Less than a decade ago, Matt Fraction was a young comics creator writing graphic novels like “Mantooth” and “The Last of Independents.” Today he’s an Eisner Award winning creator and one of Marvel’s top talents, writing “Invincible Iron Man” and “Thor” in addition to this year’s... more

Less than a decade ago, Matt Fraction was a young comics creator writing graphic novels like “Mantooth” and “The Last of Independents.” Today he’s an Eisner Award winning creator and one of Marvel’s top talents, writing “Invincible Iron Man” and “Thor” in addition to this year’s big crossover event miniseries “Fear Itself.”

This year sees the return of one of his most well known and beloved creations. “Casanova” is more of a cult hit than anything, but it’s an intense and devoted cult that has followed the book over its two miniseries. The third miniseries, “Casanova: Avaritia,” features art from award-winning creator Gabriel Ba (“The Umbrella Academy,” “Daytripper”), who drew the first miniseries (and whose twin brother drew the second one). We spoke with Fraction by phone in advance of the first issue’s release on September 7.


ALEX DUEBEN: It’s been years since the last series of Casanova. What took so long? Was it just a question of scheduling the book between other projects?

MATT FRACTION: It was a few different questions. We were almost certain at the end of the last series that it wasn’t going to be continuing at Image. It was a matter of figuring out where we were going [to publish the next series] and when the boys were going to be able to fit it into their schedule. They had lined quite an impressive array of paying work at that point. Casanova was all work done on for potential back end earning. So schedule was a part and then once we figured out where we were going to have it published, it then became a matter of getting everybody’s schedules lined up. Then I actually had to write it and that took an awfully long time. Nothing about Casanova has ever gone easy and I would feel robbed if it started to get easy now.

AD: Has Casanova always been hard to write?

MF: Yes. Very much so, but this time there had been a long gap [since the last issue]. I worked on the first script for a year, on and off. I don’t necessarily know how to articulate it, but it’s the difficult child. It’s the one that requires the most thought and work. It made my bones in some places. I wanted it to be as good as I thought I was, if that doesn’t sound too egomaniacal. I went back and reread all of [Casanova] to date and was humbled by the experience, because I didn’t think it was that good. [laughs] So there’s the added pressure of putting your money where your mouth is, trying to live up to whatever reputation I and the book had. I’d start over, constantly trying to push up my game and push up the book’s game. I don’t know that it was successful, but it reached a point where I felt like, today, this is what I am able to love.

AD: Now in the past year, the first two series have been rereleased with new color. What was the thinking behind this?

MF: Well we wanted to sell, to be quite honest. Retailers treated the one color Casanova as though it were a black and white book. It was referred to in reviews as being black and white. Aesthetically it was a choice we all liked. And it was a weird format. It was two dollars. There’s enough about the book that’s counterintuitive, that to actually start off in a hole was silly. When we went to relaunch it, we wanted to give the book every chance it had to succeed in the direct market. The direct market was engineered to sell one thing. It was engineered to sell Batman. We can use Batman as a metric on the sales charts where Batman sells “one” and things sell either above or below “one.” It is truly designed to move Batman comics. Retailers were not carrying the book because it was weird. I had a retailer tell me he didn’t order the book because if he had to chose between a two dollar Image book and a five dollar IDW book, he would rather the IDW book sat on his shelf because he would make five dollars, not two dollars. I was like, let’s stop trying to exclude vendors, because if retailers aren’t carrying it, then readers aren’t reading it. I think it looks like no other comic out there. Yes, it is full color, but there’s not another book in the world that looks like Casanova. We’re still doing something weird.

AD: It doesn’t hurt that now you and the series artists Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon are all much bigger than you were just a few years ago.

MF: That was part of the hiatus. It’s one thing for me to be the guy who writes Iron Fist and The Order and for you guys to be known for Brazilian comics no one’s heard of, but you go do Umbrella Academy, and I’ll go do X-Men and when we come back we can be the guys who did Umbrella Academy and X-Men. It certainly can’t hurt.

AD: Getting back to writing Casanova, it was originally published in the Image slimline format and now it’s a longer four issue miniseries.

MF: It’s now thirty-two pages an issue, so it’s now sixty percent than any other comic. [laughs] Comics are about twenty pages now and this is twelve pages longer. It’s different. The collection will eventually be the same length [as the previous collections], but the storytelling is entirely different because it’s not in discreet sixteen page chapters anymore, but bigger, more robust, more complicated thirty-two page chapters.

AD: Do you have a master plan for the series?

MF: Very much so. Where it goes and how it ends and all that stuff, if we are lucky enough to get there. The first three story lines are going to work as a trilogy. The fourth one kind of works as a standalone chapter that would bridge the way to a second trilogy which would be the final volumes. If it ends at any point along the way, it will still be a fairly complete story just not the entirety of the story I wanted to tell if that makes sense.

AD: Now in part this is because of the gap, but I think of Casanova as part of first stage of your career alongside comics like Mantooth and Last of the Independents and Five Fists of Science.

MF: Casanova was the first regular “monthly” comic that I wrote. I wrote short stories and two graphic novels, but yes, absolutely, it’s very much the first stage

AD: Given that and given all the other challenges, why come back to the book?

MF: This past year has clearly been one of transition for me. What keeps me coming back to it is that it is the comic that I wrote when I didn’t think I was ever going to get a chance to do it again. It’s the comic that I wrote because I wanted to see. I wrote it because if I had this one chance to make a comic what did I want to do? Another fucking Batman ripoff or something that I actually wanted to read? I created the book that I wished existed and it remains that very much. I made Casanova because there was no Casanova out there. That it has been such a constant struggle at this point, there’s a degree of stubbornness that I will not let it beat me involved. [laughs]

AD: You mentioned that this year was one of transition for you. In what way?

MF: I think with regards to the stuff I’ve been doing at Marvel. Doing a big event book like Fear Itself that moves the numbers that it moves and is looked at by the volume of people that are looking at it and garnered the press attention that it’s garnered, I’ve never worked on a stage that big.

AD: It’s a big deal to write a book like this and this is the first time in a while where the event wasn’t written by Brian Bendis or Mark Millar, but given the other writing you’ve been doing at Marvel, it seems a logical step.

MF: I hope so. That’s what’s nice about it. It felt like a vote of confidence. It was very rewarding.

AD: One of the biggest writing jobs you have is on Iron Man, your first issue of which came out around the time of the movie and it really built off the film thematically.

MF: Accidentally. I didn’t have any access. I saw the movie the same time as everyone did. I saw the trailer the same time everyone else did. I had no special access. I wrote the book I wanted to read. I was reading the casting information and was like, oh, this sounds like the kind of movie I’d want to see. Issue one was put to bed before the film came out. After I saw the movie I came back and I added the in helmet shots, the 2001 shots they did inside the helmet. That I got from the movie.

AD: So you didn’t know that Jeff Bridges would be playing Obadiah Stane, who would be the film’s villain?

MF: Well I did, but that was from reading “Variety.” I wasn’t even doing Iron Man at the time. I read in “Variety” that Jeff Bridges was going to be Obadiah Stane and I knew who that character was. I was doing a book called The Order and I thought I should bring a Stane character back. I knew I wanted an Iron Man villain at the end of the first year of The Order. I thought well I’ll create a new Stane character, because in the comic Obadiah Stane blows his own head off on panel in a way that would be very difficult to get out of. Even for comic book deaths it was pretty gruesome. I thought, I’ll create this new Stane character and that way whoever’s writing Iron Man when the movie comes out will have a Stane back on the board that they can play with. Little did I know that it would be me. So The Order ended up serving as a prequel to my Iron Man run.

AD: What is it that you like about working at Marvel?

MF: It’s fun. It’s a ridiculous way to make a living. I get to play with some of the best pop culture icons that the world has yet to conceive. I’m not one of these guys, the comics mainstream is full of these guys, who work in the comics mainstream while one hand pinches their nose closed and they recoil in horror and shame that they’re not writing the great American novel or some other kind of creative opus. I quite enjoy my job. I like the people that I work with. And you get to work with these incredible enduring icons. I like the people. I’m also not one of those who believes he’s beyond editorial. It’s always nice to work with people whose job it is to make you look like a better smarter writer than you are.

AD: So what can readers of Iron Man and Thor look forward to in the future?

MF: Fear Itself is at its heart a big Thor story, so the next year or so of Thor deals with the fallout from Fear Itself. There’s a sort of oh so hip weary cynicism that farts out of the commentariat where one drolly rolls their eyes on hearing that everything is going to change. Well, shithead, it’s a comic. It’s changing every thirty days. That’s what they do. These stories constantly move and if nothing ever changes. In theory every comic is constantly changing and if it’s not it gets cancelled because people get bored because nothing happens.

So everything that comes out of Fear Itself will be playing hell on the characters of Thor and Iron Man. Tony Stark has relapsed and that’s going to become public knowledge. I’m not interested in doing a story about Tony drinking again. He fell off the wagon for a night and is back on. Now he’s dealing with the repercussions of that relapse. We’re going to do a recovery story rather a story of the relapse itself. The fact that Tony pilots this four billion dollar war suit that could produce megadeaths were he to put his mind to it and was legally intoxicated while doing it will cause him a lot of problems in the next year.

And I’m launching The Defenders out of Fear Itself, which is kind of like Marvel’s Doom Patrol. They’re these characters that everybody loves but for one reason or another seem chronically incapable of sustaining their own books. It’s Dr. Strange and the Silver Surfer and She Hulk and Iron Fist. It’s a chance to do stuff I’ve not really done at Marvel. I’m writing it in a way I’ve never written before. Doing a kind of story I’ve never done before. It’s exciting.

AD: In Fear Itself where Tony takes a drink, it was a really powerful and chilling scene. It’s interesting how you talk about change because for a while Tony was a drinker and then he became an alcoholic and since then he’s been sober.

MF: The thing is, Tony dealt with his alcoholism by staring out of a window in the rain all night clenching his fists and by morning he was okay. At the time they weren’t allowed to talk about Alcoholics Anonymous. He just sobered up by willpower. But later began to drink again and drank much that he lost his company and lost the suit and Rhodey took over as Iron Man and Tony spent the better part of a year and a half homeless and drunk in New York in a tuxedo with long hair and beard and eventually almost froze to death in a blizzard. There was another much longer much darker chapter of that. In both cases there wasn’t the editorial breadth or depth and maybe it was inappropriate at the time based on the audience to show all this stuff. So the chance to deal with things like the program and the media and rehab culture. When rehab is televised as entertainment, how do you get sober? It’s our chance to do this in a way that Iron Man had never gotten to do. I’m not interested in Tony crashing into walls and shit like that. I wanted him to relapse. I wanted him to have a bad night. I wanted his reaction to the scariest thing he’s ever seen. The world’s going to end, we’re all going to die, what do you do? Tony got drunk. I wanted to deal with how does he pick himself up after that.

AD: He got through the crisis, but what happens after that? How do you get through the next day?

MF: What do you do when the world knows that you were piloting the most dangerous weapon mankind has conceived of and you were ripped to the tits? You don’t get to be a superhero after that. If an airline pilot gets caught drunk, he doesn’t get to fly anymore. If the guy flying an F-18 is caught drunk, he doesn’t get to fly anymore. Why should Tony Stark get to fly Iron Man if he’s doing it drunk? So the story is called “Demon.”

AD: So just to wrap up, tease us a little bit about what people can look forward to in the new Casanova?

MF: It is a psychedelic science fiction superspy comic about a wastrel who is abducted into a parallel universe where he is known for being moral and upstanding. He basically gets to be his own evil twin. The new volume opens up with him going through time and space and adopting all these different aliases and disguises to prevent, basically, himself from ever happening. It’s very spacey, very cosmic, very trippy science fiction. It’s a lot of sex. A lot of mind-bending, brain-warping medium-pushing stuff.

In a world where a twenty page comic can be read in the time it takes to say “I just read a twenty page comic,” [laughs] this one will refuse you that privilege. It’s psychedelic sci-fi. And equal opportunity nudity too. Lots of undernuts, underballs and dangling nut sacks. There’s a lot of genitals. Pretty much everybody in the book, you get to see their genitals at some point. [laughs] Hard to believe the book’s not a screaming success. More tits than a National Geographic. More dicks than a Maroon 5 concert. [laughs]

AD: So, last question, unless you’d like to end there?

MF: [laughs] I want to end anywhere but there.

AD: What would your wife, the writer Kelly Sue DeConnick, say is the biggest challenge of living with another writer?

MF: We’ve got two kids and finding balance between our work lives and our home lives. That is the challenge. It’s like water will find its own level. In the last year we’ve learned, maybe I’m not going to get the luxury of a ten hour work day, so how much work do I have to get done today and how much time do I have in which to get it done. It’s amazing when you remove the luxury of time just how much you can get done if you need to write x amount of pages and you only have four hours to do it, I think you surprise yourself how much work you actually get done. Finding time to find room for everything. We’re still not great at it. The deep secret is that every parent would much rather be playing with their kid or dicking around in the front yard than working.

Patton Oswalt braved a very rough cell phone connection to give a phone interview for his latest film. He stuck to funny one liners to keep it safe when the questions were breaking up, so it was kind of a free 10 minute standup set from a major comedian. Even his polite refusal of a Suicide Girls membership... more

Patton Oswalt braved a very rough cell phone connection to give a phone interview for his latest film. He stuck to funny one liners to keep it safe when the questions were breaking up, so it was kind of a free 10 minute standup set from a major comedian. Even his polite refusal of a Suicide Girls membership was funny.

There’s only one scene with Patton Oswalt in the new movie Seeking a Friend for the End of the World. He plays Roache, a neighbor Dodge (Steve Carell) runs into at an end of the world party. Since an approaching asteroid gives earth only three weeks before destruction, people are living up their last days.

Roache explains to Dodge how he’s been using the end of the world to get laid. It turns out 8s and 10s lower their standards when they don’t have any time to wait for someone better. Oswalt gives a funny monologue in a memorable scene from the movie, and he gave us some time in support of the film.

