Detroiter Steve Press loves movies. In particular, he loves film noir. Here, he tells us why…

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MY LIFE: BASED ON A TRUE STORY
(Or How I Got Into Film Noir)
by Steve Press

I’m probably older than most of you. Carbon dating says I was born in Brooklyn, NY at the height of the Noirocene Era. I grew up on the bitter, sun-dried streets of a town called Oceanside. It was a narcoleptic little place on Long Island, 20 miles east of New York City and 5 miles south of Hell. Now I live in Detroit.

Oceanside, New York in the mid-1950s

My first pet was a gat name of Roscoe. My first toy was a frammis. My father claimed he invented it. He always sent me outside to look for it. I never could find it. I didn’t have many friends, just associates. My 3rd grade teacher asked my mother about that. She said I was a loner. I thought she meant loaner, and she was going to take me back when the lease ran out. I wish she had.

Before it was Oceanside, it was called Christian Hook. Even before us Jews moved in, the boys down at the fire station didn’t want it to be known as Goytown so they changed the name. By the time I got there it was half Jewish, half Italian, a quarter Irish, a third Protestant, and the rest Other. Its claim to fame was Roadside Rest, which later became Nathan’s. They served hot dogs with chili and onions on them. They were called chili dogs, not coneys. Coney Island is in Brooklyn where Nathan’s started. Coneys are from Detroit. Catch my drift?

(Time out: I just checked Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coney_Island_hot_dog) and discovered there is a difference between Detroit coneys (creamy with Hungarian spices) and Flint coneys (dry and Macedonian and only on a Koegel hotdog). The best coney I ever had was in a bar in Portsmouth, NH. The owner said he got the recipe from a guy in Plattsburgh, NY. That’s about as far from Coney Island as you can get and still be in New York State. He thought the Plattsburgh guy might have originally come from Michigan.)

We had gangs in Oceanside. One, the Morticians, broke into a hardware store and marched down Long Beach Road brandishing the machetes they had stolen. Their motto was “stomp or be stomped.” They must have gotten stomped, because we never heard from them after that. I still don’t know why the hardware store carried all those machetes. We didn’t have too many sugar cane fields nearby.

My first girlfriend was a poet. Now she’s a Maoist. Some people never change.

The best thing about living there in those days was that we had 3 major league baseball teams in New York. So after playing baseball ourselves in the morning, my friends and I came inside for lunch and then watched baseball on TV in the afternoon. It was too hot to play anymore and one friend had air conditioning. But when it was raining we watched Rain-Out Theater instead. I have no idea which films we saw, or how many were noir, but that’s what grabbed me. There were all these people who looked vaguely like my parents, but acted very differently. They always had a drink in their hand, and it was always night no matter what time it was. They were more attractive, more alluring, more interesting, more shadowy, and sexier than my parents. They were from an alternate universe, one that I wanted to be a part of. Sex, booze, and allure. Unfortunately, the closest I got to that universe was film noir and my poet girlfriend. But it was pretty damn close.

My dreams often had the structure of film, with me, for example, running through the night from an unseen enemy. It was kind of like Richard Widmark in the opening of Night and the City; maybe that was one of the films I had seen. Years later, in the 80’s, I turned on American Movie Classics one night to watch DOA, because it sounded like one of those films I always liked. The host Nick Clooney (George’s father, I believe) referred to it as an example of film noir. So DOA was the first film I saw that I knew to be “noir.” I loved it. I’d already been hooked, and now my addiction had a name.

Edmond O’Brien (center) stars in DOA (1950)

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Do you love movies? Do you have a favorite movie experience? If you’d like to share, send an email to stclaircinemaclub@gmail.com