The panelists:
Christopher Funderburg, The Burning Bride, Frank Henelotter super-aficionado.
Marcus Pinn, Pinnland Empire, closet pro-wrestling super-fan.
John Cribbs, Barbara Crampton completist, The Pink Smoke co-founder.
CHRISTOPHER
On Saturday October 24th, 2015 noted Mathilda May enthusiast John Cribbs, Pinnland Empire head honcho Marcus Pinn and I will be heading to the weirdly medieval Sheraton Hotel in Parsippany, New Jersey for the annual Chiller Theatre horror convention. Cribbs and I have attended our fair share of horror, comics, rare book and Hummel figurine conventions, but Marcus Pinn is joining us as total "Con" rookie, having never attended even the "Terrence Malick Leaf, Petal and Twirling Ladies in a Windswept Field" convention held annually in the Daintree Rainforest.
I used to attend conventions regularly because it was necessary: despite living in a rural nowhere, I was fortunate in my teenage years to have access to great video store (Video Paradiso in Newark, Delaware) but, even then, as a nascent celluloid-sniffing cinephile there were artworks I was very interested in which I simply had no access to.
If I wanted see expand my knowledge of Fassbinder and Video Paradiso didn't stock Chinese Roulette, tracking down a copy required following a specialized, often impractical process like sending a hand-written letter to the offices of New Yorker video and hoping they controlled the rights (since they put out the VHS of my copy of The Marriage of Maria Braun) and that they would bother to respond to the letter and send me a catalogue of their titles and that I would be able to afford spending $30 dollars (plus shipping and handling) on a movie I had never seen for a VHS release that might be a pan-and-scan made from a crummy print with faded colors.
Horror films were particularly screwed over by the VHS era: heavy-editing for content and disrespect for the disreputable genre ruled the day - distributors saw the genre only as a sketchy avenue for a quick buck, held their noses and then ditched the evidence as soon as they had flipped a few coins: in the VHS era, horror releases fell out of print almost instantaneously and distributors made shamelessly clear that their intent with these films was purely a money-grab.
I saw the awful, heavily-edited pan-and-scan American release of Suspiria and loved it in spite of the abuse it had suffered at the hands of its distributor. I wanted to see more films by Dario Argento right away - however, before William Lustig and Anchor Bay engineered the excellent DVD release of his work at the turn of the new century, Argento's catalog had fallen into total disarray and neglect. Deep Red notoriously had been cut by 20 minutes* and fallen out of home video release sometime in the 80's. The only existing copies I could find were terrible VHS pan-and-scans featuring an utterly incomprehensible plot - and Argento isn't exactly known for his coherent story-telling to begin with.
Meanwhile, rumors of a properly letterboxed, 100% unedited laserdisc version floated amongst those who cared. You went to a horror convention to find these things: rescued obscurities and neglected masterpieces, hopelessly censored provocations restored to their proper form, all the weirdness that clueless distributors had meddled with and given up on. It was at a horror convention that I first found a copy of the unedited Deep Red (still pan-and-scan) and a gorgeous unedited, letterbox tape of Tenebrae (then only released in the U.S. as a shadow of itself under the title Unsane)... the only drawback was that this copy was the Italian dub with Japanese subtitles.
But it wasn't just horror movies: I found copies of deeply difficult to rent or purchase classics like Frederick Wiseman's "banned" Titicut Follies, Ringo Lam's purported Reservoir Dogs inspiration City on Fire, lesser Godards like Les Carabiniers and Le Petit Soldat, even Pier Paolo Pasolini's infamous Salo. So many of these black market VHS tapes came in the same basic packaging: a flimsy plastic VHS box sheathed with a single sheet of powder-blue printer paper listing the U.S. release title, a few of the alternate or foreign titles, the director and the running time. Sometimes the back-fold of the paper would feature a typo-riddled plot description, many times it wouldn't.
