The Wild Turkey year: the tycoon-opera immersion that germinated 'Low-Temperature Civics'

texture · dark B.S. '80s (recalled)

• When: "the dark B.S. '80s period" — the year JOI took off after a patent-windfall, before the film career proper (recalled at YDAU, scene 138; timeline placement with the genre cycle it seeded — see Dating notes)
• What: A biographical root of one late film, load-bearing for the art. Flush with patent-receipts and "post-carrot anhedonic and existentially unmoored," JOI spent a year drinking Wild Turkey and watching broadcast tycoon-operas (Dynasty et al.) in a remote Northwest-coast spa, where he met and bonded with Lyle. Hal insists the executive-suite film Low-Temperature Civics "wasn't an inversion or lampoon at all, but derived right from the dark B.S. '80s period" — i.e. some of the "ironic" oeuvre is secretly sincere autobiography. See the JOI timeline (the drinking; the Lyle bond).