Citizen Ditko

I read on Mark Evanier's blog today that BBC4 will be running a Jonathan Ross documentary entitled IN SEARCH OF STEVE DITKO next Sunday night. Sounds exciting. I'm not sure of the times, but if a WatchBlog reader within range of that broadcast could record a copy for me, I'll promise to blog about it and thank you personally. DVD-R or VHS welcome.

Postscript 3:58pm: A kind soul has come forward with a promise to record this event for me, but I will leave the above posted to inform others of the broadcast.

WITCHFINDER GENERAL in Stores Tomorrow

Vincent Price as the corrupt puritan Matthew Hopkins in WITCHFINDER GENERAL, a.k.a. THE CONQUEROR WORM.

It's been a long time coming.

It was in May 1988, in the debut of "Video Watchdog" in the pages of GOREZONE #1, that I first reported the atrocities imposed upon Michael Reeves' cult classic THE CONQUEROR WORM (aka WITCHFINDER GENERAL, 1968) by HBO Video's VHS release. It was the film's home video debut. In the nearly twenty years since, the film has never been available for viewing here in the States as Reeves intended it. Not only was the 17th century historical drama cut to soften the blow of its gore (and hence its outrage); worse still, its original Paul Ferris score, an enormous factor in its emotional sweep and impact, was replaced with an anachronistic synthesizer score by NEON MANIACS composer Kendall Schmidt. The film was the last ever made by the prodigious Reeves, who died of an accidental barbiturates overdose in 1969, at the age of 25 -- and it looked as though his best bid for remembrance was doomed by its current owner's refusal to pony up for the renewal of its music rights. In my two decades as a Video Watchdog, it remains in my view the most abominable offense ever perpetuated by a home video company, one that was instrumental in diminishing the reputation of a talented young man no longer among us to defend himself or his legacy.

Tomorrow, all this nonsense finally comes to an end with 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment's "Midnite Movies" release of a fully restored WITCHFINDER GENERAL. The score is back in place, sounding grand and giving this modestly-made picture a measure of majesty, and the film has also been restored to the extent of including some shots never before seen in American release. Here are two of them, featuring Maggie Kimberley as an accused witch being prepared for burning.

There are also other additional shots of gore, witch-pricking and torture that have heretofore only been available as part of a patchwork reconstruction of the movie issued on R2 DVD. The quality of Fox's reconstruction -- actually MGM's reconstruction, as it was done there under the aegis of James Owsley -- is seamless and the movie looks remarkably good, even to the extent of darkening some previously overbright day-for-night shots and brightening some shots that have always been impenetrably dark. I have only one quarrel with the transfer, which I'll illustrate with the following grab:

The reds are far too hot, and not only in these military uniforms. The blood is so luminously red, it looks fake -- it's always been overly bright, but distractingly so. So I recommend you buy the disc and mute your color somewhat before watching. Some of the deep royal blues in the film may look more indistinguishable from black as a result, but the film overall will play better.

The extras consist of a featurette ("WITCHFINDER GENERAL: Michael Reeves' Classic") with appearances by VW's own Kim Newman, Stephen Jones and Vincent Price exhibit curator Richard Squires. (I wish the producers could have invited Price biographer Lucy Chase Williams or one of Reeves' two biographers for some first-hand input; Mr. Squires seems a nice fellow, but I could tell where he read everything he has to say about the film, none of which -- this not being a text presentation -- is attributed.) There's also a very fine audio commentary by actor Ian Ogilvy and producer Phillip Waddilove (who, parents may wish to know, drops a few f-bombs while reminiscing about the once GP but now "Not Rated" feature), moderated by the articulate and respectful Steve Haberman. The extras can also be found on the WITCHFINDER disc included in Fox's new VINCENT PRICE - MGM SCREAM LEGENDS COLLECTION box set.

Alas, with this restoration comes some loss. This is the British director's cut version of the film, so it doesn't feature the opening and closing US narration by Vincent Price (reciting stanzas from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Conqueror Worm"), nor does it feature the continental version's nude tavern wenches as seen in all previous home video releases of the film under its US release title, THE CONQUEROR WORM. The loss of the Kendall Schmidt score is nothing to cry about, of course, but these other omissions fall under the heading of necessary ephemera as far as we collectors and completists are concerned. They really should have been included here as extras.

In short, WITCHFINDER GENERAL is a long overdue release of one of the milestone horror films of the 1960s -- a job well done, but one which also leaves room for improvement the next time around.

Who Is Number One?

Those who have invested once or more in A&E Home Video's DVD sets of THE PRISONER have cause to weep. Now, to commemorate the ground-breaking programme's 40th anniversary, Network Video has released a new, digitally remastered, R2 edition of THE PRISONER in the UK, and this nifty webpage offers some tantalizing before-and-after screen grabs worth checking out. And if they're not enough to make you want to exclaim "Be Seeing You," take a look at the extras also included.

BAVA COLLECTION 2 Art Revealed

As if in reply to the 12-pound heft of MARIO BAVA ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK, Anchor Bay/Starz Entertainment have upped the ante with their forthcoming BAVA - THE MARIO BAVA COLLECTION VOLUME 2. The set has now been increased in size to encompass eight (8) different Bava films!

According to this recently leaked cover art, KIDNAPPED is joining the set. What, no RABID DOGS? I would hope this is an oversight or perhaps an unavoidable omission considering the clearly crowded list of titles. The publicist for the set has promised Video WatchBlog an exclusive on the set's extras as soon as they're confirmed, so keep watching this space for further details.

To refresh your memory, three of these titles -- BAY OF BLOOD, BARON BLOOD and LISA AND THE DEVIL -- will also feature audio commentaries by me, Tim Lucas, as will Bava's wonderful Viking adventure film ERIK THE CONQUEROR, which is being sold separately by the label as it was licensed from a different licensor.

The Joy of Receiving

Today on the Bava Book Update blog.

"My Name is Victoria Winters..."

As those of you familiar with my recent routine will understand, I've lately found myself sorely in need of a nightcap come bedtime. MPI Home Video's newly issued DARK SHADOWS THE BEGINNING - DVD COLLECTION 1 has been just the ticket. This set collects the first 35 B&W episodes of the long-running ABC-TV program, the first "suspense soap opera," which originally aired roughly a year before the vampire Barnabas Collins was introduced to the storyline. What we have here is like a contemporary version of an Ann Radcliffe novel: the gothic story of an orphaned adult, Victoria Winters, and her search for identity at a forbidding mansion in Maine, where she discovers her paternity to be only one of many mysteries and by no means the darkest.

Like many other kids of my generation, I used to run home from school to catch DARK SHADOWS in its heyday, but I didn't stick with it through its entire run. I started when the show started, drifted away when I discovered greater attractions than the mild mysteries it proferred that first year, and came back when I heard that vampires were stalking the stately halls of Collinwood. I was about 11 or 12 at the time and found the miniskirts and shapely legs of Kathryn Leigh Scott compelling viewing, even when Jonathan Frid wasn't baring his fangs. I've since seen individual episodes of later episodes and not gotten hooked all over again, and have been generally mystified by the whole phenomenon of DARK SHADOWS fandom. Nevertheless, I've always been curious to revisit these earliest episodes to see if they were really dull or just over my 10 year old head at the time.

To my amazement, I'm getting hooked. I went through periods of addiction to the CBS-TV soaps GUIDING LIGHT and AS THE WORLD TURNS back in the 1970s, and I have to say that DARK SHADOWS works much like other soaps have worked in my experience. The storyline is not particularly captivating, however, over time, one begins to see through the characters to the people underneath; consequently, one becomes extraordinarily sympathetic to the actors, working under obvious stress (live on videotape), and it is the company of their struggle, the hope we share with them for their occasional triumph, that becomes irresistable. There is also a good deal of cleverness to how the show stretches the most minor of plot points over several episodes, if not several weeks, introducing new bait just before it grudgingly allows the old bait to slide off the hook.

