Christopher Moore is in many ways the definition of a successful writer. Since his first book Practical Demonkeeping was released in 1992, his books have become more ambitious as his writing has gotten sharper and funnier. Oh yes, he’s also a funny writer, which is not to say that he’s an unserious... more

Christopher Moore is in many ways the definition of a successful writer. Since his first book Practical Demonkeeping was released in 1992, his books have become more ambitious as his writing has gotten sharper and funnier. Oh yes, he’s also a funny writer, which is not to say that he’s an unserious writer, but he’s one of only a handful of American novelists who want to make the reader laugh. Whether he’s taking on religion in “Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal” or writing a funny book about death in “A Dirty Job,” there’s no writer quite like Christopher Moore

Fresh off “Fool,” a book which took him back to Thirteenth century England and told the story of King Lear from the point of view of the court jester, Moore returns to present day San Francisco with a sequel to his earlier books “Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story” and “You Suck: A Love Story” in “Bite Me: A Love Story.” What follows is an edited conversation with Moore, which was just as entertaining as his readers might expect.


ALEX DUEBEN: I really enjoyed Bite Me and I was wondering, the ending of the previous book You Suck deliberately echoed the ending of the first book in the series, Bloodsucking Fiends. Were you planning the sequel when you did that?

CM: Yeah. You Suck was left open to have a sequel and I wanted the three of them to stand as piece of work. I had originally proposed four, but I think this does it for me.

AD: What would fourth have been?

CM: I don’t know. I didn’t have a plot. I just had a title, Foul Dead Things: A Love Story. (laughs) But I didn’t know what it was going to be about. And I’m not completely closed to it, but I’m done writing vampires for a little while.

AD: Each of the three books are very different

CM: I don’t want to write the same book over and over again. And even though there are some similar plot elements, as you might think there would be in the setting with the same characters. I just didn’t want to do structurally the same book over and over again. I’ve always tried to do something at least a little different.

AD: Do you enjoy writing Abby Normal?

CM: She still has the ability crack me up. She’s difficult to write because her stuff has to be very crafted. It’s not natural for me, a middle aged white guy, to write in the voice of a sixteen year old goth girl. It’s as hard as writing Shakespearean dialect in my last book Fool. Abby’s stuff is every bit as difficult to write as that.

AD: Her dialogue definitely has a sense of structure and its own internal narrative logic.

CM: When you do these kind of dialect books you have to invent something that approximates the speech of either a sixteen year old goth girl or a medieval fool. You can’t actually write the way they would speak, or it’s not accessible to the reader. It has to be a little more clear and a little less stylistic, so its really a hybrid of normal diction and this hyper diction that these characters use. That’s what’s going on with Abby. Me trying to make the way a kid like that speaks, which can be wildly irritating, accessible to people who have to spend three hundred pages with her.

AD: When she first appeared in A Dirty Job as a small character, did you know she would become such a big figure in later books?

CM: I didn’t actually. I knew that I was going to bring her back and A Dirty Job foresees that You Suck is going to be written because there’s a scene that is duplicated in both books but from different points of view. I knew that Abby was going to be in the book but I didn’t know until I started writing her voice how big she was going to be. When I went to write Bite Me she had taken over. She had become such a strong part of the second book that Bite Me became her book.

I don’t want to sound mystical and, oh the characters tell you what to do, but it’s very much like method acting. I can talk about how difficult it might be to craft the way she speaks, it’s also self-driven and you get into the character the way a method actor would. She just had so much energy that I kinda just gave the third book to her. At least voice-wise.

AD: I know you live in San Francisco and have written a few books set in the city. For you, what makes it a great setting?

CM: Geographically you can contain it fairly easily in a book. It’s smaller than most big cities. It’s a tenth the size of London or Paris or Los Angeles, so you can write about all the different neighborhoods, or many of the different neighborhoods in the city, and the characters never have to get in a car because everything’s so close. There’s this mystical gothic-y fog thing that goes on in the city. Architecturally it’s very pretty. It’s got a lot of things aesthetically going for it.

Most of the books take place in the North end of the city which is the Financial district, Chinatown, North Beach, which is an Italian neighborhood, and Russian Hill, which is right now young professionals and retired people. You have these clashes of culture. Chinatown is like a foreign country that’s four blocks by four blocks. Watching the interaction of all those different cultures is just interesting. I was a cultural anthro major so I get to do cultural anthro in my backyard more or less.

AD: My major complaint about Bite Me is that there wasn’t enough of the Animals.

CM: The story didn’t want to keep them engaged. I understand what you’re saying. I have the same feeling, but I couldn’t get them more engaged and develop their characters more in the context that I had because of turning so much of the book over to the new members of the cast, which were Abby and Fu Dog and Jared. In a three hundred page book the cast can only get so big and I found myself saying can I go down a road with this subplot or can’t I? I thought, I’ve got to have them show up. The Emperor, too. I would have loved to have had the Emperor more engaged in what was going on, but the book didn’t have enough room for them.

AD: I definitely understand and you didn’t want to just fulfill a checklist of things from the previous books included that people enjoyed.

CM: It was tough for me to write a third book in a series and not make it formulaic. There’s an arc to any book you write that is just the arc of the story. There’s the status quo, something happens, and then you return to status quo and consequently when the characters and the setting were the same, there was going to be a similarity to the books. I was trying to avoid that, but yet satisfy readers who want the same thing over and over again. I mean I get asked ten times a day when are you going to do a sequel to Lamb. My answer is, it’s the life of Jesus, you can’t do a sequel to it. (laughs) Pretty much everyone knows how that story ends.

AD: Is there the possibility of seeing more of Abby and Tommy and the Emperor?

CM: Probably the Emperor. I would at some point like to do a book with the characters and premise from A Dirty Job, the death merchants, that would probably be set in San Francisco. It had the Emperor and it wouldn’t be a difficult stretch to put Abby and Tommy in it. I don’t have a plan for that but I do want to do a book with that premise again and that would almost undoubtedly be set in San Francisco.

Of my San Francisco books, there’s no doubt that A Dirty Job is my best. It was also way more ambitious. It’s a comedy about death. When I did Bloodsucking Fiends I thought, it’s a vampire book it’s not a vehicle for big themes. It needs to be entertaining and funny and that is all I should shoot for. Hopefully it is. A Dirty Job I had big themes to deal with that were pulled from caring for my mother when she was dying and caring for my girlfriend’s mother when she was dying. There was experience to put in that I had to bring through the comedy.

AD: A Dirty Job is one of if not my favorite of your books and I think it’s one of the most successful because that’s where the sensibility and voice and the structure and complexity of the book all came together.

CM; When I teach it’s something that I try to tell students, but it’s a really big thing to hand someone, a project or a book is often defined by its ambition before you start it. That’s what I think for any artist is what makes a difference. Are you stretching to do this? Are you trying to do something that’s actually hard to do and might be beyond your abilities. I could really fuck the dog one of these days doing that. Continually putting those hurdles in front of myself. That’s why it’s kind of fun to do a book like Bite Me. The book I’m working on right now, I’m completely freaked out about being able to ever finish it.

AD: All your books have a comic sensibility in common. Is that you and your perspective on the world?

CM: I think so. That’s kind of my default setting. I really don’t think you can teach anybody to be funny and I know having taught a little bit that when someone comes in and says I want to write like you and you talk to them for ten minutes and go you’re just not funny. It’s just not how you think. It’s not something that I learned. My dad was a funny guy. It’s just how I react to the world. I actually tried to write quote serious stuff unquote and I haven’t been able to pull it off. I get about ten pages into something and I go, something funny has to happen, this is boring.

AD: How much of say, Fluke, is you wanting to write a science fiction story, but it just comes out in this fashion?

CM: Fluke is the perfect example. The reason I wrote Fluke is because I wanted to get in the water with humpback whales. Bottom line. A friend of mine had come back from this island called Rurutu--I call it the Scooby Island cause it’s called Rurutu. He had been in the water with singing humpback whales and he described it. I thought, that’s awesome, I need to do that. In US waters the only way you can do that is if you’re on a whale research permit and you have to get permission. I started writing letters and sending my books to scientists and these guys in Hawaii said sure come on over we’ll put you on the research permit. It started more with wanting to live a life. One of the things you find pretty early on when you write books for a living is you realize I could live my entire life within this room by myself making click-y noises on a keyboard if I don’t make some effort to go do stuff.

