I had somehow stumbled on a film forum in 2009, and I don’t even recall the name of it. Reading through it, I saw a post about Erich Von Stroheim and the poster was asking … something, I don’t remember, but it was something I knew the answer to and offered it. A discussion snowballed and, as I was jabbering about Greed, bitching because it had never been released on DVD (it still hasn’t), another user piped in. I don’t even remember the user name he was using; only that he had Robert Mitchum from Night of the Hunter as his avatar. Over the next couple of days, Mr. Mitchum and I bandied back and forth about a number of topics, including Tod Browning, Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, etc. In the course of the convo, I believe I mentioned that I used to write essays on films for an art gallery magazine called “The Fringe,” had taken countless classes on film aesthetics, and dabbled in surreal indie films. Mr. Mitchum asked to see samples of my writing and I believe we exchanged emails, and… his name wasn’t Mr. Mitchum after all. It was Greg Smalley. He told me that he was starting an e-zine called 366 Weird Movies and he needed another writer, as he was the only one, and asked me to join him. I agreed, thinking it’d be fun, but on one condition: I didn’t want to get pegged into writing only about weird movies because my experience has been that, no matter what topic is chosen, once it’s named people start mantling a fundamentalist attitude to it. In other words, I wanted to remain stubbornly iconoclastic. Agreement made, I started with a reevaluation on Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931), and my Fringe Cinema subcategory was born.
My writing echoes my paintings. I go through many phases and I do not like to look back at old work, only being interested in what I’m working on currently. Greg plugged away at his List Entries, secured other writers, and it was years before I even submitted an official List entry myself. I was merely doing my own thing, week after week, and suddenly, years had gone by. Coming up for air, I often found that many movies I wanted to write about, Greg (or others) had already covered, goddammit. (Most of the reviews I had indeed read, but forgotten).
Still, it’s been a helluva decade with Greg, and I not only loved writing, but reading my peers in this family of misfits. I picked up a reputation, however, of being the site’s provocateur. I will say that I rarely set out to push people’s buttons. I just don’t give a hoot or a holler if I do, and I believe it’s an artist’s ethical responsibility to have the balls to write without inhibition and to always take an attitude of saying to hell with the status quo (and everything has the potential to develop its own status quo, even weird movie aficionados). Over the years, I’ve earned a few haters who, in their either/or mindset, wanted to label me as a liberal. I’ve never considered myself liberal Continue reading REFLECTING ON A DECADE OF 366 WEIRD MOVIES