Alexandra Moltke, who plays Victoria Winters, has an interesting dark Irish face poised between blandness and classical beauty, and the scrappy pluck she brings to her performance is winning. David Henesy, who plays a troubled nine-year-old in her charge, is a talented child actor who also has an often-uncorrected tendency to glower into the cameras until his good work becomes risible. Joan Bennett, the star of the show, is properly imperious and cold but, nearly 30 episodes in, I'm still looking for chinks in her armor that might make her at least moderately interesting. Her character is said to have never left Collinwood in over 18 years, but one episode opens with her entering the house from a trip outside. Bennett also has an amusing tendency, in her telephone scenes, to leave no ellipses in her lines to allow for what the person calling might have to say. Louis Edmonds, as the schizo arrogant/avuncular Roger Collins, is a hoot; he's probably the best actor in these early shows and, while it's usually easy to tell when he wanders off-script, he engineers the most graceful rescues for himself and his co-stars you can imagine. It's interesting for me, too, as a longtime admirer, to be reminded of how Kathryn Leigh Scott's Maggie Evans character was first introduced as a blonde-wigged, working class waitress at the hotel greasy spoon; she becomes a warmer, more interesting presence when she loses the wig in Episode 19. And, unapologetic fanboy that I can sometimes be, every time I see Mitchell Ryan, I find myself thinking what a great Nick Fury he might have been. Now-familiar faces I don't normally associate with the series have also been turning up in bit parts: Conrad Bain, Elizabeth Wilson, Barnard Hughes.

Each episode begins with a chalkboard shot that gives the dates of recording and broadcast (generally two weeks apart). In one of these, Nancy Barrett (who plays the cute, blonde, adventure-seeking daughter of Bennett's character) can be seen walking to her mark for the opening scene and vigorously scrubbing at her front teeth with a finger. It's moments such as this that distill the joy of watching DARK SHADOWS and keep me watching. It's really theater rather than television drama, a kind of rough sketch that gives us just enough material to complete in our heads, to fantasize about, to dream on. Perhaps that's why they keep remaking it. Word is going around that Johnny Depp is going to play Barnabas Collins in a blockbuster feature remake; if he gets it wrong, you can bet your sharpened dentures it won't be the last attempt.

In the meantime, DARK SHADOWS THE BEGINNING makes for compulsive, fun, and (I would argue) multi-layered viewing; I can go through three or four in a sitting and wonder where the time went. Full review forthcoming in a future VIDEO WATCHDOG.

A Week (Or So) Into the Mailing

As I hope you've figured out for yourselves, we've been quiet about the Bava book mailing because we've been overwhelmingly busy with the Bava book mailing -- and still are. I'm not sleepy enough to go to bed yet, so I thought I'd post... not an official update for the Bava Book blog, but some personal WatchBlog notes on how it's going. It's hard work, but it's going very well. Our first day paid off in lower numbers than we hoped, but we quickly adapted to increase our productivity and have been meeting daily goals after midnight that sounded unreasonable (at least to me) earlier in the day. This is new terrain for us, you understand -- a job this size may be new terrain for any married couple living in a modest suburban house. The only way to unpack, sign, repackage and ship, say, 100 twelve-pound books in a day is to go through the experience of unpacking, signing, repackaging and shipping 50 the previous day.

But, with Donna at the helm, it can be done. We've also been blessed to have friends and family members rally to our aid. Donna's mom Ellie Goldschmidt and our friend Jan Perry deserve special applause for being here through virtually every day of this process, cutting bubble paper, boxing the books for shipment, and keeping our spirits buoyant. Our pal Joe Busam, who some of you may remember as the producer of MONSTER KID HOME MOVIES and Rondo's Monster Kid of the Year 2005, has also generously stepped in on occasion to lend some additional manpower. Even on short notice. Even on Labor Day weekend. Donna's sister Barbara Harding, who hosted a wonderful and much-needed family gathering at her house on Sunday, came over to offer some assistance this afternoon. They've all played important roles in helping us get the books to you faster, and we're thankful.

Perhaps you are picturing me in a smoking jacket, sitting in a comfortable wing-backed chair, signing book after book with a flourish, and waving those who carry them to my station blithely away. Not so. According to Jan's calculations, I've been lifting somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 pounds per day. Needless to say, this is not my habit: I'm no stevedore; I'm a guy who sits on his duff and types his thoughts for a living. That's how I got into this predicament in the first place.

Here's my routine of the past week in a nutshell: I wake up around noon. Before coffee, Donna sits me down and tells me how many books she intends to have ready for pickup the next day. The figure is always conspicuously larger than the previous day's. After coffee and a quick breakfast, I set to work lifting and carrying 38-pound boxes from the towering stacks in our foyer and dining room to one of two "signing stations" (eg., card tables set up in our living room and dining room). The stacks are usually taller than me, so there is no way to observe the tradition wisdom "Lift with your legs, not with your back." Before sitting down, I cut each box open, dump the wrapped contents onto the table, tear off the brown shipping paper (or shrinkwrapping, if need be), sign the three books from each box, tip a postcard inside each one, and move the books aside until I run out of boxes. Then I carry the accumulated signed books in stacks of two, three or four (depending on how ambitious or energetic I'm feeling) to the nearest "shipping station" (eg., tables in the foyer and dining room). Generally, we've been starting around noon and carrying on, with a brief dinner break at a local restaurant (nobody's got the time or the will to cook), until 2:00 or even 4:00 in the morning.

Donna, Jan and I worked straight through the holiday weekend, taking only Sunday evening off, and got a huge number of boxes out the door today. Our goal is to get the remaining boxes of books out of the house in a couple of days, tops. It might be possible: the foyer is now completely clear of all but tomorrow's outgoing books (a hundred or so) and I was pleased, at the end of today, to see that we had made a noticeable dent in the boxes occupying the dining room. I'm seeing every possible variation of my signature all day long yet I've been feeling, from being so long away from my usual work, out of touch with who I am -- another reason I felt the need to blog; I haven't seen a movie in about ten days. This is not a good position to be in, especially when we're supposed to be prepping VIDEO WATCHDOG 135 as soon as the decks are cleared. Also, VW 134 (which we've been too busy to preview either here or on our website yet!) is due back from the printer any day now, and we need to be done with the book shipping to tend to that shipping. Thank goodness I don't have to sign copies of VW!

Yes, the work is punishing and makes us wish we were about 25 years younger to better cope with it. But when we receive e-mails from happy early recipients or discover message boards like this one where folks in Germany are sharing photos of their newly-arrived Bava books with such obvious and infectious joy, the extra effort we've put in makes the pleasure we feel that much more gratifying.

Ar-bo-gast

I don't know who's behind this anonymously written blog, but I've been reading it daily and enjoying it very much. Today's piece on the late actor-comedian Rick Aviles (and, at first indirectly and then very directly, the blogger) is impressive stuff -- so revealing that it's hard to tell whether it's the blogger or the reader who's trembling at the candor. Kudos, whoever you are.

The Centenary from Planet Arous

Nathan Juran -- the director of such classic matinee fare as THE BLACK CASTLE, HIGHWAY PATROL (Roger Corman's first screen credit), 20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH, THE DEADLY MANTIS, THE 7th VOYAGE OF SINBAD, FLIGHT OF THE LOST BALLOON, JACK THE GIANT KILLER, FIRST MEN "IN" THE MOON, and THE BOY WHO CRIED WEREWOLF, in addition to his pseudonymously-directed favorites THE BRAIN FROM PLANET AROUS and ATTACK OF THE 50 FOOT WOMAN (as "Nathan Hertz") -- would have turned 100 years old today.

Take those credits and add in all his early art directorial credits for I WAKE UP SCREAMING, DR. RENAULT'S SECRET, and some of Anthony Mann's finest Westerns, and his subsequent directorial chores on dozens of episodes of VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA, LOST IN SPACE, THE TIME TUNNEL and LAND OF THE GIANTS, and we have a lot of entertainment to be grateful for.

On "Sweet Nothings"

A friendly correspondent notified me today of this very interesting blog, The Savage Critics, where today's posting offers a critical overview of Stephen R. Bissette's TABOO #2, published back in 1989.

This issue included -- among other notable things -- "Sweet Nothings," a deliberately haunting little story by me and illustrated by my sister from another mother, Simonida Perica-Uth. We were venturing out into new realms with this story, certainly in the way it was illustrated (collages of xeroxed photos of Egyptian tombs and monuments), but also in the way the story was told. My literary style has always been... well, stylized, and I wanted to tell this story and others that might have followed in a deliberately spare manner that would seem to resonate down through the ages. Simo and I did a second, even more ambitious story in the same manner, "Clipped Wings," but what with the early demise of TABOO, it was never published. It didn't quite seem to belong anywhere else.

I don't believe I've ever read any printed assessment of the work Simo and I did together before now, but I treasure the memory of Steve telling me, at the time of its publication, that future FROM HELL artist Eddie Campbell, while staying with him, had expressed the feeling that it might be the most adult story he'd ever read up to that time in the comics form.

Copies of this classic issue are still available here at Steve Bissette's Online Emporium.

