Goodnight, sweetheart, well, it’s time to go (dup duh duh duh dup).
We’re in the hellscape where movie theaters shut down everywhere, all the time, and the ones that stay open have exactly ten screens, and nine of those screens are showing a superhero movie or some other franchised thing in its thirteenth iteration/reboot/prequel/sidequel/spiritual sequel. I guess, as a country, we just aren’t quite done with recreations of Thomas and Martha Wayne’s murder.
(The tenth screen in this scenario is showing a crummy biopic that no one will see but will win Best Picture and three acting awards at the Oscars.)
In this hellscape, the PG-13 tentpole action movies are all competing for highest-grossing picture of all time. Those that fail are about to bankrupt a studio because it turns out that maybe Jack and the Beanstalk doesn’t really have the depth of character and story necessary to justify a $200 million budget and $300 million in worldwide marketing costs. It is fine, they’ll recoup it on the back end through sponsored YouTube videos for toddlers and a microtransaction tie-in game that is only available in South Korea and was financed by TenCent.
I guess I wasn’t quite done talking about the hellscape from the 1986 entry. It is out of my system now.
So, instead, cast your gaze back to the days when a mediocre comedy adapted from a French film and directed by LEONARD NIMOY would be the highest-grossing film, worldwide, for an entire calendar year. You read that correctly: Three Men and a Baby was the highest-grossing movie of 1987, a year with no shortage of big movies.
Three Men and a Baby isn’t a good movie, if you’ve not seen it. The premise is cute but a lot of shoe leather goes into maintaining the heroin/baby mixup, and there is too much time dedicated to the bachelors panicking at mundane infant behaviors. The movie’s $$$$$ were due to megawatt charisma and perfect timing. The titular three men were:
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- the star of the biggest show on TV (Ted Danson, of Cheers),
- the star from one of the iconic 80s shows (Tom Selleck, of Magnum, PI), and
- the star of two of the other biggest hits of the 1980s (Steve Guttenberg, of Coccoon and Police Academy).
That’s a pretty good way to get people to see your movie. I like all three of those dudes, but that isn’t solely why I watched the movie so many times. What the movie had for little Matt Rob was a look at a world outside of the country. Most of my early memories of TV and movies were westerns, Star Wars, and cartoons. This was a game-changer.
For starters, I was obsessed with their apartment. In 1987, I didn’t know houses could look like that. Every house that I’d ever been inside was a standalone house, usually sitting by itself on a big plot of land. In the movie, the three bachelors don’t even live in a house. Their great apartment is in a building in the middle of a city, and nothing about that fit within my worldview. And the ceilings are so high!
It was also my first experience of the arrested development/boys will be boys/man-cave thing. The guys seem well off (architect, actor, and newspaper comics artist), but their house wasn’t full of stuff for adults so much as it was full of stuff for grown children, like pinball machines, pop art, dance parties, and a fridge that seemingly contained just fruit and beer.
I have a specific part of this movie’s legacy that I wanted to talk about, though. This was an early experience of how urban legends are transmitted. The current places to get your objectively wrong stuff are FaceBook and Twitter and Reddit and sites even worse. Stuff that is spurious and, at best, misguided. Social media didn’t invent the crummy photoshop with the misattributed quote, or the panicked antiscience screed. That shit has been part of human history for all of human history. Social media just let people transmit falsities at a faster rate and let the gullible be gulled even more. In the pre-internet days of 1987, that garbage was transmitted in other ways. Mostly, it was chain letters and word-of-mouth.
So through word-of-mouth, the first urban legend that I remember came from Three Men and a Baby. I am referring to the “ghost of a suicide in the window” legend. If you have not seen the movie or were born after its release, a)congratulations, young person, and b) there is a moment when Ted Danson is trying to foist the foundling onto his agent. And in the background of the shot, there is a person visible, hiding behind some curtains (see the header image above). What people said at the time was that it was a ghost caught on film, perhaps the ghost of someone who had jumped out that window.
This is clearly stupid, because the movie is a movie, and was filmed on a movie set. Also, ghosts aren’t real. But most damning of all, this ghost is very clearly a cardboard cutout of Ted Danson’s character, who is an actor in the film, and in fact that same cutout is visible at other times in the movie.
But people susceptible to chain letters and ghost stories will never be reasoned out of a position into which they arrived emotionally. If you’ve ever gotten into an argument with a relative on social media and no amount of objective fact sways them, you know what I’m talking about. So the rumor about the figure being a ghost—or, slightly more reasonably, the mother of the child actor—persisted.
The grainy fidelity of home video cassettes didn’t help matters, obviously.
But long after I’d filed the movie away in the library of my brain, that urban legend persisted. I even knew the truth of it, but the thrill that comes from being privy to a secret (or a conspiracy theory) is far more interesting than something as banal as a misplaced prop on a soundstage. That is the secret to the proliferation of conspiracy theories in general: everyone wants to feel like they know something other people don’t, and feeling like you know some great hidden secret of the universe, something that eases the fear of this whole scary experience of living, that’s a heady danged cocktail.
Other 1987 Candidates: Fatal Attraction; Beverly Hills Cop II; Good Morning, Vietnam; Moonstruck; The Untouchables; The Secret of My Success; Lethal Weapon; Mannequin; Evil Dead II; Raising Arizona; Ishtar; The Chipmunk Adventure; Ernest Goes to Camp; Harry and the Hendersons; Predator; Dragnet; Spaceballs; Adventures in Babysitting; Innerspace; RoboCop; The Lost Boys; Masters of the Universe; Matewan; The Princess Bride; The Running Man; Planes, Trains, and Automobiles; *batteries not included; Overboard; Broadcast News
I turn 40 in December. To commemorate the milestone, I’m writing 40 short biographical essays pertaining to a movie per year of my life.