Out of the Inkwell

2012-01-21T14:13:00.000-08:00

Mary and I hope to see "The Artist" tomorrow if the weather cooperates. It's interesting to see how people react to the idea of a silent film in 2012 – not just silent, but black and white as well.

I realize there is considerable apprehension for many people to see a film that is so radically different than those they normally see. I ran into those feelings each and every film class I taught at Western New England University when I was an adjunct instructor there.

The more brazen – or stupid – students would whine,"Please Mr. Dobbs, when are we going to see something with sound and color?"

It's now easy to see many of the films people call classics thanks to the video revolution, but what was the point of a college class if it did not expose students to things new to them and challenge their own ideas?

Many of them also had a prejudice against foreign films because it meant having to read subtitles.

"We can't watch the movie and read at the same time, Mr. Dobbs!"

(As an aside, I must note my feelings of actually wanting to torture the student with something obscure when he or she – can't remember which – asked if the class could see "Gone With the Wind." I responded it was easy to see that film, but more difficult to see the material I was going to show them.)

I'm sure the attitudes of many of the students reflected the general public: give us something that doesn't really makes us work.

That's why sub-titled foreign films get scant theatrical distribution in this country and are far less available on DVD than they should. No Red Box is going to stock films such as those.

Perhaps "The Artist's" critical reception will be enough to push people into going to it. Perhaps it could spur a revival of interest in silent film.

Now for you who haven't seen a silent film, let me just say the experience is far different than what you are used to with today's films. Silent films force you to pay attention – the information of the narrative is carried by the image and the musical accompaniment. The lack of dialogue requires keener involvement.

With IMAX and 3-D, people think the movie experience today is all enveloping. Sorry, but silent films create that same kind of involvement, but it wasn't about mechanics, it's about the suspension of disbelief. No annoying glasses are necessary.

I realize that those people who think they don't like silent films are those who have never watched a silent film or they've seen some blurry clip from something that was projected at the wrong speed.

In an effort, probably vain, I've posted some clips to show the depth of the silent film.

In my experience you're either a Buster Keaton fan or a Charlie Chaplin fans. I'm Keaton all the way and this is the film I would show my class that almost always worked. "Sherlock Junior" is fast-moving, funny and inventive.

Want high drama? "The Last Laugh" is a fascinating film.

For years, Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" was only available in a mutilated form. Now the complete film is available and it's one of my favorites – a combination of science fiction and social commentary.

Tearjerker? F.W. Murnau's "Sunrise," which was released with a soundtrack but no dialogue, is a beautiful film.

Silent cinema created iconic moments that have inspired contemporary filmmakers. Here is one of them from "Phantom of the Opera."

You want gritty social observation? Erich Von Stroheim's castrated masterpiece packs a punch even though the film was cut from nine hours to less than two.

2012-01-14T13:37:00.000-08:00

I've got to make more room for more stuff – actually for the stuff that isn't properly stored.

I blame both my environment and my DNA. Both of my parents wore the pack rat badge proudly. Perhaps it was their Depression upbringing that compelled them not to throw out certain items. My dad always keep things like any spare piece of hardware. My mom still has pieces of cloth she bought when I was a kid that she meant to make as various articles of clothing.

Somehow copies of "The National Geographic" also became sacred objects. When my folks moved from Granby, Mass. to Virginia in 1987, they left dozens and dozens of issues that they just could't manage to pack.

I go into periods during which I try hard to get rid of DVDs, books, and other objects of my affection, simply because I have to and this is one of those times.

Some times I get very industrious and put items onto eBay, but I'm not as disciplined as I should be about that. If I don't have success I don't always immediately re-list as I should.

So, in an effort to try to get rid of the growing pile of past interests, I'm going to have some sort of sale. I don't know when, but probably in the spring. In the mean time, I'm going to list some of the bargains here. If any of our interest to the readers of this blog, drop me a line and we can arrange something.

$5 for this great interview issue of the legendary movie magazine.

I've got a whole slew of the early issues of another legendary movie magazine. I used to be a contributor, but that was a long time ago. Issue Number One is $10, and every issue after that is $5.

Picked this wacky pop culture 'zone up in Glasgow in 2006. $3 and it's yours.

I've got a whole bunch of DVDs and this is only one of them. Make it your's for $3. Want the complete boxed set of Darren McGavin's Mike Hammer series ? Take it away for $15. How about the first season of the new TV show "Happy Endings?" Give me $5. The Indonesian horror film "Birth of a Vampire?" $5. "Lemura: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural" is also yours for $5.

Zorro press kit? $3.

"Memoirs of a Geisha" press kit $3.

Classy essays on horror films by big named writers, long out of print: $10

I've got copies of my books that can be personally inscribed: $20.

More bargains to follow. Price does not include postage.

2012-01-09T05:48:00.000-08:00

Some of my favorite movie stills

I'd like to share with people a hobby of mine that started when I received my first issue of "Photon," the legendary fanzine that included a movie still in every issue. The stills were not original, needless to say, but great copies from a film featured in the issue.

I was instantly smitten with the idea that I could own something that represented a film. This was 1971 or so and the only way one could actually be a film collector was to buy 16mm prints of films. I had a handful of the 8mm and Super 8 cutdowns and I watched them over and over.

But those of us who were into such things knew the only way to go make that leap into 16mm and that was not possible for me.

You kids today – yes, you know who I'm shaking my ancient finger at – have no idea just how revolutionary VHS was for the study and enjoyment of moves. It was the great agent of democracy. Living in Granby, Mass., I could't see the movies film fans could in large cities, but home video changed all of that.

In any event, I discovered there was a place in New York City called Cinemabilia that sold movie stills. I bought from them through the mail and visited the store once.

I soon became a snob. I didn't want copies of stills. I wanted originals and I sought them out the best I could.

I bought stills of films I had seen and some from films I wanted to see. Years later I still look through piles of stills.

The still is now an artifact of the past, like lobby cards, inserts, three sheets, etc. Used to help sell movies, they have been replaced in press kits by a CD of digital images.

So from time to time I'll post some images for, hopefully, your enjoyment – and mine, too.

Here's a great shot from the Republic serial "Dick Tracy Vs. Crime, Inc." with stuntman and actor David Sharpe doubling for star Ralph Byrd. Recognize the terrain? It was in a lot of Republic westerns and serials.

Clayton Moore was a boyhood hero of mine and I'm happy to say when I interviewed him in the mid-1980s, he was a great gentlemen. Here's Moore playing a highly fictionalized version of Buffalo Bill Cody.

The three Monogram Shadow films, supposedly based on the famed radio show, have little to do with either The Shadow of the pulps or the radio. Instead they are actually goofy little mysteries that owe more to Nick and Nora Charles. Kane Richmond was one of those actors who played character parts in A films and leads in B movies.

Okay, I've been lazy and haven't done the cross-checking on IMBD to deduce the name of this film, but I want to see it despite knowing that it probably is a cheap-jack little production. The cast includes Kane Richmond (third from right) Frankie Darro and David Sharpe. I want a DVD of this thing!

It's difficult to explain the appeal of the classic movies serials of the 1930 and '40s. They are low-budget, frequently poorly written, frequently poorly acted and frequently nonsensical movies. But I have a soft spot – in my head – for them. Here's actually a gem, "The Tiger Woman," starring Linda Stirling and Allan Lane.

© 2012 by Gordon Michael Dobbs

2012-01-08T06:11:00.000-08:00

A Fleischer re-make

Today's movie industry is dominated by remakes, reboots and "re-imganings" – films that rely on previously filmed properties.

While this is too common an occurance today, it is by no means somethign that is just typical with today's cinema.

If a studio had developed a story it was not out of the realm of possibility to film several versions of it over time. One of the best examples is "The Maltese Falcon," which Warner Brothers brought to the screen three times, the last time in the form of the story we remember best.

Mark Newgarden, one of the Facebook friends, posted a link to a Koko the Clown cartoon I hadn't seen before and it's a gem. I wish there could be a comprehensive DVD set put on featuring these cartoons.

If you've not seen any of the Kokos, then you should know Max Fleischer took of the convention of the cartoonist interacting with his drawn creation – first developed in vaudeville lightening sketch acts and first seen in animation in Winsor McCay's "Gertie the Dinosaur" – and made it his own.

There were other silent cartoon series that mixed animation and live action – Walter Lantz did it and Walt Disney followed Max's lead – but it is my contention that Max's cartoons did it the best.

Max and his team set up a fun dynamic: Max was the paternalistic cartoonist and Koko was a very disobedient son. Max was not above putting Koko into some challenging situations and Koko wasn't afraid of taking his revenge.

The Fleischer staff used stop motion animation in a number of these shorts and Max, who by all accounts I've gathered was a low-key person, made an effective co-star for his animated lead. Max was also a pretty good sport as you will see in this cartoon, especially being dragged throught the set.

So watch the first one, made in 1924.

"

There are some notable things about this cartoon, one of which is the absence of Koko's dog Fitz, who is replaced by a rabbit! I particularily liked the moment when Koko rips out part of the background to form a parachute and then glides over the Max. A nice piece of animation that had a throwaway gag in it with Koko wearing horseshoes.

So now here the partial remake. Max is referenced here but does not make an on-camera appearance. His only sound cartoon was "Betty Boop's Rise to Fame" made in 1934.

The Fleischers eliminated the Out of the Inkwell series with the coming of sound and in a large way, the concept of interaction between the cartoonist and the creation as a standard part of the narrative. Although Koko appeared in a number of Betty Boop cartoons, the character was never the star. "Ha Ha Ha" is almost nostalgic in its use of the characters coming out of the inkwell. It's a favorite of mine.

© 2012 by Gordon Michael Dobbs

2012-01-03T20:25:00.000-08:00

My blogging manifesto 2012

I started blogging in 2005 because my buddy Steve Bissette started and I caved to peer pressure.

After all, I write for a living and express personal thoughts in a weekly column read, according to the circulation audit by about 120,000 people every week.

That should be enough for me, shouldn’t it?

Well, yes and no. As much as I work – generally 50 to 60 hours a week – I still want to write more. My late friend Myron Waldman taught me the importance of doing your own thing. As he directed and animated cartoons at the Fleischer Studio, he did his own paintings.

And as my friend Dick Gordon showed me, you do your own projects in order to own them, so you can hopefully get additional returns from your labor and investment.

That is why I frequently post, with some additions, material that I published in the newspapers. I have plans for many of my pieces.

Of course, I’m a journalist, which means I’m not an artist. The head of the journalism program at UMass once said that we were craftsmen. We could take pride in our work, it could feature our own style and embellishments, but every story had to fulfill the purpose of informing people.

I liken it to throwing pots in a factory. They can be pretty, but they still have to be pots. They must conform to the needs of the consumer, who expects, well, a pot.

I will readily, if not shame-facedly, admit some jealousy for those who work in the arts, especially the visual arts. Their work receives an immediate reaction and variations from reality are not seen as flaws, but rather as artistic visions.

So for me, this blog is where I try to do something different that reflects my interests and personality.

However the cost of working at a newspaper group, doing the work of two people for almost six years now has taken a toll. I don’t see as many movies as I would like. I don’t read as books as I would like. I don’t have the time. I don’t sleep well.

I run a household with my wife. I have a house and a back yard that will require months of work, thanks to tornado damage.

And I certainly don’t blog as much as I would like.

For this blog to develop a bigger readership I would have to do something almost everyday, pimp the hell out of it wherever I could and stick to one basic subject. Successful blogs sell a product or a brand.

For example, my pal Steve is his own brand. He’s a world famous cartoonist who people simply adore.

(I’m not picking on you Steve, honest. You’re one of my closest friends, but you’re also a good example. Interestingly enough, Steve is cutting back on his blogging in 2012. That’s a shame as his “MyRant” is almost always interesting and well written. )

I’m not a celebrated artist or novelist. I’m not a celebrity. I’m a journalist by trade in the 108th or so largest media market in the country.

I am a thrower of pots.

But then again, I do have a following. People do recognize me when I’m working. There are people who still remember me from my WREB days back in the 1980s. There are still people who have fond memories of Animato! and Animation Planet. I have interviewed many interesting people.

2012 has been a very poor year professionally and personally. The one big freelance gig that I thought was going to materialize died a lingering death. What made it worse was that I don’t own the work. It was work for hire. I can’t even post it here.

It shouldn’t be surprising that I have toying with the idea of junking this blog. Shouldn’t I use my time for other writing pursuits?

A blog, though, could help those projects. Within the next several weeks, the introduction for my book, “Fifteen Minutes With…” will make its debut here. A sample chapter will follow. Perhaps something might happen.

I’ve decided to instead work harder on “Out of the Inkwell” and establishing a publishing schedule that will hopefully entices people to return on a regular basis.

And I will spit in the face of convention by not producing a one-subject blog. I don’t do well with many conventions, I’m afraid.

A one-time friend, a writer of horror non-fiction and fiction, once told me my problem as a writer is that I don’t specialize enough. Well, he’s not writing and I still am.

He also suggested that I quit my job and allow my wife to support me while I follow my muse.

Yeah. Right.

I’ve decided to reassert my own little local brand, write things I can’t elsewhere. Some days may be a video. Some days may be a series of movie still from my collection. Animation, local politics, movies, media and pop culture will continue to be the subjects of this blog.

If people comment, that’s great. If they don’t, that’s okay, too.

So come back often. I will.

2011-11-27T11:28:00.000-08:00

Fleischer-palooza!

There is a wealth of previously hard to see Flesicher shorts on youtube. Enjoy with the knowledge there are some politically incorrect gags and depictions sprinkled among these shorts.

I had seen another version of this short that had clearly been censored. Myron Waldman told me there had been trouble with this Screen Song.

The Mills Brothers were fantastic and this is one of my favorite Screen Songs.

2011-11-15T13:57:00.001-08:00

Two recent events have propelled the subject for this blog post, although I’ve been thinking about it for quite some time.

I recently interviewed and wrote about my friend Jen Schwartz who recently released a new album. Jen and I had a discussion about the business side of being an independent musician today and the challenge of actually getting building an audience. Go here to learn more about Jen's new music.

I also recently spoke at the Center for Cartoon Studies about the history and motivation behind adapting comic books and strips to another medium. After the class, several students approached me and for another half hour we spoke about the difficulties in getting new comics to potential markets.

In the comic book fields this is nothing new. When I worked at Kevin Eastman’s publishing company, Tundra, in the early 1990s doing marketing and public relations, I quickly realized that in the comics industry the big question was whether or not you were trying to appeal to the reader to buy the book or to the shop to stock the book.

Back then though there were several distributors serving the direct sales market – comic book shops and subscriptions services – and all of them were willing, in the light of the out of left field success of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, to consider independent product.

Now there is essentially one distributor undergoing financial problems and unwilling to accept independent titles.

Comics and music share some marketing characteristics. Within these two pop culture genres, it was certainly possible for an independent to gain exposure and shelf space, but that chance has dwindled.

Consider that there used to be enough independent retailers in both categories who could be approached to take a chance. Consider there used to be enough music radio stations that were programmed locally that a band could approach directly with a record.

Consider as well there used to be magazines that served a common points for fans of a particular type of pop culture and the stories and the reviews they ran could help elevate an artist.

The glaring irony is that while digital technology has made the creation of comics, music and film music much more easier, the Web has not ensured easy access to an audience.

The Web is narrowcasting to an extreme. While a creator can launch a site, tie it into Facebook and Twitter one still has to find it. If you do not have a lot of name recognition, how do you get people to it?

I think we have to think as much old school as new school.

For new comics creators, there is no replacement at this point for actually working conventions, handing out some sort of freebie with your Web and social media info and hawking your wares. Make sure that every other independent has copies of your books and info. Form collaborations to lower the costs of tables and trade table space.

What the independent comics scene needs at this point is a monthly comics reader, not unlike the Utne Reader, only for new comics. Screw comic book shop distribution for this publication. It needs to be in bookstores and magazines shops to reach the readers who would like this material but would never take the time to find it for themselves in a comic book shop.

Select ten or so new comics people and run their stuff over the course of a year. Don’t run a serial unless it is completely finished. Keep it back and white and print the thing as a tabloid newspaper to save costs.

Like any magazine, though, it would have to make its money on advertising, which means the comics reflect a “Big Bang” lifestyle – the whole nerd/geek chic thing with ads for shoes, t-shirts, energy drinks, etc.

What my musician friend Jen is doing is using the Web and social media in a wise and aggressive manner, but she, too, is old school. She is forming a band and will get gigs to help sell CDs and spread the word on her music.

This, by the way, is exactly how rockers back in the ‘50s and ‘60s sold records and built their careers.

The Web is a wonderful way to distribute content, but only if people know the content is there to start.

If was advising someone today, I would stress the importance of having a web site, a Facebook account and a Twitter feed. But I would also tell them they have to have a business card, an elevator pitch and be willing to sell their content; work a table at a convention, seek publicity about themselves in newspapers and stage events that could attract the eye of an audience and television coverage.

Hey, you know I am for hire.

I think people are beginning to grasp that as “virtual” as people believe they are, the market conditions today compel people to realize that nothing can truly replace old-fashioned one-on-one personal contact.

© 2011 by Gordon Michael Dobbs

2011-11-07T17:54:00.000-08:00

DVD reviews!

The Troll Hunter

While the way that writer/director André Øvredal tells his story — in the found-footage format similar to “The Last Broadcast” and “The Blair Witch Project” — is not new, the story he tells is new.

A group of university students in Norway is trying to do a video production on the spate of recent illegal killings of bears. The government-approved hunters point the young video crew in the direction of a mysterious loner named Hans (Otto Jespersen) who lives in a very funky looking — and smelling — trailer.

They follow him up into the woods and witness for themselves what this guy really kills: trolls.

It seems that trolls as big as four-story houses are real and the Norwegian government has managed to set up a preserve for them. When these monsters break out of their area, Hans the troll hunter is called in to kill them or drive them back where they belong.

This is a deep dark secret and Hans’ boss is responsible for creating cover stories for the media to explain the damage done by the trolls.

At first, Hans tries to get rid of the students, but then he decides to let them tag along to the horror of his boss.

“The Troll Hunter” manages to be funny at times and then can quickly shift to frightening. A great example of this style is when the group is trapped in an abandoned mine that is the home of a group of trolls. They must endure being holed up — literally — with their way blocked by a flatulent sleeping troll. The humor turns to horror when one of the students panics and the trolls attack.

I love originality in movies and “The Troll Hunter” is one of the most interesting new films I’ve seen in a long time.

The version that is now available is dubbed, although I watched a subtitled DVD because I enjoy hearing the real voices of the actors.

A ton of television

I find it fascinating the way people watch television programs these days: on their computer through a number of different websites, recorded from their cable systems, streamed through Netflix, on demand from their cable systems and on DVD.

Is anyone actually watching television in the old school manner?

There are now dozens and dozens of series making their way onto DVD and I’ve written about quite of number of them so far. In the past couple of weeks, I’ve received a small pile of them.

So, let’s do a lightening round of comments.

I realize that sex sells, but I couldn’t imagine that “Holly’s World, The Complete Seasons One and Two” and “Kendra, Seasons Two and Three” would really make it to the tops of the sales charts.

The initial appeal of these two women was due to their status as Hugh Hefner’s girlfriends — whatever that really means — but now we get to see how they fare outside the walls of the mansion.

Take them away from the geezer in the pajamas and they are a lot less interesting. Ho hum.

My problem is I find both of them boring. Holly Madison is starring in a Las Vegas burlesque show – OK, she has to work, big deal! Kendra Baskett is married and a mother, as are many people.

The History Channel does have two of my favorite reality shows: “Pawn Stars” and “American Pickers” and each show is out in a new season compilation.

What I like about each program is that I enjoy rummaging around tag sales and flea markets myself, looking for some odd artifact and here are folks who do this for a living. I learn a lot from the shows and even tolerate the drama between the various participants that is supposed to add some entertainment value. I could easily do without Chumlee, the “comic relief” of “Pawn Stars.”

“Top Shot Reloaded” is essentially a kind of sports show for The History Channel. Here we have a group of world-class marksmen — and women — who are challenged each week as they try to work their way to a $100,000 prize. If target shooting is an interest, this show is well worth watching.

Now a real television show to savor on DVD is Denis Leary’s magnum opus of “Rescue Me,” with the sixth season now available.

I like Leary’s work a lot and thought the series he created that preceded this one, “The Job,” was brilliant. “The Job” only lasted one season, though, and Leary has had far better luck with his hard-edged comic approach with “Rescue Me.”

In “The Job,” Leary was a troubled cop and here he is a New York City firefighter who is battling considerable person demons.

Because of the many characters and intersecting storylines, I’d recommend seeing previous seasons first just to catch up, but “Rescue Me” is superior television.

The Honeymooners Lost Episodes 1951 to 1957

When comedian Jackie Gleason performed the first “Honeymooners” sketch in 1951 as part of a weekly show “The Cavalcade of Stars,” I’m sure few people would have predicted the kind of the success Ralph and Alice Kramden would enjoy 60 years later.

Yet in 2011, it’s clear to see the comic genius of Gleason, his cast and writers. Today when so many sitcoms rely on gimmicks or staid formulas, “The Honeymooners” have remained fresh with characters that are believable and funny.

For the younger people reading this column, Gleason has been a moderately successful comic on stage and in a handful of movies, who found his true medium — television. He created many characters on his long-running show, but his most enduring was Ralph Kramden, a bus driver who lives with his wife Alice (Audrey Meadows) in a tiny apartment in Brooklyn.

Ralph is desperately insecure and constantly jumps to conclusions. He is always seeking ways to hit it big and yearns to be a big shot. Alice has got the common sense in the family and is more than Ralph’s equal when he goes on one of his frequent tirades.

Ralph’s best friend, Ed Norton (Art Carney), lives with his wife Trixie (Joyce Randolph) in the same building. Norton is a comic original — a combination of child-like innocence and wise savvy.

I was shocked at just how well developed the characters were in the very first skit. Gleason and his first Alice (Pert Kelton) had their roles down cold and were immediately believable as they fought over whether or not Ralph was going down to the deli to pick up a loaf of bread.

This is character driven comedy at its finest, and this DVD collection brings together on 15 discs all of “The Honeymooners” skits known to exist, with the exception of the 39 half-hour episodes Gleason produced as a stand-alone show in 1955 television season.

At the time Gleason produced his first skit, sitcoms were more likely to feature a knowing wife and a clueless husband. The difference is that in “The Honeymooners,” the husband was prone to rage and the wife dished it out as well as he did. People may have fought like that in real life, but characters on television did not.

By the end of the first episode, though, it was clear these two people truly loved each other, despite their failings.

This humanity made Ralph and Alice seem very real to audiences, then as well as now.

This collection also features an informative booklet on the history of the show and a great collection of extras, including two parodies of “The Honeymooners,” one starring Jack Benny in the Gleason role and the other featuring Peter Lorre as Ralph.

If you have a “Honeymooner” fan in your family, this should be high up on your holiday gift list.

The Captains

William Shatner started out as a serious actor on the stage in his native Canada. He became well known to American audiences in the 1950s and ‘60s with frequent guest-starring roles on television, movie appearances and starring roles on Broadway.

Then he accepted the role of Captain Kirk on the original “Star Trek” and his life changed.

For more than 40 years — during which Shatner has seen additional success in show business as well as being the object of adoration for millions of “Star Trek” fans — the actor has apparently nursed an unresolved issue over being identified as Kirk. Apparently he can’t reconcile the “serious” nature of his early career and the promise it had with his post-“Star Trek” life.

To try to deal with this nagging conflict, the actor interviewed every other actor who has appeared as the star — and commanding officers — of a “Star Trek” series or movie to see how playing the part changed them. Shatner spoke with Kate Mulgrew, Scott Bacula, Avery Brooks, Chris Pine and Sir Patrick Stewart.

That’s the subject of “The Captains,” the new documentary written and directed by Shatner. This production seemed to be an extension of the interview shows Shatner has done in the last several years.

As a fan, I found the interviews, with the exception of the one with Brooks, pretty interesting. Mulgrew is very candid in first admitting she really had no idea who Shatner was when she starred in her “Star Trek” series and said her children have never forgiven her for accepting the job, as the brutal work schedule kept her away for years of their childhood.

Stewart spoke earnestly about making the transition between being a renowned Shakespearean actor to a starship captain, while Bacula spoke about how much Shatner had been an influence on him.

Brooks doesn’t address any of the issues brought forth in the other interviews and instead spouts off some strained philosophical blather while seated at a piano. I wondered if he was pulling Shatner’s leg. Of course, I’ve long wondered if Shatner’s wacky self-indulgent and ironic public personality is a well-played parody itself.

At the end, Shatner came to grips with his alter ego – no surprise. In the hands of a lesser egomaniac or eccentric, this film would come across as a huge vanity project. With Shatner at the helm, though, it’s oddly endearing at times.

Die-hard “Star Trek” fans will need to see “The Captains.”

Wrecked

I never saw “The Pianist,” mainly because I no longer watch films by director Roman Polanski as I have a moral dilemma about supporting the work of a pedophile. So, I missed the performance that earned Adrien Brody an Oscar for best male performance.

Since then, I have watched a number of his films, and aside from the remake of “King Kong” in which he was terribly miscast, he has impressed me.

What is also significant is his willingness to do work such as the vastly entertaining “Predators” and the envelope pushing “Splice” that other Academy Award winners would avoid.

Certainly, this new film on DVD falls into that category. It’s a low budget thriller that is essentially a one-man show for Brody.

Brody plays an unnamed man who wakes up finding himself in the front seat of a car that has crashed into a deep-forested ravine. He is injured. He has a gun. There is another passenger in the car who is dead.

He has no memory of what has happened.

Brody’s character must first extricate himself from the wreck and he discovers he has a severely injured leg. He also discovers a backpack filled with money in the car’s trunk.

He still doesn’t know what happened, but there is enough charge left in the car’s battery to hear a radio broadcast and a news report about a bank robbery. A name he eventually recognizes as his own is mentioned.

This film teases the audience in the best way. We don’t know the story and since the character has suffered from a concussion, we don’t know what is real and what is imagined.

This film is a first feature-length effort for director Michael Greenspan and he does well setting up the confusion and terror felt by the man. Christopher Dodd’s screenplay kept me involved and guessing.

And Brody turns in a great performance as a person trying to survive and to recall what event put him in this situation.

For a solid and different thriller, try “Wrecked.”

The Trip

I love British comedy and what little I’ve seen of Brit comic superstar Steve Coogan he is capable of being pretty funny.

This film has a premise that undermines the limited laughs it presents and will be a challenge for American audiences. Context in humor is everything.

Coogan plays a version of himself — an aging comic superstar beset with numerous insecurities — who is asked by a British magazine to tour the north of England and eat in upscale restaurants for an article.

Coogan wants to take his American girlfriend on the trip, but she is back in the United States. Instead he chooses friend and fellow comedian Rob Brydon. Brydon is happily married and is satisfied with his career.

Coogan can’t stand that Brydon is happy and views Brydon as a sidekick rather than star — a view Brydon doesn’t share. The two men alternate between arguing with one another, competing with impersonations and improvising bits as they drive from one eatery to another. Some of these scenes are funny and some fell flat because they referenced British entertainment figures I didn’t know.

