"The Waterfront": "Succession" in North Carolina, with fishing, drug deals, casual homophobia, Weary butt, and Daedalus dick

I thought The Waterfront, on Netflix, would be a film noir homage, like On the Waterfront, but it's actually about about a family that  runs a North Carolina fishing empire. But it stars Jake Weary, who played a gay guy on Animal Kingdom, so I'll give it a try, starting with Episode 1.1, "Almost Ok."

Scene 1: A boat at night in dark, choppy water.  The Captain tells his crew, Troy and Curtis (Matt Davis, left), to open the hatch and prepare to transfer the shipment.  

Uh-oh, men with guns approach, knock them out, wrap them in fishing nets, and dump them into the ocean.  I'm guessing that these guys are not focus characters.

Scene 2: Establishing shot of an elegant North Carolina coastal community.  Cane Buckley (Jake Weary), son of fishing magnate Harlan Buckley, is in the bathroom keeps texting Troy and Curtis, the guys who were murdered last night, but they don't answer.  He becomes more and more upset.

He goes downstairs to kiss his bikini-clad wife, greet his preteen daughter, grab coffee, and leave.  Heterosexual identity established at Minute 4.

He drives to the beach and stares in shock at his boat, floundered, with the sheriff and DEA officers investigating. 

 

DEA Agent Sanchez (Gerardo Celasco) tells a Background Player Cop that the boat has been cleared out -- no contraband. The crew is missing, presumed drowned. 

Scene 3:  The Big City.  Cane's Dad Harlan (Holt McCallaney, left) grunts, climbs out of bed, groans, and falls to the floor.  He calls to his Side Piece that he's having heart attack: "Call an ambulance and my wife."

Side Piece meets the Wife and the hospital and apologizes for almost killing him.  "It's ok, I got this.  You go home and put on a bra."

Turns out that it was a malfunction in his electronic defibrillator; he'll be fine.   They discuss the floundered boat, and wonder where their son Cane is.

Scene 4: He's at the Carter County Courthouse (no such place, but there's a Carteret County on the coast, near Wilmington), asking the clerk to make Curtis, the drowned guy, the owner of the boat -- "And predate it!" She agrees to help because they're cousins, and family help each other.  Also he promises to fix her $12,000 in credit card debt. 

Next stop: The restaurant where Mom works. Wait -- Dad is a seafood magnate, and she works in a restaurant?  They discuss Dad's emergency and the cargo that was stolen from the boat.  

Cane: "This is the end of our seafood empire!"

Mom: "Don't be so dramatic!  And don't tell your sister.  She can't know!"

Cane: "No problem.  I hate her anyway."

Scene 5: Cane's Sister, cheering on the Havenport High School 2023 Swim Team championships, swimming in the ocean, not a pool. Her Ex-Husband  (Joshua Mikel, Daedalus on The Righteous Gemstones) appears and  yells that she can't visit her son without court permission.   She grumbles but leaves. 

The son, Diller (Diller?) is played by Brady Hepner, who may be gay in real life: he says that the universe is conspiring to make him happy -- while hugging a guy.

Scene 6: On the docks, Cane and his Sister are interviewed by DEA Agent Sanchez.  "Not my boat, I sold it to Drowned Guy Curtis three months ago."

"Ok, then. Bye."  That was easy.

Sister wants to know he didn't tell her about Drowned Guy Curtis buying his boat.

"Because I hate you.  I don't tell you anything. Bye."

At the fish factory, the foreman wants to discuss the drop in orders, but Kane ignores him and rushes into his office -- where Dad decks him!  "What the hell have you done? Don't get up -- I'll just hit you again."

"It was just one drug run, Dad. No big deal. t $10 million in cocaine and opiates. We had to pay off our debts!  We're a second away from losing this place!"

Dad orders him to go to Hoyt, the Bad Dude he hired to handle the drug run, and tell him it's over. 

More after the break

Blake McIver: The "musical" kid from "Full House" grows up, sings, snoots, and shows us what Superman is packing

Full House (1987-95) was a TGIF sitcom set in an annoyingly gay-free San Francisco.  The premise: sportscaster Danny (Bob Saget) loses his wife (don't worry, it's a 1980s death, with no grief).  He can't take care of his three daughters on his own, so his friends Joey and Jesse (Dave Coulier, John Stamos) move in to help. 

