept. (Terwilliker can’t abide any instrument other than the piano.) This is where a wild number in which, as Crowther described, “a gang of slightly satanic goons, all green and black and chalky, beat out some weird and racy jazz on a variety of grotesque musical instruments in what appears to be a modernistic cave.”
While the filmmakers may have been going for their own version of Oz, 5000 Fingers went much further, not settling for a simple, and let’s admit, farfetched “no place like home” moral. Seriously, what kid watching The Wizard of Oz could ever identify with Dorothy’s wish to give up the Emerald City’s Technicolor dreamscape to go back to dustbowl Auntie Em in freakin black and white Great Depression Kansas? We shake our heads no, even now.
Bart not only doesn’t want to play the piano, he figures out a way to remove all sound from the air on command, mixing air freshener with stuff he has been carrying around in his pockets into a concoction that just might be “atomic” and blow. He frees all the other boys from oppression, while bringing his widowed mom and the plumber together to win a new dad for himself.
The Red Vic’s benches are notoriously straight backed. There is no comfort to be had from the thin, worn foam cushion that offers little padding between ass and plywood bench, yet the film works its magic. We don’t care; we have disappeared into the Terwilliker Institute’s royal blues, butter yellows, and maniacal magentas. For weeks we will hum the tune of “Get Together Weather” though we don’t know/can’t find the lyrics, and every time we are getting ready to go out, we will sing to ourselves: “Dress me dress me dress me in my doh bee doh duds.”
Back out on the damp sidewalk the fog hides whatever lays beyond the next block, multi-colored lights glowing within. It’s as though we have also been transported to some magical, brightly colored place only accessed through dreams. And maybe we have.
Let’s see if we can score a cocktail at the Zam Zam…
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