Digitally Obsessed on the Bava Book

Mark Zimmer's lengthy article about the Bava book and interview with me went live on the Digitally Obsessed website today, and you can read it here. Thanks, Mark!

In the meantime, the shipping ordeal continues and, boy, are my shoulders sore. Our friend Jan Perry has joined the assembly line (yay, Jan!) to help speed things along. I'm not only signing the books, but lifting each 38-pound box to the signing table, cutting them open, removing and unwrapping the books, and then breaking down the boxes for flatter storage. We haven't yet achieved Donna's dream of moving out 100 copies a day, but we haven't given up hope of getting there.

BOOK OF RENFIELD Q&A

A friendly correspondent forwarded this link to me today, which leads to an anonymous reader's answers to the "Touchstone Reading Group Guide" questions published in the back pages of my novel THE BOOK OF RENFIELD: A GOSPEL OF DRACULA. What a nice gift! I've never seen anyone's responses to these questions before now, but I found the insights of this reader to be most gratifying.

It's Honorin' Time!

Jack Kirby would have turned 90 today and I don't want to let the day pass without some sort of acknowledgement. I'd hate to think that some of my readers might not know who he was, but if you check his IMDb page, you'll find that -- more than a decade after his death -- he has more blockbusters lined up for future release than just about anybody else on the planet. Stan "The Man" Lee may be getting all the press, but it's more than conceivable that The Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk, The Mighty Thor, The Avengers, The Silver Surfer, Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos, Ant-Man, Nick Fury Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., and not least of all Captain America (who he introduced in 1941) would never have made the impression they did on generations of comics readers (and future filmmakers) without the daring draughtsmanship of the man who was rightfully known as "The King of Comics."

To be candid, I have a streak of the perverse in me that has always pushed Kirby somewhat aside in favor of the comics medium's more eccentric masters, Steve Ditko, Gene Colan, and Jim Steranko. Ditko, I feel, created a unique world of comics unto himself, as different to everything else in comics as film noir is different to drama; Colan introduced a more fluid cinematic verve into his visual storytelling; and Steranko elevated comics to the realms of fine art and post-modernism. But, as I revisit Kirby's work now in the Marvel Masterworks reprints, I find it almost ridiculously evident that he was the bedrock upon which the whole Silver Age of Comics was built. Ditko remains my personal favorite, but even I have to admit that Kirby was the best.

Kirby was the artist of the covers of the first Marvel comics I saw and bought. Even though some of those covers, like TALES OF SUSPENSE #61, TALES TO ASTONISH #63, and JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY #112, aren't in a league with his best work, when I see them, I feel a remarkably deep-running emotion that literally thrills my imagination. This cover of THE AVENGERS #4, which dates from a bit earlier, is a classic case in point. The image may be still yet it is full of motion. The characters are leaping right off the page, right off the comics racks into the eager young buyer's hands. I find it somewhat indifferently inked (by Dick Ayers, I believe), but the piece is undeniably a classic. (Admiring it anew, I find myself wondering "If this scene was onscreen, how would it sound?" The mind boggles.) Energy was the essence of Kirby's art, and it's fitting that the technique he innovated of using ink blots to denote powerful fields of cosmic energy has since become known among his fellow artists as "The Kirby Crackle" or "Kirby Dots."

Kirby's energetic style was such a point of sale at Marvel that he was hired to draw the covers for even those books whose interiors he didn't draw. Both the Iron Man and Giant-Man stories in those aforementioned comics were drawn by Don Heck, much to my disappointment, though Kirby could always be depended upon to deliver the Captain America stories in TALES OF SUSPENSE. The two full-length books to which Kirby dedicated himself most whole-heartedly were epic in design: FANTASTIC FOUR and JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY, the latter being the stomping grounds of the mighty Thor and the innovative "Tales of Asgard." These were comics that not occasionally, but habitually, transcended time, space, and dimension in their quest for twelve cents' worth of entertainment. If you happened to miss the Galactus storyline in FANTASTIC FOUR #48-50, you missed something I feel was as essential to the 1960s as anything else that took place in that amazing decade. The version delivered in the multi-million-dollar feature film FANTASTIC FOUR: THE RISE OF THE SILVER SURFER is a mere pittance compared to the Krell-boost my young brain once enjoyed for a combined investment of thirty-six cents.

It's perhaps an impossible task to pick a favorite Jack Kirby cover. I can do it with Ditko, Colan, and Steranko, but not with Kirby. Many of Kirby's most ardent admirers consider Joe Sinnott to have been the ideal inker for his work, but personally I've always been more partial to the inking of Chic Stone on Kirby's pencils. This JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY cover (#110), inked by Stone, is one of many that particularly gets my heart pumping; I can remember a splash page from a Thor story during this period that depicted Dr. Donald Blake in surgery which still makes my jaw drop in its attention to detail. And this is perhaps the most mind-boggling of Kirby's talents -- not how he drew heroes, but how he drew the worlds in which these fantastic heroes dwell. Whether it was the interior of an operating theater, the countryside of Latveria where Doctor Doom reigned supreme, a prehistoric landscape, or the blistering voids at the farthest reaches of the cosmos, Kirby never showed himself less than perfectly at home -- a tour guide to mythic places, hyper-realities, and far-flung frontiers that comics and comics readers might never have reached without him. I love this particular cover more, but the cover of JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY's subsequent issue astounded writer-editor Stan Lee to such an extent that he refused to placard it with the usual Merry Marvel self-congratulation, allowing Kirby's majestic art to speak purely for itself.

If you're of a mind to celebrate Jack "King" Kirby tonight, which movie would I recommend? Oddly enough, one in which he had no direct involvement: Paul Verhoeven's ROBOCOP. Unlike the official Marvel movie adaptations we've had to date, it's ROBOCOP alone that really nails the look and feel of an upper tier Kirby comic, right down to the hero's questing body language, his square fingertips, and the squiggly highlights on his metallic chest and arms. Plus, it's a great movie. But really, the best way to celebrate Jack Kirby's 40+ year reign in comics is by revisiting the pages he actually drew -- or, better yet, discovering it for the first time, if you haven't had the pleasure. There's a lot of it now available in book form and you can find it here, for starters.

All hail King Kirby! Excelsior!

Delivery Day! Hallelujah!

"They're heeeeere."

The full story over on the Bava book blog.

Stay Tuned

Expect an important announcement over on the Bava book blog within the hour.

IF.... and NIGHTMARE USA... and My Dish Problem Resolved

My review of Lindsay Anderson's IF...., featured in the current issue of SIGHT & SOUND, is now posted at their website.

Yesterday, Amazon.com delivered to me a fresh, firm copy of Stephen Thrower's new FAB Press book NIGHTMARE U.S.A. I haven't had time to do much more than page through it with great interest, but it certainly looks like one of the most important genre film book releases of the year. I was most excited to discover that it contains a full chapter on MESSIAH OF EVIL (1975), based on interviews with writer-director Willard Huyck, writer Gloria Katz, and the film's editor. I've always been fascinated by this movie and have daydreamed about presenting something like this chapter as a feature in VW someday, but that never happened -- so I'm pleased that someone of Steve's calibre has done the job in our stead. For some reason, I was able to order this book from Amazon last week for $50 or so, but as of now, they seem to have no more sale copies in stock and there's only one "used or new" Amazon store offering it for over $70.

Also, to follow up on an earlier posting, my Dish Network problems have been successfully resolved. We exchanged our VIP 211 MPEG-4 receiver with Dish's 611 DVR, which cleared up the problem with having with hard-matted gray bars cropping all the widescreen programming we were trying to record. The 611 not only gives me the option of storing up to 25 hours of HD programming on its hard drive, but there's an output on the back that allows me to outport a downcoverted signal to our DVD recorder. This is exactly what I needed. You see, the VIP 211 has no downconversion capability. So, for the record, if you're making the leap to MPEG-4 and are interested in recording SD DVD-Rs from your HD channels, my advice would be to stay away from the VIP 211 and go directly for the 611.

Also, I am loving the ability to record HD movies and other programming directly to the 611's hard drive for later viewing at my convenience, rather than having to prepare two sets of timers every time I want to see something that's not on at a convenient time -- and having to miss out on the HD quality I'm paying for as a result. In the past week alone, I've added to my hard drive HD recordings of PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES (my first Bava HD!), ISLAND OF TERROR and GREMLINS 2: THE NEW BATCH -- none of which are available on HD or Blu-ray disc, or likely to be at any time in the near future. Unfortunately, hard drive space is limited (and so is my viewing time), so there's a limit to how much I can save and for how long -- but this introduction to collecting movies in my receiver, though only for the short term, is already changing the way I think about recording and giving me thoughts about where all this technology could and should proceed from here.