Suicide Girls: This interview is for Suicide Girls.
Patton Oswalt: Oh cool.
SG: Are you familiar with our work?
PO: I know of the website, yes. I’ve been interviewed a few times in the past.
SG: Can we count you as a member?
PO: You know, I never had a membership there. I think they sent me a free one and I never used the password and then I got a whole new internet thing so I just kind of never was a member.
SG: We’ll have to fix that.
PO: Oh, I’m good, but thank you. That’s very kind. I’m okay.
SG: Whenever I see an end of the world movie, I always think, “Where would I go to find supplies?” Do you think about that?
PO: I mean, in the case of a movie like this where you know the whole world is going to be wiped up, I think it becomes a moot point. I would try to find enough alcohol and DVDs to get me through it.
SG: I think so too! I would collect the entertainment.
PO: Okay, yeah, me too.
SG: Would you go for the full out debauchery like your character does?
PO: Maybe for a few days but I bet the hangover would be too brutal to enjoy it for very long.
SG: Is it kind of amazing that they’re still civil enough to have a party?
PO: It is nice. It speaks well for humanity.
SG: Did you improvise anything in your scene?
PO: A couple lines here and there but the script was pretty great. I didn’t have to add all that much stuff.
SG: As a standup performer, you memorize your whole act, so is it easy to memorize a long monologue for a movie?
PO: Yeah, you always get a couple runs at it so definitely it’s way easier on film where you can do it again and again. Most of my stuff as a standup is more riffing out on stage, so there’s not that much memorization involved.
SG: As a movie fan yourself, what can we do about the texting in theaters?
PO: I have no idea and theaters don’t seem to be that concerned with stopping it. I would do what they do in India which is click devices that block cell phones in most movie theaters. Go ahead and take them out. They don’t work.
SG: Is it frustrating that it seems like people don’t want to watch movies? They’d rather sit there and text.
PO: Apparently. I mean, as much as they don’t care, I care less and less about getting angry at them and just block them out and make it my own experience.
SG: You have such a strong presence on Twitter. Do you ever start a tweet and then think, “No, I’ll save that for my act?”
PO: No, because my Twitter feed is more self contained one liners and that’s not what I do as a comedian.
SG: As a comic book fan, what are your thoughts and expectations for the Amazing Spider-Man reboot coming out this month?
PO: I can’t say. I can’t get a grip on this one from the trailers. I’m going to have to wait to see it. I just don’t know. I won’t know ‘til I see it. I just learned not to just movies by their trailers anymore.
SG: Where did you fall in the greats organic webshooters versus mechanical webshooters debate?
PO: I never really thought about it either way. Whatever’s going to make the thing work in the movie I guess. I mean, it didn’t bother me in the first movie. It’s all just different versions of storytelling I guess.
SG: Is The Dark Knight Rises a big one on your radar?
PO: Yeah, it looks like it’s going to be great. I’m very excited and I hope it’s great. I loved The Dark Knight so we’ll see what happens.
SG: Do you think there’s still room for Batman after The Avengers?
PO: I think there’s always room for good movies. It doesn’t really matter. As long as you make a good movie, people will go see it.
SG: Were you a fan of The Avengers?
PO: Oh yeah, I thought it was great. I thought it was amazing.
SG: I was pleased you mentioned the great video store Erol’s in a blog post on your site. What are your fond memories of Erol’s Video?
PO: Oh yeah. Not really anything specific. It was just a part of my childhood.
SG: Did you ever imagine when you were growing up that you would one day have a platform for all your ideas and opinions?
PO: No, I don't think any of us did. There was no way to predict the kind of future that we’re living in and there’s no way to predict what’s probably coming down the pipe now. God knows what’s next so we’ll see.
SG: But even that you’d be a performer and say what you want and people would listen?
PO: It’s nice! It was a nice dream and now it’s come true so I can’t complain.
SG: Once you’ve had albums and sold out comedy shows, how does that change your perspective when you know you have a platform?
PO: Well, everything in your life changes your perspective so I can’t really think of it in terms of that. It doesn’t make me doublethink everything that I do. I always try my best to be as true to whatever I feel in the moment. I’m not like oh, now more people listen to me, I’ve got to do this.
SG: When did you realize you had your own unique point of view?
PO: It’s hard to put a finger on that. Again, it’s a thing that just happens. It just happens without you realizing it and then you kind of end up looking at it in the rearview mirror.
SG: How do you stay current?
PO: I’m more like staying true is way more important than staying current.

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World is now playing.

by Lee Camp (video) Looking to make out with a stranger in a tent only feet away from squads of angry police? Then your time is finally here! ...Okay, maybe there are other reasons to celebrate the Occupy anniversary that's coming up. They might not be as fun as that reason, but they probably matter... more

by Lee Camp



Looking to make out with a stranger in a tent only feet away from squads of angry police? Then your time is finally here! ...Okay, maybe there are other reasons to celebrate the Occupy anniversary that's coming up. They might not be as fun as that reason, but they probably matter more.



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(image) by A.J. Focht A year ago, NBC buried their Wonder Woman pilot and all hopes of seeing the Amazon princess during prime time. The CW, known for their superhero television series such as Smallville and the upcoming Arrow, is now in talks to revive her with a Wonder Woman origins series. The prelude... more

by A.J. Focht

A year ago, NBC buried their Wonder Woman pilot and all hopes of seeing the Amazon princess during prime time. The CW, known for their superhero television series such as Smallville and the upcoming Arrow, is now in talks to revive her with a Wonder Woman origins series. The prelude to the legend of Diana of Themyscira’s is being penned by Allan Heinberg. The CW is only working on a script now; the pilot has yet to be greenlit.

Henry Cavill, who will be playing Superman in the upcoming Man of Steel film recently spoke about the project in an interview. He wasn’t able to relay much, but he did say that beyond making Superman easier to identify with, they wanted to take a realistic approach to the movie. It seems likely that Man of Steel will be the first feature in the new DC movie universe, leading into the Justice League movie, and there have been rumors that it may cameo other Justice League members – namely Wonder Woman. Man of Steel will premier in theaters in June 2013.

Kick-Ass 2 is bringing back most of the main actors from the first film, including Chloe Moretz, Aaron Johnson, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, and even Nicolas Cage. And a new big name has also joined the crew; Jim Carrey has been confirmed playing the part of The Colonel in the sequel. Kick-Ass 2 is set for a summer 2013 release.

With the release less than a year out, Star Trek 2 has wrapped up filming and is headed for post-production. In recent interviews, actors http://nerdbastards.com/2012/09/06/praise-for-star-trek-2-from-chris-pine-and-zachary-quinto/ " target="_blank">Chris Pine (Captain Kirk) and Zachary Quinto (Spock) both gave their opinions of the project. Pine insists he can’t give the movie enough hype, and that the threats are even greater this time around. Quinto said the project was more challenging, but bigger and bolder than the last. We will all know soon enough as Star Trek 2 is set to release on May 17, 2013.

J.J. Abrams’ new NBC series Revolution has released the full first pilot online early. The series deals with events fifteen years after a post-apocalyptic scenario where all electricity on earth shuts off. The pilot delivers tremendous performances and is a great hook into the series. It’s a must see for all fans of post-apocalyptic stories. That’s not all Abrams is working on though, he is also currently developing a ‘android buddy cop drama’ for FOX.

Last week’s premiere of Doctor Who, “Asylum of the Daleks” broke records for BBC America. The long awaited return of the Time Lord brought in record numbers, with 1.6 million tuning in to see the premiere. In a recent interview, Matt Smith discussed the upcoming season and the future of Doctor Who in general. On a final Doctor Who note, Neil Giman announced at his Hugo acceptance speech that he will be writing a second episode, which is slated for the second half of season seven.

by Nahp Suicide A column which highlights Suicide Girls and their fave groups. (image) [Caia Suicide in Bairro Alto] This week Caia Suicide tells us why she feels at home in the exclusive sanctuary of the SuicideGirls Lounge. Members: 3,298 / Comments: 337,242 WHY DO YOU LOVE IT?: I think the fact that... more

by Nahp Suicide

A column which highlights Suicide Girls and their fave groups.


[Caia Suicide in Bairro Alto]

This week Caia Suicide tells us why she feels at home in the exclusive sanctuary of the SuicideGirls Lounge.

Members: 3,298 / Comments: 337,242

WHY DO YOU LOVE IT?: I think the fact that we can all just vent and share feelings is pretty cool and makes us feel more connected. It’s also good to know that we are not alone with our issues.

DISCUSSION TIP: Well definitely try not to offend anyone or make anyone's feelings less valid. It's difficult sometimes because there are a lot of different personalities on the site, but as long as people respect each other everything is ok.

MOST HEATED DISCUSSION THREAD: Posts in the confessions thread can create some of the most heated discussions, but the SG Lounge is a very private place and the comments there are not to be shared outside of it.

BEST RANDOM QUOTE: The thread about members emails to SGs has some of the best quotes.

WHO’S WELCOME TO JOIN?: It’s a private group for Suicide Girls only. Girls whose sets are not yet up are free to join the LimboGirls Lounge.


***
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Few women have done sexually charged works that made an impression on both men and women’s psyches. Tura Satana’s look and work, especially in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, is right up there with Bettie Page, Dixie Evans and Brigitte Bardot. Satana is a woman that took all the shit she’s gone through... more

Few women have done sexually charged works that made an impression on both men and women’s psyches. Tura Satana’s look and work, especially in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, is right up there with Bettie Page, Dixie Evans and Brigitte Bardot. Satana is a woman that took all the shit she’s gone through in life and dumped that anger right into Faster, Pussycat. Since that time she hasn’t acted very much but she is easily recognizable, hence why she has a comic book and a line of memorabilia plastered with her face.

Check out the official website for Tura Satana

Daniel Robert Epstein: Back when you did Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, did you see the film as representing any kind of female empowerment?

Tura Satana: Not really, I saw that it was a part that gave me the opportunity to get rid of a lot of anger [laughs].

DRE: [laughs] But obviously that’s something that’s been taken from the film over the years, have you come to understand that aspect of it?

TS: I knew that aspect back then but we were trying to show that women could be feminine and still be strong and powerful and take care of themselves. That they didn’t need a man around to do everything for them. Female empowerment wasn’t even thought of back then, just a little equality. That was the only reason I agreed to do it. It was something that helped me show the world that women were not weak little pansies that needed to be protected all the time. That we’re capable of doing our own thing.

DRE: How did the part come to you in the first place?

TS: My agent asked me if I wanted to do an interview for Russ Meyers and I said, “Well, you told him that I don’t do porn.” He said, “Yes. It’s not that kind of a part. There’s no nudity in the movie.” Which that was not really true, there was a little nudity in there [laughs].

DRE: You have such a unique look, what kind of parts were you going for?

TS: For somebody who was built like I was there weren’t that many parts around. If I went for a casting call nine times out of ten they were either looking at my chest or looking at my face but never the two together [laughs].

DRE: [laughs] Did Russ do that too?

TS: No, actually he just looked at my chest and said, “Oh you’ll do great.” [laughs]

DRE: [laughs] Since then have you met a lot of women who have used the film for feminist ideals?

TS: Oh yes. A lot of women fans have written me and told me how much the part that I did in Faster, Pussycat helped them get better lives for themselves. They were proud to be able to be female, feminine and kick a little ass too.

DRE: [laughs] I’m from a generation that wasn’t around when Faster, Pussycat came out, was this kind of role and movie very unusual?

TS: Yes it was. There were no parts before with a female who was strong enough to carry out what they wanted to have done or what Russ wanted to have done. When I first went in for the job, he had me read some parts and I asked him, “Do you want it played soft or do you want it played with power?” He said, “Well, give me a rendition of each.” So I gave him a rendition of each and he said, “The power definitely does it.”

DRE: [laughs] You mentioned that you had some anger.

TS: It was basically stuff from when I was a kid and when I was growing up. Mostly that was a lot of the anger I had inside of me and Russ said, “Just bring your own personality to it.” Afterwards he didn’t think anybody else could have ever played Varla the way I did.

DRE: [laughs] I hope not.

Was the role cathartic for you?

TS: I felt like there was still some unfinished business there but one thing about that part was that it did limit what I could do afterwards. There were not too many people who were willing to give me other parts because they didn’t think I could be soft enough. I wound up losing a lot of parts because of that film.

DRE: Such as?

TS: Like Modesty Blaise. They thought I was not feminine enough. Then there were some parts for the Matt Helm series. They thought I was too strong to play opposite Dean [Martin] even though I had played opposite Dean in a couple other films. Even though I wound up losing parts I’m still happy about doing the film because I feel that it accomplished a lot for women.

DRE: I know you had some very rough times when you were younger but would it be difficult for you to say that you regret them because they were a big part of what made you what you are?

TS: Yes, there were a lot of the things that helped mold me to the way that I am. I was raped when I was almost ten years old by five guys. The helplessness and anger that comes along with that is something that takes a lot out of you. But I think it also helped make me who I am because after that I could have become a devout man-hater or I could have become a sex maniac. I think I fell in between the two.

DRE: How was the rape handled legally back then?

TS: First of all you got to realize that I am oriental and this was just a few years after the war was over. It felt like there was no crime committed against me. The oldest boy’s father paid the judge a thousand dollars and I went to reform school.

DRE: It’s so hard for someone like me to comprehend that but it seems that you’re doing so amazingly well now.

TS: Luckily my father and my brother helped me through it. It helped me put things in categories so I was a lot better off than most people who went through something like that.

DRE: Were there a lot of strong women like yourself either in Hollywood or in general?

TS: No. Back then most gals were taught that we were supposed to marry, get pregnant, have babies, take care of the man and take care of the house. There was nothing that told you that you could be strong and independent. Back then there were love children all over the place and everything had to do with loving the world and loving everything else. So being strong was not a positive asset.

DRE: Your look and your character from back then has also become a strong gay icon. When did you first start to notice that?

TS: I didn’t notice that many lesbians until recently. Mostly it was the gay guys.

DRE: Why do you think that happened?

TS: I think they loved it because of the fact that I was feminine but I was not in competition with them for their partners. They were able to take their partners to go see a film and enjoy it without being worried about their partners saying, “Oh God, I’d really like to stick it to that one” [laughs].

DRE: [laughs] What is your comic book about?

TS: It’s basically a continuation from the end of Faster Pussycat. I turn out to be a good guy afterwards and I get rid of all the bad guys. I start kicking ass that way.

DRE: Quentin Tarantino said that he’d give up five years of his life to work with you. Have you guys gotten in contact with one another?

TS: No we haven’t but I’m not that hard to find. He can find me any time he wants. I would love to work with him. I would love to work with John Waters. These are people that I admire and enjoy, but I think I’m a little past their era now.

DRE: Do you still want to act?

TS: I’ve got two pictures that I’m going to do very shortly. One is supposedly a semi-documentary on my life plus the times that I had with Russ out in the desert. Russ and I stayed friends until the day he died. I never did another film with him but he always kept saying that he wanted us to but that he felt he didn’t have anything that he thought would be good enough for me [laughs]. I said, “Yeah, you probably don’t.” because he got a little heavier into porn afterwards.

DRE: I read that you are also writing an autobiography.

TS: Yeah I worked on it for about eight years. I could probably go into a lot more details than I did but there were a couple times where I just didn’t feel like writing anything [laughs]. It’s hard to put a finish to a book when you’re still alive. [laughs]

DRE: What made you want to write it?

TS: Thousands of my fans have said, “God, we have to hear your story.” So I figured I’d finally sit down and write my whole story just so they’d know what’s going on.

DRE: You said before you weren’t interested in doing nudity for Russ. Was that because you were very into being an actress or were you against things like that?

TS: The only nudity I ever did was for Harold Lloyd. That was the only time I ever posed in the nude. I didn’t like posing in the nude. There’s a mystery about a woman if she had just a drape over her. On my website you can see some pictures that are very close to being nude, but I’m still not [laughs]. I have pictures of when I was an exotic dancer on there and pictures when I was about 14 years old. I probably could put all the pictures from Harold Lloyd’s collection of me on there but I haven’t gotten around to that.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

Women in Hollywood have made monumental strides in the last year, with the success of Bridesmaids and Lena Dunham[url] on HBO’s Girls. What you don’t hear as much about is that there have been equally major advances for women behind the scenes. For example, at Gary Sanchez Productions, the production... more

Women in Hollywood have made monumental strides in the last year, with the success of Bridesmaids and Lena Dunham[url] on HBO’s Girls. What you don’t hear as much about is that there have been equally major advances for women behind the scenes.

For example, at Gary Sanchez Productions, the production company of Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, a woman holds a major executive position. Jessica Elbaum produced the Sundance hit Bachelorette, written and directed by Leslye Headland. Bachelorette[/I ] became the number one pre-theatrical download on iTunes in August. It plays theaters this month and you can still get it online or VOD.