I didn't watch -- in West Hollywood in the 1980s and 1990s, who was home on a Friday night?  But I recognize the iconic Full House house, 1709 Broderick Street, about two miles from the Castro, and I know that Mary-Kate and Ashley Olson, who played Danny's infant daughter Michelle, became pop culture icons, starring in a string of movies before starting their own fashion company.  

If you watched, you may have noticed Blake McIver Ewing, who played Derek, Michelle's "musical" friend and fellow thespian, during Seasons 6-8.  From the clips I watched while researching this profile, I gather that he is quite femme.  A contemporary blogger references "the blinding supernova of Derek's undeniable gayness," but on the show itself no one ever suspects.  Michelle's friend Lisa even asks him to the Big Valentine's Day Dance. 

The grown-up Blake's primary interest is music -- his IMDB biography effuses over its "wonderful power to be cohesive, moving, influential, emotive, subdued, deferential, caustic, achingly beautiful, full of character, simplistic, complex and/or virtually any other adjective one can think of."  Like overwritten?   He has 44 music credits and 15 composing credits on the IMDB, and nine songs available on Apple Music, including the gay anthems "It Gets Better" and "This is Who We Are."

He was recently cast in The Boy from Oz, a musical about the life of bisexual singer/songwriter Peter Allen.

But Blake also has 31 acting credits, beginning with the six-year old Ned, played as a grownup by Gabriel Olds, in Calendar Girl (1993) -- which everybody in West Hollywood went to because of the opportunity to gawk at the backsides of Gabriel and Jason Priestley, but not Jerry O'Connell, darn it.

Other than Derek, Blake is best known for playing Waldo Aloysius Johnston II in the Little Rascals movie (1994).  He sabotages the Big Go-Kart Race and steals the girlfriend of preteen Lothario Alfalfa (future homophobe Bug Hall).  Don't worry, she dumps him and returns to Alfalfa after discovering that he is a jerk.

What Superman is packing after the break

Ted Prior: Man-mountain hero of the macho 1980s, Chippendale dancer, Playgirl model. Any gay content?

 

N*de photos of this guy have been sitting in my "to profile" file since March, and since I have some free time today (and my pageviews are down by about 70%)," I'll give him a try.

His name is Ted Prior.  He was active primarily during the 1980s Reagan-Bush era  man-mountain craze, when Stallone, Schwarzenegger, and a dozen lesser lights -- Chuck Norris, Reb Brown, Steven Seagal, Michael Pare -- stormed into POW camps and drug lord lairs, got tortured while shirtless, single-handedly defeated entire armies, and won The Girl, thus demonstrating the "supremacy" of white heterosexual America.

Born in New Jersey in 1959 and raised in Baltimore, Ted originally planned to become a professional bodybuilder -- he states that he won Teenage Mr. Maryland and "ten other awards" before he turned 19.  He moved to Los Angeles, in fact, so he could train at Gold's Gym.

But he worked in theater, too, and once he hit L.A., a walk-on as a bodybuilder in an episode of The Incredible Hulk (1981) convinced him to try his hand at acting. His first starring roles were in  Sledgehammer (1983) and Killzone (1985), written and directed by his older brother David.

Most of Ted's work for the next twenty years would come from David's production company, Action International Pictures: Operation Warzone (1988), Jungle Assault (1989), The Final Sanction (1990), Raw Justice (1994).

Ted's most famous film, Deadly Prey (1987) is a sort of The Most Dangerous Game. People are being kidnapped and taken to a secret jungle enclave, where the evil Colonel Hogan (David Campbell) has his mercenaries hunt them down.  Vietnam Vet Mike (Ted) is grabbed while taking out the garbage, brought to the enclave, stripped, greased, gawked at, and forced to run naked through the jungle.  Uh-oh, they kidnapped the wrong guy.

He is shirtless throughout: a major draw of the film, as you can see from the VHS tape cover.

In November 2024, the Lyric Hyperion Theater in Silverlake, the second gay neighborhood in Los Angeles, held a "Deadly Prey" day, and promised Ted Prior "in the flesh," har har.

The only other Ted Prior movie that I reviewed was Lost at War (2007): five soldiers are trapped in a foxhole while mysterious creatures force them to re-live painful moments of their past.  It is heavy with gay subtexts.

