by Billy Russell, Staff Writer

I was fifteen years old the first time I saw the movie Blood Simple.

It was a lazy weekend, watching whatever was on TV at the mercy of what programming was available on whatever an antenna in the country could pick up. This particular weekend, it was PBS and an episode of American Masters focusing on the independent film boom of the 1980s and 1990s. I learned all about Spike Lee, Quentin Tarantino, Sam Raimi and, most curious of all to me, the Coen Brothers and their debut feature, Blood Simple (1984).

Growing up where I did and how I did, movies were always my passion. We lived in a small town in Southern California, population roughly 7,000 at the time, and my mom managed the local video store, Village Video. Village Video didn’t have the best selection in the world, but it did have an incredible horror section. I remember walking through those shelves, petrified at some of the incredible artwork. One that always sticks into my mind is the raised-art VHS cover art for the rock ‘n roll themed horror flick Black Roses. The way it bubbled and popped out of the case is still burned into my nightmares.

Many times I can remember my pre-kindergarten days being spent behind the counter at the store, a little styrofoam cup filled with Cheerios to snack on, and keeping quiet with some movie playing on the high-mounted TV for all the customers to see. When I got older, I tried to play movies I thought a lot of people would like: Star Wars or Tremors or even some broad comedy like Tommy Boy. It was like being a DJ with movies and I loved it.

My mom had wanted to make sure I was learning something and not just rotting my brain with movies all day long. She’d ask me questions about movies, so I could be familiar with things in case a customer ever asked.

“Who directed Beetlejuice?” I specifically remember her asking me.

“Tim Burton,” I replied, smugly.

“Who starred in it?”

“Michael Keaton.”

“What other movies have they made together?” 

“Batman and Batman Returns!”

The video store was kind of like a home base for the family. When it first moved to a new location, the alarm system had not yet been installed. My hometown, much as I loved it, was—like any other small California town—rife with drug use. Having just one night without an alarm system installed meant you were taking a big risk with the inventory being stolen. We spent the night at the store for security. My parents slept in the office, and my brother, my sister, and I slept in the main lobby in sleeping bags, with movies playing all night long.

So, by the time I watched that episode of American Masters, I already knew a bit about movies, but there were a lot of blindspots. I knew Fargo, and I knew The Hudsucker Proxy, but I didn’t know Blood Simple. And I thought it looked incredible. There was a shot of a lonely road, lit only by the headlights of an idling car. A soon-to-be murder victim was crawling along the road, with someone slowly pursuing them with a shovel dragging on the ground.

I had two handy-dandy home video guides at my disposal: my favorite—written by Roger Ebert—and my less-favorite—written by Leonard Maltin. Both Ebert and Maltin loved Blood Simple. And if Maltin liked something, it was usually pretty good. Don’t get me wrong, I have a soft-spot for ol’ Maltin, but that guy was hard to please. He’d give fucking Alien a negative review for being too scary. Yet, he’d give a glowing 3.5.-out-of-4-star rating to George Romero’s nasty little horror-drama Martin. Ebert, on the other hand, was easier. He’d praise RoboCop for its badass action sequences. If both of these guys could agree on something, I knew Blood Simple was worth seeing. 

The small town I grew up in was higher up in the mountains, and the “big cities” closest to us (part of the endless suburban sprawl of larger cities) were about thirty miles away, essentially a downhill drive the entire way. Whenever someone would go into the city for whatever reason–clothes shopping or whatever essentials couldn’t be bought in town–we’d call it “going down the hill.” 

“I’m gonna go down the hill to catch a movie,” someone might say. Or, “Are you going down the hill? I need to buy some new shoes.”

“Going down the hill” was essential for everyone from my town, because our town was very, very small. We had one main strip in the middle which included a Circle K, a hardware store, a grocery store, a variety store and two churches. And, of course, the video store. In-town shopping was fine for the basics, but if you needed, say, clothes, or shoes, or a backpack, that was a 30-minute-to-an-hour long drive.

