INTERVIEW - Lars Horntveth Releases Kaleidoscopic Album That Lynch Would Love

The Norwegian ensemble Jaga Jazzist has been a platform for many side projects, but Lars Horntveth has really raised the stakes with his new album, joining forces with the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra to produce a 36-minute single track that invites the listener to take an uninterrupted journey across an imaginative sonic landscape (though passages of it are available to preview here). Here's my chat with Horntveth about some of the intentions and influences that made Kaleidoscopic possible...

TB: Continuity is a battleground issue in both music and film. Some filmmakers, such as David Lynch, disapprove of films being broken up into chapters on DVD, trying to make it more difficult for the viewer to disrupt the continuity of films. Meanwhile, the music industry is rapidly struggling to adapt to a world where listeners buy singles, not albums. Does Kaleidoscopic's structure comment on these sorts of issues?

LH: Yes, absolutely. The decision not to cut the album up in tracks was very thought through. It's not that I want to be difficult, but I think Kaleidoscopic has to be listened to from start to finish. There is just too much music released these days and so much of it just don't get the attention it deserves. I just like the idea that you sit down, relax and listen to music. Also that you make time for the music to work. Not all albums are made so you can “understand it” on the first listen. I love albums that take time to understand or like cause they are often those I listen to for many years. So I wanted to make an album like that.


TB: I read that you count Joanna Newsom among your influences. Can you describe Newsom's impact on Kaleidoscopic?

LH: Joanna Newsom´s Ys was on of the main reasons I wanted to have just on composition on the album. There are 5 tracks on Ys, but they are very long. I think for a pop/alternative singer like Newsom, it's a very brave decision to do that. I guess there were some fans that fell off, but she most certainly got some new, very dedicated ones. Musically, one of my all time favorite composers, Van Dyke Parks, has arranged the orchestra on the album and Jim O'Rourke mixed it. That's inspiration enough for me.


TB: What does the new Jaga Jazzist work you're rehearsing sound like to you after working on your own music for so long?

LH: Actually, the new Jaga album is already recorded. We are mixing it in February 2009. I think we have managed to combine more complex elements in the music this time. More progressive stuff, harder to play, but still catchy I think. While What We Must was a more straight going, indie rock/shoegazer influenced album, this one is very detailed and “written out.” It´s influenced by Steve Reich, Rick Wakeman, Dungen, Spirit, Fela Kuti, King Crimson, MGMT, Air etc. Hehe, I think it's too early for me to say what this album actually sounds like...


TB: How do you know when a musical idea you've had is something for Jaga Jazzist or something for you to work on solo?

LH: That's is actually not a problem for me. First of all, I have three main projects that I work with; Jaga, The National Bank and my solo stuff. There are so many people involved in these bands, so we have to plan our time very far ahead. So it just gets very natural what to do. We took a break with Jaga for almost 3 years, in that time it was natural for me to do something on my own. Another aspect is that with Jaga, I write for nine people I have known almost all my life, not nine professional musicians. In my solo works I work with classically trained musicians who just play what's on the written sheet. So the processes are very different from each other, democracy versus dictatorship.


TB: You set out to make this album without knowing what the outcome would be. Is that an experiment you'd like to repeat for future albums?

LH: I think that the idea of writing chronologically was very interesting and challenging. The main thing was to keep focus on what would be the right curve of the album. Not to make it too intense, but also not too quiet. I think that it could work to do something like this again. Anyway, I like concept albums, so I'll probably have some kind of dogma thing going on next time as well.

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INTERVIEW - Ladies And Gentleman, The President Of The American Tarantula Society

When it comes to appreciating the unique charms of the world's largest spiders, you can't beat the American Tarantula Society for education and advocacy. Last week I spoke to Wade Harrell (the Society's president) all about the ATS and the objects of their affection -- if you've ever wondered how to send a tarantula in the mail, or how to store a hundred of them in your home, then this is definitely an interview you aren't likely to forget!

TB: So, do you live somewhere where there are a lot of tarantulas?

WH: No, I actually live in Richmond, VA. There are no tarantulas here; in the US, tarantulas live west of the Mississippi River.


TB: How did you get involved in the ATS?

WH: I found out about the ATS from an ad in a magazine. It was probably '96 or so; I was keeping a lot of exotic pets, mostly reptiles, and I'd started getting into things like tarantulas and scorpions, and had a few of those. I became a member, and then I became a contributor, and then I started going to their conferences. Eventually I got involved with their board of directors. With that kind of group, if you sit there long enough, they'll eventually put you in a leadership position.


TB: How would you characterize the people involved in the ATS?

WH: It's all kinds of people. It's kind of like that with the exotic pets scene in general, which is a good mixture -- everyone from bikers and goth teenagers to computer geeks, families with kids, and scientists. Tarantulas aren't related to reptiles at all, but as to the people that like them, it's kind of an offshoot of the reptile hobby; most of the reptile events have people selling tarantulas there. The ATS holds our own annual conferences, pretty much the only yearly event that's devoted to tarantula enthusiasts solely -- though we do talk about scorpions and other arachnids as well.


TB: What work and/or honors come along with being the President of the ATS?

WH: When I first started I was writing articles for the magazine and stuff like that; when you get to the higher levels, a lot of it is administrative. The good parts involve trying to figure out what you want to do with a society like this. When the ATS started, there was no network for people at all, because there was no internet yet. Now people obviously get most of their information from participating in various web forums, so figuring out what the role of a society is in this new environment is very exciting. The direction we need to go in is more educational, and try to foster an appreciation for not just tarantulas and other arachnids, but nature in general. They're not just bugs in a box; we want people to think about the context in which they live their natural life.


TB: It's quite an impressive and unusual-sounding title you have. Do you get to invoke it often?

WH: Only when I'm trying to do something for the organization. Like if I'm trying to get someone to contribute materials -- we have a quarterly magazine, and I'm always trying to get people to write for it, so I tell them I'm the President of the American Tarantula Society, and once they stop laughing…


TB: How do the hobbyist and scientific contingents interact?

WH: One of the things we try to do is try and bring the scientific community and the hobbyist individuals closer together. I'd say our membership is probably 85% amateur enthusiasts and 15% people engaged in some kind of scientific work, and of those there are only a handful that work specifically with tarantulas. Unfortunately there's no money in tarantulas, they have no economic importance, aside from the people selling them for pet trade. There is some venom research going on with them. But mostly there's not much incentive to work with tarantulas right now. Hopefully there can become more interest as scientists realize how many people really do care about it.


TB: On your "So You Found A Tarantula..." page, there are instructions for shipping tarantulas to ATS for research purposes. Do people really send them to you?

WH: Well, the person who receives them Brent Hendrixson, a researcher who's active with us and contributes to our magazine. I'm not sure how many he gets a year, but it's a fair number. We try to promote what he's doing because he's doing a lot of DNA work and taxonomic work -- Even though tarantulas are large, seemingly conspicuous spiders, they're actually very poorly studied, so we're not even close to knowing even how many species are living in the United States. That's what he's trying to work on.

But I do personally receive tarantulas in the mail, and I've sent them in the mail. It's kind of a nail-biting proposition at times, because you want them to be okay... Tarantulas are surprisingly delicate animals. They can't really survive any impacts, so you have to really pack them -- in fact, you pretty much have to immobilize them. You put them inside a plastic cup and pack paper towels around them and tape it up, and then in turn have that immobilized inside a Styrofoam box so it's insulated, and then you send it express overnight. That's pretty much the standard method, but it depends… some carriers won't take them, and some will. Some will tell you that they won't, but they really will.


