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The Joe Bob Briggs interview! Part 3 DC: Particularly as this is a horror convention, do you think there are some horror films that you have helped to reach a wider audience? Bloom: Well, we did a series of videos back in the 1980s of Doris Wishman and Herschell Gordon Lewis films before they had really become cult figures. I think those had some influence. I mean, the original films they gave me on The Movie Channel were films they could never show on cable today. They were just too bad. They were, like, softcore West German sex comedies, like "Wild on Ibiza," "She's 19 and Ready" - it should have been called "She's 34 and She's Never Going to be Ready." (laugh) That was a time when cable didn't have enough product to put on. Cable was fairly new and they didn't have anything to show. We're going through that period again now. There are too many networks and not enough stuff, which is why, when you flip around the channels, you see the same thing 30 times in different guises. KY: Exactly - $114 a month for digital cable and there's still nothing on TV! DC: How many videos were in that series, by the way? Bloom: There were 25 in the series. Most of them were either Herschell Gordon Lewis films or Doris Wishman films. There were a few like "Sex and the College Girl," I don't know how that got in there. The really rare ones were the Wishman films. They hadn't really been widely seen, and actually I think still haven't been widely seen. DC: I watched MonsterVision on TNT regularly and I always had the feeling that you weren't totally in control of - especially the first feature that was shown on a night. Bloom: No, I was never in control. They didn't have much of a library at TNT. Even though Ted Turner bought the entire MGM library in the '80s, and they did have access to all those movies, increasingly they had a rule of - first of all, no black and white. We showed some black and white movies in spite of that, but they were under the impression that if people saw black and white they surfed to somewhere else. Even though I think if you package those old black and white films you can provide enough excitement that people will watch them. And then increasingly they wanted no 1970s films. Well, the '70s is the goldmine for exploitation. The '70s is when all the great exploitation came out. The cut-off came about 1982, 1983, and they didn't want anything earlier than there, and they weren't buying any new films, so it was really difficult to come up with things. And they thought that, since I came on at 10 p.m., in prime time, they thought the first hour of the show had to be tamer than the rest of the show, both in what I said and what the film was. The 12 o'clock film could be anything; at that point, they didn't care what I said. But at 10 o'clock, they were fairly - they're one of the more conservative networks as far as what you can say. They have, like, a six-page list of forbidden terms. (laugh) One of them was "lesbian" - just the word "lesbian." KY: That so limits you! (laugh) Audience: You'd have to say "the love that dare not speak its name." (laugh) Bloom: They don't watch the scripts that closely, so I would go ahead and put the stuff in, and use the old trick I learned years ago at newspapers, which is, you put all the stuff in you really want in, and then you write a special paragraph that's so vile and outrageous, so far over the line that you know it's going to make them livid with rage, and then you have a two-day argument about that paragraph and why it should be in the show, and then when they get that paragraph taken out they've forgotten about all that other stuff you put in there. (laugh) That actually works! After they've had that big argument with you, they don't want to have another argument, especially about lesser things. Audience: James Whale did that with his films. Bloom: Is that how he did it? Audience: He put in things he never thought would make it past the censors so they wouldn't notice the other stuff. Bloom: Yeah. But they (TNT) were especially politically correct on any kind of ethnic term, no matter how apparently… They once asked me what a "bohunk" was. (laugh) I said, "A bohunk is a person from Bohemia. It was an ethnic slur, about a hundred and fifty years ago." They said, "Well, why are you using it?" I said, "Because it sounds funny! The word 'bohunk' is funny! We're not going to get any letters from outraged Bohemians!" (laugh) And they didn't want me to use "bohunk." They were especially straight-laced about that sort of thing. I remember the word "lesbo" was my first big fight with them. And I said, "You know, the word 'lesbo' is actually closer to 'Lesbos,' the Greek island of Sappho, than 'lesbian,' which is some kind of later Anglo-Saxon bastardization of the original word 'Lesbos.' So what if I just always use the plural 'lesbos'?" (laugh) "It's defensible on etymological grounds." And they would just say, "Is this meeting over?" (laugh) They'd always say, "We're on your side, John. We're trying to protect your show. We're trying to protect the network. We're trying to protect - " I'd