Bachelorette stars Kirsten Dunst, Lizzy Caplan and Isla Fischer as high school friends who grudgingly play bridesmaids to their friend Becky (Rebel Wilson.) The girls begin the film as angry, resentful, promiscuous, and/or addicts (some combination afflicts each character). The night before the wedding they cause even more disasters that will take all night to fix, if they even make it before the wedding.

We got to chat with Elbaum by phone about her career as a female exec for some of the hottest comedy producers’ in Hollywood. She had a lot to share about the current climate for female comedy, her film Bachelorette and the latest Gary Sanchez production, the long awaited Anchorman 2!

Suicide Girls: Did you pick up Bachelorette from Sundance or was it always a Gary Sanchez production?

Jessica Elbaum: It was always Gary Sanchez. I was actually working on a TV show with Leslye Headland and I’d seen the play. Actually a show that we were developing with HBO for Lizzy Caplan so Lizzy and I went to New York to see Leslye’s play, and then both obviously flipped out for it. Then while I was working with Leslye on this other idea, I had asked her more and more about the play and why she wrote it and how she wrote it and when she wrote it. She had told me, “I actually wrote it as a feature first but it got a little bit held up in the studio system.” At that point nobody was rushing to make a dark female comedy. So she developed it into a play. I asked her to read it, read it, flipped out for it, had Will and Adam read it and they said, “Absolutely, let’s go.”

SG: I wish I had seen the Sundance cut, because I heard it was even more brutal?

JE: Oh, the ending and how it was written was the last shot is just of them on the bench, “Are we going to be okay, you guys? Oh fuck it, let’s get a drink.” And then the movie ends. People were not into that. I personally was but I think it left people a little bit like, it’s disturbing. So we changed some things around and I think we give people a little bit more of what they want in this cut.

SG: I don’t know. I don’t see how if you made it that far, that’s what would be too disturbing for you.

JE: I know, but it’s so funny. Listen, we didn’t have time or money for reshoots so we got in there and did what we could with what we had and it was just a matter of switching around a couple scenes. It plays dramatically different. It’s crazy for me because I’ve been with it for so long. It’s also never not interesting. It’s never not interesting depending on the audience you see it with.

SG: I hope someday that cut becomes available as a study.

JE: I would love to have it, I don't know that they would ever actually sign off on this, but another DVD set. Like here’s this one, here’s that one.

SG: And it’s not like you gave it a happy ending.

JE: No, by no means, but it certainly is a happier ending. I think that just seeing the girls dancing, when they’re with their arms around each other and jumping and they’re happy, makes people happy. I think that there’s something about seeing that, that they all came together and the four of them are going to be okay, it makes the girls slightly more likeable. There’s something about that.

SG: Maybe I know too much about human nature but I didn’t think they were going to be okay.

JE: By the way, they’re not going to be okay.

SG: What do you think of this conversation we’re now having in the media, from Bridesmaids to Lena Dunham and Girls about not only women’s comedy, but dark women’s comedy.

JE: It’s interesting to me, and I made the mistake of saying it’s a dark comedy. For me, I should abandon the word dark and just say real because Lena’s show and Bachelorette to me are I guess you could say dark, but very real to me. So I’m so over the moon that that show exists, that we were able to make this movie, that Bridesmaids sort of paved the way for all of us, but the flip side is we’ve been trying to do this for years. Get a grip, you know. Women have been trying to tell these stories for a very long time.

SG: Women have been trying to tell these stories for a long time, but unfortunately so many of the ones that got made were those stupid trying to make everyone likeable and not funny versions.

JE: Yeah, and then we got a little bit derailed, even though I’m a fan, because of Sex and the City. It’s interesting, Sex and the City was I guess relatable a couple of years ago, or five-ten years ago but something has shifted. Now I watch Sex and the City, I’m like, “What on earth?”

SG: It was still at the height of the greedy fantasy ‘90s.

JE: It’s like wish fulfillment weirdness.

SG: Is likeability in a way the death of comedy?

JE: Well, depends on who your audience is. Meaning that this movie’s more difficult because the girls are not likeable.

SG: I guess, but as I asked that I remembered Robin Williams and Jim Carey, people who are funny and likeable.

JE: Yeah, and I think Will Ferrell’s very likeable too.

SG: But, he does play some real asshole characters.

JE: I mean, there’s nobody better than Will at playing a dick but people still loving him in the end. Ricky Bobby, Cam Brady who he just played in The Campaign, even Ron Burgundy.

SG: I always wonder, how are the high maintenance career girls of most romantic comedies considered likeable? I don’t like that.

JE: I don’t. That’s so not something that I respond to so they are the least likeable to me. Kirsten in Bachelorette is way more likeable to me because I see parts of myself in her. I don’t see myself so much in 27 Dresses or whatever those movies are. I don't know why they’re likeable. Also those are more glossy. Those are just glossy movies.

SG: I definitely enjoy watching Regan, Gena and Katie more, but I still wouldn’t want to hang out with them. They’re dangerous.

JE: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s dangerous for sure but I’ve been there.

SG: Are you invigorated by the VOD approach and all the opportunities that provides to get movies to people?

JE: I am. I didn’t know really anything about this model because Gary Sanchez had never been involved with a release like this so we were learning as we went. The news of being number one on iTunes and breaking that pre-theatrical record has been incredible. We continued to do well and I think for a movie like this, that was made for a price and there’s not a ton of marketing money and P&A behind it, it’s like a built in campaign. I think it’s the best thing that could have happened for this movie and movies like this I think are going to start being released this way. I think it’s exciting because there’s so much more opportunity to make these films. I think if this model continues to prove it’s working, I think independent film is going to just blow up even more. There’s such an opportunity here. It’s funny, at first I was like, “VOD? I want it to be on theater marquees everywhere.” And the exciting thing is it’s still going to be. It’s sort of the gift that keeps giving.

SG: I’ll tell you, theaters aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. They’re kind of the worst place to see a movie now.

JE: I agree and we talk about it a lot over here. Times are changing. People want to see movies when they want to see it on their iPads. They don’t care about the picture and the color and the sound. Unless it’s a big tentpole movie, I think watching movies at home or on your computer or iPad is just what’s happening and it’s going to continue.

SG: Well, you can see it without distractions from all the people making noise in a theater.

JE: 100%. 100%. And the cool theaters are gone. Sunset 5, that’s gone. The Landmark in Santa Monica is a shithole. There’s just no cool theaters. There was a theater on Wilshire in Santa Monica that I used to love going to see movies at, done, gone. It’s all boarded up and gone. One of the coolest theaters I enjoy going to the most now is still the Laemmle in Encino. That’s kind of a civilized theater to go to.

SG: Was it important to find four very different looking women for Bachelorette?

JE: It’s funny, it was always in the script Regan was blonde, Katie was redhead. It’s as if the roles were written for these girls, but they weren’t. No, we never at least said it out loud but I think that when it happened, it was kind of fate. We kind of loved how it came together that way and the contrast of how they all looked just made it even better, but no. It was definitely not high on the list.

SG: And you got Rebel Wilson before she exploded?

JE: We got Rebel before she exploded which was such a get. I just saw Pitch Perfect last night and she is amazing.

SG: What had you seen her in at that point?

JE: I had seen clips of her from Bridesmaids and that was kind of it. I knew that she was coming out in Bridesmaids but nobody had seen the movie. The way she played the scene in the bathroom with Kirsten when she read for it was just incredible. She made you want to laugh and cry. Her confidence, only Rebel can pull off being called pigface and still being okay.

SG: How sensitively did you have to discuss the script with her, because the script does indicate how they treat her, she does have to be heavy?

JE: It was never an issue with her. Some of the bulimia stuff, she was like, “I would like to tone that back a little bit,” but she was like, “Call me pigface.” She never had an issue with it.

SG: Anchorman was before your time with Will Ferrell so what is it like to work on a sequel to the legendary movie?

JE: That’s the next thing I’m jumping into over here which is so exciting. They’re writing it right now and we’re just sort of in the pre-pre-production phase, but are you kidding? It’s incredible. To be on Anchorman 2? Actually I started, my first day, I was Will’s assistant, I started with him nine years ago, my first day with him was on the reshoots for Anchorman January nine years ago. Nine years later I’m producing Anchorman 2 so that’s kind of a fun full circle story.

SG: Were you there for the teaser shoot?

JE: I was.

SG: What was that like with everyone back in costume?

JE: Amazing. Incredible. Just very, very surreal. There was never a question. Of course they’re all going to come back to do this which is really cool.

SG: After all the hurdles of trying to get the studio to sign off on Anchorman 2, how did the idea for the sequel change?

JE: I don't know that it ever changed more than they just got on board. They just realized it was going to be a big mistake to not do this.

SG: So it was always the ‘80s and a custody battle between Ron and Veronica?

JE: You know what, I don't know if that’s still going to be the story. They’re up at Will’s writing every day and we haven’t seen anything yet. So we shall see.

SG: You have to do a trilogy now.

JE: Oh, are you kidding? For the rest of my career, if I could just do Anchorman and an independent movie every year, those two movies every year, I’m good.

SG: Is that how you hooked up with Gary Sanchez, being Will’s assistant?

JE: Yeah, so I started with Will nine years ago, Gary Sanchez happened about five years ago and it was just Will, Adam, myself and Chris Henchy. Now it’s just grown into a big legit company.

SG: What is the environment for women there?

JE: Excellent. The guys are open to everything. They’re huge Lena Dunham fans, obviously Leslye Headland. Lizzy’s always kind of been in the family and now Isla and Kirsten, they love it. I certainly think I’m pushing the female voice around here, not so secretly anymore, but it’s kind of one for all.

SG: Have you always had a raunchy sense of humor?

JE: I mean, I guess. My parents saw the movie and I thought they were going to freak out but they loved it, thank God. I don't know if it’s raunchy so much as… I guess raunchy. Real and raunchy? Bachelorette is raunchy but it’s grounded you could argue, right? Or you think I’m completely off the rails saying that.

SG: Like I said it was scary because you know how real those women are.

JE: I mean, we all know women like that so I guess the raunchiness always came second to me just being so into how real it felt to me.

SG: They’re not shitting in the street.

JE: Exactly. Like that, Bridesmaids I loved so much but I don't know that I would say, “Hey, Isla, now you’re going to shit in the street because I think that’s funny.” You know what I mean? The subtle things that the girls do, when you just watch the way Isla moves and runs and the stuff she does with her eyes, then Kirsten. They all improvised so much and they brought so much to this movie, it’s incredible. Kirsten falling on the bed, that was just something she just did. One of my favorite lines is Kirsten saying, “This hotel is disgusting,” totally her. Little things like that make me laugh.

Bachelorette is now available for download or streaming. It opens in theaters September 7.

by ChrisSick In which we dissect the epidemic of Werewolf Disease, chairs what talk back, and why four-day-long political infomercials are entirely useless. There's nine weeks left until this horrible, grueling, vile campaign is over. 63 days, 10 hours, 45 minutes, and 10 seconds, as of this writing. more

by ChrisSick

In which we dissect the epidemic of Werewolf Disease, chairs what talk back, and why four-day-long political infomercials are entirely useless.


There's nine weeks left until this horrible, grueling, vile campaign is over. 63 days, 10 hours, 45 minutes, and 10 seconds, as of this writing. Now, 9 seconds. 8.


Yes. I am counting all of them.


It has, thus far, been officially No Fun. There was some dim hope, previously, that the introduction of Paul Ryan — the acknowledged Big Idea man of the Republican party — would dramatically shake up the race, and introduce some much needed debate of the issues. Which is the word talking heads on television use to describe median tax-rates for middle-class wage earners and average Social Security payments. As opposed to meaningless Culture War arguments that only affect unimportant things like whether or not a woman's less important, legally, than the fetus she carries, or if those people should be allowed to get all married up.


Paul-motherfucking-Ryan, as he shall be known henceforth (having inherited the title of Big Idea Man of the GOP along with the “motherfucking” honorific from Newt-motherfucking-Gingrich), turned out to be surprisingly disappointing. As the media's anointed Serious Policy and Pretty Face Conservative, he broke the hearts of many a Neutral Arbitrator when he took the stage in Tampa with a mouth just full of goddamn lies. For those of us who've read his budget proposals and seen the non-partisan analysis of same, the fact that the man is a compulsive liar wasn't all that shocking. That he lies about facts that can and will be immediately fact-checked by even friendly media sources is a bit disconcerting, but such are the risks of politics in the post-truth era.


What was surprising was learning that Paul-motherfucking-Ryan did not, in fact, lie. At least, according to reliable media shills. Jennifer Rubin, Knight Templar of the Romney Media Crusade, got out ahead of the story to tell the twelve people who read her WaPo column (mostly employees of Media Matters and Alex Pareene over at Salon) that the left was totally losing their shit:

Which is true, given that only leftists count lies by omission, lies by misrepresentation, and, well, straight-out-factually-incorrect statements as, y'know, actual lies. Oh, also, Actual Grown-Ass Adults not stricken with a severe case of Werewolf Disease.


Werewolf Disease, according to various medical experts, is a Real Thing. And this is one of the clearest cases I've ever seen. Symptoms of Werewolf Disease include being full of lies and false equivocation, not giving a single shit about anything resembling truth or facts, and generally having a smile made of knife blades and hatred.


And, apparently, the entirety of the right wing has been stricken.


Which, really, should shock no one. Of the themed nights, one was, naturally, about rebutting a statement Obama never actually said, and another was about “Loving America,” since Democrats clearly do not.


Because apparently you can take the I-4 from Tampa International directly to the Tampa Bay Times Forum and bypass truth entirely. Select highlights of the convention include:

• Chris Christie's keynote address, in which he promises to tell hard truths while lying extensively about his record as NJ Governor.



• Mitch “One-Term Obama” McConnell, reading from — what sounds like — the same chain email your grandparents have forwarded you thirty times since '08 that you've deleted without opening.
  
  Marco Rubio's speech about economic opportunity and how voting for an incredibly rich man who came from a privileged background over a moderately rich man from a modest background will reinforce that message and ensure opportunity.



• Every single female or ethnic minority GOP member the convention organizers could find.



• One, Mia Love, notably followed by a blonde actress and birther there to tell you how Obama is destroying society.



• Lots of jokes about how often the President plays golf. Because he's such a slacker compared to the previous President who had three times as many vacation days in his first term.



• A number of personal and family friends of Citizen Mitt, who basically were there to show us that the Republican Presidential nominee does, in fact, have friends.



• And, finally Mitt Romney's acceptance speech. Which no on can even recall because, just prior, a crazy old man spent fifteen-minutes arguing with a motherfucking chair.

Yes, did you think I had somehow forgot about that? Did you think anyone, ever, anywhere, could somehow forget about that?



[Via @zdroberts]


Clint Eastwood stood on stage at the Republican National Convention and argued with a chair. Then Mitt Romney took the stage and no one was listening to a single word he said, because we were all busy thinking about Clint Eastwood arguing with a chair.


It was, to use a classic Hunter S. Thompson description, deeply weird. And, if you were watching at home and felt unsettled by the whole thing, you were not alone. Within hours the New York Times had the story on high-level finger-pointing and blame-shifting within the Romney campaign. The speech was panned by liberal commentators and Republican politicians alike.


But!


Within hours of that, The Romney Media Crusade marched forth to bravely deny that there was anything even remotely weird about the speech, and if you thought there was, well you're just far too coastal elite to get what Clint was laying down. As Derek Hunter of the Daily News observed:

Polling data released so far is split, with Public Policy Polling finding narrow disapproval in Florida and North Carolina, and Survey USA noting widespread approval among Floridian voters. Both firms are noted for having a left-leaning house effect, for more information on in-house polling biases, see Nate Silver here.