The film plays with the professional and personal reputations of both performers. Brydon’s version of himself is quite likable, while Coogan is the epitome of a vain superstar. The fact they are playing versions of themselves is a bit precious.

I had to research Coogan on the Internet to understand the parody of himself he was presenting.

Director Michael Winter-bottom presented the film as a fictional narrative despite the fact the subject is supposed to be more of a semi-fake documentary. The playing with formats added greater confusion for me.

The few laughs the film generated — my wife noted I laughed five times — didn’t justify the time it took to watch it.

© 2011 by Gordon Michael Dobbs

RIP Richard Gordon

2011-11-03T19:01:00.000-07:00

Haunted Strangler

This is a difficult piece to write as the journalist in me is trying arrange the facts in a logical sequence, but the memories are spilling out of my head in a haphazard way. On one hand I want to write an entertaining piece about my friend Richard Gordon. On the other, I want to cry.

Other than my father, there have been two men I’ve known who’ve made a profound and positive impression on me: the late animator and artist Myron Waldman and movie producer Richard Gordon, who passed away at the age of 85 on Nov.1.

Richard – or Dick to his friends – was the almost last of the independent producers of low-budget horror and science fiction films who rose to prominence in the 1950s. His only contemporary who is still alive is Roger Corman. Like Corman, Dick never really retired and maintained an office from which he made deals to keep his films and the ones he represented on television and on home video.

Although he refused to upgrade to a computer – he steadfastly stuck to his electric typewriter, telephone and fax machine for his business – he sold licenses to put several of his films on the AMC website.

First Man into Space

I met Dick at a Cinefest in Syracuse NY in either 1984 or ’85. A friend of mine at the time had been corresponding with his older brother Alex – also a film producer – who was also at the three-day film festival and he convinced a group of us that we should make the four-hour drive to Syracuse to meet Alex.

We did that and met Alex and Dick, who were amazingly gracious gentlemen. One of our group, an ardent Bela Lugosi fan, knew that Alex and Dick befriended Lugosi and that Alex had written a Lugosi vehicle for Ed Wood, “Bride of the Monster.” The fan asked Alex who was a better actor: Lugosi or Boris Karloff, and I saw the first instance of Alex’s skillful diplomacy as he somehow dodged giving a potentially disappointing answer.

I interviewed Alex for a radio show I was hosting at the time and made arrangement to meet Dick in his office in New York City for an interview. Again, he was the epitome of an English gentleman and we became friends.

Dick and Alex were movie fans down to their DNA. As kids in their native England they were the heads, respectively of the country’s Buster Crabbe fan club and Gene Autry fan club. Alex eventually worked for Autry in several capacities. Dick had an over-sized portrait of Charles Middleton as Ming the Merciless from Crabbe’s Flash Gordon serials that Dick received as a boy. It was personally inscribed to him.

World War II interrupted their plans – both were in the British military – and the brothers came to the United States in 1947 to pursue a career in film. Dick once told me that his father urged him to go if that it was what he wanted to do.

Dick and Alex were among the first filmmakers who were movie fans. They were probably the first fan boys who made that leap to be successful participants.

Island of Terror

They both sought to make movies with people they admired and subjects that interested them as fans. Alex was the first producer to cast his films with his own favorite actors – something long before Quinton Tarantino ever did.

Dick and Alex both had a razor sharp memory when it came movies. Dick could recount not only details about a film he saw as a kid, but could tell you where he saw it. His taste in movies was quite broad. Fluent in German, Dick was very knowledgeable in German cinema from the silent period through the present. On the other hand, if you had a B-western to give him, he would welcome that with a smile.

I would always visit Dick every time I was in New York and he was there. He was a very active traveler for many years and he liked to go on tours of foreign counties, always some place new, but if he was in-town, we would get together for lunch or dinner.

The annual Cinefest, though, was the chance to spend greater time with him and to watch movies together. He could be quite critical of the varied offerings at the festival, which specialized in American and British films from the silent era through 1950. I never saw him walk out of a film, but he could certainly roast something he didn’t like.

Over an often-mediocre meal at the hotel dining room at the festival, Alex and Dick would tell stories about their films. I wish I had recorded them. For instance, both men were fairly critical of the movie “Ed Wood,” as Alex had been an intimate of the notorious director and Dick knew Lugosi very well. They strenuously objected to the scene in which Lugosi called Karloff a “cocksucker.” They said Lugosi would have never used such language.

Dick was never a name-dropper, but as he spoke he would continually surprise me. I never knew he had tried to set up a film deal for legendary director Fritz Lang. He told me how Lang had introduced himself to Dick’s secretary as “Dr. Mabuse,” the super-villain he had created for several memorable films.

Fiend Without a Face

I was also a little shocked that William Burroughs had offered Dick the screen rights to his notoriously un-filmable novel “Naked Lunch.” Dick met the author through theater owner and director Antony Balch with whom Dick made two movies, “Horror Hospital” and “Bizarre.”

One of the best dinners was the one time my wife Mary came to Cinefest. We dined with Dick and two of his directors, Norman J. Warren who helmed “Inseminoid” and Radley Metzger who made “The Cat and The Canary.” They all showered Mary with attention and performed a bit of roast on each other.

I once asked Dick why he had never attempted to license merchandise for any of his films. There had been some novelizations of his movies in paperback, but I thought he was missing the boat with the horror craze of the 1980s and ‘90s. He looked at me and said, “Why don’t you do it?”

I had fun and a little success. I still have the life-sized “Fiend Without a Face” brain monster that one guy made each of us as a prototype.

The Cat and the Canary

Dick’s last venture as a filmmaker was his acquisition of a short – a ghost story from 1953 called “Return to Glennascaul” – featuring Orson Welles. Dick filmed a new introduction for the film with director Peter Bogdanovich and managed to get it out on video.

He really wanted to see a new version of “Fiend,” which was best remembered film and several people wrote script and took out options. The “fiend” did appear, however, in the film “Loony Tunes: Back in Action,” thanks to director Joe Dante.

At one point there was a hint that a publisher might be interested in a novel based on the film. Steve Bissette and I came up with an outline for a sort of a sequel and Dick was appalled. We had one scene in which the brain monsters were gathered in the woods around a campfire with the one human they had taken a collective liking to!

So, we tried again. I worked on the second draft and tried to solve some problems set up in the film that modern audiences just wouldn’t accept. I remember very proudly that Dick was extremely pleased with it. The intended publisher was no longer interested apparently in such projects and the book quickly faded away. In a way, I didn’t care. The one audience I truly cared about pleasing was happy with what I had done.

Tower of Evil

Why was Dick’s career so long? I think that one thing that contributed to it was an economy of scale. Richard never expressed an interest in having a studio or producing multiple movies at a time. Each film received a lot of attention from him.

Dick’s career extended years beyond his being an active producer because he had the foresight to ask for the return of the rights of his films once the initial theatrical release was completed.

I would call or visit Dick and he would tell me how he had sold films to a German DVD distributor or how he managed to get his movies onto French television. His sole complaint in later years was that younger show business executives had no idea who Boris Karloff was, much less the stars of his other films.

Corridors of Blood

The appeal of Dick’s films could be seen in their almost constant availability on home video. When one license was up, he successfully sought another. The esteemed Criterion Collection was among the licensees and the company released a boxed set of three of Dick’s films and one produced by his brother Alex.

I had asked Dick several times to write a book about him and Alex. He always turned me down partly because he was really a very private person and partly, as he told me, he didn’t want to produce a book that would have stories that were hurtful to people.

Months prior to his death, Richard collaborated on a book on his career with Tom Weaver, who was not only a friend but had interviewed him many times. I’m glad was able to get him to speak about his career and I need to buy the book myself. The last time I saw him, Dick had told me not to do so as he would have a copy for me. Go here for more info.

Inseminoid

I saw Dick in June this year. He had been in the hospital with heart problems and he was a little frail. I was concerned, but glad to see him. He wanted to have dinner with me and asked if it was acceptable if I would come with another friend of his. Naturally, I said yes.

We took a cab to Greenwich Village to a French restaurant that was opposite from the French restaurant that was our destination, Dick explained it was his habit – and he was a creature of habit – to go to the first establishment to have a drink at the bar. He loved Harvey’s Bristol Cream Sherry and he said the place was one of the few bars in the city that still served it.

I drank a bourbon, and we then had a great meal at the restaurant where Dick had been dining once a month or so since the late 1950s.

We took a cab back to mid-town and walked Dick to his apartment.

This weekend I would like to reserve some time on the couch and watch some of his movies. And perhaps have a little sherry in his memory.

Thanks Dick.

2011-09-27T16:33:00.001-07:00

I love the Kids in the Hall and looked forward to speaking with these two guys. I wasn't disappointed.

It’s not the easiest thing to laugh and take notes and that was the primary challenge in speaking with Kevin McDonald and Scott Thompson, two of the members of the legendary comedy troupe, The Kids in the Hall.

This reporter recently conducted two separate telephone interviews with the comedians and actors and that was a blessing. If they had been on the line at the same time, I would have been unable to take clear notes.

At the same time both men were refreshingly candid about a career in show business.

McDonald and Thompson will be appearing together in a stand-up act with new material at the Hu Ke Lau in Chicopee on Oct. 7.

On the show, McDonald played a number of either crazy or naïve women as well as his unforgettable role as “King of Empty Promises,” while Thompson broke new comedy ground with his monologues as Buddy Cole.

“The Kids in the Hall” television series ran from 1988 to 1995 and has been re-run since as well as collected recently on DVD. Since then, both men have been busy with a variety of projects and appearances as well as taking part in several reunion projects with fellow “Kids” Mark McKinney, Bruce McCullough and Dave Foley, the most recent being “Death Comes to Town” in 2008.

McDonald, for instance, has made a mark as a voice actor in animated productions that include “Invader Zim,” “Lilo and Stitch” and “Catscratch.” He likes it, even though he has no creative power.

“It’s tiring,” he explained. “I scream all day because my characters always fall a lot.”

He noted with a little apprehension that he met a voice actor who “did me better than me.”

McDonald recently made the move from Los Angeles to Winnipeg, Canada, because of a new relationship. He explained he initially made the move from Canada because “I have to go out and keep reminding people about me; reminding them about the Kids in the Hall and ask them for money.”

Performing in the reunion tours with the rest of the group “seemed like old times,” he said.

The Kids in the Hall were often noted for their performance in female roles and the steps they took to look like women. Playing in drag today, means “certainly a lot more makeup,” McDonald said.

One of the aspects of “The Kids in the Hall” television show that continues to impress is the edgy innovative quality of the writing. McDonald said the members used to write the television shows by bringing ideas together to McCullough’s apartment and acting them out over and over. Since then with the advent of the personal computer, the team has broken up into smaller writing groups.

He said that the “hardest thing” the group ever wrote was their feature film “Brain Candy.”

“We couldn’t turn a page [in the script] until everyone agreed,” McDonald remembered.

He said each of the tours featured new material and that while in the writing process it seemed like “no time had passed.”

McCullough was in charge of the most recent “Kids” production, the mini-series “Death Comes to Town” and McDonald said the problem the “Kids” has always had is writing longer pieces than skits.

McDonald is new to stand-up but enjoys it and is happy to be on the road with his friend.

“Kevin and I are such good friends,” Thompson said. Neither man wanted to tour alone and the two decided to make a two-year commitment to a stand-up gig.

McDonald said that although part of his stand-up show is scripted, there is also room for improvisation. Thompson explained the two men do a separate set and then come together for a set.

If you’re hoping to see a reprise of well-known characters or skits, you won’t find them at this show, Thompson said.

He said at the beginning of the tour, they tried to do some of their well-known characters, but “we dumped them.”

“It’s easier [to do the tour] without a bag of wigs,” he said.

Thompson was one of the first openly gay performers on television and his signature character was Buddy Cole, the acerbic barfly always holding a martini and ready with a piercing remark.

Cole was Thompson’s stand-up voice for years and Thompson envisioned bringing Cole back as the star of a new show in which Buddy is undertaking a tour of Africa and the Middle East.

Thompson, along with “Kids” writer Paul Bellini, even wrote a Buddy Cole book titled “Buddy Babylon: The Autobiography of Buddy Cole.”

One can tell there is more than a little of Cole in Thompson. When I opened the interview with the admission I’m a big fan of the “Kids,” he said that would make things easier.

“The last [interviewer] was a petulant a*****e and he stayed one through the interview,” he said.

Thompson has also been busy since the “Kids” left the airwaves. He’s had prominent roles in television series such as “The Larry Sanders Show” and “Providence,” as well as other shows.

He said he is “thrilled” to be on stage and performing stand-up, nothing that much of the material is about his life.

“Stand-up is so pure,” he said. “It’s just you and a mic. You’re like a gunslinger.”

Although he improvises on stage, he sticks to the material he developed and said with a hearty laugh, “The show is filthy — really, really dirty.”

Thompson is also honest about the tour and about the nature of show business and in a moment of candor, he said he needs the money from the stand-up tour.

“I’ve not had the most illustrious post-“Kids” career,” he said. He views himself as a comic actor and writer who would be “very, very happy with different character roles.”

He noted, that unlike shows such as ”Saturday Night Live,” there was no “break-out” member of the troupe, with the possible exception of Foley, who landed the starring role on “News Radio.”

He said that McKinney and McCullough gravitated to “behind the camera.”

Thompson had been vocal in the past about the depiction of gays on television and in film and the straight actors who get the parts. He said things have “come a million miles” since he raged against how Tom Hanks played a gay man dieing of AIDS in the film “Philadelphia.”

He said he watched the sitcom “Glee” and was amazed by the gay character on it.

“I’m more philosophical about that now,” he said. “I kind of forgive.”

He said one observer wrote of “The Kids” that watching them performing one could tell that they loved one another.

“That’s the secret,” he said. “The Kids in the Hall, that’s our secret — a ‘bromance.’”

© 2011 by Gordon Michael Dobbs

2011-09-19T20:23:00.001-07:00

With comedians, you never quite know what to expect in an interview. I've conducted conversations with comics that was all about their shtick and some who acted like they never cracked a smile.

I didn't know what to expect from Tom Green, a polarizing talent if there ever was one. I think that either you're a fan of what he is best known for– outrageous, in-your-face confrontational prank humor – or you're not. I admire the guy for staking out a piece of comic turf that relatively few have.

It turns out that Green is an articulate sincere guy, who is serious about his stand-up career.

If you think of outrageous when you think of comedian Tom Green, you would be right. Green came to prominence with a program on MTV that emphasized a willingness to do almost anything to himself or his sidekicks for laughs — or shock.

Talking to Green reveals another side to the guy willing to put live mice in his mouth for an audience’s amusement. He’s a performer who is very serious about developing his stand-up act.

Green spoke to Reminder Publications last week. He will be appearing at the Hu Ke Lau on Oct. 1 in Chicopee.

MTV picked Green up for his first show in 1999, after the performer had starred and produced his own show for the Canadian Broadcast Corporation, which was based on his long-running homemade show seen on cable access.

The success of the first MTV show led to subsequent shows and specials on the network as well as a string of movies, including the infamous “Freddy Got Fingered,” which was Green directed and co-wrote.

Having started performing stand-up at age 15, Green has returned to the comedy format and has been touring for the past two years.

“I always wanted to do it again,” he said of stand-up. Green stopped performing when he started his cable access television show.

He added he enjoys the writing process of developing jokes and stories.

“The real fun I have is crafting a joke with a lot of structure, but make them look unstructured,” he explained.

Green does improvise on stage as well and uses stand-up for the expression of opinions on social issues.

After working on mainstream television and movies, Green appreciates the one-man quality of stand-up.

“What I love about stand-up is the complete freedom. There are no rules there,” he said.

“With the television shows, we were challenging ourselves to smash the rules each week into smithereens,” Green said.

Green was raised in the culture of skateboard and said that was the inspiration for the crazy physical stunts seen on his show. When asked if his show inspired MTV’s “Jackass,” he said, “People ask me that [all the] time. I tell them to drawn their own conclusion.”

While Green doesn’t think MTV copied him, he said he has been told by “Jackass” cast members such as Steve O that they were inspired by him.

Green’s success also led to movie roles in a number of films as well as his star turn in “Freddy Got Fingered,” a film that is now considered a cult film.

He said that acting in someone else’s film “takes a lot on pressure off” him and he “doesn’t necessarily have to always do everything.”

He currently has several film ideas in development, including one he calls “Insane Prank Movie.”

Green has the reputation of pushing boundaries and he did that with his Internet-based talk and variety show that ran from 2006 to this year. Green was a pioneer in using the Internet as a way to broadcast a television show, which he jokingly called “Web-o-Vision.”

He said he enjoyed the show and would do it again, despite the fact that he made just enough money on the show to cover the costs.

“It was a fairly elaborate show,” he noted, which was broadcast weeknights over Livestream and then archived.

“I’ve always been aware of technology and curious how to apply it to make funny comedy,” Green said.

He stopped the production of the show to go on tour and devote himself to stand-up. Green recently did a 12-day appearance as part of the acclaimed Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which was well received.

One unidentified reviewer wrote on www.edinburghspotlight.com, “His insanely genius ‘shock humour’ is what helped Tom shoot to fame and it’s something he fortunately hasn’t let go of. Loosely based on the story of his life, Tom doesn’t hold back. He’s incredibly open and honest about elements of his past making the show much more than just hilarious antics.”

© 2011 by Gordon Michael Dobbs

2011-09-11T13:43:00.000-07:00

Flea market treasures

One of my true summer and fall pleasures is the Hadley Flea Market, an outdoor collection of dealers located on Route 47. Mary and I have been going there for years and almost always find something either for us or for a friend.

Because of the horrendous summer we've had, we took only the second trip to the flea market of the season today, but it proved to be a great haul for us. We each found books, a couple of things that will be Christmas presents and I discovered the following post cards.

This is an arcade card, a photo printed on card stock the same size as a postcard that was given our as a prize or sold at carnivals and penny arcades. This one features Tom Tyler and Frankie Darro (w) from the silent western "The Desert Pirate."

Okay Springfield residents, this is what the corner of State and Chestnut Streets looked like at the turn of the 20th Century. You see the church where the museum parking lost is now located and the former library building that was moved into the Quadrangle to allow the construction of the present central library.

This next shot is looking down Main Street. The building with the onion dome in the foreground is at the corner of Main and Bridge streets.

This "skyscraper" was the home of "Good Housekeeping" magazine and Phelps Publishing.

© 2011 by Gordon Michael Dobbs

2011-08-29T11:35:00.000-07:00

Sen. Lieberman

The tornado victim

The esteemed panel

All photos by Patrick Dobbs

Ah, so close and yet so far away.

Last week I had the honor of being part of a panel discussion at the Connecticut Science Center in Hartford, Conn. – a truly impressive interactive science museum. The museum has a new exhibit called “Nature Unleashed: Inside Natural Disasters” and the discussion was on the theme “Are We Ready for Nature Unleashed?”

I was asked because the museum personnel wanted a survivor of the tornado in the group and had been steered to the stories I’ve written by a friend of mine. I joined a panel that included the state’s deputy commissioner of emergency services and public protection, a vice president of Connecticut Light and Power, a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) official and the chief operating officer for the Connecticut and Rhode Island American Red Cross.

The star of the show, though, was Sen. Joseph Lieberman.

I thought it would be interesting to ask Lieberman two things: does he really support the idea of cutting Social Security in order to strengthen a defense strategy against terrorists as reported and does he agree with what Mitt Romney proposed about eliminating FEMA and allowing states to respond to disasters without federal help.

I didn’t get the opportunity to pose either question and Lieberman framed his remarks around being prepared for national security threats rather than natural events.

He did ask the audience if they would contact their members of Congress to get entitlements under control.

He offered no message about tax reform or questioning whether or not the war in Afghanistan is worth the lives and money it is costing.

The discussion was a worthy one with all of us contributing to it, but the journalist in me was yearning to be allowed to talk.

I thought it was interesting that a week later we are hit by a huge hurricane. What's next? A plague of locusts?

© 2011 by Gordon Michael Dobbs

2011-08-26T07:20:00.000-07:00

Magical Mystery Tour

This has not been a good year so far and, in response to the stress, my wife and I have made plans for a number of little trips. This weekend with the boys was one of them and included no strips clubs and very little drinking! And only one seegar! We were good geezers.

Instead it was a mini-tour of some new England oddities, stuff that fascinates me! Here in still, movie and print is some of what we experienced.

In top photo, author and researcher Loren Colen in his museum. In bottom photo, I meet Big Foot, or a reasonable facsimile. Both photos copyright by Joseph A. Citro and used by permission.

This is what I wrote about the museum. It was a pleasure to speak with Loren Coleman who is a hell of a nice guy, besides researching a topic that is a huge interest of mine.

PORTLAND, MAINE – It may take you a little more than a tank of gas to drive from Western Massachusetts to the International Museum of Cryptozoology and back, but if you are interested in topics such as Big Foot, lake monsters and unknown cats, among other creatures of controversy, the expense is well worth it.

The museum has the ultimate interactive feature: its founder Loren Coleman, a world-renowned expert on cryptozoology, is on hand most of the time to personally answer questions from visitors.

“Cryptozoology” is the study of hidden animals and the proponents of the research point out that such creatures as the giant squid, mountain gorilla and okapi were once thought of as mythical. Coleman has used the coelacanth, the living “fossil fish” long though extinct until a live specimen was caught in 1938, as the symbol of his museum.

Coleman is no wide-eyed fanatic with an aluminum foil hat. He has a graduate degree in psychiatric social work and worked in that field for years. He has written numerous books and has regularly appeared on such television shows as “In search of …” and “Monsterquest,” among many others.

Originally, the prolific author and researcher had the museum in his home, but the demand to see it was so great he decided to move it to its present location in 2009. In turn, the response has been great enough that Coleman will be moving it around the corner from its present location at 661 Congress St. to larger quarters.

The museum is an amazingly dense collection of artifacts that range from original plaster castings of Big Foot footprints to photos of lake monsters and unknown sea creatures to items depicting efforts to defraud the public such as the a reproduction of a Big Foot mask used in 2008 to earn a group of grifters money for the sale of a fake Big Foot carcass.

Where else could you see a sample of hair from a yeti?

There is an amazing undated photo of a group of Marines with a large unidentified sea creature that will leave you wondering just what it was. A digital frame displays a slide show of lake monster photos, including the famous photo of “Champ,” the lake monster of Lake Champlain.

Another digital screen runs a loop of the famous 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film of Big Foot striding through a California forest. Coleman dispute the more recent claims that the much-studied film was faked.

The recent report of a motorist in Connecticut killing a mountain lion – an animal long extinct from New England – is an example of a less exotic “cryptid.” Although there have been reports for years of people spotting mountain lions where they shouldn’t be, Coleman noted the official explanation was that this mountain lion shared DNA with big cats from South Dakota. Rather than say that mountain lions had returned to New England, wildlife officials claimed the animal had walked 1,500 miles.

Mountain lion generally have a range of 100 miles. To admit that mountain lions have returned would trigger their classification as an endangered species, Coleman said which could affect issues such as commercial development.

Coleman explained to Reminder Publications the museum attracts 5,000 visitors a year and that most are curious tourists who have heard about the attraction. About 30 percent are “cryptonuts,” while about 10 percent are skeptics who come to challenge Coleman.

That the museum has plenty of examples of attempted hoaxes is acknowledgment that Coleman applies great scrutiny to reports about unknown animals.

Ironically, in the age of digital technology that should make documenting sightings of unknown animals more plentiful, presenting fake photos and videos have become easier, Coleman said.

He also noted that just because a person’s cell phone has a camera doesn’t mean there would be more photos of Big Foot and big cats. Besides the fear and astonishment a sighting can inspire, it still takes time for a person to take a phone out of a pocket or purse.

But if you do get a good shot of the inexplicable, Coleman might be interested.

For more information on International Museum of Cryptozoology, go here.

2011-08-08T17:20:00.000-07:00

Fed up

I was going to blog about Dave Sharpe. Go ahead, Google “Dave Sharpe stuntman.” He was frickin’ amazing.

But my hands have a mind of their own.

Lord, these politics is killing me. I just want to escape. Let’s watch a movie. Let’s go out to my favorite watering hole. Let’s smoke a seegar on the front stoop and talk trash.

I can’t convey the depths of my despair about the idiots who are bringing this country down the road to an even deeper depression.

I feel like I’m a broken record. I write in editorials and on Facebook that we need jobs. We need terms limits. We need to reverse the Supreme Court decision that allows corporations to be considered as “people.” Outlaw lobbyist who buy votes on behalf of their clients. We have to get out of the toxic trade agreements that are killing American manufacturing.

But instead too many people prattle on as if the rich are going to save the country. Don’t raise their taxes! They create jobs. No, they don’t. The companies they own create jobs – overseas so the rich can get even richer.

This country was built on entrepreneurs who got their hands dirty developing inventions, providing services or building something. The potential is still there, but the odds are longer and longer every day for success. It’s not government regulation. It’s the way the marketplace is controlled.

The middle class and working poor people who support the Tea Party and the Republicans think the rich will provide solutions. They might as well be sucking a gas pipe. Supporting these people will strip you of your ability for collective bargaining and tear away any sort of safety net.

Is there waste in government? Damn straight. Are both parties to blame? Absolutely. Have too many Democrats drunk that corporate Kool-Aid? I’m afraid so.

But the beauty part of all of these discussions is how the powers that be keep the groundlings bickering among themselves about stuff that scarcely matters.

Corporations with agendas own the national media and the whole left-right argument no longer applies. Corporations are essentially countries. The only political agenda is to gain power and money in the short term.

What can we do? More than what we are doing now. Pick an issue and become obsessive. Mine is keeping local. Want to build jobs? Buy local. Keep your money out of the hands of national chains as much as you can afford. We need to go back to growing as much food as we can locally and regionally. We need to look at our own area and see what is how potential for surviving on our own. We need to rebuild our economy locally as well as nationally.

We need kick the sumbitches out of office locally who aren’t being progressive, who cling to the old ways of graft and getting along.

Anyway, I need some relief. I’m not going to get it from Congress. The networks aren’t going to have the guts to tell the real story.

I’m going to watch a little Dave Sharpe. Damn, he was great in “Spy Smasher.

">

© 2011 by Gordon Michael Dobbs

2011-07-31T10:05:00.000-07:00

Haven't posted in a while, so I'll do a quick one collecting the more recent DVD reviews. This summer has been so disjointed between increasing stress-filled work, the tornado and a virus that has diminished my hearing. Blogging has taken a back seat.

It’s July and at this time 35 years ago, the drive-in theaters would have been in the middle of their season. Remember The Airline, The Red Rock? The Park Way? Can you hum the jingle played on the commercial for the snack bar? Did you watch the countdown clock as it noted the time to the next feature?

Variety, the bible of show business, called them “ozoners;” parents of teens called them “passion pits;” and families on a budget saw them as an inexpensive night out for a carload of kids.