But before the internet made access to anything and everything on this continent and the next a matter of a few seconds of googling, horror conventions were the only way to find half of this stuff. And the vendors would even have a tv/vcr set-up on hand to prove they weren't ripping you off - you could preview the exact tape you were buying before you put down your cash. Which was better than you could say about New Yorker video and some their pitiful VHS transfers. I'd go every year, sometime twice a year, list in hand of everything that had piqued my interest but eluded my grasp and get to work in the dozens and dozens and hundred of sketchy VHS & laserdisc libraries throughout the convention halls.
Half the time you were chasing ghosts: there was a 4-hour Japanese laserdisc of David Lynch's Dune (and the x-rated cut of Wild at Heart that had played at Cannes to a chorus of boos), an uncensored version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 that scarcely resembled the theatrical cut, a Super-8 feature made by members of the Jonestown cult, a 3-part Hong Kong heroic bloodshed flick that Tarantino had also ripped off for Pulp Fiction, a Fulci movie where the killer talks in a Donald Duck voice, all manner of intriguing craziness that you could never be sure actually existed. You'd ask around for the bonkers movie starring only midgets and instead of finding the Herzog film you wanted, you'd get directed to The Terror of Tiny Town.
That to me was the essence of the convention experience: crate-digging for obscurities and searching for the concrete manifestations of what had heretofore existed only in our wildest imaginations. If you felt like buying an original poster for the Japanese release of Belle de Jour or an action figure depicting the creature from The Thing (and who didn't feel that way sometimes?) you could do that, too. Of course, meeting in person the directors and actors and spfx artists who toiled on those obscurities was a major draw for many of my fellow conventioneers and I have fond memories of gawking at luminaries such as Fred Olen Ray, Tom Savini, Joe Pantaliano, Dick Miller and Tobe Hooper, but that was never the main appeal for me. (I can acknowledge and appreciate some folks live for that stuff, though.)
But in recent years, internet access and a film culture that insists on films being released with proper color-timing and correct aspect ratios has rendered my convention-going superfluous. I've gone to maybe three horror conventions in the past decade. So what's drawing me back to Parsippany this year? Nostalgia? To feel the connection to a crowd of fellow deep-divers and crate-diggers? I'm not sure and, truthfully, I'm hoping for Marcus' baggage-free reaction to give me a little perspective, to give perspective to all of us who spent months and years hunting for a 98 minute, letterboxed version of Suspiria.
MARCUS
I'd like to thank John & Chris for inviting me to hang with them at the Chiller convention. Had it not been for them I probably wouldn't have had the opportunity to meet one of the greatest Tag teams of all time -The Nasty Boys! That experience alone was worth the trip for me. I saw them at a house show back in the early 90’s so it's nice to know their alive & active unlike so many of their peers (R.I.P. Dusty Rhodes & Roddy Piper). The duo of Brian Knobs & Jerry Sags have a reputation for not only being some of the stiffest workers in the business, but they're also known for being really rowdy, sometimes off-putting human beings. But as far as my experience goes, they were some of the nicest guys I ever met...
As Chris pointed out, this was my first time going to one of these things. Conventions like Chiller aren't really my thing but I hesitate to say that because I don't want it to come off like I think I'm too cool for a horror/comic convention. I think we all know there's a lot of stereotypes & prejudgments that are associated with certain folks who go to them thanks in part to people like Trekies and Star Wars fanatics. I certainly had my little jokes and internal prejudgments before going to Chiller but at the end of the day I'm not really in any position to make fun of anybody. I’m just as much of a dork but for different reasons.*
On the drive up to Chiller Chris totally triggered a memory in me that I completely forgot about - as a kid I used to go with my dad to record conventions at the Springfield civic center in Massachusetts. As a DJ I went through a period where digging for rare records was a big thing for me. While the folks at record conventions don't dress up in unflattering Frank Gorshin-era Riddler outfits (like this one guy I saw at Chiller), music collectors/enthusiasts, of any genre, are still some of the easiest people to crack jokes on. That lonely, borderline OCD Harvey Pekar/Terry Zwigoff world of music collectors, seen in movies like Ghost World & High Fidelity, is very very real. Unofficial Hip-hop scholars/enthusiasts, like myself, are just as nerdy & dorky (just look at a guy like Questlove for further example). We pride ourselves on knowing pointless insider trivia and owning rare bootleg versions of classic albums like Illmatic (Nas) & Reasonable Doubt (Jay-Z). Did you know Terminator X didn't perform a lot of the scratches on the Public Enemy Albums? Did you know Eric B was more of a "curator" rather than the DJ/producer he's often credited as? Do you know Freddie Foxxx ghostwrote for Salt N' Pepa or that Big Daddy Kane wasn't Biz Markie's only ghostwriter? I can name everyone on the Midnight Marauders album cover (front & back) without the help of the Internet. See? That all sounds a little nerdy. So who am I to judge someone if they want to dress up like deadpool or mad max?