None of which matters worth a damn, Clint Eastwood's angry chair is to this cycle what Sarah Palin's debate performance was to the 2008 race. It doesn't matter what the polling says, any conservative with a keyboard will tell you to shut your stupid, liberal piehole, because Clint's speech was pitch-perfect, and he wasn't talking to you, anyway, silly liberal. He was talking to Real America.


After the dust settled and the President ordered the hurricane to dissipate, the polling came in. The Real Clear Politics average of polls has the race at a complete tie, but it only includes two daily tracking polls that closed after the end of the convention, Gallup and Rasmussen. Gallup's is a seven-day registered voter poll that shows Obama with a +1 advantage, while Rasmussen's three-day likely voter poll gives Romney a +4 advantage for a net bounce of +5 post-convention. (Note: A late check of the polls show Rasmussen giving Romney only a +3 advantage as of 9/4/12)


Nate Silver has, as is his wont, posted an incredibly complex analysis of post-convention polling to try and determine a standard baseline for convention related bounces. If you can actually find such a number within that web of regression analysis and multi-column tables, god bless, but I'm far too tired to sort that out, so for sake of argument we'll take the Rasmussen's three day/likely voter poll at face value (here's a quick list of reasons why we probably shouldn't take Rasmussen at face value).


A five-point bounce isn't bad, but historically it seems soft, and as the Clint Eastwood jokes filter out into the land of memegenerator and the like, we're left struggling to see a post-VP announcement bounce, and the softest possible post-convention bounce. Meanwhile, hot on the heels of Tampa comes the DNC in North Carolina which will most likely negating any potential gain.


Assuming George Clooney doesn’t get drunk and challenge Clint Eastwood to a fist-fight (he’d lose), it's hard to imagine that by this time next week the race won't have returned to its status of statistical dead heat with a small, but consistent, lead showing for Obama. Worth noting: none of the outside indicators — such as Nate Silver's chance to win, or Intrade's prediction market — have shown any dramatic shift away from the odds of Obama winning reelection.


Which seems to indicate these conventions are a gigantic waste of time, television coverage, empty chairs, and, of course, the $136 million in taxpayer dollars spent subsidizing the political conventions this year. The campaigns themselves will spend roughly $3 billion this cycle and at the end we'll have learned the Mitt Romney really is exactly as boring as his haircut would suggest, and that the country's first black President is still viewed as a metaphorical antichrist by a disturbingly large number of troubled individuals, and a literal one by some that are quite famous.


All of which is bringing the Werewolf out in me, but for the sake of your edification and entertainment, I’m postponing treatment until after the election. Sixty-three days, 7 hours, 53 minutes, 7 seconds...6...5...


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by Laurelin (image) Disappointment is one of the worst feelings in the world. I vividly remember experiencing it as a little girl who so badly wanted a cat for her birthday; my parents had a huge wrapped gift on the table when I woke up, and as I tore through the paper I was so sure it must be something... more

by Laurelin



Disappointment is one of the worst feelings in the world. I vividly remember experiencing it as a little girl who so badly wanted a cat for her birthday; my parents had a huge wrapped gift on the table when I woke up, and as I tore through the paper I was so sure it must be something for my new cat. It was a birdcage, and as it took everything in me not to break down in tears. I forced a smile, and I named my first pet parakeet Buttercup.

Later on in high school I would pick out my favorite outfit just to have my crush be out sick that day. I would do something out of line at home and have my parents so upset that they weren’t even angry, just disappointed, and I wished with all my heart I could take it back but I never could.

As I get older I notice that a lot of the time the fierce optimism I associate with my bright demeanor has faded. When one always expects to be let down, it almost makes the inevitable disappointment more manageable. That guy you liked, it never would have worked out anyways. He would never like someone like you. Things would be too complicated, too messy and it’s probably better this way, even though inside I’m screaming because I want so badly for just one person to prove me wrong.

I remember the moment I realized my last relationship was over, the black cloud of disappointment just washed over me like a wave and I was shaken to the core with the realization that this was really it. I was back to being just me, not me and him. It was the day after his birthday, and we were supposed to meet for a drink at the bar we worked at. I wanted to see him so badly, our schedules were tough and we rarely had days off together. I waited...

Every time the door opened I looked, and it was never him. A lifetime spent watching the door, and he never came, my cell phone eventually glowed with a text that simply said, “I’m sorry.” I walked home and I watched the trains go by under the overpass and I knew it was over, this was the last time he would let me down.

We all have baggage. An expected crash and burn after so many before seems only right; but maybe, just maybe, this time things will be different. As someone new comes into your life, there’s that fine line between great expectations and where they’re going to fall. I can’t help but find myself waiting for a storm, holding my breath, forever waiting for disaster.

It’s exhausting and I wish for something different. Outside it starts to rain, and I quicken my pace as I head for the bar. I wonder if he’s there yet, and I wish for sun briefly before realizing I don’t even care. No matter how grey the sky becomes and how rarely the sun seems to shine, maybe I’ve been going about things all wrong. Maybe the key is just to learn to dance in the rain.

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Courtney Taylor-Taylor is best known as the lead singer and guitarist of the band The Dandy Warhols. The band is favorite of many of here at SG and the favor is returned by many in the band. Taylor-Taylor is responsible for writing some of the group’s best known songs including “We Used To Be Friends”... more

Courtney Taylor-Taylor is best known as the lead singer and guitarist of the band The Dandy Warhols. The band is favorite of many of here at SG and the favor is returned by many in the band. Taylor-Taylor is responsible for writing some of the group’s best known songs including “We Used To Be Friends” and “Bohemian Like You.” The band is still going strong and last year announced that a new album “The Machine” will be released in 2012.

Taylor-Taylor’s new project is something completely different. “One Model Nation” is a graphic novel and an album coming out on January 31. Taylor-Taylor described the project as “We invented a German art noise band that disappeared in 1978 and then I wrote a book about the last three months of their career.” We reached him at his home in Oregon and it’s clear from our conversation that the project is a very personal one, driven by Taylor-Taylor’s personal history and his thoughts on the world as much as it a look at late seventies Germany and events that are almost too strange to be true.


ALEX DUEBEN: It was amusing to read in the back of One Model Nation about how the book began by thinking about the trend of rappers fighting the police in movies and what if they made rock movies about that situation. It is odd there aren’t any.

COURTNEY TAYLOR-TAYLOR: Yeah. I mean it doesn’t matter anyway because the way they portray bands in movies, a nine year old wouldn’t buy. They just sit around and say, “we’ve got to stick together, you guys!” “We’re going to make it!” That’s what being a fucking band is? Are you kidding?

I felt [about this] the way I feel about everything. I wish that somebody would do this. If it bugs me for long enough, I go, I better just do it. I’ll learn how to do it. Somebody’s got to do it and nobody’s doing it, so I’ll do it.

AD: How did you and Donovan Leitch go from that idea to this story set in seventies Germany?

CT-T: Well Donovan started geeking out on the internet and he was like, you’re not going to believe this. I had never heard of the Baader-Meinhof gang. That was at the same time that some anarchy people were going to blow up the space needle and apparently had a warehouse around the corner from our studio so we had cops over at our studio all the time. They weren’t bad, but we were definitely feeling like, they’re cool, but I can see what it would be like to really truly get hassled by the man.

I’m thinking about that all the time while Donovan is telling me that a bunch of basically just jerkoff haters in Germany in the late sixties and seventies got together and without any sense just started killing people in the name of this anger that the youth of the country felt about having to inherit this war guilt. It was like, wow, it just started to work. I ended up sitting with Karl Bartos from Kraftwork. He was the one who was like, don’t even try to make it real. Your idea of what it was like and what made these bands look so cool and do such cool things is far more spectacular than it really was, so just go for it.

AD: Did you end up doing much research into Germany and that period?

CT-T: Yeah. I could have just made the whole thing up since it’s really science fiction. Berlin in the seventies seems very science fiction, very industrial wasteland-y. Donovan was way into it. He was feeding me all these outrageous events. Andreas Baader being interviewed out of prison with just a few guards. These two two college kids that show up. I mean who else is going to come bust him out? What the fuck did they think was going to happen? Was it just too obvious that two kids showed up and said they wanted to do their homework there? I mean how does that happen in real life? Do you know how hard it was for me to write that? This is so unbelievable.

AD: I would think that’s harder to write just because the real stuff seems so crazy and unbelievable.

CT-T: The real things are the hardest to believe. If I had to make up a whole story, it could never have been as deep as this one. I’m just simply not that powerful of a creative person, I think. That was the good part about using actual history. It was nice to use history, but smoothing out those seams where you stitch it together was a really big bite to swallow. I mean opening with a shootout at a show. That actually happened at a college, but I wanted it to be like a rave. In Portland we had crazy ones in the early nineties, late eighties. Portland was a really empty town back then so there was a lot of warehouses and a lot of cop violence.

I did a bunch of research. I just talked to anyone I could. I was doing some college radio stuff in Germany and this teacher told me about when he was in college when bands played and the cops showed up and it was a little like Kent State. Also there are just movies. Donovan would find Fassbinder and Herzog films and we’d watch them and go, what the fuck is that?

AD: After reading the book I had to poke around online to see what was real and who some of these people were.

CT-T: Wasn’t that fun? Isn’t that great? I really wanted that, for people to poke around and find out.

AD: The real life events are so bizarre but the scenes with the band feel very real so the unreal insanity happening around them really does give the reader a sense of what that might be like.

CT-T: And then having them have a fulcrum part in it, even on a personal level. His relationship with Ulrike Meinhof is pretty fucking believable. It’s like relationships I’ve had in my life. I love that part of it. What’s real and what’s not.

AD: Was there that much official government hostility towards youth culture in Germany at the time?

CT-T: Well it’s hard to say, isn’t it? How much is in your head. How much is what people say. How much is coincidence. Some weird thing happens for a different reason but you put it together with something else that happened and now you’re actually just being paranoid. That’s the big thing in the book. How much is just weird coincidences and timing? That’s a thing that I really wanted to get across in the book. I guess I just wanted to make people aware that I think about that shit. I mean if you think about that, it might be interesting for you to know that I think about that shit too. A lot. Am I being paranoid or is this actually happening?

AD: In the book you wrote that you originally wanted to make this a film. How did it end up being a comic?

CT-T: I had never seen a screenplay in my life. I got this screenwriting program and I was like, I’m not going to learn how to use this, so I ended up writing the thing more like a play. I’ve read a lot of plays. I started having other people read it. I don’t know the film industry. It starts to get out of your control and I don’t really care to see any of my work get twisted and manipulated and wrongly put out there. I ended up having Mike Allred read it because he’s the guy. Red Rocket 7 is this perfect rock and roll/science fiction/shoot ‘em up with introspection. In the record producing industry you would say the dude has the ears of a thirteen year old boy. That’s why he’s so good. Mike Allred is that person in the comics industry. Mike and the Image Comics guys hooked me up with Jim Rugg. He had done Afrodisiac which has a seventies look and it’s fucking awesome. I knew this guy could go as far as he wants stylistically.

Donovan and I tried to write it at first together and that was a disaster. We were just goofy. And we didn’t know what we were doing.I started over. I was jetlagged a lot for eight years because it was constant touring and I was wide awake at three a.m. and working [on the book]. I’d put it away for months and come back and be horrified. You learn to whittle away the words. That’s why it took me another six years to make it not suck.

AD: Talk a little about the album, One Model Nation. Was it harder or easier than making the graphic novel?

CT-T: Making the record was so easy. It was about just making cool shit. We didn’t have to make it fit into anybody’s sensibility. It was just however far we wanted to go. It was great. We just camped out in my house in the country, we set up a bassline and spent days out there. It was super fun and really easy and it was like a dream. [laughs] The jerkoff teenage fantasy of what it’s like to be in a German art noise band.

AD: I know that you live in Portland, Oregon.

CT-T: My family’s from Portland. We’re probably one of the oldest Portland families left. We predate the Civil War.

AD: The city has changed a lot in past ten or fifteen years. What keeps you there?

CT-T: I don’t get lost in it.

I was pretty bitter about it for a long time. It started happening in the nineties and it was not pretty. You grow up being the outsider and dream of this world where everyone is hip and culturally aware and then it actually started to happening to Portland. This depressed economy armpit town that I lived in. To hang out at coffeeshop and have a fucking piercing is a fucking cliche. It’s basically just a glut of the kind of people I always liked. To the point where it’s embarrassingly horrifying. It is Portlandia.

AD: So to end, how you describe One Model Nation to people?

CT-T: We invented a German art noise band that disappeared in 1978 and then I wrote a book about the last three months of their career. It’s pretty weird and interesting.


One Model Nation, the book and the album, will be available January 31st.

by Blogbot (image) [SaintKitten in Cute Moustache] Artist / SG Member Name: Carolina Montoya a.k.a. SG Hopeful SaintKitten Mission Statement: Some of the things I do are inspired by weird dreams I have, so there's no common meaning. I’m working on a project about how tattoos are a physical introduction... more

by Blogbot


[SaintKitten in Cute Moustache]

Artist / SG Member Name: Carolina Montoya a.k.a. SG Hopeful SaintKitten

Mission Statement: Some of the things I do are inspired by weird dreams I have, so there's no common meaning. I’m working on a project about how tattoos are a physical introduction to the person that has them. I guess everything that I’ve been doing lately has an element of that. For instance, I love classical paintings and sculptures, and you can tell by some of my own paintings and tattoos that I do. 





Medium: My favorite it’s definitely oil. But I also love to try new things, and mix them up. I’ve done some watercolors as well, but I will always return to oil.

 (I'm also a tattoo artist, and as such, my medium is ink in skin.)

Aesthetic: Finding my own style has been an issue for me, so I’ve tried pretty much everything I think it’s possible to. I’ve even done a few “Buffay’s” (you’ll get it if you ‘re a Friends fan). But I have to say realistic drawings and paintings are my thing.




Notable Achievements: Notable? Not yet. Personal achievements? Yes, everyday! I try really hard to get better day by day, and I’m proud of a few things I’ve done, but I have to say to be in the place I want to be I’ve still got a lot of stuff to discover and learn.





Why We Should Care: You should care because I’m just like most of you. It’s not easy for me to buy cool stuff, or wear nice clothes, and most of the time I give away my work. What I really want with my work is that people can relate to it, and the only way of making that possible is that my work is seen. 



I Want Me Some: You can contact me via SG or on http://www.facebook.com/CarolinaMontoyaSaintKitten " target="_blank">Facebook.





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Ashley Bell literally bent over backwards to entertain us in The Last Exorcism. The film marked her major movie debut in a leading role, and quite an impressive debut it was as a small down girl possessed by a demon. Even though it was called The Last Exorcism, they’ve made a sequel and Bell is back. more

Ashley Bell literally bent over backwards to entertain us in The Last Exorcism. The film marked her major movie debut in a leading role, and quite an impressive debut it was as a small down girl possessed by a demon. Even though it was called The Last Exorcism, they’ve made a sequel and Bell is back.

Bell also gets to step up her physical work in the film The Day. The post-apocalyptic thriller casts bell as Mary, the toughest most fierce survivor in the wasteland. It may have become a cliché to see a woman kick butt in an action movie, but Bell makes it primal and vicious. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2011, where WWE Studios picked it up and is now distributing it.

