Commander Softpants
Today Kim handed me a letter that was addressed to me and she had glanced at the addressee. She asked me who Commander Softpants was. I tried to think of something witty to tell her, but then I decided that the actual truthful story was better than anything I could make up. So, I decided to turn it into a story. I mean, why waste a perfectly good title and an interesting story if you’re a writer who is prone to boring his readers with gardening tales of wonder, right?
I have previously explained that back in my first career as a banker at Bankers Trust Company, I knew a guy who the bank had hired in at the Senior Vice President level from Chase Manhattan Bank. Generally speaking, Chase was considered a somewhat more prestigious firm than ours, not by a lot, but certainly by a bit. His shift from Chase to us must have meant something since these were not the days (the early 80’s) when senior executive movement was all that common in New York banking. He was put in charge of a hot-shit area where all the leveraged buyouts were getting done. These were mostly middle market companies, so they were quite credit-intensive. For reasons that were above my pay grade at that time, he didn’t work out in that spot as well as they had hoped, so he was moved to run a large operating area of the bank. I didn’t know him all that well at the time, but I’m guessing he was less than thrilled with that move at the time.
There comes a time in every career where you have to decide if you are destined to make your play at the firm you are with or whether you should move on. He had already make that choice once, but he was probably at a stage of life that made it more difficult or at least less desirable to do it again so soon, so he knuckled down and made the new gig work. He was a funny guy…in two ways. He was pretty humorous in a quirky kind of way. But he way also pretty quirky in a humorous kind of way. He had been a very large man in his youth apparently and had, at some point slimmed down to less than fighting weight. He was slender to the point of gawky. And if you ever sat next to him during a dinner, he would talk to his food telling it what he was going to eat and what he was choosing to leave uneaten. It was weird, but harmless. He also spoke and wrote (emails) in staccato phrases and was not particularly fluid in his articulation. That added to the weirdness.
His wonderful sense of humor made him a favorite at senior officers gatherings because his strange sense of humor was so out of place in a banking setting. Bankers generally tell traditional jokes both on and off color. This guy never told a traditional joke in his life. His jokes were like a George Booth cartoon. Absurd would be a good descriptor. Strangely enough, I was given the opportunity to run the operating area he had run and I jumped at the chance. It was actually one of three assignments available to me at the time, but I thought running an operational area would be good experience. It also gave me a chance to see his sense of humor up close and personal, in a way that only sitting in the man’s chair can afford.
It was time for him to retire and he told us all he would be writing and producing movies. We all thought that was just another case of his absurd sense of humor. But not so. He rented an office in Robert DeNiro’s production building in Tribeca. He went there every day by himself and said he was working on writing his great movie script and looking at production opportunities. He made it clear he expected all of his old banking pals, which included me, to invest in his movies. He lacked a little subtlety in that regard, but at least he had given us fair warning.
While writing away on his great American film script, he found a comedy entourage that sprang from his son’s college upstate. They had a script and were ready to make the next Animal House, set in upstate New York and chronicling the antics of a local police force and the state troopers that regularly crossed paths and swords in the area. It was a simple theme with humor as the primary raison d’etre. He had found his vehicle and plunged in with several million dollars of funding to make the movie, asking most of us to invest. For some long forgotten reason, which I mostly attribute to his very lovely and classy wife, I managed to miss the investment round.
He and I were both movie buffs, so he asked me to go with him to watch the first cut of the movie. We went to a screening room in TriBeCa and I sat through what I thought was the most moronic movie I had ever seen. I finessed my reaction and bit my tongue when he said he was submitting it to the Sundance Film Festival. Since I owned a large house in Park City, Utah, the venue for Sundance, I told him I would let he and his family stay at my house if he got into Sundance (I figured the odds of that were deminimuosly remote). When he called me to say he got his film into Sundance, I was surprised. When he called to read me the Sundance blurb on the film where they said it was the funniest movie that had ever been submitted to Sundance, I was shocked. And then, when he called to tell me they had given his film the Blair Witch spot of Midnight first night at the Egyptian Theater on Main Street, I was blown away with disbelief. I actually thought maybe the film had improved in editing or something.
I attended the first night showing with my houseguests (he and his whole family) and realized in the first five minutes that the film hadn’t changed, but that the Film Festival crowd was rolling in the aisles over the same gags I had and still thought were moronic. Then I watched Harvey Weinstein and other movie moguls outbidding each other in the lobby of the Egyptian following the showing, trying to buy the distribution rights to the film. I decided then and there that I did not have what it takes to invest in film. That film, Super Troopers (2001), was a big hit that went on to be a cult classic. My friend went on to produce the ensemble’s other comedic films like Club Dread (2004), Beerfest (2006) and Slammin’ Salmon (2009), none of which did particularly well with the same slapstick absurd humor genre. I missed all those investments by some circumstance.
The movie my friend was writing finally got produced. He is a Jewish white NYC banker whose one and only movie script in his soul was a black gospel movie. Go figure. It was called Preaching to the Choir and it was what I call Cain & Abel meets Sister Act. I thought it was a decent movie but it flopped big. You can watch it most any night on BET Network and judge for yourself. I missed that investment too.
Then came the sequel. Super Troopers 2 released in 2018. I did not manage to avoid getting tagged for an investment that time and put $50,000 into the production company called, for some reason, Commander Softpants. Bingo! It was a hit and what Kim was handing me was a residual check from the “back end” royalties from my investment in the film. Like everything in life and investing, I would rather be lucky that good. Go Commander Softpants!