My family went down the hill for grocery shopping, and I called ahead of time to the local Blockbuster and the local Hollywood Video to see if they had Blood Simple available to rent. They did not. By this time, my mom hadn’t worked for the video store in town for a number of years, and even if she had, they didn’t have it. I asked my parents if they could drop me off at the mall before they did their shopping so I could hit up the local F.Y.E., and they obliged me.

I browsed through the shelves and didn’t find Blood Simple in stock. I’d gone through this with F.Y.E. before, and if they didn’t have it in stock, you could usually get the cashier up front to order it from their supplier. 

“Hey,” I said, stepping up to the desk. 

“Hey,” some friendly twentysomething replied.

“I wanted to see if you could order a movie for me. You don’t have it in-store, so maybe you can get it from your supplier.”

“Sure, let me check. What’s the name of it?”

“Blood Simple. Directed by Joel Coen.”

He typed it in and his nose wrinkled. He scrolled and scrolled through the computer before letting out a sigh and telling me, “Okay, so here’s the deal: It’s out of print. But, buuuuuut, it looks like they’re reissuing some special edition of it this year, both on VHS and DVD. I can’t pre-order it through here, but you can on Amazon.”

“Amazon? You mean that internet bookstore?” This was 2001.

I thanked him for his time and when my parents picked me back up, I explained the scenario to them, that I could buy the new edition online, using their credit card. 

“I’m good for the money, you know I’m good for it!” I said in my best impression of a pathetic gangster, whose walls were closing in on him. “I just don’t got a credit card! I’d need youse to buy it for me, and I’d pay youse back.”

It wasn’t a matter of money, they explained. It’s that this whole “internet” thing was new and weird, and they weren’t comfortable with the idea of using their credit card on a website they didn’t know, couldn’t trust, and potentially risked having their financial information stolen.

At that point, I realized I’d exhausted every option available to me, and I called it quits.

Days, maybe even weeks, passed. I was at school, eating lunch with my friends, and I saw a good friend of mine, Darrell, glasses balanced on the end of his nose, as he read the inside of a cap of Sprite. 

“Huh,” Darrell wondered aloud. “I wonder how much this is worth?”

“What do you mean?” I asked him.

“So, Sprite is doing this thing. Each cap is worth a certain amount of money. You see this code?” He showed me a code printed on the inside of the cap that looked something like 8JUV9X123. “You plug this in to Sprite.com and it’s worth anywhere between five cents and a quarter. Sometimes you get lucky and it’ll be like a buck.”

“What can you buy with it? More Sprite?”

“Sure, they have merchandise. You can exchange it, though, and buy shit from Amazon.”

“Wait, Amazon? Did you say Amazon?”

“Yeah,” he said. “So what?”

“I wanna buy something on Amazon. You using that cap?”

“Nope, knock yourself out.” 

He flipped it to me the way a big shot might flip a kid a quarter. I took the cap, put it in my pocket and made a beeline straight for the school library. The computers may have been slow and awful, but by god, they had internet! I pulled up Sprite’s website, created a login account for myself and plugged in my very first cap. The login account homepage told me I had a whole $.05 to my name.

I went back to my friends’ table: Darrell, Lane, and Cedric were still sitting there. I asked them if any of them had any more Sprite caps. Nope, they shook their heads, they were all drinking Cokes. I saw other kids drinking Sprite: “Hey, I’m collecting Sprite caps. If you’re not using those when you’re done, can you drop them off for me?”

They looked confused, but they agreed. Sure enough, sometime after lunch, on my way to another class, someone would approach me with a cap or two, and I’d save them in my backpack to enter in on my lunch break, in the library on the school computer. I kept this cycle up, every lunch break. I only had a few assholes tell me no, not because they were using them, but because they just didn’t want me to have them, because fuck me. Okay. 

My quest for caps took on a life of its own, though. Before long, I didn’t even have to ask anymore; people would just find me. One time, someone approached me with a plastic zipper bag filled with caps. “We heard you were the Sprite dude,” they said. “So, here you go, Sprite dude.” I remember that that bag alone was worth something close to $5, because I got a lucky cap worth a whopping whole $1.

