Fifty
years have passed since that blissful summer of 1975. My favorite team—the New
York Mets—were bona fide contenders that summer, but their underperforming cost manager
Yogi Berra his job in August. His interim successor, coach Roy McMillan, was touted by management as akin to the late and revered Gil Hodges—“a
strong, silent type.” A local sportswriter quipped that McMillan was “just
silent.”
For sure,
it was a different time on a whole host of fronts from professional baseball to politics to
youthful fun and frolic. Gerald Ford was president; Abe Beame, the mayor of New
York City. There was an unprecedented fiscal crisis playing out in the Big Town, which didn’t concern me in the
least. I was twelve. There were no electronic devices monopolizing our
every waking moment in 1975. No Internet. No social media. What, pray tell,
did we do with ourselves? As it turned out, an awful lot of things.
Permit me
now to do a speedy rewind and recall John, a neighbor and friend, who owned an
8mm movie camera, which was a big deal back in the day. He, along with my older
brother and I, decided to make a
Batman movie that summer, a spoof of a
spoof, if you will. We were fans of the campy television series, which aired in
daily reruns on local station WPIX, channel 11. The show, which ran for not
quite three full seasons, ended a mere
seven years earlier. Many of the
programs that we watched in syndication during the late afternoons and early
evenings during the 1970s originally aired in the 1960s. Shows like
The
Munsters,
I Dream of Jeannie, and
Hogan’s Heroes. They
weren’t far removed from the primetime lineups.
Now, let’s add
fifty years to that equation. Ditto the ages of the boys in
Batman. I doubt
the three of us—in 1975—gave much thought to one day being in our sixties and
collecting Social Security. We lived
then in multi-family homes with our extended
families, including our grandmothers. In their forties and fifties, our parents
were
old; our grandmothers, in their seventies and eighties, were
ancient.
So, when
we filmed Batman—a silent movie—on location in our backyards and on the quiet
urban terrain of our leafy neighborhood, it was, we thought, a creative coup.
We fashioned a dummy with a Styrofoam mannequin head and shirt and pants
stuffed with newspapers. Said dummy served as Batman and then Robin scaling a
building and, later, as the Joker getting tossed out of an upstairs window. The
old homestead and bedroom window—where Ma hung out the family clothes to dry—served as
an evocative backdrop. Very few families had dryers
in 1975. The bat phone was a retired rotary-dial phone vanquished to the
garage—a final resting place for so many things before the trashcan. A sports-bobbing-head
doll functioned as the desk statue in Bruce Wayne’s study. You know: the one whose
head lifted, revealing a switch that furnished access to the bat cave and jiffy-quick wardrobe change.
Speaking
of the wardrobes: Batman’s cowl was a multi-colored bathroom towel from the home
linen closet, and the Caped Crusader sported New York City Department of
Sanitation-issue gloves. Nobody in our respective families were ever “garbage
men,” as we called them then
and now, but they were the genuine article. Their
provenance remains a mystery to this day.
For
further information on the blockbuster summer of 1975, I suggest revisiting two previous
blogs: Hello, Dummy...Goodbye, Dummy and A Bohack’s Injection. These essays fill
in the blanks, as it were, of good times in a good place. And, as you will see,
the dummy had a couple of more acts up his stuffed-with-paper sleeves. There
actually wasn’t a man down there, but a dummy.
(Photos
from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)