From a business point of view, drive-ins were largely owned by independent showmen who understood that to draw crowds to their theaters, they had to offer audiences something they couldn’t experience either in standard theaters or on television. It’s no wonder those owners were willing to take chances on independently made films, foreign movies and low budget productions that had the elements that would draw audiences: action, adventure, sex and horror.

These showmen knew they had to package these films creatively and did so in double-bills, triple bills and “from dawn to dusk” shows.

Home video killed these theaters as renting a movie to watch at home proved to be even cheaper than popping the family into the station wagon and heading for the drive-in. At least staying at home meant there was no fear of driving away with the speaker still on your door.

This week’s films would be highly suitable for a drive-in double bill.

REC2

Several years ago, when attending the Rock and Shock show in Worcester, “REC” was the film many people was buzzing about. The Spanish horror film was told through the camera of a video crew that was following a group of firefighters as they responded to a call in a large apartment building in Barcelona.

Inside that building, which was quickly cordoned off by the government, was a group of zombie like creatures who aggressively attacked the crew. The last image of the film showed the reporter being dragged away from the camera by a particularly awful creature.

The sequel, “REC2” has just been released on DVD and continues the story 15 minutes from the conclusion of the first film. Now, a group of SWAT police officers are told they must accompany an official from the Ministry of Health inside the building to assess the situation.

What they don’t know is the man is not a health official, but a priest and the zombies are not your garden variety walking dead, but instead are demonically possessed.

That’s the only spoiler you will get from me about this very-well directed film that punches your buttons on a variety of levels. Running around a claustrophobic dark old building is bad enough without being attacked periodically by ravenous demons, but then directors Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza pile on more surprises.

While not a gore film, this movie is indeed moist at times – a warning for the squeamish.

The DVD is presented in its original Spanish with well-crafted subtitles. It has an extensive “making of” feature as well.

This is a kick-ass film and has an ending that will leaving you slack jawed.

Insidious

“Insidious” is a film I wanted to see in theaters, but instead my wife and I took our goddaughter to see “Hop.” Thanks goodness for DVD!

James Wan is noted for being the director for the first “SAW” film, but that film and this one are quite far apart in theme and treatment. “Insidious” is about a family that is struggling with a tragedy: one of the children, Dalton, has fallen into a coma that baffles his doctors.

With the coma comes an increased level of what appears to be a disturbing amount of paranormal activity at the family’s home. A move to a new home does quell the aggressive sightings.

When an investigator is called in, her interpretation shocks the parents. It’s not the houses that are haunted; it’s their son.

This is not a gore film at all. Wan and writer Leigh Whannell created a realistic state of sadness and dread and their shocks are frequently as simple — but effective — as a face at a window. They prove that severed body parts are not necessary to give audiences the shivers they expect.

With several major plot twists, “Insidious” delivers the kind of thrills I certainly seek from a horror film. It would be right at home at a drive-in.

Omnibus

When I was a kid, “Omnibus” was exactly the kind of television that I avoided. Give me “The Lone Ranger” or “Soupy Sales” any day of the week.

But what do kids know?

I still like “The Lone Ranger” and “Soupy Sales” — what do adults know? — but watching the new two disc set of some of the best segments of this long-running series made me realize even more what a lazy, cheap and terrible medium mainstream television has become.

“Omnibus” ran on all three commercial networks during its long run in from 1952 to 1961. It was underwritten by the Ford Foundation, but supported with commercial advertisers. The show featured a wide selection of documentary films, performances and interviews. It was smart TV that didn’t come across as snooty.

This set features some great episodes. Host Alistair Cooke introduced and participated in many of the segments and the DVD includes Cooke interviewing author and cartoonist James Thurber. The collection also features several of the pieces focusing on classical music and conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein.

One of my favorite segments is one in which Dr. Seuss — Springfield’s own Theodor Geisel — hosts a talk about how he would design a science museum for children. The piece is funny and Geisel was charming as he spoke about a terrible science museum in “South Anthrax” that was dominated by dust and dead things. His recommendations were based on the then-new Boston Museum of Science.

I also enjoyed a filmed essay of the “night people” of New York City, the people who work at night and the people who stay out for the city’s diverse nightlife.

“Omnibus” was the type of show that in some ways was set up like a magazine. If one segment wasn’t appealing, wait a moment and another would be of interest.

Much of the show was produced live and it was broadcast before the advent of videotape. The quality of the images — taken from 16 mm films — is acceptable. The set comes with a booklet that adds additional background to the segments presented in the collection.

This is the type of television I wish we still had today.

The Girls Next Door: Season Six

Oh, where do I start? I would personally love to sit and talk with Hugh Hefner about a wide variety of topics — classic films, cartoonists, the publishing industry — but the subject of why a guy in his 80’s would want to “date” women in their 20’s wouldn’t come up — really.

The fact that Hefner is actually one of the most influential men in popular culture in the latter half of the 20th century has been over-shadowed by his successful attempt to re-energize the Playboy brand by allowing a “reality” series to portray a version of his life in which he is squiring about women young enough to be his granddaughters.

For a guy to be willing to allow his life to be shown as a freak show might be seen as sad to some and to others a testament of his willingness to promote his business.

In any event, this edition of the television series will undoubtedly not sell very well as it features a new cast of “girlfriends,” including the one who stood Hef up at the altar. Who wants to see a slow motion car wreck? We all know the tragic ending.

Who knows if there will be another series, as it will depend on the now 85 year-old publisher wants to assemble a new group of bubbleheads willing to pretend they like the old man enough to be his “girl.”

And this, my friends, is what television has become.

Just Go With It

I’m not a big fan of Adam Sandler or farces or the source material of this new romantic comedy, but I did find myself actually enjoying the comic’s new film, “Just Go With It.”

This new film directed by Sandler’s regular collaborator Dennis Duggan, has good pacing, some great gags, casting surprises and a genuine heart about it.

Sandler plays Danny, a successful and basically nice plastic surgeon, whose bad brush with marriage has caused him to use a ruse with women: he claims he is in a bad marriage. The scheme to meet and bed women has worked well for 20 years but backfired when a young woman, Palmer (played by Brooklyn Decker) he has met objects strongly to the idea that he is married.

Danny must now convince his girlfriend that he has a bad marriage and must find someone to act out that role. His long-time nurse in his practice, Katherine, played by Jennifer Aniston, reluctantly agrees to help him out. All goes smoothly until her children are accidentally mentioned and a new layer of lies must be installed.

The complications really pile up, though, on a trip to Hawaii where Danny, Katherine and her kids must all play their roles.

What makes this film so different than its source material, the 1970 comedy “Cactus Flower,” is that Danny is a decent guy and Palmer isn’t a ditz. In the original film, the Walter Matthau character was a nasty womanizer and Goldie Hawn’s character wasn’t too appealing either.

What really makes this work, though, is the chemistry between Sandler and Aniston. They actually seemed to be enjoying their roles together.

The film’s other surprise is two accomplished comic performances by Nicole Kidman and rocker Dave Matthews.

While no comic masterpiece, “Just Go With It,” is a light fun comedy, perfect for summer viewing.

Battle Los Angeles

I didn’t see the Tom Cruse remake of “The War of the Worlds” — George Pal’s original take on the H. G. Wells book still works fine for me — but this science fiction war film seems to be a great updating of the material, even if it isn’t an official remake.

Although an epic subject — the world is invaded by alien war machines and soldiers — director Jonathan Liebesman and writer Christopher Bertolini keep the focus on a small group of Marines in Los Angeles charged with a specific mission.

By keeping the story small, the audience can identify with the Marines and the group of civilians they are attempting to rescue. This approach works well and the science fiction parts of the story are made more realistic this way.

Liebesman brings the grittiness and horror of war to the film, which plays most of the time as a well-directed combat movie.

Aaron Eckhart leads an ensemble cast — that includes Longmeadow native Bridget Moynahan — as the war-hardened vet who is the sergeant in command of the Marine unit. Eckhart is an accomplished performer who seems at ease with both comic and dramatic parts.

Although this film may not present anything groundbreaking for either the war or science fiction genres, it is a piece of expertly assembled entertainment.

© 2011 by Gordon Michael Dobbs

2011-07-02T07:29:00.000-07:00

So when does the reporter become past of the story? When a U.S. senator is touring his neighborhood and a news colleague needs a quick example of a resident hit by the tornado. As usual, the dean of Western Massachusetts reporters, I use that title with respect, did his typical fine job. Thanks Ray!

See my crushed car right here!

2011-06-29T19:58:00.000-07:00

As some people might remember – old people – I was a radio talk show host on the late WREB in Holyoke in the pre-Limbaugh era. It was a time in the industry when local hosts prevailed and there were few national syndicated shows, if any. The dismantling of the Fairness Doctrine helped ensure the rise of the syndicated show, which was often offered free to station in exchange for advertising time, and the demise of the local host.

I loved being on the air as I am a ham at heart and would do it again if offered a job with a realistic salary. From 1982 to 1987, I earned $5 and hour as a talk host and was paid .75 for each live endorsement I did.

The salad days!

I love going to the New Media Seminar presented by the bible of the business, Talkers Magazine and bask in the glory of radio. People often wonder why I am there and I have to explain I'm a writer from the area where Talkers is published.

Every year I enjoy the Talk Rumble and for the last few years I've been posting video from it. Here is a part of this year's combat.

2011-06-26T17:30:00.000-07:00

I shot some tornado footage and finally had the time to edit the shots together.

2011-06-18T05:27:00.000-07:00

Back in the 1980s when I was a radio talk show host over WREB, I interviewed a fair number of celebs including Elvira Mistress of the Dark. That was the problem. I was interviewing Elvira, the fictional character rather than Cassandra Peterson the talented actress who created the role.

The result was a very awkward exchange in which I was attempting to do improv comedy with someone who had been trained at The Groundlings along side with Phil Hartman and Paul Ruebens.

At least I got a great station i.d. from her.

The interview didn't stop me, though, from enjoying her show and her two feature films.

A couple of weeks ago I received the opportunity to interview her once more and she was great. At the end of the talk, I told her about our previous conversation and she explained that at the time she wanted to do what Ruebens had been doing – stay in character (he was constantly Pee Wee Herman) during interviews and public appearances.

She has since decided to discontinue that practice and for me that's great as I'd much rather speak to Peterson.

Before "Mystery Science Theater 3000," before "Riff Tax," before "Cinema Titanic," Cassandra Peterson was making fun of movies as Elvira, Mistress of the Dark.

She told Reminder Publications in contrast to the members of those other comic groups she had "two big things working for me [dramatic pause] — my personality and my talent."

"I'm the queen of subtlety," she said with a laugh.

Peterson has brought her show "Movie Macabre" back to television in syndication — WTIC runs it at 2 a.m. Friday and Sundays at 1 a.m. — and two of the new shows are now on DVD.

Each DVD has a double feature. The first is "Night of the Living Dead" with "I Eat Your Skin" — which Peterson quickly noted has nothing to do with eating someone's skin — while the second has Sir Christopher Lee's last appearance as Dracula in "The Satanic Rites of Dracula" paired with "The Werewolf of Washington."

The new shows are funny and clever with Elvira not only poking fun at the movies — of the four only "Night of the Living Dead" is really any good — but also setting up comic bits.

Peterson, an actress who was a member of the famed Los Angeles-based improvisational troupe, The Groundlings, auditioned to be a local horror film host on a TV station in 1981. Her success in the regional market led to a syndication deal where "Movie Macabre" was seen all over the country.

Her character took on a life of its own and became a cottage industry inspiring two movies, many guest appearances on television shows and a lot of merchandise. Although she has done other roles than Elvira, Peterson is at peace with the character that took over her career.

"I was very angry," she said with a laugh. "I wanted to do Shakespeare in the Park."

She said she did have some reservations in the beginning, but realized as she landed roles on pilots for television shows she had a decision to make: work all season long in a show being paid the minimum union scale or work in October and make a year's worth of money.

Peterson owns the rights to the character and controls what she does with it.

"It's like running a company and I'm the CEO," she explained.

The down side is that because a show business corporation doesn't own her character, Elvira doesn't have the support that other characters receive.

Peterson said she "wades" through horror films in the public domain to select ones she thinks have potential for the show. Then she and her writing partner Ted Biaselli watch the film over and over — as many as four or five times — to come up with a theme for the Elvira segments and the "pop-ins" in which Elvira appears at the corner of the screen with a quip as the film is running.

She said her training in improvisational humor helps her with the writing.

She has made 20 shows for syndication and six more that will be DVD exclusives.

Peterson continues to make public appearances at various pop culture conventions and is impressed with the stories her fans tell her.

She recalled that people have come up to her teary-eyed because they watched her show as a child with a now departed parent. Many young women have told her they saw Elvira as a strong powerful woman and she was a role model.

Other fans have recalled how they had one of her posters up in their room.

"I think I helped them through puberty," she laughed.

Considering this has become a career for her, it is lucky for her own sanity that she is actually a horror movie fan.

"Totally, totally," she said. "I wouldn't have gone to the audition if I hadn't."

She quickly noted she likes "the old bad ones that are unintentionally funny," and isn't a fan of the new breed of slasher movies.

Peterson said that as a child her favorite film was the Vincent Price classic "House on Haunted Hill" and she loved the movies Price made with director Roger Corman based on the stories of Edgar Allan Poe.

She said that while other girls were interested in playing with Barbie, she was assembling plastic monster models.

"I was a pretty odd girl, but it paid off," she said.

To learn more about her show and the DVDs, log onto elvira.com or become her friend on her Facebook page at Elvira Mistress of the Dark (Official).

© 2011 by Gordon Michael Dobbs

2011-06-08T12:41:00.000-07:00

Yes, we were lucky

Our new to us car was crushed.

It was supposed to be a typical Wednesday evening – no big deal.

I arrived home around 4:15 p.m. to prepare supper for my in-laws. We bring it to them most Wednesdays and my wife visits them while I cover the Chicopee School Committee.

While I put some meatballs in the microwave I looked out through our back porch. It was raining a bit and I wondered which, if any, of our cats were outside. I had heard there was a threat of a tornado, which I immediately discounted. The storm was intensifying and I thought, “I’ve never seen a thunderstorm like this.”

That’s because it wasn’t just a thunderstorm.

The winds quickly picked up to a level I’d only seen on televised news reports. The color of the sky was a shade of green. When a huge tree came crashing down from my neighbor’s yard, I knew this was no ordinary thunderstorm.

I watched the winds selectively snatch the cable for the television, phone and Internet from the side of the house and pull it.

I walked from the kitchen to the dining room with the porch door flapping crazily in the background. The noise of the wind was deafening. Having most of my windows open meant they were saved from being blown out by the difference in pressure, but it also meant the winds came into my house to do damage.

The winds popped out the window screens. It pushed a glass jar off the mantle, which broke on the floor. Debris from leaves to pieces of insulation in the wind was deposited almost everywhere.

The cliché of the tornado seeming to take forever to pass while in reality only lasting several minutes was true in this case. When it was over, I was in a daze.

I looked out my front door. The tree that shaded our living room had been uprooted and it laid length-wise down the top of my relatively new car. A large piece of roof decking from someone’s house was mixed in with the tree. Another tree near the driveway was snapped into two pieces, which hung together.

The debris around my car blocked Spruce Street and two other downed trees covered the intersection with Hawthorne Street.

The trees in our backyard, which provided shade for the house, were all destroyed. A spruce tree was snapped close to its base. Two maple trees were shredded. There were broken limbs, roofing material and glass everywhere.

My back porch was structurally intact but most of the windows were destroyed and part of the siding near the roof was gone. A quick look around the house showed that storm windows had been broken but the regular windows seemed OK.

I was startled to realize that our power was still on. The underground cables that bring us electricity in this neighborhood are notorious for having problems, either on the hottest night of summer or the coldest day of winter.

This time, though, the technology came through for us.

I called my wife and told her what had happened. She had watched the funnel cloud travel through the area from her office on State Street. She told her co-workers she knew it was in her neighborhood.

I went back to the front door and looked out. People are starting to come out of their homes. One woman was screaming the name of a child, whom she eventually found unharmed. Neighbors started going from home to home asking each other if they were OK.

A group of people started removing the tree limbs from my car with the intent to clear the street. Rain forced us to stop. When the rains stopped, more people with axes and chainsaws came back. I was able to move my car up onto the sidewalk and Spruce Street was now somewhat clear.

My wife and I have lived in this neighborhood since 1990 and have never seen people coming together in the fashion as they did that night.

A young woman walked down the street trembling and clearly distressed. She can’t get past the debris and we told her to walk up on our yard, but be careful of the boards with nails.

My wife, who had arrived home, talked with her. She lives in Sixteen Acres, but she has family here and she needs to check on them.

As the afternoon pushed on, we were visited by two police officers who were checking every home. They told us there was considerable destruction in the South End.

As dusk fell, the sky was still an odd color. One young woman declared breathlessly at one point she has heard another tornado is coming. I dreaded the thought of going through this a second time, fearing we wouldn’t be as lucky as we were a few hours before.

Fortunately, another tornado didn’t come; only rain fell.

I took a short walk down to Central Street and saw in the dusk homes with no roofs and another one, recently renovated, that was practically destroyed.

We sat on our front porch, watching lightening strikes in the distance and listening to a steady soundtrack of sirens and passing helicopters. People waked down the street asking us if we were OK.

Later than night, I watched the news conference on our television that still has an antenna. I turned it off near midnight but had a difficult time sleeping. A team of firefighters awoke me between 3 and 4 a.m. to make sure we were all right.

The next morning, I drove my wife to work. What should be a five-minute trip was lengthened due to the traffic. Central Street was closed and Florence Street became the detour. Our tiny Spruce Street – barely wide enough at times for two cars – was suddenly elevated as a main drag.

Being a journalist, I couldn’t stay at home. I got my notebooks and camera and set out walking. What I saw are things I’ve never seen in person before.

House after house had suffered damage from stripped off roofs to complete destruction. On Hancock Street I walked past the Elias Brookings Museum Magnet School. There were some children gathered there and a guy wearing a hardhat told them there would be no more school here.

Looking at the damages, I thought, he may be more correct than he really knows.

School personnel were going in and out of the building. Its windows were all blown out and there was one second-floor classroom that is completely open to the elements.

Across the street, one house had most of its front walk sheared off, giving it the exposed view of a dollhouse. Next door, another brick building was without its roof.

I met, by accident, Ward Three City Councilor Melvin Edwards, who lives in the neighborhood. Like me, his home suffered minimal damage, but we shared a worry for this area as a whole.

There had finally been some forward development in this working class, working poor neighborhood. In the Central Street corridor, the long abandoned Spruce Manor Nursing Home – a major problem – had been demolished and there are now new single-family homes being built.

As we walked up Central Street, the destruction was breathtaking. I now realize how incredibly lucky we were. Only a fluke in topography or barometric pressure kept the tornado from ripping apart our home as it did so many others.

I took photos and shot some video. Edwards and I went to Beech Street where nearly every home had been damaged including one that was lifted off its foundation.

The police had blocked Central Street as workers tried to deal with a brick apartment building that was crumbling apart.
CNN had a crew on Beech Street. The videographer told me no matter how many times he has seen scenes such as this one he can’t get used to it.

I also met a reporter from WCBS radio in New York City. He left the city at 5:30 a.m. that morning to report on the tornado, which has been his fourth one in the Northeast.

As the morning progressed there were a growing number of people driving and walking through the area holding video cameras and taking still photos. As I sat on my front steps I watched this conga line of gawkers as they drove slowly, many with one hand on the wheel and another aiming a video camera.

I felt like sharing a gesture with them.

I realized this was a historical event and people want to see it, but this shouldn’t be some sort of perverse tourist attraction.

Crews of workers came through the area in the afternoon sawing down fallen trees to make sure streets and fire hydrants are clear. A pick-up truck rolled through with a woman standing on the back bumper asking everyone if they needed water. Children sat in the truck bed handing out bottles.

At suppertime, my wife and I took a walk. What appeared to be insurance adjusters were walking throughout the neighborhood with clipboards and cameras.

As we headed home we saw two men trying to loosen a piece of metal siding from its perch in branches. They were successful and laughed, although looked a little sheepish when they saw us. They loaded the metal into their pickup, which was already nearly full.

Vultures, I thought. It didn’t take them long at all.

Although the process of getting a new car and the overwhelming chore of cleaning up tons of tree debris numbs us, my wife and I know we were very lucky. Many people were not. And this neighborhood may take several years to fully recover.

One more shot of our car followed by homes very close to us that were hit by the storm.

2011-05-14T10:43:00.000-07:00

ADVENTURES IN MEDIA, EPISODE 213:

My career in media has almost always included an interactive element. I certainly had that as a radio talk show host back when dinosaurs ruled the earth and I've had that for the past 11 years working at Reminder Publications.

Even when people are calling me names and expressing pretty hateful thoughts about me, I hold close to my happy place that this is the nature of political discourse in America and really has always been so. Newspapers in the 18th and 19th century were far more harsh than even the worse Murdoch tab today – as difficult as that may be.

My mail at WREB included a cut and paste job in which my face was photocopied on top of the "Asshole of the Month" column that used to run in "Hustler." Whoever sent it put some thought in that piece of hate mail.

It's interesting how some people are reassured by hate and seek its comfort over trying to either understand some other opinion or agree that this country was founded on varying ideas.

Today, I get a fair number of letters to the editor and over the years I've learned that some people write to react to something I've written, some people simply need to voice their opinion on an issue and some just need to write – anything

The graphic above is my all time favorite letter, written to me by John Skok who used write almost every week. I'm afraid that Mr. Skok has probably passed on by now and I enjoyed his musings.

This one, though, was simply way out of the box and, yes, I printed it.

"Has anyone noticed as I have that some bathroom tissues (toilet paper rolls) are less wide than they used to be? If the companies are going to make the paper tissue less wider than now we are in big trouble. Oh, well, back to the depression era when we used crumpled newspaper ot leaves. What a way to recycle paper."

© 2011 by Gordon Michael Dobbs

2011-05-03T16:48:00.000-07:00

Here are some recent DVDs I've watched.

No One Knows About Persian Cats

One reason I love watching foreign films is to get a taste of a different culture and Iran is certainly a different culture. This film from director Bahman Ghobadi is part documentary and part fiction about the huge underground music scene in that country.

Ghobadi's film is the product of the underground. In the making-of feature, he explained that in Iran, one must obtain a permit to shoot a movie. The script and subject matter must be approved by government censors who want to make sure there is nothing that goes counter to the government or how they interpret Islam.

Tired of the bureaucracy, Ghobadi decided to shoot the film illegally and did so with a skeleton crew with their eyes peeled for the police. Despite the obstacles, the film has a very polished look and is very well edited.

The film tells the story of two musicians, Negar and Ashkan. They are trying to fill out their band, obtain a permit for concert in Tehran and then get visas and passports so they can tour Europe. Their search is a difficult one, taking them to secret rehearsal spaces and dealing with forgers to get the necessary papers.

I think they are a couple, but the film is extremely chaste. Only in the last few minutes does one get the sense they are in love.

Ghobadi filmed the performances of actual bands to present a flavor of the music scene and clearly young Iranians love all sorts of rock 'n' roll — folk rock, heavy metal and hip-hop are among the genres represented. Unfortunately, playing it can land them in jail.

The film is subtitled, although almost all of the music is sung in English, which must be the international language of rock.

Go to Netflix and check it out.

Behind the Burly Q

Director Leslie Zemeckis has produced what is clearly a labor of love. Starting in 2006, she began interviewing people who worked in burlesque — strippers, comics, straight men, theater owners and others — to capture a look at an American art form that only recently has seen a resurgence of interest.

Burlesque — a somewhat naughty combination of low humor, music and pretty unclad women — has been around in this country since the 1860s, but reached its classic form in the late 1920s and continued until the mid-1950s. Those on camera spoke fondly, most of their time on stage and generally explained how the reputation of burlesque's overt sexuality has been overstated throughout the years.

For some, burlesque was a training ground. Chris Costello, daughter of comic Lou Costello, spoke about her father's time in burlesque where he and Bud Abbott developed many of their most famous routines.

Alan Alda detailed how growing up in burlesque affected him. His father, Robert, was a singer in burlesque before he landed a movie deal at Warner Brothers and lead roles on Broadway.

Although the hazards of making a living doing something many people viewed as immoral took its toll on performers, the remarkable thing is how many of those interviewed seem to miss it.

For Springfield area residents who remember burlesque, "Behind the Burly Q" features a segment on Ann Corio, the stripper from Hartford, Conn., who used her fame to land movie roles in the 1940s.

Corio and her husband owned the Storrowton Music Theater in West Springfield for years where summer theater productions were presented, including versions of her own hit Broadway review, "This was Burlesque."

In this day of explicit entertainment, old-fashioned burlesque might seem like weak tea, but Zemeckis revealed the charms of the wink and the nod and leaving the audience wanting more.

Anything Goes

In 1954, Broadway legend Ethel Merman returned to a production that had helped make her a star 20 years previous, "Anything Goes," with songs by Cole Porter.

Merman recreated her role as brassy nightclub singer Reno Sweeney in an hour-long episode of "The Colgate Comedy Hour." The Archive of American Television has now released a DVD of the production and I'm sure Merman's fans as well as those of classic Broadway shows will have many reasons to rejoice.

There is another attraction to this long-forgotten show: Frank Sinatra.

This show was broadcast live 56 years ago and the DVD's source material is a kinescope — Merman's personal copy. Kinescopes were 16-millimeter films of live television with the image taken from a television monitor. I've seen some kinescopes where the image is soft and slightly out of focus. This image, though, is very sharp, making watching it a pleasant experience.

The DVD comes with a 20-page booklet that put the show into its historical context. Although Merman never had the kind of success in movies she had enjoyed on the stage, she was still a big draw in the mid-'50s. Sinatra, on the other hand, was in a career slump at this time.

The plot revolves around Merman's character finding her true love with Sinatra's gangster character as opposed to marrying for money and stability.

It's silly stuff — as most musical comedy is — and the bulk of the humor is carried on the capable shoulders of Bert Lahr — better known as the Cowardly Lion from "The Wizard of Oz."

What fascinated me about this show is that it's an example of what television used to be: live and willing to take chances. Theatrical productions were a key part of programming at that time.

Could you imagine a network forgoing its schedule of cheap reality shows to actually put a live theatrical event on the air today?

I'm not a big fan of either Merman or Sinatra, but these two performers seemed to enjoy what they were doing so much, their energy proved to be infectious.

For more information, log onto www.eonehomevideo.com.

Valhalla Rising

Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn is an up and coming filmmaker on the international scene and other critics have praised this art house film as a cult film in the making.

I've watched a lot of cult films and my share of art house films and all I can say is that Refn's film has a long way to go to measure up to the best in either genre.

Set in 1000 A.D., the film centers on an enigmatic prisoner held by a Viking clan and used as a fighter. One Eye, as he is known, doesn't speak, but is the champion at the fights that earn his captors money.

He hates them and manages to kill all of the tribe while escaping, with the exception of a boy, who had been charged to take care of him. After his escape, One Eye and the boy join up with a group of Vikings headed to the Crusades. Instead of the Middle East, they wind up in North America, where things don't go very well.