Of course, that’s all acting. In real life she’s a total sweetheart. She even dresses up to meet reporters and look good on camera, even though her biggest roles have been stripped down and natural. Bell is a trained actor with a background from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and Cambridge University, so she shared with us all her tricks and secrets in a sit down interview that could have gone on forever. She was so gracious she would have kept chatting, but we wrapped after a healthy session.

Suicide Girls: We do see a lot of kickass women, but they’re not usually this full on survivalist. Was that something you wanted to add to the archetype?

Ashley Bell: I think that was in the script. It was right in the script, part of the Mary character description. I said to myself, “This is a challenge. I must do it justice. I must go there and figure out how to be her.”

SG: Was your perception of her that it was one level beyond what we’ve seen before with tough fighting women?

AB: Very much so. Very much so in the lack of how much she says. It wasn’t, for me, a matter of not having lines in the script. It was a matter of what has the writer chosen to have her not say. What is she hiding from these people. What is she looking at. What is preoccupying her mind. There was a basic, a lot of human qualities that Mary has to shut off the survive in this world. A lot of empathy has to be shut down to live. She can’t overextend herself to help somebody because she’ll be putting her neck on the line. She has to make those choices and make those decisions because she has this path of revenge to live up to and live for. She has to complete that in her life.

SG: That’s what I got out of it. We see Kill Bill or Alias but there’s still a moment of, “Oh, I still like them.” Mary was someone who I liked watching survive, but she’s kind of scary.

AB: Yeah. [Laughs] You know, it was interesting. A lot of people that read the role didn’t like her. When I read the script, there was something about her that I loved. Because I liked her, I could fight for her and I could get behind her and fight for what she believed in. I could pull for her. I understood some part of where she was hurt so badly that made her act this way and get this calloused over. I cared for her. That’s what attracted me to really fight to get the role.

SG: Since WWE is distributing the film, has there been any talk of you appearing on WWE?

AB: Oh, God, I hope so. I hope I get allowed at least near the ring. This is my second project with them which is very exciting. I also did The Marine: Homefront. It’s a wonderful family to be a part of. I love it. We’re also actively looking for projects for a third film possibly with them, with me possibly very much in an action position again.

SG: Well, they had Maria Menounos do a fight at Wrestlemania and I don’t think she’s trained. You can probably pick up some lessons for a ring match.

AB: I know, right? I’ll spring off of the side of the ring and put somebody in a headlock.

SG: You could fight Eve Torres.

AB: I could fight Ms. Torres, yeah.

SG: How do you like appearing all glammed up like today, versus the very natural look you’ve had in films like The Day and Last Exorcism?

AB: Oh yes, the hardest part of filming was no hair and makeup. No, I like being able to disguise to be a character like Mary. I really get a kick out of it. It’s really a lot of fun. It was a huge process every morning. I think I went through an hour of continuity makeup. They were painting bruises on me and then they just stopped doing that after a while because the bruises existed, but because I was in that dress, so much of my skin was exposed. They had to cover me in this fake gore pack of dirt and have dry scab in my hair and all this stuff. The dirt actually proved for a fantastic contour so I had wonderfully sculpted cheekbones. I like disguising as another character. That’s very fun for me to slip into something like else. I like that process.

SG: When your body and your face is so much of your tool set as an actor, how is your self-image as Ashley?

AB: I think just the whole thing gets transformed. There were many different levels to attack transformation with this. With my body and my face they wanted that very gaunt look so I did have to drop weight to change the way my face looked, and they needed me to add on muscle so my body, when I got done filming, looked like it had been through the ringer. Because we were on this diet, there was no more color in my face. My body looked very different. I liked being able to change that, to go undercover as a different person. Nothing was added on. I was able to do it myself, like with some of The Last Exorcism stuff, there was no CGI or prosthetics added on. They let me do that myself to change it. I always find that to be a challenge as an actor and something I relish the opportunity to do is to change the way I look, to be a different person.

SG: Are you looking for more physical roles or maybe a break from that?

AB: I am looking. I love the path that I’m on in terms of doing physical things and action. I had a kick being on an action set. I love it. It’s so much fun. I would love for another action role to come along, but I also did do The Bounceback which is a romantic comedy. I did have a little break from that. It was very hard the first couple of days. I didn’t have a gun. I had to use my words and I wasn’t tripping and falling over things. I didn’t have any bruises. I was like, “What do I do with myself?”

SG: Are you ever antsy with your body, like you don’t know what to do with yourself when you don’t have a performance to give?

AB: Oh, I’m very antsy, yes. I always consider working is vacation for me and in between jobs is when the real work starts happening. I always find ways to occupy myself. I just went on point, I take ballet just recreationally but I just went on point shoes. I still continue taking ballet. I like to learn a different skill. I’m still studying Muay Thai every now and then and just keep my body prepared for wherever it next needs to go.

SG: Don’t you have to maintain ballet every day?

AB: I do it like two or three times a week but I do cardio every day. I’ve always been active so I need to keep active.

SG: Do you get to be heroic in The Marine?

AB: I do, yes. I did play the hostage in that film and The Miz rescues me but what I loved about this kind of hostage character was that she doesn’t give up. She doesn’t start to cry and there’s nothing wrong with that kind of character, but this character fights. She yells. She looks for the air holes in the situation. She looks for ways out of where she is, where she’s tied up and I like that about her. I like that she’s a fighter so that’s what attracted me to that role.

SG: Who is the villain?

AB: Neal McDonough. Most of my scenes were actually with Neal and he’s incredible. There is nobody that plays a villain like Neal McDonough, just that cool demeanor with those eyes. Acting with him is something I’d hope for every day.

SG: In The Last Exorcism 2 are you able to step up the physical transformation?

AB: Very much so, yes.

SG: How important was it for you to stick with that character?

AB: Very. Nell always has hit me very strongly. Actually from when I very first auditioned for the role, there’s something about that girl, that character that just hit me so viscerally. It was wonderful to be her again. I didn’t think that would happen. To become her again in the world of The Last Exorcism Part 2, it was great to get back inside of her skin. I’m happy to have had the chance to live her again.

SG: Did you have questions still that had a chance to be answered?

AB: Oh, I always have questions. That’s what gets me hooked on a role is when I ask questions. There was a lot about Nell the first time around that was such a question, which also helped inform me about Mary because a lot of going through the world of The Day, Mary internally was always asking questions, like when they go through the house. Where are the tracks? Where is the trap wire? How long has the dust been sitting there for? Is there smoke anyway? Would lighting a cigarette attract attention? Would it deter attention? What do I see? Things like that very much hook me into the world.

SG: If The Day can be considered somewhat horror as well as action, are you getting a lot of horror scripts because of these two projects?

AB: I do get some horror scripts. What I’m most flattered by what I’ve been getting is I’ve been getting really phenomenal character scripts. Even though The Day has horror elements, it’s not just gore for gore’s sake. It’s in very specific parts and everything. What attracted me to that script was the characters that are there. You see these very strong personalities and they’re what then generates the film and gets the audience hooked in and everything. The Bounceback is a romantic comedy but I loved the character I played. Again with Chasing Shakespeare, another film I did, was the character I played. I’m so grateful for these roles. They’re all very different characters and I like that.

SG: How important was your training at the Tisch School at NYU and Cambridge?

AB: Oh God, that training was unparalleled. I studied mainly Shakespeare at Cambridge. I studied acting and directing and they taught us Shakespeare, and there’s no Shakespeare I’ve ever gotten like what it was like at Cambridge. That was very helpful. I opened up all those notes while I was doing Chasing Shakespeare because my character was doing a lot of scenes from The Tempest so I was opening all that up again. Then NYU was wonderful. I was in Playwrights Horizons to start out with and then I was in Strasberg for my last year of training and that’s the method, which I was curious to learn because I just had heard so much about it. I wanted to make up my own mind on it. It’s been very informative, especially in picking what I’ll need to pull from for Mary or picking what I’ll need to pull from for Nell to kind of have those tools to dig into the character. It’s very, very helpful.

SG: Are there any roles where you don’t use it, where you just go in fresh?

AB: No. Sometimes it doesn’t require as much of that but I always go in doing tons of research and “homework.” I do my homework before I’m going in. My scripts are just piled with notes and coloring stuff. They become a tapestry. The more messed up they are the better.

SG: Do you ever feel overqualified for some roles?

AB: Never. No. Never. God, in The Day just to start alone, I did my preparation but I just was fighting to keep up with who I was acting against. I’m acting with Dominic Monaghan, Shawn Ashmore, Cory Hardrict and Shannyn Sossamon. That’s a strong, strong ensemble. Every day I just was fighting to keep up with them. Look at the places I’ve been. I’m acting opposite Neal McDonough. I would stay on set to watch Neal act. With The Last Exorcism Part 2, the cast is an ensemble of a phenomenal group of actors. Movie sets are so wonderful for that reason because you get to sit and just be in this whole microcosm, just stare at everyone and watch what they do and learn.

SG: Since The Last Exorcism was a found footage movie, did a lot of people think you weren’t even an actor?

AB: Yes, there was a question as if it was real or not which was the biggest compliment I ever got. All I had heard was that some audiences thought this was a real girl which was such a compliment. I love that about the found footage genre because you can’t lie. That was something Daniel [Stamm] so searched for those truthful moments of being no vanity, no anything, to unearth that. I love that about that style. It was very raw, like The Day. It was very raw. What is so phenomenal about the day is Guy Danella and Doug Aarniokoski, the producer and director, this started out as an independent film. Guy took this script that Luke Passmore wrote and ran with it to get it financed. And he did it. He brought it to life. Now that the WWE acquired it at Toronto, it gave it this whole new life. It’s now being seen by the world. If not for Guy Danella’s sheer spirit and determination to get it done, he did it. He, with Doug, and a phenomenal script with Luke, they did it and they now made it seen.

SG: Have you gotten to be on any films with lavish trailers and all the trappings?

AB: God, I think any trailer’s quite lavish. I don't know. There are all those wonderful perks but I only realize them once the job is done because I’m so worried about doing my job. Yeah, there were trailers for The Day but once we started shooting at the beginning of it, we were pretty much in that house and we were very tight as a cast together and that kind of bonded us. We all have this experience in our past that bonded us.

SG: Have you had a chance to meet young girls who’ve been inspired by your work?

AB: I have and it’s remarkable. It’s just something that I never in a million years could have dreamed. They’ve seen things and they said it’s why they want to be an actress, and they said they’d been inspired by certain things I’ve done and it is just unbelievable. To make a living as an actor, as an artist, it’s such a privilege. It’s nothing I take for granted. It’s so special.

SG: What is your character in The Bounceback?

AB: Her name is Cathy and throughout the span of this film, in this weekend in Austin, she’s getting over an ex-boyfriend and then meets someone new there. It’s very cool about this character to both break up and fall in love in the span of 48 hours.

SG: Who are your leading men?

AB: I worked with Zach Cregger who’s on Guys With Kids. He’s so funny. Sara Paxton plays my best friend and also Michael Stahl-David plays my ex-boyfriend.

The Day opens August 29 in theaters.

by Damon Martin (image) For every Geoff Johns and Jim Lee in the comic book industry there are a thousand writers and artists just hoping to climb, scratch or claw their way onto the radars of a major publisher like DC or Marvel. The role of independent comics however has served as a rich creative breeding... more

by Damon Martin



For every Geoff Johns and Jim Lee in the comic book industry there are a thousand writers and artists just hoping to climb, scratch or claw their way onto the radars of a major publisher like DC or Marvel. The role of independent comics however has served as a rich creative breeding ground where there is no corporate bottom line to meet or concerns that stories are too graphic or gritty to land on the page. With that freedom also comes the kind of passion that is lost in the more mainstream comic world, since, as most independent comic book writers and artists will tell you, no one is making millions from self-publication.

Michael Easton is a life-long comic book fan and writer, who worked for DC/Vertigo when he co-penned the graphic novel The Green Woman with award winning author Peter Straub. As much as Easton loved working on that book, there is a certain freedom that comes with a self-published work like his 2008 graphic novel, Soul Stealer, which is a 500-plus page gothic story following an immortal warrior named Kalan, with wonderful art provided by Christopher Shy.

The freedom allowed Easton to tell the story in his own words, without worry that a publisher would tell him something was too graphic or that he needed to cut pages. He told his story to a very specific audience, but those that read it stuck by him, and that's one reason why independent comics will always hold a special place in the industry.

"You end up having a lot of late night phone calls with Shanghai when you're going through the printing process. You end up talking at 3 o'clock in the morning about how you want your color bleeds going. But we set this up because it was going to be a freedom issue. Nobody was going to let us do a 550-page, large format, hardcover comic book, but that's where I think the independent business is going," Easton said when speaking at San Diego Comic-Con. "Digital comics are great, but if you offer people something extra, you offer the large format, you put in sketches, you put in outtakes, you put in an audio track, posters, things like what were doing, I think you'll get a collector audience."

Those late nights also included writing sessions till all hours as he listened to Radiohead and Jeff Buckley for inspiration. The end result paid off because the collectors picked up on Soul Stealer and it has become a cult classic among comic book enthusiasts. Easton admits his book wouldn't have been the same if he’d had to conform to certain standards required by many major publishers.

"Some of the comic companies now are having very specific regulations about what you can and can't do. And with Chris, I mean he's the ultimate graphic artist…you want somebody who's going to bleed on the page with you. The horror has to be horrific, and the violence has to be violent, and the beautiful, passionate sexual element has to be there too. You can't always do that when you're worrying about some kind of censorship issue and things like that. We don't have that, we have complete freedom," said Easton. "We did the book exactly like how we wanted to do it."

Part of the reason Easton is able to do the things he's able to in his books is because writing is his passion but it doesn’t always pay his bills. During the daytime hours, Easton has been an actor for most of his adult life, working on several television shows including soap operas like General Hospital and One Life to Live. Not needing to bow down to the almighty dollar has given Easton the flexibility to tell his stories the way he wants to. It's also allowed him to keep his stories personal. He’s never has to sell to the highest bidder because he had to make rent.

"I'm very fortunate to have a day job. This allows me to do everything the way I want to do it. We've had film companies come to us, and in another life I would have optioned this thing off a long time ago, but having the day job has allowed me the financial independence to say I'm waiting for the right people to look at this. Waiting until Christopher Nolan sees this or Ridley Scott or James Cameron, we really want to be turned down by all of those people before we would go somewhere else," Easton commented. "You only get one shot. It really is a passion, and it's a passion to take something like this to another level."

With Soul Stealer now available in a special one-shot hard cover edition, Easton is moving onto his next story called Credence, about a New York City cop which he has described as “Californication meets The Bad Lieutenant.” Long-term, Easton would love to see his newest creation land on television alongside shows like Breaking Bad or Sons of Anarchy – the kind of edgy shows that push the envelope and have developed loyal and deeply involved fans.

"We've done about 135-pages, it's going to be a long graphic novel...the story stops when it needs to stop. It's got a real great, edgy feel. Everyone right now is talking about movies, but I love what's going on with TV right now. Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Game of Thrones, Justified, Californication. and Weeds. I think it's the most interesting storytelling," Easton said. "I think if Shakespeare wrote today he would have written The Sopranos, he would be David Chase. He would tell the story the way he wanted to. So where Soul Stealer was this big epic film, Credence is going in the other direction. Let's do a gritty little movie. I live in New York, so it has that ‘70s kind of French Connection feel to it."

Easton hopes to debut Credence this October at the New York Comic Con, and if there's one thing to say about this particular independent comic book maker – he's definitely going to do it his own way.



