28 THE COASTAL BEND MAGAZINE • Early Summer 2018 TheCoastalBend.com BIG TIME HOLLYWOOD PRODUCERS showed up at our newly built Flour Bluff Junior High School in the spring of 1984 looking for kids interested, with their parents’ permission, in working as extras on a movie to be filmed in the area. Par- ticipants had to be willing to have their hair cut, and the pay started at $60 per day—big bucks to a 14-year-old in 1984. The Legend of Billie Jean was the first screenplay that became a feature film for the writing team of Mark Rosenthal and Lawrence Konner, who went on to write Star Trek VI, Superman IV, Planet of the Apes, The Beverly Hillbillies, Flicka, and other ma- jor movies. The film is about siblings Billie Jean and Binx Davy, two high school kids growing up with their divorced mother at the Breeze Haven trailer park in Corpus Christi, who end up in a squirmish with the son of surf shop owner. Hubie and his gang trash Binx’s prized Honda Elite scooter, and Billie Jean heads to the shop locals know as Dockside to confront Hubie’s dad about the $608 repair bill. The lecherous shop owner tries to put the moves on teenaged Billie Jean, and Binx shows up with a silver revolver, shooting him in the shoulder in defense of his big sister. The pair race back to Breeze Haven, where the daughters of the park manager commandeer their mother’s blue Ford LTD station wagon, and the four go on the lamb, knowing that police will be hot on their trail. The foursome break into the mansion located at the corner of Ocean Drive and Dod- dridge (the one with the pillars, not the castle house), and while the house appeared empty, they are soon discovered by Lloyd, the college-aged son of the home’s owner, who happens to be the Texas Attorney General. Having seen the crew on TV news broadcasts, and not unaffected by Billie Jean’s striking beauty, Lloyd is sympathetic. The film’s most memorable scene is the emergence of the transformed Billie Jean, with a chopped, spiky haircut, and fightin’ outfit that started as a pink on turquoise wetsuit. Lloyd films Billie Jean’s statement of innocence and defiance, declaring, “Fair is fair!”—the film’s original title. Hundreds of kids work together to help their new heroine and her band of noble outlaws run from the cops, now led personally by the Attorney General, whose son Lloyd is pretending to be kidnapped by the gang. The Legend of Billy Jean is a running tour of Corpus Christi in the early 80’s. The Breeze Haven trailer park location is on Wheeler Avenue in Aransas Pass, but is lo- cated in the film around the corner from the original Sonic Drive-In in Flour Bluff, which was next door to the original Benjamin’s on SPID—a divided highway back then, not a freeway. In the drive-in scene at the beginning of the film, you can di- rectly see the Pizza Hut and the old Sambo’s (now Taqueria Jalisco) across the street. Much of the film took place at Dockside in Flour Bluff, the oldest surf shop in Texas, which in the film was positioned a few blocks from the beach—in fact, Padre Balli Park (where Bob Hall Pier is located) ten miles away on North Padre Island. Outdoor scenes were staged with the JFK Causeway in the background, the Harbor Bridge, and even the grain elevator on the north side of the Port of Corpus Christi. For us GenXer’s, this movie reminds us that the shopping mall hierarchy used to be reversed—Sunrise was the nice mall, the cool mall, where all the kids hung out. Padre-Staples Mall (now La Palmera) was where Grandma went, and was falling apart. How that world has changed! Hundreds of extras gathered on the beach, at Padre Balli Park, for the film’s climactic closing scene, a place hard to recognize to- day for all its changes. Join us for a quick photo tour of The Legend of Billie Jean, in celebration of Helen Slater’s appearance at Corpus Christi Comic Con this summer!