Sorry, folks. This is going to be the most inside interview I’ve ever done. I grew up in Maryland going to Ocean City every summer, and now Michael Tully has made a movie about Ocean City in 1985. In Ping Pong Summer, Rad Miracle (Marcello Conte) spends the summer in OC with his family and makes friends with breakdancer Teddy Fryy (Myles Massey). While crushing on the local beauty Stacy Summers (Emmi Shockley) at the local arcade, he has to beat her older boyfriend at ping pong. Training montages, as well as local montages at the various buffets and minigolf courses in Ocean City ensue. I spoke to writer/director Tully about all the Ocean City nostalgia in his movie.
CraveOnline: I probably have the most in-depth Ocean City questions you’ll ever hear.
Michael Tully: All right, bring it on. I’m ready. I’m ready for the OC questions.
Can the world appreciate the majesty of Ocean City?
Can the world or should the world?
Well, it’s obvious the world should. I’m asking if they can.
Can the world? I don’t know. I think that’s a good question. I think you have to go there to really understand it. Our lead producer, George Rush is from San Francisco and when I told him about the movie, he’s like, “This sounds great. Do we have to shoot it in Maryland? Why are we shooting in Maryland?” I was just like, “It has to be Ocean City or I don’t want to make this movie because it’s super important to me.”
We took a year before even we took a trip there in the spring and he was like, “Whoa, I don’t know if I really would compare this to anywhere else. It seemed very familiar and has all the tropes of the mid-Atlantic beach town but it’s just kind of its own thing.” He sort of signed off then to say, “All right, I know what you’re talking about. Let’s make this movie in Ocean City.” The funnier thing is, maybe not in Rotterdam, in Holland when we showed it, but I’ve asked at every screening, “Who here has been to Ocean City, MD?” In San Francisco and in Ashland, OR there were a lot of hands raised at all of these screenings.
I also went to Hershey Park a lot, so how did you choose the Super Dooper Looper T-shirt?
The Super Dooper Looper was the first loop roller coaster I ever went on. To me, that shirt was the coolest thing. That loop roller coaster was the coolest thing ever. I found out, my wife is also from Maryland and that was the first loop roller coaster she went on. So I just, for this movie, it’s like an artificial formula Hollywood movie but I wanted to insert my own very normal functional middle class upbringing into an ‘80s movie. Whereas the characters maybe aren’t really real, a lot of the situations and the T-shirts and going to the Paul Revere Smorgasbord with that insanely long dolly of the buffet, those were things that were my own life transferred onto the screen.
Now I haven’t been to Ocean City in 20 years. Do they still have the Dough Roller restaurant, the Sea Terrace condo and Old Pro mini-golf?
Yup, oh yeah. The beautiful thing is if I’m trying to make a period piece in New York City, I’ve lived here for 14 years and now I live in Austin and I think I’ve been gone for a year and I couldn’t do a period piece of five years ago down here. But in Ocean City, they’ve made a real commitment to preserve the timelessness of it, so there’s not even a Starbucks in Ocean City proper. You have to cross the bridge to West Ocean City. That contributed to how we were able to make a legitimate feeling period piece on such a low budget is because Ocean City mercifully has all of those things you just mentioned. They’re still there.
So you didn’t even have to set up an ‘80s patch within modern day Ocean City?
No. The Fun Hub, the primary arcade, that was a build so that was a warehouse that we created, but all of the other locations, it really was a bigger question of me excavating my childhood saying, “No, this is Paul Revere.” I took the production designer, Bart Mangrum into the restaurant and he’s like, “Are you kidding me right now? This is real? All right, we’re pretty much ready.” So when you’re making a low budget movie, you can’t afford to build every set. You have to pick and choose your battles.
Man, in Ocean City, it was a dream because it was mainly get the cars out of the way. Even the extras on the boardwalk the first day, by the end I was like, “No one here has a cell phone. Everyone looks like they’re in the ‘80s. Just roll the camera. I don’t think it matters anymore.” Whereas if you’re somewhere else you might be like, “Oh, everyone’s got cell phones and all this modern gear on.” It just has a timelessness that lent itself to making an authentic 1985 movie.
I was going to say, I must have gone to every arcade in Ocean City. You made up the Fun Hub, right?
Yeah, there was one that was further up in the ‘90s on Bayside in a little strip mall. That’s still there, and the ones on the boardwalk are still there. Again, when you’re making a low budget movie, we were shooting off season. It was after Labor Day so it wasn’t like it was crazy, but we wanted to have as much control as possible. A lot of those arcades are tight squeezes, and frankly they do have modernized games so it’s not like we can just go right in there.
For example, the montage where Teddy and Rad are playing Skee-Ball, those are Skee-Ball machines from the ‘60s, even earlier than the ‘80s but that qualifies for a period piece if it’s the era before, not after. So we were able to just do a little bit of moving of some equipment, set up the frame there and take some of the modern toys out of there and boom, you’re back in 1985, and shoot it with a 16mm camera.