For more on Michael Easton's work visit: michaeleaston.com/

by Lee Camp (video) What are you doing right now? Does it really fucking matter? Like really matter? What would it be like if it did? This video has the answer to all those questions as well as a killer recipe for a key lime pie. Related Posts: Moment of Clarity: A Category Five Shit Storm Hits The RNC... more

by Lee Camp



What are you doing right now? Does it really fucking matter? Like really matter? What would it be like if it did? This video has the answer to all those questions as well as a killer recipe for a key lime pie.



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From October 31 until November 2 dozens of bands will gather in New Orleans to create the Voodoo Music Festival. One of those bands will be Mindless Self Indulgence. MSI is one of the most unique industrial bands out there today. Wait check that, they are one of the most unique bands in general. Frontman... more

From October 31 until November 2 dozens of bands will gather in New Orleans to create the Voodoo Music Festival. One of those bands will be Mindless Self Indulgence. MSI is one of the most unique industrial bands out there today. Wait check that, they are one of the most unique bands in general. Frontman Jimmy Urine may hate doing the music but he loves to get up on stage and fuck with the audience. From kissing the entire front row to drinking his own piss and spitting it on the audience Urine is one of the nuttiest people to hit the music stage since GG Allin.

MSI calls themselves NYC's first industrial band but the lead guy also named himself Urine. Anyone that can get to the show must report on the SG boards because when the 50 Cent crowd meets up with the MSI crowd its going to be a real different experience.

Check out the website for the Voodoo Music Festival.


Daniel Robert Epstein: Good to talk to you again. No I'm just kidding we've never spoken before.

Jimmy Urine: Good because I thought your name was Danielle and that you were a chick. We've got to start off fresh.

DRE: Are you psyched about the Voodoo Festival in New Orleans?

JU: It's spooky. I'm going to put a hex on that shit. I got my chicken heads and everything.

DRE: Are you going to dress in the black top hat and paint yourself like a skeleton?

JU: Naw just not going to eat for a couple of days and probably get the same effect.

DRE: Are you going to check out the show too?

JU: If I wake up. Mostly I sleep all the time when we're on tour. But I hate music. I'll probably be eating a Po boy sandwich a fucking catfish Po boy sandwich with extra Po Boy.

DRE: You hate music?

JU: I don't like music very much.

DRE: Well I know you don't like your own band.

JU: If I don't like my own then what do I think of other people's bands. I got video games on the bus you can't drag me away from them.

DRE: What games you got there?

JU: The usual, anything I can get bootlegged.

DRE: Have you played Enter the Matrix?

JU: Not yet. I like all the kind of rachety clankity games, Wario and Mario. Couch punching "I can't fucking believe I did that" games. Those are the best.

DRE: Ever since it came out that Arnold Schwarzenegger had orgies in the 1970's I want to know who else is orgying out. Do you have orgies?

JU: My orgy consists of me using my left hand and my right hand at the same time. That's my orgy. You know what it's like having two girls in the band, my menstrual cycle is off that's it. I think I'm on their menstrual cycle now.

DRE: Thirty years from now when you run for governor I want people to read this interview.

JU: You want to bring me down. You want to have some extra leverage when I start raising taxes. I'll have to pay you off.

DRE: You guys are nuts onstage. Was it always like that?

JU: From the beginning baby. I've never been in any other band. I've seriously never done anything else but hang out with Steve and going nuts and fucking some shit up.

DRE: Just to bring up someone that's obviously influenced. Late in Groucho Marx's life he couldn't make fun of people anymore because they liked being made fun of by Groucho Marx.

JU: Exactly the idea has become the institution. The last tour was our big headlining tour which was very successful. It was called Alienating our Audience and we spent the whole time berating everybody. Now we have to go out again, what's it going to be called "We weren't kidding last time we really meant it. Don't you get it?"

DRE: Do some people hate it?

JU: That's the best thing it divides people down the middle. People either fucking love it or they want to fucking kill me. Its Grateful Dead type stuff where they follow us to every show so you see the same kids every night its like "Didn't you see me do this last night? You know what I'm going to do. Let's just hang out and have coffee."

DRE: Do people like getting pissed on?

JU: I don't know. We're very immature so it appeals to a younger audience. Anybody who is really old is going to be hanging out at the bar while the 13 year olds are going to be up front getting their ass kicked.

DRE: Was anyone a piece of shit bigot, and return the album after they bought it?

JU: I don't know, I definitely put it out there, anytime somebody tells us, like oh man you said some shit . I'm like here's 20 bucks, just give me the friggin record back so I can resell it.

DRE: The funny thing is that the Led Zeppelin people really hated that song, but people were ok when you ask people to kill themselves.

JU: I know! I love that, that's my favorite. People care about their guitar heroes. They obviously don't want change, if you look at the way music is right now. They want it to be the same old shit.

DRE: I was surprised to see that you guys toured with Korn and ICP, just because, they seemed to have lost some credibility.

JU: When we toured with them it was a while ago, so they weren't totally un-credibled yet, but people think that you can go out with anybody because you're in a band. And they are like, you guys are my favorite band and they are my favorite band so you guys should tour together. And it doesn't work like that, ever. It's literally like who you know, and with a lot of bands it's like either we've gotten lucky or its trial by fire. But almost a lot of that stuff has been actual invitations from the leads. Whether it's been bands that we actually love or bands that we have a cool relationship with or whatever, it's always been real friendly behind the scenes. With Korn, Johnathan Davis pushed to have us on tour. And that's how it is in this business anyway, which you have to get the crap beat out of you to learn. Any band that you see that all of a sudden just appears on MTV, there is a big fucken reason they are on there. It's not just like their music connects with the kids, no, he knows somebody or somebody is pushing that, or this is going to be this record label's big push for that year. There is some reason; it just doesn't come out of nowhere. It's all that crappy political stuff, I just want to bang my head.

DRE: How was it breaking off from the big label and starting your own?

JU: It was like a big war with Elektra, but there are hardly any labels anymore, there are like 3 now. EMI just bought some other stuff, there is going to be just one. They are all dying anyway because they can't compete, the movie industry doesn't have a problem because there are DVD's and nobody is really burning movies. The record industry doesn't know what to do about the MP3's, and they are just losing it, losing it, losing it, and they are owned by some giant fucking bottling company anyway. Like Schweppes owns Elektra and they don't give a crap about them. They are like just give us your check and get the hell out of here. They just want to sign someone like the White Stripes and give them twenty thousand dollars. It's the worst business in the world and now it's becoming lame. It's not that kind of lotto that it was in the 90's.

DRE: People are a little stingier now, I guess.

JU: Well I wouldn't blame them. They have no money, they have no power, and they have no leverage. So it's like you're going to see Britney Spears for the rest of your life, just because she makes money. It's all about who makes money.

DRE: I don't mind seeing her as much as listening to her.

JU: Both things are so hand & hand, hit the mute button.

Where is my friggin account by the way, I need to jack off or something.

DRE: We'll get you one. The game Breakout on your website is really hard, the ball moves too fast.

JU: Yeah I know what you are going to do man.

DRE: I can't handle it.

I spoke to Steve O a while back and he likes to hurt himself also. He said that he is not too into GG Allin because he doesn't seem like GG was having any fun. Like he was just a psycho.

JU: Yeah, GG went out like a punk though. That's my biggest problem with GG. Did you hear all the stuff that he was going to do for his big ender?

DRE: Oh yeah he was going to kill himself on stage.

JU: Yeah, he was going to take out the audience, then shoot himself. He was going to lube up a stick of dynamite and stick it up his ass, and blow his whole fucking body apart. And then he's like ok man, see you tomorrow. And then he goes out with heroin, I'm like lame ass ending.

DRE: Are you guys into drugs?

JU: No we're not into drugs. You know what I like to do? I love this and everybody doesn't believe me but its fucken good. You get yourself 4 Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and you get yourself a Cherry Coke, and you leave the Cherry Coke out all day until it's completely flat and then you eat the peanut butter cups and then you chug the entire Cherry Coke, and in about 2 seconds, you'll have 15 minutes of amazingly crazy energy and then you'll never going to be able to do another thing for about 4 hours. If I eat a box of cookies, I'll be up for 3 days so I don't really want to do a line of cocaine although people offer it to me all the time.

DRE: I used to wash down Lemonheads with Dr. Pepper.

JU: Yeah you know what I'm talking about. Cherry Coke and Pixie sticks and you're set, a whole night full of fun.

DRE: Have you tried the inside out peanut butter cups yet?

JU: No, I want to though. I did the Uh Oh Oreo's though.

DRE: Which ones are those?

JU: Those are the ones where they made the cookie vanilla and the inside chocolate.

DRE: Oh I haven't seen those.

JU: Yeah they're called Uh Oh Oreo's because they fucked up!

DRE: Oh my god!

JU: They might as well call them we fucked up Oreo's

DRE: Whenever I talk to people I always seem to end up talking about candy.

JU: You know why, because man, [laughs] because you're so gushy and sweet.

DRE: I love candy, that's what it is.

Do you really hate you're audiences, or you're just out there having fun and it's a great thing?

JU: I get to do what I want. The audience is fun. I want to be entertained that's my whole thing. I'm not entertained if I'm doing the same fricken thing every damn night. So I got to make it different, and have entertainment and if the difference is that I push over Steve's mike stand and he beats me with a guitar and then I go ouch I better not do that again. Then that's ok.

DRE: Did Steve ever say I don't want to do that you're just sick?

JU: No not really, we've done tons of stuff. The only thing that ever surprised me is that when I don't see it coming and I run right into him. When he dropkicks me or something. And now I'm on my back, ok I guess we're going to do it from down here.

DRE: Did you guys play this week?

JU: No we're going on tour towards the end of October.

DRE: Who are you touring with?

JU: Mindless Self Indulgence, have you heard of them?

Another mindless tour, we're going to get some openers, I'm not sure who the openers are yet, I don't think they have confirmed.

DRE: Oh that's right you guys are going to be in NY in December, I can't wait to see that.

JU: Three nights at Irving Plaza, talk about repetitive audience.

DRE: [laughs].Are you closer to sucking or closer to becoming a born again Christian?

JU: Closer to sucking what?

DRE: I heard you guys are going to quit when either you suck or become born again Christians.

JU: Oh man, you do your homework, I forgot about that quote. I must have been on Pixie sticks when I made that comment. I'm closer to avoiding work. I'm closer to oh, jeez I got to make another record. I got to read a comic book today, I got to go jack off to porn, oh.

DRE: What comics do you read?

JU: Oh man, don't even start dude, cause yo man I went like yo. You know what I'm sayin? [laughs] I went all into ebay for comics.

DRE: Oh yeah that will kill you.

JU: Anything by Richard Corben, Moebius, Milo Manara.

DRE: Oh the good stuff.

JU: The Euros all the Euros. I'm fucken geeked out.

DRE: Can you believe Richard Corben does mainstream comics now.

JU: But their great I love the Banner and Cage miniseries.

DRE: It's amazing that he's 65 years old and he's a hot artist. It's so wild.

JU: If there is one thing we should play, is a comic book convention, last time I went to one I got clocked by 300 huge dudes.

DRE: How old are you anyway?

JU: I'm old enough to know that you touching me is wrong. [laughs].

DRE: [laughs] OK I know you saw the Pokemon bitches video right?

JU: Yeah, that's great, you know what I like about our kids, and they're a bunch of fricken geeks. You should go the website and check out the fan art. They're good.

DRE: Pikachu finally made sense to me.

JU: I like it when that stuff happens, the Pikachu stuff and the kids know everything. Most of our kids are probably not going to be doing heroin. More like playing Magic the Gathering in the basement somewhere.

DRE: I went to one of those once, the larps.

JU: Oh fucken gamers, fuck the gamers. I hate the gamers.

DRE: It was very confusing to me I just wanted to eat and hit on the hot girls.

JU: They are so annoying I don't like the gamers.

DRE: I read this funny quote, well not that funny, Beasties are to hip hop what you guys are to industrial music.

JU: It must have not been us saying it because it's not very funny.

DRE: I'm just not sure what that means.

JU: I don't know what the hell that means either. We are to Reese's peanut butter cups what ZZ Top is to Zydeco Music. You could pretty much say that about anything couldn't you?

Is industrial even around anymore? I think we are the last electronic band on the face of the earth at this point.

DRE: I was talking to KMFDM the other day, and he is just like we were never industrial anyway.

JU: Yeah let's repackage.

DRE: He confused me.

JU: Industrial is dead. All electronic music is dead. We killed it. it's all our fault. If KMFDM wants to blame someone they can blame us.

DRE: What's the craziest thing anyone threw on stage at you?

JU: The one I always remember is live shotgun shells. Somebody threw an open Swiss army knife at Kitty and luckily she deflected it with her cymbal. Also fun gross stuff like stink bombs, firecrackers, mustard on bagels and crap like that. I'm hoping for some Po Boy sandwiches at the Voodoo Fest. That's going to be a fun crowd because when it's our crowd they love us so I can slap them around. But I miss the fun days when we toured with Insane Clown Posse and the crowd only wants to see ICP so it's a trial by fire. But no matter who we open for we never leave the stage until it is time to go. We love that shit when they go nuts.

When we've opened for other bands at universities the crowd doesn't seem to care, they want to go listen to The Strokes or something. They're too intellectual for us. But when we open for a Godsmack crowd they want to fucking kill us. We get some reaction from them.

DRE: What's the craziest thing you ever threw back?

JU: It was probably peeing in a cup, drinking my own piss, asking people to make out with me and having hundreds of people say yes. That's the funnest thing to do.

DRE: What's piss taste like?

JU: Like warm beer which tastes like fucking piss anyway. I hate beer. If you're going to get drunk do it right, vodka. Drinking beer is like drinking piss and eating bread. It's going to get you fat.

DRE: I pee all the time, everyday and often I wonder what it tastes like. So it's not a big deal?

JU: Its just piss. Hell Jesus drank his own piss. I am JC, me and him got something in common.

DRE: In your youth were you a troublemaker?

JU: No I was invisible which my problem is probably. In high school I didn't really know anybody or do anything. Catholic middle school was my favorite because that was like Bart Simpson time then I got transferred out because I failed. I guess my religious workbook wasn't up to par and my penmanship sucked.

DRE: I thought when you failed they just hit you with rulers or something?

JU: Have you ever been to Catholic school?

DRE: I'm Jewish. I went to Hebrew school. I got kicked out of class a lot too.

JU: See it's the same fucking thing but just different skirts. Yours were gray ours were plaid. There's no difference, can't we join hands, and can't you just get over Palestine.

DRE: I never went to Hasidic school but I used to live near an all girls Hasidic school and I once saw them playing soccer in their long jeans skirts.

JU: Damn that must chafe. They have to overcome adversity like the Special Olympics.

DRE: Did you ever do anything when you were a kid that you look back on fondly now?

JU: I liked my life when I was a kid. I was fine until all this shit started. My parents were rich and I didn't have to worry about nothing. I probably could have been a doctor or a lawyer. If anything I wonder why I do this.

I was upper middle class in Manhattan with a summer home.

DRE: A lot of artists don't like to admit they grew up with money.

JU: Probably the happiest moment in my life was when mom said that I don't have to borrow her credit card anymore.

DRE: Has Mindless Self Indulgence been accepted more? Maybe you get less flack for doing what you do.