TB: You mean postal carriers?

WH: Yeah, it turns out the Post Office will carry live tarantulas. Periodically their policies change -- sometimes they say no live creatures at all, sometimes they'll say spiders are okay but you can't ship scorpions. There are some very strange, inconsistent rules; you can ship lizards, but not snakes or turtles. All the carriers are that way, so you have to stay on top of what the current regulations are. There's no specific law against it, it's just the policies of the shipper.


TB: Is that the kind of thing the ATS might lobby against, if laws or policies changed?

WH: We would try to be involved in that. We're not a huge organization, it's not like we have attorneys on staff that we can just send out to take care of things, so the most we could do is write letters and try to explain that there's a right way and a wrong way to do these things. It's usually nothing that singles out tarantulas specifically, mostly just blanket regulations covering all exotic pets.


TB: Are there any creatures out there that fill you with the same dread that most people usually reserve for large hairy spiders?

WH: Not really. Flies are really gross, and some of the maggot-oriented things I've witnessed in my years of working with animals were pretty disgusting. Most of the animals that bother me are the ones you'd have a pretty good reason to be bothered by -- parasites, and things like that. I'm not a big fan of mites and ticks. Just like other animals, tarantulas have mites that bother them, and getting rid of them can be a major problem. But in terms of just being creepy, there's nothing really.


TB: Are there any tarantula-themed movies that you really enjoy?

WH: Of course there's the classic Tarantula, which is kind of a silly one. But I like the earlier scenes in that movie, where the effects are done using an actual tarantula. The dog-sized tarantula in a laboratory cage is a very cool image -- they've got other animals too, like a giant rabbit, but of course it's tarantula that escapes. The movie also has an uncredited role, Clint Eastwood is actually in it as the jet pilot who napalms the tarantula.

Earth Versus the Spider is a really funny one, even lower budget than Tarantula, but they use an actual tarantula for almost all the shots in that movie. They never say explain why there's a giant tarantula, which is one of my favorite things about it. It's just there in the middle of the desert eating people for some reason.


TB: I noted that Tarantula.com is taken by some kind of media company, and they're really not doing much with it at the moment. Would you ever consider a campaign to make them surrender the name, in the name of science?

WH: That's kind of an interesting idea! [laughs] But I think that the word "tarantula" is pretty common in popular culture. And there's actually a lot of debate within the tarantula hobbyist groups over whether you should really call these spiders tarantulas or not to begin with... The original spiders that were called tarantulas were actually these kinds of wolf spiders that lived in Southern Italy; they became very famous because it was believed that they were dangerous to people, even though they weren't. And when people were describing these huge spiders from South America and other places, they started calling those tarantulas too. So now the name applies to all the large hairy spiders included in the group Theraphosidae, which is the family that tarantulas occupy today, and all those wolf spiders are in a totally different family.


TB: Is there a name that these people have proposed to be used instead?

WH: That's another thing people like to debate! Of course some scientific types say that we should reject common names altogether, and just call them Theraphosidae. In Africa they're often called baboon spiders, mainly because somebody thought their legs looked like baboon fingers when they're in a burrow with their legs sticking out of the hole. In South America they're often called bird spiders, because certain kinds can kill birds, though it occurs only rarely. In Asia there are some called earth tigers or tiger spiders, as many of them are striped, and they're often very aggressive when they're disturbed. So, there are a lot of names already out there.


TB: Do you happen to own any tarantulas now?

WH: Oh yes! I've probably got… oh, a hundred right now. A lot of them are babies -- I breed them sometimes -- so they're small, about a quarter inch across. My largest one now is about 8 inches across.


TB: I can only imagine that this takes up a lot of space… Do they have their own separate enclosures?

WH: Yes, they have to have their own cages. They don't have huge brains… they will eat each other. To a tarantula, another tarantula is just another big bug to eat. The good news is that they don't require a lot of space as individuals. The small babies live in pill vials, you know, little 3-4 oz. containers, so that's pretty easy. When they get larger, a 5-10 gallon aquarium is more than enough space for most.


TB: That seems astonishing to me, because I have three cats, and if I wake up in the middle of the night and the house is on fire, how am I going to get three cats out of the house? I can only imagine what you'd do with a hundred tarantulas...

WH: That would be tough... It's usually a good idea if you have a lot of these kinds of pets to let somebody know. There are a lot of notification things you can do; through pet stores you can purchase actual labels for all your doors that say "Please rescue my pets." Obviously, as I have a whole bunch, that would be a challenge.


TB: If you had a sticker that said "Firemen: Please rescue my hundred tarantulas," it would probably good for keeping out burglars too.

WH: [Laughs] Yes, it probably would.

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INTERVIEW - The Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne On The True Meaning of Christmas (On Mars)

Christmas came early! After 7 years in production, the Flaming Lips film Christmas On Mars has finally been unveiled, and is now orbiting the earth on DVD. Things are about to get trippy here, so proceed carefully:

1. Go here to watch an intro to the movie featuring Kevin Maher's audio interview with lead singer Wayne Coyne.

2. Exciting, right? Well guess what -- the interview spills over right here into an incredibly in-depth Hermitosis exclusive! So after you've been inoculated by the video, click below and hear from Wayne's own lips about what this movie really is and why we have his mother to thank (or blame) for it!

3. (For info about where you can see Christmas On Mars in theaters, check out Cinema Purgatorio!)

Thanks, Kevin and Wayne! And God bless us, every one... including the Martians.

KM: Christmas On Mars has had some really non-traditional screenings. What's the idea behind, for example, a 7 AM show at an offbeat location?

WC: To me, it sounds like something where if you read it on a poster you'd think, "Oh, that's great!" but then the next second you'd think, "…But I'm not going to get up at 7 AM to watch a dumb movie." I think it's just in the spirit of the Flaming Lips philosophy: anything is possible, let's try new things. When it was suggested that we do a breakfast screening of the movie I thought, "Well there you go, why not? Who else would do that? Steven Spielberg probably isn't going to do that with his new film, but I can do it with mine." I'm not sure if anyone really wanted to show up (or even whether anyone did). But just the idea that we could do that, I thought, why not?

I always encourage the crowd and say, "You've gotta laugh, you've gotta cheer," and that really does make a big difference sometimes, making them feel that they can laugh and be part of the momentum of something like that. I saw it in LA a couple of weeks ago with a crowd of 600 people, and they were pretty drunk, and a lot of them were on some acid – they told me that out loud a couple of times – and it's pretty thrilling I have to say. Seeing it with an audience in the beginning, I have to say I had some anxiety about that, but it's a lot of fun. It's better than I ever thought it could be.


KM: One of the things I love is how homegrown the movie is. How do you think it would have been different if you had a big budget?

WC: The idea that I'm doing it all myself – that I'm in there building all the sets and doing all the grunt-work and everything along with it -- I think that's what gives it that Flaming Lips home-made arty touch to it. In editing it and putting it together, we really felt that even though a lot of it was shot in my backyard, a lot of it looks like it could have a somewhat decent budget to it. I would want to think that, regardless of the budget, I'd have dictated that it would look the same, but I would have never gone into it thinking that I would deserve any money, or that anyone in their right mind who had any money would want to give me a bunch of it to make a movie with.

I think the stress and strain and unanswerable questions would have become too much, I think I would have been defeated or made a horribly unwatchable, uncharming, cheap movie. Sometimes a movie is either good or bad, but then there are the other dimensions of it which make it more interesting. There are some scenes that you can watch in it and think, "That's in a room in Wayne's house!" That might not make it good, but I think in some ways it makes it more interesting to watch.