That book was completely motivated by wanting to experience what it was like being in the water with whales, and as I started doing the research, it turned out that the scientists were much more interesting than the whales. That’s what the book ended up really being about. The people who study whales much less than the whales themselves. But it all started with just wanting to experience what it was like being in the water with a humpback whale. Which was awesome by the way.

AD: Do you do a lot of research?

CM: I actually do. For Fool I spent a month in England and France. For Lamb I went to Israel for almost a month. I didn’t go to the Himalayas or India and other places that take place in the book. I quite frankly ran out of time and money. I couldn’t go to those places and actually get the book done, so all that’s done from my imagination. I always try to go to the places I’m writing about. It adds dimensions to the book that I would never have been able to anticipate. If I hadn’t gone to Israel and seen how desolate Judea is, where the Dead Sea is and where a lot of the gospels take place and seen how rough the land is from Nazareth to Jerusalem and sort of gotten an idea of what the geography of the place is like, it would have been a completely different book. So yeah I always try to go to where I’m writing about. Even it’s harder with the historical stuff.

I’m writing a book now that takes place in nineteenth century Paris and the city is in many ways the same but the culture’s not. It’s weird because it’s closer to our culture than medieval england or first century Palestine were and that actually makes it more difficult because I can’t just make shit up. (laughs) There was this huge hole in the Jesus story. I could do anything I wanted. With Fool, which was set in the Thirteenth Century, it was kind of the same thing. There’s so much that people don’t know about what went on in those days that I was able to fill it in.

AD: How do you work. Do you outline your books, because in Bite Me, especially, there’s a lot going on.

CM: I do a sort of diagram that’s less a “category one subcategory a” outline and more of a circles and arrows thing. Because it’s a visual representation it’s hard to describe it. The short answer is I do a very rough outline and then I try to plug in scenes that I know are going to be there and stay about five scenes ahead of myself. I mean I obviously write in scenes. That’s how I learned to write, it’s what is effective, and it’s how drama happens. For instance I know that in the next scene we’re going to meet the old vampires and then I’ll get there and decide whose point of view I need to do that from. As far as the outline goes, all the outline will say is, meet old vampires. And then as I approach that I’ll figure out that they had to get somehow and I’ll research the ship.

As the years go by I outline more for a couple reasons. One, I’m on deadline all the time so I can’t afford to be stuck. With Lamb I was stuck for six months. I got up to Antioch and I remember the proposal to the publisher said, and then they’ll have adventures, or something like that. I figured I’ll figure it out when I get to it, and then when I got to it I went, fuck I have no idea what happens now. And I’m stuck in Antioch going I don’t know what’s I didn’t think it through, so I do that now. What I do is outline a little bit more and know where I’m going so that my writing time is more efficient. But then when I write, I write it page one, “once upon a time,” right to the end. I try to write a little bit every day. I have goals which I always fall short of. I try to write a thousand words a day and then I’ll do eight hundred. I try to write for four hours a day and I’ll write three. What happens is the story tightens up as you get to the end, by the time you get to what would be the third act of a book you don’t have a lot of flexibility in what you can do. You sort of set all this stuff in motion and you can’t go very afield to do any exploring. Any goofing around you have to do it in the first half of the book. It becomes necessary to outline as it tightens up. Like braiding a rope or something.

AD: Reading the books, you seem to enjoy the first two acts more than last part, it’s much looser and feels more relaxed in the beginning and the end is very much about wrapping up the plot.

CM: You mean actually doing the process? The first hundred pages are so fucking hard I can’t even tell you. I hate that part. This was the first time I ever said that out loud because it’s not a good thing to say things like that, but the first hundred pages of a book are miserable. You’re establishing the world and you don’t know what you’re doing and you don’t have the characters set and every day you’re making just a million decisions and I’m awful at making decisions. It takes me three hours to figure out where I’m going to have dinner if I’m going out to dinner. All those decisions have to be made and they set the path for the rest of the book in those first hundred pages. It typically will take me six months to write the first hundred pages and I may write the next two hundred pages in two months.

As far as what I enjoy writing the most, probably the middle third of a book is the most enjoyable you’ve got things running but you still have some room to move around in and you can make decisions that go a little farther afield a digress a bit. But the first part’s miserable and largely because even if you’ve done it a dozen times like I have you still go shit I have no idea what I’m doing. This is like the first book all over again.

AD: I don’t know if you want to say anything about the next book you’re working on. You mentioned it was set in 19th Century Paris.

CM: I can tell you about all I know about it. It’s about Nineteenth century French painters. Yes, it’s funny. Yes, it’s going to have weird supernatural stuff in it. It’s going to include a cast of characters that’s a laundry list of the most famous painters of their day, the impressionists and the post-impressionists. It turns out, that’s really hard to do, so don’t try that at home. (laughs)

They say the house always wins, but in the case of "Casino" Jack Abramoff it was the guy holding the keys to the front and back doors that made out like a bandit. Like thousands of other lobbyists (close to 14,000 individuals were registered as such in 2009 according to the Center for Responsive... more

They say the house always wins, but in the case of "Casino" Jack Abramoff it was the guy holding the keys to the front and back doors that made out like a bandit. Like thousands of other lobbyists (close to 14,000 individuals were registered as such in 2009 according to the Center for Responsive Politics) Abramoff peddled access to influence, which he bought with generous campaign "donations" and perks such as luxury "fact-finding" trips.

Abramoff wasn't too picky about who his clients were, had no problem representing more than one side, and, as a disciple of Ronald Reagan school of economics, had a innate disrespect for any rules and regulations that interfered with his ability to capitalize at the often excessive expense of his clients.

Having represented several Indian tribes with regards to their lucrative gaming rights, Abramoff (along with business partner Adam Kidan) utilized his gambling expertise and made a play to buy the SunCruz floating casino line. The deal hit headlines in 2005 when three men connected to the Gambino crime family were charged with the 2001 murder of SunCruz founder Konstantinos "Gus" Bouli, who had sold a majority interest in the company to Abramoff and his associates. By this time Abramoff was being investigated for bribery and corruption relating to his Indian gaming clients, who had collectively been charged an estimated $85 million in fees by Abramoff and cronies Ralph E. Reed, Jr., Grover Norquist and Michael Scanlon -- for the privilege of being played off against each other.

In truth, Abramoff's business practices probably had much in common with those of a large proportion of his contemporaries. His main crime in Washington's prevailing climate of corruption seemingly being that he got too cocky not to get caught. Ultimately Abramoff and an elite group of conspirators including Ohio's Republican Rep. Bob Ney, his former Chief of Staff, Neil Volz, and Michael Scanlon, who had served as Communications Director for disgraced Texan Rep. Tom DeLay (and had assisted Abramoff in the SunCruz purchase), paid -- albeit relatively lightly -- for their crimes, and Washington was able to breathe a collective sigh of relief that it had been seen to do something with actions that had minimal long-term impact on the status quo.

However, it's this status quo, the lobbying system and how its symbiotic with the way we finance the election of our leaders, that we should really take issue with since it has done more to pervert the course of democracy than any one individual. In 2009 a record $3.48 billion was spent on lobbying. And since a politician's primary objective once they get in power, by necessity, is to find the money to get reelected, it's easy to understand why our representatives in government are forced to serve the needs of those with fat checkbooks above those of the people.

With an eye on this bigger picture, Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney (whose previous credits include Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Taxi to the Dark Side) takes an in-depth look at the stranger-then-fiction Abramoff affair in his new film Casino Jack and The United States of Money. SuicideGirls caught up with Gibney to talk about the wholesale selling of America he investigated, and how, with a dearth of untarnished white knights, our future champions might just take the form of the likes of Eliot Spitzer (who's the subject of Gibney's next, as yet untitled, project).

Nicole Powers: We all think we know Abramoff, but what struck me about this movie is that what has been reported by the mainstream media is just the tip of the iceberg. I mean, I had no idea that his story went from Angola to Russia to Malaysia, and from revolutionary rebels to oligarchs to heads of state.

Alex Gibney: I know, and to me that was the wild and fun part. I got into the story not just because he was a lobbyist, but because he was this action movie hero. He's the main character in an action film of his own mind. He's going all over the place like some sort of secret agent. It was a fantastic story.

NP: I loved the clips you show of the movie Abramoff produced, Red Scorpion, which starred Dolph Lundgren in the rogue freedom fighter role that you theorize was Abramoff's fantasy version of himself.