I'm coming around to the idea that HD's real future is not HD and Blu-ray discs, but as a cable or satellite conveyance system only, that may ultimately help to wean us away from needing to own every film we like, or may need for future reference, for fear that it may never turn up again. What cable and satellite companies need to start working on is wiping the slate clean of all these wasteful channels that sell their souls nightly to Paid Programming and setting up motion picture and television data banks that we can rely upon to do our collecting for us, and pipe down to us what we want to see, when we want to see it, in HD or SD as the case may be. As it us, people are spending hundreds of dollars per month on DVDs and DVD sets and running out of room in the process. I don't know about you, but I would gladly redirect my monthly DVD allowance toward a monthly subscription to one or more such data banks -- as long as I could rely on them to maintain operation and to provide me with the special interest material I want to see. Of course, such a fantasy would require the hiring of management who truly know and love movies in order to become a successful reality, which is something that Hollywood has never seemed too able or interested in managing -- but with Dish Network and other providers offering in excess of 900 channels, it would be nice to see them used for a higher purpose than selling Girls Go Wild videos and male member enhancement medications.

Exciting ERIK THE CONQUEROR News

What better way to celebrate a happy ending to the Bava book auction, and to start a new week, than to make an important announcement about Anchor Bay Entertainment's forthcoming October release of Mario Bava's ERIK THE CONQUEROR [Gli invasori, 1961]?

In addition to my own feature-length audio commentary, I provided to the disc's producers a special bonus: a 28-minute excerpt from my 1989 telephone interview with Cameron Mitchell! This material focuses specifically on ERIK and Cameron's warm feelings about Bava himself, whom he described to me as "one of my favorite people on the planet."

I didn't know whether producer Perry Martin would want to use the interview as a separate audio feature, or if he might want to shuffle my commentary and the interview together, but he tells me he's done a little of both. The bulk of the interview will be included as a separate audio option, but those parts that specifically discuss certain scenes in the picture will be mixed in with my commentary. I'm looking forward to seeing and hearing the final results, and I'm delighted that Cameron's personal comments about Bava's best swashbuckler are being preserved for posterity on what promises to be a fantastic release.

The ten of you who won the limited edition CD of my Vincent Price and Cameron Mitchell interviews in the Bava book auction, never fear -- the ERIK DVD will contain only one-third (roughly) of the interview that you'll own in its entirety -- with his further discussions on BLOOD AND BLACK LACE, KNIVES OF THE AVENGER and MINNESOTA CLAY.

It's been a long and exciting night, and Donna and I want to thank everyone who participated in our auction and helped to make it such a grand success. I'm tired, but before I hit the sack for some overdue shut-eye, I want to send out Happy Birthday (or Buon' compleanno) greetings to Alice & Ellen Kessler -- the graceful female leads of ERIK THE CONQUEROR -- who are turning 71 today, and to Bava composer Stelvio Cipriani (BAY OF BLOOD, BARON BLOOD, RABID DOGS), who is celebrating his 70th. And finally, according to the IMDb, I was a year early in wishing a Happy Centenary to Lurene Tuttle last year, who actually turns the big 100 this very day. (What do I know? I watched a PERRY MASON episode last night and was tickled to find Lurene Tuttle starring in it... but when the credits rolled, she turned out to be Josephine Hutchinson!)

Ultimate Bava Book Auction Ending Soon!

Just a quick reminder to everyone that our Ultimate Bava Book Auction on eBay reaches its exciting conclusion in less than a day!

Here, in the east coast time zone, the final bids will be locked down Monday morning at 7:39:02 am. On the west coast, the auction ends Monday morning at 4:39:02 am, pacific time.

We apologize for timing the auction's end at such an awkward hour for most people. We hadn't sold anything on eBay in many years, and never anything on quite this scale in terms of page design. It was important for us to post the auction no later than Monday morning, to ensure that the winners' names and addresses would be in hand before the books arrive this week. If you're going to bed early, remember to bid your highest before retiring... or set your alarms to be there for the finish.

Thanks to the many numbers of people who are watching and participating in this historic auction! And good luck!

Centenaries, Centenaries! They Pleasure Me!

Greetings, my friends. We are all interested in old age, for that is how you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember, my friends, drier skin and creakier bones and varicose veins will affect you in the future -- if you are lucky.

You are interested in the unknown... the mysterious. The unexplainable. That is why you visit this blog each day. And now, for the first time, I am bringing to you, the full story (well, the short version) of what happened on that fateful day -- August 18, 1907. I am bringing you all the evidence, based only on the secret testimony of the marcelled-hair soul who was launched that day on a life of prophecy and prediction. My friends, I cannot keep this a secret any longer. Let us call a spade a spade. Let us praise those who have entertained us. My friends, can your heart stand the shocking fact of The Amazing Criswell's centenary?

For years, he told us the almost unbelievable, related the unreal and showed it to be more than a fact. He might never have believed that such a day would come, but yes, friends, the gentleman born Jeron Criswell Konig, better known as The Amazing Criswell, narrator of Ed Wood's PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, was born 100 years ago today.

All of us on this earth know that there is a time to live, and that there is a time to die. Yet death is always a shock to those left behind. It is even more of a shock when Death, the Proud Brother, comes suddenly without warning -- as it did for brother Criswell, on October 4, 1982. Who could have predicted it?

But, fortunately for us, Criswell has become one of the Threshold People, people who are dead but who continue to entertain us from the Beyond. Some sooth-sayers claim that because he took his rest in a coffin in life, Criswell now spends his death in a proper bed. Could this be the reason for his longeivity? Who among us can say? Who are we going to ask -- Jeanne Dixon?

My friend, you have now read this blog, based on sworn testimony. Happy 100th birthday, Cris. And as for the rest of you... Can you prove that it didn't happen?

Dick Miller to Receive Lifetime Achievement Award

And it couldn't happen to a more deserving guy.

Dick Miller -- one of the most beloved and iconic character actors of the past half-century, known particularly for his many roles in Roger Corman and Joe Dante pictures -- will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 43rd annual Cinecon, the world’s oldest film festival devoted exclusively to classic motion pictures. The award will be presented by Joe Dante at the gala awards banquet on Sunday, Sept. 2nd at the Renaissance Hotel in Hollywood.

Also receiving awards will be three other actors with significant genre credits: John Saxon, Piper Laurie (an actress who's always had a place in my heart for once marrying a film critic -- Joe Morgenstern of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL) and, of course of course, the time machinist's best friend, Alan Young.

Although you may want to attend just for the banquet, anyone who knows enough about movies to know and revere the name of Dick Miller is strongly encouraged to register for the full conference as well. Over two dozen extremely rare features will be screened -- all but one in 35mm, as well as nearly a dozen shorts (including three chapters of the 1941 Columbia serial THE IRON CLAW). If you love old movies of any stripe, you won’t want to be anywhere else Labor Day weekend.

For more information, click here.

The Ultimate Bava Book Auction is Here!

Actually, it's on eBay -- but, believe me, it's worth the trip. Click right here and check out the wealth of production materials and rarities Donna and I have assembled for the 10 lucky winners -- in addition to the first 10 signed and only numbered copies of MARIO BAVA ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK!

What could we possible offer in an "Ultimate Bava Book Auction"? Well, let me put it this way...

You've been pining to hear my never-released KILL, BABY... KILL! commentary? Here's your chance!

You've always wanted to eavesdrop on interviews with the likes of Vincent Price and Cameron Mitchell? Here's your chance!

You've thought of how nice it might be to have some actual manuscript pages from this historic effort? To see how I changed things before they went to press? Here's your chance!

You think 12 pounds and 1128 pages is awfully unwieldy and wish you could own a second copy that could be conveniently slipped into your laptop or jeans pocket? Here's your chance!

And you know what? That's still not even the half of it.

Go to the auction page now (why are you still here?) and check out the full details. Donna and I have worked very hard to make this auction as attractive and exciting and generous as possible. Our goal is to honor this once-in-a-lifetime publishing event by knocking your socks off not once, but twice -- first with the auction, and then with the book itself, which should start shipping shortly after the auction ends!

And remember... If you've already pre-ordered the Bava book, no problem -- you can still participate in the bidding. If you win the auction and have already pre-ordered, we'll gladly refund the price you paid for the book on request! (Some people may want to keep that second copy anyway, since they got it for less than half the cover price, so you'll have to speak up.)

Enjoy!

