I recently got a new TV. I know you’re happy for me, it’s definitely all I hoped it would be, but I am not going to bore you with any details about it, suffice to say it’s nice enough for me. I only reveal this to reveal what movie I watched on it first, as I relaxed, tired of hooking up cables and screwing together the TV stands, it was Eddie and the Cruisers 2: Eddie Lives . I love that movie. I don’t watch it much anymore, I have literally worn out the videotape, and I’m not positive I could get another one.
As I think about it, it may be the only thing that my ex-wife ever gave me that I still have, but that’s not why I love it so much. The first Eddie and the Cruisers had it’s moments, buoyed by the time it came out, and the fact that we had it on movie disk in the barracks when I was 19. We had to have watched that movie a 100 times sitting around the barracks. There were 3 movies in that room, Eddie and the Cruisers, Footloose, and the Wall, one of them was going whenever we were in the room. We could only work and go downtown to hit on the German girls so much, there was a lot of movies watched.
I didn’t go see Eddie 2 in the theaters, I’m not even sure it was in the theaters where I was living, but I rented it before I owned it, and as I’ve mentioned, I have nearly worn out the VCR tape. It’s one of those rainy day movies, pop it in, and let it play.
The links go to plot summaries and details, I’m here to write about why I have a teeny obsession about it, and why I am considering using Nanowrimo month to write the third installment of the Eddie Wilson saga.
First of all, the story really hasn’t been told right, or at least finished right. The first movie was an early version of Cold Case, lived through rewrites and more about Tom Berenger’s character, the songwriter that Eddie took in, in the present at the time of the movie an English teacher reminiscing. That character did not 
appear in the second movie, and it was better for it. The second movie was about Eddie, a contractor watching his past become famous, as we seemed to do to dead artists back then, and now.
The sequel was cluttered with cheesy monlogs and extended scenes of the band practicing, like Rocky building up to his finale fight. In between, we watched Michael Pare try to create the character of Eddie Wilson, and not completely failing. It is a story of redemption, and unrequited dreams, and bridled talent, and like held breath, it never quite gets expressed.
Two movies, both fell a little short, though I love them. As I watched Eddie and the Cruisers 2 on my new TV, glad that I could barely see grains in the worn-out recording on my fancy new TV and completely enjoying the music over the sound system, I realized that maybe I could finish the job that two movies couldn’t.
Nanowrimo is coming up and I need to take a different tack for it. 50,000 words shouldn’t be sp hard to do, even in the span of a month, but I’ve flopped twice, once with a head start. An article in Men With Pens reiterated what I was thinking when I watched Eddie 2, that maybe taking a character like that and making him my own, can get me through a whole, novel-length story, and bring the rest of it back with it, my own story of redemption.
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