VIDEODROME Hardcover Available Now

You may remember that my Studies in the Horror Film book on VIDEODROME was originally announced as forthcoming in both trade paperback and signed/numbered limited hardcover editions. Some of you have expressed a special interest in acquiring the hardcover, which did not materialize at the same time as the softcover, and a few of you may have even been holding out in favor of it. So I'm happy to be able to pass along the news that the hardcover edition is now in house at Millipede Press and available for purchase. Collectors should note this is the author's first-ever signed/numbered limited edition -- if you don't count a 20-copy signed/numbered edition of an illustrated prose poem called "Amelia Earhart" that I Kinko'd for a select group of friends back in the mid-1970s, and I don't think we should. Long live the VIDEODROME ordering page, which you can find here.

First VIDEODROME Review

While doing my morning net browsing, I was pleased and surprised to discover the first review of my new book VIDEODROME that I've seen on Steve Bissette's S.R. Bissette.com site. (Pictured on the left is a photo not included in the book, showing me interviewing actor James Woods on the set.) Go ahead and click on the review, then come back after reading it and I'll comment.

As with his earlier review of MARIO BAVA ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK, Steve is wonderfully enthusiastic and commendatory about the book itself ("a brilliant dissection of the collaborative creative process at work, hence of interest to anyone who is either a creator themselves or eager to understand the creative process") and his review is one that any writer would be pleased to receive. He also has some strong opinions on the subject of what he sees as my ratification of "pejorative terminology" -- in this case, my identification of VIDEODROME as a conceptual granddaddy of the subgenre we know today as "torture porn" -- and I'd like to take a moment to respond to this.

In the book's final chapter discussion of VIDEODROME's influence on contemporary horror trends, the phrase I actually use is "so-called 'torture porn'" and I hardly "dismiss these successors" with the "simplistic contempt" Steve mentions. In fact, my space limitations being what they were (I was contracted to deliver a 144-page book and was generously granted an extension to 160 pages), the whole discussion is limited to a single paragraph that is shared with its influence on films such as THE RING.

Steve may be needled by the fact that I've used the phrase without the "so-called" in some of my past VIDEO WATCHDOG writing, but I've always used it as a convenience, without any political bias nor, as best I can recollect, any critical bias. I see the term as analogous to one that I coined back in my 1980s writing for GOREZONE and FANGORIA -- "gornography" -- a humorous pun that, as a matter of fact, I remember Steve enjoying at the time. I suppose this is a particularly appropriate explanation of anything apropos of VIDEODROME, but Steve seems to have an entirely different subjective take on "torture porn" than I do, one that may well be more connected to reality (as most people perceive it) than my own. I've never seen it as anything but a descriptive term, poppy rather than pejorative, referring to films meant to arouse audiences with dramatizations of reductive cruelty. This probably has something to do with me finding the term "porn" more amiable and user-friendly than its more severe-sounding root word "pornography."

For all that, I've had letters on the subject in the past, which is why I took care to predicate the term with "so-called" in VIDEODROME. Even though I don't take the term as nergatively as some, I would hope this gesture shows a dawning sensitivity on my part to how other people perceive it and a resolve to use it with greater care and awareness.

Would You Believe... TWO New Books?

You know you've been really busy/distracted when someone has to remind you that you actually have two books coming out in a given month.

Yes, in addition to my Centipede Press book on VIDEODROME, I have another book streeting on September 16. It's not entirely mine, but I am one of the many contributors to THE BOOK OF LISTS: HORROR (edited by Amy Wallace, Del Howison and Scott Bradley) along with Stephen King, Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, VW's own Ramsey Campbell, Kim Newman and Richard Harland Smith, Johnny Ramone, Karl Edward Wagner, John Skipp, Eli Roth, Edgar Wright, Steve Niles, F.X. Feeney, James Gunn, Poppy Z. Brite, Jorg Buttgereit, Paul M. Jensen, Lisa Tuttle, Stephen Volk, Jack Ketchum, Barry Gifford, Richard Stanley, Ann Magnuson, Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni, Thomas Ligotti and many other luminaries. There's also an Introduction by the legendary Gahan Wilson. Scott Bradley tells me that I wrote the book's single longest article, which is titled "10 Horror Films That Aren't Horror Films," and Gahan singles it out for special mention in his Intro, so I feel very pleased about being a part of this project. It's a pleasure to share a forum with so many colleagues, friends and heroes -- not least of all Ann Magnuson, who I don't know, but for whom I've harbored a secret crush for at least twenty years. I'm told that her list is called "Ann Magnuson's 22 Sexiest Movie Monsters (Human and Otherwise)" and I'm looking forward to reading this core sample of her erotic imagination. THE BOOK OF LISTS: HORROR also has a MySpace page, which you can access here, and Richard Harland Smith shares a list of his own early favorite entries from his contributor's copy here.

