Moment by Moment (1978), written and directed by Jane Wagner.

I’ve always found it baffling how much people love awful movies. We tend to avoid terrible books and TV shows–perhaps books are too long (though you could read The Bridges of Madison County in two hours, and it’s up there with the worst) and TV shows date too quickly? Maybe it’s because there are so many terrible films–every year bombs that are dropped from Hollywood’s zeppelin onto a (usually) suspecting public: only the greatest gluttons for punishment endure The Conqueror, Doctor Doolittle, At Long Last Love, Clan of the Cave Bear, or John Carter from Mars, to name but a few. As someone who does not find any pleasure in watching “they’re so bad it’s good” flicks or enduring the rarely funny (to me) Mystery Science Theater 3000, I usually end up avoiding these turkeys. So how did I end up watching, with my friend Tom, the wretched Moment by Moment, starring Lily Tomlin and John Travolta?

Moment by Moment has always intrigued me simply because its very existence seems so strange. I get the appeal of making a piece of shit like 1967’s Doctor Doolittle–a popular, albeit racist children’s “classic” gets the bloated musical roadshow treatment, and voila! Money in the bank, usually. But who thought to take Lily Tomlin, so great in Nashville and other films (not to mention theater and TV) and pair her with that dancing heartthrob John Travolta? I remember the film being in the background of my cinematic consciousness in 1978, for I was in Southern California (where Moment takes place) that year, Grease was huge, kids I know were batty about Travolta and then… this?

A personal history

I can’t say I like Saturday Night Fever or Grease, because I don’t. In fact, I hate those movies–the first is really misogynist (like, that’s a strong theme) and Reaganistic, the second just dumb nostalgia with shite music. But I like to read, and last summer, during the pandemic, came across a magnificent little confection by Darcy O’Brien called A Way of Life Like Any Other. There are some books that you just can’t get enough of, and this splendidly sordid and short tale of a Hollywood upbringing matched my own true love of Eve Babitz’s similarly sexy and wayward Southern California Bildungsromans. I love to read about Los Angeles and Hollywood because my Mom is from that area, near Pasadena to be more specific, San Gabriel to put the pin in the map, so I often wonder what it might have been like to grow up there, with her teaching and us visiting my Grandfather, who had a posh hair styling salon in San Marino. He used to style the hair of Kay O’Malley, who owned the Los Angeles Dodgers. In 1978, I visited him, watched a Dodgers game, and got an autograph from a clearly irritated Tom Bosley. Maybe my Grandpa styled the hair of a character actress or two, or some aging starlet from the lost years of silent film.

Darcy O’Brien’s novel is about a teenager who endures two parents, divorced, who used to be stars in the silent era. It’s an autobiographical novel–O’Brien truly was the son of actors George O’Brien and Marguerite Churchill, the former the star of F. W. Murnau’s great silent film Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. The book takes the young man all over Southern California, through wrecked mansions and studio backlots, to a decadent Europe, and it witnesses his own parents’ rise and fall and fall and hilarious fall.

It also has the greatest epitaph I’ve ever read:

Growth. Self-deception. Loss.

If that doesn’t sum it up, I don’t know what does. Note: O’Brien didn’t write this, but quoted Benedict Kiely.

As is usually the case with me, when I freak out over a book that is fairly rare, I tend to try and find every single book that author has ever written. Usually, I succeed. Just as often, I then shelve the books and never read them. Darcy O’Brien will likely see this fate, especially because one of the books he wrote was the novelization of the Tomlin and Travolta vehicle, Moment by Moment.

Yes, I own this book.

Now, through the years I’d heard of Moment by Moment, and I knew it first as the movie that derailed Travolta. I mean, this was a young, young actor whose first two movies were just massive hits. And there were massive because of him. They weren’t Jaws or Poseidon Adventure or Star Wars, spectacles where it didn’t really matter who was the star. No, his movies were driven by his personality. Saturday Night Fever and Grease worked, if you like those movies, because of John Travolta, not in spite of him. And it seemed, in my head, as though you leap from Grease to Pulp Fiction and find piles and piles and piles and piles of garbage in-between.

According to legend, the Australian film producer Robert Stigwood saw John Travolta in Welcome Back, Kotter and signed the kid to a three-movie deal for a million bucks. That was some big money in the 70s, and it was widely criticized at the time. Stigwood put Travolta into Saturday Night Fever and Grease in 1977 and 1978, respectively, and walked away with millions. Many, many millions and he made Travolta the toast of the world. Stigwood closed that deal by putting the young sweathog in 1978’s Moment by Moment, which was, and is, a disaster by everyone’s standard. Good thing Stigwood did Grease in ’78, because his other two movies that season were Moment and the hellish Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Which tells us you can’t win them all.