KM: As far as the distinct low-budget charm goes, I especially liked the grainy black-and-white look. Was there a specific era of film that you were going for?

WC: When I think of Christmas movies, there's a 1950's version of A Christmas Carol that I remember from when I was growing up. I was born in 1961, and watching TV wasn't like it is now, where you can just watch it a hundred times -- you had to wait for these movies to be played on TV, and if you were lucky you could see them every year. So [for Christmas on Mars] there was always this 1940's halfway-destroyed black-and-white version of this otherworldly Christmas scenario. But part of what I liked about it is that the movie looks old but it's set in the future, so there would be a kind of disconnect. Are we seeing something from the past, or are we seeing some artifact that's been discovered in the future?


KM: In Christmas On Mars, you've got an alien who dons a Santa Claus suit. We've seen that before in Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. Is this an homage?

WC: I have to say I didn't know that movie existed before I started to make this movie, but I think two or three copies have been sent to me since I started making the film from people saying, "Hey, did you know this existed?" I don't know if I've seen all of the film, but I've seen enough of it to know that it's not that bad a movie. I think people look at Santa Claus Conquers the Martians as if it was some horribly unwatchable B-movie, but it's not as bad as you'd think.


KM: You call the movie a "film freak-out." Can you tell us what that means?

WC: We started playing the movie at the beginning of last summer in our giant circus tent with our giant sound system in there, and I didn't want audiences (who were going to be at rock festivals watching the Flaming Lips playing a rock concert) to think, "Why would we want to watch a boring old movie?" I wanted them to know that even though it wasn't a concert, there was more to it than just turning off your mind and being entertained by a screen. I think if you're prepared for there to be some stuff, some intensity besides it just being a story, then you're not so jarred out of the momentum of it.


KM: To me, "freak-out" reads as Mothers of Invention, and the movie reminds me (in a good way) of 200 Motels.

WC: Yeah, I can understand that. I think a lot of younger people wouldn't know of the Frank Zappa connection -- certainly that type of artist who has been given too much freedom (maybe more money than they deserve). "Uh-oh, let's see what they do!"


KM: I saw your movie on DVD, but I would love to get to see it in the theater. The sound is so striking and original -- what were some of your influences on the audio?

WC: I think all rock bands – and I'm speaking purely from experience and from talking to people – I think all rock bands feel like eventually as they mature and they go on in their life, they're going to be invited to do a soundtrack for a movie, and of course it's going to be someone like David Lynch or Stanley Kubrick -- you know, someone who's going to want a really strange otherworldly piece of music for them.

When we went in to do the music for Christmas on Mars, I think we decided that the way we would do the music is that it would tell you an element of the story that really wouldn't be there otherwise. And I think that's really true of all films, the sort of atmosphere and the internal psychological meaning that they can have -- a lot of it is in the music and the sound effects. In the beginning I think lots of times we were actually making music before we would even shoot the film… maybe these two would go together. And that didn't always wind up being true; a lot of the music we started with, we wound up rejecting... In the end we wound up using one theme over and over, and giving it different flavorings as it went through the movie. We were probably listening to things like Bernard Herrmann, who's done things with Hitchcock, and I know he worked with Scorsese on Taxi Driver. We were always going back to like Brian Eno-influenced stuff, and even stuff like Igor Stravinsky, trying to make it seem otherworldly but putting it in context as if it were a foreign film. I think it feels somewhat Eastern European, as if some drug-damaged composer was brought in to do the music for this thing, but he happened to be sort of living on the edge of Siberia or somewhere. And I like that. I like that people could be wondering, "Is this a foreign film? What is this?" If you don't know anything about the Flaming Lips you could stumble upon it somewhere and not really know whether it was made in Oklahoma or shot on Mars.


KM: That brings us to the subtitles. Why does the DVD have the option for Russian subtitles?

WC: Again, as we're free to do whatever we want… Even in the beginning I wanted this idea of there being subtitles whenever people speak. I don't know why, but in the old DVD player that I had, the subtitle switch was always stuck ON -- so whenever you'd put in a DVD, the subtitles would automatically come up. When we were practicing for our Who tribute over the summer, I put in the DVD of Woodstock, and I have to say I never realized what people were saying half the time until I read the subtitles!

The idea that it would come up in Russian adds just another exotic spice or flavoring into this thing. And it does really translate in Russian! I've had several Russian-speaking people come up to me and applaud how correct we were with a lot of the subtitles. I'm glad there's some intrigue. It's just a strange home-made movie and nobody stopped us, so we just did whatever we wanted to do.


KM: What else is the band up to now? You're about to go on tour, is that right?

WC: Well, we've sort of surrendered to this idea that we play every summer. Back in the '90s we'd sort of just pick and choose when we wanted to go out on tour and play, and over the last five or six years we've slowly realized that we play every summer. Our summer usually starts at the beginning of May and goes until the end of October, and I think this year we've decided that we want to make another record before we go out and play, so I in about January or February we'll start. We've already pieced together quite a few things… Then after that we'll go out and play all these strange little nooks and crannies around the civilized world. Probably till we die.


KM: I don't know if you're a John Carpenter fan, but there were elements of Christmas On Mars that reminded me of early John Carpenter, like Dark Star and The Thing. Are you a Carpenter fan?

WC: I am in a sense, I mean, I really do love The Thing, and I hadn't watched it in a long time, and as I watched it in the last couple of years as I was making Christmas on Mars, I saw some similarities to it. I don't know the Dark Star movie too well; I've seen bits of it, and I know that it's based on a kind of hippies-go-to-space kind of trip, but I like it enough to say sure, I'd take that. I don't think my film falls squarely into a Science Fiction sort of thing, just because it's so weird. But I would accept that, sure.


KM: I noticed on the credits that you're given a story credit. Was there a fleshed-out screenplay, or did the actors get to improvise?

WC: Now that I look back at what I thought the story was going to be in the beginning, and at the way that it ended up, I can say yeah -- there's definitely a story there. On the other hand, if you'd caught me three years ago and asked me what it was about, I'd have said, "I don't know, I'm just going to keep working until I've got something that isn't embarrassing to show people." Everybody would ask me as I went if I'd written a screenplay, but since I was the director and the producer and building the sets and writing the dialogue and all that, I never felt the need to really write it. The only person who was going to care was me, and I was the only one that really knew where it was going to go. It was like, "Well, Wayne's making this and he knows what he's doing." They weren't worried about it too much.

As far as improvising, I find that people would rather not improvise if you can give them stuff. They would rather know what to say than have to make something up and be clever and cool on the spot. They want to know that this has some meaning for your story. There were times in the film when people did improvise and I used it, but there was never a time when I walked onto the set and said, "I don't know what's going to happen here, and you're going to just say stuff back and forth." But some of the best lines in the film happen to be just dumb things people said that seemed very natural and also worked for the story.


KM: So... "Take a shit on my dick," was that an ad-lib or did you write that?

WC: I have to say that out of all the actors in the film, I knew that he was like that anyway. His character is based on him in real life; he's a used car salesman who teaches Sunday school, but when you catch him in an unguarded moment, he spews out these wonderful, horrible, poetic sorts of one-cuss-word-connected-to-another original lines. So we'd be taking a break setting up lights between something, and he'd say something like like, "Just take a fucking shit on my dick, man," and I'd be like, "Hold on, wait, we've gotta use that!" I think he had a couple more of that stature. The one I like a lot was something like, "You look like something that crawled out of Godzilla's asshole!"