My only reservation about going to Chiller is that Horror just isn't really my strong suit. Sure I know the basics, but my knowledge doesn't really go that deep. Often times John & Chris get in to conversations about horror movies and I'm completely lost. I don't share the same enthusiasm for Frank Henenlotter as they do**, I haven't seen any other Hellraiser movie besides the first one (and I barely even remember that one), and I don't have much of an opinion on the films of Dario Argento. I certainly recognize his iconic status in the world of film but his work just doesn’t do anything for me. So when it comes to horror, I'm kind of like "meh". Movies with titles like "The Virgin Axe Murderers" or "Cannibal Nazi Holocaust" just don't get me excited. Obviously those titles are made up but at one point when I was pursuing the DVD's at the convention this one guy was reading off a bunch of rare horror movies he was looking for to one of the vendors and I swear it sounded like he was just making shit up with titles like "Casket Of Blood" or "The Bride Of The Cannibal Corpse"***
But Chiller is more than just a horror convention. As I mentioned at the top of this piece, there was a somewhat strong pro-wresting presence. Not only were the Nasty Boys there but so was Rob Van Dam & Greg "The Hammer" Valentine who, by the time I got to his booth, had nodded off in his chair so I didn't want to bother him. He’s also known as one of the stiffest workers in the business. I didn’t want to wake him up and become the victim of a sleeper hold. Also, everyone from John Amos & C. Thomas Howell to Paul Sorvino & various members of the baseball furies (The Warriors) were attendance. Any collector or lover of “digging” would have a field day at Chiller. There were plenty of non-horror DVD bootlegs, rare pieces of vinyl, posters & pro-wrestling shoot videos to pick from. I was tempted to buy a bootleg of the entire Are You Afraid Of The Dark series but I didn't want to pay $50 for something that would more than likely collect dust at the end of the day.
I'd be lying if I said there weren't a few things that made me a little sad like seeing Linda Blair still live off of her Exorcist notoriety. I obviously have no way of knowing this but she has to be sick & tired of "Reagan" at this point. I don’t know if John or Chris caught this, but the look on her face had this façade of emptiness & sadness. And Paul Sorvino looked like he had no idea where he was. Conventions like this are interesting. I think some folks would be quick to judge the “has-been”, “washed-up” or “B-level” movie stars for peddling photos & autographs for $20-$40 a pop, but personally I respect their hustle. The movie industry isn’t exactly knocking on their door so I say get money where you can.
At the end of the day the highlights greatly outweighed the low points or odd moments. I stood about three feet away from John Amos, the guy who played Elliot's brother in E.T. nodded his head at me as if to say hello, and I found a cool Gremlins magnet for my refrigerator.
I would absolutely go to one of these again (I hate New York City and I’m always looking for an excuse to get away for the weekend). I'm sure there's a bootleg DVD of some sort with my name on it out there, and my photo op with the Nasty Boys only whet my appetite for meeting more legendary pro-wrestlers.
On a scale of 1-10 I give my experience an 8.