But then there’s Lily Tomlin. God, my Dad loved Tomlin. He thought she was great in Nashville (a movie he hated, mostly because he thought it was cruel, and she saved it by being compassionate); he adored her in The Incredible Shrinking Woman and The Late Show. I always thought Tomlin seemed fun, and I like those films fine (I agree with him about Nashville), and I think she holds her own as a ghost in All of Me and is so great in Flirting with Disaster. In The Late Show, she’s a total hippie-type who has an affair with a very old Art Carney, and that movie is a loving set-up of old films noir, written and directed by Robert Benton, who gave us Bonnie and Clyde. I like seeing her in pictures, because she seems to bring a great deal of heart and humanity to her roles, and of course she’s fun, almost always fun. Tomlin just seems like a cool person, a kind person.

True story: back in the day, I was assigned by the long-defunct Rake Magazine to cover Robert Altman’s shitty A Prairie Home Companion movie. There was a press junket, with all the stars at a long table at the St. Paul Hotel (Kevin Kline, Streep, Tomlin, and even Altman) answering questions. They answered all of our softballs and the highlight was when Altman yelled at Streep for taking too long to answer a question about a local pizza parlor. He seemed like a dick, probably because he was dying and hadn’t made a single good movie in over 20 years. At the completion of the junket, the stars took horse-drawn carriages down to the Fitzgerald Theater to watch the World Premiere.

I went there looking for stories. At the edge of the red carpet was a teenaged girl who was the “founder, president and only member” of her high school’s Meryl Streep Fan Club. She was dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, which was her attempt at cosplay, as she was dressed as Karen Silkwood, her favorite Streep character. She presented Streep with an armful of roses, as did a number of other people, leaving Meryl to try and walk down the carpet with about five bouquets of flowers spilling out of her arms. As Tomlin walked by I heard her grumble,

“No one ever gives me any fucking flowers.”

How I wished I had some flowers for Lily!

Anyway, with Darcy O’Brien in mind, with the hope that Tomlin was interesting, I thought I should check out this book, and this movie, and see if they’re any good. One surprise: the film is directed by Jane Wagner. Jane Wagner?!?

Wagner, aside from being Tomlin’s writer, collaborator, and wife, also directed her in this, wrote The Incredible Shrinking Woman, and was the force behind Tomlin’s triumphant one-woman show, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, which wowed Broadway in the mid-80s and won a Tony, or perhaps many Tony Awards.

I will never forget that show. Now, I’ve never seen it, but in the early 2000s I was seeing a counselor who had a framed poster for that show displayed prominently over her shoulder, along with a half-dozen items celebrating Bruce Springsteen, “the most honest artist of the 20th Century”, according to her. She, the counselor, would often forget my name, often times calling me Paul, though she once called me by my brother’s name. I don’t know which was closer, the name of my brother or the name that sounds similar to my own. There were times I wished I was watching this show instead of sitting in her office.

Anyway, even before this, the joyous picture of Lily screaming at the gods with her epaulets (over a naked body?) was in all the stuff I read in high school: the New York Times and New York magazine, because I loved New York at the time and read about Gotham voraciously, even subscribing to the magazine and buying the Sunday Times just to read the Arts section. I trust Tomin and Jane Wagner. I don’t trust John Travolta at all, but he didn’t have much to do with the creation of Moment by Moment.

The movie itself

So the movie: yeah, the movie. Please ignore the loathesome reviews of Moment by Moment. You either get film criticism’s greatest contrarian suggesting it is not just good, but one of the greatest films of all-time, or you get people cringing at the thought of Tomlin and Travolta in bed together, and what’s cringe-worthy to them seems mostly to do with Tomlin being older than Travolta (though it is true they look remarkably alike). She was 39 at the time and he was 24, and that’s just gross, right? I guess we’ll forget that Art Carney was 59 and she was 38 in The Late Show, just one year earlier, but that’s different because he’s an old man and when they do this, well, that’s good.

Tomlin is supposed to be a wealthy Beverly Hills divorcee. At the start of the film, we see her strolling along, looking bored (she looks bored throughout this movie), and to communicate her high status, Wagner has this long tracking shot of Tomlin strolling, interrupted with fade-ins of luxury shops, like Gucci. But we never see these shops, or really any wealth at all. Tomlin goes into a drab drug store, eager to get some prescription sleeping pills, angry that the druggist won’t comply because she hasn’t got a script from her doctor. In strolls Travolta’s Strip (yes, his name is Strip), looking for his poor friend Greg, who used to work there but was fired for stealing drugs.

Strip recognizes Tracy, and follows her. She wanders into another fairly drab wine store, picks up an order, then heads to her dented Mercedes Benz. Strip keeps trying to engage with her and Tracy doesn’t just look like she’d like him to leave, doesn’t have that rom-com “this guy’s bugging me, but he’s cute” look, but seems genuinely threatened by Strip. She doesn’t remember him. He explains that she was nice to him at her house party where he was the valet, and did him a favor. Eventually they part, and he mentions that he’s visiting a friend at his beach home, so maybe he’ll run into her at her beach home.

