How To Pick Up Girls!

Year releasted: 1978

by Nathan Rabin
October 22nd, 2003

"You're a New York cabdriver all right, tough as nails with a heart of gold!" recent New York transplant Fred McCarren tells crusty cabbie Alan King early in How To Pick Up Girls!, demonstrating an impressive ability to reduce people to stereotypes. But McCarren's gifts of perception fail him soon afterward, when he's locked out of his new apartment by brusque big-city types, then unwittingly encounters a transvestite in a singles bar. Still, McCarren's view of the city improves when swinging roommate Desi Arnaz Jr. cheerfully offers him the services of a buxom sex partner as a randy "Welcome To New York" gift. Arnaz also scores his corn-fed chum a job as an assistant to fashion photographer Richard Dawson, whose work with fashion models only feeds McCarren's fear that he'll never be a successful swinger like his bed-hopping mentor. To help boost McCarren's self-esteem, Arnaz helps him pick out some Studio 54-ready threads, only to have McCarren protest, "I look like Mark Spitz!" His newfound sartorial courage seems to pay off when he and Arnaz pick up two women while shopping, but McCarren's elation turns to despair when he ends up spending the night alone anyway. Plucky neighbor Bess Armstrong offers a shoulder to cry on, listening patiently to McCarren complain that he looks like the "runner-up in a John Travolta look-alike" competition, and playing him part of her interview with Howard Cosell. While Armstrong uses the bathroom, McCarren uses her tape recorder to quiz an attractive stranger on her romantic preferences, discovering in the process that nothing opens doors quite like shoving a tape recorder and microphone into a woman's face. At work, he quickly employs his new seduction technique by securing a date with a famous fashion model. Not even Arnaz's revelation that the model is Dawson's longtime girlfriend can dim McCarren's jubilation, particularly after they end up at Studio 54, partying among the beautiful people. McCarren's night of disco decadence costs him his job, but he rebounds by wooing Armstrong and writing a book on how to pick up girls. Alas, the sole publisher to express interest in McCarren's tome does so only so she can personally chastise him for the book's glib sexism, and on the advice of crusty printer Abe Vigoda, he self-publishes. Though giddy from the runaway commercial success that's become synonymous with self-publishing, McCarren nevertheless feels empty inside. When Armstrong refuses to move to Chicago with her old paramour and vows to give McCarren a try, the red-hot author turns his back on his newfound fame, ready to put his tomcatting ways behind him.