Wall of Paul

Yep. I was there for the quake of '74.

We all know people who get a kick out of bad, stupid filmmaking, even if they normally prefer to watch something like “Chinatown.” But I simply can’t get to that place in my psyche. Just like you, I have an unknown expiration date, and I'll eventually curdle. So I figure I should spend my time watching, listening to, and reading The Good Stuff. If I want to groove to a dose of idiocy, all I have to do is hit the sidewalk and strike up a random conversation.

That said, I used to be a little kid, and didn’t know from stupid. Until I hit my mid-teens and developed a bit of self-respect, I lined up to watch the same nincompoop-entrapment pictures that everyone else watched.

My dad had to drive my brother and me to the theater to see these films, so it didn't happen all that often. But in the winter of 1974, Dad agreed that we all needed to experience, not a plain old “movie,” but a picture that was being boldly advertised as “an event.” So we took showers, brushed our teeth, and trekked to the theater, primed for something different...something Significant.

The “event” was a Charlton Heston disaster movie called “Earthquake.” Given that one of the definitions of “event” in “Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary” is “something that happens,” I have to admit that the posters were accurate. But “Earthquake” was (and is, unless they’ve re-shot 80% of it) a bad, bad, lousy movie.

A touching examination of what it would look like if huge buildings were to topple over and crush normal-size people, it’s the kind of picture where Ava Gardner plays Lorne Greene’s daughter, even though Gardner was only seven years younger than Greene, and – at this point in her life, anyway – basically looked like an old broad wearing a designer hat. Even as an 11 year-old I was dumbfounded.