Speaking of the VIDEODROME book, I received a call from Centipede's Jerad Walters over the weekend and he tells me that the first printing is now in hand. I'm expecting my personal copies to arrive within the next few days. I will be signing pages for a very limited hardcover printing, coming later, but signed copies of the VIDEODROME softcover will be available through Video Watchdog. There's a full-page ad in our next issue, #144, with full details -- and we'll also be presenting that ordering info here and on the VW website once our initial order is received.

VIDEODROME Turns 25

Notebook in hand, your friendly blogger observes Steve Johnson as he applies gore to the body of Barry Convex. From my first day on the VIDEODROME set, December 1981.

Photo (c) Donna Lucas

Going to the Mobius Home Video Forum today, I was surprised to find a thread in progress noting that David Cronenberg's VIDEODROME made its bow in 600 North American theaters 25 years ago, yesterday. People were being asked for their recollections, with a "cough, cough" aimed in my particular direction. Having taken the time to post a lengthy reply, I feel I should post it here as well, for the benefit of my daily visitors and also to help me keep track of it in the future:

I'm amazed to see this thread because, just last night (on the anniversary, as it were), I finished proofreading my book on VIDEODROME for Millipede Press. Today I have to attend to some photo captions and then I should be done, except for signing off on the changes to the text once they've been made.

I'm very pleased with the way the book is turning out, and I feel grateful toward my younger self for the extent and vigor of his curiosity. Piers Handling of the Academy of Canadian Cinema read an early draft of this material and said it was the best production history of a Canadian film he'd ever read; I don't think there's any question that it's better now, with one foot in 1981, 82 and 83 and the other in 2008.

I have a lot of memories connected to this film, including being present for James Woods' first bullet squib shot -- he was scared at first, but jubilant afterwards and cheerfully showed us the red mark caused by its concussion on his chest -- and laughing a lot at his on-set humor and antics.

I saw Les Carlson in his long underwear while his bullet squibs were being removed. He kept putting off our interview all day, then finally agreed to talk with me as he was having the squibs taken off at the end of a long day. The next morning, the production manager got in my face because Les had billed her overtime because of my interview! In fact, the production manager came close to throwing me off the set the very first day because, although I arrived with Cronenberg's approval, he had failed to get the production's permission for me to be there, and everything was top, top secret.

I remember Rick Baker talking on the set about the difficulties of having to be a business manager for EFX as well as an artist. He spoke to me more than once about wanting to retire, when he had enough money, and spend his life sculpting animals. I always heard reggae playing in his workshop, but in our last interview, he confided to me that he didn't really care for reggae, that it was his concession to the guys in EFX, whose average age was 20. I remember standing next to Rick one day, seeing that he was about a head shorter than me, and realizing that this was the guy who had played King Kong opposite Jessica Lange. Kong's hotel room was in the penthouse of the tallest building in Toronto and I stood with him on the balcony overlooking the city.

I remember being under the stage, pulling the cable that tore Barry Convex's upper lip as he had his memorable death scene. We were all wearing garbage bags to protect our clothes from the overrun of Karo blood and it was like being in a submarine. A pretty crew member sitting next to me began to strip and stopped when she got down to a T-shirt that said "Courage, My Love." Needless to say, I've never forgotten her and she's in the book.

I remember telling Cronenberg at the wrap party in March, as Elvis Costello sang in the background (on tape), that Philip K. Dick had just died.

I remember feeling a visceral reaction to my first viewing of the movie, partly engendered by the lower frequencies of Howard Shore's amazing score, and going to Cronenberg's house for dinner after my screening. David seemed nervous at first -- but relieved when I shook his hand and called him "Maestro." I was elated and, I'm sure, cursed more than was appropriate over dinner. I was young and in rarified air.

The movie itself is a miracle. It was shot by the seat of everyone's pants, without a firm middle or end, had a series of disastrous previews as it was being cut together, and somehow came together as what it is in the editing room. It bears little resemblance to any script I read. I love the movie but don't feel it is the perfect expression of what Cronenberg was going after; the time and money simply weren't there. VIDEODROME succeeds on the strength and vision of its ideas rather than how they coalesce into a story. As always, always happened on Cronenberg's films, some of the best scripted stuff got left out for some reason or other.

I later visited the sets of DEAD ZONE and THE FLY but with their escalating budgets and higher profile prima donna stars and various related/unrelated tensions, some of which were my own fault, they were not on the whole as pleasurable to visit. Overlooking the film's failure at the boxoffice, and the failure of my work to surface in any faithful version till sometime later this year, I regard VIDEODROME as one of my life's happiest adventures.

