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John Bloom (a.k.a. Joe Bob Briggs) was interviewed by Kathy Youker (KY), David Christenson (DC) and a participatory audience from 11 a.m. to noon Saturday, Sept. 28, 2002 in St. Paul, Minn. (Transcription by David Christenson. Because I could only identify some, not all, members of the audience by voice, I just identified all audience comments and questions as "audience." And when the text says "laugh," that's the audience laughing.) John, in his first appearance of the weekend, was funny and informative although he said he was operating on three hours' sleep at the time. His quotes are as close to verbatim as practical; some of the interview questions have been edited to make Mr. Christenson seem less stupid. For more information, check out the Joe Bob website. DC: Could you tell us about the origin of Joe Bob Briggs? We see the official fictional origin, but I'm trying to envision you back in the early 1980s, sitting in a newspaper office and coming up with this idea. Bloom: I was always a newspaper reporter, sports writer, feature writer, had virtually every job you could have at a newspaper. I never wrote for the fashion section or the food section but I think I wrote for every other section. I was trying to finish a book, a true crime book called Evidence of Love, and rather than being the journalist who slides down the fire pole and runs off and covers things all the time, I wanted to do something where I could stay home. A friend of mine had just become the features editor of the Dallas Times-Herald, and she had no film critic. I'd always been interested in films but I'd never thought of doing that as a profession. And I actually didn't know that it was such a big deal getting these jobs. A film critic job, I later learned, after I got it, was like - you know, every time one comes open you have a thousand applicants - with credentials. I just said, "Could I do this film job while I'm finishing this book?" It appealed to me, the idea of just going several times a week and sitting in a theater, and turning in copy, that sounded like a pretty good deal. (laugh) I thought I would do it for a year or so. So for the first time I was responsible for keeping track of everything that comes out, you know, getting all the press materials, and dealing with the publicists… After about three months of it I was just bored to tears. These Hollywood mainstream movies. The studios would have screenings, and I would go to every screening, and I would review the movie - it was the heyday of Dudley Moore, I remember. (laugh, groans) It was like every other movie was a Dudley Moore romantic comedy of some sort. So those bored me to tears, but the foreign films interested me. The great thing about foreign films is that Americans hate foreign films so much that we only get the absolute best ones from the countries overseas, and so by the time a foreign film actually makes it to a screen in America it's probably pretty damned good. So I like those. Then I noticed, at the drive-in - there were quite a few drive-ins in Dallas - there were films that were never heard of before they played the drive-in, and never seen again after they played the drive-in, and never publicized. There was never anyone who called me up and said, "Hey, do you want to see 'Dr. Butcher M.D.'?" (laugh) You would see the ad in the paper on Friday; the movie would be gone by the next Friday. I remember one of the earliest ones I noticed was "Graveyard Tramps." "Graveyard Tramps" came back three or four times. "They bite, they squeeze, they're willing to please." (laugh) I knew some of the advertising agencies that placed these ads in the paper, so I would say, "Hey, when you have one of these movies with the cool titles coming up, screen it for me so I can review it." And they would call back and say, "Well, the guys who own these movies consider critics the enemy. Their goal in life is to never have their movies reviewed, ever." And I said, "Well, you don't understand. I think I kind of like these films." (laugh) So I essentially created Joe Bob as a way to create a populist critical structure to review these films, rather than take the Janet Maslin route where you only occasionally review this sort of film so you can put it down and write about what it does to our society. She used to write a series of articles, you know, "The Pornography of" - "The Pornography of Violence," "The Pornography of Anti-Feminism," "The Pornography of," you know, and she would choose one of these films to represent that. I thought, what about a guy who loves these films? These films obviously make money. There's a certain type that continuously shows up at the drive-in. Shortly after that I met Roger Corman, since he was putting out most of these films at the time. All phone calls eventually led to Roger Corman. When I was in L.A., I went by to see him, and he was very gracious and showed me through his studio, which was a converted lumberyard in Venice, California. I said, "Roger, I'm starting this new column." He had seen the column and liked it. I said, "What are the all-time foolproof genres for you?" He said [Bloom mimics Corman's cultured tone] "Well, that's an interesting question, John. I would say, certainly, breasts - nudity is something I've always insisted on…" (laugh) And I