Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #112 California Girls (1985)
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor or early aughts animated television program. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.
I also recently began an even more screamingly essential deep dive into the complete filmography of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and I will be writing about the cult animated series Batman Beyond as long as one very generous patron deems necessary.
When I lived in a group home in the frozen tundra of Chicago, one of my housemates once groused of his lot in life, “Man, I hate America. When I grow up, I’m moving to California.”
I had some news for him about what country California is in but on an existential, mythic level there was undoubtedly an element of truth to his statement.
Sure, California may be part of the United States, but it is also incontestably a universe onto itself, with one of the world’s largest and most important economies. Perhaps most importantly, California is an ideal, a dream, a fantasy, a wonderland of sex and sun and movie stars and swimming pools so seductive that its siren song is heard and heeded all over the world.
We’re so obsessed with California that characters don’t really need a reason to want to move to California. The state’s appeal is self-evident. Sunshine! Supermodels! Movie stars! Swimming pools! The most beautiful men and women in the world! The beach! Money! Glamour! Planet Hollywood! The Supermodel Cafe!
It’s California, baby! In Tuesday’s Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 entry, The Wizard, a deeply traumatized nine year old with a narratively convenient case of catatonia feels an irresistible pull to make a sacred pilgrimage to this American mecca for the most holy and sacrosanct of reasons: to compete for 50,000 dollars in the Video Armageddon championship held at Universal Studios but also because California is the promised land and spiritual home for so many spiritual seekers, cinematic and otherwise.
In California Girls, meanwhile, good natured New Jersey auto mechanic Nathan Bowzer (teen idol Robby Benson making an unsuccessful transition to adult lead) gets tired of waiting around for a promotion that never comes and an ex-fiancé who has moved on and decides to finally act on his longstanding dream of wiping the slate clean by moving to California to start life anew.
Watching this featherweight obscurity I couldn’t help but think that I might be the only person in the world watching it today, or this week, or potentially even this month. California Girls has never been released on DVD or Blu-Ray due to a combination of song clearance rights and universal disinterest but the benefactor who commissioned this series made a copy for me.
Our everyman hero, a real keeps a “Wall of fame” of pictures of bikini-clad beach babes on his wall to inspire him to both make the big move and masturbate himself to orgasm.
The wall of fame is supposed to represent our everyman hero’s fantasy of the L.A good life but all I could think about was how often he must have jacked it to each and every one of those Los Angeles beauties.
One mediocre movie. So many terrible covers!
Nathan finally stops masturbating long enough to fly out to Los Angeles to pursue his dreams. On the plane he meets Elliot, a big talker played by Charles Rocket.
There are some actors where the moment you see them pop up on screen, you think they’re up to something sinister. With Rocket, I didn’t even have to wait that long. The moment I saw Rocket’s name appear in the opening credits I thought he must be playing some manner of bad guy.
This suspicion only grew stronger when Rocket’s character seemed entirely too good to be true. Obviously he wouldn’t invite a total stranger like our hero to live with him indefinitely, ostensibly out of the goodness of his heart, unless he planned to murder him, frame him for murder or rob him of the modest inheritance his father left him.
Alas, the worst thing Eliot does is fill Nathan’s mind with impossible expectations by urging him to pursue his impossible dream of the ultimate “California Girl”, a supermodel or famous actress or sex bomb pop star.
How ridiculous are Elliot’s standards? When Nathan expresses interest in Karen Malone (Tawny Kitaen) when he meets her serving at a catered affair, Elliot encourages his new friend to not settle for a mere waitress when an everyday schmoe from Jersey like him deserves an Ava Gardner-level beauty.
That’s right: in California Girls, an unassuming grease monkey from Jersey is told that he could do a lot better than a woman who looks exactly like a young Tawny Kitten and should set his sights higher.
When Nathan meets cute with Karen, she is smilingly serving an exotic delicacy known as “sushi” that is, I shit you not, raw fish.
Raw fish!
Can you believe it? In California, those health nuts eat raw fish. I know what you’re probably thinking: fish sticks, right? Or English pub-style fish and chips? Nope. Raw fish. As in completely uncooked. And they call it sushi. Sounds like a fad to me but apparently they prepare it so that you don’t get sick even though you are literally eating fish that has not been cooked.
Nathan has his own conception of the quintessential “California girl” in the form of the supermodel face and banging body of California Dream cosmetics, Heather (Martha Longley).