JU: We always get flack. There is always some reason to hate Mindless Self Indulgence. I don't know why, you think people would get it. When we first put the whole thing together someone always pisses on us in some way. You would think it would be incredibly easy now to do what we do because we were around before Jackass, before Tom Green and now that's what kids love. We're doing great on our own now that we're not on a major label because we are not a square peg in a square hole.

DRE: Is there money to be made with Mindless Self Indulgence?

JU: This a no brainer on a lot of levels. The big labels didn't know what to do with us. We knew but I don't think they were prepared for us knowing how to market ourselves. We had fight every step of the way and once we went independent its worked out so much better.

DRE: Do you have any tattoos?

JU: No I'm waiting until I'm fifty then I'm going to do the whole Yakuza thing and get a big dragon on my back. Every time I think of something I don't know if I want it forever.

DRE: What kind of women are you attracted to?

JU: Just about anything at this point. I have a dick and it gets hard then that's good. I walk down the street and if I see a girl and my dick gets hard that's and if I see a boy that's good too and same with seeing a chicken. If my dick gets hard and I want to fuck it then that's good. People like to attach labels to themselves, straight, gay, S &M, it's just so simple. It doesn't matter what you do whether its horrible or mainstream or boring, you know what turns you on. So why the big brouhaha.

DRE: Are there chickens that are better looking than other chickens?

JU: Some chickens yeah. But if a girl wants to impress me she's just got to pee her pants and I'm there.

DRE: Do you spend time on the internet?

JU: Looking for porn because that's all its good for.

DRE: What porn do you like?

JU: Just peeing stuff but I don't pay for it.

Check out the website for Mindless Self Indulgence

By Daniel Robert Epstein

Nadine Labaki is my kind of woman. Sometimes I have to go around the world to find a soulful intelligence to whom I can relate. A Lebanese filmmaker, Labaki has lived life and experienced war and tragedy, so the perspective in her art is perceptive and philosophical. Certainly not superficial. You would... more

Nadine Labaki is my kind of woman. Sometimes I have to go around the world to find a soulful intelligence to whom I can relate. A Lebanese filmmaker, Labaki has lived life and experienced war and tragedy, so the perspective in her art is perceptive and philosophical. Certainly not superficial. You would think coming from a conflicted region, Labaki’s films would be serious and perhaps difficult to take. She actually makes comedies. Her first film, Caramel, was a romantic comedy. Her second, Where Do We Go Now?, is a comedy about religious conflict between Christians and Muslims.

How can such a subject be funny? Well, Where Do We Go Now? opens with a procession of Muslim women marching and swaying in a musical rhythm, so you know there's something different here. The men of their unnamed village are always on the brink of fighting. The women do everything they can to distract the men, from drowning out news broadcast to bussing in a group of bikini models. With a light touch Labaki gets people thinking and talking about important matters. Speaking with her in person was equally impressive. Though she was from the other side of the world, she spoke my language both literally (English) and spiritually. We had a gentle conversation about the culture and film making of Lebanon.

SuicideGirls: Is the opening scene that’s like a dance, is that an actual religious ceremony?

Nadine Labaki: No, no, it’s really inspired by, I don't know if you’ve seen images of these women on TV show have lost children, hitting themselves and tearing their clothes apart. We have seen this image for so many years in Lebanon, either on TV or in my family, of women reacting very aggressively towards themselves. It becomes sort of like the ritual of mourning, the ritual of suffering where women really hit themselves. Because I think suffering becomes so intense that they can’t do anything but hit themselves. So this is inspired by these women that I’ve seen in my life. It became like a ritual of mourning that I imagined.

SG: Did that also help you indicate the humorous side of the movie by turning it into a dance?

NL: Yes, it was important. All these aspects, whether it’s humor or dancing and musical numbers, it was important because this is intended to be a fable. It’s not really a realistic film. With nonprofessional actors, and the fact that they’re acting very real, it has this very realistic approach. But at the same time, it had to be like sort of a fable because I didn’t want to relate it to any specific event. Unfortunately in Lebanon, because we’ve been through so many wars, when you talk about the war, people tend to want to relate it to a specific event and this is not what I wanted to happen. I wanted to be more universal. I’m talking about conflicts in general. I’m talking about the war in general. This conflict could’ve happened between two families or two football teams or two friends. It’s not specifically between Christians and Muslims in Lebanon. And I think the fact that there's musical [elements], it does give you that. The fact that there’s humor also give you this distance. I needed humor to create this distance because sometimes when you laugh about your flaws, it’s a way to start seeing them and maybe to start healing from them. It was an important part also to make the reasons why we get into the conflict ridiculous, to make you understand that sometimes it is ridiculous why we make wars.

SG: In real life have you ever been able to prevent fighting using some of the tactics these women use?

NL: [Laughs] No. No, no, no. I imagined, because it was inspired by true events that happened in 2008, true conflicts. There was conflict between two opposing political parties and then people who were followers of these parties took weapons again and went down to the streets and started killing each other again, after having succeeded in living at least 20 years of peace. At that point I had learned that I was pregnant and I think it does give you a different perspective on life. So I imagined my son if he was 18 years old now and he was tempted to take a weapon, to go down to the street and whatever the rest were doing, what would I do as a mother to stop him? That’s how the whole story started, the whole idea for the film started. So whatever these women are doing in the film are not really true events that happened, but it’s things that I would have imagined doing if I was in that situation.

SG: I would like to think there is a hope for preventing violent conflict, but is it inevitable? The women do everything to hide the news, and an accident still makes them fight. Is conflict inevitable?

NL: It’s not completely inevitable but unfortunately most of the time this is how it happens. I needed to talk about how we misinterpret things sometimes and how rumors can create conflicts out of nothing and how what happens outside can influence what happens inside. And how sometimes we are so eager for conflict that anything is an excuse for us. This was the proof. The cross fell and it broke and it’s even a Christian boy who did it, but the Christians, because they needed somebody to blame, they automatically blamed the Muslims of the village. So I wanted to talk about that. I wanted to talk sometimes how conflicts erupt out of misinterpretation.

SG: Is the issue at heart then that both sides want to have a conflict? Correcting that is the solution.

NL: Absolutely and unfortunately when there has been so much blood between two parties, we haven’t really talked about it. Revenge is inevitable when there has been so much blood, and there has been so much blood between so many parties in Lebanon, that anything can become an excuse to start a war again because we haven’t forgotten, because we haven’t forgiven. Forgiveness is really an important stage and this forgiveness is not something that we did unfortunately in Lebanon. There’s so much blood in the soil of this country and people are unable to forget it. So everything becomes an excuse to start a war again because they want revenge.

SG: I hope they try the busload of women. That was a good plan.

NL: [Laughs] That might work.

SG: Is the movie opening dialogue?

NL: A lot of dialogues. The movie is doing great over there. We’re breaking records. We’re making history and it’s going beyond the film. I’m having talks in universities and schools and doing political talk shows talking about the subject, talking about how we can try to avoid new conflicts. So it’s going really beyond the film and I’m really happy about that.

SG: We don’t get to see a lot of Middle Eastern humor. Is there a lot of humor?

NL: Yeah, of course. I think humor does create this distance. When you laugh about your flaws I think it’s a way to heal. It was important and it’s something that is part of our culture too. We tend to make a lot of jokes, we tend to laugh about our flaws, we tend to use our language in a very interesting humorous way. It’s also part of our personality.

SG: Is it distance it creates? I thought humor brought things closer to me.

NL: Distance in a sense that you do look at things in a different perspective through humor. When you’re laughing about the situation, it’s like as if you are acknowledging that the situation is ridiculous and then you acknowledge that maybe you should do something about it and change it because it is ridiculous. Maybe distance is not the right word for it but it does give you a different perspective on things.

SG: It might depend on the audience, because someone who lived this conflict might need a distance. Someone who’s never experienced it like me might see humor as a way in.

NL: Absolutely, true. That’s true. It does create distance for people who have lived the war. This film is really my way of saying we’ve had enough. We’ve had enough. I don't know one person that hasn’t lived a tragedy, a tragedy related to wars, especially women. When we have family gatherings, I look at the women in my family who have lost children in such absurd and violent ways during the wars. I look at them and say, “How do they do it? How do they manage to keep living?” I’m obsessed with this idea. I don’t want to be in that situation, God forbid. It’s really my way of saying we’ve had enough. We don’t want to go through this again.

SG: In Hollywood, it’s tough for female directors. What is the Lebanese film industry’s attitude towards female directors?

NL: You know, you can’t really talk about an industry. We don’t have a film industry. It’s really cinematic adventures. That’s what I call them. We don’t really have an industry so you do things your own way. It’s not like people give you a chance to do it. You create your own chance and you say, “I want to do it” and you find a way to do it. It’s not like you’re waiting for other people to give you the chance because there’s no film industry. So you do things the way you want them. Even the way I work, I’ve created my own way of working. I don’t work like any other director. My way of working is a bit chaotic but it’s organized chaos because I work with nonprofessional actors and I improvise a lot and I do things I’m not supposed to do and I’m looking for that unpredictable moment of truth all the time. I don’t tell the actors what the scene is until the last moment. It’s really like my own way of working and I created it. I’m not waiting for anyone to give me permission.

SG: Had any of your actors experienced these conflicts in real life?

NL: Everybody. Every one of the actors, everybody that was on the shoot, everybody involved in the film. Everybody has a tragedy related to war so everybody relates, whether actors or even the crew. The atmosphere on the set was just amazing because everybody was aware of what the film was saying and everybody wants to make a change somehow and they believed that what they were participating in was something that could bring change an it made it even stronger. It was a very intense emotional adventure.

SG: How must it feel playing these scenes for pretend when they could be real?

NL: It wasn’t pretend. Most of the time it wasn’t pretend. Most of the time it was we were relating to things we knew very, very well. That’s why I don’t like the word acting very much. I need to believe as a filmmaker that what’s happening is true. The way that these actors are reacting or what they are saying could have happened. They could have said the things they said or they could have reacted this way in that situation. I need to believe that what’s happening is true because I think that cinema can be a very powerful nonviolent weapon to make a change. And it does make a change when you do relate as a viewer. When you relate to what you’re seeing and when you think, “This could have happened to me” or “This could have been me on the big screen” or this story could have been true,” this is when you start relating to your own life or to your own situation and this is when you start thinking, at least thinking. I want you to come out of the film or the movie theater and take this film with you and think about it. Think of the situations and I don’t want you to be in the situation when you know that you’re watching a film with actors and it has nothing to do with your reality and this is a different reality and you go out of the film and you forget it the next minute. Because I do believe that it’s very powerful and cinema can make a change.

SG: Are you rare in Lebanon, a woman who does all of this for herself? Are there a lot like you?

NL: No, I’m rare. There are other women that are directors and there are other directors that are doing very, very good things but like I said, we can’t really talk about the film industry. We are very, very limited and there’s not a lot of filmmakers. There’s a few women filmmakers that are doing good stuff and we are rare as filmmakers.

SG: They don’t have to be directors, but artists or women breaking out.

NL: There are, there are a lot of women breaking out and especially breaking the clichés of Arab women. That’s what’s very important. There’s a lot of interesting women, interesting artists that are breaking these clichés.

SG: Was this a controversial movie to make in Beirut?

NL: It could have been controversial if a lot of people knew about it but I kept it secret until the end. I didn’t give any scripts to any actors. They discovered the scenes most of the time the same day. Of course they knew about the theme but they didn’t really know in detail what we were talking about. I kept it secret. Nobody knew about it, not even the press. They knew I was filming but they didn’t really know what I was filming. It was important to keep it secret until the end.

SG: Here we call that guerilla style.

NL: It’s not really that. We had permissions, we had all of that but I didn’t want a lot of people to know, because when you talk about religion it becomes a very taboo subject and it becomes very delicate and people start interpreting things differently and I didn’t want any of that to happen.

SG: It’s not even specifically about Christianity or Muslim, but just the fact that there is religious conflict.

NL: It’s not really about religion for me. It’s not about Christians and Muslims. It’s about the fact that people are different and people have a problem tolerating this difference. We could have created two new religions. We could have created religions that don’t exist to make it even more universal. But I needed it to make it simpler for people to understand, so when they see a cross, they understand we’re talking about Christians. When they see veiled women, they understand that we’re talking about Muslims, or when they see a mosque. So it was important to make that clear for the viewer, but really we could have created two new, not even religions. Maybe two sects or two parties, or two political parties. It’s mainly about the fact that we don’t tolerate the difference of the other. That’s what I’m talking about.

SG: What’s your next film going to be?

NL: I don't know yet. I haven’t started writing yet. I think I will start writing at the end of the summer, my next film.

Where Do We Go Now? is in theaters now.

by Blogbot (image) [SaintKitten in Cute Moustache] Artist / SG Member Name: Carolina Montoya a.k.a. SG Hopeful SaintKitten Mission Statement: Some of the things I do are inspired by weird dreams I have, so there's no common meaning. I’m working on a project about how tattoos are a physical introduction... more

by Blogbot


[SaintKitten in Cute Moustache]

Artist / SG Member Name: Carolina Montoya a.k.a. SG Hopeful SaintKitten

Mission Statement: Some of the things I do are inspired by weird dreams I have, so there's no common meaning. I’m working on a project about how tattoos are a physical introduction to the person that has them. I guess everything that I’ve been doing lately has an element of that. For instance, I love classical paintings and sculptures, and you can tell by some of my own paintings and tattoos that I do. 





Medium: My favorite it’s definitely oil. But I also love to try new things, and mix them up. I’ve done some watercolors as well, but I will always return to oil.

 (I'm also a tattoo artist, and as such, my medium is ink in skin.)

Aesthetic: Finding my own style has been an issue for me, so I’ve tried pretty much everything I think it’s possible to. I’ve even done a few “Buffay’s” (you’ll get it if you ‘re a Friends fan). But I have to say realistic drawings and paintings are my thing.




Notable Achievements: Notable? Not yet. Personal achievements? Yes, everyday! I try really hard to get better day by day, and I’m proud of a few things I’ve done, but I have to say to be in the place I want to be I’ve still got a lot of stuff to discover and learn.





Why We Should Care: You should care because I’m just like most of you. It’s not easy for me to buy cool stuff, or wear nice clothes, and most of the time I give away my work. What I really want with my work is that people can relate to it, and the only way of making that possible is that my work is seen. 



I Want Me Some: You can contact me via SG or on http://www.facebook.com/CarolinaMontoyaSaintKitten " target="_blank">Facebook.





***

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by Bradley Suicide (video) I, like so many of us, grew up loving ‘80s classics. The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, Saint Elmo’s Fire, on and on. I could recite these movies word for word, line by line when I was growing up, and to tell you the truth, still can. The movie that took the cake for... more

by Bradley Suicide



I, like so many of us, grew up loving ‘80s classics. The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, Saint Elmo’s Fire, on and on. I could recite these movies word for word, line by line when I was growing up, and to tell you the truth, still can.

The movie that took the cake for me was, by far, Sixteen Candles. Something about it captivated me. And of course, I was enthralled with the smoldering and sexy Jake Ryan, just like almost every other girl. With that amazing bone structure and those perfectly gorgeous piercing bedroom eyes, he had my heart beating out of control (I have to pause and take a moment).

In case you live under a rock and haven’t seen Sixteen Candles, I will take this opportunity to tell you to pause your reading and pick up where you’ve left off once you have watched every amazingly corny moment of it in its entirety.

