That Was Then... This Is Now

My grade 10 ESL students read the book and then watched this film version. They were not impressed at all and everyone agreed that it is not a good portrayal of the book. Some essential scenes are missing such as Mike Chamber's story which helps the reader really understand the motivation behind Bryon's change of heart. It would really have not been that difficult to just follow what was written in the book. Someone needs to be blamed for this poor excuse of a film!

The desperate male students in the class were hoping that the Angela character would have been as hot as she is described in the book!

Read the book instead.

That Was Then, This Is Now is the story of two working class youths who look like they are on a street to nowhere in their lives.

After his parents killed themselves, Emilio Estevez is taken in by his best friend Craig Sheffer and his mom Barbara Babcock. The two of them get in all kinds of trouble. But Sheffer is starting to think that may be if I grow up their just might be a future for him.

Estevez is carrying a lot around, many of us do and we react to it in different ways. Estevez is on the road to career criminality. He gets involved in deeper and deeper and threatens to bring Sheffer in with him if Sheffer does not heed the better angels of his nature.

The key scene is when we learn as Estevez confides to Scheffer just what it is he's carrying inside. Some of the best acting in both their careers.

Hollywood has done very well with S.E. Hinton novels. That Was Then This Is Now is right up there with Tex, Rumblefish. and The Outsiders. This one managed to get done without Matt Dillon.

I recommend it highly.

In English class, we read S.E. Hinton's saga of teenage angst. The students were enthralled with the story. While the setting was from years past, the ethical questions raised and the teenage situations were quite apropos. The story generated a great deal of quality discussion in class...education at it's finest.

The movie, however, was a bit of a disappointment for us. Taken by itself, it was a fine example of 80's brat-packish fluff. It was formulamatic, but entertaining. One could hardly say that the movie was based on the book, though. Bryon's personal growth journey and coming of age, so well illustrated in the novel, was sacrificed to car chases and Hollywood's penchant for tidy endings, in the movie.

While I would recommend both, I would caution that they are two separate stories, sharing the same character names. Perhaps there is the lesson: You cannot watch the movie to get out of reading the book! .

Only thing wrong with this movie-- the decision to "update" the story to make it contemporary. Some novels lend themselves to that kind of reinterpretation easily, but S.E. Hinton's early works aren't among them. The book, set in the late 60s, was essentially a follow-up to "The Outsiders," picking up a few months after its TV Series left off. The character of Ponyboy was taken out of this film for obvious reasons (why would he still be 16 in 1985?), but other Outsiders (most notably Tim Shepard) remained intact without aging a day-- effectively destroying any continuity it might have had with the film it was undoubtedly cashing in on. As result of this questionable rewrite, the novel's focus on the greaser/soc conflict dying off is completely absent, as are other time period-specific subplots. Perhaps the filmmakers wanted this to stand on its own from Coppola's then-recent "Outsiders" adaptation, but this likely hurt "That Was Then...This Is Now" in more ways than it helped it.

I read the book for this movie and it was really good and very emotional to read as the characters change. The movie how ever is so ridiculous it's funny. For some reason it was changed to the 80's instead of the 60's which completely ruined the movie for me also making the sheppards immortal by doing this. Also since in the 80's it got rid of the hippies and changed it to punks but it is hard to take people that are supposed to be mean seriously when they're wearing a mesh tank top and eyeliner. And the way it's shot is just ridiculous and very over dramatic (classic 80's) but a great movie for a great laugh if I'm being honest.