Orson Bean's New Book

I've written here in the past about my admiration for this gentleman to my left. Actor, author, raconteur, cutting-edge educator (he and his second wife once founded an arts-oriented school where kids were graded for self-expression), stand-up comedian and game show panelist, Orson Bean -- I feel -- has lived an exemplary life. His two works of autobiography, ME AND THE ORGONE and TOO MUCH IS NOT ENOUGH, are amazingly brave and candid works of self-exploration that encompass such matters as his experience in Reichian therapy, the founding of his school, an LSD trip, being stalked by a Satanic cult in Australia, and the failure of his second marriage following a visit to Sandstone (a free sex community) and later experimentation in open matrimony. I should note that the failure of Bean's second marriage was not a failure of the bond between husband and wife; I'm told that Carolyn Bean is still very much a part of Orson's current life with third wife, actress Ally Mills. They all spent last Thanksgiving together.

While visiting Mark Evanier's blog last night, I was surprised and pleased to learn that Orson has written a novel -- his first -- a novella, actually, as the whole thing amounts to less than 125 pages. Originally called MIKEY, it's apparently about spirituality as experienced by people outside of, or alienated by, the Church. Initially, Orson's agent couldn't place the book because Christian publishers found the book too candid (it reportedly includes some profanity and allusions to sexual activity or human sexuality) and mainstream publishers found it too... spiritual. With great largesse, Orson opted to give the book away free online for a short time... until Barricade Press, a publisher in Fort Lee, New Jersey, came forward to express interest in publishing a more polished draft. Now retitled MAIL FOR MIKEY, the book is set to be published in early October 2008.

I haven't read it yet, but I'm betting it's as interesting and as embracing of life and its mysteries as anything else Orson Bean has written.

Scorsese on Antonioni

Just linking to a terrific NEW YORK TIMES memoir by Martin Scorsese of how the films of Michelangelo Antonioni impacted his life.

New Books from Bryan Senn and Steve Bissette

Now available from McFarland and Company is A YEAR OF FEAR: A DAY-BY-DAY GUIDE TO 366 HORROR FILMS by Bryan Senn ($35 softcover, 560 pp), a hefty trade paperback generously illustrated with 218 B&W photos and ad mats. It's formatted around a very clever idea: go through the calendar year, find historical events for each day and then find a horror film relatable to each event.

For example, the movie for May 21 is THE MAZE (1953), because it was on that day in 1977 that the longest leap by a frog (33 feet, 5 ½ inches) was recorded. On November 11, the date of the first fatal train wreck in the US (in 1833) is DR. TERROR'S HOUSE OF HORRORS (1965). September 16's selection is WHITE ZOMBIE (1932), because on that day in 1915 Haiti became a US protectorate. And the movie for November 5, Guy Fawkes Day? No, not V FOR VENDETTA (2006); it's Antonio Margheriti's THE LONG HAIR OF DEATH (1964), which itself features the burning of an effigy. It's a rare movie fan who could resist at least thumbing through this book looking for the movie assigned to their birthday. (Lucky me: I get MARS NEEDS WOMEN for my birthday viewing.)

What would have likely become an instant White Elephant item if produced as an actual calendar (I know -- I've published a horror film calendar!) becomes a compellingly browsable book (and not limited to use over a single year, either). Best-known for his excellent 1930s horror reference GOLDEN HORRORS, Senn's entries for each film are smart, literate and interesting, and often leavened with quotes from various published sources related to the films. In case you have any doubt that Tom Weaver is the most valuable researcher classic horror films have ever had, just flip through this book at random; Tom's name appears on so many pages, crediting the sources for quotes and background information, he probably deserved co-author credit. Not all the data came from Weaver; there are also citations for works by David J. Skal, Mark A. Miller, Richard Bojarski, Robert Tinnell, David Del Valle, Dennis Fischer, Alan Upchurch, Bob Madison, Tom Johnson and Deborah Del Vecchio, as well as other articles from the pages of FANGORIA, FILMFAX and SCARY MONSTERS. (Me, I'm not so fortunate -- a few Mario Bava films are included herein, and the entries for BLACK SUNDAY [December 29, Barbara Steele's birthday] and BLACK SABBATH [March 7, the day the telephone was patented by Alexander Graham Bell] -- tap into my reseach and use at least one quote I obtained from Lamberto Bava, but other scribes are cited as the go-to people for Bava info. Oh, well.)

Senn's YEAR OF FEAR isn't exclusively horror, incidentally. There are several entries for science fiction films (WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE, QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE) and the odd marginal title like RASPUTIN AND THE EMPRESS. I could find only one silent film included: 1923's THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME, an odd inclusion when you realize that NOSFERATU and PHANTOM OF THE OPERA aren't represented and a later version of HUNCHBACK (Charles Laughton's) is. Nevertheless, A YEAR IN FEAR is commendable for providing a welcome structured curriculum for studying a well-considered cross-section of genre fare ranging from the early sound classics (like DRACULA, 1931) to contemporary releases (like DOG SOLDIERS, 2002). And you just might learn some fun things about history in the process.


In other book news, Black Coat Press will soon begin publishing in book form the collected video review columns of VW's own (occasional) Stephen R. Bissette. BLUR is the umbrella title for these volumes, and because our man Steve is nothing if not loquacious, the first volume will cover June 1999 through March 2000. Literate, informative, well worth reading, and well worth having. The very cool front-back cover design, seen above (and incorporating Steve's inimitable graphic stylings), is the work of Jon-Mikel Gates.

Read more about BLUR over on the official SRB blog MYRANT.

Lucas on Lanza on Russell

Donna and I recently had the pleasure of meeting Jason Gargano, the entertainment editor of Cincinnati's popular free paper CITY BEAT. During our conversation, Jason asked me if I'd be interested in reviewing something for him, and proceeded to produce from somewhere in his car a copy of Joseph Lanza's new book PHALLIC FRENZY: KEN RUSSELL AND HIS FILMS. I pride myself on having read every book about Russell's work, so I agreed... and now that review (my first for CITY BEAT) is in print. For those of you who don't live locally and can't pick up the paper around town, here's a link to my review.

Dysfunction Cured!

My review of Bret Wood's PSYCHOPATHIA SEXUALIS (Kino on Video) for the August SIGHT & SOUND is now up and functional over at their website.

More Bava in Time for Halloween

It's being announced elsewhere, so I might as well join the bandwagon and report that Anchor Bay's MARIO BAVA COLLECTION VOLUME 2 will be released on October 23. The titles included in this set are: BARON BLOOD, LISA AND THE DEVIL and HOUSE OF EXORCISM, ROY COLT & WINCHESTER JACK, FOUR TIMES THAT NIGHT, BAY OF BLOOD, and 5 DOLLS FOR AN AUGUST MOON. The audio commentaries I recorded are for LISA AND THE DEVIL, BAY OF BLOOD, and BARON BLOOD -- and I recorded them in that order, for those who may be interested in auditing them sequentially and hearing my voice disintegrate in slow motion. The Alfredo Leone/Elke Sommer commentary recorded for Image Entertainment's HOUSE OF EXORCISM release will be ported over for that title.

ERIK THE CONQUEROR (which will be the complete original export version, not the AIP reduction) will be released separately at the same time, also with a commentary by me, which I'll be recording before the end of this week. The closing shot and end card of the film (curiously missing from the German DVD release) has been restored, which should make this gorgeous-looking release of even greater interest to collectors.

Finally, I mentioned here recently that I managed to record the first three commentaries in a single marathon session last Thursday night. Someone on one of the horror discussion boards has suggested that my expeditious work somehow speaks poorly of me and makes the set's extras as a whole seem less attractive, because -- they presume -- the commentaries have got to be a reckless mess. I resent this because, first of all, I don't do careless work and certainly wouldn't boast about doing careless work; I only mentioned the marathon session because I felt so pleased to have succeeded in my aims against the odds and the clock. It was an achievement. Secondly, I didn't set the deadlines for these commentaries, but as a professional, I agreed to live up to them. I refused to let the quality of my work suffer due to time constraints and, if it somehow did suffer despite my best efforts, I wouldn't have released it. As I write this, it remains for those three recordings to be edited and synched to the movies, so I don't know yet myself how everything is going to turn out -- but I think even the raw tracks were on par with other commentaries I've done.

PS: I wanted very much to record an audio commentary for 5 DOLLS FOR AN AUGUST MOON but time simply didn't allow it.

Calling All Bloggers

Lee Marvin in his classic role as Slob in Edward Dein's SHACK OUT ON 101.

Over at Movie Morlocks, VW's own Richard Harland Smith is calling for an August 29 Blog-A-Thon for Lee Marvin to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the actor's death.

