I SAW IT ON TAPE - Run

Sometimes the circumstances surrounding a movie tend to be more memorable than the movie itself; the Hows and Whens and Whys of that first time. This isn't any kinda revelation, the same applies to songs and smells and just about every other sensory experience in our lives - if they're at all adjacent to anything out of the ordinary then they're forever intertwined. Though in the case of 1991's Run, the movie, for me, is overshadowed by its own poster (which is the same image as the video cover you see before you). This Patrick Dempsey Thriller was released on Home Video in July of '91 and it would be at least another month before I actually saw the movie. But within those brackets of time I would become extremely familiar with the poster - in a way that felt extremely unfamiliar. 

In 1991 my mother had a newspaper route. Actually she had six routes, all over town, and every day after school we'd pack up her tiny car with bundles of newspapers and I'd ride along and help deliver these papers to nearly all the homes and businesses of Leominster, Massachusetts. For this I would receive $10 a week, which was a decent allowance for a first-grader (most of that money went to baseball cards - because I grew up in a Norman Rockwell painting I guess). All of this is just to give you context to the fact that we drove up and down and all around the same roads of our city every day for a few years, and in these travels we drove past a couple different video stores (because, again, it was 1991). The reasons why video stores were so wonderful demands a long list, but it was even exciting to just drive past one - especially to the bourgeoning film scholar that I was becoming - because every few weeks they'd change the posters in their storefront windows to advertise the new releases. So to break up the monotony of basically having a full-time job when I was 8 years old, every day had a kind of "Is today the day?" vibe to it because of these posters. 

There was one particular video store that we became very familiar with in our journeys - not because we rented videos from there but because they were once semi-generous enough to literally give me their Edward Scissorhands poster right out of the window (which is a very short anecdote you can read here that ties in nicely to this tale). In doing that they left an empty spot in their lineup that went unfilled for only a short period of time, but would eventually be occupied by a new one-sheet - the movie for which became maddeningly indeterminate. 

I want you to look at the art on that video cover. It might be hard to imagine but maybe you could arrange it in a way that it's much further away from you. And perhaps you were moving past it at 40 mph. The point is, for weeks this highly stylized pink & orange posterized image of Patrick Dempsey and Kelly Preston was simply unidentifiable to both my mother and I; we just couldn't make heads or tails of the super contrasted imagery. We weren't even able to recognize that there were humans on the poster, just a formless rainbow of Tetris colors. Eventually we tried slowing down as we drove past (when we could remember in time without slamming on the brakes) but that was no use - it required thought and precision. 

Did we eventually just pull into the parking lot to stop and decipher this abstract art? Hell no. What predictably happened was we just rented the damn video from our usual location - and there in our hands the two blurry actors came into focus and it immediately became less interesting. And alas, there was no Predator-style heat signature cinematography in the feature. The premise involves Patrick Dempsey's character getting blamed for the accidental death of the son of a mob boss, and of course the whole city is on the payroll so no one can be trusted, leaving only one thing to do - run! I became best acquainted with this movie once it made its way into the cable channel rotation -- nary a Saturday afternoon in the early 90s when you couldn't find Run somewhere on the dial. But that first time on tape was the last time I saw it from beginning to end, and judging by its current availability in any format it may stay that way. But even though that video store is long gone (I think it's a nail salon now) that window that promoted so much early 90s Cinema still remains, and I'll cary my history with that pane of glass forever - particularly the perceptible mystery of Run. 

- Paul