I thought Vikings were amazing mariners — not this bunch.

Refn's film is full of long, long shots of rugged landscapes or dirty actors clad in skins reciting pithy dialogue. It's a pretentious piece of claptrap. The glacier-like pacing of the film is punctuated by scenes of graphic violence. I've not seen a disemboweling in a movie for a long time — joy!

I'm sure the film was about something and had some deep inner meaning, but it wasn't apparent to me.

Sugar Boxx

This is what "Grindhouse" — the loving and entertaining recreation of 1970s drive-in movies — has brought about. Now, people like me will have to suffer through low-budget "homages" to independent fare from 35 years ago.

I would much rather watch the originals. Thanks goodness, they are now on DVD.

This particular film tackles one of the most controversial genres: the women in prison movies. It is next to impossible to craft a type of production that would have the potential for as much exploitation as the women in prison movies.

It is also next to impossible to defend the films — which date all the way back to the 1930s, but really didn't come into their own until the 1960s.

Despite the distinct lack of political correctness, women in prison films have always found an audience and I'm sure when "Sugar Boxx" pops up at a Red Box, it will also be a high renter.

Set in 1975 — although there are no indicators of a particular time — Genevieve Anderson stars as an investigative reporter who goes undercover at a notorious women's prison. All of the plot points and cliches of the genre are trotted out.

According to the making-of feature, this is all supposed to be amusing and hip. It's not. It's cheap, style-less and tawdry.

The movie also commits the unforgivable sin of being boring.

Pass this one up.

© 2011 by Gordon Michael Dobbs

2011-05-01T14:02:00.000-07:00

Films I hate!

Recently I was speaking with my friend Amber about movies – a typical conversation between us – and I brought up how much I hate “Top Gun.”

To my surprise, since “Top Gun” is considered to be some sort of "classic,” she hated it as well. Thank you Amber!

For me, “Top Gun” is all that is wrong with big budget vapid Hollywood fare: big names, big effects and nothing else. I particularly hate the film for how the lead female character is treated in it. Kelly McGillis is a civilian instructor who risks her entire career in order to have a relationship with the arrogant fighter pilot played by Tom Cruse.

The film celebrates very bad values and is completely soulless, but it clearly has touched the 13 year-old make fantasy that lives in too many adult men.

While I am stumped when asked what is my single most favorite film, I do know what films I hate and what films I couldn’t be made to watch again. I’ve been told over and over my taste in films is not with the critical norm.

For instance, I don’t think Adam Sandler is a huge comic star. Neither is Will Ferrell. They do the same damn movie over and over. “Avatar” is an exercise in re-presenting themes common to several genres. It’s a derivative piece of crap.

I’ve never seen “Titanic” and never will. Knowing how the film ends kills any interest in it.

“Independence Day:” a big budgeted 1950s sci-fi film, again with few new ideas but a lot of noise. A mini-budgeted film, such as “Cube” has more ideas and more tension that than film.

"2001" is really really pretentious and amazingly boring and I know I'm supposed to love that film.

Most of the Robert Altman films I've sat through bored me to tears – "MASH," "Nashville" – with the one exception of his adaptation of "Popeye," which I liked alot. Of course,most Altman fans HATED "Popeye."

“Gone With the Wind” is a film I saw in the eighth grade and I’ve never seen the thing in its entirety since. Now, we 13 year-old white kids from Granby Junior Senior High School were hustled into a bus and brought to the theater to see The Great Film and not a single teacher provided any context for us nor did anyone challenge any of the racist images and scenes depicted in the film.

Besides all of that, Scarlett O’Hara is a psychopath. Why would anyone want to be with her?

“White Christmas” was a television staple around the holidays as I was growing up, but it always seemed to be so fake on so many levels. Shot on soundstages, the film lacked any touch to reality. This is another film I grew to despise.

In fact, almost anything with cloying self-conscious Danny Kaye is enough to make the skin peel off of my skin.

Here comes a shocker: I’ve never seen “Bambi” or “Dumbo.” That’s right “Mr. Animation” has never seen either film, both of which are celebrated classics. I intend to go to my grave never seeing them. Why? I’m the biggest sentimental lunkhead when it comes to movies. I’m sure I would sit and bawl when Bambi’s mom is shot or when Dumbo is teased and that kind of emotional response is not entertaining to me.

I spent several evenings with my pal Steve watching films with him that naturally he LOVED and just brought me closer to the grave. “Sante Sangre,” “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and her Lover,” Jan Svankmajer’s “Faust” and “Twin Peaks: Come Fire Walk with Me.”

Now with Steve, the more he realized I hated each film, the more pleasure he received from the film. If you asked him, those four films probably among his favorite films, I’m sure.

We remain close even those any one of the films could have torn the friendship apart!

What films are you suppose to like, but you hate?

© 2011 by Gordon Michael Dobbs

2011-04-03T10:50:00.000-07:00

Back in the days when I was editing the two animation magazines (Animato and Animation Planet) I tried to see every animated feature I possibly could.

My love of animation has not diminished, but my time that I can devote to it has decreased substantially.

On Friday, we took our 11-year-old goddaughter to a movie she requested to see, “Hop.” Now, my understanding wife told me I could be exempt from this expedition to a kid film that looked just awful to me.

Does anyone need yet another CGI animated, live action film with a hackneyed plot? The only advantage I could see to the thing was that it was NOT in 3-D.

We went to a suppertime show and the auditorium was filled with families with kids. It’s been a while since I went to a kid’s movie like this and I forgot the joy of listening to a movie over screaming babies and parents who were providing a commentary track for their kids.

Yeah, I can be a grumpy old man.

The film started and there was a moment that gave me a little hope. In the sequence depicting the many rabbits that served as Easter Bunnies through the years, there was one rabbit in armor on a horse with a lance. I want to believe that was a reference to Crusader Rabbit, the first animated series designed for television.

I had renewed hope this wouldn’t be too painful and I’m happy to say my blood sugar levels didn’t rise too much as the film unreeled.

This is one of those movies with a lot of talented performers in absolutely thankless roles that don’t allow them to do very much. Everyone needs to pay the bills, but Dennis Cole, Elizabeth Perkins and Kaley Cuoco were pretty much wasted.

The stars of the show were James Marsden on screen and Russell Brand, Hugh Laurie and Hank Azaria off screen providing the three key voices. Marsden’s character is a somewhat irritating loser, while Brand played the Easter Bunny’s son destined to take over his father’s (Laurie) job. The plot revolves around Marsden’s and Brand’s characters coming to grips with what they want to do in life.

Don’t we all.

I laughed five times in the film, which was five more times than I thought I would laugh. There was quite a product placement for Hershey/Cadbury chocolate in the film and I wondered for a while just how much I cost.

All in all, I can think of a lot of other kid’s movies that were far worse than this mostly benign film. And, most importantly our goddaughter liked it.

Here is the trailer.

©2010 by Gordon Michael Dobbs

2011-03-27T07:41:00.001-07:00

Yeah, yeah yeah: spoilers.

Two thoughts occurred to me as I watched the beautiful disaster known as “Suckerpunch.”

First was “How much CGI does a movie have to have before it’s considered as animated or mostly animated?”

The second was “How did Zack Snyder pitch this movie to the money guys?”

I was looking forward to the film, based on its rather outstanding visuals and, I must admit, its cast of beautiful women kicking ass in action sequences. I wasn’t prepared by any of the film’s marketing to expect a half-baked film with a film within a film that is ultimately some sort of statement about personal freedom.

Emily Browning plays a young woman whose loses his her mother and in the course of defending herself and her sister against the advances of an evil stepfather, kills her younger sister. She is then hustled into an insane asylum where the step-dad bribes an orderly to have her lobotomized in five days before the police can start investigating – even though the cops have started their inquiry.

It is this moment in the plot – about 15 minutes in – that for me the film fell part. The idea the step-dad could do this is completely illogical. Now in light of this film being some sort of anthem for personal freedom and choices – supposedly – I guess anything is possible, but the set-up doesn’t work.

Once inside the asylum, our heroine, dubbed “Baby Doll,” participates in a therapy involving theater. Through that she imagines she is being held captive at a combination burlesque house and brothel. While there during the course of a dance, she is transported to another fantasy dimension where she encounters Scott Glenn as some sort of wise man. He instructs her how she can escape.

So every time she dances, she and her fellow prisoners are in this fantasy dimension and Glenn’s character sends them on some sort of mission. This mission is a parallel to what is happening in the dance club and in the asylum (although we never see the action in the asylum).

These action sequences are pretty amazing to watch but they don’t carry any dramatic weight because they are a fantasy. If we were seeing the action in the asylum we could possibly feel something for the characters.

The conclusion is that Baby Doll doesn’t escape. She is lobotomized, but one of the fellow inmates escaped thanks to her efforts. That woman manages to get to the bus station where the kindly old drive – Scott Glenn – covers for her when the cops start looking.

Cue a CGI landscape with the bus rolling off and a voice-over blathering about choices and freedom.

Huh?

I would have loved to have listened to Snyder explain how he was going to make this “personal” film about personal freedom and cut a trailer that made it look like a women in prison action movie on steroids.

Or did the success of “300” and “Watchmen” – which cost $120 million to film and made $185 million world-wide in theaters, not a huge success – give the director carte blanche? “Watchmen” was essentially an expensive art house film for comic fans. “300” was a silly film whose tone reminded me of one of those men’s magazines from my youth with covers featuring half-naked women Nazis and bare-chested heroes.

In any event, any success this film will have will be from its cleverly edited trailer and not from word-of-mouth. The audience with which I saw it was pretty much glassy-eyed by the end. They clearly wondered what they had experienced and not in a good way.

On the question of animation, I’m fearful someone at the Academy of Motion Pictures Art and Sciences will be asked to start considering movies for the animation classification if the majority of the footage is created in the computer rather than the soundstage, such as this one. While I have nothing against CGI films – I re-watched “Sky Captain” recently and confirmed just how much I loved that film – I think sooner or later someone is going to look at these kind of films in a different way.

Perhaps the producers of these CGI-heavy films will take a similar stance to that of Robert Semeckis who claims his motion capture technique has no relationship to rotoscoping – right.

In any event avoid “Suckerpunch” like the plague.

© Gordon Michael Dobbs 2011

2011-02-23T05:58:00.000-08:00

2011 Toy Fair images.

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

NEW YORK — The mood was mixed at the annual American International Toy Fair — one of the world's largest trade shows for the toy industry — conducted last week at the Javitts Center.

Talk to one manufacturer and there was hope. Speak to another and there wasn't.

The sponsors of the trade show, Toy Industry Association Inc., released an analysis of the 2010 holiday shopping season by Sean McGowan, consumer leisure and lifestyle analyst of Needham & Company, LLC. He wrote in part, "I don't think that 2010 will go down as being a 'bad' year for toys, but I think it will be remembered for being no better than many other years. I would say retail toy sales will wind up being flat to slightly down for the year, which has pretty much been the standard for most of the past 10 years or so, with some exceptions (both positive and negative). Ironically, it may simply strengthen the notion that toy sales are relatively resistant to changes in the general economy — people don't spend much more on toys when times are good, and they don't spend much less when times are lean."

The irony about this year's Toy Fair is there were plenty of buyers walking the exhibit floor. New York City was not the center of a winter storm, which in past years has affected attendance.

Walking through the row of exhibits, one trend became clear: toy makers are still hesitant about investing in licensing. In a year that will see the last installment of the highly successful "Harry Potter" movie series, there were few toy tie-ins. While the upcoming "Green Lantern" movie may be getting a lot of attention, few manufacturers seemed willing to tie their profits to it.

Manufacturers seemed to stay with licenses that are considered evergreen: some Disney characters, Dr. Seuss and some superheroes.

Thomas Lonergan, executive vice president of Janlynn in Chicopee, said he was seeing customers buying non-licensed products over the same product featuring a Disney character.

Janlynn, primarily known for its line of crafts for both adults and children, has several lines of pillowcases that come imprinted with a design for children to color. Lonergan noted customers were buying the non-licensed kits over the Disney ones. The difference is in the pricing. He explained Janlynn must pay a fee to Disney for the use of the image and the non-licensed kits are less expensive.

He said the company would rather invest in their own brands and properties than those of another company.

Blocks away at the Hasbro show, the toy company's lineup reflected a similar philosophy. Although the company has licenses with Disney, Lucasfilm and Marvel Comics, the toy giant clearly has exercised caution with licensing. Hasbro is in the enviable position of companies seeking licenses from it for some of its established properties.

"Sesame Street" has been added to that short list of licenses this year.

Hasbro spokesperson Helen Van Tassel explained the company integrates many of its licenses into its existing toy properties. For example, its "Harry Potter" license is for a special version of its venerable board game, "Clue," in which the action takes place in Potter's world. Hasbro also has a version of "Operation," in which the long-suffering patient is now "Mater" from Pixar's "Cars."

Local companies at the show

Van Tassel said the sales for Hasbro's games division located in East Longmeadow were not outstanding, but the company hoped the new lineup of games and toys would do better this year.

Hasbro has long been positioning itself as an entertainment company with the development of animated television series and its successful "Transformers" movie series. Van Tassel said the company bought the Discovery Kids cable network to create their own television channel, "The Hub."

On the cable outlet, Hasbro has a variety of family programming, including game shows based on their classic board games.

"Transformers" is a huge franchise for the company, with the third "Transformer" feature film, "Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon," to be released this summer in 3-D. One of the toys Hasbro will be releasing is a "Transformers" mask with built-in 3-D glasses.

Hasbro is introducing a new construction aimed at the LEGO market, KRE-O, which will have 12 sets all with a "Transformer" theme.

Its "Sesame Street" lineup includes a toy that will appeal to the "Tickle Me Elmo" audience — "Let's Rock, Elmo." "Let's Rock Elmo" features an interactive, drum-playing Elmo that encourages a child to play along with it on a guitar and organ.

Hasbro has substantial licenses with two Marvel Comics movies, "Captain America" and "Thor." Toys range from two different sizes of "Thor" hammers as well as a "Captain America" shield that shoots Nerf discs.

"Star Wars" fans can rejoice with the introduction of a highly-realistic light saber designed for play that will retail at $34.99.

Hasbro's "Jigazo" should appeal to fans of both puzzles and art. The Japanese import can take any digital photo and turn it into a portrait puzzle. The pieces can be used over and over.

If that wasn't cutting edge enough, the company will be releasing two versions of famous games in its new "Live" format. "Monopoly Live" and "Battleship Live" look at first like fairly conventional board games, except each have a computer with an infrared "eye" in the center of the board. This computer "sees" the position of the players' tokens and directs the play of the game.

Van Tassel said each version allows for immediate game play without the necessity of reading and learning any rules.

Another variant on a traditional favorite is "Scrabble Alphabet Scoop," designed for young readers. Scrabble tiles are placed in a "soup bowl" and players must use spoons to retrieve the letters they need to spell out words on their game card.

Keeping with the ongoing trend of emphasizing fitness, Hasbro will be performing a "bake over" on "Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head," the first redesign since 1983. The new model will be slimmer and trimmer.

At Janlynn, Lonergan said the company was receiving substantial orders on a new line of costume jewelry aimed at girls from ages 8 through 13. "Charmtastic" is a charm bracelet system that allows girls to build their own customized charm bracelet.

Sales have been significant this year and Lonergan said the company did more business on the first day of this year's trade show that it did during the last two annual shows.

The company was also seeing interest expressed in its "Make It Cool" brand of craft kits for children.

Joel Nulman of Fantazia Marketing of Chicopee didn't have the same perception of the show as Lonergan. His company sells a line of oversized plastic items from a three-foot tall box of crayons that serves as a bank to a two-foot tall baby bottle lamp.

His new item at the show is "Acrobat Man," a bucket of plastic figures that can be linked together like a construction toy.

Although he spoke well of the traffic at the show, Nulman said, "I think people are very cautious."

He said to describe the economy as still in recovery mode would be "an understatement."

The cool and crazy

Perhaps the most fun aspect of Toy Fair is simply finding new items that amaze, horrify or sometimes confound.

As someone who keeps a "Slinky" on his desk as a tension reliever, I have to admit "Nanodots" (www.thenanodots.com) is a welcome addition — as long as I don't let them near anything that can be affected by magnets. "Nanodots" are incredibly powerful, small magnets that can be placed in a wide variety of geometric shapes. Because of their size and the health hazard they can pose if swallowed, they are not a toy for kids; but for adults, playing with them can be quite addicting.

William Mark Corporation manufactures a variety of toys that fly and the company's latest drew quite a crowd at the show. "Air Swimmers" (www.airswimmers.com) are large helium balloon fish that fly through the air like a blimp, guided with a remote control.

"Skylanders Spyro's Adventure" (www.skylandersgame.com) is a video game that works with the Nintendo Wii system and features over 30 characters in toy form that can enter or exit a game when they are placed on a "portal" connected wirelessly through the Wii. The company believes the video adventures game genre will be changed by the concept of players using actual action figures. These figures remember alterations made to the virtual character.

Heroes in Action Toys have produced a group of action figures that merge popular presidents with classic movie monsters. Richard Nixon is the "Monster from the Watergate Lagoon," while Bill Clinton is a werewolf, John F. Kennedy is the "Phantom of the White House," Abraham Lincoln is the Frankenstein monster, George Bush is a zombie and Barack Obama is a vampire.

Perhaps more disturbing are the "Throttle Necks," (www.throttlenecks.com), plastic figures of Obama, Sarah Palin and Rep. Nancy Pelosi that a person can actually strangle and hear them gurgle.

At the Toy Fair, one frequently finds an independent who, against the odds, is finding recognition and making sales. Ernest Autumn Van Den Heuvel is one of those people. A heavy equipment operator, he has developed the "HandTrux" (www.handtruxtoys.com), a bright yellow plastic toy that fits over a child's arm and imitates the digging power of a backhoe.

Van Den Heuvel, an animated guy, said he had been making sales and attracting the attention of so many buyers, he had run out of business cards and sales literature.

"This is an outstanding red letter day," he said with a wide smile.

© 2011 by Gordon Michael Dobbs

2011-02-02T13:14:00.000-08:00

The pages reproduced above are from the 1901 book "The Complete Tribune Primer" by Eugene Field with drawings by Frederick Opper. I picked it up from a used book dealer because of the Opper cartoons.

Opper is one of the true pioneers of newspaper comic strips. He is known for his "Happy Hooligan" strip as well as " And her Name was Maude" – about an independent donkey – and "Alphonse and Gaston" – the eternally polite Frenchmen.

I really like his cartoony style and the illustrations in this book are a joy.

I had never heard much about Field, here is a complete bio of him but he is from the school of journalism in the 19th century that allowed people to be writers of both hard news and fiction, not unlike Ambrose Bierce, one of my literary heroes.

It should be noted that Field and his brother were raised after the death of his mother in Amherst.

Some of his "primers" still work today, such as "The Bottle." (capitalization is the author's)

"This is a Bottle. What is in the Bottler? Very bad Whiskey. It has been Sent to the Local Editor. He did not Buy it. If he had Bought it the Whiskey would have been Poorer than it is. Little Children, you Must never Drink Bad Whiskey."

Ain't that the truth!

© 2011 by Gordon Michael Dobbs

2011-01-31T10:38:00.001-08:00

John Kawie

I may have written before that journalists seldom have the opportunity to do anything that approaches a long-form interview. Usually the first question that I ask once I've been told I have an interview scheduled is "how much time do I have?"

It was a refreshing change of pace to sit down with John Kawie and his wife to discuss his DVD without a publicist setting a time limit. Kawie is a very likable guy – heck, he's a Springfield boy who remembers the Wicky Wacky Cloud Club, for goodness sake! – and I could have spoken with him much longer than I did.

It made me feel good. I hope he liked the story I wrote.

Sometimes cliches aren't trite and John Kawie has indeed made lemonade out of the lemons life has handed to him.

In 1997, the Springfield native had successfully made a difficult career transition. After almost a decade of hard work, he had left his role as a business owner and become an in-demand stand-up comedian.

A week after his wedding, Kawie faced the aftermath of something he never anticipated: a devastating stroke at age 47.

Kawie's journey through his recovery is presented in his one-man show, "Brain Freeze," which has just been released on DVD.

Kawie spoke to Reminder Publications during a visit to the area. Although a long time resident of New York City, Kawie, who grew up in the Hungry Hill section of Springfield, has family and friends here.

He recalled fondly going to Springfield Indians matches at the Coliseum and Giants games at Pynchon Park while growing up.

Even though he successfully headed the business founded by his father, Kawie said, "My first love was to make people laugh." When someone approached him to buy the business, Kawie saw this as his opportunity to follow his dream.

He took a course on writing humor, which culminated with a performance at a Connecticut comedy club.

"I had a great set and I loved it," he recalled.

He was hooked.

"If you follow what your heart tells you to, doors will open," he asserted.

He decided to move to New York City and pursue a career as a comic.

"I was broke, but I was working," he said.

Kawie explained that in the late 1980s during the boom of stand-up comedy, there were a lot of clubs in New York City, but not all of them paid. Many club owners considered giving stage time to a new comic to be enough compensation.

Kawie noted with appreciation the owner of the Improvisation as someone who would regularly give the comics at least a token payment that could pay for carfare.

To help make ends meet, Kawie landed a job at a Gap store as a clerk, while seeking time on stages at clubs. He said there is a difference between staying in New York City to work as opposed to touring. Comics watch each other in New York City and tend to write better. On the road, he explained, comics learn they can be sloppier with their performances.

Kawie was seen as an up and comer, opening for comics such as Dennis Miller and Howie Mandel. He had his own special on Comedy Central and he developed a unique niche as the country's first Arab-American comedian.

He became a writer and performer on "The David Brenner Radio Show" and wrote for Bill Maher's monologue on Comedy Central's "Politically Incorrect." He also was a substitute host for Dick Cavett on his radio talk show and he wrote for Dennis Miller's show on HBO.

He recalled with a smile fellow comics, such as Dave Attell and Sam Kinison, who encouraged him.

"Life was good," he said.

One week after his own wedding, he and his wife Marilyn attended the wedding of a friend. The next day, Kawie didn't feel just right, but he chalked it up to a mild hangover. When he realized that his condition far exceeded his initial reaction, he was taken to a hospital.

He had had a stroke and he thought at the time he would be released the next day.

Instead, he spent months in hospitals and rehabilitation clinics regaining his abilities. He admitted, "My memory was shot."

His left arm was paralyzed and he had difficulty walking.

His outpatient therapy years were "the dark period of my life," he said.

Participating in group therapy, Kawie began to tell a joke each session as a way to work his way back. He started writing again and thought about a project.

Kawie's comic idol was Richard Pryor. He explained there are several schools of comedy. Comedians such as Jerry Seinfeld offer observations, while someone such as Pryor deal in telling truths about themselves and society.

Before his stroke, Kawie had become interested in the monologues of Spalding Grey and Eric Bogosian and Kawie began to think about turning his experience into a one-man play.

His acting coach helped him for six months, writing and honing what would become "Brain Freeze." He had trouble memorizing his work and would listen to a recording of it over and over to learn it. Memorization didn't help the comic timing he needed and he had to learn where to pause.

He said that those around him always encouraged his effort.

"I always got green lights. "I didn't get red light," he said.

Kawie started performing his show at hospitals and rehab centers to others facing the same challenges he faced. The reaction was so positive, he started performing in "off off Broadway" theaters.

He expanded his writing activities by writing a column, "Life at the Curb," for the American Heart Association's magazine, "Stroke Connection."

A performance in 2003 at the New York Fringe Festival led to an award, "Best Solo Show," and to glowing reviews in the New York Times and the New York Daily News.

He acquired an agent Spalding Grey's wife and took the show all over the nation.

In the show, Kawie speaks about dealing with the aftermath of his stroke from using a plethora of Post-it Notes to trying to button his overcoat with one hand.

While at his 40th high school reunion at Williston Academy, Kawie met a fellow alumnus who heads PARMA Recordings.

"That's how the DVD was born," he said,

Kawie said the release of the DVD will "get it out there to rehab centers I couldn't go to."

He intends to continue touring with the show, but will do far less traveling. He is now thinking about a book on his experiences.

He admitted that he "sometimes" misses performing stand-up, but sometimes not."

"It's a grueling lifestyle," he said.

He wouldn't want to be a young comic starting these days. He noted that some club owners are concerned about political correctness in comedy.

"It's better when you let the comic go, let him fly," he said.

To learn more about "Brain Freeze," visit its Facebook page or go to here.

© 2011 by Gordon Michael Dobbs

2011-01-30T11:33:00.000-08:00

Ben Bailey of "Cash Cab"

Mary, Mark and I saw Bailey perform at the Hu Ke Lau on Friday night and he was excellent. Although some of his material was "blue" – I love that term – most of it was clever observational humor. He's a funny guy and it's a shame the "Cash Cab" format doesn't allow him to showcase his consiberable comic talent more.

Here is my interview piece with him. I enjoyed speaking with him.

Think driving a cab in New York City is challenge? Imagine conducting a television game show while negotiating Manhattan traffic.

That's the job of Ben Bailey, the stand-up comic and actor who is the host and star of "Cash Cab," the Emmy-awarding winning game show.

Bailey, who won an Emmy himself for his hosting duties, is appearing at the Hu Ke Lau on Jan. 28 for one show.

Speaking to Reminder Publications, Bailey readily admitted that driving a cab and hosting a television show was "tough at the beginning." He started the "Cash Cab" job in 2005.

"It's still tough," he said. He added that as he doesn't concentrate on any one of his tasks listening to the producers of the show feed him questions to ask through an earpiece, driving the cab and interacting with his guests — he does alright.

"It's sort of a Zen thing," he said.

Bailey has never had an accident, despite his multi-tasking.

In "Cash Cab," unsuspecting people seeking a cab get into Bailey's taxi, only to find out they are on a quiz show and their ride, if their answers are right, could pay off in hundreds of dollars.

If their answers are wrong all it takes are three bad ones — they are back out on the street.

Bailey said the show seemed "pretty ridiculous on paper" when he auditioned for it. Originally, the producers had thought a New York cabbie would be the host, but soon realized they needed someone who could improvise and had a comic background.

He had an edge over some of the other comics, as he had already spent years as a limousine and delivery driver. To get the job, though, he had to pass the test for his taxi license, which Bailey took quite seriously.

"I was studying for a couple of weeks," he said. "I had a lot in the balance."

He was offered a pre-test, which if he passed would allow him to skip the class for the test and he had to answer the question of which bridge he would use to drive someone from 161st Street to Yankee Stadium.

The question stumped him and he was shocked to see a list of bridges in the city with names he didn't recognize.

Bailey fell into stand-up in an accidental way. He described himself as a "wise ass" in school, who enjoyed making his fellow students laugh. He aspired to be an actor and moved to California to pursue a career.

He worked in hotels while trying to get a break and was talking to a fellow New Jersey transplant in the parking lot of the Comedy Store one night in Los Angeles where he was offered a job answering the club's phones.

He watched some of the comics from the wings, thinking he could be funnier and after telling stories to other comics while they waited to perform, landed a spot on a show.