AG: The weightlifting scene, I mean who thinks of that? To come up with a weight lifting scene in an action movie -- because, of course, Jack was a weightlifter. How good is that?

NP: And obviously your movie covers the mob-style hit too.

AG: That's right.

NP: How far towards Abramoff do you think that went?

AG: You mean, was he responsible for the murder?

NP: Yes.

AG: I don't think he was responsible for the murder. I think what it shows though is his recklessness. In other words, suddenly, he's become so drunk with power and money that he's become extremely reckless, and he's using his political pals to help him do financial deals -- Bob Ney's role in the SunCruz thing. And suddenly he's got himself in a situation that because he's so close to the center of power in Washington D.C. that mobsters that are associated with his pal Adam Kidan are just a hair's breadth away from the seat of power in Washington D.C. So that recklessness about who he was doing business with, and how he was doing business, really is what's important about that I think.

NP: Obviously Abramoff is sitting in jail, but the people that he was interacting with on a daily basis are still out there. The powers that be stuck Abramoff in jail and tied a nice bow on top of his case, but there are many more people that are just as guilty in the highest echelons of power who got off scot-free.

AG: I became really sympathetic to Jack in the sense that I think it's exactly as you say, he became the convenient mechanism by which everybody could say, "It wasn't me. I didn't have anything [to do with it]. It was Jack. Jack did it all. He was the criminal. Now the criminals are behind bars and it's all good." When in fact Jack was doing what in many ways was mainstream. He was dong it more outrageously, he was dong it more recklessly, but a lot of the stuff he did was very mainstream lobbying stuff.

NP: He was the fall guy. With him in jail, Washington could say they'd reformed, and that the checks and balances were working. But in actual fact, with the recent Supreme Court ruling which removed corporate spending limits on campaign financing, things are actually even worse than when Abramoff was doing his thing.

AG: I couldn't agree with you more. Things are much worse now, and, in a funny way, Abramoff going to prison becomes a smoke screen for just how bad things are.

NP: You got some amazing interviews for the film. What motivated people like Ney and DeLay to talk on camera?

AG: I bribed them. I learned that from Jack. [laughs] No, it took us a long time to get Bob. I wrote to him a couple of times in prison, [and got] no response. When he got out, one of my producers, Zena Barakat, made contact with him through another gig she was on. [She] mentioned this to him, and he liked her and ultimately agreed. Adam Kidan, same thing. We just reached out to him after he got out of prison. I had actually corresponded with him while he was in prison, and I think he wanted to tell his story. In the case of Bob, he knew that the guy who had sent him to prison, Neil Volz, had talked to me. At the time he couldn't have been more angry at one person than at Neil because Neil basically put him in jail. Now they've had a bit of a rapprochement I think, but that motivated Bob to talk.

It's funny the way it works. You keep at it, you keep at it, and then you get one person and it kind of leads you to another person. Once you get somebody in the room, my experience is that they're pretty open. DeLay is a little bit different. I mean DeLay spoke only because he was on a book tour. He was not the kind of strutting motherfucker that he was when he was at the height of his power. He was somewhat humbled, or, at least, soft-spoken, but he was completely unrepentant. And that was great. That's fine.

NP: You didn't get Abramoff on camera for the movie, but I understand you did talk with him.

AG: I didn't get any video of him in prison, but I did visit him. It was important for me, I think, to take the measure of the man. I found that productive, fruitful, important, but I was prohibited from taking my cameras into the prison.

NP: So what did he have to say to you?

AG: Most of what we talked about was off the record, but he gave me a tremendous amount of color and background in terms of how he did what he did, and that was great. Also, what was intriguing to me, back to this whole bad apple / rotten barrel thing, you know, talking to him, he's funny. He's a good storyteller, he's a movie buff, I'm a movie buff, he's a sports freak. It becomes easy to demonize people, like Washington has done to Abramoff, and when you do that you think, well it's just their character, it's a man of bad character, and you miss the bigger picture, which is how corruption works both systemically and how it works really in all of us.

NP: Because there's thousands of other lobbyists doing very similar things.

AG: Correct. It's going on now, and, as you say, it's worse in some ways.

NP: This movie is ultimately about the sale of America, and having seen your Enron documentary, it was interesting to see how you connected the dots in that film to Arnold Schwarzenegger. How Enron championed the ousting of California Governor Gray Davis, and brought in Schwarzenegger. Obviously we're sitting in California, which is a bankrupt state to this day because of that energy crisis. And one of the possible quid pro quos that you present in the movie is that Schwarzenegger was put in power on condition that he wouldn't go after the Enron money.

AG: Yeah. I think in a way, Schwarzenegger was a kind of beneficiary of the demonization of Gray Davis. I mean there was that famous meeting which I cite in the movie where Ken Lay talks to Schwarzenegger and a bunch of other people about taking advantage of what they did to Grey Davies. But I think Enron saw that much more pragmatically. Gray Davis was getting in their way, preventing them from making as much money as they wanted to make, so they took him out. And the way they took him out was by manipulating the electricity prices in the state. Now, at the same time, they were making scads of money doing that. With Enron it's a case of a failed company. I mean that was a disastrous company that was just hiding how disastrous it was from everybody, but that was one big profit center -- basically strip-mining California.

NP: And they were also pulling strings on a grass roots basis to oust Davis.

AG: They were definitely pulling strings, but one of the things I discovered afterwards was that they weren't the only ones. Sadly the outgoing Clinton administration wasn't giving a lot of help to Gray Davis either. In fact Alan Greenspan and Lawrence Summers, the Chief of the Economic Council for the Obama administration, called up Gray Davis and lectured him. Basically they said you've got to build more dirty power plants and eviscerate your pollution controls, and let electricity prices rise as much as they will rise. You've got to believe in the market is what they told him. These were Democrats, well Greenspan wasn't a Democrat but Summers was Treasury Secretary.

Everybody has imbued that kind of money logic, the idea that whatever's good for business is good for America. Now Clinton has apologized for a lot of the policies that were done in his name through [Robert] Rueben and Summers, and that gets back to Casino Jack because Casino Jack is all about how money twists people. You know, suddenly people think it's a really good idea to have no regulation. Is that because in the pure marketplace of ideas they've just come to that [conclusion]? Or is it because actually, year after year after year, they're being re-elected because of the amount of money they're being paid by Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Citibank etc?

NP: You talk about how money twists people, but the subject of your next documentary, Eliot Spitzer, is somewhat of an exception. One of the reasons they went after him was because money didn't twist him.

AG: Correct. Now, we should say right away that he certainly gave them the ammunition to take him out. They didn't force him to start seeing prostitutes. But, he was the one guy who was standing up when the federal government wasn't, when the FCC wasn't, the Justice Department wasn't. He stood up to them. He really had a finger on what ultimately led to the huge financial meltdown, and they were very angry at him. And, yeah, I think they took him out.

NP: What hope is there for a man (or woman) that can't be bought? Everyone has skeletons that can be rattled.

AG: At the end of the day, that's why we all watch. I think we're all potentially corrupt. I mean, in some ways, hoping for the white knight, the one perfect person, it's a fruitless hope. We're all imperfect. But the question is, when are we going to stand up behind people who are trying to do the right thing? That's important. Spitzer may not be perfect, but we have to ask ourselves, is it more important that he was seeing hookers or that the global economy was melting down?


Casino Jack and The United States of Money opens in select theaters on May 7. For more information on the film and to find out how you can help the campaign for more transparency and accountability in government go to: TakePart.com/CasinoJack

George Romero is an icon among horror movie fans. His iconic 1968 film Night of the Living Dead created a new genre in the form of the apocalyptic zombie movie, spawning five sequels and an almost uncountable number of imitators. His 1973 movie The Crazies (which was recently remade pretty well by Breck... more

George Romero is an icon among horror movie fans. His iconic 1968 film Night of the Living Dead created a new genre in the form of the apocalyptic zombie movie, spawning five sequels and an almost uncountable number of imitators. His 1973 movie The Crazies (which was recently remade pretty well by Breck Eisner) unleashed a kind of government-caused-outbreak paranoia that was the antecedent of what Stephen King would later exploit in The Stand. Romero and King would collaborate on a celebration of 1950s EC comics horror publications in Creepshow. He totally rewrote the vampire myth as a young man's psychosis in Martin. Outside of horror, Romero made the intensely personal Arthurian parable Knightriders. SG talked to Romero in Boston, while he was promoting his latest zombie movie Survival of the Dead. Survival of the Dead, available now on Video on Demand and opening theatrically on May 28, concerns a rag-tag band of survivors of the zombie holocaust who find themselves on an island off the coast of Delaware, embroiled in an intergenerational feud between two clans of Irish settlers.