It took forever to raise the money to buy Blood Simple. For-fucking-ever. First of all, movies back then? They were cheaper than the ‘80s—before the cost of owning home video was subsidized by Diet Coke ads—but they still cost a shocking amount, especially for a specialty title like Blood Simple. In 2001-ish, a brand-new movie was like $25–not terrible, but I was raising the money by nickels and dimes at a time. Aaaaand I had to pay the shipping fee. Prime, with its free shipping benefit, was decades away. On top of everything else, to convert my Sprite points to Amazon there was some service fee bullshit that took a certain amount off the top. Basically, I had to raise $50 to buy this goddamned movie.

Finally, the big day came, and I had enough money to cover the arbitrary Spite-Amazon exchange rate and transfer fee, the movie itself, and the goddamned shipping. I was sitting at the school computer, caps in my lap, and a crowd behind me. Darrell was right behind me, Lane was to the left, Cedric to the right, and a whole bunch of other kids who’d contributed a great number of caps to me. They all wanted to witness this historical moment. I logged in, punched in the codes, and made my purchase.

An error appeared on screen: SORRY, AN ERROR HAS OCCURRED.

“What the fuck?” I gasped.

“What happened?” Lane asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t fucking know.”

“Hit refresh!” Darrell yelled.

“No, don’t hit refresh, hit back! Hit back!” Cedric yelled.

The crowd behind me was erupting into discontent whispers. “What’s happening?” “Is it broken?”

Finally, I got back my homescreen and the entirety of the purchase had been deducted. I had a remaining balance of $.011 after everything. When I went to Purchase History, however, it was blank. The order never came through! I started panicking. Okay, okay, okay. Everything was okay. I’d just have to reach out to Sprite customer service and explain this whole thing to them. They’d understand. Right? RIGHT?!

But no one was there to hear my incoherent ramblings. They were long gone and I was crafting a frantic message to Sprite customer service. 

The next day, Sprite had responded to me, and they told me I needed to reach out to Amazon, because I converted my points. It was now Amazon’s problem. Amazon, predictably, said something like, “I don’t know what Sprite’s talkin’ about, the order came from their website, you gotta take it up with them.”

I went back and forth, again and again, to no avail. No one wanted to refund me points, complete the order, or give me Blood Simple.

After that, I officially gave up. Occasionally, one of my friends would ask me, “So, what’s up, did you get Blood Simple or what?” And I’d just solemnly shake my head.

Sometimes, someone would approach me with two handfuls of Sprite caps and I’d wave them away. “I don’t do that anymore,” I’d say. “My caps days are over.”

I finally came to terms with the fact that some people get to see Blood Simple, and some people do not. I was one of the people who would not. Hell, maybe it never even really existed in the first place, I tried to convince myself. It was just a glitch in the Matrix that wouldn’t allow me to see the movie.

It was months later, and I was running errands with my dad. We were going to the store, checking the mail at the Post Office, buying chicken feed and all that stuff early on in the day, because I had a football game that afternoon. Yes, I played football for one terrible season and sucked at it, but I was able to then say, “I played football for a year,” and I’d never have to do it again. Growing up in the country, you have to play for at least one year. It’s an unwritten rule. 

When we rolled up to the Post Office, my dad gave me the keys to the P.O. box and sent me in. I always liked the Post Office. I liked the way it smelled. It liked how quiet it was inside, but how loudly my footsteps echoed inside. I slid open the metal box and inside was the usual: bills, letters, but there was also a little red key. Whenever you got a little red key, it was to open up another P.O. box, because there was a package too big for your regular box.

“What’s the package?” my dad asked.

“I don’t know, I figured it was for you and Mom.”

“Why don’t you open it up and see what it is?”

I tore off a corner of the large, paper envelope and ripped it open. I dug my hands inside and felt something smooth, slick and square. When I pulled it out of the envelope, it was a copy of Blood Simple on VHS. It was the brand-new reissue I was trying to get my hands on. The case was black, but the M. Emmet Walsh character, smoking a cigarette, was lit with red neon. I blinked, and my eyes were hot. I could feel tears welling up.