He also acted in television series such as "Law and Order Special Victim's Unit," "One Life to Live" and "Hope and Faith."

When asked which performing venue he prefers, he replied, "None of them are easy. All of them are difficult."

He added, "All are very hard, but I get a lot of enjoyment out of all of them. Stand-up is great because you get immediate feedback. The show is great because you can meet people."

Bailey has thought about starring in a sit-com and has developed several ideas. "I've been too busy to pitch them," he said.

He added the television networks really seek out reality show concepts because they are less expensive to produce and he isn't interested in doing that kind of show.

He has a busy tour schedule as a stand-up and he said with a laugh of his writing process, "For me, the jokes just fall out of the sky."

When an idea hits him, he hurriedly writes it down.

"I grab a napkin, toilet paper, a paper towel," he said.

Naturally the ideas don't' spring forth finished and Bailey said that writing and perfecting new additions to his act "is as much fun as performance,"

His comedic style is to tell stories with multiple punch lines along the way to the conclusion.

"I milk it," he said.

He clears the schedule for "Cash Cab," though. When the producers call, Bailey sets aside eight weeks once or twice a year to shoot footage for what will become 40 new shows.

Despite the show's popularity at first people would ask, "What on earth is this?" Bailey recalled not everybody wants to play. He said that on one day's shooting, it took six stops before he could find someone to play the game.

© 2011 by Gordon Michael Dobbs

2011-01-24T18:19:00.000-08:00

Commentary: 1/21 from WGBY on Vimeo.

My media week.

I work at a newspaper all week and then did the following:

Here is my first and hopefully not last commentary for WGBY's new program "Connecting Point." I think for a old, fat grey rumpled guy I don't look too bad – I look like a newspaper editor minu a cigar clenched in my teeth – and I think I got used to the teleprompter enough to appear semi-relaxed.

Is my hair too short?I really look like my dad more and more.

The crew at the station made it very easy – good guys all of them.

I like TV enough as a medium, but I'm not good expressing a lot of emotions through my face. I can't smile on cue. After years on radio, though, I can emphasize the emotions I need through my voice.

I've never appeared on any TV show – I used to be a guest on WGBY's show "water cooler" back a few years ago – with an audience and have wondered if that would relax me a bit more.

Anyway, it was fun.

On Saturday, the fun continued with an appearance on my friend Mino Giliberti's radio show. Mino is the owner of Buon Appetito in Westfield, perhaps my most favorite restuarant on the planet.

Not that anybody asked, but here's the fat man's line-up of favorites: Buon Appetito; Peacock Chinese in Springfield; Theordore's in Springfield, Bub's Barbeque in Sunderland; City Jake's Cafe in Springfield; and Chef Wayne's in Springfield.

Anyway, it was a 2/3 WREB reunion as Jonathan Evans is Mino's co-host. Jonathna was the mid-day host on WREB and I was the p.m. drive-time host. Ron Chimelis was missing, but then Ron doesn't like to admit he was a radio talks show host!

My apperance marked the first time since 1987 that Jonathan and I have been on the same broadcast together.

So I intervierwed Mino a bit and he interviewed me more and the hour flew by quickly as good radio always does.

So print, radio and TV all in one week – a good week.

2011-01-15T05:44:00.000-08:00

My buddy Steve has sworn off eBay, but before he took the oath, he bought me something I had been eyeing: a fumetti starring Tom Tyler.

I didn't bid on it as its cover featured an action shot with Richard Arlen and I've discovered over the years that many people mix up the various B-Westerns stars. It's easy enough to do as they'll all a bunch of white guys in cowboy hats.

Although the term "fumetti" is used in Italy to describe comics in general, we use it specifically for stories told with photos rather than drawings.

So this publication, "Photo Adventures," is in French and was produced in 1961. It reproduces the 1935 Tyler Western "Rio Rattler."

Eddie Gribbon, a comic actor who started with Mack Sennett, plays Tom's sidekick in the film.

The film itself was pretty standard for a Tyler Western cranked out like so many sausages by director Bernard B. Ray. Tyler was under contract at this time with Reliable Pictures, a company that used the same sets and supporting actors over and over. Although Tom clearly tries his best in this film, it's interesting to see him rise to the acting challenge as the good bad guy in "Powdersmoke Range," made the same year at RKO.

What always fascinates me is how pop culture is recycled. Here is a 1935 creaky low budget American B Western turned into a French language fumetti in 1961. Although it's been made clear to me the reach B- Westerns and serials have had is surprising – consider the 1970s Turkish remakes of Republic serials from the 1940s – I'm always amazed by artifacts such as this one.

© 2011 by Gordon Michael Dobbs

2011-01-10T18:17:00.000-08:00

I have a feeling some of my conservative friends won't like the following very much, but it's been on my mind.

I don't know about your family and friends, but the following recently happened in our circle.

The son of a very close friend a young man not yet 30 is fighting cancer. He had an operation and chemotherapy, went into remission and the cancer returned. He has had additional chemotherapy and appears to be on the
road to recovery, but his doctors wanted to run a PT Scan. This test would confirm their results.

His insurance company said no.

An elderly relative of ours is battling a number of health related issues. Her doctor sent her to a specialized hospital ward for 10 days for necessary observation.

Her insurance company said no. It cut her stay to five days.

She has had asthma for years. The insurance company told her it would longer accept the prescription for the inhaler she has long used under the co-pay agreement.

When I witness for myself these kinds of incidents, I bristle at the notion that many people repeat like parrots, "We have the best healthcare system in the world."

They then usually bleat out some talking points about socialized medicine, Obamacare and death panels.

There is little wrong with our healthcare providers. There are great doctors, technicians, nurses and therapists working in organizations committed to providing the best care possible in this nation.

I have no beef with them. It¹s not a healthcare problem. It¹s a health insurance problem.

"Death panels?" While the Obama legislation had nothing to do about deciding who lives or dies – it's a great lie as counseling someone over end of life decisions is not euthanasia we have plenty of people who make decisions on a daily basis that can affect the quality and length of a person's life.

They are called insurance companies and you pay for the privilege.

The political theater over repealing the recently passed health insurance legislation will probably amount to just more time wasted and more talking heads spitting out the same old rhetoric.

I wonder if any of these critics would like to sit down with the people I know and honestly see what their lives are like as they cope with illnesses that are not of their making.

Perhaps if they had a similar situation in their family, they would think differently. I'd like to think so.

© 2011 by Gordon Michael Dobbs

2011-01-06T19:24:00.000-08:00

File this under "unbelievable."

Since "Machete" was released on DVD this week, I thought sharing this commentary from Alex Jones was appropriate. I think Jones has made some very interesting points about various conspiracies but I can't believe Jones is taking a parody/homage to exploitation films as the Latino version of "Birth of a Nation."

He better not watch any vintage black exploitation from the 1970s if he is easily upset by the message there are bad white people.

Wow.

I wonder if he ever actually watched the completed film.

2011-01-04T19:25:00.000-08:00

Some recent DVD reviews:

Resident Evil: Afterlife

As a horror film fan, I suppose some people would be surprised that I hadn't seen any of the three preceding "Resident Evil" films, but I must admit a certain prejudice toward movies based on video games. Those I've seen haven't been very good.

"Resident Evil," though, has been a very successful movie franchise and stars an actress I admire — Milla Jovovich.

If you're like me and are coming to the franchise late, you need to know that Jovovich plays Alice, a woman who has been turned into a superhero due to the experimentation of the Umbrella Corporation, the most sinister of companies. This same group has developed a virus that has turned most of the population into flesh-eating zombies and Alice fights for her survival from both the zombies and the corporation.

In this fourth film, shot in 3-D but released flat on DVD, Alice has had her super powers neutralized by one of the Umbrella Corporation's men, but escapes to try to find "Arcadia," a place where other survivors have gathered to form a zombie-free community. She finds her friend Claire (Ali Larter) along the way as well as a group of people in Los Angeles who have successfully escaped the zombies by making a fortress out of the city's jail.

When they realize Arcadia is a ship docked in the harbor, they try to make their way to it.

Now, what interested me about this film is Jovovich, as she is undoubtedly one of the few female action stars working today. She does a great job with the material, which is pretty thin.

That's the problem with the film. The plot felt stretched and recycled.

Writer and director Paul W.S. Anderson and Jovovich's husband — is not the most precise of directors. There are story elements that are introduced, such as a giant, axe-welding zombie who acts quite differently for no apparent reason that the other zombies, that are pretty inexplicable.

While the "Star Wars" and "Lord of the Rings" films were treated as standalone films with somewhat open endings, this film doesn't have a plot rich enough to use that story-telling technique successfully. The ending comes across as a cheap device.

Despite my crush on Jovovich, I can't recommend this sloppy, tired film.

Crazy Mama/ The Lady in Red

Shout Factory is now releasing a new series of DVDs featuring many of the films produced by Roger Corman during the 1970s and into the early '80s. For geezers such as me, these DVDs will be the cinematic equivalent of junk food nostalgia, while for others younger viewers — they may provide an insight into the careers of some now well-known directors and stars.

These films came at a time when the drive-ins were still a huge force in the movie business and young people were going to movies to see something they couldn't see on television.

Corman, of course, is the director turned producer who has bragged he has never lost money on any film he has made. This might be true. Corman had released dozens of the most unapologetic exploitation films imaginable in every genre.

Filmmakers such as Ron Howard, James Cameron and Joe Dante, among others, received their start from Corman, which is one reason why the veteran producer received an honorary Oscar in 2009.

This double feature presented by Shout Factor can be viewed in "grindhouse" mode, as if you're watching the film in a sleazy urban theater. It adds to the experience.

"Crazy Mama" is director Jonathan Demme's second film. As explained in one of the extras, Demme was able to go from being a publicity agent for United Artists to a director for Corman.

Demme may have won awards for his films such as "Silence of the Lambs," but "Crazy Mama" certainly wouldn't be one of them. Cloris Leachman stars in the 1975 film as Melba, a struggling beauty salon owner who decides to return to her roots in Arkansas when she is evicted.

Her mission is to buy back the farm from which her family was evicted 30 years ago. She has no idea how she is going to do this and along with her daughter, mother, two of her daughter's boyfriends, a dotty senior citizen and a married man she has picked up, she embarks on a series of petty crimes to fund the purchase of the farm.

This film is an amazing mess. One moment it's a broad comedy, while another it's supposed to be a suspenseful crime drama. It's difficult to tell if Demme wants audiences to take any of it seriously.

One should note that winning an Oscar much less being in a hit television show — does not ensure choice cinematic material.

Leachman, though, slogs through the film admirably, trying to make Melba a sympathetic character. I think Demme owes the actress a role in one of his new movies.

"The Lady in Red," from 1979, is a surprisingly effective period film that purports to tell us the life of the young woman who mistakenly betrayed gangster John Dillinger to the FBI.

Pamela Sue Martin plays farm girl Polly Franklin, who winds up working as a prostitute in the early 1930s in Chicago. Although in other films adapting the life of Dillinger, this character is a minor one, this script by John Sayles makes Franklin's story the central one.

Sayles includes social commentary in the film, which also has the prerequisite violence and nudity that exploitation audiences expected. Director Lewis Teague, who went on to helm "The Jewel of the Nile" and "Cujo," among other films, keeps the pace of the film quick and clearly had an eye for period details.

Martin makes her character sympathetic and believable as a young woman trapped by her circumstances.

"The Lady in Red" is a very good example of how the exploitation film could be something more than simply throwaway drive-in fodder.

If you like seeing films that skirted underneath the radar of many critics years ago, check out these releases from Shout Factory.

Easy A

Remember how rumors could tear through a high school? Remember how wrong they usually were? This is the premise of "Easy A," a solid little comedy that shows that even in the era of cell phone and Internet, there has been little advancement when it comes to relationships in high school.

Olive (played with perfection by Emma Stone) is a high school student who flies under the radar. She's a good student and a good girl, but one day her best friend badgers her into saying something she shouldn't have. In an attempt to shut her up, Olive claims that she recently lost her virginity to an older guy going to the local community college.

She really hasn't. She doesn't even have a boy friend. Her best friend, though, can't resist telling people and before long Olive is the girl everyone is talking about and not in a good way.

Guys who acted as if she was invisible, now stare at her. Girls called her names. The high school's Christian group prays for her, when they aren't condemning her.

Olive's reaction to her new found fame is to play it up. If people can't understand she was fibbing, then she will play the part of the school's tart. That decision leads to other repercussions.

What I admired about the film is that Olive is a sensible, positive kid from a loving family who makes a mistake and eventually learns from it. Stone is one of my favorite new actors, especially after her performance in "Zombieland."

Director Will Gluck and writer Bert V. Royal have created a realistic, endearing and funny teen movie.

Vengeance

If it's made in Hong Kong, I'll give it a try and this 2009 film, just coming out on DVD, is one that is in many ways worth watching.

Legendary French singer and actor Johnny Hallyday plays Costello, a successful chef and restaurant owner who comes to Macau in response to the murder of his son-in-law and grandchildren. Only his daughter has survived the attack.

Hallyday plays Costello with the barest of emotions and expressions, but he makes it clear that this is not a man to mess with. When it's clear the police are not moving fast enough to solve the crime, he decided to take action.

He is, though, a stranger in a strange land and being in the right place at the right time gives him the allies he needs.

Costello witnesses a contract murder carried out by a gang of three men. He goes to the police to view a line-up and even though the cops have one of the trio, Costello doesn't give him up.

It's his way to find the men he needs men who know the local underworld. The trio accepts his offer and finds the men who killed Costello's family. The story doesn't end there.

Two twists in the film provide the audience with questions about the nature of vengeance and whether or not Costello's efforts were worth the price.

Director Johnnie Ito is a guy who is willing to throw some traditional and non-tradition ingredients into his dish, including a French star who is probably not too familiar to his core market.

The taciturn Hallyday looks like he has had one too many plastic surgeries and his minimalist acting style is at first a bit off-putting. His performance eventually grew on me, especially in the second half of the film.

Ito cast two Hong Kong superstars into the film Anthony Wong and Simon Yam. Wong plays the leader of the men recruited by Costello and does it with great cool. Yam is George Fung, the mobster who ordered the hit on Costello's family.

I enjoyed the stylish film that ends not with a satisfyingly violent conclusion to the story but rather with a contemplative note.

Looking for a crime drama that's different? Check out "Vengeance."

Despicable Me

I had wanted to see this film in the theaters, but the time to do so eluded me and now I've caught up with it on DVD and I'm glad I did.

The trend in animation lately is to present the story in computer animation as the medium and 3-D as the marketing point. Although simply using computer generated imagery (CGI) is no guarantee of a quality film, at this time the medium is dominating the industry.

I do miss the artistry of hand-drawn animation or the realism that traditional stop motion brings to a film, but in the right hands, CGI is fine. I thoroughly enjoyed "How to Train Your Dragon" and "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs," and this film joins them as a movie both adults and kids can enjoy over and over.

Gru is a criminal mastermind who yearns to be the most successful evil genius in the world. When he comes up with a plan to shrink the moon to hold it for ransom, he is stopped in his tracks by Vector, a younger super villain on the rise.

In order to obtain the shrink ray Vector has, Gru uses three orphan girls as cover for the robbery. The three girls, though, have an effect on Gru he did not expect.

The film opens with a wonderfully twisted sequence that defines Gru. He encounters a little boy who is upset that he has dropped his ice cream cone. Gru cheers him up by twisting up a balloon animal and gives it to the boy. As soon as the kid is happy, Gru punctures the balloon.

To see this professionally evil guy change is the heart of the movie. It never gets bogged down in sentiment and there is much humor created by Gru's minions -- little yellow pill-shaped guys who make the various things he needs to carry out his plans.

I saw the film flat and it works just fine. I really think the current 3-D hysteria is vastly unnecessary.

The voice performances are quite good and Steve Carrell gives Gru a great "foreign" sound. I did think it was silly for the producers to bring in someone as talented as Julie Andrews for literally a handful of lines as Gru's mom. What's the point? Any number of voice actors could have done that.

That's a minor gripe. This is an animated film adults shouldn't dread watching.

Doghouse

It has been said, "Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery" and I think there is some little love note to "Shaun of the Dead" in this new zombie horror comedy from Great Britain.

Lucky for horror fans, the producers of "Doghouse" have come up with enough twists to keep the film fresh.

Stephen Graham -- currently seen as Al Capone on the HBO series "Boardwalk Empire" -- is Vince.

Vince used to be quite the ladies' man until his marriage and now that he is depressed over his up-coming divorce, his friends have decided to undertake a road trip for all of them to re-assert their single maleness.

All of them are in lousy relationships with women and naturally they don't blame themselves.

So where to go but a remote village where women outnumber the men and they would be the new roosters in the henhouse?

Except this village is the site for an experiment that has turned all of the women into cannibalistic zombies who only attack men.

While "Shaun of the Dead" was a vastly superior film that could be enjoyed by non-horror film fans, "Doghouse" is marketed to a crowd that likes their films "moister."

There are plenty of blood and guts, humor and genuine surprises to keep things interesting; although the movie has one of the worst endings I've seen in a long time.

Not for everyone, horror fans should welcome "Doghouse".

Billy The Exterminator, Seasons One and Two

Just in time for the holidays are these two collections of the television series that details the professional adventures of a Louisiana exterminator.

A high concept, indeed.

Billy Bretherton was featured in two episodes of "Dirty Jobs," and he was clearly charismatic enough that producers at A&E decided he could carry his own show.

Billy and his family tackle any number of critters and what makes him different -- I assume -- from his peers is they don't dress as if they are roadies for a heavy metal band.

Billy likes his bleached spiked hair, his studded bracelets and black ensembles and goes to work removing alligators, wrestling opossums and mixing it up with raccoons as if he had just shopped at Hot Topic.

Despite his clownish look, he takes his profession seriously and drops a variety of factoids throughout the show.

He clearly tries to make the show educational and there is a theme of "I'm a professional; don't try this at home" running throughout it.

I like the show, but if you are bothered by legions of cockroaches, a beehive as big as a shed, bats, rats and other small beasts, you might want to consider watching something else.

© 2011 by Gordon Michael Dobbs

2011-01-03T08:16:00.000-08:00

My buddy Steve gave me an ad slick for a film I had never heard of – a burlesque movie in 3-D no less.

Naturally I was compelled to do some digging.

It turns out this film was actually a re-edited version of a 1947 film called "Linda be Good." The synopsis from imbd written by Les Adams matches the one on the ads sheet : "Linda Prentiss joins a burlesque troupe to get information for a novel she is writing without her husband, Roger Prentiss, knowing about it. Not knowing who he is, she meets her husband's boss, Sam Thompson, while on a night-clubbing tour with the show's burlesque queen Margie LaVitte. Later, the boss takes a client and Roger to the burlesque show, and Roger is stunned to see his wife as one of the stars."

Sidney Pink is credited as the director of the new 1953 version and he simply added a color 3-D stripper sequence as the film's conclusion.

Now, of course, I'd love to see it. I'm sure it's not a very good movie, but this is a great example of the rules of the classic exploitation film. Take a property with little value in the current market and add material to it to make it marketable. Change the title and turn something that played in neighborhood theaters into an "Adults Only" film that would be seen at drive-ins and grindhouses.

Re-titling to make a film more saleable was very common. My friend Richard Gordon's film "Tower of Evil," was also known as "Horror on Snape Island." Later, another producer bought re-issue rights to the film and called into "Into the Fog."

It's conceivable a drive-in devotee could have seen that same movie three times!

I have to admit I love the outrageous showmanship of the exploitation guys!

© 2011 by Gordon Michael Dobbs

2011-01-02T19:31:00.000-08:00

Inexplicable artifact #1

Found at a 25 cent postcard bin at Antique Village, Mechanicsville, VA. Click on it and read the verse. Postmarked 1914.

2011-01-01T15:59:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year!

Me as an angry middle-aged zombie by my good pal Mark Masztal! I frequently feel like the angry walking dead!

My mom informed me today that Mary and I are now at the same age she and my dad were when Mary and I were married 32 years ago.

Our anniversary was Dec. 30.

And my dad was already retired at age 56.

That was the random factoid that got me thinking on the first day of the New Year.

You see 2010 was a rough year. Now “rough” is a relative term. We still have jobs. We can still pay our bills – although a little more dough a month would make things easier. We haven’t lost out home.

There are too many folks who are struggling with just life these days.

We had some events this year that weren’t pleasant as well as some financial surprises that complicated matters.

But what my mom said to me underscored the need to me to get some stuff done.

The problem being a reporter at a newspaper – for me at least – is that you’re not considered a “writer” by many. One of my journalism professors at UMass compared being a reporter to being a potter. We know what goes into a story and we repeat it over and over. Now, if you’re a good reporter, you make those recurring elements better than those who are just going through the motions.

But you’re still throwing the essentially same pot – or a variation of it – over and over. At best you’re an artisan not an artist.

Ah, that was encouraging and that was at the beginning of my career! The beauty of my job is that every day offers something new and different. If I’m a potter, I might be making a plate or a serving bowl or something other than a freaking pot.

As I get older I get tired of having to deal with people who view what I do as some sort of short order cooking. I follow a recipe and the results are perhaps tasty, but ephemeral.

I spend anywhere from 50 to 60 hours a week at my job. It gives me little time to pursue other writing. Yes, I’ve done two books, but they were jobs that I could handle in the time I had.

The book projects sitting on my mind’s shelf require more time. I need to make time for these projects.

I worked on two book proposals this year and made great progress on one of them – the “secret project” I hinted about on Facebook. This project I think could sell but is of a topic that might embarrass my boss or cause someone at work to feel harassed even though I am writing it on my own time. I’ll probably use a pseudonym.

I despise, loathe and hate the hypocritical nature of “political correctness” these days.

I also wrote three comic book stories in 2010 for a proposed project that has just now gone down the tubes. Because they involve characters owned by my friend Steve, I can’t do a thing with them.

So, what’s the agenda for 2011? Write, write, write. Try to sell a book. Try to sell two books.

I’ve reached a critical mass on Tom Tyler material and I want to assemble a book on the guy who was the B-Western star who wanted to act, but I really, really doubt I could find a publisher on that topic. I might put something together for a self-publishing outfit such as Lulu.

I’ll keep you informed. The clock is running.

2010-12-23T11:52:00.001-08:00

My New Year's Column

The kid was waiting at the crossroad. His face was unlined and his diaper was clean. He adjusted his sash that read “2011” with a winning smile.

Down the road he spied a slowly moving figure coming toward him. As it approached closer he couldn’t notice a long matted beard, a bald head, and a toga-like outfit that was stained and ripped.

The sash that read “2010” barely still hung around him.

The kid slowly realized what he was looking at – his predecessor. He uttered a single word, not suitable for a family newspaper, under his breath.

It took a while for 2010 to make it over to him. Not only was he slow, he was also limping. Eventually he came up to the kid and stopped with a groan. His cheeks seemed hollow and his eyes sunken.

“Holy crap,” the old man said looking at his young colleague, “I looked just like you just a year ago.”

“Holy crap, indeed,” the kid said while looking at the damage.

The kid fidgeted nervously. “You mean I’m going to end up like you?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” the old man replied. “I never thought I’d look like this.”

“You see one is never quite sure what is down that road,” the old man said while he pointed ahead to a thoroughfare cloaked in fog. “You could age gracefully or you could be beaten up – continually.”

“What happened to you?” the kid asked.

“Well, there were a lot of things: unemployment that wouldn’t go down; jobs that continued to go overseas. Home foreclosures that are still happening,” he said.

“It takes a lot out of you,” he added with a sigh. He rubbed a prominent bruise on his arm.

“There were also the usual things: wars that won’t stop; greed; people concentrating on venal and trivial subjects, you know like the Kardashians”

The kid shuddered. “The Kardashians,” he thought.

“What they don’t seem to understand is time actually does fly,” the old man continued. “There’s not enough time to go around and they blow a lot of it.”

“You see, we’re all alike,” the old man said. “We all start out fresh-faced and full of hope – bright eyes and bushy tailed. But the events lately have had a tendency of going bad really quickly.”

“Do you have any advice to get through this?” the kid asked.

“Sure,” the old man replied, leaning against a walking stick. “Don’t believe everything you see on TV. Stay away from those informercials and reality shows. Just watch ‘The Soup’ and ‘The Big Bang Theory.’ Everything else is pretty much crap."

The kid took out a pad and pencil from his diaper and started taking notes.

“Understand that a good part of politicians tell you is self-serving hooey. An occasional cigar won’t hurt you, but avoid those dumb energy drinks. Watch out for people who compliment you a lot. They can’t be trusted. Read ‘The Devil’s Dictionary’ by Ambrose Bierce for support.”

The old man coughed, took a deep breath and continued.

“There’s nothing wrong with prayer, too. Listen to the blues. Watch good movies. Watch bad movies if they entertain you, too,” he said.

“Also read those local community weeklies. There’s some good stuff in there,” he added with a wink.

The old man looked at a beat-up pocket watch hanging by a chain around his neck and said, “It’s time for you to get going.”

“I’m a little scared,” the kid said, taking a couple tentative steps.

“You can’t be scared,” the old man said. “You’ve got to give this your best effort and keep your head high.”

As the kid headed into the unknown, the old man offered one more bit of advice: “Keep laughing. It’s your best defense.”

©2010 by Gordon Michael Dobbs

2010-12-08T19:15:00.000-08:00

Time to sell stuff!

Check out these eBay bargains.

"Naked" is a crazy pop culture book I pickedup in Scotland in 2006.

Here's the long out of print book, "Dark Visions" a bunch of interviews with horror folk by Stanley Wiater. I wrote the introduction. I also co-conducted the interview with Vincent Price, but didn't get credit.

Movies: Then and Now has an interview with the late Joe Spinnell.

The lushly made presskit for "Memoirs of a Geisha is a nice and rare item.

As is the presskit for the second Zorro film

Everything is priced to go. I've got more to put up, including a completley mint-still-in-the-box absolutely essential Wile E. Coyote cookie jar from the early 1990s.

2010-11-28T08:26:00.000-08:00

My parents moved down to Virginia in 1987 following my brother and his wife who moved the year before. Virginina has never been appealing to Mary and me, but we've made dozens and dozens of visits over the years and I've visited Whitings Old Paper in an antique mall near Mechanicsville (on Route 301) probably every visit.

It's a great shop and I've found many thimgs over the years, including a four-sheet catalog from a non-theatrical rental company this last visit.

The reason it intrigued me so is the movies it offered were low-budget productions most of which I've never heard of and there is nothing mor einticing to a film fan that movies that are unknown to them.

I call it the "What's this thing?" condition.

Here is an example:

"FBI Girl" is available on DVD in a double feature from VCI Entertainment.

The other film, "Timber Fury," is also on DVD, but there are no youtube posts for either film.

Here are two others from the sales sheet:

I've actually seen part of another minstrel movie years ago, but "Yes Sir Mr. Bones" beat it as a truly inexplicable cultural document. Shot in 1951, one realizes that racist humor was still very much of the mainstream American comic lexicon. Try to watch this clip – it's painful.