And he does. It seemed to me that young Strip was valeting at Tracy’s inland home, somewhere in Beverly Hills or Malibu, in part because her beach home is remote and has no place to park anything. She’s relaxing on the beach the next day, and up walks Strip–apparently, even though there are hundreds of miles of beachfront in Southern California, his pal’s beach home is right near Tracy’s. He walks up to her, tries to make small talk about how he was deserted by his pals, how his best friend Greg is in jail, all the while smiling like a goof and mooching cold chicken and white wine from her.

All this time he’s not in a bathing suit but in the same Navy blue underwear he’ll don through half the film. Seriously, these scenes are so edgy, and Tracy seems seriously disturbed by Strip, that it felt like the opening moments in Peter Haneke’s Funny Games, where the forced politeness and weird personal stories of feigned hardship are peeled away to reveal menace and eventually homicide.

Not so, here, though both Tom and I certainly felt that way. Instead, after numerous times trying to get Strip to go away and leave her alone, of her abandoning the beach and trying to retreat into her home (where he still won’t leave her alone), Tracy sees him shivering, and then falls for him. Suddenly, the tables turn and now Tracy has fallen head-over-heels for Strip, and yet he continues to manipulate her by demanding that she love him, that they’re equals, blah, blah, blah. She hesitates to say she loves him (this whole scene is essentially the second day of their relationship), and is embarrassed to be dating such a young man, but hates that feeling because she adores him.

It’s a bizarre twist. To give you an example, at the beginning, Strip thinks he can impress Tracy by providing her with the same sleeping pills denied her by the pharmacist. He can get her anything to help with any mood! But once they’re intimate, she wants to smoke some pot and but then when she later talks of smoking pot, he recoils and says “No! I don’t want you doing drugs. That scene is nowhere!” Really, Strip? Later, at a fancy restaurant that actually looks dingy and run down (for God’s sake, nothing appears luxurious in this film), he tells her how he ran away from home because two years in a row his parents forgot his birthday. When Strip discovers that his friend Greg was murdered after being bailed out, he spends the night with Tracy, their love reflected in her grabbing at his cock. Strip is forever demanding that she prove that she loves him, and Tracy feels guilty loving a guy the same age as her son.

By the way, it’s easy to forget she has a son with her developer husband. Earlier we saw the husband driving in an Audi by a house being built, to show he’s in the construction business. In another scene, we’ll see him on a couch talking to Tracy about her affair with Strip, and he’s surrounded by photos of himself and Tracy. There are photos in the beach house, too. There are absolutely no photos of their son at any age, and he’s only mentioned three times, each time as a way of reminding us that Strip is roughly the same age as Tracy’s son. Her beach home is enormous and grubby, and again I’m at a loss as to who thought these sets looked like they were the playgrounds of the rich and famous. Later, Tracy and Strip will go to a gallery opening (of a photo series of people’s feet), and it looks like someone threw up some drywall and hung some blown up pictures on a wall in a cheap soundstage.

Plot twists come and go with a swiftness that rivals The Room: Strip’s pal Greg was killed, that’s forgotten about, then suddenly Strip talks about writing Greg’s folks and sending them a picture of the two of them, then forgotten, and then, at the gallery, we think this scene is about Trudy running into her husband, who sees what she’s up to with this young dude. It is about that, but in a confrontation between Strip and Tracy we learn that at the gallery was the gangster who had Greg killed. This will not be mentioned again.

Look, Tracy is a wealthy, almost 40 year old woman, newly divorced, and Strip is a 24 year old bum who parks cars for a living, a job which he clearly no longer has. Though everyone is shocked at Tracy’s philandering, no one, not her best friend, her husband, not Tracy, ever wonders if Strip is trying to get anything from her financially. That question literally never comes up once–it’s given, by literally everyone, that Strip just loves her, even if it never seems like anything other than creepy and materialistic. The problem is only his age.

What also bothers me about this movie is how out-of-place it seems. Aside from its obvious failures (script, casting, acting, lighting, score, sets and costumes), the movie seems made by people who have no sense of Southern California, of young people, of rich people, hell, of people. Wagner and Tomlin are from the Midwest (Tennessee and Detroit, respectively); Travolta from New Jersey. Maybe this bright, Southern California life was hard for them to grasp?

I suppose you could have a high time laughing at this movie (according to Wikipedia, MST3K was turned down trying to get the rights to roast it on their show), but my friend Tom and I were mostly baffled by the whole experience. I had hoped, deep down, to see Tomlin put in a great performance, Wagner give us some solid direction and a witty script, and then Travolta ruin it⁠—it had to be his dumb acting that brought these two down, right? But nothing works. No one could have saved this film, even two actors who had better chemistry.

More than flowers, I wish that Hollywood had given Tomlin some great roles over the years.

If you do want to watch Moment by Moment, the only way to do so is to buy the Kino DVD or Blu-ray, or come by my house and I’ll give you the cheap DVD I bought on eBay.