THE MAKING OF CALIFORNIA BIG HUNKS arrives forty years after the original fever dream, and the world is finally ready. To mark the anniversary of their accidental cult classic, producers Mark Schulze and Patty Mooney have unearthed never-before-seen footage from the 1985 production — the raw, candid, behind-the-scenes electricity that the cameras caught when nobody was quite looking. Mooney, who edited the original film and served as its cool, disembodied voice of introduction — “And now, Dave…” — turns that same intimate eye on the making of the myth itself.
And then there’s the new soundtrack. Candace Love has scored this companion piece with the kind of music that makes vintage nonsense feel like archaeology — because that’s exactly what it is. Jim the Cop. Reno in the Jungle. Dave the Dirty Cowboy. Donny in the Ruins. Michael in the Gym. Danny in the Haunted Disco. Six men. Six fantasies. One San Diego living room’s worth of production value. An inexplicable Jay Leno connection. A garage sale discovery. A Red Letter Media coronation. A Berlin record label pressing the whole thing onto pink vinyl.
California Big Hunks didn’t mean to become legend. It just couldn’t help itself.
CHÈRE MYSTÈRE is the luminous folk-Americana album from Candace Love — a velvet curtain pulled back on the secret world of a San Diego strip club dancer. Smoky light. A rowdy crowd hungry for something they can’t name. Love poems scratched on cocktail napkins, folded around crumpled dollars and slid across the stage like confessions. And one night a man with a gun walked out without settling his tab, leaving nothing behind but the particular silence that follows a held breath.
Who is Candace Love?
CANDACE LOVE is the musical persona that poet Patty Mooney kept at a slow, steady simmer for fifty years and has now turned all the way up. Since the age of fifteen, Mooney has been filling notebooks with poems drawn from an adventurous life: road trips spanning 25,000 miles and every continent, mountain biking in the dirt and altitude, beaches and surf towns, love affairs, travel through Italy and Greece, the strip club stage, the open road, the natural world, the human heart. For decades, she imagined those words carried by melody. Now they are.
In collaboration with AI as creative partner, Candace Love has become a torrent, with albums arriving like dispatches from a life fully lived. Mountain biking anthems. Sea-salted love songs. A tribute to the forgotten poet Effie Lee Newsome. The long, strange history of cannabis. Songs shaped by Sara Teasdale. Holiday music with wit in it. True-life travel chronicles from the 1980s. Soundtracks for cult video classics. And more coming.
Candace Love is a method, one in which poetry leads, music follows, and fifty years of living finally get their say.
Ongoing Work
Most music films produced by New and Unique Videos® are scored by Candace Love, the musical persona of Patty Mooney. Across albums and films, this collaboration continues to evolve as an exploration of how poetry, technology, and lived experience can meet without hierarchy.
Candace Love is not a genre, a novelty, or a persona detached from authorship. It is a method of listening and responding, where language remains at the center and music serves its meaning.