KM: How did you come up with the visual designs? Did you feel that the alien – speaking of looking like something that came out of Godzilla's asshole – do you feel like the finished alien is what you had in mind?

WC: I wanted to look like me, and yet still be a character, and the same with Steven and Michael – if you like the Flaming Lips, there they are, they're in the film! So I never wanted to put too much makeup or costuming on us and cover us up in that way. I knew I wanted that I wanted the audience to think of my character as being green, but actually just looking sort of like me with some weird antennae and a crazy suit. I didn't really want there to be some strange looking alien -- just a man that arrives in a space bubble. I don't know why. I never thought of it being like a B-movie looking thing. As it went, I sort of hoped that there would be some sense of special effects that would make it look more fantastical than just me in that strange suit. And then as I started to see it in my character, and in the music that plays when my character shows up, I started to think, "It'll be enough." It just looks like me, like I've got some cheap antennae on. The audience – I don't know, maybe they already think I'm some sort of alien from outer space or something.


KM: If you did have this incredible over the top costume it would stick out from the landscape that it's appearing in. I think all the elements work together beautifully.

WC: Yeah, but that's giving me way too much credit. Believe me -- I'd have been the first one to go over the top and not know it. At the beginning I thought I was just making space tunnels so they could walk through them and just get on with the story. But little by little, I realized that I was making it the way I want, I'm dictating where the lights go, and all the little bits of the space station, what they're made of, and even using toys as parts of the space station and stuff. If I had just handed that over to some set designer – well it's not that it wouldn't have been as charming, but it certainly wouldn't have had my fingerprints and my stuff all over it. Once I got about halfway through it, I was glad I was doing it that way. I thought, "Okay, well it's probably a good thing that I'm in there having to make it all up. For better of worse it will reek of my influence."


KM: How did the rest of the band feel about it? Were they able to trust you and follow where you were going with the movie?

WC: Well I think really it was both. It was sort of that adventure of, "Let's go and make this thing!" We do that even when we make our records, no one ever really has a great plan. You have a bunch of plans and you hope they work, and they inevitably don't work, and you just start making it up as you go. I know this never sounds like true justification, but we've made a lot of music videos where we don't really know what we're going to do, and within a couple hours we'll just set something up and do it. I did that a lot with Brad Beasley, the guy who helped me direct the film, and his crew, and so we were used to working in this way. We know we're going to make a film, and we know what it's going to be about, and even though I never had to sit down and convince anyone that I knew what I was doing. I think everybody wanted that – they wanted to be in the middle of this potential catastrophe together. I think we were having as much fun as you can have as you're making something like this.


KM: Can you tell your fans, based on the 7 year experience of making this, the most important thing you've learned from making Christmas on Mars?

WC: For better or worse, I'm an artist who has been given the freedom to follow my obsessions, and maybe that really that's the only thing that you can trust: that you're surrendering to some overriding master that is taking you into this other world.

For people who haven't seen the film, there's a marching band scene, where the marching band has giant female genitals for heads and things like that. If I had to really sit there and tell people what I thought that meant, or justify why it should be in the movie, I wouldn't be able to. But I could always just say, "I don't know what it means, but it's my movie and I like it and that's the way I wanted to make it." If you go into making any sort of personal subjective unique art, if you have to explain to people every ten minutes what it means, and why it's there and why they should believe in it, I don't think you could. I think that most of what I like about the movie, I don't even know why I did it! I just liked it and went about doing it. To me, that's true of all important things in your life, and that's especially true for art. We don't want art being made because it's going to make us look cool or make us a lot of money, or make us famous, we want art to be made because if we don't make it we'll just go crazy. So we make it, and we look crazy for making it, but we know that we would be crazier if we didn't make it.


KM: I really love the intro that you do for the movie, the story of how your mother sort of inspired the movie. Can you give us a sort of Reader's Digest version of that story?

WC: Sure. Inevitably when you make a movie like this, people want to know where these ideas come from, and they come from a million different moments in your life. Hopefully all art is made from some sort of great spattering of influences. But I know for sure that when I was a teenager, my brother and I would stay out until all hours of the night, and we'd come home at two or three o'clock in the morning, and my mother, who claimed that she never slept, would be up on the couch watching movies and catching up on housework from the day or whatever. And we came in one night and she was sobbing, because she'd watched what she thought was a very sad movie. And we said, "What was this movie?" and she didn't know what it was. She didn't remember whether it was set on a ship or a submarine or what, but she described it as a group of some sort of workers were trapped in some sort of unsaveable condition, some catastrophe had happened and they realized they were going to die. And once they realized they sort of accepted that they were going to die, they were visited by some sort of being. And we asked, "Well, what sort of being?" And she didn't know whether it was God or some kind of alien, but they were visited by this entity and they seemed to be made happy with their lives.

It being 1974 or 1975, we just assumed we'd see this movie, that it would come on again sometime and we'd be able to say, "Hey mom, here's that dumb movie that you saw." But then as time went on, all movies became sort of always available, and if it was a good movie, we'd probably have seen it before now. Little by little we concluded that my mother, as she'd done a million times before, probably sat on the couch and started watching a movie, fell asleep, woke up while another movie was playing, and sort of dreamed the middle of it -- connected the first movie, her dream, and another movie, and thought it was all one movie! I think we all have probably done that.

I had gone over this movie and added my own imagination to it for so long that, once I knew that it didn't exist, I was sort of trapped. I was like, "I want to see this movie, I've thought about it forever." I think that pushed me into saying "I'm going to make this movie." Even though her describing it ends up being kind of a vague outline that could have been any movie, I see now how what she described fits in perfectly to Christmas On Mars: that this entity comes, and the entity is me, and I don't know if I'm supposed to be God or some sort of alien from outer space, but these things tie together, and again, I can't really justify it. I just know that it became important for me to say, "I want to see this movie… if no one else wants to see it, I know I do."

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INTERVIEW - Sandow Birk Looks Forward to More Tormented Papercraft If Divine Comedy Films Continue

Having run across Sandow Birk's update of Dante's Divine Comedy (packed with wonderfully apocalyptic illustrations), I was extremely intrigued to discover that the first cantica has been adapted to film, via incredibly trippy puppetry and the vocal talents of Dermot Mulroney and James Cromwell (trailer here).

Birk is an artist who's no stranger to projects of incredible scope or acerbic social commentary (see In Smog and Thunder, an account of a fictitious war arising between Los Angeles and San Francisco). I'm grateful to him for setting aside a few moments while traveling to answer a some questions about the past, present, and future of his Divine Comedy.

TB: I'm curious about your religious background and how that affected (or evolved during) the work.

SB: I'm not a religious person. I was drawn to Dante at first by Gustav Dore's fantastic engravings from the 1800s, but once I had picked up The Divine Comedy I was sucked in by the complexity of the poem, by the beauty of the writing, by the glimpse into the mind of a medieval scholar and his view of the world, by the importance of the work in world history, and by the epic-ness of the project. I am amazed and continually fascinated by Dante's poem for an endless number of reasons. After spending a year reading the poem and reading about the poem, I began to see that it -- the poem and the illustrations by Dore (and by others through history) -- could be the starting point for making a new project that speaks about our times, our world, our society, and also that comments on Dante's work and Dante's view of the world at the same time.


TB: Illustrating this work is sort of artistic Holy Grail, like making a Tarot deck. I seem to recall that William Blake died before he could finish his illustrations for Inferno. Do you feel like you've cleared some great hurdle in your artistic life?