">

The other film seen here is a starring vehicle for one of the most active second or third bananas in ther 1950s and 60s: Sid Melton. Anyone who grew up in that era could see Sid in a variety of TV and film productions, but I bet this was one of the few times he got star billing.

I couldn't find a clip from this film, but I did find "Lost Continent," perhaps the "biggest" film offered by this company. In fact, you can experience this entire film right here:

">

Stick with it. You've got to see the dinos!

2010-11-07T12:57:00.001-08:00

Lucky is thinking, "Gulp!"

Vincent

There are many ways to divide up the people in the world, but animal lovers and non-animal lovers is a significant division.

And I do not expect the non-animal lovers to understand or appreciate in some way the following post.

This is not some sort of criticism. Some people simply want animals to be part of their lives and others don’t.

Two animal lovers raised me. I married an animal lover. Our foster daughter and granddaughter are not animal lovers by any means. That doesn’t make them bad, just different.

My late father often said he would much rather be around animals than people. He sometimes noted that as a kid growing up in crushing poverty in rural Alabama during the Depression that the family dog was his best friend. Dad was anti-social, but that’s just how he felt. My mom remains an animal lover, although she no longer has any pets.

When we had the small family farm in Granby, we had plenty of animals, but the diary goats were clearly my mom’s favorites. They came into the milking area of the barn by name and were as loving and intelligent as a dog.

My mom could barely stand the day they had to sell the herd. She had to leave the house.

So I expect some readers to roll their eyes. That’s okay. We’re the crazy animal people.

One of our favorite pets was put down this week. Vincent – named for Vincent Price – was a jet black short haired male cat wit the most intimidating set of double paws I’d ever seen.

Despite Vincent’s appearance – he had a swagger that indicated he would stand for no foolishness – he was a sweetheart.

Vincent lived with us for 16 years. He started life as a stray – a feral kitty born of a mother cat we fed on our porch. This cat – which eventually died – was somewhat friendly, but Vincent as a kitten was not. He was as wild as he could be.

When winter came we were fearful for his safety, but Vincent made a decision. One cold day, he simply ran into the house and was instantly part of the family.

It amazed us that he could turn off one set of behaviors and turn on another, but that’s what he did.

He was a favorite of our friends and got along fine with the dogs in the house. He would frequently want to help me write, by lying down in the space between the computer and the monitor.

Unlike some of the other cats, he enjoyed being held and we could carry him around cradled in our arms like a baby.

To wake us up, he would gently but firmly bite a selected finger.

He had a problem with one eye, which necessitated its removal. He was not even more intimidating with just one eye. I wanted to get a small watch patch for him, but that suggestion was vetoed.

Although he no longer had the advantage of third dimensional sight, he caught a bird right after coming home from the vet’s.

In his later years, he developed the habit of sitting with us when we were watching a movie or television. He liked to sit very specifically – close to us on a side that would prevent the dog from being close to us. He tolerated Lucky the Wonder Bichon – just tolerated.

In the last few weeks, his health broke and we were forced to put him down. He’s buried in a flowerbed in the back yard.

What is amazing about pets is they want to express affection and they look for affection. They don’t judge. They don’t discriminate. It is a cliché to say we could learn a lot from them, but it is the truth.

Like all of the cats we have Vincent was a rescue. I think he had a good life and I know he enriched ours.

2010-10-30T05:17:00.000-07:00

Who would you vote for?

Now remember, this is the candidate for the U.S. Senate in Delware who was unaware of the Constitutional protection of the freedom of religion and expressed her ignorance in a debate at a law school.

For more on her check this out

And this is the woman who has set fanboys' hearts on for for over 30 years.

">

I love how Halloween and the elections have collided a bit in Deleware.

2010-10-18T19:18:00.001-07:00

A Rock and Shock addition:

How could I forget this photo? This is one huge difference in the conventions of my youth and now: women. There weren't any women at comic book conventionsor movie convnetions when I was in college. Not even women at booths hawking stuff.

These two ladies were among the models for the new Mantown Calendar from WAAF. I bought one. It's for charity. I'm giving it to my brother-in-law. Oh never mind!

2010-10-18T15:22:00.000-07:00

Actor Danny Trejo admired the work of Westfield, Mass.-based artist Jamie Cross who was tattooing Trejo’s portrait on the foot of a customer.Contact Cross here.

Rock and Shock 2010 or am I too old for this stuff anymore?

So, Mark, Marty and I once again had a table at Rock and Shock and we all made varying amounts of cash. Whether we go again next year is a question, as the rates will probably increase to the point that profitability will be difficult to make.

I’ve been going to conventions of one sort or another – my first was a Boskone science fiction show when I was in high school – and generally they have been positive experiences. For a teen growing up in Granby, Mass. it was always reassuring there were other people who were into the same odd stuff – comics, movies, horror, fantasy – that I was.

It was a lot tougher to be a fan of such things back then. I think I started a fanzine, just to communicate to other like-minded folks.

Attending UMass confirmed there were fanboys and a few fangirls like me, but traveling to conventions in New York City or Boston was especially rewarding to me.

I like Rock and Shock a lot. It’s close to home. It’s organized well by someone who gets it and the dealers’ area is laid out to accommodate crowds.

The DCU center in Worcester, though, is a poorly run facility that didn’t keep the restrooms clean, harassed dealers about outside food and hadn’t properly cleaned up the exhibition hall from the mess the circus animals made. I don’t blame the Rock and Shock management as they were contesting the DCU people over these issues.

Rock and Shock is a young fans’ show. The kids who attend probably barely know who Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing was, much less Karloff and Lugosi.

However if you have something to sell that they can relate to, you can do all right.

At age 56, though, much of the magic of attending a convention, even behind a dealer’s table, has been lost. The best part of the weekend in many ways was simply hanging with two friends.

My buddy Jeff Allard has a great post about his feelings. Check it out here.

A large part of it for me revolves around interactions with guests. I have fond memories of simply talking with people. I didn’t have to buy an autograph and, in fact, they were happy to autograph whatever you had.

That’s not the case any more and hasn’t been for a long time.

I remember at a Chiller Con years ago, Mark Godard, the second male lead of “Lost in Space,” yelling at a fan who had shot some video of him while he sat at his dealer’s table. Now, if he had paid him, I bet it would have been okay.

Jerk.

This show I was asked by my buddy Steve Bissette if I could fact-check something with legendary director George Romero. So, I stood in line. There was a sign alerting me to all the things he was selling and the various costs. I reached the head of the line and had to clear what I wanted to do with one of his assistants – a humorless guy who was pretty unfriendly. I told him I wanted to ask Romero a question. I read it off my iPhone from Steve’s email and as I did another handler came into the areas and was clearly aghast. He asked the first guy what was I doing, what was the question and clearly got worked up about it.

Romero seemed fine answering it. He clearly was used to a more standard interaction – greeting, autograph, photo – but I had no issues with him. Now, with the other two morons, I did.

I was going to try to stake out some interview time with Danny Trejo, but next to Romero he was the most popular and, while he was clearly nice to the fans who ponied up a minimum of $30 for a signature, there was no time for idle chitchat.

Perhaps my time at conventions has come and gone. Or perhaps I need to attend one that has a greater emphasis on older films.

Here are some photos:

This guy was going around going around the show trying to get people to go to make-up artist Cherie Verie to get some custom work done. Contact her here.

Mark at our table. He was busy zombie-fying folks.

Actor and comic Judah Friedlander was hawking his book “How to Beat Up Anybody” at the show.

Posters, posters and more posters: I sold four from my collection – one very reluctantly. I bought none.

Director of a film I will never watch Ruggerio Deodata, the man behind “Cannibal Holocaust.”

Some cool stuff!

© 2010 by Gordon Michael Dobbs

2010-10-12T17:44:00.000-07:00

There are always critics out there.

So I get an e-mail from the folks at the Historic Journal of Massachusetts that they reviewed my Springfield postcard history book. I'm addressed as "Dr." in the e-mail.

Hmmm.

So here's what was published or about to be published:

Arcadia Publishing is known for its extensive line of local history photography publications. Springfield is part of the Postcard History Series, which focuses exclusively on old postcards. A brief introductory essay outlines some of the high points of Springfield’s history, from the founding of the settlement by William Pynchon to the present day. Numerous famous residents are also briefly profiled, including Springfield’s most famous son, Theodore Geisel, and one of her most infamous, Timothy Leary.

The bulk of the book consists of 180 postcards. Many of the postcards feature the landmarks of Springfield, such as Forest Park, Court Square and other important municipal buildings. Others focus on important businesses, such as the Smith and
Wesson plant, the Springfield Armory and the Indian Motorcycle factory. Like the Images of America series, each postcard is accompanied by a short caption.

The captions, while informative, are too short to add up to anything of substance. There is no attempt at interpretation or placing the postcards into any sort of historical context. While current or former area residents (myself included) will enjoy seeing familiar buildings, some gone, others not, without any kind of contextual support, Springfield is little more than a collection of old postcards. This is particularly unfortunate because some of Springfield’s best history is left out as a result.

An excellent example is the postcard featuring the Bosch Magneto Company. Bosch was a well-known and long-time employer in the city. Opened in 1910, it was in operation until 1986, when the plant’s operations were moved to another state. The building itself, situated along the border of Springfield and Chicopee, was destroyed by arson in 2004. This information, all from the caption, is somewhat interesting, but the reader would be better served by being told the real story behind the Bosch plant. Originally owned and operated by a German family, the factory was seized by the federal government twice, during both the First and Second World Wars. After World War I, the original owners were allowed to repurchase the business, but the government refused to permit this after the second, and ownership passed to a new company that remained in control until the plant’s closure.

This amount of information is difficult, if not impossible, to get into a caption for a postcard. But it isn’t in the book anywhere. The logical place would be the introduction, but upon closer examination, the introduction reads like an extended version of the captions, and repeats a good deal of information that can be found there. The Bosch postcard is not the only example, but it is one of the most striking.

Many questions go unanswered. What are the origins of the postcards themselves? Postcards featuring the beautiful architecture and monuments of the city make sense. Springfield was once a popular tourist destination, one of the gateways to the Berkshires. Postcards to sell to that market would be expected to appear. But who thought a postcard of the Bosch factory would be popular, or Monsanto, a chemical factory? Why was it produced, and by whom? A large number of the postcards appear courtesy of their owners. Why did these individuals keep these postcards? What was their connection or interest to the subjects of them?

Local history buffs will no doubt enjoy Springfield, or any of the other similar books that Arcadia Publishing churns out yearly. As a local history buff, the reviewer found the postcards interesting, especially when one spots a house or building that still exists today. But without that local connection, this book is the equivalent of a neighbor’s vacation slide show. It is pretty and interesting, but it lacks meaning.

Micah Schneider is a master’s candidate in history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

I had to respond and did so thusly:

I am delighted to first be referred to as a "Dr." when I'm not one and to have a review of my book that COMPLETELY misses the point. The Arcadia books are strictly formatted by the publisher. They tell you EXACTLY how many words to be used in the caption.They tell you exactly how long the introduction should be.

But of course the authors – such as myself – is seen by this academic as some sort of boob historian who can't adequately present his story. Thanks so much.

"It is pretty and interesting but lacks meaning" – did the reviewer actually read my introduction? I actually set up the context to explain how this city came about, why it is significant, why it is still significant within the format given to me by the publisher.

The reviewer wonders why people used postcards and why people collect them today? Did I have to explained the history of cheap postal communication and the thrills of collecting little pieces of history?

I guess the reviewer missed there are two very interesting facts brought up by this book that have seldom been brought up before: the location of the tavern visited by Washington and the movement of the former library onto the Quadrangle.

You want a history of American Bosch? Within the context of a postcard history book?

I emphasized that this book was a mere introduction to the history of the city. I referenced other more in-depth works on Springfield's history.

Here's a novel idea: instead of taking pot shots from your ivy-covered towers on Western Avenue, how about actually interviewing authors to obtain an understanding of how a book is created and what is its intent.

G. Michael Dobbs

P.S. At least you gave me fodder for my blog and Facebook.

2010-09-29T05:46:00.000-07:00

New car

With the considerable help from my brother and his wife, Mary and I purchased a new car: a 2009 Chevy HHR. While we've bought our share of cars in the past, for some reason – largely financial – I was quite worried about the process. I deeply appreciate the help my brother gave me as he absolutely loves buying cars – God bless him.

With our road trip to Rock and Shock coming up – yes soon the pimping of our booth will begin on this blog and on Facebook – Dogboy has declared the new ride "the party car." I'll have the get the DVD system and wet bar installed before then!

Mark also did the following graphic. There is only one mistake: It's silver grey! Lucky has not ridden in it as yet nor has he christened the tires, but I'm sure he will on both counts soon.

2010-09-14T13:22:00.002-07:00

Do you ever forget what you have? And why you have it? I stumbled across a copy of "The Penguin Film Review," a slight paperback book from 1948. I think I picked it up at a tag sale and I had forgotten about it. When I found it I realized why I have bought it.

It has an essay by Fritz Lang, a director I much admire, about happy endings and it reveal interesting things about him. I was hooked when he admitted he didn't know how to create suspense.

He said that out his successes and failures he had "developed a kind of automatic reflex device that guides my work."

I thought my fellow film fans would appreciate the chance of reading what Lang thought about story construction and how a story ends. He was one of the greats.

2010-09-12T15:40:00.000-07:00

Stuff on eBay

I'm starting to go through stuff that I've been lugging around for years and out it slowly but surely in eBay. I wish I could simply sell it at a show, but that is far more expensive and labor intensive that the 20 minutes or so it takes to something on eBay.

In one way I'm reluctant to part with any original art from my very limited collection, but in this case it doesn't make any sense to hang onto to the painting seen here.

I'm going to go through my still collection as well, but even in this age of being able to scan an image and sell the original I'm reluctant to let the best go.

Here's the link to the vampire painting

Here's a "Chicken Run" action figure set.

And here is the link to the factory sealed Popeye set.

I've got two of of the Popeye sets, if anyone locally is interested. More stuff to follow.

2010-08-29T11:54:00.000-07:00

As a kid I marveled at the concept that someone well known or famous came from the same town or area in which I lived.

Although I was born in Roswell New Mexico, I never considered it my hometown. As a service kid, I attended kindergarten, first and second grade in Springfield, Mass., third grade in Montgomery, Al., part of fourth in Rantoul, Ill., the second half of fourth and the first half of fifth in Hadley, Mass., the second half of fifth in Greenville, Calif. and my sixth, seventh and apart of eighth grades in the Department of Defense schools on Okinawa.

Springfield was always where I considered home and if someone asked what was my hometown, Springfield was my response.

Although I spent my high school and college years living in Granby, Mass., Springfield is my hometown.

When I became interested in film during junior high school, I was very intrigued to discover the show business connections to the area and Springfield. Among those was Eleanor Powell, who was born and raised in the city.

Now I’m not a huge fan of musicals, but there are some performers who are just electric on screen. I’m a fan of Fred Astaire, for instance and I love those early 1930s Warner Brothers musicals with the over-the-top numbers of Busby Berkley.

What bowled me over with Powell was that she danced like no other woman on the screen at the time. She had a kind of athleticism the other female dancers lacked. Strikingly attractive, she made what she did looked so easy and effortless, while of course anyone watching her perform would know it was the product of grueling work.

Powell’s time of the screen was relatively short, compared to some of her contemporaries. She basically retired from film in 1944 while still a young woman.

She does have fans today, thanks to her films being broadcast on Turner Classic Movies. If you’ve not seen one of her films, do yourself a favorite and haunt the TCM Web site to see when one will be on.

Here is the official Web site for Powell

2010-08-15T08:58:00.000-07:00

I really liked this Korean cultural mash-up.

I've not posted DVD reviews for a while so here are some of the films I've recently seen:

How to Make Love to a Woman

I must admit a grudging respect for some old school exploitation values exhibited in this new sexually tinged romantic comedy.

First, the title sounds like something one of the old road show producers would have brought 60 years ago from one theater to another. There was once a kind of movie that low budget producers made and showed to men-only and women-only audiences discussing intimate subjects that invariably included a live lecture from a "hygiene" expert!

Second, the design of the cover art suggests the film might be part of the "American Pie" series. It's not. Deception was part of the exploitation experience.

Third, while one might expect there would be some nudity in the film, there isn't any. Explicit language, yes, nudity, no. "Bait and switch" is also a fine tradition of the exploitation film.

Lastly the inclusion of adult film legend Jenna Jameson in the cast puts forth the promise of some hotsy-totsy action, but guess what? Jameson's cameo role is certainly demure and brief.

Having noted all that, "How to Make Love to a Woman" isn't a bad little comedy that plays on basic miscommunication between two people who love one another, but it's not a truly notable film at all.

Josh Meyers of "Mad TV" is a record company executive who realizes he isn't much of a lover, even though he cares deeply for his girlfriend. He goes on quest to improve his skills, but hits a roadblock when his bumbling and ego causes her to consider accepting a job offer in another city.

There are some talented character actors in the cast, including Ken Jeong and James Hong, who brought some additional mirth to the proceedings and Meyers is fine as the lead as is Krysten Ritter as his girlfriend.

There is nothing particularly outstanding or memorable, though, about the film and that's the problem.

The DVD extras include the usual making of feature in which the producers actually describe just how difficult it is to make a film in just 19 days.

The Good, the Bad, the Weird

I've sung the praises of Asian films before in this column and this 2008 Korean "western" set in Manchuria in the 1930s during the Japanese occupation would be a great introduction for a newcomer.

What always fascinates me is how Asian filmmakers -- whether they are Japanese, Chinese, Korean or Indonesian -- have pushed their own history, culture and attitudes through a filter of film grammar, technology and iconography that is largely American. The results are films that look familiar in some ways but take viewers along paths they didn't expect. As a film fan, that's what I live for.

In this case, Korean director and writer Jee-woon Kim has clearly been influenced by westerns in general, but especially by Sergio Leone's classic western, "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," which in turn was the great Italian director's reimagining of American westerns.

Kang-ho Song is "the Weird," a Korean outlaw who steals a treasure map that is the object of desire by a Chinese crime lord as well as the Japanese occupying forces. Byung-hun Lee is "the Bad," a skilled assassin who understands the value of the map and seeks to have it for himself. Woo-sung Jung is "the Good," a no-nonsense bounty hunter who dresses like a cowboy and seems to have patterned himself after Gary Cooper.

The director knows how to stage great action sequences -- from an outstanding train robbery to some spectacular fights -- but he also infuses the film with a uniquely Asian perspective. The Korean outlaw longs to return home, now occupied by a brutal Japanese regime. The cultural and historical differences of Asian people come into play in this film.

Jee-woon Kim also understands how to use humor and sentimentality to sustain the viewer's interest.

I really liked this film and think you might as well if you can suspend your disbelief a bit -- I can't quite believe Manchuria was as much as like the wild west as it was portrayed -- and give the subtitles a chance. I always opt for subtitles, as I really want to hear the performances of the actors even if I don't understand the language.

The Dungeon Masters

I'm not much a game player, so if I can't finish a game of Monopoly one can see that I would never be able to immerse myself in video games or in the game featured in this documentary, Dungeons & Dragons.

There are a lot of people out there, who do plunge into playing a game and it becomes more than a recreation, but a lifestyle for them. This new film looks at three people who devoted a substantial part of their lives not just playing the game but being a game master and organizing a game.

While fictional movies and documentaries about fanboys and their pursuits is nothing new -- "Trekkies" probably invented the genre -- director Kevin McAlester manages to avoid clich s. He doesn't laugh at his subjects. He presents their lifestyles and allows the audience to react.

McAlester follows three very different people: Richard, a married sanitation worker and member of the Air Force Reserve; Scott, a married apartment building manager and struggling writer; and Elizabeth, a single woman trying to find employment.

McAlester shows that in each case the role of game master gives these people a sense of control over some part of their lives. Scott is clearly very smart, but he seems incapable of applying himself to anything meaningful. Elizabeth is searching for a solid relationship as well as a job. Richard, who seems to have a very full life, obviously yearns for something dramatic.

While these three people may dress in costume and talk about elves, trolls and dragons, at the core they are no different than anyone else who is a fan of something. Is the person who regularly wears shirts showing his or her allegiance to a sports team and can reel off facts, stats and analysis of the latest game no less a geek than these three?

Considering that I have spent much time with fanboys -- I'm one myself -- I think this film is an insightful look at how people can give into a hobby to the point of near obsession.

The extras include some great outtakes and a series of "not outtakes, exactly," that have some interviews with folks who make our three subjects look pretty normal -- whatever that means.

Don't Look Up

At last, a DVD horror film release that isn't some lame low budget vampire film. "Don't Look Up" is a genuinely creepy film with some good shocks.

Reshad Strik stars as a film director named Marcus. He's going through some personal and professional hard times -- his girl friend is dying of cancer and he walked off the set of his second movie -- when he receives an offer to film a script based on a lost movie.

A Hungarian director -- look for director Eli Roth in a cameo -- disappeared in 1928 when he attempted to shoot a film based on a medieval legend about a village doomed by a supernatural spirit. Marcus wants to make his version of the same story in the very studio his counterpart used more than 80 years ago.

Anyone who has seen any horror movies knows this can't be a good idea. For Marcus, the extra wrinkle in the story is that he has psychic abilities and can "see" the events that took place years previous.

It's not too long before the spirit makes herself known and members of the crew start dropping and she has some plans for Marcus.

The shocks include far more than the standard gory deaths. Director Fruit Chan, a Hong Kong filmmaker known for a horror film called "Gaau ji (Dumplings)," makes sure not only are his actors allowed to build a characterization, but also to vary the chills.

One of the most disturbing moments in the film for me was a scene in which the director and his producer -- played with an oily charm by Henry Thomas -- watch the dailies from the first day. Their footage contains that shot 80 years earlier, long thought lost. It's a subtle but effective moment.

This is the kind of horror film I like: original, unpredictable and free of dumb vampires!

The extras include the standard interviews and behind the scenes footage.

"Shinjuku Incident" may certainly be a disappointment to Jackie Chan fans who expect silly comedy and stunt-filled action. Instead, they are going to find a very serious film dealing with illegal immigration and organized crime.

In an interview included in the DVD's extras, Chan said he would like to extend his career as an actor and director, like Clint Eastwood. To do so, he has to take on more dramatic roles and clearly this is a step in that direction.

With the success of the re-make of "The Karate Kid," American audiences are starting to see this new Jackie Chan, but he has been around for awhile -- in his Chinese movies.

Chan tried a straight drama in his 1993 film "Crime Story," and returned to it with his performance as a failed alcoholic cop in "New Police Story." His burglar character from "Rob-B-Hood," was also a departure from his standard good guy parts.

In his recent American films he has reverted to his standard screen persona, such as in "The Spy Next Door." The sad thing is his more interesting films, such as "New Police Story" and "The Myth" haven't received any theatrical release here though they eventually come out on home video.

If you're a fan of Chinese cinema or of Chan, I recommend adding those two productions to your Netflix list.

"Shinjuku Incident" tells the story of Nick, a Chinese tractor mechanic who illegally comes to Japan to search for his girlfriend, Xiu Xiu, years after she immigrates to find fame and fortune. Although at age 56, Chan is a tad too old for this role, he delivers a moving under-stated performance as a man who is attempting to do the right thing, but whose choices are limited.

Once in Japan, Nick encounters prejudice from the Japanese plus the challenges that come from being an illegal alien. Nick lives on the streets until he meets a friend from back home, Joe, who introduces him to a group of a largely Chinese illegals all living in a communal home.

Struggling to find any meaningful work, while working in a sewer he rescues the life of a sympathetic police officer. He also sees his one-time girlfriend, now the wife of a powerful Japanese mobster, Eguchi.

Although resistant at first to do anything against the law, Nick eventually begins stealing and scamming. When he saves Eguchi's life, he's given the crime territory of the would-be assassin. Eguchi is not being generous. He plans to use Nick and his Chinese gang as pawns in his game to take over leadership of the mob.

Director Derek Yee handles this gritty drama pretty well, although there are moments in which the passing of time is not presented well and creates a little confusion.

For instance, the audience has no idea Xiu Xiu has been gone as long has she has before Nick begins his search for her and until we see her young daughter, who is about six or seven years old.

Overall, though, this is an above average crime drama that plays out in the same vein as the classic gangster films from the 1930s such as "Public Enemy" or "Little Caesar."

One note of caution: there are several moments of graphic violence that are also very uncharacteristic for previous Jackie Chan films.

And Chan demonstrates that he not only has a place in cinema history as one of world's best action stars, but also as an effective dramatic performer.

Stolen

When I was teaching a film class at Western New England College, I frequently showed one of the worst movies I had in my collection: an obscurity called "Terror in the Amazon."

I showed that film to illustrate what constitutes good direction. I learned my students couldn't really tell what good direction is like because they didn't have a benchmark of really terrible direction for comparison.

"Terror in the Amazon" provided that. It's truly incompetent.

The difference a director makes to a film can be crucial and that's the problem with "Stolen," a murder mystery that takes place over the course of 50 years.

"Stolen" features a pretty intriguing script. John Hamm plays a present day cop who is still grieving for the disappearance of his son eight years ago. He suspects an incarcerated child killer, but can't prove it.

His obsession with solving the case increases when a construction crew discovers the corpse of a young boy who had been murdered about 50 years ago. Through flashbacks we learn of the boy's story.

While I thought Glen Taranto's script had much merit, director Anders Anderson made a bit of a mess of it. An average episode of "Criminal Minds," has a better use of production value and a closer attention to detail.

Because this is partly a period film, one can't help but notice the haircuts and clothing are too far off, something a good director would notice. The use of a roadside diner supposedly a busy location is on a dirt road. Huh?

There is never a true sense of location established or that these events are actually taking place in a "real" place.

The film has a fine cast, but too many characters have too little to do and have been given throwaway roles, such as the lovely Morena Baccarin whose talents are completely wasted.

This is Anderson's first film and he has a lot to learn.

While flawed, mystery fans might find some interest in "Stolen."

Left Bank

This horror movie from Belgium came with some high recommendations and I was expecting a lot. While it also has many good points, watching it was fairly irritating.

Marie is a young runner who is headed for great things when she contracts an unknown ailment. Her doctor recommends a month's worth of rest and Marie decides to move in with her new boyfriend.

Slowly but surely she discovers the apartment building in which they live on the left bank of the river in Antwerp has a disturbing history. It is supposedly built on the site of literally a hole to Hell and the place where generations of devil worshippers have conducted ceremonies.

Now Marie, in the worst traditions of the horror film protagonist, sticks around even as she realizes that things are not what they seem. A sensible person would have tried to escape well before she does.

That's where this film is frustrating. There are some good performances and some good ideas that hole in the basement is pretty damn creepy but the film is agonizingly slow. The writer and director apparently want to stick with the conventions of the genre rather than do something new.

This film is unrated and while the violence isn't explicit, there are a number of sex scenes and ones with nudity that are fairly revealing. While low-budget director Fred Olen Ray once accurately said that "nudity is the cheapest special effect," these scenes certainly don't make "Left Bank" a better story.