Ladislas Starewitch at 125

I don't know that any festivals or retrospectives have been organized anywhere around the world to commemorate this anniversary, but the great Polish-born animator Ladislas Starewitch was born 125 years ago today.

A worsening problem with any commemoration of Starewitch is the correct spelling of his name, as there are several. I am using, not altogether comfortably, the spelling used on and in a book about the great man recently published in France. His IMDb page spells his name "Wladyslaw Starewicz," which is how the surname has always looked correct to me, though the given name looks a little wonky. I've seen "Wladislas" too. It's a terrible problem for an artist to have, given how difficult it already is simply to see his work.

Starewitch was born in Poland and made his first short film (LUCANUS CERVUS, about stag beetles) in Lithuania in 1910. It was meant to be a naturalistic study, but Starewitch discovered that the heat of his lighting equipment made the beetles sluggish and resistant to action, so he incorporated what were then known as trick-photographic techniques (read: stop-motion) to get them to do what he wanted. When his family relocated to Russia in 1912, he continued along this line. Over the next eight years, he continued to make animated shorts but he also made some live action shorts as well, all of a fantastic nature. Included in the Ruscico DVD of the wonderful Russian horror film THE VIY (1967), for example, is a Starewitch short called THE PORTRAIT, which remains superbly frightening and is the earliest known film to pull the proscenium trick that later made THE RING so hair-raising. Among the several Starewitch films I'd love to see, I'm most curious about a few other live action pictures he made: RUSLAN AND LUDMILLA (1915), ON THE WARSAW HIGHWAY (1916), and CAGLIOSTRO (1920). In 1920, he and his clan fled Russia to Paris, France, where he picked up his work without dropping a stitch.

LA ROMAN DE RENARD (1930).

In the current issue of SIGHT & SOUND, various contributors from around the world were asked to name and write a bit about an obscure film they felt deserved to be better-known. I chose Starewitch's only feature-length achievement, LA ROMAN DE RENARD (1930), known in some territories as THE TALE OF THE FOX. If not for some unforeseen technical delays and distribution problems, it would have become what it was intended to be (and, I think, really is): the world's first stop-motion animated feature with sound. Based on a fable by Goethe, it tells the story of a crafty fox, always up to mischief and talking his way out of trouble, who dares to thwart the ruling of the King that animals should not prey on one another because Love must rule the land. Not only is the script clever and the character design impeccable (in S&S I said that it looked only a step or two away from taxidermy), but the animation -- executed by Starewitch and his daughter Irena over an 18-month period -- remains the most believably fluid and antic until the introduction of CGI, especially in its incredible interpolations of blurred movement.

Starewitch serenaded by the canine hero of his beloved 1934 short, "The Mascot."

Unfortunately, very little of Starewitch's mind-boggling work is available on DVD. LA ROMAN DE RENARD and a collection of short films were issued a couple of years ago as Region 2 discs in France, and these are already hard to find. While watching one of the shorts in one of these collections, LE RAT DE VILLE ET LE RAT DES CHAMPS ("The Town Rat and the Country Rat," 1927), I was amazed to discover listed in the credits as a backgrounds artist Josef Natanson, who went on to become an important matte painter in Italian films during the 1960s. The earliest screen credit for Natanson I had been able to find was for the backgrounds he painted for the classic dance sequence in Powell and Pressburger's THE RED SHOES (1948), but this one credit elucidates a 20-year gap in this important career about which we know nothing.

Here in America, Starewitch fans have had to make due with Milestone/Image Entertainment's compilation THE CAMERAMAN'S REVENGE AND OTHER FANTASTIC TALES, which includes his best-known short, "The Mascot," a 1934 short originally titled "Fétiche." (It's also available as a $2.99 video download here.) This remarkable story of a puppy who struggles against natural and supernatural odds to fetch an orange to bring to a sick little girl is also known to some people as "The Devil's Ball," mostly due to a lengthy and untitled excerpt that used to run frequently on the USA Network show NIGHT FLIGHT back in the 1980s. That's where I first discovered the work of Starewitch and, all these years later, I'm still eager to find more.

A few of his animated shorts can be found at YouTube, and here's a link to a fine website that will serve as a more in-depth introduction to this brilliant filmmaker and his great works. Happy birthday, Maestro!

Stepping Out with Stephen Forsyth

In case you've ever wondered what became of Stephen Forsyth, the star of Mario Bava's HATCHET FOR THE HONEYMOON ("My name is John Harrington -- I'm a paranoiac"), he decided he didn't like the roles he was being offered and quit acting circa 1970. Then he returned to his native Canada, where he dedicated himself to a new career in music. I knew about this because he told me so when I interviewed him for the Bava book, but I could never get him to tell me anything too specific about his last 30 years in music. He said that he composed music mostly to accompany performance art, but that was about it.

Now up on YouTube are a pair of fascinating videos from the musical career of Stephen Forsyth. The first, dating from the 1980s, is a rock video called "Step Out of Love" and it actually features Stephen. The song (which he wrote and recorded) is catchy, the choreography is very impressive (I don't think I've ever seen Iggy Pop quite this animated in a video), and he remains very photogenic. By Googling around, I found out that this piece was part of a live Twyla Tharp dance retrospective held in New York in August 1990, reviewed by THE NEW YORK TIMES here.

"Step Out of Love": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThuU5lpqGSQ

And then for something completely different. The second video, dating from the 1990s, is an avant garde piece for piano and dance:

"Helios": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHyuq5EK8l0

The work showcased in these two videos seems poles apart, representing opposite musical disciplines, yet both are very well accomplished. The second piece, "Helios," shows Stephen to be at home in atonal classicism, while "Step Out of Love" presents him as a fine pop tunesmith, vocalist, and (most surprising to me) dancer. And, unlike many other MTV acts of the period that look dated and silly now, Stephen's pop video remains convincing -- it looks like hard work played out with panache -- and the editing still feels contemporary.

Surprise Surprise

Many thanks to Kim August for alerting me to the fact that Amazon.com already has pages up for the paperback and hardcover editions of my VIDEODROME book, which is listed there as a November 2007 release.

A very spiffy cover, too. I can still vividly remember where I was standing in the room when this very scene was shot. I can even remember standing in the same approximate area when Michael Lennick and Lee Wilson got the idea to film a strip of television static in 16mm and project it onto this stretchy, veiny material from Rick Baker's EFX Inc. and dissolve it out to create one of the movie's most memorable images.

Seeing the format that Millipede Press' "Studies in the Horror Film" series is going to take also excites the imagination about what further entries in the series there might be. An exciting development in publishing, to be sure.

Last night, I joined the elite group of people (Roger Corman may be the only other person able to make this claim) who have recorded three full solo DVD audio commentaries in a single day -- a single night actually, as this took place roughly between midnight and 5:30 am. These commentaries are for the second round of Mario Bava releases coming later this year from Anchor Bay, and the recordings are now out the door and flying west. My voice was close to shot after the third one, but I can tell you this much: wine helps.

I promised to pamper myself today by goofing off and imbibing soothing liquids (to restore my throat, you understand), but it's turned into a work day, after all, though a pleasurable one. I started compiling my personal mailing list for the Bava book, which gave me the opportunity to call and e-mail a bunch of the book's interviewees in search of their current addresses. I got to speak on the phone with Brett Halsey and John Steiner, I left a message for Daliah Lavi, e-mailed other old acquaintences and got e-mailed back, but it seems I may have inadvertently lost touch with Richard Harrison. (If anyone within the reach of this blog knows where to find him, please let me know.) Everyone seems happy for me, excited to know the book is on the way. After all this time, it's really happening...

Your Faithful Blogger on the VIDEODROME set

One of the many things we've been doing this week is getting some last minute additional images together for my "Studies in the Horror Film" book on David Cronenberg's VIDEODROME, which is being published by Millipede Press. I thought I would share a few of these shots with you, partly to stir up interest and partly because I'm not altogether certain these particular ones will make the cut; it's not a book about me, after all. If they do appear in the book, they'll look a lot better, because I didn't do anything much to restore these. I'll leaving that task to the many-handed team at Millipede.

Anyway, this was me twenty-five years ago. Dig those Italian frame eyeglasses. This particular Author's Photo, which finds me simultaneously posed by and broadcast on the fabled Flesh TV, was taken by the show's video effects supervisor Michael Lennick.

Here I am on the actual "Videodrome" set, interviewing assistant director John Board -- a wonderful fellow, knowledgeable, funny, authoritative, keeps a set on its toes. This is one of the few shots that finds me looking color-coordinated with my surroundings. It wasn't really in Pittsburgh, but in Toronto. Photo by Donna Lucas.