SB: I never saw my project as "illustrating" Dante. That's been done many times over the centuries by artists much more adept than I am. And I don't think illustrating Dante is necessary, or the way I want to spend my time and my efforts. What I set out to do from the beginning was to use Dante's poem as a way to do a project that speaks about our times and our society in a meaningful way. I think the books do that in some ways -- in more thoughtful and critical ways that play off the text and the poem, and the film does it in a different way, a funnier, more satirical and more political way. The two are very different projects and they were conceived and done separately.

In answer to your other point about a hurdle, I would say that the project has been the "deepest," most complex, most thoughtful project I've done to date, and it was exhausting. I worked on the books for four years non-stop, and I think during those four years every book I read was either by Dante or about Dante. It was a lot of work, to say the least.


TB: I was impressed by the puppetry in the film and how many sequences really felt like animation because of how smoothly all the elements combined. Do you consider it in any way to be an animated work?

SB: I don't think its "animation" in the true sense of the word or in what people think of as animated films. The film is actually a live, filmed puppet show. There were no computer effects done at all. That was something we planned at the beginning -- if it couldn't be done with paper, tape, wire, string and some paperclips, it wasn't in the movie.


TB: Are there films in the works for Purgatorio and Paradiso as well?

SB: The film project was entirely exhausting and expensive (not in terms of the film world, but in terms of a bunch of artists trying to make a movie on their own). The whole team of us who made the film were worn out after it was done, but enough time has gone by since then that we're starting to think about another film project. Of course I'd love to make another Dante film. There's the idea of doing Purgatorio and Paradiso as one film, so that we'd then have the two-part trilogy, which is funny. But at this point there's not much more than some thoughts about a new project. We're all keen, but we don't have any money, same as usual.

TB: You've spent so much time creatively orbiting this subject, working in so many different roles and examining it from all sides. The same could be said of In Smog and Thunder. How do you know when it's time to move on to the next thing, and how do you know when you've alighted onto something that's going to wind up absorbing years of your time and effort? Have there been false starts and endings along the way, with these or other projects?

SB: Over the course of my career it seems the projects keep getting larger and more grandiose, which is part planned and part not planned. I've had an arc where I've intentionally tried to expand the scope of my projects -- for example, my earlier paintings were about gang wars in my neighborhood and surfing in Los Angeles; "Smog" was about California as a state, as was the prison project. Dante has been more universal and international in intent. As I get more successful its also been easier to get more collaborations going (which I like) and to get them funded as well. So the two work out well together.

That said, not every idea becomes a big project, but once I get an idea that interests me I tend to investigate and work on it more and more and the ideas tend to grow. The "Smog" project, for example, kept growing and growing into other media (sculpture, drawing, audio tours, film, etc.) That project ended when I felt I had done enough and basically got sort of sick of it.

The Dante project had a built-in ending when we had ended all of the cantos and the three books. It wasn't until later that the film idea and project came about. But even Dante started with the smaller idea of just doing something based on "Inferno" and grew into the entire Divine Comedy.

So yeah, there are false starts and starts that go much further than I could have ever imagined when I take the first steps. But I try to simply find projects and topics that are interesting to me, that are relevant to our times, and that I hope have something intelligent and meaningful to say about our lives and our society. If I can do that, and if I can get people to see it when its done -- that's what I set out to do being an artist.

TB: What are you working on in the meantime?

SB: I've finished a big project of a series of 15 huge woodblock prints and a series of paintings all about the war in Iraq. Entitled "The Depravities of War", the show has been traveling to various cities. It was shown in Washington DC at the Katzen Art Center this fall and its on its way to Heidleberg, Germany in Februrary and to Chicago in March next year. There is a book about the project which is published by HuiPress, who are the publishers of the prints as well.

As for my next projects, I'm working on a big one for fall 2009: an ongoing four year project (so far) based on the Koran. It should open simultaneously on both coasts: at PPOW Gallery in New York City in Sept. 2009 and at Catharine Clark Gallery in SF in Sept. as well. I'm going to continue working on it all year.

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INTERVIEW - Author Marvin Kaye Sheds Light On My Favorite Anthology

When I was in high school I stumbled across a fat hardcover anthology called Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural. This wasn't like other collections I'd seen; beneath the appropriately spooky Edward Gorey cover design I found dozens of amazing stories, some obscure and some beloved, some contemporary and some classic. I read the book to bits, and loaned it to friends until I eventually lost it.

A few years ago I recalled the book's title and tracked down a copy on Amazon. Revisiting the selections one by one brought back a ton of memories, and I began to realize what an effective primer this volume had been for me as I explored the genre. And once again, Masterpieces began to work its insidious way through my current circle of friends -- it's spent less time in my actual possession than out of it. This time around I paid far more attention to the curatorial role that author Marvin Kaye played in presenting these stories -- I became determined to find out more, and to let him know that his collection was still very much appreciated over 20 years later...

TB: A lot of people ask me about Masterpieces' Edward Gorey jacket, wondering whether it was created specifically for this collection. Can you tell me about it?

MK: Edward ("Ted") Gorey did the dust jackets for eight of my Doubleday anthologies, which proved a great selling point. In addition to Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural, he also did the dust jackets for Ghosts, Devils & Demons, Witches & Warlocks, 13 Plays of Ghosts and the Supernatural, Haunted America, Masterpieces of Terror and the Unknown, and Sweet Revenge. And when I did the centennial edition of Dracula for Barnes & Noble Books, we used some of Ted's drawings from the Frank Langella Broadway play version.

I believe Ted and I exchanged a cordial letter or two, but never met. He was supposed to appear at a big book fair that ran one year on 5th Avenue, so I went to meet him, but when I got there, I learned he'd stayed home because one or more of his many cats was sick.


TB: Your headnotes (or "rubrics") to each story paint an interesting picture of why certain selections were made, and helpfully infuses the collection with your personality. There are some stories I would not have been patient enough to read without the extra nudge, and afterward I felt that interesting feeling of having shared something with someone. I don't have any other collections in my library that have this component; do you introduce the stories individually in your other collections? Is it important to you to have that opportunity to compel and intrigue (and occasionally apologize to) your readers?

MK: Yes, I do this for each and every selection, even the occasional poem. I regard one of my duties as an anthologist is to provide information, if available, about the author, and the reason I chose to include the composition. Sometimes I've selected pieces that are not personal favorites but have some valid reason for inclusion, whether it be historical significance, or representative of a style of writing that many readers enjoy. In devoting the time, energy and research that I do to my rubrics, I am paying homage to the splendid introductory notes that Anthony Boucher wrote for the contents of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and the ones written by Ellery Queen for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Those two periodicals taught me more about genre literature than any other source, though honorary mention belongs to H. P. Lovecraft's important essay, "Supernatural Horror in Literature."


TB: At the time of the collection, you list your favorite H.P. Lovecraft story as "The Music of Erich Zann." Over 20 years later, has any other of his stories supplanted its place in your heart?

MK: "The Music of Erich Zann" is still my favorite Lovecraft story, though "The Rats in the Walls" is a close second. "Rats" actually is more frightening; I admire "Zann" as the most Poe-like thing Lovecraft ever wrote; had it been claimed as a lost Poe manuscript, I think it would have passed.


TB: When crafting an anthology, how do you come to terms with having to choose between two equally deserving candidates? And how much does the publisher usually interfere with your selections?