say, "From what?" And they'd say, "Well, you know, you get too many letters, Congress is always on our case about wanting to limit cable and pass censorship laws against cable, they write us letters and write Congressmen letters…" I'd say, "You mean, the whole policy is to prevent adverse litigation and legislation?" And they'd say, [flatly] "Yes." (laugh). They were always afraid of Congress. They were always afraid Congress would censor cable. DC: The show ran until - Bloom: It went up to 2000. DC: And since then you have been writing for UPI primarily? KY: A couple of places - I saw one of your pieces on The National Review online... Bloom: Well, I've been freelancing, something I've been doing my whole life. Wherever the editors that I know go, that's where I end up writing. A friend of mine became editor in chief of UPI; another friend has become editor of Men's Journal; another friend until recently was at The National Review. I just write for friends, people I know, that I know won't change my copy much, who sympathize with the way I write. DC: You're still reviewing the movies. Bloom: Still reviewing the movies for UPI. I do a lot of direct-to-video releases. I do a lot of real independent films, which is tough, because with the cheap digital cameras now, every 16-year-old kid from rural Kansas has a horror movie. I can't watch them all, but I sure do get them all in the mail. I try to hit a median between the absolute bottom-of-the-barrel amateur efforts - which do get released, by the way - and a little bit more elaborate films, where they actually have a little bit of money. DC: Any hidden gems recently, studios or brands that stand out? Bloom: Hidden gems in terms of the films themselves? DC: Or filmmakers who are working in direct-to-video - the Herschell Gordon Lewises of our time? Bloom: The place to go to find the real cutting edge films is www.b-movie.com, which is a company in Syracuse that serves as distributor for small cult filmmakers all over the country. It used to be called Salt City Home Video. Salt City is the motto of Syracuse, but everyone thought it was in Salt Lake City, so they changed it. There's a lot of absolute dreck on there, but occasionally there's a really original, great film. Audience: Did you get to see "The Blair Witch Project" before it was discovered? Bloom: No, I saw it at the same time as everyone else. Why do you think they would show it to me? (laugh) You know, what's interesting about "The Blair Witch Project" is that it has a lot in common with "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre." When "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" was made, there was a similar sense of shock. [Tape runs out, gap in conversation] Bloom: For most of the people associated with "Chainsaw," it was sort of a resume killer. They all went to Hollywood and tried to work in other films, and it was like, "What's your main credit? Oh, that thing." (laugh) It was not a good thing to tell people. Audience: [A question about "Chainsaw" director Tobe Hooper, too faint for the tape recorder] Bloom: He had a really hard time. He was supposed to have a three-picture deal at Universal Studios, and they never made a picture with him. He did make a little nothing movie - well, it's actually an O.K. movie - it has many titles, "Death Trap," "Legend of the Bayou." It's where Neville Brand runs a motel in Louisiana and feeds guests to the alligators in the swamp out back. He made that film, which was, like, a step backwards. He was supposed to have this big Hollywood career and he had to go make this film for a couple of Kurdish guys in southern California. Then he got "Salem's Lot," the TV mini-series, which you would think would launch him into the stratosphere, and he still had trouble, didn't get a film for three or four years. Then his big break was supposed to be "Poltergeist," and everybody said that Steven Spielberg actually directed it. It actually hurt his career that he made "Poltergeist," because everyone believed Spielberg was a ghost director on it. I think it's totally untrue. No one said Spielberg was a ghost director on "Back to the Future" or other movies he produced around the same time, but for some reason this sort of urban legend stuck to "Poltergeist." He ended up making low-budget horror films the rest of his career, and TV - he's done some TV - but he never got out of the ghetto. He wanted to make comedies! DC: I want to ask one question, then go to more audience questions. Current projects that we should be aware of - I've read that you're working on a book… Bloom: I have a book coming out in April called Profoundly Disturbing: Shocking Movies That Changed History. It's about movies that, they may not be great movies, but they're movies that changed the culture in some way. And I have a new TV pilot, so… Audience: What was it specifically about, "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," that the industry so abhorred? Bloom: I don't think they watched it. I just think they regarded it as the lowest form of pornography. I think it's one of the most inspired titles ever, and the title worked against it. I mean, to