Michael Marano: You used zombies as a critique of consumer culture in Dawn of the Dead. In the years since then, zombies have themselves become commercial commodities. There are scores of video games, movies, and Simon and Schuster has a line devoted specifically to apocalyptic zombie novels. Any thoughts on the ways that zombies have become the very kinds of consumerist products that you used zombies that you poked fun at thirty years ago?

George Romero: Well, it's surprising. First of all, I do think it was video games that popularized the creature. I guess they [zombies] are perfect targets for first-person shooters. And I really think it was the video games, and after that the graphic novels, that have made them popular. I don't think it was so much the movies, because if you think about it, Zombieland is the only one that really was a blockbuster, or any kind of huge hit. As far as this question about them becoming a consumer item, I don't know how popular it [the zombie genre] is. I guess they're popular enough! (Laughs.) It's hard for me to even get a sense of that. I'm sort of still doing my own thing. My zombies are still sort of shuffling around slowly and they're almost just a minor annoyance. My stories have always been about people, and how they deal with the problem, how they fail to deal with the problem, and how stupidly they deal with it. To me, it has been a perfect vehicle for socio-political criticism. It's just been fun that way! So, that's the way I think of them (zombies). And people say, 'Jeeze! You created all of this!' And maybe I did, somehow! I didn't even call them 'zombies' in the first film. They were 'flesh eaters' or 'ghouls.' I never thought of them as 'zombies,' because when we made that film (1968's Night of the Living Dead), 'zombies' to me were still the guys in the Caribbean doing wetwork for Lugosi (in White Zombie). I just wanted some sort of strange phenomenon that would be a game changer so that people, my characters, would fail observe that and hoist themselves on their own petard.


MM: I want to talk about "game changers" and sort of "society changers." You started out cutting news footage, back in the Medium Cool days when they still used motorcycle couriers and actual--what that stuff they used to use?

GR: Film?

MM: Yeah! That's the stuff! Film! It was like YouTube with sprockets.

GR: It had little holes in it! They never let me actually cut it. I was a courier. I was Haskell Wexler!

MM: You were?

GR: Yeah, I just ran the stuff around. I learned how to edit at one of those labs. But they never actually let me work on the news footage. It was too precious!

MM: That sort of news-based reality behind how you cut your teeth learning how to cut film, did that news paradigm affect the way that you chose to depict societies falling apart?

GR: I think it more affected stylistically the original film [Night of the Living Dead] than anything else. And even though it's only in the last 20 minutes of the film, people always write about that film and how it's got this 'vérité style' when really it doesn't. I mean we were shooting with a sound blimp. It's just very static. Until I can finally get the camera out of the blimp in the last twenty minutes of the film and the camera, once out of the blimp, was really portable, and I intentionally tried to make that stuff look like news footage and tried to cut it with that same sort of chop that the guys used to use back in the lab. From Dawn of the Dead on, I guess, I've had this conceit that if there's something I wanna talk about, or whatever, I can bring zombies out of the closet and get to make a film, and get it financed.

MM: Now, with using zombies as social commentary and always having them on hand for that, I couldn't help but notice that with Survival of the Dead you seem to be reapplying your satire not just to society, but you seem to be taking on other genres. Like, a little bit of western...

GR: Oh, yeah! [Laughs]

MM: ... and little bit of the "Irish land dramas," like The Field. I kept thinking of Ryan's Daughter.

GR: Really?!

MM: Yeah. I wanted Sarah Miles to be eaten. I wanted that. And I know from Creepshow that you're an old school EC Comics fan. Did old Mad Magazine (originally an EC comic book) approaches to critiquing films and film genres inform how you approached satirizing other movies in Survival of the Dead?

GR: I think it probably does! It's waaaay in the background, somewhere in here (gesturing to his medulla) in the bottom part of my brain. I wanted to do something stylistically different with (Survival of the Dead). I knew I was going to do some Looney Tunes kind of moments with it, and that comes from old comics I guess. I'll go to see horror film with a friend, I'll go to see a horror film with Steve King, and we're sittin' there, the only ones giggling and everyone else is hiding their eyes or running to gag. And we chuckle! And for anybody who grew up on the old EC comics, they were just filled with bad puns and terrible jokes. And it was humor all the way, and it just made you chuckle. So, I just can't resist that! And then I just wanted to completely change (my approach to zombies in Survival). It's a lot more fun to me, for me, to say, 'Hey, man! Let's just do something completely different!' And once I had the idea of the feud, I remembered the old William Wyler film called The Big Country, and I said, 'Let's model it after that! And let's have fun! And let's sort of make a quasi-western out of this.' We went with 2.35 [aspect ratio]. We didn't mute the colors. It was just a choice. All of a sudden, all the department heads got together and said, 'Wow! That would be really fun, to do that!' So that was just, 'Hey! Let's have a picnic, here!'

MM: To me, a lot of the headshots in Survival of the Dead really reminded me of (EC Comics artists known for their ghoulish humor) Jolly Jack Davis and Ghastly Graham Ingles.

GR: Yeah! Those boys!

MM: Now, I don't want to ruin anything for people who haven't seen Survival of the Dead yet, so I'll just speak a

MM: I want to jump back to what you were talking about earlier about using zombies as a template to create character-based drama. You tend to create apocalypses, not just in your zombie movies, that are very small scale. A farmhouse (in Night of the Living Dead). A TV Station where order is breaking down (in the opening of Dawn of the Dead). A bunker (Day of the Dead). In your 1973 movie The Crazies the enemy seemed to be Ma Bell, the phone company. Even Martin, Bruiser and Knightriders, seem to be about intensely personal apocalypses. Do you want to comment on that? Maybe in comparison to large scale apocalypses, like Michael Bay's and Roland Emmerich's?

GR: Well, first of all, I would never tackle one of those! I wouldn't know how! And I don't quite know what's the purpose. Because... it's much more likely that we'll face these little more minor apocalypses, be it family, or school or a job or whatever. And that's always just connected to me, somehow. Just was my characters don't deal with the looming threat of the zombies, they continue to just deal with each other on a superficial and a ridiculous level. And they create their own problems.

MM: In the Cold War days, your zombie apocalypses were total and complete breakdowns of world order. There's no TV, no communication. It's all just done. In your post-9/11 zombie movies, the end of the world seems like a chore. Just another goddam thing to deal with. Was this conscious on your part?

GR: With these last two (Diary of the Dead and Survival of the Dead) I sort of went back to the beginning of (the zombie plague). I didn't know where to go after Land of the Dead. I didn't want to go Beyond Thunderdome. But that was a pretty apocalyptic world. I didn't want to go further than that. I just didn't know where to go. Do the zombies take over? I'm not interested in that. There was another reason for us starting over [bringing the narrative back to the start of the zombie apocalypse]. I always wanted to sort of do what Steve King does with the town of Castle Rock. You know, create this sort of collage. This is happening here, while this is happening here, and this character recurs. I've never been able to do that, because the copyrights on the first four films are all owned by different people, and I can't get 'em to come together on a deal, here! So, that was another reason why my current partner and I wanted to start over with this, and start fresh. These two (recent zombie movies) actually connect; Survival uses a minor character from Diary. I actually have two more ideas (for further zombie movies). This movie wouldn't exist if Diary hadn't made a lot of dough. I mean, it cost so little that, even with a limited theatrical release it made a lot of money for the producers. If the same thing happens with this film, I'm standing by! I got two more minor characters from Diary, and I would love it to have this little set of movies that go together.

MM: Do you have any non-zombie movies planned?

GR: I'm working on one! I don't know if it will happen. At my age, man, I don't want to go out and do the pitch again. Peter Grunwald (my business partner) and I--we were out there for almost six and a half years almost and never made a movie. We got all these huge development deals. And I made more money than I've ever made in my life, but I never made a movie. For one reason or another, all the deals blew up. And I just don't want to do that anymore. And I found a lovely place to work, in Canada. And I work with now, again, the same family of people. The guy that shot my first movie up there shot this movie. The same wardrobe people and everything. I love the collaborative process of making films. And I hate the deal making. We have an idea that we would love to do. If it gets too nuts, the development aspect of it, then I don't know. I do have another horror movie idea, which is non-zombie. Which I'm sure we can finance. But if this film does well, I think I'll do another one of these (zombie movies). Hey, I'd be happy if did two more of these that that was it. I love doing them!

