A TV investigative reporter wants to learn the real Eddie Wilson story. The Top Ten Dueling Monsters In Yu-Gi-Oh! Sign Up Today: Get exclusive deals, product news, reviews, and more with the Mental Floss Smart Shopping newsletter! He's played in the movie by Michael Pare, a good-looking hunk whose photograph is currently hanging above the desks of at least two women here in the office. Buoyed by the television exposure, the soundtrack cracked Billboard’s top 10 before topping one million in sales to go platinum. “It wasn’t a script I liked.” Barkin said her agent more or less talked her into it on the premise she’d only have to work on it for a couple of weeks. The behind-the-scenes drama - the wild ambition, the wheeling and dealing, the image making - convey such different sentiments from the music's explosive, euphoric feeling that there's bound to be a built-in incongruity, for one thing. THERE hasn't yet been a successful movie about the early days of rock-and-roll, even though the subject is certainly capable of generating a lot of emotion. Little do they know that the real monster is waiting for them outside. FILM: EARLY ROCK DAYS, 'EDDIE AND THE CRUISERS'. Itching to grow out of his scrubs on General Hospital, soap opera actor-slash-singer Rick Springfield lobbied for the title role in Eddie and the Cruisers. "Runaround Sue" by Eddie Wilson. —E.M. But the ending is so frustrating, so dumb, so unsatisfactory, that it gives a bad reputation to the whole movie. 10 Things You Didn’t Know about Eddie and the Cruisers, Five Classic Movie Comedies that Could Easily Be Made Into TV Shows. It is directed by Jean-Claude Lord, and based on literary characters created by author P. F. Kluge. When you're done, crack open The Penguin Book of Witches and The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories, which will also send shivers up your spine. Published in Japan in 1991, the book turned the VCR into an instrument of terror at the height of its popularity. If they'd just gone ahead and dealt with Eddie's disappearance, even in melodramatic terms, the movie would have paid off. His old record company does everything short of planting a story that Eddie and Elvis were seen shopping at a mall in the Midwest. Eddie's startling good looks (in the John Travolta-Matt Dillon street-kid style) and his energetic sound (the songs are by John Cafferty, who also does Eddie's singing) are accompanied by enough artistic self- importance to make the character less sympathetic than he might be. Club in, File Name: is eddie and the cruisers a true story.zip. Having directed Sylvester Stallone in 1974’s The Lords of Flatbush, he approached the actor to put him in touch with Scotti Bros. Records, the label that had helped facilitate a meeting between Stallone and the group Survivor that eventually paved the way for “Eye of the Tiger.” Scotti Bros. agreed to distribute the soundtrack, giving Cafferty’s band its first real break after toiling in local clubs for over a decade. At some point, Van Damme expressed irritation that Seagal had previously claimed he could best Van Damme in a fight. At around 200 pages, it's a quick read—and when you're done, you can fire up one of the novel's TV and film adaptations to keep the creepiness going. There are no fraternity or sorority houses at Haverford college so they had to improvise a bit. Cracking open a horror book in your comfiest chair is one of the best ways to embrace the Halloween season, and at Mental Floss, we’ve got plenty of suggestions for your next title. Eddie's music sounds good, but it also sounds a lot like Bruce Springsteen's, and it would not have been the rage in 1963. (He used the stage name “Frank Cujo” before settling on Van Damme.) The fraternity house is actually the home of the Haverford college president. Ellen Barkin, as the reporter, has the film's most awkwardly written role. Eddie and the Cruisers is the story of a band and a man that were striving for greatness but hit a serious pitfall on their way up. Video: Could Robert Pattinson be the Next James Bond? "'OK, Jean-Claude, what’s he doing?' To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. Arriving in the state, he took to using trash to build out on a small patch of land. Answer. "Eddie and the Cruisers" is all buildup and no payoff. As directed by Martin Davidson, who directed ''Hero at Large'' and who is also co-author of this script with Arlene Davidson, ''Eddie and the Cruisers'' is vivid, full of conviction and more than a little foolish at times. —Ellen Gutoskey, Staff Writer. While Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone were considered the apex of the 1980s action movie hero, genre fans found a more graceful alternative in Jean-Claude Van Damme. So the anachronisms are a greater mystery than that of Eddie's disappearance. Some of the details ring uncannily true, like the slick ''oldies'' nightclub act that one of the Cruisers is still doing nearly 20 years after Eddie's supposed death. Van Damme helped re-cut the film with screenwriter Sheldon Lettich and Carl Kress, an editor who worked on 1974’s The Towering Inferno. In 2012, a statue paying tribute to Van Damme debuted in Brussels, Belgium in front of the Westland Shopping Center. There was E&TC music in a commercial and it said it was by Eddie Wilson. Cut to New Jersey shore, 1963, Paré in sleeveless T-shirt as rock hero Eddie Wilson. While the movie stuck to the same basic structure, the killer angle was dropped. Heading to Hollywood in his early 20s to pursue his dreams of stardom, Van Damme picked up bits parts in films like 1984’s Monaco Forever (he was officially credited as “Gay Karate Man”) and a future GIF-worthy scene in 1984’s Breakin’ while working as a cab driver, waiter, and bouncer, among other odd jobs. Being famous seems easy, it’s getting there that’s the problem. The Belgian-born actor and martial artist used his flexibility to great effect in action classics like 1988’s Bloodsport, 1989’s Kickboxer, and 1994’s Timecop. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. Their Bruce Springsteen-esque sound actually had some endorsement from Springsteen himself: Cafferty told People that the Boss was around for their early gigs and helped guide him through some songwriting challenges. According to one concertgoer, the “fake” band lead by Paré was more well-received than the real warm-up band—Skid Row. Eddie and the Cruisers was not originally conceived as a nostalgia trip for Jersey rock. The 1983 film Eddie and the Cruisers features a recreation of a strange New Jersey landmark made of sand, clay, and trash as a testament to human ingenuity in the face of the great depression. No body is found and to make matters worse the master tapes to the second album mysteriously disappear shortly after. Let the Right One In has all the trappings of a grade-A horror story—bloodlust, mystery, plot twists, etc.—set against a backdrop of real-world issues, from bullying to alcoholism. When producers went looking for a group to supply original music that would be lip-synched by the cast, they found John Cafferty & The Beaver Brown Band (named after a paint color) toiling in and around New Jersey. Star Wars, Goonies, Game of Thrones, from fantasy to science fiction to the dramatic and silly, Tom is all about the greatest and most insane stories that can be found.