But there was never an arcade called the Fun Hub?
No. I’ve been writing this movie for 20 years, which is kind of embarrassing. I’ve been wanting to make it, and I’d say for 19 years, maybe almost 20, it was a rec center. But when we were scouting, rec centers typically are kind of boring. They’re white walled rooms, sterile environments where old people play shuffleboard and Scrabble. It wasn’t until a month before when the production designer got down and I was like, “I’m saying it wrong. It’s not really a rec center. It’s more like an arcade.”
Then the floodgates opened and Bart found a picture of a basement arcade that he loved that had blue walls. All that was his idea and then the title, I remember us sitting around like what is the most generic title you can come up with? We were like Fun Zone, Fun Land, whatever. Then I think I came up with the Hub because it was just such a dumb sounding word honestly, and then everyone just screamed laughing. We were like that’s it, done deal, let’s call it the Fun Hub.
Which Old Pro course did you shoot at? I’m guessing the Pirate course with the Polynesian next door?
Yup, you’re right. It was 137th. That’s where the pre-screening cocktail party is for our premiere. The Sun and Surf [cinema] is just a few blocks away and Phillips next to it is where the after party is. The one I really grew up going to and playing a lot was the one new Jolly Roger, the castle one. But what they’ve done differently is first of all I think they painted the castle, and secondly they put up a white fence, a thick fence, not a see-through fence. I just thought visually it didn’t look as attractive to have that big fence. The next one we went to was the Pirate/Polynesian. I think that was maybe a little bit of tweaking since the ‘80s. They did some updating. They actually added one in the back that’s an indoor course and that definitely wasn’t there in 1985 but we didn’t use that in the movie for that reason.
I remember an Old West course but I think that was torn down in the ‘90s and I forget which street it was on.
It’s funny you mention the Wild West. There are definitely some I have in my childhood memory and they’re not there anymore. There are still a lot of them. Some of them are kind of modernized, like the Alaskan/Antarctica glaciers. That one just had too much of a modern feel whereas the pirate ship and the colors and the vibrancy of it felt really authentic to 1985.
Why did you choose to have fake movie titles on the marquee?
That’s a combination of rights issues, it was two things. We would’ve had to clear the rights and again, in advance we hadn’t done that. The other thing was, I didn’t want the movie to have pop culture references to turn it into a wink-wink like, “Hey, Live Aid’s on closed circuit TV. Let’s go watch Live Aid.” I didn’t want the movie to have those kind of jokes. I actually ultimately felt like putting real movie titles on there would’ve placed it too much. People would have been like, “Oh, Harry and the Hendersons, ha ha.” I just felt like people would have laughed wrong at that moment so we spent the time to come up with our own fun movies. The joke was that will inspire us to actually make a movie called One in a Row and Mind Maze.
That’s a good reason, but do you have to get the rights to even place the title of a movie?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is a rights issue. You can’t just simply put Back to the Future. Now, there’s a difference. The legal aspect is really ephemeral. If it’s in the back corner in the background, so it’s not prominently displayed, we had that issue with some of our video games. If it’s in the frame in a close-up, then it becomes a clearance issue whereas if it’s just hovering in the background, you don’t need to worry about it so much. It’s how it’s played and what I really wanted to have, more importantly than the movies was to have “Now serving Old Bay popcorn” on the marquee. So if we literally framed that shot differently and Rad and Teddy were just walking away, and in the background of the shot it said Back to the Future, I think we would’ve been able to do that legally, but that’s when creatively we decided it would be more fun to just come up with new names.
Is that why they weren’t real sodas when they were making the suicides?
Yeah, that was also generic. We did get clearance from ICEE. Initially it was Slurpee and 7-11 just didn’t have any interest in approving that, so we thought it would be more fun to just be generic soda, like Cola, Fruit Punch, Orange. It just felt more ‘80s to me that way.
Lastly, did you have the kids play real ping-pong, not Forrest Gump CGI it?
100%. I would rather see real people not playing very well sports than faking them being awesome. It’s a big grudge I have because I grew up playing sports. When I watch movies and it’s like Jonathan Rhys Meyers in Match Point clearly looks like he’s never held a tennis racket. That’s a problem to me. Now I’m not even watching your movie. The other reality is these are teenagers and adolescents in 1985 Ocean City in an arcade. They’re not going to be Matrix style wizards. That was a very, very conscious decision to one, have real ping-pong playing, and then to not make them be better than they were. I think it made for a more honest movie which is what we were trying to do, make it realistic within its kooky world.
Thank you for this movie, Michael. I’m really excited to talk about it.
Cool, thank you so, so much. I’m really glad you could connect even more than most because you’ve got it in your soul. I can tell you’ve got Ocean City deep in there.
vFred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever and The Shelf Space Awards. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