Millipede Press will be publishing my book on VIDEODROME in the spring.

Surprise Surprise

Many thanks to Kim August for alerting me to the fact that Amazon.com already has pages up for the paperback and hardcover editions of my VIDEODROME book, which is listed there as a November 2007 release.

A very spiffy cover, too. I can still vividly remember where I was standing in the room when this very scene was shot. I can even remember standing in the same approximate area when Michael Lennick and Lee Wilson got the idea to film a strip of television static in 16mm and project it onto this stretchy, veiny material from Rick Baker's EFX Inc. and dissolve it out to create one of the movie's most memorable images.

Seeing the format that Millipede Press' "Studies in the Horror Film" series is going to take also excites the imagination about what further entries in the series there might be. An exciting development in publishing, to be sure.

Last night, I joined the elite group of people (Roger Corman may be the only other person able to make this claim) who have recorded three full solo DVD audio commentaries in a single day -- a single night actually, as this took place roughly between midnight and 5:30 am. These commentaries are for the second round of Mario Bava releases coming later this year from Anchor Bay, and the recordings are now out the door and flying west. My voice was close to shot after the third one, but I can tell you this much: wine helps.

I promised to pamper myself today by goofing off and imbibing soothing liquids (to restore my throat, you understand), but it's turned into a work day, after all, though a pleasurable one. I started compiling my personal mailing list for the Bava book, which gave me the opportunity to call and e-mail a bunch of the book's interviewees in search of their current addresses. I got to speak on the phone with Brett Halsey and John Steiner, I left a message for Daliah Lavi, e-mailed other old acquaintences and got e-mailed back, but it seems I may have inadvertently lost touch with Richard Harrison. (If anyone within the reach of this blog knows where to find him, please let me know.) Everyone seems happy for me, excited to know the book is on the way. After all this time, it's really happening...

Your Faithful Blogger on the VIDEODROME set

One of the many things we've been doing this week is getting some last minute additional images together for my "Studies in the Horror Film" book on David Cronenberg's VIDEODROME, which is being published by Millipede Press. I thought I would share a few of these shots with you, partly to stir up interest and partly because I'm not altogether certain these particular ones will make the cut; it's not a book about me, after all. If they do appear in the book, they'll look a lot better, because I didn't do anything much to restore these. I'll leaving that task to the many-handed team at Millipede.

Anyway, this was me twenty-five years ago. Dig those Italian frame eyeglasses. This particular Author's Photo, which finds me simultaneously posed by and broadcast on the fabled Flesh TV, was taken by the show's video effects supervisor Michael Lennick.

Here I am on the actual "Videodrome" set, interviewing assistant director John Board -- a wonderful fellow, knowledgeable, funny, authoritative, keeps a set on its toes. This is one of the few shots that finds me looking color-coordinated with my surroundings. It wasn't really in Pittsburgh, but in Toronto. Photo by Donna Lucas.

That's me with a chunk of Barry Convex's cancer in my hand. Polyvinylchloride, I think it was. Photo by my good friend Robert Uth, who asked me to look queasy.

And, last but not necessarily least, here I am in Rick Baker's EFX workshop holding a foam latex casting of Rick's own hand, which was later used to fill Barry Convex's right sleeve during his animatronic death scene. Another photo by Robert Uth.

My VIDEODROME book will be coming out sometime later this year or early next, I'm told. Needless to say, I'll be sure to let you know when it's available.

Cronenberg's Next

I've found a riveting new trailer for David Cronenberg's forthcoming EASTERN PROMISES online. Watching this made me think of two things: as good as she was in them, it's heartening to see Naomi Watts moving away from KING KONG (film and video game) and the RING series and going back to serious drama (I recently watched 21 GRAMS again and she's never been better); and secondly, this dark thriller looks like it could be the Oscar contender for Cronenberg that A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE wasn't, quite.

Speaking of Cronenbergian things, I'm told that my Millipede Press book on VIDEODROME is proceeding nicely and now in the photo selection/clean-up stage. This past week I pulled out some additional never-before-published shots, including several of myself on the set -- images I literally haven't seen in decades. I was surprised to discover that photos exist of me standing on the actual Videodrome set, and the derelict ship where the film's closing scene takes place, and in Rick Baker's EFX workshop holding a severed arm and a big chunk of Barry Convex cancer. There are also shots of me in the company of David Cronenberg, James Woods, Debbie Harry, Mark Irwin, Carol Spier, and co-producer Victor Solnicki (who I didn't recall meeting). Since I don't anticipate seeing too much more of myself in the book than an author's photo, I will share some of those images here once Donna has a chance to digitally rejuvenate them.