MK: How do I choose between any two authors for space? This was never a problem in the majority of my anthologies [Mr. Kaye has assembled 31 of them] because they are big books with plenty of space. I don't think I ever had to leave anything out for that reason. Occasionally the rights were not available for a story I wanted to include, or the author or estate might want more money than was comfortable for my budget, but that seldom occurred. Mostly the contents of my big anthologies include all and everything I wanted.

The exception to this are the five anthologies I did for the Science Fiction Book Club from 2000 till this year. They include The Vampire Sextette, The Dragon Quintet, The Fair Folk, Forbidden Planets, and A Book of Wizards. The first of these was suggested by Tanith Lee, who said if I could sell such a book, she'd write a vampire novella that would include vampirism, sexual content, and music (thus playing on the word sextette two ways). My editor at SF Book club was delighted with the idea, but choice of the other five authors was not entirely up to me as it always had been in the past. With only six authors, the book club wanted names likely to sell well. So the editors and I came up with a priority list, and there was an "A" list, a "B" list and a "C" list. Though I didn't have as much control as I usually did, every author choice was mutually approved by me and the editors, so it worked out well. We followed the same working arrangement for the remaining four books; sometimes the editors overruled my choices, sometimes they agreed with me. It was all very cordial; the editors are personal friends.

Now I'd come up with (or rather Tanith did) the title for the vampire book, and Forbidden Planets, which is my only solely SF collection, was also my idea. The other three were the editors's ideas. I was OK with the dragons and the wizards, but personally I was a little doubtful about The Fair Folk, an anthology of six original novellas about fairies. I doubted it would appeal to as wide a market as the others, but I was wrong. Not only did it sell well, but it won me the World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology of 2005.

Except in the five instances cited above, my publishers mostly let the choice of material be mine, I had a somewhat different situation with The Ghost Quartet, which the SF Book Club decided not to do. Tor Books is its publisher. This idea also derived from Tanith Lee, who told me she wanted to write a ghost novella inspired by Strindberg's play "The Ghost Sonata." She wanted it to be a quartet, since I'd done a sextette and a quintet. She also wanted me to be one of its four authors. Had the SF Book Club chosen to publish it, I would have surely been excluded, but Tor was all right with me being one of the four provided one of the others was Orson Scott Card. I'd bought stories from Scott before, but he was and is so busy with his book deadlines, I doubted he'd be able to participate. At first he said no, but when Tor said they'd only do the book if he was in it, Scott relented. I'd already done an issue of H. P. Lovecraft's Magazine of Horror that spotlighted Brian Lumley, so I asked him and he agreed to be the 4th of the quartet.


TB: Did you ever think back in 1985 that people would still be enjoying this collection several decades later?

MK: Did I think, in 1985, that people would still be reading and talking about that anthology? Absolutely, yes... provided it remained accessible and in print. Its contents are indeed masterpieces and would be familiar to all genre enthusiasts whether they appeared in my collection or not.


TB: From what I've read on your website, it seems that your life has become a blend of writing, theatre, and healing work. Can you tell me a little about how these overlap in your life?

MK: Writing and theatre blend because I've written plays and adaptations for the theatre. They overlap to the extent that while I'm writing various kinds of fiction I usually am involved in one or another show, mostly with my theatre company, The Open Book. Healing work is off in its own corner, so to speak, and doesn't really blend or overlap with the others, except perhaps in some vague philosophical manner.


TB: I'd like to ask you all sorts of things about the healing modalities you practice, but I'd at least basically better ask how you came to them. Was it through treatments that you yourself received?

MK: How I came to healing is a long-ish story, but basically this is what happened: the first time I was scheduled to act in the Edinburgh International Fringe Festival, I was staying for a week in London. The night before I went to Scotland, I was scheduled to have dinner with the fantasy editor Steven Jones. On the way to meet him, I was crossing Oxford Circus when I was sideswiped by a double decker bus and knocked against the side of a stone fountain. Nothing was broken, but all summer I limped around Edinburgh using a cane. Edinburgh is largely up and down steep hillsides, so I didn't realize I'd sustained a back injury till I got back to NYC, where walking is mostly level.

To get relief from the back pain, I tried different modalities, but the only one that gave me real relief was energy healing. The woman who treated me taught reiki, and I enrolled in first level reiki. I became so convinced of its healing abilities, I went on to study 2nd level and eventually became a reiki master (level 3). One day, the same woman, at the start of a treatment, told me she'd just learned craniosacral therapy and wondered if I'd mind receiving such a treatment. I agreed, and was very impressed with the results, and sometime later, after reading a book about it, I decided to study it, too. I took four courses in craniosacral and became an assistant teacher of it at quite a few sessions. During my training, which was through the Upledger Institute, I discovered lymph drainage and studied that up through the first Advanced Level.


TB: Do you think that short fiction (and anthologies) stand to benefit from the amount reading and writing people do online now?

MK: I hope so, but am somewhat skeptical. I suspect online activity produces more online activity and not necessarily book sales. But I'm hardly an expert, and may well be mistaken.

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INTERVIEW - Spongebob Star Tom Kenny Can't Wait To See El Superbeasto In the Ring

Some personalities are just not conducive to a good phone-interview, but I suspect this is an area where voice-over actors really have it made. That's part of why I was excited to talk to Tom Kenny, who aside from voicing Spongebob Squarepants and many other memorable characters, plays Otto the gorilla in Rob Zombie's long-awaited The Haunted Adventures of El Superbeasto, which was the subject of this week's Web Stalker.

Unfortunately that guaranteed that me and my raspy still-in-my-bathrobe voice would be the obvious weak link in this interview, but Kenny was grateful to have something to do while trapped in rush hour traffic, so he was mercifully nonjudgmental as he shared thoughts about his castmates, Zombie's achievements, the world of voice chasers, and animation at large.

TB: Have you gotten a chance yet to screen the film in any of its incarnations?

TK: I’ve only seen a couple pieces of the it. Mr. Lawrence, the director -- who is also the voice of Plankton on Spongebob -- showed me a couple of scenes, and it looks really funny. One scene in particular, where the main character is in a strip club watching a girl do her routine... it was like a much naughtier version of those Tex Avery cartoons where the wolf is watching Red. It’s amazing how many cartoon shorts from the "golden age" are about horniness and ways to repress it!


TB: Are you an animation buff from way back?

TK: That stuff was totally my obsession as a kid – anything animated. Although I was born in ’62, so I was a little young for that wave of adult animation that happened in the '70s: Fritz the Cat, Heavy Traffic, Coonskin, and stuff like SCTV. I love animation and I love doing kid-friendly stuff, but I have to admit that it feels good to do something for a different demographic.


TB: In his blog about El Superbeasto, Rob said,"It's much easier to make normal shit, but getting folks behind crazy shit is a nightmare. They all love it once it make them money, but before that forget. It's the ugly child no one loves." Do you agree?

TK: Well, if he can’t get it rolling no one else has a prayer! Yeah, I agree. That’s the whole story of Hollywood, right? Trying to make something that pushes the envelope and breaks the norm, but that's very hard to explain. If it’s something simple, you can just say, “It’s sort of like Bee Movie, only with elephants instead of bees - and there are fart jokes!” and they go, “Oh, okay.” But something like this... Look, not everything is going to appeal to a giant demographic!


TB: Has that been your experience in a lot of the offbeat stuff you've worked on?

TK: I think it’s really hard to get stuff going. Spongebob had an uphill battle in the pitching stage; Mr. Show which I was on with David Cross and Bob Odenkirk, has a big cult following now but took a really long time to sell to HBO, and when they finally put it on it was in a weird time-slot and on odd days of the week. I think a lot of it depends on the intestinal fortitude of the person doing the selling. I’ve been lucky to work with creators who won’t stop until it's on the air, long after I would have gone, “Fuck it! I have other ideas, I can’t waste any more time on driving around pitching to guys with ties on, forget it!”

