Oakland has been via rather a lot in recent times, shedding a sports activities legend and a beloved actor — to not point out two sports activities franchises.
Maybe one method to cope is to flee to the films, or one explicit film, the place you’ll be able to hoot and holler as a bunch of East Bay teen punks give a whuppin’ to neo-Nazis outdoors the 924 Gilman Road music membership. If that doesn’t pep you up, how about cheering on a fictionalized model of Golden State Warriors legend Eric “Sleepy” Floyd as he slam-dunks some actually rotten guys?
You get all that craziness and extra — together with belts of actual historical past and nostalgia — all through “Freaky Tales,” the anxiously awaited spring film launch a rowdy, gory stroll on the wild aspect set in 1987 Oakland. Written and directed by the filmmaking duo Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden (“Half Nelson,” 2019’s “Captain Marvel”), this huge fats smooch to The City opens Friday in space theaters and connects its plot dots via 4 storylines, some loosely rooted within the fact.
“I think Oakland needs this movie right now,” the Berkeley-born Fleck mentioned throughout an interview with Boden at one of many movie’s star areas — the venerable Grand Lake Theatre.
“The city’s gone through some tough times. We lost Rickey Henderson, Angus Cloud (the late “Euphoria” star who seems within the movie). We simply misplaced lots of people … the Oakland A’s. I feel (this movie) is only a celebration.”
And the way. “Freaky Tales” made a splashy debut on the Sundance Movie Competition in 2024 and final month obtained rounds of high-fives from an enthusiastic crowd gathering for a particular screening held on the Grand Lake. The East Bay pink carpet introduced out native icons together with rapper Too $hort and Sleepy Floyd, together with stars Pedro Pascal, Jay Ellis, Ben Mendelsohn and extra.
“Freaky Tales” recaptures the vitality and artistic would possibly of Oakland whereas additionally celebrating the style filmmaking that turned all the fad within the VHS age. A prevailing love for Oakland will get combined in with a surrealist tinkering of key figures, native occasions and areas as storylines bounce from a rap showdown between two feminine ice cream store staff and Too $hort (performed by rapper Symba, a Berkeley native) and a few wild Tarantino-level shenanigans involving Sleepy Floyd (performed by Ellis). Too $hort — whose 1987 music lends the movie its title — narrates and pops in for a cameo whereas Floyd – who now lives in North Carolina — additionally has a cameo.
One of many movie’s brightest smiles is available in a scene the place Pascal’s debt collector character enters an area video retailer the place he engages in a hilarious dialog with a movie-loving clerk, performed by Harmony native Tom Hanks.
Pascal says capturing that scene was an expert and private spotlight.
“Not only was I with Tom Hanks, but I was on a set that was a mockup of a real VHS rental store that I grew up going to. I cannot tell you about the embarrassing amount of time I spent in VHS stores. It was sort of like my dream landscape as a child. … I knew every single movie that was on all the shelves. I was identifying all of the Tom Hanks movies that were on the shelves of this set while doing a scene with Tom Hanks. It was kind of like a nostalgic ecstasy.”
Pascal fondly remembers Hanks declaring just a few spots round Oakland the actor is aware of properly, at one level telling Pascal: “I got my ass kicked on that corner.’”
Oakland has develop into a hotbed for inventive, outside-of-the-box filmmaking. A number of of the films which have set there embody Oakland director Ryan Coogler’s 2013 debut “Fruitvale Station,” 2018’s “Blindspotting” from East Bay natives Rafael Casal and Daveed Diggs and Boots Riley’s surreal 2018 comedy-drama “Sorry to Bother You,” with LaKeith Stanfield. To generate much more Bay Space scripts, Casal and The Black Checklist have created the Bay Checklist, a mission aimed to spotlight the highest 10 scripts from the Bay Space screenwriting group. Boden and Fleck are concerned in that as properly.
Everybody behind and in entrance of the digital camera of “Freaky Tales” will get a bit nostalgic, since this movie dives into an East Bay means of being, however it does have some sharp edges to it.
Why, although, is it set in 1987 Oakland? Two phrases: Sleepy Floyd.