That's me with a chunk of Barry Convex's cancer in my hand. Polyvinylchloride, I think it was. Photo by my good friend Robert Uth, who asked me to look queasy.

And, last but not necessarily least, here I am in Rick Baker's EFX workshop holding a foam latex casting of Rick's own hand, which was later used to fill Barry Convex's right sleeve during his animatronic death scene. Another photo by Robert Uth.

My VIDEODROME book will be coming out sometime later this year or early next, I'm told. Needless to say, I'll be sure to let you know when it's available.

"The Passenger" Moves On

Michelangelo Antonioni has vanished from this island Earth at age 94. His disappearance took place the same day as that of Ingmar Bergman, whose death was noted by many a blogger with terms like "Endgame" and "Checkmate." Bergman once staged a memorable chess game with Death, of course, in THE SEVENTH SEAL -- one of the few films whose every image is invested with such power and inevitability that they seem to preexist the film itself, like carvings in ancient wood or stone -- but it was Antonioni who was truly the chessmaster, one of cinema's rare geometric thinkers, possibly its first and without question its most definitive.

This is a very busy week for me, a prelude to a very busy month in fact, and I can't spare the time to write about Antonioni and his glorious work as fully as I'd like. BLOW UP and L'AVVENTURA have always been personal favorites, and when Criterion released L'ECLISSE a few years ago, it immediately vaulted past them into my Top 10: I watched it three times in three days, and then began writing an infatuated short story about the spell it cast, which work and time (again) conspired to prevent me from finishing. Once this present pile of work is out of the way, I would like very much to go back to it and complete it in tribute to this outstanding artist. Last year, "THE PASSENGER" (another of those curious films with titles in quotes, like "DON'T LOOK NOW" and "THESE ARE THE DAMNED") was finally released on DVD, a magnificent film about life, identity, and mortality.

Antonioni's films were often criticized for being too nihilistic, but I don't see them as nihilistic as much as conscious and accepting of the human condition. Just because they are cerebral doesn't mean they are without spirit. "THE PASSENGER" is actually the ideal film to watch if you seek the comfort of knowing that only what Antonioni was, as a man, is dead. What he is and always was, as energy, survives -- I believe the film subtly expressive of this philosophy, that this world is no one's final destination, that we are all merely passengers, our present identity in quotation marks (as well as question marks). Needless to say, his films remain with us as his representatives.

Today, I send a loving genuflection halfway around the world today to one of my favorite filmmakers, Eric Rohmer -- who recently turned 87 -- in the hopes that he can keep his name out of the headlines for awhile.

Requiem for a Heavyweight Broadcaster

Tom Snyder as he appeared in a bit part in "A Friend in Need," a 1961 episode of THE RIFLEMAN. He had two lines.

I was very sorry to read about Tom Snyder's death yesterday at the age of 71, from leukemia. As a constant viewer of his NBC late-night talk show TOMORROW WITH TOM SNYDER (1975-81) and a frequent viewer of his post-Letterman series on CBS, THE LATE LATE SHOW WITH TOM SNYDER (1995-98), I feel as though I shared a big part of my life with him, but that's not exactly true. He shared a big part of his life with me and anyone else thoughtful enough to tune in. Few television hosts were as forthcoming about themselves as Tom Snyder. He would talk "Mother Snyder" when it was her birthday or if she wasn't feeling well, about the joys and woes of raising a teenage daughter, about his problems with the networks, and he would even make on-air references to his experiences with smoking pot or about the times when he tuned into SCREW editor Al Goldstein's public access porn show.

Talk about a box of chocolates. With TOMORROW and Tom Snyder, you never knew what you were going to get. The theme music he chose for the program was probably a clue to the real Tom: Barry White's "Love Theme" -- romantic schmaltzy disco music that was equal parts cheesy and classy. Tom could either be very cool, a complete jerk, and most winningly, he could often be seen vulnerably and forthcomingly trying to navigate a through-line between the two. On the evening that Barry White himself appeared on the show, it was like the Pope had deigned to give him audience. And Snyder gave him the serious attentive interview that I doubt ROLLING STONE ever did.

"Got it. It's not a band, it's a company. It's not a concert, it's a gig." "Humour me..." "Not for long."

Cutting-edge guests didn't necessarily guarantee a cutting-edge interview; his legendary sit-down with John Lydon and Keith Levene of Public Image Limited is a classic example of "failure to communicate," and I can also well remember a joint appearance by James Brown and football great Jim Brown, who apparently showed up at the studio one evening unannounced, requesting airtime on TOMORROW to discuss solutions to the problems facing black youth... in which it quickly transpired that the two JBs really had nothing to offer except that more young black people should look up to role models like them. It turned out to be a fairly bare-faced, smug-assed ego stroke that left Tom so baffled that he spent the next on-air segment scratching his head over why the interview hadn't worked. Very candid, very brave -- and it momentarily turned galling television into great television.

I've written here before about what TOMORROW's great interviews with Sterling Hayden meant to me. But I can also remember seeing a round-table discussion between Snyder and various Russ Meyer stars, including Uschi Digart, to this day the only interview I've ever seen with her. She came across as very smart and business-savvy. I'll never forget Snyder's incredulous comment "So what you're actually saying is that, on a Meyer set, there's no actual..." (he fumbled for a word) "... balling?" His choice of word somehow rooted his question at once and forever in the 1970s. Tom often had trouble with finding the right word for that particular act on national television. On another occasion, he started a show by telling an off-color joke after warning viewers that he couldn't use the word that made that joke so funny. He proceeded to tell it, and to the audible amusement of the stagehands, he sat flustered at his inability to say what he wanted to say. Then he said, "You know, the irony is that I can't say the word, but I can spell it backwards as much as I want. KCUF! KCUF! KCUF!" I've often wondered if he got his wrist slapped over that, the next day. His lusty laugh had an appreciation of the ribald. Another case in point is Grace Slick's first appearance on THE LATE LATE SHOW, when she referred to the crux of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal with the phrase "polishing a knob." Snyder smiled at the former psychedelic rock goddess with an ever-widening Cheshire grin before saying, "You know... I like you."

Which brings us to another of Tom's great TOMORROW moments, and perhaps the one that most crystallizes his value as a broadcaster. There was a night when he interviewed actress Liv Ullmann, I believe on the occasion of the release of Ingmar Bergman's SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE. (Yes, I've heard about Bergman's passing, but that will have to be another topic for another time.) Throughout the interview, there blossomed something very strange in the communication between interviewer and interviewee that was as quizzical as it was compelling to watch. They seemed to be flirting with one another but, then again, they weren't. The next night, Tom opened the show by confessing that, during the previous night's interview with Ms. Ullmann, he had felt a powerful erotic pull that, he was convinced, was being reciprocated and teased on the air. The interview, from his perspective, had been great foreplay. After the show, a production associate alerted him that Ms. Ullmann and her entourage were going to the elevators to leave, and he literally ran after her. Catching the actress just as the doors were closing, he took her aside and explained that he was under the impression that they'd shared what is now known as "a moment." Ullmann then very politely and tactfully thanked him for his flattering interest but said that he must have misinterpreted something in her manner.

He certainly didn't have to discuss such a personal story on the air, but stories like this helped to turn both of Tom Snyder's shows into something conspicuously more than a nightly talk show; they were, in a sense, personality-driven serials in which the interviews were central yet also incidental. There's an element of that in LATE NIGHT WITH DAVID LETTERMAN, but in that setting, it's show-biz served with an unhealthy dollop of irony. With Snyder, you always got the reality of Tom Snyder at that moment -- good, bad, smart, stupid, curious, clueless, but ceaselessly watchable -- and his passing drops a precious digit from the ranks of a most endangered species.

Tonight, let's all raise a Colortini in his honor and watch the happy memories as they fly through the air.

New SIGHT & SOUND, More Dish on DishNet

The August 2007 issue of SIGHT & SOUND is now on newsstands (or should be), which means that a free selection of material therein is now available for your perusal on their website. Among the attractions is my NoZone column on Bret Wood's directorial debut PSYCHOPATHIA SEXUALIS (Kino on Video) -- at least it claims to be there. Perhaps I caught the page still under construction, but as I type this, the link isn't connecting to the review. Maybe it will work for you by the time you read this. If not, keep trying. Better yet, buy the magazine.