When it comes to comic books, places like Japan are far ahead of us in not assuming that this art form is only for kid genres. You know, animation can be used to tell any kind of story, and just like a bookstore has a children’s section and among many other sections, so should it be for animation. There’s a weird animated French film from the ‘70s called Fantastic Planet that I saw when I was a kid; it doesn’t have any sex or anything in it, but it’s a very adult story about a world where humans are playthings for these giant, blue-skinned pet owners. It’s tough to find anything equivalent in a movie theater, everything these days is CGI farting animals.


TB: For a fringe project, the cast of El Superbeasto turned out to be pretty amazing!

TK: Yes, it's a totally crazy mishmash of people like Paul Giamatti and Rosario Dawson with others who are huge voice-over freaks like me, Rob Paulson, and John di Maggio. Celebrity on-camera actors do lots of animated films, and to me -- someone who does a lot of voice-over -- their work is often lacking. They don't really bring anything to the party except their movie-star cred. Not that anyone cares! [laughs] Character actors seem to fare better in general, because that's sort of what us voice-over types are -- our own version of that naggingly familiar guy you know you've seen in a million movies but you don't know his name. Giamatti really brings it, I really liked his Dr. Satan a lot. Rosario Dawson was really great too, and her character was really... you know, dirty. She plays a really great nasty girl.


TB: Hmm, I wonder how she constantly winds up in that position?

TK: I don't know! Because I worked with her, and that's not the side of her I saw. She was like my kid sister.


TB: I get really frustrated with bland celebrity voice-over too. Is there a special tier of fame for great voice-over work?

TK: I didn’t know about this until recently, but there are people who are sort of steeped in that, they call themselves voice chasers. They’re like storm chasers! They're just seriously into voice-over work and connecting the dots to figure out who does what voices. Being a voice-over person is usually almost like being a puppeteer or something, you get so used to being crouched behind the counter and no one’s really looking at you. It’s amazing to go online and realize how many people know everything you do! Even obscure stuff that only takes you twenty minutes and then you never think about ever again; I've seen people discussing some obscure thing that was just a stop on my way over to another voice over gig.


TB: What was your exposure to Rob Zombie's work prior to this? Were you a big fan of his other movies?

TK: I knew him more through his music; my nephew is really into him, and when we’d drive around we'd listen to it in the car,. Also there's the monster rock connection -- being a sort of middle-aged first-wave punk rocker, I revered The Cramps, and there’s definitely a crossover from what they were doing to what he’s done; he loves The Cramps too, he's used them as his opening act and stuff like that. And then there’s the world of monster movie memorabilia collecting, I’ve always heard stories about the obscure stuff he buys. As for movies, while I’m an old-school horror fan, I’m not a gore fan at all -- I have so little stomach for anything post-Halloween. So those movies are not on my radar, even though I know he has cool character actors like Sid Haig, people who are idols of mine. My tastes are different, it’s just not my thing. The people who do traffic in that are really nice, though; I’ve worked with Robert Englund a bunch of times and he’s really nice, a hilarious, sweet guy -- but I’ve never seen a Nightmare on Elm Street movie and probably never will.


TB: So, do you know anything we don't about when El Superbeasto will be released?

TK: I’ve been hearing so many different stories, and even Mr. Lawrence has no idea. He finished his work, he got paid, and now he too is just watching the pages fall off the calendar wondering when it’s going to come out. I have no idea. One of the advantages of being a session musician instead of a rock star is that you come in and play your drum part and then you forget about it and leave, you don’t have to be involved in the bullshit. It’s one of the huge perks of my job. I hope it comes out soon, I really want to see it!

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INTERVIEW - Why Bruce Campbell Is Looking Forward to Halloween -- and Eventually, Evil Dead 4

This October you may get to ask Bruce Campbell a few questions yourself; the actor/director will be touring with his new film My Name Is Bruce, landing here in NYC on Halloween for a screening at the Sunshine. You'll have to check out my AMC column for Bruce's MNIB filmmaking recollections... But while you're here, you may as well soak in everything he told me about that Evil Dead remake that he and Sam Raimi are always threatening to do.

I refuse to believe that I'll ever meet a nicer guy to spend 22 minutes on the phone with than Bruce Campbell. I'm beginning to see why everyone wants to live at his house in the middle of nowhere...

TB: Did you always suspect you'd wind up living out in the woods and talking to yourself?

BC: Yes! It’s an acquired taste, you have to desire it. It’s a strange little home that we have... We have no cell service out there, and it unnerves some of my city friends. They ask, “How can you sleep here at night?” What, are the wolves going to tear through the screens and come in and drag me away? They can’t handle the quiet or the lack of light (there aren’t any street lights on any of the roads, so it’s basically pay attention or die). Other people come up, however, and say, “Oh... I have to live at your house. Starting now.”

The area in Southern Oregon where I live is actually the most undecided voter block in the nation. George Bush went there twice to try to rally the troops. Our kind of people though, they don’t want to be told what to do by anybody. It's the rich people and rural people who are anti-government; rural people are afraid of government because because they’ve never seen any other humans before. Where I live, we’ve got neo-nazis and real outdoor crazies.


TB: At least if you don’t have cell-phone service, you know the neo-nazis don’t either...

BC: Exactly. We’re all on a level playing field.


TB: You'll be in New York for Halloween. Have you seen the parade we have here?

BC: I saw it 2 years ago, it was really a blast. It made me glad that there are still so many freaks out in the world -- that it’s not all just Wall Street stuff. I think we need more rebellion, and this is a sort of planned rebellion. People need an outlet, and I think Halloween is good for that. There’s like a hundred thousand cops in NYC who are out on Halloween because of all the freaks pouring in for the parade! My favorite gag with the officers is going up and saying, "Man, I’ve gotta tell you, I’ve seen a lot of costumes tonight but yours is the best.” Of course half the guys just go, “Get the fuck out of here!”


TB: Are you ready to start talking about the new Evil Dead movie that is supposedly in the works?

BC: I wish I could... It’s so enigmatic! I’ll hear a rumor sometimes about things that Sam has said. I heard that at the convention Sam said he’d be doing Evil Dead 4. But then I heard he said he’d be doing Spiderman 4 and 5 back-to-back. And I thought, "When are you going to do Evil Dead 4? Seven years from now when those other two behemoth films are done??" Sam has the full desire and interest to do it though, and so do I -- as long as it’s with him. I’m way past that whole “let it go” phase! So whatever, we’ll do it eventually. But I’m doing this TV show right now, and he’s making big-budget movies, so it’s a matter of actually finding time to do it. That’s the truth of it, there’s no scuttlebutt or anything. But there’s no script, either!


TB: Would you want to play a part in it, in addition to working behind the camera?

BC: I think it’s a remake, so I wouldn't be anywhere onscreen. Unless I’m the old guy at the bait shop going, “You kids have a great weekend!” It’s a new batch of people with a new set of circumstances, I would think. I’m lobbying for the remake to be done like the old days when we were shooting on 16mm. Go with total nobodies, because no one in the original cast was anybody – we were just a bunch of schmoes from Michigan, so let’s get a bunch of schmoes from Michigan again. Just assemble five cast members who are 21, like we were, and put them through absolute hell for about ten weeks. I’d do it retro, go easy on the digital stuff... goback to real stage-based effects, which can be shocking in their hokeyness or their reality or whatever. Sam’s a great magician, he can do a whole mixed bag.