Christopher Moore is in many ways the definition of a successful writer. Since his first book Practical Demonkeeping was released in 1992, his books have become more ambitious as his writing has gotten sharper and funnier. Oh yes, he’s also a funny writer, which is not to say that he’s an unserious... more

Christopher Moore is in many ways the definition of a successful writer. Since his first book Practical Demonkeeping was released in 1992, his books have become more ambitious as his writing has gotten sharper and funnier. Oh yes, he’s also a funny writer, which is not to say that he’s an unserious writer, but he’s one of only a handful of American novelists who want to make the reader laugh. Whether he’s taking on religion in “Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal” or writing a funny book about death in “A Dirty Job,” there’s no writer quite like Christopher Moore

Fresh off “Fool,” a book which took him back to Thirteenth century England and told the story of King Lear from the point of view of the court jester, Moore returns to present day San Francisco with a sequel to his earlier books “Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story” and “You Suck: A Love Story” in “Bite Me: A Love Story.” What follows is an edited conversation with Moore, which was just as entertaining as his readers might expect.


ALEX DUEBEN: I really enjoyed Bite Me and I was wondering, the ending of the previous book You Suck deliberately echoed the ending of the first book in the series, Bloodsucking Fiends. Were you planning the sequel when you did that?

CM: Yeah. You Suck was left open to have a sequel and I wanted the three of them to stand as piece of work. I had originally proposed four, but I think this does it for me.

AD: What would fourth have been?

CM: I don’t know. I didn’t have a plot. I just had a title, Foul Dead Things: A Love Story. (laughs) But I didn’t know what it was going to be about. And I’m not completely closed to it, but I’m done writing vampires for a little while.

AD: Each of the three books are very different

CM: I don’t want to write the same book over and over again. And even though there are some similar plot elements, as you might think there would be in the setting with the same characters. I just didn’t want to do structurally the same book over and over again. I’ve always tried to do something at least a little different.

AD: Do you enjoy writing Abby Normal?

CM: She still has the ability crack me up. She’s difficult to write because her stuff has to be very crafted. It’s not natural for me, a middle aged white guy, to write in the voice of a sixteen year old goth girl. It’s as hard as writing Shakespearean dialect in my last book Fool. Abby’s stuff is every bit as difficult to write as that.

AD: Her dialogue definitely has a sense of structure and its own internal narrative logic.

CM: When you do these kind of dialect books you have to invent something that approximates the speech of either a sixteen year old goth girl or a medieval fool. You can’t actually write the way they would speak, or it’s not accessible to the reader. It has to be a little more clear and a little less stylistic, so its really a hybrid of normal diction and this hyper diction that these characters use. That’s what’s going on with Abby. Me trying to make the way a kid like that speaks, which can be wildly irritating, accessible to people who have to spend three hundred pages with her.

AD: When she first appeared in A Dirty Job as a small character, did you know she would become such a big figure in later books?

CM: I didn’t actually. I knew that I was going to bring her back and A Dirty Job foresees that You Suck is going to be written because there’s a scene that is duplicated in both books but from different points of view. I knew that Abby was going to be in the book but I didn’t know until I started writing her voice how big she was going to be. When I went to write Bite Me she had taken over. She had become such a strong part of the second book that Bite Me became her book.

I don’t want to sound mystical and, oh the characters tell you what to do, but it’s very much like method acting. I can talk about how difficult it might be to craft the way she speaks, it’s also self-driven and you get into the character the way a method actor would. She just had so much energy that I kinda just gave the third book to her. At least voice-wise.

AD: I know you live in San Francisco and have written a few books set in the city. For you, what makes it a great setting?

CM: Geographically you can contain it fairly easily in a book. It’s smaller than most big cities. It’s a tenth the size of London or Paris or Los Angeles, so you can write about all the different neighborhoods, or many of the different neighborhoods in the city, and the characters never have to get in a car because everything’s so close. There’s this mystical gothic-y fog thing that goes on in the city. Architecturally it’s very pretty. It’s got a lot of things aesthetically going for it.

Most of the books take place in the North end of the city which is the Financial district, Chinatown, North Beach, which is an Italian neighborhood, and Russian Hill, which is right now young professionals and retired people. You have these clashes of culture. Chinatown is like a foreign country that’s four blocks by four blocks. Watching the interaction of all those different cultures is just interesting. I was a cultural anthro major so I get to do cultural anthro in my backyard more or less.

AD: My major complaint about Bite Me is that there wasn’t enough of the Animals.

CM: The story didn’t want to keep them engaged. I understand what you’re saying. I have the same feeling, but I couldn’t get them more engaged and develop their characters more in the context that I had because of turning so much of the book over to the new members of the cast, which were Abby and Fu Dog and Jared. In a three hundred page book the cast can only get so big and I found myself saying can I go down a road with this subplot or can’t I? I thought, I’ve got to have them show up. The Emperor, too. I would have loved to have had the Emperor more engaged in what was going on, but the book didn’t have enough room for them.

AD: I definitely understand and you didn’t want to just fulfill a checklist of things from the previous books included that people enjoyed.

CM: It was tough for me to write a third book in a series and not make it formulaic. There’s an arc to any book you write that is just the arc of the story. There’s the status quo, something happens, and then you return to status quo and consequently when the characters and the setting were the same, there was going to be a similarity to the books. I was trying to avoid that, but yet satisfy readers who want the same thing over and over again. I mean I get asked ten times a day when are you going to do a sequel to Lamb. My answer is, it’s the life of Jesus, you can’t do a sequel to it. (laughs) Pretty much everyone knows how that story ends.

AD: Is there the possibility of seeing more of Abby and Tommy and the Emperor?

CM: Probably the Emperor. I would at some point like to do a book with the characters and premise from A Dirty Job, the death merchants, that would probably be set in San Francisco. It had the Emperor and it wouldn’t be a difficult stretch to put Abby and Tommy in it. I don’t have a plan for that but I do want to do a book with that premise again and that would almost undoubtedly be set in San Francisco.

Of my San Francisco books, there’s no doubt that A Dirty Job is my best. It was also way more ambitious. It’s a comedy about death. When I did Bloodsucking Fiends I thought, it’s a vampire book it’s not a vehicle for big themes. It needs to be entertaining and funny and that is all I should shoot for. Hopefully it is. A Dirty Job I had big themes to deal with that were pulled from caring for my mother when she was dying and caring for my girlfriend’s mother when she was dying. There was experience to put in that I had to bring through the comedy.

AD: A Dirty Job is one of if not my favorite of your books and I think it’s one of the most successful because that’s where the sensibility and voice and the structure and complexity of the book all came together.

CM; When I teach it’s something that I try to tell students, but it’s a really big thing to hand someone, a project or a book is often defined by its ambition before you start it. That’s what I think for any artist is what makes a difference. Are you stretching to do this? Are you trying to do something that’s actually hard to do and might be beyond your abilities. I could really fuck the dog one of these days doing that. Continually putting those hurdles in front of myself. That’s why it’s kind of fun to do a book like Bite Me. The book I’m working on right now, I’m completely freaked out about being able to ever finish it.

AD: All your books have a comic sensibility in common. Is that you and your perspective on the world?

CM: I think so. That’s kind of my default setting. I really don’t think you can teach anybody to be funny and I know having taught a little bit that when someone comes in and says I want to write like you and you talk to them for ten minutes and go you’re just not funny. It’s just not how you think. It’s not something that I learned. My dad was a funny guy. It’s just how I react to the world. I actually tried to write quote serious stuff unquote and I haven’t been able to pull it off. I get about ten pages into something and I go, something funny has to happen, this is boring.

AD: How much of say, Fluke, is you wanting to write a science fiction story, but it just comes out in this fashion?

CM: Fluke is the perfect example. The reason I wrote Fluke is because I wanted to get in the water with humpback whales. Bottom line. A friend of mine had come back from this island called Rurutu--I call it the Scooby Island cause it’s called Rurutu. He had been in the water with singing humpback whales and he described it. I thought, that’s awesome, I need to do that. In US waters the only way you can do that is if you’re on a whale research permit and you have to get permission. I started writing letters and sending my books to scientists and these guys in Hawaii said sure come on over we’ll put you on the research permit. It started more with wanting to live a life. One of the things you find pretty early on when you write books for a living is you realize I could live my entire life within this room by myself making click-y noises on a keyboard if I don’t make some effort to go do stuff.