said, "Well, do you consider that a genre?" And he said, "The genre changes. It can be a sex farce… For a while we were doing very well with nurse films, and for a while we were doing very well with cheerleaders. Then it occurred to someone that we were doing rather convoluted plots in order to have nudity, so we started using strippers… (laugh) It actually was so simple. We would have her place of work be a place where she had to take off her clothes as a matter of course…" He had certain rules about it. Generally he would only have one meeting with his directors, and he would say, "I want three nude scenes. I want one within the first 10 minutes. I want one chase…" He would outline these six elements. "And beyond that, the movie's yours." (laugh) And he would hire very highly motivated recent film school graduates, who wanted to make a serious film, and they could make any film they wanted as long as they had the Roger Corman elements in it, and actually they turned out some good films. Anyway, from my conversation with Roger, I developed the three genres, which were Blood, Breasts and Beasts. Roger wasn't really into martial arts, but I added Kung Fu as a fourth genre. So I started doing the Joe Bob column. The first movie I reviewed was "The Grim Reaper." Actually it had several titles - what is the Latin term for cannibal? That was one of its titles. It was an Italian cannibal film. The column became instantly popular. In order to disguise my intentions, though, I conspired with the editor. We had one of these Friday entertainment sections which has all the movie listings in it, and in the back it has a lot of discount furniture ads and things, and it's kind of greasy and ink comes off on your fingers. I said, "Let's put it back here on page 34 in the back of the entertainment section." Because one thing you know if you've worked at newspapers very long is that editors never read their own paper. I said, "It'll take weeks for them to know this is in the paper." Actually that turned out to be true - I think it was, like, six months before the top editor saw it was in the paper, even though it was getting a lot of mail. So we were able to get away with sort of developing the whole idea before an editor decided it was too much. The other inspiration for it was that I'd been reading a lot of 19th century journalists like Ambrose Bierce who had written under a lot of different names and created entire universes that they would write for a while then abandon and go on to another one. It used to be a fairly common tradition in journalism; now I'm sure you couldn't do it anywhere. DC: So, the character's world, you started developing that right away in the column? Bloom: It developed from the movies. The first half of the column would be about Joe Bob's life, and the second half would be a review of a movie, and the third part would be letters and fan reaction. Audience: What year did the column start? Bloom: 1982. DC: It wasn't immediately syndicated? Bloom: It was immediately popular locally, and then about three years later it was syndicated. DC: The movies you were reviewing at the time, you say
they were strictly drive-in movies. But drive-ins have dwindled so much
- that was sort of a dying breed of movies at the time, wasn't it? At the time, and still to some extent today, the drive-in was considered kind of a seedy place, a blue-collar place. Especially in Texas it was a rich world to evoke in the column, so that's why I called them drive-in movies. As the video revolution happened, a lot of them became direct-to-video movies. The spirit of these movies lives on. The drive-ins have now gone back to family entertainment, which is a cycle they go through every seven or eight years, they'll do family movies. If people are having a lot of babies they'll do family movies, then there will be a period when they go back to a more enterprising kind of movies. DC: I think it's because of you that we associate the term "drive-in movies" with what used to be called "B" movies. Bloom: Yeah, anything your mother didn't want you to see, that's what I called the drive-in movie. DC: But at the time, you were pretty much the only… Bloom: I was the first guy to review these movies. These movies were totally un-reviewed. Well, I should give credit. There was one guy in New York who did a fanzine called Sleazoid Express, that, as far as I know, was the very first. He would go into theaters on 42nd Street, which is the drive-in of New York City, and review the movie and the audience. (laugh) Things like "Shriek of the Mutilated," "Blood-Sucking Freaks," you know, I think he did the very first reviews of those films. Then the other guy who popularized sort of low-rent movies was John Waters, when he wrote the book Shock Value. And probably the third guy was Michael Weldon. Actually he started out writing about movies on TV, and developed the word "psychotronic" to describe the movies. He had a newsletter which was only concerned with movies on TV, so he wasn't really as hardcore as Bill Landis, the guy who did Sleazoid Express. Landis was the real pioneer. I don't know what happened to him. [Ed. note: see www.sleazoidexpress.com] I was the popularizer. I was the guy doing it for the daily newspaper. Next page: 'For $4,000, I'll go to Cleveland' |
At long last: the Joe Bob Briggs interview!