TB: So this wouldn't be one of those big-budget do-overs that we all dread?

BC: I would definitely go back to a low-budget docuhorror feel. When you hear “remake” you think giant, like a big $40 million version. My feeling is no; the first Evil Dead cost $400 thousand in 1979, and I’d like to make it again for the equivalent amount. Then I think you’d have something; the people would want to see what you could pull off within those parameters. I swear to god, the same story doesn’t even seem so interesting anymore somehow, I think we'd need a whole new dynamic... and then the sequel could just pick up wherever we leave off.


TB: I think people would appreciate that, horror fans can smell a big-budget sequel coming a mile a way.

BC: Yeah, Blair Witch 2 is a great example. Now that's a film where you think, “Well, the studio sure got their mitts all over that!” It’s funny, they probably scraped together $40 million for that sequel and considered it low-budget. Blair Witch is one of my favorite movies and I haven’t even seen it – well I’ve seen five minutes, but I think if I watched the rest I’d barf or get a headache. I want to send them a tripod for christmas. But it’s because of what it represents: it means that these guys took a movie and found a brilliant marketing strategy that planted enough infotainment fear in your brain to want to believe in it. For the sequel, I’m not sure why bigger had to be better. Every sequel is more expensive, even with Evil Dead, where the sequel was way more expensive. For part 4, why would we even make a $40 million movie? Why not deliver an old fashioned ass-kicking -- heavy objects and primitive weaponry!

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INTERVIEW - In a New Film by Sean Donnelly, Tiffany's Stalkers Imagine What "Could've Been"

In I Think We're Alone Now, two strangers share a common interest: they have both devoted huge portions of their life to stalking the '80s pop icon Tiffany. The trailer introduces Jeff Turner and Kelly McCormick as two lonely individuals whose tireless obsession has become an uncanny source of comfort in their lives. (If the trailer unsettles you, then hold onto your hats, because there's a lot more where that came from!)

The film screens this weekend at Fantastic Fest in Austin, TX, but you can view it in its entirety via the festival's website. In the meantime, I spoke with filmmaker Sean Donnelly today about obsession, a documentarian's responsibilities, and Turner and McCorkmick's reactions to his work. Oh, and about Tiffany herself, of course...

TB: I'd love to know a little about how all this started, though I'm sure you've answered that question a million times by now...


SD: Not a million, more like 30 times. But I've never told the whole story until now...

I was in Santa Cruz, California at my parent's house over Christmas break during my sophomore year at NYU's Film and Television program. I was walking down the street with an old friend, Jordy Cohen, and we just randomly met Jeff Turner on the street. He was a very charismatic and friendly guy, and we thought he'd be great for a short film we were working on at the time. Jeff was enthusiastic about being a part of it, and as we got to know him we were more and more fascinated by him. (As a side note, the film school style short we made was terrible and will hopefully never be seen again.)

We didn't learn about his history with Tiffany until our 4th or 5th time going to his house. When he showed us his radionics machine which he uses to communicate with Tiffany on a spiritual level from a distance, we knew that we had an interesting story on our hands. I shot new footage every time I came back to Santa Cruz over the next 5 or 6 years. I showed some of the roughly edited footage to a friend of mine at NYU, Phil Buccellato, and he was hooked. He ended up helping me shoot and edit the rest of the film.

[Name withheld] on a Tiffany fan site told us that she had encountered another person, Kelly McCormick, who was as obsessed with Tiffany as Jeff. She put me in touch with her, and Kelly was very excited to be a part of the film. Phil was the first one to meet Kelly, and took a 14 hour bus ride with her from Denver to Las Vegas on her way to see a Tiffany concert. We didn't really know how the two stories would fit together, or if we even needed Kelly's story at all. Eventually we realized that the two compliment each other very well. Jeff is a little bit lighter and makes more jokes, while Kelly's story is much more intense and emotional.


TB: Can you clarify for me the extent to which Tiffany herself has been involved with this film, or about any contact you've had with her while making it?

SD: When I first approached Tiffany in 2002 she was very friendly and more than happy to let me interview her. When I asked her questions about Jeff, however, she was no longer interested in talking to me. I interviewed her twice, but none of that footage made the final cut of the film. Ultimately the film isn't about Tiffany, so the footage didn't really make sense in the movie. Once the film was completed, I sent a copy to her agent. He told me he thought it was very well done and interesting, but that he didn't want to show it to Tiffany because it might scare her.


TB: Your subjects seem so disarmingly candid; how much time did you spend with them?

SD: The film was shot over 6 years so we got to know them very well. When we were in Denver with Kelly we stayed up late watching movies from her collection like Tron and The Girl Next Door. We spent a lot of time talking to her over meals, seeing action movies in the theater and hanging around Denver hot-spots with her. I even slept on her couch the first time I went out there. And I still keep in touch with Kelly and get emails from her weekly.

As far as Jeff goes, we spent even more time with him since he lives a few minutes from my parents house. At first I thought Jeff was a pretty quirky guy, but I definitely grew to like him a lot more over time. I hope watching the film has that same effect on people.


TB: Have Jeff and Kelly screened the film, and if so, can you tell me their reactions?

SD: I sent Kelly a DVD of the film and she watched it with her new girlfriend, Myra. This is from the email she wrote me after she saw it: "...If you like for me to be in any more of your films, please don't hesitate to let me know! ... Awesome work, Sean! I am very pleased!!!"

Jeff saw the movie for the first time at the Cinequest film festival in San Jose. He said "The film was much better than I expected". His Q+A from that screening is on youtube here.


TB: Documentarians who bring seriously offbeat or mentally unwell individuals into public view always wind up facing accusations of being exploitative -- the Maysles with Grey Gardens, for example. Did you feel a great deal of pressure in filming and editing this movie because of that?

SD: Definitely. That was our major concern when editing the film, and why it took us so long to finish it. There was a lot of footage that we cut because of those types of issues. I think in the end we made a very accurate and fair film about these people, and they would agree. Still though, we have gotten a few comments from people who say they think we exploited them. A friend of mine made a documentary about drug addicts at Sundance a few years ago, and she said she got many of the same types of comments, so maybe it is unavoidable.


TB: Our discomfort with these individuals and this subject matter is hard to pin down. I can't tell if it's because their obsessive nature is so familiar to all of us on some level, or because their perspectives seem so far-fetched and alien. Can you comment on this?

SD: I don't think the film has any agenda. The point of it is to introduce the world to these people, and let them walk away with their own conclusions. The people who say the film is hilarious say it because they would find the subjects hilarious in real life. The people who say the film is really dark would be terrified of the subjects in real life. Most people walk right by these people (and people like them) everyday, and ignore them. Hardly anyone ever takes the time to get to know and understand them. This movie forces the audience to hang out with these people for 70 minutes and listen to everything they have to say, and that causes great discomfort for some people.

TB: Do you believe that a culture of consumerism and advertising is partly responsible for fueling obsessive tendencies in certain susceptible people, and maybe even cultivates them in people who are less susceptible?

SD: I do. Both Jeff and Kelly are pop culture junkies. Jeff can tell you the year just about any movie came out between 1940 to now. He watches hours of movies and TV everyday, and stops by the store every week to read the tabloids. Kelly watches tons of movies, mostly big budget action movies. (She once told me, "No offense Sean, but I'm not a big fan of independent films.") Having access to this much personal information about people you don't know can make you feel a lot closer to them, especially when you don't have many strong relationships in your life.

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