San Diego is a very strange city. Not sure how we sell it to Hollywood. We could pitch it as “Stepford Wives” (the original version) meets “Chinatown.” Corrupt robots bumbling around SoCal. Maureen O’Conner, Susan Golding and Dick Murphy were such perfect gynoids and I like Mike Aguirre as Jake Gittes. I can just picture Mike hunkering down in a river canal looking for evidence of financial mismanagement and incompetence while the evil gynoids bump into each other trying to cover stuff up.
And I got it – Scott Peters as John Huston’s Noah Cross. Or maybe we cast David Copley in that role. Let’s be fair. Maybe it would be “Stepford Wives” meets “Clueless” (but that’s not fair to “Clueless,” which is actually a very funny movie).
San Diego sure doesn’t deserve to be David Lynch territory. I’m not even being fair by mentioning our city in the same breath as Chinatown, which is one of the best noir efforts to come out of Hollywood. Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive were way too edgy to be in the same league as our airhead city by the sea.
Our current blockbuster, “Sanders in the Sea,” is more like “Being There” meets “The Poseidon Adventure” with Chief Sanders as Chauncey Gardner leading Donna as Shelly Winters around a sinking ship. Didn’t Shelly die in that film?
Actually, maybe San Diego is like Hal Ashby‘s brilliant “Shampoo.” Sanders is Nixon. We cast Scott Peters in the Warren Beatty role, running around town, trying to hustle his brood, make some deals, while Sanders – I mean Nixon – drones away on an old black and white television set stuck in a corner in rooms filled with faceless powers that be.
Since Aguirre styles himself as Woodstein in “All the President’s Men,” we can pitch San Diego as “All the President’s Men” meets “Animal House.” With Mike’s method portrayal of Woodstein investigating Sanders as Dean Wormer.
That might not be fair to “Animal House” though. Back in 2001 the Library of Congress called the film “culturally significant.” I don’t think the city of San Diego will be receiving any awards for anything significant anytime soon.