JOHN
A few years back, I considered buying a plane ticket and heading west to the San Diego Comic Con. Not because I was interested in the development of the latest Thor movie. I was 29, I figured that 30 was just too pathetically old to attend "conventions" - I wanted to go out by splurging on a trip to the biggest and most infamous of comic shows. In the end I changed my mind, not because I got over the fear of being a middle-aged fanboy but because San Diego doesn't represent what I care about when it comes to this kind of thing. I've never been into cosplay or gaming and I don't lose my head over Star Wars panels: I'm one of the freaks who's in it for the one-sheets.
My initiation into the world of sweaty nerd flea markets is very similar to Funderburg's. Having picked up the final three issues of Daredevil: The Man Without Fear, I discovered a booth in the back corner of the Tysons Corner Marriot where a dealer who looked EXACTLY like Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons sat uncomfortably behind rows upon rows of videos. He mostly brought stuff for the geek set: bootlegs of the Roger Corman Fantastic Four, that famous tape of Star Trek bloopers where the sliding doors keep closing on cast members, complete series of Gatchaman, Robotech and Thundarr. But when I asked him about John Woo (at that point only The Killer and Hardboiled had been released on American VHS), he slurped the remaining nacho cheese off the tips of his fingers and pulled out a box filled with homemade clamshell cases with labels that read "Once a Thief," "A Better Tomorrow II" and "A Bullet in the Head." (Better than The Deer Hunter! Not as good as Days of Being Wild, but then what is?)
Often the picture was poor, sometimes the subtitles were unreadable, but from then on that booth was my first stop at the monthly Tysons Corner convention. I'd just heard about this crazy Canadian cartoon, Heavy Metal? Thanks for selling me that fuzzy copy of Police Story 3: Supercop, do you have anything else with Michelle Khan (the name Michelle Yeoh was billed under in those days)? The mall video store wants to charge me $79.99 to order Heisei-period Godzilla movies, can you help me out? In the pre-digital age, this guy was an inflated iteration of Leland Gaunt who didn't make you spread mud all over Wilma Jerzyck's sheets in exhange for the things you need (did I mention I was also super into Stephen King at the time?)
My foray onto convention floors was something of an evolution. When I was a kid and still liked most sports, my dad would dutifully usher us to card shows. At one in St. Louis I met... get ready for it... Warren Spahn! Yeah well I was super-excited at the time, and Spahn was cordial as his curve ball was devious. (He would go on to die in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. I kind of want to die in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. To me it seems like the perfectly-named death spot.)
By middle school I'd traded Spahn for Spawn, falling into comic books right around the time they started to get lousy and over-marketed (sports cards got shitty right around the same time, come to think of it, the word "embossed" suddenly applying to both cards and comics). That's right: it was the Age of Image. The variant prism cover. The limited hologram card. Wizard Magazine. Marvel made the cards-to-comics transition easy for me by manufacturing their own cards depicting such beloved heroes as Sasquatch and Foolkiller. My brother and I would go to comic conventions, spend all our money on a box of Marvel cards and sit in the lobby of the hotel opening all 36 packs as my father stood there shaking his head, watching his sons' love of sleek athleticism retrogress to admiration of goddamn cartoon characters wearing tights right before his disbelieving eyes.
My first "celebrity guest" encounter came at a Dark Horse Comics event at Another Universe in the Springfield Mall. The event was... under-attended, to be polite. In fact, I think it was just me and five of my buddies, gawking around a table where perched a collective of bored and probably disappointed comic writers and pencillers. At the front of the table was the charming Art Adams, who gave what one would consider the ideal performance for slobbering fans: he posed for pics, signed stacks of books, scribbled some original doodles, shared anecdotes and basically put up with a bunch of idiot high schoolers for a surprising amount of time. I've experienced this same warm reception over the years from the likes of Sergio Aragones, Jim Wynorski, George Lowe (the voice of Space Ghost) and Taimak - the Last Dragon himself - who was so generous with his time he did everything save getting down on one knee and shining my shoes.