That book was completely motivated by wanting to experience what it was like being in the water with whales, and as I started doing the research, it turned out that the scientists were much more interesting than the whales. That’s what the book ended up really being about. The people who study whales much less than the whales themselves. But it all started with just wanting to experience what it was like being in the water with a humpback whale. Which was awesome by the way.

AD: Do you do a lot of research?

CM: I actually do. For Fool I spent a month in England and France. For Lamb I went to Israel for almost a month. I didn’t go to the Himalayas or India and other places that take place in the book. I quite frankly ran out of time and money. I couldn’t go to those places and actually get the book done, so all that’s done from my imagination. I always try to go to the places I’m writing about. It adds dimensions to the book that I would never have been able to anticipate. If I hadn’t gone to Israel and seen how desolate Judea is, where the Dead Sea is and where a lot of the gospels take place and seen how rough the land is from Nazareth to Jerusalem and sort of gotten an idea of what the geography of the place is like, it would have been a completely different book. So yeah I always try to go to where I’m writing about. Even it’s harder with the historical stuff.

I’m writing a book now that takes place in nineteenth century Paris and the city is in many ways the same but the culture’s not. It’s weird because it’s closer to our culture than medieval england or first century Palestine were and that actually makes it more difficult because I can’t just make shit up. (laughs) There was this huge hole in the Jesus story. I could do anything I wanted. With Fool, which was set in the Thirteenth Century, it was kind of the same thing. There’s so much that people don’t know about what went on in those days that I was able to fill it in.

AD: How do you work. Do you outline your books, because in Bite Me, especially, there’s a lot going on.

CM: I do a sort of diagram that’s less a “category one subcategory a” outline and more of a circles and arrows thing. Because it’s a visual representation it’s hard to describe it. The short answer is I do a very rough outline and then I try to plug in scenes that I know are going to be there and stay about five scenes ahead of myself. I mean I obviously write in scenes. That’s how I learned to write, it’s what is effective, and it’s how drama happens. For instance I know that in the next scene we’re going to meet the old vampires and then I’ll get there and decide whose point of view I need to do that from. As far as the outline goes, all the outline will say is, meet old vampires. And then as I approach that I’ll figure out that they had to get somehow and I’ll research the ship.

As the years go by I outline more for a couple reasons. One, I’m on deadline all the time so I can’t afford to be stuck. With Lamb I was stuck for six months. I got up to Antioch and I remember the proposal to the publisher said, and then they’ll have adventures, or something like that. I figured I’ll figure it out when I get to it, and then when I got to it I went, fuck I have no idea what happens now. And I’m stuck in Antioch going I don’t know what’s I didn’t think it through, so I do that now. What I do is outline a little bit more and know where I’m going so that my writing time is more efficient. But then when I write, I write it page one, “once upon a time,” right to the end. I try to write a little bit every day. I have goals which I always fall short of. I try to write a thousand words a day and then I’ll do eight hundred. I try to write for four hours a day and I’ll write three. What happens is the story tightens up as you get to the end, by the time you get to what would be the third act of a book you don’t have a lot of flexibility in what you can do. You sort of set all this stuff in motion and you can’t go very afield to do any exploring. Any goofing around you have to do it in the first half of the book. It becomes necessary to outline as it tightens up. Like braiding a rope or something.

AD: Reading the books, you seem to enjoy the first two acts more than last part, it’s much looser and feels more relaxed in the beginning and the end is very much about wrapping up the plot.

CM: You mean actually doing the process? The first hundred pages are so fucking hard I can’t even tell you. I hate that part. This was the first time I ever said that out loud because it’s not a good thing to say things like that, but the first hundred pages of a book are miserable. You’re establishing the world and you don’t know what you’re doing and you don’t have the characters set and every day you’re making just a million decisions and I’m awful at making decisions. It takes me three hours to figure out where I’m going to have dinner if I’m going out to dinner. All those decisions have to be made and they set the path for the rest of the book in those first hundred pages. It typically will take me six months to write the first hundred pages and I may write the next two hundred pages in two months.

As far as what I enjoy writing the most, probably the middle third of a book is the most enjoyable you’ve got things running but you still have some room to move around in and you can make decisions that go a little farther afield a digress a bit. But the first part’s miserable and largely because even if you’ve done it a dozen times like I have you still go shit I have no idea what I’m doing. This is like the first book all over again.

AD: I don’t know if you want to say anything about the next book you’re working on. You mentioned it was set in 19th Century Paris.

CM: I can tell you about all I know about it. It’s about Nineteenth century French painters. Yes, it’s funny. Yes, it’s going to have weird supernatural stuff in it. It’s going to include a cast of characters that’s a laundry list of the most famous painters of their day, the impressionists and the post-impressionists. It turns out, that’s really hard to do, so don’t try that at home. (laughs)

(image) It’s an idea whose time has come. Actionfest, co-founded by movie producer Aaron Norris (brother of Chuck), is a brand new film festival based in Asheville, North Carolina that just had its inaugural run in mid-April and is expected to reoccur annually. As the name implies, it’s a festival... more

It’s an idea whose time has come. Actionfest, co-founded by movie producer Aaron Norris (brother of Chuck), is a brand new film festival based in Asheville, North Carolina that just had its inaugural run in mid-April and is expected to reoccur annually. As the name implies, it’s a festival devoted exclusively to that most critically neglected of genres: the straight-up action movie. While critics haven’t completely dismissed the action genre over the years, singling out the occasional masterpiece like Die Hardfor praise, they’ve undoubtedly tended to favor action that is wedded to science-fiction or other high-minded genres as opposed to action for its own sake. They also generally under-appreciate the complexity involved in pulling off traditional action elements like car chases, gun battles, explosions, and mano a mano combat, all of which can be exhilarating when done in high style by a talented filmmaker. Directors such as this year’s Oscar winner Kathryn Bigelow toiled for decades in the action ghetto, making gems like Point Break and Blue Steel while going unrecognized by the critical community, and the chances of other action veterans like John Woo and John McTiernan being officially recognized by their peers anytime soon are slim at best. The need to support this genre, which requires its directors to have inherent choreography instincts, endless patience, a meticulous eye, and genuine visual flair, has never been greater. Hence, Actionfest.



Traveling down to Asheville for this year’s inaugural fest, I wasn’t exactly sure what kind of action films to expect. Would there be some ultra low-budget, do-it-yourself action films like Robert Rodriguez’s debut, El Mariachi? Answer: not really. The DIY phenomenon seems to have died out over the years. Would there perhaps be an action movie equivalent to Ti West’s recently praised mock-80s horror film The House of the Devil, with its actresses in big hair and 80s clothes? No such luck. Would there be genre crossovers, perhaps in the form of violent thrillers or sword and sandal films? And would there be a ton of imports from Asia and South America, where martial arts films have more currency of late than in North America? The answer to the last two questions was definitely yes: Actionfest proved to be nothing if not international in flavor, with the Chilean revenge film Mandrill and the Muay Thai martial arts film Raging Phoenix just two of the many international films premiering. It also marked the regional debuts of highly-anticipated genre offerings like Neil Marshall’s gore-soaked Romans-invade-Britain epic Centurion and the awards-caliber Australian noir film The Square, both of which deliver a heavy quotient of blood while telling fantastic, gritty stories. If you’ve ever wanted to see an angry Scottish banshee saw off a soldier’s head during a battle, don’t miss Centurion when it comes to theaters this summer.



One staple of the action genre is revenge, and an action festival wouldn’t have been complete without an old-fashioned man-against-the-fucked-system revenge drama, a la Death Wish. The Actionfest title that fit that bill was Harry Brown, a British import starring Michael Caine as an elderly widower and ex-Marine who decides he’s not going to sit still anymore as packs of mindless hooligans trash his East London neighborhood. Spoiler: Old Man 1, London, 0. Then there was Dirty Mind, a delicate Flemish comedy from director Pieter Van Hess about a film crew technician who undergoes a drastic personality change after an on-set accident permanently ups his adrenaline levels, and refashions himself as a fearless stuntman. Eventually, a surgery option is presented that will restore his old, cautious personality, but why be yourself when you can be a fearless man, loved and admired by all? An unpredictable, engrossing film, this was undoubtedly a festival highlight. As with all festivals, there were also the oddball films that you know you’ll never see again outside of the fest, and for me, the movie that most lived up to that description was Noboru Iguchi’s RoboGeisha. Part Japanese fetish film, part mechanized body horror, part Kill Bill-on-LSD, this nearly indescribable piece of craziness is like Takashi Miike meets Russ Meyer. See it at your own risk.