© 2010 by Gordon Michael Dobbs

2010-08-09T19:24:00.000-07:00

Year in Fear: Take Two

A newly minted friend on Facebook posted a “Year in Fear,” the calendar for horror fans that I conceived and which featured artwork from my friend Steve Bissette.

I realize I’ve blogged about this doomed project before in 2008, but this posting is more detailed. I’m in a revelatory mood.

I split an advance of $1,250 with Steve from Tundra Publishing – the now legendary experiment in something to do with creator rights publishing – and thought at the time that were going to make big money.

How could we go wrong? Every way possible.

The tale of the “Year in Fear” should be one taught to anyone entering into a business or to any creative type dreaming of a new project.

In 1988, I met Steve Bissette at a party conducted by a mutual friend. Steve is one of most charming guys you could meet and we quickly struck up a friendship. About a year, year and a half later I came up with the idea of a calendar for horror fans and asked Steve if he would like to come aboard. He said yes and when he was invited to be one of the first creators invited into the Tundra inner circle by Kevin Eastman, the calendar was going to become a reality.

I had known Peter Laird, half of the Ninja Turtle creative team since my days at UMass. We were never friends, but fellow comic book fans at a time when we sort of stuck out like sore thumbs.

I had staged the first museum exhibition of the Mirage Studio crew at the Wistariahurst Museum in Holyoke where I worked. I think, without digging through old papers, that was 1987.

Anyway, I was known a bit by both Kevin and Peter.

Mark Martin, a fabulous designer and artist with whom I subsequently became friends for 20 years, designed the calendar. Mark and I no longer talk – I don’t why, ask him – but I have to give him his due. He designed a great looking portfolio for Steve’s work.

But it was a crappy calendar. More on that in a minute.

By the way, what made all of this more painful was a friend at the time was trying to do his own calendar that was surprisingly similar to mine that was going to be published by Peter laird. I remember him telling me something along the lines of “It’s not personal. It’s business.

The thing was over-sized and was in black, white and blue. I thought that all we had to do was solicit it through the comic book distributors and the fans would grab it.

After all Steve was and still is a pretty hot commodity.

Lesson number one: don’t put all of your eggs in one basket.

This was the early days still of comic fandom and frankly what people bought was the ancillary items – they didn’t exist as they do today. They bought comic books. A calendar was a fairly foreign item in shops in 1990 and 1991.

We solicited orders in the summer – just in time for the fall calendar season and got back orders for 125.

There were 1,000 of these in the Tundra warehouse.

Well, Tundra was full of cousins, brothers-in-law and long-time friends of Kevin’s and some of them formed a brain trust. I was on their shit list as I had actually come up with a promotion item to give away to stores that the fans did want – a shot glass for Steve’s “Taboo Especial.” We made a profit on a give-away and I was toast. I had shown up these guys.

One of them said not to worry; he could get Costco to buy the entire stock. He had connections. He didn’t sell any.

Lesson two: Don’t trust someone’s brother-in-law.

So then I took it upon myself to get them sold. I spoke with a regional card shop chain whose management couldn’t understand the idea behind the calendar and then I decided to go large and went to Atlantic City to the open vendor day at Spencer’s Gifts.

The buyer was a great guy who had gone to college in Springfield and who patiently explained to me just why this product was nearly unsellable. First, I was too late. Calendars are ordered in the spring of the year. Second, it was too big. Third, where was the hole?

The hole? On crap, we don’t have a hole so it could be hung in the store and hung by the customer.

We had done EVERYTHING wrong.

Lesson three and the most important one of all: do your homework.

I went home only to hear the Tundra braintrust wanted us to autograph the stock so they could be used as give-aways for Tundra UK. Steve and I dutifully signed hundreds of them.

Then we discovered they were going to be tossed. We rescued a bunch.

We had a couple of months left, so I worked out a fulfillment deal with Fangoria magazine. They ran an ad for the things and we spilt the money.

After that we were stuck with a bunch of them. They sat in our basements.

Soon after, I had bought, along with Patrick Duquette, the animation magazine Animato! That’s a cautionary tale as well, which I’ll also tell one day.

We started working conventions ands eventually Patrick lost a taste for it, so I’d split a table with Steve. We realized of we cut the calendar bits of the plates; we would have nifty little prints. We sold them for $3 with Steve’s autograph and that is how we made money on our calendars.

Of course we pissed every dollar we made at shows by buying other things at shows.

I still have a few of them in my basement. I keep one at my office at work as a reminder of the importance of market research before launching a product.

Postscript: You know I was trying to find a graphic for this posting and I realized that some things I could have scanned, I’ve thrown out. Tundra was a bad very scene and sometimes I just want to purge.

© 2010 by Gordon Michael Dobbs

2010-07-31T12:33:00.000-07:00

Talk radio days

Here is part of a story the Transcript-Telegram did on WREB in 1984.That's my pudgy face in the left hand corner.

The other day I received the 20th anniversary edition of Talkers magazine, the bible for the talk radio industry. I always look forward to every issue as I spent from May 1982 to April 1987 as the afternoon talk show host on the late but still remembered WREB in Holyoke.

The new issue has a time line of the development of talk radio and my years on the air were in that pre-Rush Limbaugh era in which the majority of the hosts were local and the programming reflected the concerns of a market.

While there are some great nationally syndicated hosts, the institution of the local host has been decimated by the corporations that own so much of radio today and who see an opportunity to boost profits by running syndicated programming they get in trade for running commercials.

The industry is divided over whether radio, which by law is supposed to serve the needs of the public, is actually serving those needs with syndicated programming. I don’t think it is.

I also think that if you take a now wily vet such as myself and produce a local talk show I could beat the syndicated stuff. Until someone actually has a station with local or regional ownership that believes in what radio can do and should be doing, that point is moot.

Anyone out there wishing to stage a local radio revolution? Give me a call.

The Talkers story quickly got me thinking about my time in radio. I was a kid who was fascinated by radio and when I was in high school, I used to see what AM stations I could pick up at night when the signals would bounce around the atmosphere. I think Cleveland was the furthest away.

My mom regularly listened to talk radio over WACE in Chicopee and then WREB and folks like newsman Richard Lavigne and talk host Tracy Cole were people we regularly heard.

Cole was very popular despite the fact he was a hateful son of a bitch. Here’s a true story: Cole basically hated women. There were three kinds of women to him ladies (people who agreed with him), broads (those who did not) and welfare broads (he hated those the most).

Despite all this, and the fact he was a bald, bespectacled little scrawny guy, he had his share of groupies. There was a cot in a storage room in the station’s old studios in Holyoke where I was told Tracy apparently brought some of his conquests.

My mind boggled when I found out.

One day, my boss station owner Joe Alfano told me, Tracy got into an argument with a woman on the air and called “a stupid c**nt.”

The next day the FCC was on the line. They had received multiple complaints and were ready to pull the station’s license and give Alfano a $10,000 fine.

Alfano, who was quite a character in his own right, convinced the FCC that Cole had said, “That’s a stupid stunt.” Apparently there were no recordings to confirm what Cole had said. They bought the explanation and incident worked in the station’s favor as people tuned into Cole’s show to hear what he would say next.

When I was a reporter at the Holyoke Transcript I got to know WREB morning guy George Murphy and did a story on him riding the Mountain Park roller coaster to raise money to help restore a statue in town. I had regularly listened to George who was a born broadcaster and when he found out about my interest in film, he had me on as a guest several times.

When I was bounced from the Transcript – I wouldn’t accept a change in beat to cover Granby where my parents lived – I did a story for the Amherst Record on George’s short-lived replacement, a woman named Helen Oats. When she left, I applied for the job.

I was supposed to do the morning shift, but Ron Chemilis, then the owner and editor of the Chicopee Herald was hired for that time and I wound up with the afternoon shift of 3 p.m. until sign-off at sunset. Because my hours shifted during the year, I eventually had to do the half-hour news at noon.

With little training, no call screener except for the receptionist who simply put the calls on hold and no producer, I was put on the air.

My only helper was my seven-second delay button.

WREB was a pioneering station in the area for having an all talk market. I’m convinced other stations started including talk shows in their programming because of us.

My pay, which remained the same for the entire five years, was $5 an hour. I received money to do live endorsements and my price was .75 for each commercial I did. At the end of my time there I received a raise to $1.25.

My best live spot was for a device called “Cold Stick,” a drug-fee treatment for hemorrhoids. You put this plastic tube filled with anti-freeze in your freezer and tuck it up your rectum for “long lasting cooling relief.” My challenge was to avoid saying “pain in the ass” on the air.

I supplemented my income with freelance writing and with bartending. Despite the poverty levels imposed on me, I had a ball.

I realized after my first year that station management had little idea what I was doing, nor did they care as long as the sponsors were happy. I did get one sponsor upset when I interviewed a Playboy Playmate who was appearing at a local car show. I think they eventually came back.

The station owner once said that he would broadcast Japanese folk music if it made him a profit.

Gov. Michael Dukakis was the first state-wide elected official I can remember actually recognizing the potential of talk radio. He came on my show several times, including appearing at this remote broadcast.

The station was not unlike “WKRP in Cincinnati,” as we had a very odd newsguy Richard Lavigne and a fast-talking salesman who also used to wear the white shoes and belt in the summer.

Richard Lavigne was a legend in local broadcasting circles and amazingly odd. He wore string ties and pants two sizes too big held up with suspenders. He wore his bachelor status on his sleeve pining away for a lost love, but could have had his share of little old ladies who constantly asked about him. He foamed at the mouth when he did his half-hour commentaries due to his using too much denture adhesive.

He knew everyone in Holyoke and everyone knew him.

I was the house liberal, so I got the best hate mail during the time of Reagan. Chemilis, now a big time sports writer for the local daily paper and who keeps his radio days under wraps, was the conservative. The mid-day host, Jonathan Evans, fell somewhat in the middle.

I didn’t have the best radio voice, although a story in the Transcript about the station said my voice was “like an old shoe,” which was clearly a compliment. Ron’s voice was “like Kermit the Frog,” which clearly wasn’t.

It was a real treat to speak with character actors such as Frank Coughlin Jr. seen in perhaps his best known role as Billy Batson in the serial "The Adventures of Captain Marvel."

I realized that it wasn’t how you sounded, but what you said and how you produced your show. I liked a mix of local, regional and national guests. My first celebrity guest was the great broadcaster Doctor Demento and later I convinced the station we should run his show.

Here’s a short list of the people who appeared on my show: politicians such as Gov. Michael Dukakis, Attorney General Eliot Richardson, Sen. George McGovern; actors including Clayton Moore, Lucy Arnez, Mary Crosby, Vincent Price, Lillian Gish, Elvira, Dave Thomas, Rick Moranis, Fritz Feld, Keye Luke, Billy Benedict, Frank Coughlin Jr., Virginia Christine, Mark Metcalf, Antiono Fargas; authors Sidney Sheldon, Cleveland Amory; directors George Romero, Larry Cohen; voice actors Clarence Nash, Andriana Caselotti; movie producers Brian Grazer, Richard Gordon, Alex Gordon; and wrestlers Killer Kowalski and Bob Backlund.

Backlund came on my show days after losing the WWF heavyweight title and he tied up the phone lines for two solid hours with calls from his fans.

Here am I posing with Killer Kowalski after taping an interview with him at Mountain Park. He was lifting me up!

The station manager once thought it was a good idea for me to switch personas one day and be a conservative to mix it up with the audience. I didn’t do it. I wasn’t comfortable playing a role.

I did have a problem with finding the right words to use in a nasty exchange with a caller. I soon discovered calling a conservative “A Nazi,” was like dropping the atomic bomb on them. I once called one of them “brain dead,” and I quickly got a call when a woman who tearfully told me her son was brain dead. So I crossed that off the list.

Next time I called an obnoxious caller a “cretin,” and that was followed with a call from another tearful woman whose child was indeed a cretin by the medical definition. He suffered from neonatal hypothyroidism.

That was another insult I couldn't use.

So I tried “pinhead,” and that worked!

I left WREB simply because of money. The station had a new owner when I left and I was leery of what the future would bring. I accepted a job as the program supervisor at the Wistariahurst Museum and several years later WREB was gone. I was quite sad.

I’m even sadder that I never had the guts to steal Tracy Cole’s microphone collection. In the storeroom, Cole had left several vintage pill-shaped microphones. I wanted them and figured they could easily disappear. But I didn’t take them and I can’t remember what happened to them when Cole died.

For more on WREB, take a look at George Murphy’s blog http://holyokemassradiowreb.blogspot.com

© 2010 by Gordon Michael Dobbs

2010-07-21T16:23:00.001-07:00

Tom Tyler!

A postcard with a scene from one of his FBO silent films. I think that may be a very young Frankie Darro or Darrow holding the gun. Frankie was billed with both spellings of his last name.

Original still from his silent film "Wyoming Wildcat."

A Spanish novelization of one of Tom's silent films. These little magazines were sold at theaters.

Ah the perils of eBay. I'm afraid that I haven't abandoned some sort of project involving the life and career of Tom Tyler and these are some recent acquisitions concerning the B-Western star who actually wanted to act. The careers of many of the B-cowboys from the 1930s through 50s were defined by the stardom they attained with their series. Outside of those films, these actors really didn't have a career. Once their series was over, that was it.

Tyler was different. He yearned to be an actor who had that life outside the confines of low budget oaters. And he succeeded in becoming a character actor in a wide range of films. His parts were supporting, but often showy. I just watched him in the Errol Flynn western "San Antonio" and he was great as Flynn's initial menace.

He's got a great part in the Cary Grant/Ronald Colman dramady "Talk of the Town," and is in "Gone with the Wind." That's pretty good for an actor whose training was churning out westerns.

These three items are all from his silent career at FBO studios. Tyler was a popular western star whose job was eliminated when FBO became RKO. He even announced he was going to change his name so he could start his career over as a non-western performer. That didn't happen and Tyler took the lead in a series of very low budget silent westerns at the dawn of the talkie era.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Tyler was willing to play the bad guy, which was often a showy role for an actor – Buster Crabbe told me he played a bad guy once in "Swamp Fire" and enjoyed it – and because of that choice he was able to perform in some pretty solid pictures.

I've been think that once I finish the SECRET PROJECT proposal perhaps I should seek someone to do a Tom Tyler scrapbook bio.

© 2010 Gordon Michael Dobbs

2010-07-14T08:11:00.001-07:00

Favorite tunes

My nephew Douglas! asked me the other days what my favorite songs are. I really didn't have an answer for him, except "Sing Sing Sing" came to immediate mind and he seemed a little disappointed that it didn't have any words!

The following are pieces of music that, no matter what mood I'm in, make feel better.

I interviewed Mel Taylor the drummer in The Ventures and saw them in person in the mid-1980. They were great!

Could this be the single best piece of swing music ever written?

The driving beat of this theme song of a Fifties private eye show make it a perfect song to drive to late at night.

I interviewed Don McLean and he was such a jerk that I didn't listen to his music for years afterwards. This is a great song, though.

Scott Joplin remains such a seminal force in American music.

Mary and I saw Juice Newton perform a few years back here in Springfield and she was in wonderful voice.

Elder statesman of the Blues Nation with a national anthem

What are some of your favorites?

2010-07-13T07:38:00.000-07:00

I've not posted some of the recent stories I've done for th newspapers I edit and thought the following would be of interest:

Societal collapse makes for gripping feature
At first glance, some people might wonder if a feature-length interview with a single person about essentially the factors that could lead to the end of American society as we know would make a good movie.

"Good" isn't the right term. "Collapse" is an amazing, compelling and frightening film thanks to its subject, journalist Michael Ruppert.

Let me say at the onset that I believe everyone, regardless of political belief, should see this film. It addresses issues that concern all of us. Buy it, rent it, but watch it.

Perhaps you've never heard about Ruppert before. I hadn't, but once I watched this film, just released on DVD, I started scouring the Web to read more about him.

Chris Smith, the man who directed the highly regarded documentary "American Movie," is able to paint a rich portrait of Ruppert with a limited cinematic palette.

Seated in what looks like a bunker or an interrogation room, Ruppert chain-smokes and talks about subjects seldom covered in the evening television news. Articulate, but clearly tired of the fight he has waged to have his stories noticed by the general public, Ruppert allows his emotions to overcome him at one point.

Occasionally, Smith underlines a point by cutting to public domain or news footage, but for the bulk of the film, the camera is on Ruppert.

A former Los Angeles police officer, Ruppert came to national prominence when he researched and broke a story that showed the CIA had imported illegal drugs into the country. That story and his subsequent reporting earned him death threats and harassment.

Unlike other outsiders who hawk books, videos and podcasts, Ruppert hasn't made a mini-empire from his work He said he is behind in his rent.

He is not without his critics who have questioned his theories and dismiss them as conspiracy.

What "Collapse" shows is, despite his considerable travails, Ruppert hasn't given up his fight and focuses on what he has been covering in his newsletter "From the Wilderness."

Ruppert documents how he has predicted certain political and economic events that have had serious repercussions on both this country and the rest of the world. In this film, though, he focuses on two major interlocking subjects: peak oil and the fragile world economic system.

Shot over several times in 2009, "Collapse" is especially relevant today with the BP oil crisis in the Gulf of Mexico. Ruppert speaks about how many scientists believe that we are on the downside of the bell curve in the amount of oil left in the world to consume. He points out we have built our civilization on relatively cheap fossil fuels, especially petroleum.

Part of that oil-based structure is our financial system, which in 2008 showed its house-of-cards-like status.

What will happen when we can't afford the oil we have left? That's the ultimate question Ruppert poses for the viewers. The answer, as we all know, is almost incomprehensible.

Ruppert's arguments and information are very persuasive and as a viewer I kept waiting for the moment he discussed solutions.

The moment never really comes as he said in the film, "I'm no messiah."

What he does emphasize is living within our environmental means. Population must be curbed, wind and solar energy solutions must be implemented, food production must once again be a local industry and buying gold isn't a bad idea.

The DVD's extras include a recent interview with Ruppert, who seemed to be in a better place in his life thanks to the response to the theatrical release of the film worldwide. The DVD also has much more interview footage that was cut for time.

***

Reminder Publications spoke to Ruppert last week, who is busy promoting not only the DVD release of the film, but also his new Web site venture www.collapsenet.com, an online subscriber-supported newsletter.

Ruppert is very happy with the film. "Chris Smith got it absolutely right," he said.

Commenting on the oil leak in the Gulf, he said the two main themes of the film are seen in that one event.

"It's all about the way money works," he said. "We looking at extinction in the Gulf," he added.

He said he has learned and confirmed through several sources the problem is not just the deepwater well that is pouring thousands of barrels of oil into the water each day, but also many additional leaks that are coming through fissures in the surrounding sea floor. He asserted both BP and the federal government know of the additional leaks and are not telling the public.

"They have absolutely no idea how to deal with it," he said.

What Ruppert is now saying is by the end of the year, there might be between five and 10 million refugees from the Gulf States. As the crisis deepens the jobs of more and more people will be affected, he said.

Florida may be "doomed," he added.

He believes strongly in "people seeking local solutions" to the problems facing the country.

"It's so clear. It's happening everywhere," he added.

On speaking tours in northern California, Oregon, Washington and Vermont, he has seen evidence of "act locally, think globally" axiom and it has heartened him.

"People get it all over the world," he said.

He noted that on a recent trip to Martha's Vineyard, the "year-rounders" understand and are acting on the concept.

Since he said there is cataloging of these efforts, he sees his new Web site as a clearinghouse for information for these efforts.

Paramount among the new way of living is a greater emphasis on local food production, which Ruppert sees happening in a number of areas. He said Americans couldn't continue to import or transport food in the current manner.

Right now, profit is selected over common sense, he added.

He dismissed the power of the federal government to actually make the necessary changes to prepare for an era with decreasing oil and said he sees mayors and county officials as the government officials most inclined to take steps to change on a local level.

He even questioned whether or not the United States would be the same political entity in a few years, with states breaking up into smaller entities.

Still despite the grim nature of his message, Ruppert expressed hope. In the film he tells the fable of the 100th monkey. The story tells of one monkey that learned to wash his food. He taught another and so on. When the 100th monkey learned how to do this, suddenly all of the monkeys in the population started doing it.

"Maybe we're reaching the 100th monkey," he said of the acceptance and taking action on the changes Ruppert sees as inevitable.

WWI documentary reveals lasting history in Europe

While living in a small Belgium village, retired University of Massachusetts Professor Ed Klekowski and his wife Libby didn't realize the history that surrounded them.

They soon did as the town was near the legendary Western Front, the battle line between the Allies and Germany in Belgium and France during World War I (WWI).

Once, however, the husband and wife realized the artifacts of that conflict -- "the war to end all wars" as it was described at the time -- literally abound in the nearby woods and fields, they became intrigued.

For the Klekowskis that meant producing a documentary. Their new film, "Yanks Fight the Kaiser: A National Guard Division in WWI," will be broadcast by WGBY on June 30 at 8 p.m.

Examining history on film is nothing new to the couple as they produced "Under Quabbin," "The Great Flood of 1936" and "Dynamite, Whiskey & Wood: Connecticut River Log Drives 1870-1915" for the local PBS station.

Their new film is the second part of a trilogy about WWI with their first film being "Model T's to War: American Ambulances on the Western Front."

Ed Klekowski said, "Our interest in WWI began in 2004 while living in Leuven (Louvain), Belgium. We were waiting to go into the university library, when a Belgian student asked if we were Americans. She then gave us a lecture on how the old university library had been burned by the German Army in 1914, and how American students from grammar schools, high schools and colleges had donated money to rebuild the library in the 1920's. And how every July 4th the American flag is flown from the library bell tower as a thank you.

"Well, we were hooked; we had to learn more, the war to end all wars became a passion," he continued. "We soon were visiting Western Front battlefields every weekend.

"And one weekend we visited Apremont and saw the fountain that Holyoke had put up honoring its Yankee Division soldiers; you could say it spoke to us," he added. "We walked around the village and into the woods behind -- and there were the trenches! They seemed haunted, artifacts were everywhere. We had to tell this story."

Traveling to France and visiting the village rebuilt by Belle Skinner of Holyoke, Klekowski recalled thinking, "What's Holyoke doing in the middle of France?"

As the couple's film documents, the Yankee Division, made of National Guard troops initially from Massachusetts and Connecticut, was the first American unit to arrive in France to assist the Allies in the war. Soliders from Western Massachusetts were part of that unit.

The troops managed to skip their combat training in the United States and had to be trained and equipped by the French. By April 1918, though, because of their bravery and success in attacking the German trenches, the French awarded the Croix de Guerre to the division, becoming the first American military unit to be decorated by a foreign government.

The film uses much archival movie footage and still photographs and Klekowski explained a Signal Corps unit documented the division's activities.

Klekowski said finding and assembling that footage represented a year's work in itself. Local historical institutions such as the Wistariahurst Museum also supplied photos and information.

"Everyone was forthcoming with materials," Klekowski said. "We could have made a two-hour show."

The reading of memoirs represented the personal side of the war and Klekowski noted the early 20th century was a time when many people kept diaries and wrote detailed letters.

Step inside the woods of the Western Front of France and Belgium and Klekowski said you'd find the evidence of war where the troops left it. He said the actual front was only two to three miles wide and about 400 miles long. The mark of years of assaults and defensive actions taking place in the same basic strip of land can still be seen today.

In the film, Klekowski tours WWI bunkers that are still in place and shows how shell casings and unexploded shells have lain undisturbed the better part of a century after the conflict.

"The woods look like New England," he said. "Except here they were shaped by glaciers and there by artillery."

In the woods, one can find stumps of trees with shrapnel embedded in them.

He also said the woods are cluttered with a multitude of bottles. The French troops drank wine, while the Germans drank beer and schnapps. He said that one contemporary account described "No Man's Land" -- the area between the lines of opposing troops "looking like a local garbage dump."

© 2010 by Gordon Michael Dobbs

2010-07-06T13:14:00.000-07:00

Okay, please explain the following objections to me:

and this one as well:

Don't conservatives support the effort to get to the truth of the oil spill in the Gulf? Don't conservatives want to protect those who have served their nation? Please don't tell me it's a matter of fiscal responsibility – the Republican members of Congress during the Bush years went along with raising the deficit. Suddenly, they've got religion?

2010-06-25T11:26:00.000-07:00

Photos along the Holyoke Canalwalk

I have to say if I had money to invest in a building I'd do it in the Paper City. Projects such as the Canalwalk – the first phase was opened on Friday – along with the high performance computing center and the eventual return of passenger rail make Holyoke more and more attractive.

Here is a random collection of pipes and turbines that now sits near the Canalwalk. I know it has just been dumped there, but it looks like sculpture.

You see nature reclaiming itself even in the center of an urban complex. This patch of plants hides a waterway flowing from the canal. It looks like a typical wetlands.

Looking toward Appleton Street along the Canalway.

2010-06-23T08:26:00.000-07:00

Random Springfield photos

I was at the groundbreaking for the new home for ReStore on Tuesday and couldn't help but wonder if the former Sunshine Arts building, which is next door, could find a new use. It doesn't look like it's in bad shape.

High School of Commerce grad Springfield Mayor Domenic Sarno wouldn't cave to the demands of the crowd and wear a Tech High School hat at the groundbreaking of the new state back-up data center at the Tech site. Maybe, though, he didn't want "hat head."

I was walking down Bridge Street and spotted this display at a beauty school. It looks like a special effect from an Indonesian horror film. Can you imagine working in the factory that produces plastic heads and hands for these displays? How wonderfully bizarre.

As part of the sidewalk on Bridge Street is this relic of the past. Max Zeller was a successful furrier who had a long-time store on Bridge Street. Zeller is long gone as is his store and the popularity of fur coats.

2010-06-17T08:41:00.000-07:00

More fun with mug shots

From today's e-mail, a posting from Sgt. John Delaney of the Springfield Police Department:

"The Springfield Police Department Narcotics Division under the direction of Sgt. Neil Maloney and Sgt. Martin Ambrose conducted an investigation on Cocaine sales coming from the Forest Park address located at 16 Cloverdale Street. The investigating detectives determined that a Kevin Wilson age 38 of 16 Cloverdale Street was living in the dwelling with his girlfriend Damaris Ortiz age 33 and they were dealing large amounts of Cocaine by making 'deliveries' of the illegal narcotic all over the 'City of Homes.' The dwelling was held under surveillance and the officers observed Wilson on several occasions make deliveries in his Taurus and he would bring his two children, age 9 & 10 while he dealt Cocaine to waiting customers in different parking lots located in Springfield.