PS: Truphen Newben is back with two more terrifying TALES FROM THE PUB at YouTube: "The Return" and "Doppelganger."

Cronenberg at 64, Cronenbook at 25

Today is David Cronenberg's 64th birthday, and the perfect occasion to go public with some news I've been keeping quiet for awhile.

Some background first: Perhaps some of you know that I spent most of the 1980s writing almost exclusively about Cronenberg's films, beginning with a series of CINEFANTASTIQUE set reports -- and finally a cover story -- about the making of VIDEODROME. I was the only journalist granted access to the set, which was closed to protect the film's revolutionary storyline from being leaked. I visited for nine full days. My deal with CFQ was to write a book-length article that would appear as a double issue. This issue happened to coincide with the editor's marriage and, by the time he and his wife returned from their honeymoon, VIDEODROME had opened and closed -- a huge boxoffice flop. CFQ had an unfortunate history of bad feature article choices (KRULL, THE BLACK HOLE, etc.) and it was decided to literally cut the losses by editing my material down to a single issue feature. (I was, of course, being paid by the word.) Then it was announced that Cronenberg had been signed to direct THE DEAD ZONE for Dino De Laurentiis, which prompted the decision to assign me to cover that filming for a special double issue that would cover both films, to be published about a year later. (I was, of course, to be paid on publication.) I visited the set of THE DEAD ZONE for a few days, wrote my article and sent it in, whereupon the editor got cold feet -- Stephen King movies were not doing so well at the boxoffice, so it was decided to run my coverage of both Cronenberg films in a single issue. This whittling-down process was agonizing on a monetary level, but that agony was nothing compared to reading what the magazine had done to my VIDEODROME manuscript. Piers Handling, the head of the Academy of Canadian Cinema, had told me that it was the finest production history of a Canadian film he had ever read -- he included a section of the manuscript in a book he edited, THE SHAPE OF RAGE: THE FILMS OF DAVID CRONENBERG, as it was originally written, while CFQ published an abortion, so greatly condensed that my work couldn't be simply cut; it had to be paraphrased. I was so angry when I read the results that I temporarily lost the power to speak, and it ended my ten-year affiliation with the magazine.

My original manuscript then went into a file cabinet, where it resided for the next 20-odd years. Criterion welcomed portions of it into their marvelous DVD of VIDEODROME, but there was a much they didn't use. In fact, material exists in my files -- like a lengthy Q&A with Cronenberg, which I conducted after my first viewing of the film -- that was omitted from the original manuscript because I didn't then have the time to include it and meet my original deadline. After that first deadline had passed, there was no reason to add anything more because pages were already being cut.

Now that you have the messy background, here's my very neat announcement:

Later this year, in the fall, Millipede Press will be publishing my VIDEODROME book as the first offering in an exciting new trade paperback series called "Studies in the Horror Film." If you've seen the BFI's "Film Classics" and "Modern Classics" series, or Continuum Press's "33 1/3" series about rock albums, the same principle applies here... except this series will consist of uniform numbered books devoted to the in-depth study of individual classics of horror cinema. Publisher Jerad Walters is anticipating that later books in the series will run, on average, about 20,000 words and 144 pages, but VIDEODROME -- being a full production history -- will likely be a bit longer. I'll also be adding some new material to help the book bridge the years of its long sleep: hard as it is to believe, this year marks the 25th anniversary of the manuscript's completion.

I've been working with my original typescript to recreate it as an editable computer document, and reading through it again has been an uncanny experience. The book puts me back on the set in so many ways, back into the warm and funny camaraderie of the people who made it, and I think fans of the film and Cronenberg's work in general will be impressed by the level of intimacy it achieves with its subject. I honestly can't remember reading another book quite like this -- it will give you the VIDEODROME you know, of course, but also the VIDEODROME you don't know unless you too were there, the one that David Cronenberg didn't quite know even as he was writing it by night and directing it by day. In other words, it will put you in the midst of Cronenberg's creative process, his wrestling with the raw idea of VIDEODROME. That's what reading it has been doing for me anyway, and it's been so long since I wrote this book, it feels like the work of someone else, a better writer than I remember being at that age, who was somehow privy to my own experiences.

I've been out of touch with David Cronenberg for a long time, so it's interesting to resume touch with him again through my writing, which was so sympathetic and attuned to him and what he was doing. Wherever he is, whatever he's doing, I wish him much happiness on this, his Paul McCartney birthday. As the aged onion skin of my typescript is being rejuvenated on my computer screen, I reflect on those words I was among the first to hear -- "Long Live the New Flesh!" -- and pass them back to their author with many happy returns.