From the Sun vaults, March 7-13, 1980

Marin was standing at the precipice of cultural irrelevance 30 years ago this week.

Five years after the Pacific Sun's "The Serial" column had boogied Marin County into the national spotlight--directly beneath its disco ball--the pale imitations of Mill Valley satirist Cyra McFadden were becoming sadder than a flare-trousered turkey at closing time at the Trident.

McFadden's sharp ear for the colloquial and keen sense of location had turned "The Serial" into Marin's finest gift to the world since the waterbed (invented by Muir Beach's Charles Hall in 1967). But following its 1975-76 run in the Sun--not to mention three separate book publications, the rise to fame of original "Serial" columnist Armistead Maupin and a National News Council-censured NBC TV special mockingly titled I Want It All Now--one would have thought America had seen just about as much of Marin as it would ever want to.

And only one thing foreshadows an American phenomenon's certain plummet over the cliff into the pop culture scrap heap: a Hollywood big screen treatment.

It was the first week of March in 1980 and Serial, starring Martin Mull and Tuesday Weld as wannabe Marin scenesters Harvey and Kate Holroyd, had just opened at the Cinema I theater in Corte Madera. "It'll knock 'em dead in Pittsburgh and Poughkeepsie," was about the kindest thing Sun editor and publisher Steve McNamara had to say about it in his story, "Celluloid Serial."

"In its Pacific Sun and (book) versions The Serial was a devastatingly deft satire on the more hiply ludicrous aspects of Marin," wrote McNamara...(But) the typewriter team in Hollywood dumped overboard virtually all of McFadden's piercing wit and uncanny ear for language. Instead we have a slapstick attack on the '70s." (McFadden had originally signed on to write the screenplay, but soon jumped ship. Hence the film's title Serial, not The Serial.)

The annoyed McNamara tallied off a string of the film's more obvious Magical Marin targets: communes, Moonies, hot tubs, dope smokers, women's groups, pansy hairdressers, strange religions, multiple marriages, orgies, tantric sex, whale savers, big-shot executives. He went on to quote some of the film's more brilliant turns of dialogue such as, "Single men want to get into your life--as well as your pants!" and "What's interface? A new word for oral sex?"

The Pacific Sun's longtime film reviewer Irving R. Cohen was even grimmer.

"Bad is bad," he wrote. "But if the tone of this review is aggrieved, it is not because I went with great expectations and was disappointed."

The film was shot in multiple county locales including Belvedere Lagoon, Mill Valley's Lytton Square, Sam's in Tiburon, the Sausalito houseboats and aboard the Sausalito ferry--though Cohen guessed at least two-thirds of it was done on a Paramount studio back lot.

The one laugh the Pacific Sun did get out of the film was its reception in Los Angeles. "At a weekend press screening, the audience at the Westwood Village Theater gave the film a cheering, standing ovation...on Monday, both the Hollywood Reporter and Variety echoed those sentiments with rave reviews of their own," reported the Sun proudly.

Serial wasn't the first mainstream Hollywood product that attempted to satirize a social movement it didn't quite grasp. Films like Skidoo and Candy (both from 1968) found the likes of Jackie Gleason, Otto Preminger and Marlon Brando embarrassing themselves in an attempt to send up hippies; while more recently, Warren Beatty tried to milk hip-hop for painfully awkward laughs in 1998's Bulworth. But one might have expected more from a satire of the 1970s starring supposedly hip '70s comic actors as Mull, Tommy Smothers and Peter Bonerz. Serial's director was a guy named Bill Pesky. It was his only feature film. It's currently unavailable on DVD.

The other day we asked McNamara if his memories of Serial are as grievous as he originally claimed.

"Yep, it was terrible," he affirms. "All the deft insights in Cyra's delicious satire had vanished. Instead there was a clunky romp. The people who made the film didn't have a clue."

McNamara says he's fully aware that certain parts of Marin are always "ripe for ridicule--but the suits in Manhattan and Hollywood had no idea how to do it."

"Of course I'm biased," he concedes. "When it came to mocking Marin, the Sun did it best."

Still does, we hope. Email Jason at jwalsh@pacificsun.com.

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