"Yesterday at 7:00 P.M. the surveillance officers observed Wilson leave his home with his two kids and proceed to drive to the parking lot of "Friendly's" on Sumner Avenue and make a Cocaine sale to a waiting customer. They observed the 'Father of the Year' (its almost Fathers Day) leave the car and make the sale while he left his two kids in the car. The detectives then followed him to Island Pond Road where he made another sale. After the sale they followed Wilson to Wilbraham Av. where they attempted to pull the vehicle over. When Wilson spotted the cops he attempted to swallow the remaining Cocaine. The officers tried to stop the cocaine from being swallowed and Wilson resisted the police in front of his kids. The police retrieved 4.5 grams of Crack Cocaine and he was arrested. The detectives then returned to 16 Cloverdale Street with a Search warrant where they arrested the girlfriend and found the following items ...
85 grams of Cocaine
$3,000.00 in cash
.9mm semi-automatic handgun fully loaded
packaging material
scales and drug paraphernalia
Arrested are......
1) Kevin Wilson age 38 of 16 Cloverdale Street
2) Damaris Ortiz age 33 of 16 Cloverdale Street ...charges....
a) Trafficking in Cocaine 28-100 grms
b) Violation of a Drug Free School Zone
c) Poss. of a Firearm
d) Poss. of Ammo
e) * Wilson is charged with Resisting Arrest
f) * Wanton/Reckless Behavior, risk of injury to child
The children were taken to the Police Station where workers from D.C.F. arrived at station and took custody of the kids.
Both defendants will be arraigned in Springfield District Court today."

wait for it

2010-06-15T17:53:00.000-07:00

If you don't understand it right now, please realize we are seeing a true environmental apocalypse in the Gulf, one that will affect the world for many years to come and create a refugee problem as people, unable to work, must leave and seek work and housing elsewhere.

Security should be in the hands of law enforcement or the National Guard, not rent-a-cops and goons.

This might be the moment in American history at which we have the kind of revolution that Thomas Jefferson wrote was necessary for the health of the Republic. If the Tea Party types were actually serious about fundamental change, if the Progressives were serious about change, this insane corporate/government clusterf*ck should be the trigger.

We can lay this at the feet of the federal government. Consider this : "In 1995, both houses of Congress passed and President Bill Clinton signed the Deep Water Royalty Relief Act (S.395), which granted a royalty "holiday" to oil and gas companies drilling in government-owned deep waters in the Gulf of Mexico for leases sold between 1996 and 2000. Specifically, under the program, companies would not have to pay the normal royalties except when market prices reached $34 a barrel for oil and $4 per thousand cubic feet for natural gas. At the time, oil and gas prices were fairly low, and supporters of the bill argued it would provide an incentive for petroleum companies to drill for oil and natural gas inside the U.S." Sourcewatch

Always remember that Bill Clinton was just Republican light.

That was followed with "In 2005, Congress passed and President Bush signed the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (H.R. 6). which included a variety of provisions to provide royalty relief to oil and gas companies. Environmental and taxpayer groups criticized the legislation. Sara Zdeb, Legislative Director of Friends of the Earth, criticized the legislation as it came out of conference, saying, 'the bill hands over billions in taxpayer dollars to America’s worst polluting industries while shortchanging renewable energy and energy efficiency—proven solutions that reduce our dependence on oil.'[7]"

Another shot from the Bushies: In 2006, Congress passed and the President signed the Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and Senate Energy Committee Chairman Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), coauthored the plan to open 8.3 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico and share 37.5 percent of the new royalty revenues, dedicated to coastal protection, with Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi and Alabama. An additional 12.5 percent will be dedicated to the state side of the Land and Conservation Fund, which funds the acquisition of parks and green spaces across the country.[8] An industry-led coalition called the Consumer Alliance for Energy Security applauded passage of the bill and claimed that they “played a prominent role” in winning its passage.[9]

"Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s Energy Program criticized the legislation:
'America is already the third biggest oil producer in the world. The problem isn’t that we produce too little oil – it’s that we consume too much, using one of every four barrels of oil in the world each day. The smartest way to break our reliance on oil is to increase fuel economy standards and invest in energy efficiency measures and mass transit... Left to their own devices, oil companies will just keep drilling in environmentally sensitive federal land and offshore areas, and fueling their corporate wealth in the process.'"[10]

This is not a Republican or Democratic issue. This is corporate short-term greed. They don't care how they make their money, as long as it is made.

2010-06-14T19:11:00.000-07:00

A pivotal scene from "Metropolis" and a fascinating glimpse behind it.

The wait was well worth it

The absolute joy of being a film fan is seeing something you never thought you would ever see. That’s why I’ve been going to Cinefest for 20 years or so – so I can sit in a hotel convention center and see films that are unlikely ever to appear on DVD or be run on television outside of a 3 a.m. showing on Turner Classics.

Back in the 1980s, I used to attend informal gatherings of several film collectors who had acquired 16mm prints of films discarded from television stations or other sources. There was a thrill of seeing something that was an unknown commodity – a thrill that turned sometimes or horror or boredom as you realized a film had deserved its obscurity.

There are plenty of “lost” movies – movies that are no longer easy to see because all prints have been destroyed or literally been lost. Most of the films of the silent era are gone. They have decomposed through the use of the unstable nitrate film stock or they were actively destroyed to make room in vaults for more contemporary films – films with a value for re-release.

Film fans who are younger than 50 or so don’t realize that especially in the era before television studios re-released popular films to new audiences. A movie such as “King Kong” or “Gone With the Wind” had multiple releases. There was an earning potential with these films.

But silent films? Outside of a handful of archives and specialized theaters there wasn’t much demand. It’s little wonder that so many silent films were “lost.”

The output of one studio, FBO, has vanished aside from just a few titles. Merged and molded into RKO for the sound period, the silent films of FBO were destroyed.

There is a romance about these lost films. Will they ever turn up? Will they hold up to the legend that surrounds them?

There is the Holy Trinity of lost movies, “Greed,” “London After Midnight,” and “Metropolis.” Erich Von Stroheim’s eight-hour cut of “Greed” will undoubtedly never be seen, largely, I think, because the studio cut the film down to a standard length and probably trashed the footage immediately.

Perhaps “London After Midnight” will emerge one day. There are still quite a number of Lon Chaney Sr. fans who would love to see this early depiction of a vampire.

“Metropolis” suffered a fate like “Greed,” in which studio politics took an important work away from a filmmaker and altered it. What’s worse for a work of art – to disappear completely or to exist in a truncated form?

Until the release of the Giorgio Moroder restored version in 1984, I never even tried to watch it despite the fact it was in the public domain and fairly easy to find on cheap VHS.

Some purists might have condemned Moroder for his use of rock music – I think his choices suited the film well – but he was the man who started the rehabilitation of the film and its rediscovery by a new audience and I certainly thank him.

When the restored version of 2002 was released I was privileged to see it in the former Columbia Pictures screening room in Manhattan. I sat there knowing I was watching something no one had seen since the film’s release in 1927.

Not quite.

While that restoration was done with the best material and research available at the time, the newly released restoration is indeed – with the exception of just one or two scenes – director Fritz Lang’s movie.

Not only are scenes long since missing from a near complete 16mm print of the original cut of the film, but for the first time researchers had a blueprint for the editing of the film. While the shooting script certainly gave indications of what scene went where, the final edit, since the studio, UFA, had destroyed it several weeks after the release of the film in Berlin, remained unknown.

Lang was quoted disowning the film and I can’t blame him. Lang apparently never watched the film again in any of its forms – he died in 1976 well before the Morodor version was released.

Was all the effort to find and restore the film worthwhile? Yes, it was as my friend Mark and I discovered recently when we traveled to Boston to see the film at the Coolidge Corner.

The movie as a whole stands a remarkable work. Its visuals are outstanding and amazing on the big screen.

Its theme that the heart must be the mediator between the hearts and the hands – we must remain spiritually connected in the face of technology that can dehumanize us – might seem to some as amazingly hokey, especially from a movie maker known for his gritty American film noir work.

Perhaps its my age or my prejudice to like this movie, I found its message, however simplistic, to have real meaning in today’s virtual world.

Despite its length of two and half hours, the film moves along in its new edition at a good pace. Finally we have the entire story, which makes perfect sense, and we have a complete vision of a future world in which technology certainly has outstripped society’s ability to cope with it.

While some might chuckle at the class struggle depicted in the film – H.G. Wells gave a negative review of the film at its release for its “foolishness, cliché, platitude, and muddlement about mechanical progress and progress in general” – I don’t think we’re all that far away from the kind of divides we see in the film with today's erosion of the middle class and the growing poverty in this country.

The acting in the film drew laughter at some points. That’s to be expected, as the style of acting here is radically different that what audiences are used to today. I do think Brigette Helm did a tremendous job as the virginal Maria and her out of control robotic counterpart. And nearly all movie mad scientists owe much to the archetype created by Rudolf Klein-Rogge as Rotwang.

Although the original symphonic score is appropriate in the film, it didn’t serve the erotic dancing sequence very well. A more contemporary score would have been better there. That quibble is quite minor.

If you have the chance to see the film in a theater by all means do so.

2010-05-28T06:48:00.000-07:00

My current state of mind during a double layout week. Calgon take me away!

2010-05-27T11:58:00.001-07:00

I love the press releases I get from Springfield police spokesperson Sgt. John Delaney. Here is one I received today:

"Yesterday at 1:39 P.M. an 82 year old female city resident was pulling into the "Bank of America" lot located at 1316 Carew Street. The female was driving her car into the lot to do some banking. Her windows were open because of the heat. The elderly female victim parked her car when an unknown male approached her on the passengers side window. The unknown male asked the female victim if she knew where the Springfield Plaza was? As she turned to point to where it was the thief reached into her car and stole her purse containing $50.00 and all her ATM cards. The thug then ran to a waiting silver colored Jeep Cherokee and fled. There was a witness in the lot who observed the crime and jotted down the plate number. There were three people in the Jeep. The car fled towards Chicopee. Bank employees assisted the victim in canceling her ATM card and the police were called to take the report. As the bank was canceling her card they received information that someone was trying to access her account from an ATM on Springfield St. in Chicopee. The ATM was located at the Honeyland Farm Store. (Later, an employee of the Honeyland stated that all three subjects from the Jeep tried to use the card and one of them told the clerk that their mother gave them the ATM and to buy anything they want. The alert clerk didn't buy this garbage and threw the scum out). The Officers in Springfield broadcast a "lookout" for the Jeep and Officer Edwin Vasquez of the Springfield Police Departments "Ordinance Unit" spotted the Jeep traveling down Newbury Street. He pulled the car over across the Chicopee line. Chicopee PD came to assist and the trio was arrested. The victim made a positive ID. The video at Honeyland Store shows the three brain surgeons trying to use the stolen credit card. The victim ID's and money were recovered in the Jeep. Great job by the victim, the witness, the bank employees and the Springfield and Chicopee P.D. Let hope they throw away the key on these three......
1) Brenda Manchino age 21 of 29 Los Angeles Street
2) James Gelinas age 18 of 29 Los Angeles Street
3) Joseph Martinelli age 19 of 236 Springfield Street, Chicopee ... charges ...
a) Larceny from a Person Over 65 years of age
b) Receiving Stolen Property
* Martinelli had Cocaine on his person (shocking, I know) he was charged with the Poss. of Cocaine also."

And now the best part, the mug shots!

Wait for it...

2010-05-25T18:04:00.000-07:00

An ode to growing older, yet another year

It’s just a few days from my 56th birthday and I feeling rather introspective.

The reasons are many.

I don’t believe I’ve succumbed to middle age craziness, but I do realize that certain things in my life and personality have changed.

Now I’m very lucky – now that’s the dog! My wife of 31 years still likes me. Loving someone is a lot tougher in the long run if you don’t actually like the person to whom you’re married. My foster daughter and my granddaughter care for me, as does my nephew Douglas. My other nephews, although fine young men and I never really much of a chance to build a relationship.

I’ve got a good relationship with my brother.

I’m gainfully employed doing something I like and, despite what some co-workers think, I’m actually good at – oops, dangled my participle. Our credit card debt is low. We’re paying the bills more or less on time. I’m appreciative of the blessings in our life.

But I do have some issues.

I have a decreasing tolerance for unnecessary bullshit. Now let’s face it everyone faces necessary bullshit at work and in the family – the situations in which you close your eyes, grit your teeth and move on because you have to. As a younger man, I always took it on the chin, but now I’m more apt to sift through the unnecessary and necessary and say something.

My tolerance is waning. The following thoughts frequently run through my mind:

Why do you insist on mistreating animals? Why play that damned music so loud I can feel it? Why throw your bag of fast food wrappers on the street? Why look me in the face and lie and know that I realize you’re lying? Why have children when you can’t care for them?

Why do you invoke Christ’s name, but behave as if you’ve never read the Bible? Why do you think supporting hate is something He would have approved of? Killing in His name is acceptable?

Why do so many people squander the life and opportunities they’ve been given? Why do people who are young really and truly believe that youth trumps age and experience?

Why do so many of the people in power actually do something to help make things better rather than support the corporate status quo?

Now the last 31 years of my life have gone by in a frickin’ flash and time is accelerating. I can feel it every week getting just a bit faster.

I’ve got stuff to do. Books to write. Places to see. Seegars to smoke. Wild Turkey to think about drinking. Movies to enjoy. Friends to cherish. Every minute of my life counts more and more and more.

That’s why at age 56 – almost – I just can’t stand the petty crap I’m forced to wade through on a daily basis.

Perhaps I do have some sort of middle-aged craziness. Ah well, I plan to have a very large piece of cake, a beer and a smoke on May 29th and screw ‘em.

2010-05-17T16:51:00.000-07:00

One of the eight cats, DG, likes to keep me company when I write. Here he is at about 6:30 this morning as I was trying to meet all of my deadlines today. I wish I could have slept a bit more myself.

Catching Up
It's been a very busy month so far and frankly I've been boggled. if I'm not working for the newspapers, I've been trting to catch up at home and battle a frequent fatigue.

But I've done a few fun things, such as attend the graduation ceremony for the current class of the Center for Cartoon Studies thanks to my pal Steve Bissette who is a much loved instructor there. I've had the pleasure of lecturing at the school several times and I am constantly amazed at the high level of work I see. Some of the senior thesis projects I saw this past weekend on display were truly ready to published – very polished, professional pieces of work.

There's a lot of talent at this school and I can see why Steve loves teaching there. Seldom have I seen a school/business environment where there seems to be so much genuine support and respect among faculty and students. This certainly wasn't like what I saw working at a college for seven years.

Evan Dorkin's commencement address was one of the best I've heard: funny, sentimental, blistering real and heartfelt.

Mary, Lucky and I also went on our first fishing expedition on beautiful Beaver Lake in Ware – "Come for the fishing, but stay for the beaver! " – and Capt. Dave on the good ship "Fishing Boat" – he reminded his lovely wife Kim that fishing boats aren't supposed to be clean – caught quite a whopper, as you can see below.

This monster was 50 pounds if he was an ounce. Needless to say we didn't try to get the hook out of his mouth.

I've got a bunch of new movie items that I need to scan. Stay tuned.

2010-05-06T05:39:00.000-07:00

My wife has a blog!

Mary and I have been married for 31 years and our relationship can be characterized as one of mutual infection.

That sound romantic, doesn't it?

When we met she had no idea about who Max Fleischer was nor was she educated in the lore of obscure exploitation cinema.

I thought her father was speaking a foreign language with his Scottish accent and Glasgow slang.

Now you can quiz Mary on bizarre film stuff – remember this is a woman with a personally inscribed poster of "Insemenoid" from both the producer and director – and she's pretty impressive. Quick, who is the director of "The Corpse Grinders?" She'll shoot back "Ted V. Mikels." She's met Ted as well.

And me? She's says that I'm more Scottish than she is at times. I've certainly embraced her culture and heritage.

One divide remanded, though, between us – blogging, Facebook,etc. She is now on Facebook and now she is blogging about her scrapbooking activities. She used to make fun of scrapbooking – she has been an active cross-stitcher for years as well as a beader – but couldn't get into the rapidly growing hobby.

That's right, Mary was a hobby snob.

Then something clicked and, whoosh, she's into glue dots, and pages, and stamps, and embossing and make and takes and – you get the picture.

Now she is blogging about her scrapbooking, so she has succumbed to another of my dark sides. I wonder what I will have to learn about?

Check it out.

2010-04-25T12:23:00.001-07:00

Why I love W.C. Fields

Fields was perhaps the only American comic who had a sequence in a major studio film gags centered around a blind person

I spent a good part of my recent vacation at the Cape finished the best book – and I think I've read them all – on the life and career of W.C. Fields.

Thankfully many of his films have made it onto video, although in collections, rather than single releases. I hope younger film fans take to time to discover this true American original.

James Curtis's book explodes many of the myths surrounding Fields, such as his hatred of kids, his drinking habits and his general reputation as a curmudgeon. Instead through many interviews and his own letters a far more complex portrait emerged of a hard-working self-made man who understood his comic gift and fought very hard to bring his vision forward.

Go out and find this book if you're a Fields fan.

I've always been attracted to people who are individuals. They don't follow trends. They don't make themselves over into something widely accepted. They stand and fall on their own merits.

Fields certainly falls into that description. He could employ slapstick, but it never seemed stereotypical. His drinking jokes were unique and his views on American families were not like any other. There was no other comic with a point of view such as his.

Like Keaton, I think Fields would find a pretty wide contemporary audience if his films were given a chance. The two were very popular among the college crowd in the 1960s and '70s and I think a revival would be successful.

The first film star I ever interviewed was Buster Crabbe, who was quite gracious to me. I remember being so nervous I could barely stop my leg was bouncing as I spoke to him on the phone. Crabbe worked with Fields on "You're Telling Me" and said he was just like his screen image in real life. At the time, I thought what Crabbe meant is that he was a guy who drank too much and disliked children and dogs – the short-hand image Fields grew to have. Yet if you watch the film – one of his best – he plays a well-meaning family man who eventually triumphs despite his many short-comings.

After reading this book, I prefer my latter interpretation.

2010-04-23T14:43:00.000-07:00

I spoke this week to students at the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont on public relations, marketing and media relations issues. I offered my services because what I have seen is the average person involved in some sort of creative pursuit is more than likely at the mercy of someone else when it comes to getting the word out on a product.

Today one can create comics, a prose book, movies or music much much more easily with the advent of the new digital technology. While some futurists would like people to believe the Web and the social networking sites now allow greater exposure for alternative or independent efforts – they do – the playing field is still not even.

Having a Web site and a Twitter feed is not enough.

It takes a multi-tiered concerted effort to find an audience for a product and to create a brand. Using everything from personal selling at conventions to considering ad buys to support a product or appearance is all part of the mix. What I have seen and experienced, each creator needs to have a very active part in this process.

The following is an outline I used for the class. I'm happy to answer questions from people as this was a two-hour class. Post here or e-mail me at mdobbs at crocker.com.

Why make a concerted pr/marketing effort? Competition for entertainment dollar and justified paranoia: don’t trust your publisher to take care of you.

1. Who are you? What is your product?

Can you describe it in 30 seconds – elevator pitch?

2. Secret of success is in knowing your product and yourself. Where does your product fit in?

For example, I discovered my animation magazine did not sell particularly well in comics shops, for example. Although one might think this was a legit market, I discovered comics fans are not necessarily cartoon fans. I fared better with regular bookstores.

Where would your product best fit in? Who is your audience? You must do research to make sure that where and to whom you present your product

Essentials: Prepare yourself for personal marketing. If after your pitch, if someone expresses interest. Be prepared. Have a business card. Can you put your book as a PDF on a CD? A CD is easier to have in pocket or purse than your book.

Importance of having a blog and a web site with your name in the URL. Naturally be on Facebook and Twitter. The easier it is to find you, the better.

Remember: You are the brand. Properties come and go, but you need to be known.

3. You must fit your product with the right audience. To do so, you must do research.
Example: My experience with my project with Steve Bissette, "The Year in Fear Calendar" was a failure on EVERY level because I trusted the publishing staff and their premises and because I didn't do my research. We found out comic book shops in 1991 weren't interested in something like a calendar. We sold 125 of a 2,000 press run. Next I discovered our calendar came out too late for regular stores to consider buying. Its huge size and lack of a hole – and of course it was laid out not as an effective calendar with the days of the week – would have made it a challenge for any retailer to display.

Much of this pain could have been avoided if I had done my research.

4. Let’s talk about the first level of pr/marketing – conventions.
Research is important. Is the convention the right one? What is the price point range of the audience? Don't waste your time trying to sell comics at a Star trek convention for example, or have really expensive items at a small regional show.

Have a range of items and price points. Can you have a $2 or $3 item on the table as well as a $12?

Conventions teach how to sell. Improper way: sitting at table not paying attention to potential customers – drawing, writing, yakking. Right way is to engage customers and to have right price points at right prices.

5. Next step: spreading the word.
Again research is important. Where do you publicize your product?

What is the news significance of your product? New book from acclaimed artist? First book? Good reviews?

Reviews: how to you get them? Do you know someone whose name would help sell your book? Seriously, use them! Think about handing out copies at cons to well known types. Always include business cards.

Check out the following web sites for their submission requirements:

http://weeklycomicbookreview.com/

http://www.comicsbulletin.com/

http://comics.ign.com/

http://www.bonafidecomics.com/

http://www.tcj.com/

http://www.csnsider.com/

http://www.cbgxtra.com/

Podcasts

www.comicspodcasts.com

http://www.comicgeekspeak.com/

http://www.ifanboy.com/

Do your own podcast and videos to promote appearances, conventions, etc.

To get stories in the mainstream press, you need a hook or a reason for the story: local artist, first book, second book, won award, lauded by critics, etc. This is where a good review can come in handy to sell an editor on doing a story.

First, find out the right editor to send material and what they want and how they want it. Look at web site or call.
Prepare materials according to instructions.

What’s the best press release? A one-page document that answers the questions of who, what, when, how and why and spells out the hook of the story.

Send materials and follow up several days later with phone call. Be polite.

6. Advertising
It’s important to realize that even the best free marketing campaign should be supplemented by advertising.

Put an advertising page in your books that lists other publications of yours and how to buy them. Consider trading ads with other creators.

Consider forming advertising and distribution collectives with other like-minded creators. Create a pool of money and look for logical ad buys to promote books and appearances.

Remember basic rule of advertising: smaller ads that appear regularly have more impact than big one-shot ads.

Promotional items – "freebies" – ideally should not be free. One of the CCSers prepared a sampler that sold for a $1. They gave it away to key people but sold the rest at a price point that allowed people to take a risk without much risk – great idea.

© 2010 by Gordon Michael Dobbs

2010-04-15T16:08:00.000-07:00

Scenes from the Cape

Sitting on the beach of our timeshare, enjoying a book, a seegar and an adult beverage, the Fat Man forgets about deadlines, advertisers and politicians.

At Jack's Outback 2 in Yarmouth Port, I encounter a mind-boggling breakfast, stuffed french toast. We go to the eatery because Rachael Ray featured it in her book "$40 a Day." We later find out this isn't the original restaurant nor owner, who lost his lease, and the subsequent owners have used his name. The food was good, though and affordable.

The Edward Gorey House is a great museum dedicated to the life and work of the acclaimed late artist. He lived in this house in Yarmouth Port from 1986 until his death in 2000. If you're a fan of his work, this is a must see. For more info go here.

Mary always takes a wade at the Cape regardless of weather. Here, her toes take a dip near the Cape Cod Canal.

2010-04-13T12:22:00.000-07:00

Kane Richmond is behind the mask – something the Shadow of air and print never wore

At last, the Monogram Shadow films

I'm not sure how many people today have actually realized at the enormous shift in popular culture that has happened since the success of the Christopher Reeve Superman film and the first Star Wars movie.

In the case of "Superman," the success showed there is an adult audience for material once viewed as just for kids. My friend, veteran movie producer Richard Gordon, once observed how the major studios shifted their feature films to the subject matter once reserved for B-movie and independent films:science fiction, action, horror and adaptations from comic books, pulp novels and radio shows.

"Star Wars" showed the power of the modern merchandising and the enduring ability of a "cult" film to grow a loyal audience.

One would think given today's producing standards, movie makers would have jumped at the chance to bring the successful Shadow character to the screen. The Shadow novels were very popular and the weekly radio show endured over two decades.

A property such as that was not considered "serious," by the big studios then and The Shadow was relegated to an unsuccessful feature made by Grand National, a Columbia serial and then three features produced by Pathe and released through Monogram.

I have several stills from the films (which I will post once I return from vacation) and as I'm a big fan of Kane Richmond, I have been wanting to see them for a long time.

Thanks to a dealer at Cinefest, I now am the proud owner of the three films and they are amazing – in the wrong way.

The casting is fine as Richmond was a veteran B movie hero. If the screenplays had called for it I'm sure he would have made a great Shadow. Instead he was called on to spend most of his time as Lamont Cranston, the meddling nephew of the police commissioner, who insists in solving mysteries before the police can. He and his girlfriend Margo Lane were transformed into a B movie version of Nick and Nora Charles – squabbling and cracking wise.

Although Burbank is a minor character in the first film, "The Shadow Returns," he is the only Shadow associate except for Shreveport the taxi driver who is carried over from the novels or radio show. There is no mention of The Shadow "clouding the minds of men" nor does Richmond ever look like The Shadow with the piercing eyes, red scarf and hawk-like nose.

When he is The Shadow, he is sometimes seen as a shadow, implying some sort of transformation and super power, although it is never clear just what is being presented.

The intent in all three films was to present a generic mystery with comic/romantic overtones that could capitalize on The Shadow without actually having to make an authentic adaptation.

That's not to say there aren't some interesting moments in all three movies ( released in 1946). There's a nasty reporter in a very film noir story element in the second film "Behind the Mask" and the overly complicated plot of "The Missing Lady," the third and last film has some very good photography that any big budget film noir would have been proud to have.

But overall they are disappointing, but in my mind they are not as disappointing as the big budget Shadow film with Alac Baldwin. Now those folks should have known better.

© 2010 by Gordon Michael Dobbs

2010-04-12T06:16:00.000-07:00

Mary and Mike at Bass River Beach, S. Yarmouth, Mass.

Caution Reminder Publications readers. Dobbs uses some blunt language here. Read at your own risk.

On vacation!

Now there is a guy at work who razzes me every time I take time off. He is apparently offended that I have been able to negotiate four weeks vacation time from management.

But I don't actually take vacation very often.

I do take time off, but there is a difference. Usually, I take time off because I need to use it (or lose it) or to accomplish things I can't get done through the weekends.

Right now though I'm actually on a for real vacation – an extended period of time in which I have no work commitments. Well sort of, kind of. I still must write two pieces for the paper this week while on I'm on vacation,

The last time I took a real vacation was in 2006 when we went to Scotland. This year, we're at our time share at Cape Cod and I'm doing basically nothing.

I've got an excellent book on W.C. Fields I'm reading and have a bunch of DVDs to watch. So far I've furnished the three Shadow movies made in 1946 by Monogram starring Kane Richmond as Lamont Cranston. I've wanted to see these for years and will write about them later this week.

We've walked on the beach, ate a couple of nice restaurants and poked around.

I know the odds are when I return to work there will be unnecessary issues I will have to resolve as well as now a backlog of e-mail, etc.

Until then, frankly Scarlet, I don't give a shit!

2010-04-01T14:04:00.000-07:00

And yes, this is serious commentary from the most listened to man in talk radio. Hate is indeed easy and clearly profitable for Rush.

Here's another one:

Didn't George W. Bush use executive orders? Go here to check out his bunch