“It’s a confluence of reasons that really stems around that 1987 Sleepy Floyd game (a wild Lakers-Warriors playoff game in which Floyd scored a stunning 51 points),” mentioned Fleck, an enormous booster of Bay Space sports activities groups. His ardour is such that he wrote a vigorous, private Mercury Information commentary that urged A’s proprietor John Fisher to not depart Oakland excessive and dry. (Fleck, who attended Diablo Valley School in Nice Hill earlier than shifting on to New York College’s Tisch Faculty of the Arts, stays outraged as ever in regards to the A’s leaving the Bay Space.)
“I listened to the (Lakers/Warriors) game on the radio and heard (Warriors sports commentator) Greg Papa’s play-by-play, where he actually called Sleepy Floyd ‘Superman,’” remembers Fleck. “That was just ringing through my head for years after.”
Boden heard her filmmaking collaborator pitch numerous iterations of “the story a couple of child within the Bay Space within the ‘80s” for more than a decade and then helped him turn it into “four stories that are all about these different underdogs in the East Bay that collide in this genre, mix tape, mash-up, action-packed kind of way,” she said.
The first tale was inspired by an actual incident where 924 Gilman Street patrons faced off against a group of skinheads in a David vs. Goliath moment, she said. The final Floyd storyline takes the “Superman” moniker and runs off with it in gory ways.
Since the plot hinges on a few real-life personalities and thrusts them into unique and — in the case of Sleepy Floyd — absurd situations, it would be easy to assume that not everyone would hop aboard in an instant.
But everyone did. East Bay rapper Too $hort, who still lives in the East Bay, didn’t hesitate.
“He was on board from day one,” Fleck mentioned. “As soon as we told him what this was and what we wanted to do, he said ‘Cool, let’s do it.” In actual fact, the influential musician went on to function an govt producer.
“We were a little more nervous about approaching Sleepy given where we take (his story).”
They didn’t must be.
“He was super friendly and supportive,” Fleck mentioned.
Floyd took the decision with Fleck and Boden to debate the movie after he mentioned he obtained a message through LinkedIn from the studio.
“I was just blown away because I had no idea what the call would be about,” Floyd remembers. “They gave me the basis of the movie and that it was going to be based on the 1987 game with the Warriors. I didn’t realize I would be killing people exactly,” he mentioned, laughing. Within the movie, Floyd can be the celeb spokesperson for Psytopics, an East Bay cult-like non secular heart.
The expertise of being part of the movie and coming again to the Bay ushered in some nice reminiscences for him.
“It makes me feel good and proud,” Floyd mentioned. “To be able to have a moment that still lives today in people’s psyche and memory … . It kind of brings that game, that night, back to life. Because as you get farther and farther away from it, it’s just a memory and a stat.”
Floyd additionally will get nostalgic about what it was like for him to be on the house workforce and play on the Oakland Coliseum. (The night time earlier than the Grand Lake premiere, Floyd and others on the movie attended a Warriors sport in San Francisco. He and Too $hort reminisced about when the Warriors performed in Oakland.)
“We were talking courtside last night and it just felt like family there (at the Oakland Coliseum),” he mentioned, whereas praising the Warriors’ new digs on the Chase Heart. “But you knew the ushers. You knew the people in the parking lots. You develop relationships with those people over the years. You lose that. I’m sure they’re gaining all of that back. But we were just reminiscing about the old Oracle Arena and how fun it was.”
What was significantly enjoyable for Fleck was to plunk the tales in precise areas that maintain fond, private which means to him, even when the unique companies are not there — such because the Loard’s Ice Cream on MacArthur Boulevard or Candy Jimmie’s membership and gathering spot, dwelling now to The New Parish.
Though “Freaky Tales” is City-centric, the filmmakers see it having broad attraction regardless that Bay Space audiences would possibly choose up on allusions others would possibly miss.
“The intention was for people everywhere to come into the movie and have a good time. That’s No. 1,” Fleck mentioned. “But yes, for the Bay Area people there are a lot of Easter eggs.”
For that purpose and others, “Freaky Tales” is a kind of movie greatest skilled with a crowd in film theaters, Boden mentioned.
“Look we admit, not all our films have been huge rambunctious crowd pleasers the place you could have a complete viewers screaming and applauding and laughing. However this film is like an infectious expertise to see with different folks.