As is common with most film festivals, Actionfest was also brimming with activities beyond the scheduled screenings, and the two most prominent non-film events this year were an outdoor stunt show for the locals with a jetpack flyer as its centerpiece and a big panel discussion with legendary stuntmen on hand to swap stories and discuss their craft. (See footage from the stunt show here). The show was something to behold, featuring a highly-trained skydiver who jumped out of a plane many thousands of feet in the air and landed ten feet away from me as well as the aforementioned jetpack stuntman, who powered himself over the top of the movie theater like Iron Man and landed safely on his feet to thunderous applause. The show also included amazing demonstration of how stuntmen pull punches for fight scenes, set themselves on fire and take backwards falls off buildings, but the highlight of my Actionfest experience was by far the panel. It was a thrill just being in the room during the gathering of legendary stunt coordinators such as Paul Weston, known for doing the stunts on most of Roger Moore’s James Bond films, as well as Raiders of the Lost Ark, Superman, Return of the Jedi and countless others. Weston’s anecdotes ran the gamut from stories about his time hanging with the Beatles on the set of the film Help! to explaining why the catapult stunt in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves was the toughest of his career to telling tales out of school about Roger Moore’s extremely lax work ethic when it came to doing the simplest stunts like, say, climbing up a ladder.



Other highlights from the raucous stunt panel included Weston revealing how he made Christopher Reeve fly with piano wire, and a young stuntman in the audience delighting the crowd with the story of how he was asked to run face-first into a beam repeatedly on the set of the recent My Bloody Valentine 3D because the 3D cameras needed coverage from multiple angles. The stuntmen on the panel were also unafraid to name names when it came to directors who had put their safety in jeopardy, singling out Blade director Stephen Norrington and director Michael Winner as filmmakers who were known for caring more about getting the shot than stuntman safety. One stuntman gave as an example of when to say no to a director the story of the time he was asked to walk out onto a building’s ledge that was no more than two inches wide. Also on the panel was Aaron Norris, who told stories of his long association with brother Chuck’s movies, including how he associates the film Forced Vengeance with the honeymoon he took during its making and the tale of how he talked a studio into letting him direct his brother’s film Braddock: Missing in Action III after the original director began turning in footage so bad that Norris feared it would ruin his career. Although Norris’s filmography includes work with some other colorful directors like Joseph Zito and Andrew Davis -- the latter being a well-respected action director throughout the 80s and 90s -- they sadly couldn’t make it to Asheville to discuss their respective entries in the Norrisography.



If Actionfest had an alternate name, it would definitely be Norrisfest. Chuck Norris’s library of titles, consisting largely of mawkish Vietnam POW rescue fantasies from the early Reagan era and poorly executed cop dramas, and interspersed with the occasional corker like Andrew Davis’s Code of Silence, was front and center at the festival thanks to his brother’s heavy involvement; the man himself even agreed to show up and collect a lifetime achievement award on the festival’s closing day. Norris films were not only screened along with the regular lineup of features during Actionfest, they were also played continuously on a wall-mounted screen in the festival’s VIP lounge throughout the fest, a surreal touch if ever there was one; imagine sipping cocktails on a leather couch while zoning out to Delta Force 2: The Colombian Connection. In fact, the first year of Actionfest was a bit surreal all-together, something that first struck me when I witnessed Chilean martial arts star Marko Zaror chatting up Asheville locals outside the main theater, and correcting them on the proper pronunciation of Chile. It wasn’t just witnessing the intermittent culture shock that the festival produced, however, it was the newness of action cinema being taken seriously at all. As action fans, we’re not used to seeing the genre we love most being considered as deeply as other genres, like horror, but a dedicated festival could change that. If Actionfest does more to draw widespread attention to the admirable work of the stuntmen, fight choreographers, cinematographers and visionary directors who’ve dedicated their careers to filming action and filming it well, then it will be well worth the twenty bucks I paid for a Code of Silence t-shirt at the gift shop.

Last month Scott Snyder ceased being an immensely talented short story writer and teacher with degrees from Brown and Columbia and instead became one of comic’s hottest writers and a new horror-fantasy icon. American Vampire #1 created by Snyder and illustrated by Rafael Albuquerque has received a lot... more

Last month Scott Snyder ceased being an immensely talented short story writer and teacher with degrees from Brown and Columbia and instead became one of comic’s hottest writers and a new horror-fantasy icon. American Vampire #1 created by Snyder and illustrated by Rafael Albuquerque has received a lot more press than the typical comic series, largely because of Snyder’s friend and mentor who is writing the backup story in the first five issues, Stephen King.

Snyder’s first book, the short story collection "Voodoo Heart" was an amazing batch of stories, tales about chasing blimps across the nation, guarding Niagara Falls from would-be suicides, trust fund runaways and a pilot who crashes into a wedding and runs off with the bride. The stories were fantastic and unlikely, outlandish and improbable but never impossible. Instead, quiet tales of odd characters dealing with strange circumstances that were funny, bizarre and touching. His short story “The Thirteenth Egg” was one of the best parts of the superhero anthology “Who Will Save Us Now?” and was very much the kind of fantastic horror story that comics do so well.

Snyder is also writing the just-released “Iron Man: Noir” miniseries, a pulp take on Tony Stark set in the 1930’s. The second issue of “American Vampire” goes on sale Wednesday April 21 in which the new species, the “american vampire” of the title makes its debut, and we chatted with Snyder about the series, the evolution of monsters and his long-delayed first novel.


SCOTT SNYDER: It’s sound so creepy to be like, I love this site, but I really do.

ALEX DUEBEN: Well awesome. I’m a big fan of yours. I read your book Voodoo Heart a while back and really loved it and American Vampire is really great.

SS: Thanks. We worked really hard on that. It’s definitely been like, I feel like the luckiest guy on Long Island right now. It’s been a great ride so far.

AD: In other interviews, you’ve talked about how the idea behind the series was vampires evolving. How did you come up with this concept and what are they changing into exactly?

SS: It was several years ago when, I mean there’s always a vampire glut, but there was another glut of vampire works out there. I think it was when there a sequel to Blade and Underworld. It just seemed like all of the vampires were too cool to give you the time of day, looking like they were on their way to some neo-gothic club that happens to exists in the sewer with a chandelier overhead. The leather trenchcoats and sunglasses. That aesthetic was so boring by that point. It made me nostalgic for vampires that I grew up on. My favorite vampire movies and books are things like Salem’s Lot and Lost Boys and Near Dark and the works where vampires are not so much scary because they’re exotic and romanticized but scary because they’re your loved ones come back to kill you from the dead. They’re not scary because they’re so foreign and beautiful and so on. What’s scary about Salem’s Lot to me is that penultimate scene of Danny Glick, that little boy, scratching at his brother’s window to be let in in the middle of the night. What’s scary about Lost Boys is Michael changing into a vampire in front of his brother and his brother’s worried that his own brother is going is going to kill him. Similarly in Near Dark, the girl you fall for, who seems to be your dream girl, turns out to be a serial killing vampire.

I was in a model shops getting a Doctor Who model for a friend of mine and they had a series of busts. One of them was a zombie Confederate soldier. I had been thinking about vampires and it occurred to me, why not have a vampire that walks the kinds of landscapes you enjoy writing about? Why not make a new kind of vampire that’s indigenous to this place? From there it just took off. If I’m going to make a new kind of vampire, what’s he going to be and when’s he going to appear. Wouldn’t that mean then, as a logical extension, that there had been other species before that had branched out as well. I thought about doing it as a book for a while. I worked on it as a screenplay with my best friend for a bit. When I started working in comics, I was biding my time, thinking this was the perfect format for it.

AD: Both stories, Pearl, which is by you and Skinner Sweet, which is King’s, are set in the West. Is that the specific setting for the book?