“We bought you the goddamn movie,” my dad said.

“Jesus Christ. Thank you, Dad.” 

Once we got home, I rushed to unload everything. I grabbed the chicken feed and ran to the coop to fill up their feeders and store the rest.  I ran inside with the groceries to put everything away, spinning like a tornado–imagine Taz, the Tasmanian Devil putting away groceries.

“What’s going on?” my mom asked. “Why are you acting so crazy?”

“I got Blood Simple! I got the movie you bought for me! I’m putting away everything so I can watch it!”

“Whoaaaaa, whoa, hold up,” my dad said, holding his hands up, indicating that I should hold my horses. “You have a football game in only a few hours. A movie like Blood Simple, I think you need to be in the right frame of mind, with no distractions. Just wait until after the game to watch it. I think you’ll appreciate it more.”

“Look,” I said, pointing my finger like a maniac. Pointing at him, the heavens, at invisible Sprite caps that haunted my dreams for over a month. “I went through hell and back to watch this goddamn movie! I’m watching it now! And if I don’t appreciate it enough, I’ll just watch it again! After the stupid game! But I’m watching this thing come hell or high water.”

Both of my parents backed away from me, the way you’d back away from a rattlesnake, coiled and ready to strike.

If I closed my bedroom door and drew the curtains, it was pitch black. Right in front of my bed was a TV with a VCR on top. The shelving above my bed housed some of my favorite “sleepy-time” tapes, movies I’d watch when I had trouble sleeping. Sleepy-time tapes didn’t need to be sleepy, comfortable movies in the traditional sense, just comfortable to me. Movies I could recite from beginning to end, that I’d seen a million times and could drift to sleep with a warm wave of nostalgia crashing over me.

I proceeded to watch Blood Simple from beginning to end and it, too, joined that shelf of comfortable, sleepy movies. I watched that tape so many times, I can still remember the coming attractions before the feature: Universal had put out the re-issue for Blood Simple, so there was a trailer for the DVD release of An American Werewolf in London, the direct-to-video release of Tremors 3, and a trailer for some horror-slasher anthology, a best-of kills compilation called Boogeymen. 

Blood Simple is a tense, taut movie about characters who make rash, stupid decisions out of panic. When they feel their heads going under water, they move quickly, do stupid things, and sometimes find themselves killed over it. It is also a hypnotic, nearly dreamlike movie with a wonderful, tinkling piano score by frequent Coens collaborator, Carter Burwell.

I loved just about everything about it. I loved the drenched-in-neon bar scene. I loved the nighttime scenes bathed in shadows. I loved the over-lit daytime scenes that were so bright, it nearly hurt your eyes and you’d have to squint at it. All of these creative decisions made sense to me. It just clicked. This was a movie about characters who lived at night. Daytime was unnatural to them.

That night, after my football game, I watched it again, in the living room, with my parents.

Over the years I’d show the tape to countless friends who’d never seen the movie. Most of my friends were baffled by it. “You went through all that bullshit for this? It doesn’t even have tits in it!” But I loved it.

About a month later, after I finally saw Blood Simple and gushed about it to anyone who’d listen to me, I was at a thrift store with my mom. I was looking at cheap books and movies for sale and, of fucking course, I saw Blood Simple for sale for a goddamned quarter. A QUARTER!!!

I just rolled my eyes and walked away.

Over the years, whenever a new issue of Blood Simple has been released, I’ve bought it. I wound up owning it on DVD, when I no longer had a VCR. I bought Criterion’s Blu-ray a number of years ago and then I bought their upgraded 4K Blu-ray and watched it on a Samsung OLED. I’ve seen it at its roughest quality and its best-possible home video quality, and I’ve loved it in every shape and form I’ve seen it in. Blood Simple is a masterpiece and I adore it. Everything I went through to see it for my first time was worth it. 

And Sprite, or Amazon, or whoever, you owe me fifty bucks.