During the 1980s, Ted worked as a Chippendale dancer.  This led to modeling gigs in the  October 1983 and March 1984 issues of Playgirl.

More after the break.  Caution: Explicit.

Luke Benward: Fried worms, Disney movies, Christian music, gay friends, a j/o video, and a n*de Cameron Monaghan

How to Eat Fried Worms (Thomas Rockwell, 1973) is one of the classic novels of my childhood: Billy brags that he can eat anything, so when his friend Alan offers him $50 to eat a worm a day for 15 days...  He can prepare them any way he wants, but Alan will provide the worms. The parents are in on the scheme, there is no bullying involved, each of the boys has a buddy-bonding best friend, and the only girl is Billy's sister.  No one wins the Girl of His Dreams.

 Remembering the buddy-bonds and the absence of the heterosexist trajectory, I eagerly tuned in to the Disney Channel version (2006).  But now Billy (Luke Benward) is confronted by a gang of  bullies led by Joe (Adam Hicks), he fors a group of friend instead of a special buddy, and there is a Girl of His Dreams.  

A rather disappointing start to Luke Benward's career.  Let's see if he has redeemed himself since with some gay roles.

According to the IMDB, Luke was born in 1995 in Franklin, Tennesse.  

He first appeared on screen playing Mel Gibson's son in We Were Soldiers (2002).  

The infamous homophobe Mel Gibson?  That's even worse. 

After roles in the revamped Family Affair (2002) and Because of Winn-Dixie (2005), Luke hit Disney gold with Fried Worms (2006).  

His Disney stardom assured, he continued with Mostly Ghostly (2007): A shy boy (Sterling Beaumon) encounters a a ghost boy (Luke) and his sister, who has a crush on him.  He must figure out how they died before it's too late, and win the Girl of His Dreams. 

Left: Luke and Sterling Beamon strangling Miles Heizer.  Neither has actually worked with Miles Heizer.  Maybe they're friends?

Minutemen (2008): A teen nerd (Luke), his buddy, and the Girl Next Door become time travelers, allowing him to best the obnoxious jock who is dating the Girl of His Dreams. Guess who he ends up with.

Dog Gone (2008): A boy (Luke) rescues a dog from bumbling thieves, bests the school bully (Cameron Monaghan, left),  and wins the Girl of His Dreams.

Things are not looking good for you, Luke Baby.

Let's skip past Girl v Monster and Zombies and Cheerleaders to Luke's first major tv role in Good Luck Charlie (2013).  Charlie is a girl, not a boy, and she doesn't bring good luck; she's the subject of a video diary filmed by her father.  Luke plays Beau Landry, an employee at Bob's Bugs Be Gone who meets, falls in love with, and eventually becomes the boyfriend of Teddy (another girl.  What's with this show?).

Ok, what about Ravenswood (2013-14), a teen mystery series featuring dark secrets in a small town?  Luke plays Dillon Sanders, who is dating focus character Olivia but is secretly plotting to prevent her from discovering the dark secrets.  Oh, and he kills her father.  That sort of ends the relationship.

Cloud 9 (2014): A snowboarder and her obnoxious boyfriend are trained by snowboarding great Will Cloud (Luke).  The boyfriend gets dumped, and...well you know the rest.

Measure of a Man (2018): Dude gets a girlfriend.

Life of the Party (2018): Middle-aged Deanna, newly dumped by her husband, returns to college, and has s*x with a fratboy (Luke), who becomes obsessed with her.  Guess what?  He's the son of the woman Deanna was dumped for. 

I'm tired of this.  Let's see what else Luke has been up to.

He's done some music, such as the theme song for Cloud 9, and he has appeared in the music videos of several other artists, including Martina McBride and Jason Aldean.  

Wait -- he's the son of Christian country-western singer Aaron Benward, shown here with his boyfriend...um, I mean singing partner Scott Reeves -- and the grandson of Christian music producer Jeoffrey Benward.  They have won Dove Awards, and Jeoffrey was inducted into Christian Music Hall of Fame.  Why didn't anyone tell me this before?  Luke Baby is too fundamentalist to play a gay character, and if he's gay in real life, he's got to be extremely closeted.

According to the  Who's Dated Who website, Luke has been in several relationships with women, and is currently dating Ariel Winter (Alex Dumphy on Modern Family).  You know there were gay characters on that show, right?

More after the break.  Caution: Explicit.