To update you on my continuing Dish Network saga: Yesterday we had a Dish technician and his apprentice come to the house for a look at the set-up. To make a long story short, it seems the most likely cure for our recording ailment would be to swap out the VIP 211 with their DVR 622. Not only does this unit offer 160 hours of hard drive storage for HD content (not quite recording for posterity, but close), but the rear panel offers video outputs in both MPEG-4 and MPEG-2. We can run the MPEG-4 to our monitor and the MPEG-2 to our recorder, which would be giving it the same input that we had when there were no problems. In theory, it should work and my fingers are crossed.

The more MPEG-4 programming I see, the more impressed I am. I was checking out the Family Room HD shows two nights ago, before turning in, and was knocked out by the sumptuous video quality of... of all things, FLIPPER. Not the Universal theatrical remake of some years ago, but the original 1964 teleseries; it was like looking through a well-cleaned window at 1964. I never cared for the show particularly, but I was so impressed with the presentation that I stuck with it through the remainder of the episode in progress and an entire second episode. It was reformatted to 16:9 of course, but the show was filmed in such a way that the cropping was never very apparent. It was followed by THUNDERBIRDS, which I've always enjoyed, and it looked beautiful too, though the cropping here was more obvious. Even programming I'm more familiar with, like Rudy Maxa's SMART TRAVELS, looks significantly improved in MPEG-4, with purer, deeper blacks and heightened textures. And a World Cinema HD promo for Kieslowski's BLUE was astonishing in its clarity.

It seems to me, after having made the leap to HD DVD and Blu-ray now for some months, that the companies responsible for cherry-picking titles for release haven't made much of a leap with me. I'm not losing interest in HD per se, but I do find my interest in the HD disc formats slowly eroding. With the exception of CASINO ROYALE and CORPSE BRIDE, easily my two favorite HD/Blu-ray experiences, it's all been about upgrading so far, as far as my own viewing is concerned. The difference is usually appreciable, but very often it isn't exciting -- and, by "exciting," I mean the feeling I got when I first saw STARSHIP TROOPERS in SuperBit.

As I say, it's a matter of poor selection; I'd rather have DRAGONSLAYER than REIGN OF FIRE. Right now, there are only 10-20 titles on the market that I would care to watch more than once -- everything else is the 21st century equivalent of that early videocassette eyesore, FLASHDANCE. Broadcast HD, on the other hand, is infinitely more far-ranging and adventurous than the current selection on HD and Blu-ray discs. I saw 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY in HD on HDNET one year ago, and wrote about it here; we're still waiting for the HD disc. That's why I tend to suspect, at this stage anyway, that broadcast HD may well become the surprise victor in this latest "format war," rather than either of its high profile combatants. Of the three options, it's the one with the most obvious imagination, and therefore the one with the most probable future.

HD is also at its best when it can take you by surprise. When you buy a film on HD or Blu-Ray disc, especially with the current crop of pickings, you sort of know in advance what you'll be getting. Broadcast HD offers you the opportunity to browse/surf through unexpected possibilities and have your breath unexpectedly taken away. Maybe even by FLIPPER.

An Artful Penetration of THE WEIRD LOVEMAKERS

Akira (Tamijo Kawaji) checks the beating heart of Yuki (Yuko Chishiro) after assaulting her in THE WEIRD LOVEMAKERS.

KYONETSU NO KISETSU (1960), originally released in America under the exploitative title THE WEIRD LOVEMAKERS, was the directorial debut of the Malaysia-born Koreyoshi Kurahara (1927-2002). I'm not entirely sure what I was expecting; this Nikkatsu production was distributed here in the States by Radley Metzger's Audubon Productions, usually an avatar of good taste though their ad campaigns could be sensationalistically exploitative, but it's certainly more than I was expecting.

Shown on the Dish Network/VOOM channel World Cinema HD with its Japanese title subtitled as THE WARPED ONES (which, to my senses, suggests a comedy), the film turns out to be an important rediscovery on many fronts. It is directed by Kurahara with a freewheeling, gleefully hedonistic verve that reminded me of nothing less than Joseph H. Lewis' GUN CRAZY, with Yoshio Mamiya's B&W scope cinematography alternating between the carefully composed and the recklessly hand-held. It's also a story of young adult delinquency that has some conscious ties to earlier Western works like GUN CRAZY, REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE and Godard's BREATHLESS but these pale in contrast to how much the film anticipates Stanley Kubrick's A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. Scored by Toshiro Mayuzumi (STREET OF SHAME, WHEN A WOMAN ASCENDS THE STAIRS, THE INSECT WOMAN), it is also -- perhaps above all -- one of the great jazz films, and possibly the best illustration the cinema has ever given us of the jazz buff. It's the only film I've ever seen that makes jazz seem scarier than the darkest heavy metal, that makes jazz seem dangerous.

Akira, Masaru and Fumiko make plans for their stolen car.

It's the story of two petty thieves, jazz-loving Akira (Tamio Kawaji) and Masaru (Eiji Go), who use their hooker friend Fumiko (Noriko Matsumoto) to separate various horny tourists from their wallets. Caught in the act and arrested at a Tokyo jazz bar, Akira and Masuru find an opportunity for revenge soon after their release from jail, assaulting the arresting officer and abducting his girlfriend Yuki (Yuko Chishiro). They take her to a secluded nearby beach, where Akira rapes Yuki within an inch of her life while Masuru and Fumiko become better acquainted in the surf. As the episodic story continues, the three principals are shown living together, with Masaru determining to join a local yakuza gang, against Akira's leering advice. Akira is also tracked down by Yuki, who informs him that she is pregnant with his child.

Akira disrupts a contemporary art exhibition.

Akira, played by Kawaji with the face-rubbing mannerisms of Brando and the tortured swagger of James Dean, is a more extreme character than was seen in most Western cinema up to this time. He steals cars and motorbikes without shame, eats like a pig, drinks incessantly, and greets every woman he meets with "Wanna get laid?" He's not at all likeable, but he is fascinating -- especially when he's in the grip of something he understands, like a cathartic jazz solo. The film seems to acknowledge and ponder this dichotomy with a pair of complementary scenes; in one, a drunken Akira disrupts an art gallery exhibition, smearing his hands over valuable paintings, turning displayed abstract works upside down, and replacing the phony, lite jazz being played on a jukebox with the Real Thing.

Akira is treated like an art exhibition.

In a later scene, Akira goes to taunt Yuki at her cottage, where he finds her entertaining a group of local artists. Akira does everything he can to alienate these people, whom he regards as the flesh-and-blood equivalent of contemptible lite jazz, but they turn the tables on him and treat him as a remarkable art object in his own right, analyzing and approving his contempt for society to his face, and bidding against one another to obtain him as a model. Much as the exhibit sequence looks forward to Alex's (Malcolm McDowell's) invasive assaults on various Pop and Op Art domiciles in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, this sequence of artists deconstructing Akira seems to anticipate Alex's deconstruction by his admiring, cynical government. It should be noted that Akira sleeps next to... no, not an engaving of Beethoven's stony face... a framed copy of Ornette Coleman's THE SHAPE OF JAZZ TO COME. Even the jazz club where Akira broods between petty crimes foreshadows the Korova Milk Bar: the walls painted black and festishized with portraits of the great jazz masters, their names painted in delirious white strokes like the Milk Bar's adverts of Vellocet and Drencrom. Kubrick simply had to have seen it.

Yuki awaits the humiliation of her boyfriend at the hands of Fumiko.

In an unexpected turn of events, the pregnant Yuki prevails upon Fumiko for her help. Since her pregnancy became known to her boyfriend, their relationship has not been the same; he acts superior to her and treats her as someone tainted. So she pleads with Fumiko to seduce him, to destroy his pride as hers has been destroyed, so that they might rediscover their love for one another on levelled ground.

I won't go into the ironic finale, but the 75m film certainly builds to an evil boil and sustains its mood extremely well. I don't know if Quentin Tarantino is familiar with this movie -- which is apparently available in some form from Something Weird Video, probably the dubbed Audubon version (World Cinema HD showed the film in Japanese with subtitles that pulled no punches in the strong language department) -- but these characters seemed to me very much like antecedents of his most hellbent characters, and the whole feel of the film a convincing annex of his universe.

Under whatever title, Kurahara's film is much too important to be so obscure. The same goes for another Audubon import, Tinto Brass's NEROSUBIANCO, which Radley Metzger retitled THE ARTFUL PENETRATION OF BARBARA. (Yes, Virginia -- theaters actually used to show movies with titles like THE ARTFUL PENETRATION OF BARBARA and THE WEIRD LOVEMAKERS, though they won't admit to this in your History class.)