In a literally unbelievable turn of events, after experiencing a montage sequence of sex, sun, babes and Summer fun set to, of all things, the Beach Boys’ “California Girls”, Elliott and Nathan have a fender bender with the girl of Nathan’s dreams, a woman whose unclothed image he has undoubtedly pleasured himself to thousands of times.
The stunning model is at first angry but when the enthusiastic onanist volunteers to come over to her mansion and fix her luxury car she is intrigued and aroused. Because Nathan represents something Los Angeles has never seen before: a schmuck from a loser town on the east coast who moves to Southern California for the gorgeous weather, women and opportunities.
Men like that don’t pour into Los Angeles en masse every single day looking to realize their Beach Boys fantasies. No, they’re precious, precious unicorns that must be pursued and treasured and valued because they are so rare and beautiful and special.
For reasons that will eventually become apparent, this impossibly beautiful dream girl becomes instantly enamored of the schmuck from Jersey. She doesn’t just want him to move into her mansion with a swimming pool so he can do to her in real life all the things he merely dreamed about while playing underwear wack-a-mole while gazing at her image on his “Wall of Fame in New Jersey”: she also wants to make his business dreams come true.
#NameAMoreIconicDuo
Alas, even in the 1980s, nobody who eagerly volunteers, “I’ve always wanted to be a venture capitalist!”, the way Heather does here, could ever be anything other than terrible.
At first, Heather is inextricably obsessed with helping Nathan achieve his dreams of owning his own business. The supermodel with the peculiar, pedestrian taste in men decides that what L.A desperately needs is an auto shop only the very rich can afford.
So Heather and a shady business manager played by Martin Mull build an “Automotive Emporium” for Nathan that’s a cross between a high-end luxury spa, an elaborate art instillation and Jiff-E-Lube. It’s a huge palace of a place that does boffo business the first day, which would be wonderful except that Nathan is the only mechanic, and consequently faces an utterly inhuman work load.
Opening the business together proves the beginning of the end for the unlikely couple. Heather makes an instant and dramatic transformation from angel investor to anti-Christ. She insists on controlling every aspect of their business but only so that she can first drive Nathan mad from overwork, then destroy him.
When Nathan finally does have some time off so he can appreciate the spoils of his ostensible success, he returns to discover that the previously thriving business has now been completely gutted, and is now a pathetic shell of its former glory.
Even more disastrously, when Nathan returns home his evil now ex-girlfriend is with her new lover and curtly informs Nathan that it’s over, then adds casually, “Just out of curiosity, how soon do you think you can get your stuff out of the den?”
She’s not being completely cold-hearted. Instead of definitively telling Nathan he needs to move out immediately to make room for the new stud in her life, Heather merely asks, purely out of curiosity, how long it would take for him to remove anything that might remind her that they had a life together, romantically or professionally.
Then, friends, things take a turn as we discover that Nathan’s entire California adventure has been NOTHING BUT A DREAM/NIGHTMARE HE EXPERIENCED IMMEDIATELY BEFORE ACTUALLY FLYING TO LOS ANGELES.
If I were emotionally invested in California Girls and its characters on any level I would probably be angered by this revelation. It would piss me off. I would feel cheated.
I most assuredly was not invested in California Girls on any level, however. So I greeted this final switcheroo with a derisive, dismissive snort, as one last insult.
In the movie’s version of real life, Nathan flies to Los Angeles next to a haggard old smoker, and is thoroughly underwhelmed by his experiences in Southern California until he meets a beautiful woman, also from Jersey, who is having a similarly shitty time. She is played of course by Kitaen, who is billed prominently but is probably only in the film for about ten minutes or so, with the implication being that now that Nathan’s impossible L.A fantasy is over he can enjoy a REAL romance with a down-to-earth, girl next door type played by one of the sexiest and most glamorous women alive.
I have written about a lot of random movies for this website. It’s kind of my whole deal but California Girls stood out as particularly random, in no small part because it is a TV movie, an art-form I have shockingly little experience with for someone who has been writing about movies for nearly a quarter century now.
The few TV movies that I have seen have been on the distinguished and important side and this movie could not be less important or less distinguished.
I’m still pretty early in my journey through the films of Tawny Kitaen and things have already gotten really fucking weird and really fucking random. I am more than a little psyched that it’s only going to get weirder and more random from this point on, as we move past Kitaen’s ostensible “golden age” and into some gloriously dodgy territory.
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