But back at Another Universe, the same couldn't be said for Geoff Darrow, the sullen artist behind The Big Guy & Rusty the Boy Robot (later "Conceptual Designer" for the Matrix movies). I don't know if it was because we spent so much time chatting up Art Adams, or that he was pissed that he'd traveled all this way to sit awkwardly in the middle of an empty mall in Springfield, Virginia, or maybe because my first question was, "What's it like working with Frank Miller??" Whatever the reason, he refused to acknowledge us; he signed the obligatory number of comics before sitting back and crossing his arms. Moving further down the table, Darrow's cold greeting shook me up so much, it was all I could do not to shed tears right into Mike Mignola's Masala chai.*
Years later I would have a similar experience "meeting" a pre-Kill Bill David Carradine, who wouldn't deign to so much as raise his eyes to appreciative fans. I wasn't even really a fan, I just happened to have a dvd of Q: The Winged Serpent on my person and thought it was a funny coincidence. He actually smudged the signature with his sharpie, making it look like some kid got a hold of my dvd and fucked it up, then passed it off to his handler so he could continue his siesta.
The handler asked me for $20, which also took me aback - it was the first time I was confronted with idea of paying for an autograph. Up until then, I'd been used to modest comic book shows featuring guests who weren't washed-up TV stars, who'd gladly hang out and sketch something for you without asking for a dime. Being asked to shell out for that encounter with Carradine, if it could indeed be called that, felt like a mugging. Would even a drawn-out conversation with Carradine about what Shannon Whirry was like on the set of Animal Instinct, or whether he enjoyed his role as "dad" in Karate Cop, have been worth twenty bucks??
(At some point down the line I read a blurb with Carradine in an article about conventions where he shrugged off the whole exchange, cynically theorizing that people get autographs so they can put 'em up on eBay. No wonder he was such a dick that day.)
I like seeing famous people, as much as anybody. If I spy them on the street, I generally try to leave them alone, but in the setting of a paid appearance I don't mind hassling them. The now-standard $20-$60 charge has made me selective: at this last convention, I only approached three guests, including Frank Henenlotter who I've met and taken a picture with before (and for free). People who I really enjoyed talking to. I realized a while ago I don't get souvenirs from these meetings for bragging rights (my Michael Caine-signed Get Carter dvd is just sitting on the shelf next to the other ones) and I'm not the sort to get besotted at the sight of Spike from Buffy. They're all shorter and less attractive than their larger-than-life characters, so what's to get excited about?
There's always a concern that these encounters will feel dehumanizing, like that scene from The Wrestler (as recently ruminated upon here). I admit I didn't notice Linda Blair looking like "a facade of emptiness & sadness" as Marcus did (and Paul Sorvino seemed like he was having an okay time to me), but I certainly had a similar reflection at the last Chiller Weekend I attended. Rip Torn was in attendance... at least in theory. A figure who resembled the Jacob Marley version of Rip Torn - grey, weak, hunched over, seemingly oblivious to where he was - sat at the table. Three or four handlers surrounded Torn to make sure no person directly approached him. He would take about 10 minutes to autograph a photo, pass it off, and try to gather enough strength to do another one. It was so depressing I had to just walk away. (The cruel irony is that one of my best finds at this last week's convention was a beautiful poster for Payday.)
Jesus - he couldn't have been any older than Warren Spahn was when I met him, and Spahn was spry enough! Then again, I'm guessing Spahn lived a cleaner life, probably never got into an on-camera dust-up with Norman Mailer. Anyway, walking away from 97-year-old John Zacherle last weekend after he signed my Brain Damage poster, I realized that I've probably never gotten an autograph at one of these things from a person under the age of 50. I suppose my cinematic and wrestling heroes will be shuffling off this mortal coil sooner rather than later, and I'll have no reason to go to these shows anymore except to find more bootlegs and posters. Which is fine - I love doing that. While I suppose there are better things I could do with my time (like learning the names of everyone on the Midnight Marauders cover), it's always a fun atmosphere, there's always at least one interesting new person you meet and one day I'll find that Tomb of Ligeia lobby card no dealer ever seems to have.
Thanks for coming with us, Marcus! If you have to go into New Jersey, Mr. Pinn is the one I recommend you do it with.
