Stallone reigns in 'Tulsa King;' the Pepsi-Harrier fracas

Kirk Boxleitner | Nov 24, 20220

Stallone triumphs on TV with “Tulsa King,” while Netflix takes us for a wild ride with “Pepsi, Where’s My Jet?”

‘Tulsa King’

One of the themes of the later years of Sylvester Stallone’s career has been his ongoing struggle to stay relevant in an ever-changing world, whose changes always seem to be turning away from the sorts of conditions that helped make him a success in the first place.

In this sense, “Tulsa King” on Paramount+ seems ideally suited to the big man, casting him as a Mafioso who did 25 years in prison rather than rat out any member of his mob family. This leaves him a bit miffed when he’s told there aren’t any prospects left for him in New York, so if he’s going to earn money for his bosses, he needs to start a branch for them in Oklahoma.

Stallone’s Dwight Manfredi shares in common with certain tragic heroes a ruefully self-aware sense of his own damnation. He walks out of his prison cell recognizing that being a gangster wasn’t worth “25 seconds” of incarceration, never mind 25 years. And yet, even with a rap sheet and an adult daughter who’s long since stopped speaking to him, Manfredi flies to Tulsa at the behest of mob bosses he neither respects nor even likes any longer, and he starts doing the kind of head-knocking we soon gather he’s always done, simply because he does it so well.

The fish-out-of-water angle of a big-city East Coast paisan stuck in rural America, like Joe Pesci in “My Cousin Vinny,” is one audiences surely expected as soon as they saw “Stallone” next to “Tulsa.” But “Tulsa King” also uses Manfredi’s quarter-century behind bars to turn him, in the character’s own words, into a cultural Rip Van Winkle, for whom Google searches are still a bit of a novelty, never mind smartphone apps, Uber rides, legalized marijuana or chosen pronouns.

Manfredi nonetheless operates swiftly, turning his taxi cab driver from the Tulsa airport into his personal on-call chauffeur, strong-arming his way into acquiring a protection share of a low-key legal weed shop before his ride has even dropped him off at his hotel, and striking up a friendship with the owner of the first country-western bar he strolls into for a drink that evening.

Manfredi does some reprehensible things, but Stallone manages to make him a charming thug, in part because he has no illusions that what he’s doing is awful, so he tries to be as pleasant as he knows how to be about it. He cracks a skull to force his way into the cannabis business run by Bodhi (Martin Starr from “Silicon Valley”), but he also buys the guy a security camera so no one else can rip him off.

Manfredi doesn’t hesitate to turn his fists onto a drunk redneck who refuses to stop groping a woman at a strip club, as well as the car dealer who refused to sell to Manfredi’s driver Tyson (Jay Will) just because the young man is Black. But mostly, this lion in winter would rather just slide the right people some hundred-dollar bills to grease the wheels, including when scheduling a driver’s test to renew his license, which expired in 1998.

Not that Manfredi looks to be in for smooth sailing in Tulsa, because he’s already been recognized by a fellow former New York gangster who’s convinced Manfredi has come there to kill him, and Manfredi’s one-night stand with Stacy (Andrea Savage), who’s not even 50 to his 75 years old, goes south even before she learns he’s a recently released mobster, and she subsequently tells him she’s an ATF agent.

Like Stallone’s character, “Tulsa King” hits the ground having already found its stride, and establishes a number of promising connections and relationships right away, with plenty of room left to grow and explore the potential of this show’s premise.

The second episode ends on a remarkably vulnerable moment, after Manfredi has been introduced to Tulsa’s “Center of the Universe” — a real-life acoustic anomaly in the middle of the city’s downtown, that acts as a private echo chamber, even though it’s totally exposed to the public — and he confesses into the night that he told his daughter to stop seeing him in prison, not because he thought she couldn’t cope with it, but because he couldn’t.

‘Pepsi, Where’s My Jet?’

Attention, all streaming services: This is the type of documentary miniseries you should be running instead of “true crime” serial killer-lionizing swill.

The saga of events during the latter half of the 1990s that led to the Leonard v. Pepsico Inc. court case was hilarious, ridiculous, thought-provoking and inspiring in a distinctively American way. Because at its heart, it was about an internationally powerful mega-corporation that made its money by remaking its cheaply consumable, disposable products into pop culture mythology, and how that corporation got stung by one of the most ardent disciples of its own mythos.

Catching up with John Leonard brought with it some unexpected resonance for me because he and I were both college students in our 20s back in the mid-90s (which means we’re both only a handful of years removed from 50 now).

The Seattle undergrad had sought to take advantage of a Pepsi Cola advertising campaign by sending away for an actual Harrier jet, all because the TV ads for the “Buy Pepsi, Get Stuff” merchandise catalog lacked any fine-print disclaimers, and inadvertently supplied numbers onscreen that made its joke offer technically attainable.

For those who didn’t live through this stretch of relatively recent history, what I imagine must seem laughably absurd to those who watch “Pepsi, Where’s My Jet?” is the unflinchingly stone-faced seriousness with which everyone involved refers to “The Cola Wars,” from advertising professionals to cola company executives.

Actress Cindy Crawford speaks entirely soberly about being “drafted into the Cola Wars,” like they were Korea or Vietnam, and Leonard himself, as both a kid and an adult, is captured on video referring to himself as a member of “The Pepsi Generation.”

Indeed, if a contemporary big-screen movie had been made about this real-life legal comedy, an actor like Pepsi spokesman Michael J. Fox would have been nearly ideal casting for Leonard, because he was everything American pop culture loved about Marty McFly and Alex P. Keaton.

Leonard balanced his college classes with multiple paying jobs, and when he perceived that it might actually be feasible to acquire the Harrier jet, he went to his surrogate father figure and fellow globe-trotting mountain-climber, Todd Hoffman, to pitch him a

diligently researched, detailed cost-analysis business plan.

John Leonard was clean-cut, hard-working, goal-oriented, ambitious and, like so many Americans dream of being, he honestly thought he’d found a way to cash in a golden ticket, albeit from Pepsi rather than Willy Wonka, by dint of his own ingenuity.

Even the Pepsi execs and admen who had to deal with the legal fallout from Leonard’s demands admitted to Netflix that they found it hard not to root for the kid, even when the legal proceedings got wild enough that a young Michael Avenatti (yes, of Stormy Daniels fame) got involved, by threatening to highlight an earlier, more disastrous Pepsi sales campaign in the Philippines, one that had cost people’s lives.

Given that Avenatti appears to have been as unrepentant a scumbag back then as he is now, it’s perhaps most impressive that John Leonard, who admired Avenatti’s aggressive energy, walked away from the man’s shadier schemes with his own soul intact.

Because two decades later, a now-middle-aged John Leonard appears to have grown into as thoughtful and meditative a man as his mentor Hoffman, with whom he continues to travel across the world, revealing the depths of maturity that always lurked within the hustling kid.

And yes, at the risk of sounding journalistically biased, it’s hard to watch “Pepsi, Where’s My Jet?” without concluding that, however mad he might have been, Johnny had earned that jet.