Saturday, August 24, 2013

Finding The Kingman Motel Online


August 24, 2013
  My son called me the other night from Baltimore and was jazzed to talk about a movie he watched with his honey. He sort of remembered seeing it with Kathy and I at a movie theatre in the Scottsdale, but now that they live in Baltimore, the movie had even more resonance because the movie starts in Kingman at the Kingman Motel, then goes to Baltimore where he now goes to school and where his wife is from. Tommy commented that both he and Pattarapan cried at the end, because it touched them that much. He asked me if I remembered seeing it and did I remember when we saw it? The info on the movie said the movie was released in 2008, but at that time Tommy was in the Peace Corp in Peru. So, it became kind of a mystery: what was the date we saw the movie? And how could Tommy be with us if he was in Peru? Hmmmmm.

  I have kept a Franklin Daytimer since 1994 and I thought about weighing into those files upstairs in my studio, but then I recalled that I also have 4,111 posts right here. So I merely pulled up my archives and Googled "Jennifer Anniston Steve Zahn Management," and, in one second, up came the date and the post and my review. Crazy, amazing.

May 16, 2009
    Yesterday Mert Glancy came by the True West offices and lent me an old ledger of newspaper articles one of her relatives wrote in the 1930s. We had a grand time talking about all the old Kingmanites and the black bear that recently tried to break into the Kingman post office on Hilltop (he must have figured that would be the safest place to go because nobody would ever wait on him). The one-year-old bear then ran up Jefferson Street, which is where my grandmother lived, right across the street from the Glancys. The bear ran right between Laury's old place and my Aunt Sadie Pearl's and was shot in the driveway of the house across the street.

   I left the office early at 4:30 and drove down to Desert Ridge to get some more art supplies for Mickey Free ($73, Sue account), then met Kathy for a new movie opening at Harkins:

To all of my Kingman Homies
   Forget Edge of Eternity and Badlands and How The West Was Won and Roadhouse 66, you need to see Management the new film starring Steve Zahn and Jennifer Anniston. It's about a young guy (Zahn) who helps his parents run the Kingman Motel. I'm not kidding. My father's gas station, Al Bell's Flying A, was right next to the real Kingman Motel. Anyway, it is so Kingman! Steve Zahn is every Kingman kid you have ever known. Naive, goofy, misdirected and hilariously out of step with the rest of the world. Unfortunately, they didn't film it in Kingman, but still, I think you'll get a hoot out of it.

"Do you want to touch my butt?"
—Jennifer Anniston as Sue Claussen, to Mike (Zahn)