It’s Elliot Gould Week on the Late Movie!
Weird fiction piece by Clark Humphrey
12/3/90
The year is 1971. No longer is style reserved for the elite or the effete. No longer is the female the only gender permitted to dress with flair and individuality. Men have been freed from the constraints of boring fashions. Now everyone can look singular and provocative, thanks to miracle fabrics and a sophisticated fashion distribution system. Todd Phillips is one of the men who are making this revolution in popular style possible.
By night, Todd is just another struggling writer in Manhattan, but by day he’s the overworked assistant (and brother-in-law) to Joey Newgarden, the president of a new, NOW company, organizing deals between America’s hottest new clothing designers and the efficient textile factories of the Far East. Every morning Todd dresses in wide-legged trousers and Qiana print shirts, brushes his caucasian Afro, and heads to the bustling midtown offices of Today Casuals. Just as he leaves the elevator, he puts away his END THE WAR badge; his brother-in-law still, for all his hipness, supports the war, giving frequent, unsolicited sermons on Vietnam’s potential as a source of low-cost labor. In this morning’s lecture to Todd, Joey also mentions the consulting team hired to put together names for all the bright new colors Today Casuals is using. Too many of them still had names associated with women’s clothes, Joey barks. Todd reads aloud from a list of potential masculine-sounding names for teal and fuscia. Joey sucks on his cigar for a while, then stops Todd in between “Ox-blood” and “Flame Red.” Joey has a new assignment for Todd. He is to go out and do research on the street, in the hippest discotechques, wherever today’s people are gathered. Todd is to find out two things: what clothes men want to put on, and what clothes women want men to take off.
Todd goes home to his sweet but perhaps too square wife Alicia (Lauren Hutton in an orange-brown sweaters). It is she who has had to live with her brother Joey all these years, and gives her husband Todd tips on placating the geezer, which he follows too literally, leading to wacky hijinx. Todd tells her about his new assignment. Alicia sensibly says that she has never judged anybody by the clothes they wore. After some more bantying about, they do something really daring. They head for the bedroom without putting the dinner dishes away. The scene ends in the bedroom as Todd, in colorful boxer shorts and socks, carefully folds and hangs up his clothes.
The next day, Todd has several short wacky scenes with the hip young people of today. His first hilarious encounter is with a few protest marchers outside a bank building. The kids fail to convince Todd that wearing an END THE WAR badge isn’t enough; Todd fails to convince the kids that their shabby-looking clothes went out of style two years ago. He then appears in a record store in the East Village, where he has a funny argument with a bemused clerk who tries to tell Todd that it’s Led Zeppelin, not The Lead Zeppelins. The smart-alecky young customers tease Todd by claiming they only wear wide jeans because of peer pressure, that they’d all rather be strutting around the Village in grey flannel suits.
Outside, Todd takes a wrong turn by trying to start up a full interview with a dope dealer trying to lay low. The dealer mistakes Todd for an undercover cop (“You’re looking and talking like a guy who wants to blend in but you really haven’t got a clue”). Threateningly, he tells Todd to get out of his life.
Todd quickly backs off, turns backwards around a corner and bumps into a young woman in the brightest orange hot pants ever made. Todd apologizes to the woman and says that she is obviously a young person who believes in herself and in the way she looks. Before he can get far into his interview, the woman asks if he wants a date or what, or else he can just stop bugging her. He continues asking what she thinks about men’s dress shirts in “pumped-up purple.” Her pimp shows up, mumbles something about “that new undercover pig on the street,” and gives him a prompt punch in the stomach. They leave Todd there to lie on the sidewalk as sunset approaches.
Finally getting up at the start of a rainstorm, Todd somehow stumbles into a swinging discotecheque. Lost amidst the blaring guitar-and-trumpet music, the flashing blue and pink lights, and the intensely fun-loving young singles drinking their pink and blue drinks, a dazed Todd stumbles to and fro across the dance floor and inadvertantly invents a wild new dance step. All eyes in the room are on him as he realizes that after years of trying, he is hip, he is in. He revives, becomes energetic. He attempts a major leap and rips the seat of his cheap Today Casuals pants. Everyone either laughs or turns away — except for one dangerously stunning brunette with eyebrows out to here and knees to just die for. Her huge eyes show an honest pity for this fool. She offers to sew up his pants back at her place.
In the next scene, she is in her studio apartment, still in her blue top, red short skirt and huge belt, sewing his pants. Todd comes out of the bathroom with his leisure suit jacket tied up around his waist. After some cute embarrassing jokes, she tells him that what she wants him to be wearing right now is nothing. She takes her clothes off in two smooth motions. Carefully folding and hanging up his clothes, he strips to his oversize boxer shorts. The seduction of Todd Phillips is completed in her swinging single’s pad, amongst the bedroom mirrors, the bright pink cocktails, and the loud folk/rock/trumpet soundtrack. She takes him (during the commercials), then spurns him when he reveals what a square he really is underneath his hip clothes.
He learns from her that the clothes women want to take off the most are the ones that say to them, “I’m a tasteless guy who’s rich and stuipd. You can take me for all I’ve got.” To her, Todd represents a good time, a nice one-night stand and nothing more. Disillisioned by her attitude, he becomes depressed, turning her completely off.
The next day, he quits his job to save his marriage. That evening, he has a good shouting match with the wife, ending on a surprise note of reconciliation and a bathtub scene, the two dressed as God had originally intended, their clothes strewn about the floor, uncared for.