SS: It’s not. The cycle we’re working on next also takes place in the West, but the one that I’m plotting now after that takes place on the East coast. There’s one we’re thinking about that’s going to take place in Middle America. There’s an overseas one we have in mind. The west just seemed like both a mythological place and [a place] of optimism and endless sunshine. That seemed like such an inhospitable place to the vampires we’ve seen. The perfect place to begin another species that can walk in the sun and has a kind of more muscular character to it than what came before. Plus there are certain desert qualities that really characterize the American vampire.

Our editor, Mark Doyle, who’s been amazing, we went back and forth thinking maybe we should include some teaser where it shows what the American vampire looks like. I’m really excited for people to see issue #2 where the actual new species makes it’s first appearance. It’s not some incredibly radical different thing where it doesn’t look like a vampire, but there are some notable differences. It has much more desert qualities to it. Rattlesnake fangs and an unhinging jaw and so on. We’re really trying to have it be something where we make something that’s new, not just as a gimmick, but something that’s new that’s in some way allows us to really get into inter-species relations and conflict later on in the series. Each vampire species has its own set of weaknesses and strengths and that means that the European vampires have sort of are eager to find some way to kill off this new bloodline.

AD: Why did you decide to open the book with Pearl and her story?

SS: That was an editorial decision. Originally I pitched the series as starting with Skinner in the West and Vertigo essentially rejected the pitch on the idea that if it was going to start in the West, it would be too narrow of a focus and too literal. In the pitch I had included other ideas for where it was going to go. The second cycle was going to be the 1920s it was going to be Pearl so I wrote that up as a lot more elaborate pitch for them saying, I agreed with what they said and what if we started here. They immediately jumped at that. We were actually going to save Skinner’s story for later in the series.

They knew that I knew Stephen King and could I contact him and anyone else I knew to just give a line of press for when the announcement was made. I had given him the pitch to see if he could make any suggestions and he’d been really helpful about giving me a couple tips. He was really excited for me. He said you know I really love that character Skinner and when you get to him I’ll write an issue if you want. I was like, if I tell them you’re going to write an issue or two they’re going to jump at that. I don’t want it to be something you do because you feel like it’s some favor or something and he was really adamant. He liked the character and thought it would be fun.

I went back to Vertigo and told them. It was a Friday afternoon when the office is closed and I got this Monday morning call, basically, did you say Stephen King said he would write an issue? Immediately it became, how do we do that. Steve wrote him with such exuberance and made up so many interesting things about the character. The character was developed and designed and had a history, but some of the nuances and his long standing grudges Steve elaborated on and made so much richer. He brought in this whole theme about legend versus fact and history versus folklore. Issue one was the closet thing to the outline that I had set up for him. He really takes off in issue two. You start to see the epic scope of what he wants to do.

AD: When you originally proposed this, were you thinking of having a rotating series of artists like in Brian Wood’s series Northlanders?

SS: That’s exactly what the proposed format was actually. Rafael [Albuquerque] was just the first person that auditioned for the series. Editor Will Dennis, who’s been terrific, he does Northlanders and does Scalped and he suggested Rafael. Rafael sent some sketches based on my descriptions of the characters and it was just immediate, this guy understands who they are. We actually wound up using his sketches in a couple of the promos. These are sketches before he ever saw the script.

He’s in Brazil and I contacted him on instant messenger and I talk to him literally every day. We’ve become really close friends. It was his idea to the two cycles in two different looks, one in washes to give Steve’s an antiquated feel and do the Pearl one in these real hard inks to give it an art deco 20s look. Rafael will always be our artist on the big forward moving cycles. In between what we’re going to try and do is explore a little bit of the history between different vampire species and human-vampire relations. Explore why the species we’re all so familiar with from folklore and Dracula has become the dominant species and where are all the other ones are. I just feel so lucky to get to work with him.

AD: Is the plan to jump around in time with these characters and some new ones? Do you have an endgame in mind for the series?

SS: I do have an endgame, but it’s far far in the future. I know in mind how I want the series to end, but we have so many ideas to go forward and backward and sideways with it. We’re hoping to get a good long run like some of my favorite Vertigo series. In terms of the format, we are going to explore different decades and we’ll return to different decades as well to show different perspectives on things. We are absolutely going to pick up on the characters decade to decade. It’s Skinner’s blood that we’re following, essentially. He’ll pop up in fun and surprising ways, sometimes featured centrally as an antagonist or protagonist and other times he’ll make cameos. Pearl the same. I can promise that we’re following both the bloodline and the characters that are established in this cycle so they won’t disappear after this at all.

AD: Has working at Vertigo and Marvel come about because of the short story “The Thirteenth Egg” that you wrote for the superhero anthology, Who Can Save Us Now?

SS: In terms of working in comics, all of it did. I think all the time, what if I hadn’t written that story? It’s crazy. It caught the eye of Mark [Doyle] and my editor at Marvel, Jeanine [Schaefer]. The chance to pitch for the Marvel Timely series two years ago. Then I got Iron Man: Noir, which they’re waiting to release so it coincides with the movie, and Nation X. That led to a chance to pitch a creator owned thing to Vertigo.

There’s nowhere I’d be more thrilled to be than Vertigo. I get intimidated all the time by the bar that’s set. It won’t be for lack of trying if it sucks. There’s no phoning it in. I understand how fortunate I am to be able to do this at Vertigo and to be able to have my own series as a relatively green writer. And I want to know what people think. People think I’m just saying that, but I really do want to know. Comics fans are so astute and so generous and so vicious. I want to know. I want it to be a series that people feel a part of and respond to. I’ve been on that side as a fanboy for a long time so I want people to feel like they have access to the story as well.

AD: Like I said at the beginning, I really loved your first book Voodoo Heart and I know you’re working on a novel, but I keep seeing the release date change. I don’t know how much you want to say about it or when we can expect it.

SS: I’m really not going to finish my next draft of it until at least the summer. I’m hoping 2011, but it’s a ways away. It’s actually about somebody who works in comics. It’s about a guy who’s struggling with his son who’s in an accident and he is caught in this place, psychologically, where he’s having a lot of trouble reconciling the limitations of medical science and the more fantastic possibilities that he writes about everyday. It’s called The Goodbye Suit. I want to let it sit until the summer and look it over and really rewrite it and tinker with it and then hopefully have it done before the end of the year. I love it to death and it’s very personal. I’ll definitely do it but I’m just having a lot of fun with comics right now and I like to step away from it for a while so I can be more objective when I look at it again.

My plan is to get a few cycles of Vampire done. I like to finish the whole cycle at once, so I write all the issues of a cycle together. I’m finishing cycle two and I’m going to finish cycle three hopefully and really get into four by the summer and be a good full year ahead and then take a few months over the summer to really work on the novel more and come back to Vampire in the fall. That’s the hope, that I can buy some some months to work on it without having to do both, but we’ll see.

AD: A lot of the interviews have been pretty overwhelmed by talking about Stephen King, and that’s understandable, but the heart of the comic and what makes it so awesome seems to get obscured a lot of the time.

SS: If you wanted to know what it’s like to work with Stephen King, he’s the most generous guy in the world. I’ve been wracking my brain, why is he writing so much. Is he doing this as a favor to me because we’re friendly. I loved it but I don’t want to be burdening him with this, doing it because its an obligation. What you realize quickly from talking to him, when you see the intensity of his scripts, is that he acts like a hungry exuberant young writer when he likes a story. The writing is just so fun. It’s inspiring to watch because he has no reason to be that enthusiastic about it from a pragmatic standpoint. He doesn’t need to go to the mat for five issues of this thing. He does it that way because he’s a story guy, and when he gets into something he likes he lives there entirely. For a young writer, someone like me, it was incredibly inspiring to watch. To see somebody who’s so established, it doesn’t get more established, act like somebody who’s right out of the gate and getting their first job. That was great.

He’s also the most gracious guy in the world. I keep thanking him and he’s like, I should be thanking you, this is so much fun. I’m like no no no. I’m thanking you. Mark and I got him a fun gift. We got him an Elvis Day of the Dead bust. He and I are both big Elvis fans. The funny thing is, yesterday I came home from dropping my son off and I had this big package. I opened it up and it’s this big bottle of Dom Perignon from Steve. I’ve never drank Dom Perignon. “Thanks for the wild ride. Congrats. TCB. Steve.” TCB is Elvis’ personal logo which we both use. That’s Steve King. That’s who he is and I just can’t say enough good things about him as a writer, as a person, as a mentor, as a genius storyteller. I can’t throw enough love his way.