Oh, my gaaawd. This is the big night. The yellow Camaro is premiering at the Angelika Film Center. It's tuxedo and limo time. We'll be on the edges of our seats with white knuckles. That will be just like whenever we actually rode in the yellow Camaro.
The yellow '72 Camaro was my son's car in high school. It lived on our driveway for a long time. It's in the new Amy Talkington movie, The Night of the White Pants, opening tonight at the Angelika.
White Pants is a very funny, off-beat, punky movie set in East Dallas, and it's based on a dysfunctional Swiss Avenue family. My favorite scene is when the bright young record-producer daughter brings home her computer-programmer boyfriend for the first time, and he turns out to be her brother's long-lost drug dealer. You know, that and some cranberry sauce -- you've got another darned Thanksgiving in the Swiss Avenue Historic District.
My son, Will Schutze, gets a credit at the end -- watch for it -- and his yellow car is all over the movie. Other East Dallas young persons who got involved were Evan Faram, Beau Bebeau and Jeff West.
It stars Tom Wilkinson, Nick Stahl, Selma Blair and Janine Turner. The movie stars ride around in my kid's Camaro. It's amazing. The car is gone now. I am glad. I had a very complicated relationship with that car toward the end, after the kid left home but the car stayed. I became Howard K. Stern to its Anna Nicole Smith.
Now it has gone bye-bye, and I won't talk about that in detail. But I do hope you will wave at it when it appears on the big screen. And I do hope that will be the very last time I ever see it. --Jim Schutze