this day, when a member of Congress wants to make a speech about what's wrong with America, he's sometimes invoke the name "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre." The film is 28 years old at this point, and it's still famous as a short-cut code to mean "so reprehensible it shouldn't exist in America." It got that reputation very early because people had an image of it as, you know, when you hear the title you think it's some guy cutting up bodies for 90 minutes. They missed the whole comedic aspect of it, and… Audience: When I think of movies that I thought would fit that description, that someone might bring up in Congress, "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" isn't one of them. Bloom: No. Also, it's a very sophisticated film. It's an 85-minute film and it's got 1,400 edits; it's got Hitchcock-level editing. It's got some edits that are as short as four frames. All that stuff at the beginning where you're hearing sounds of the slaughterhouse, and seeing little images of the cows, where you don't know what you're seeing, is a very intricate montage. The dinner scene with the family, where Marilyn Burns screams for about 15 minutes straight, is like, very short cuts, a whole lot of angles, extremely complex editing job. Audience: It's got a serious moral statement: "See how you like being meat." (laugh) Audience (another): I think it's the soundtrack. I used to manage the State Theatre downtown... I did seven days a week, 13-hour days. For two weeks we played "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre." My office opened onto the balcony - 13 hours of non-stop screaming. (laugh) By the second week I developed a twitch. (laugh) It's just constant screaming. And your mind fills in the blanks - if you watch the film, it's all off-camera, with very little graphic violence. Bloom: He does an awful lot just by suggesting things with low angles and weird shots. It's all Hooper's - I mean, the people making it didn't really understand what they were making. Hooper is not a very social person. He's not easy to talk to. He wasn't the kind of guy who would actually try to talk to the actors; he doesn't really understand actors, he just kind of wants them to do their job while he does his job. So they're always kind of pissed off at him. Not just on this film, on every film. When they first meet him they think he's a nice guy, and then the more they work with him, the more they think, "He never talks to me, he must hate me." He just gets them in the right place in the frame doing what he wants them to do, and then he forgets them. His films are never about actors, and the actors have a hard time with that. Ridley Scott's the same way, but he's just a little bit more elegant man so he's able to make them think they're more important than they are. Audience: Hitchcock was accused of saying actors were cattle, and he said, "I never said that actors were cattle, I said they should be treated as cattle." (laugh) Bloom: There's a spectrum. At one end of the spectrum are those Hitchcock-type guys for whom the acting is really not that important, other than to sell the movie. Then at the other end of the spectrum you've got John Cassavetes, where it's all about actors, it's only filming actors. But Hooper is definitely towards the Hitchcock end, and I think he was amazed in later years that the ["Chainsaw"] crew harbored resentment. Of course, they partly harbored resentment over never making any money. (laugh) I don't know if you know this about the movie, but it ended up being distributed by the mafia, so they never saw the big profit sharing coming back. DC: We've got about two minutes left. Question? Audience: [Partly intelligible question about how long the We Are the Weird newsletter was published.] Bloom: Oh, that was at least, I don't know, six or eight years. The internet kind of made fanzines obsolete. It was never really financially self-supporting anyway, it was more of a fun thing to do. You know, speaking of "Chainsaw," it was originally based on Ed Gein. Plainfield, Wisconsin, is that near here? DC: The other side of Wisconsin. Bloom: O.K. But it was also based on - I don't know if you remember this serial killer named Elmer Wayne Henley, he was a Houston serial killer. He was a 19-year-old kid who helped this older man kill young men and bury them in his yard. When he was arrested, he said, "Yep, I did it, and the kind of guy I am is, now I'm ready to take my punishment." He was proud of himself because he was able to say who he was and what he did. That became sort of the inspiration for the cook and his attitude: "This is who we are as a family. This is what we do. … By God." (laugh) Audience: One of the almost-founding members of our group [Minn-Con/Arcana] visited the mental institution and danced the hokey-pokey with Ed Gein. Bloom: I think it was Ed Gein, I've always read that as he served out his time in the Wisconsin state institute for the criminally insane, or whatever, that his big hobby was rock jewelry. Now, I want to know, where's the jewelry? Somebody's got it. It's going to turn up at one of these shows, right? (laugh) |