The other day this slice of ‘80s awesomeness was on TV so I flipped it on while I got ready for work. Somewhere towards the end of the movie between when Samantha’s sister is in the middle of her drug induced nuptials and when that limo pulls away revealing the ever breathtaking Jake sitting there waiting for Samantha it hit me, Jake Ryan was a douche bag.

Plain and simple.

After carefully mulling over the key moments in the film that led me to this conclusion, I was dumbfounded that it had taken me so long to realize this. Between throwing a Project X style party and destroying his parents home, being an asshole to his girlfriend, then basically pimping her out in a rufied state to some random dude he doesn’t know, and lending a kid without a license his dad’s Rolls Royce…well I am pretty sure all of that has nut sack written all over it. The cherry on top of all of it is that horrible scene where Jake and his friend appear to be doing innumerous pull-ups, only when the camera to pans out you realize that in true bro fashion they have been standing on the ground the whole time thinking they are hot shit. Watching it now, it kind of reminds me of Mike “The Situation” from Jersey Shore!

Long after the candles on the cardboard cake had been blown out and the credits had rolled, I was still reeling. I began looking at the guys that I am attracted to and re-evaluating the relationships that I have had, both short and long, with this new epiphany in mind. And then, Doh! Facepalm! The pieces fell into place. Things like this are the reason I, and so many other girls, like assholes. We are conditioned to like the guy that is a complete douche at times because it has been beaten into us since our youth. Not to say there isn’t other conditioning that I am sure is involved, but humor me here.

On top of it all, and I am sure people are going to rip me a new one for this, but the ending of this movie is so far from the scope of reality that it’s insane. When on earth has this happened? In a high school setting, when has the smoldering, popular, sexy as all hell dude ever left his perfect ten girlfriend for a chick that he doesn’t know and that is by no means bad looking but definitely wouldn’t turn your head? Never. It doesn’t happen. Berate me all you want for this, but you cannot say that I am wrong. (I didn’t blossom until after high school and was very awkward for most of it, so I was definitely on the plain side of that coin.)

And I know it isn’t just me that this crap has subconsciously affected, go ahead and flip on the radio to Taylor Swift, her songs are all filled with this exact scenario, which in turn is screwing over yet another generation of females who are being set up with the same recipe for heartache and disaster that Sixteen Candles so generously left my generation. It’s a vicious cycle.

Now that I have come to this conclusion, I can actively work on trying to pick better dudes. Like guys that treat me well, who don’t pimp me out to people when I’m inebriated, and who actually can do pull-ups. I don’t think it’s too much to ask, but thus far this seems to be a pretty tall order.

And there you have it, my Jake Ryan theory.

You’re welcome.

Xoxo
Bradley

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by SG's Team Agony feat. Smythe Let us answer life's questions - because great advice is even better when it comes from SuicideGirls. (image) [Smythe in There Is A Light] Q: I have a very close friend who recently told me she was physically attracted to me, and wants to start a friends with... more

by SG's Team Agony feat. Smythe

Let us answer life's questions - because great advice is even better when it comes from SuicideGirls.


[Smythe in There Is A Light]

Q: I have a very close friend who recently told me she was physically attracted to me, and wants to start a friends with benefits relationship. There is a lot of sexual tension between us, and although I'm very sure I won't develop feelings for her, her friends have told me that she hopes down the line we can have a full-on relationship. I'm afraid of her developing emotional feelings, and endangering our friendship. I really love the girl and don't want to lose her as a friend. What should I do?

A: Holy goodness, that's a toughie. It is really awesome that you realize there may be issues with engaging in a friends with benefits (FWB) relationship. If she's already made mention of hoping for more than just ass with you, then odds are things will get complicated. She's going into things with hopes for more, and she will probably get attached more than is warranted in a FWB arrangement. It seems like, despite what she may say, she won't be able to help herself from getting overly emotionally involved. At the end of a FWB relationship, depending on the kind of a person she is, it may just take a moment for her to wrap her head around the shift back to strictly friends status, but there is the possibility of her taking it hard, like a legit break up, and you may lose her as a friend.



You also don't have to jump into the deep end with the FWB thing. Talk about it with her, express your concern about losing a friend. Probably don't mention her friends speaking to you; let the conversation just be about you and her. Gauge her responses to your concerns, it may be clear at that point that it’s best not to go any further. If you decide to give the FWB thing a go, maybe keep it PG-13 for a bit and see if her attitude towards you shifts. I feel like a lot of people can shrug off a few make out sessions, but damage control after sex can be a bit harder.



Tread carefully, if you dare to tread at all.

Smythe

***

Got Problems? Let SuicideGirls’ team of Agony Aunts provide solutions. Email questions to: gotproblems@suicidegirls.com

Ti West is becoming a major name in horror movies. His 2009 film, The House of the Devil, harkened back to 1980s atmospheric horror, to the point where it was available on VHS in a big plastic shell case. He’s been invited to speak on numerous panels, such as the 2010 South by Southwest Film Festival’s... more

Ti West is becoming a major name in horror movies. His 2009 film, The House of the Devil, harkened back to 1980s atmospheric horror, to the point where it was available on VHS in a big plastic shell case. He’s been invited to speak on numerous panels, such as the 2010 South by Southwest Film Festival’s Directing the Dead one, where he joined Zombieland’s Ruben Fleischer, and Cloverfield and Let Me In’s Matt Reeves, and memorably spoke about the awkward moment when you have to direct a woman to show her naked breasts.

His new film, The Innkeepers, premiered at this year’s SXSW. After continuing to play the festival circuit, it’ll finally creep into homes via VOD on December 30 (and will get a theatrical release on February 3, 2012).

The Innkeepers is a horror comedy about two clerks working at a soon-to-be defunct hotel during its last weekend in business. Claire (Sara Paxton) and Luke (Pat Healy) pass the time by speculating about ghostly inhabitants and attempting to record EVP.

Claire’s slapstick bumbling and Luke’s sarcastic comments are a change in tone from the popular House of the Devil (a satanic cult movie that exploited the power of silence with nary a laugh). West has also directed The Roost and Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever, although he disowns the latter because it was taken away from him in editing. He also directed segments of the forthcoming films V/H/S and The ABCs of Death.

Midway through the SXSW festival in Austin, I caught up with West at a point when we didn’t have a full night’s sleep between us. I was going on three hours and he just barely had me beat. Those are the glorious moments when you just push through the exhaustion on pure adrenaline because you just have to keep up with the prevailing film geekery.

SuicideGirls: Last year on the “Directing the Dead” panel you said when you had to ask an actress to do nudity, it reminded you that that's a human being.

Ti West: Yeah. I do mean that but I don’t mean it in a “That’s a person, that’s offensive” kind of way because I don’t care about that. I mean it as in when you actually say it to someone, you realize you’ve just said that out loud and you’re like, “This is weird.” You just feel like a creep is what I’m getting at. It’s an odd situation to be in that when you’re not in it seems like oh, it’s just business as usual. Then when you’re actually there being like I have to tell her, it’s not even like because she knows she’s going to be naked, but I’ve got to tell her, “You’ve got to turn your boobs more to the camera,” you’re like oh man, this is weird.

SG: I found it a compassionate point of view because it’s a staple of the genre we love. Should we feel a little guilty for enjoying naked boobies?

TW: No, I don’t think so. I’m just saying it’s just awkward to do it. As the person doing it, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it, it’s just when you actually say it out loud, and maybe this is just me being weird and insecure about it but the times that I’ve had to do it, it’s one of those I can’t believe I have to go up to this girl and be like, “You need to turn more this way because we can’t see.” They never care. Everyone’s always fine with it but it’s just you realize what you’re doing when you ask that.

SG: My take was you were being compassionate.

TW: I think that’s ultimately where I come from.

SG: Of course we hear stories of bad producers forcing naive young actresses to do it, but I take a positive perspective that that’s a cool girl, she’s sharing her hot body with me on screen, so thank you, lady. Maybe it isn’t always like that.

TW: It’s just weird because it’s people everywhere. The whole thing is just awkward. Whenever anyone says, “Sex scenes are so awkward to shoot,” it is. It’s just a weird thing to be doing. It’s part of it but it’s odd.

SG: When you’re doing a horror movie set in a hotel, is that dangerous territory?

TW: Well, I’ll tell you that the first time we put the camera on a steadicam and walked down the hallway, I was like, “Oh, shit.” Because you can’t not. As soon we did it, as soon as he walks down that hallway you’re like, “Oh man, The Shining.” What can you do? I tried to stay far away from that stuff. I think other than a few visual things like that you can’t avoid, I think we’re a standalone thing. But yes, that’s one of the greatest movies ever made. I’m uncomfortable making a movie that’s similar to a movie like that.

SG: They still make exorcism movies though.

TW: That’s true. I feel like movies, sometimes they use similar bell type sounds and you’re like dude, what are you doing? I don’t know. When there’s a movie that good, it’s best to just leave it be.

SG: Did you want to use humor this time around?

TW: Yes. House of the Devil was a movie about a girl that was just bummed. So I was just like I don’t want to make another bum out I don’t have any money kind of movie. My whole goal with this movie was to make something that was charming. I have had every kind of part time day job ever and I really like those relationships you have with people. They’re not your friends, they’re your coworkers but you spend eight hours a day with them and you develop these quasi-friendships with them and it’s usually snarky and there’s usually a lot of humor in there. That’s really where it came from is to really try to make a charming movie about these minimum wage jobs that turns into a horror movie.

SG: Charming is a good word. I described it as campfire style. The scare is part of the fun.

TW: I can see that. Certainly when she tells the ghost story especially but I like that hanging out, you’re just kind of making conversation because what else are you going to do? Then you kind of develop this rapport based on that. That’s what I thought these two characters having spent so much time just sitting at a desk together.

SG: Even just as far as the joy of being scared, versus the intense disturbing horror movies.

TW: Yeah, again, House of the Devil is a girl who’s bummed out and then it’s a Satanic cult and it’s violent. I’d just done that so I wanted to make something that was a little bit more kooky and mystical and go down that not really fantasy, but a little bit more abstract field and have humor and have kooky wacky like screwball comedy stuff, but still have it be scary, which is like an odd combination but I felt like the contrast of those two things would work well.

SG: Speaking of mystical, several movies this year dealt with the interconnection human beings have with each other and the afterlife: Source Code, Insidious, the documentary I Am. What do you think makes so many filmmakers explore that metaphysical theme right now?

TW: I think because even if you’re a skeptic, there’s some inkling that there might be some truth to that. Nobody really believes in vampires. Nobody really believes in werewolves. Nobody believes in zombies, but ghosts are something that’s like I don’t think I believe, but maybe. I think there’s something about that that audiences and filmmakers, your own mortality, there’s something you can’t help being sort of interested in that. That’s to me what’s always been interesting about ghost stories. That’s why I think those movies to me are always the scariest movies, because I don’t really believe they’re going to happen, but I’m not 100% sure that they won’t. I’m in the high 90s but there’s that little percent, whereas I have no fear of zombies breaking in here ever. So that’s just entertainment to me. It can be well done craft or social commentary but it stops there. Whereas the ghost thing I think hits everybody more personally. Also anyone that’s had anyone in their life die, that’s a really trying experience and that’s something you think a lot about, like what happens? It’s not even necessarily in a religious way. I guess like you said, in a metaphysical way.

SG: Have you explored that deeper in real life, any reading?

TW: I had a friend that used to listen to a lot of Deepak. Me having to always hear her tell me about Deepak, Ekhart Tolle, some of that made it into the Kelly McGillis character because I would hear all these things about consciousness and all this stuff. I cannibalized some of her ramblings to me and put them into there.

SG: What are your favorite obscure horror comedies?

TW: Ah, I don’t know because there’s not really that many that don’t go into the weird outrageously silly Troma territory. This isn’t totally a horror movie but Death Race 2000 is a great comedy dark movie. Eating Raoul is a great dark black comedy with horrific elements. But just straight up ones, there’s not too many. The Burbs is awesome. The Burbs is one of my favorites. It’s genius and it’s not straight up horror but it sort of is because it’s the creepy neighbors but The Burbs is probably the answer I’ll go with. Forget Evil Dead II. Let’s go with The Burbs.

SG: Are you drawn more to horror movies as a movie viewer?

TW: No, I have 1000 DVDs and the minority is horror movies but I do like provocative stuff. So I’m always going to respond more to that. I just feel when stuff is the same, another Transformers movie, another Fast and Furious, other than some effects, there’s nothing in that movie that’s going to be new to me. I’ve said this a bunch of times but Steven Soderbergh had a really good quote when they were like, “How come you’re taking some time off from making movies?” He said, “I just can’t get excited about another over the shoulder shot.” It’s like something else needs to excite me so I’m always looking for edgier more provocative movies that give you a visceral reaction because so much doesn’t anymore.

SG: Do you have Blu-rays?

TW: I don’t have a lot, I have maybe 10 to 20.

SG: What movies are in your main rotation, DVD or Blu-ray?

TW: Well, I did this interview for Criterion for the Hausu DVD and they gave me a stack of DVDs. So my beginning of Blu-ray was just all Criterion stuff. I was watching a lot of that, rewatching Videodrome and all that sort of stuff. I bought Scott Pilgrim which I like a lot. Because of Netflix I get everything on Blu-ray whenever it comes out and it’s a fantastic format. As far as DVD stuff, my purchase of DVD has slowed, much like everybody, has slowed down over the years.

SG: We don’t need to own anymore. There are all sorts of sources of instant movies.

TW: My Blu-ray player is a Playstation and I got it because of the Netflix Instant thing and that just blows my mind. I think that’s amazing. The more stuff that gets on Instant, I have this floor to ceiling thing of DVDs that I just look at like, “I don’t even need these.”

SG: What are your perennials?

TW: Golden Child, The Burbs, Karate Kid, Teen Wolf. Movies I grew up with. 48 Hours, Beverly Hills Cop I watch all the time. I think it’s great. There’s something about those movies, it was the last bit of not lowest common denominator. They weren’t attempting as much. It was before all the test screenings. 48 Hours is a comedy but also an action movie, but also really dark and also just really well written and really well shot by Walter Hill. How often do you get a really well known gritty director to do a Nick Nolte/Eddie Murphy buddy comedy racial tension action movie? It’s like whoa. That just doesn’t happen anymore. Those are the movies I grew up with and I really like that stuff.

SG: What is on your stack to be viewed?

TW: There’s a bunch of Criterion things that I haven’t seen. Friends of Eddie Coyle, I haven’t watched that yet. I might be pretty caught up. I don’t have a stack, I don’t think, of stuff to see. When I was in New York finishing all the sound for the movie, I was in a hotel so I would just sit and watch tons of stuff. I watched the whole Sopranos season so I caught up with that. I’d never seen that before. I got really into TV box sets because I like the long form of it.

SG: Do you ever go through your collection and pull stuff out to get rid of?

TW: No. The collector element in me, I hold onto it.

SG: I’ve had Cabin Fever 2 on my stack for two years and I still haven't gotten to it. Should I watch it?

TW: Uh, I guess. It’s not my movie. I’m sure there’s things in there that could be amusing. Yeah, I don’t know. It doesn’t bother me. I’m long passed it at this point but it’s a bummer, it’s a shame.

SG: But you know how it goes, you might want to watch it to see what you're talking about, but then it just sits there.

TW: Actually, you should watch it. Here’s why. The way that you brought that up knowing the history of it, it’s totally fine. If you didn’t know the history and you were like man, I loved your movie and now I’m going to check out this Cabin Fever one you made, I’d be like, “Don’t!” Because then it’s like you’re going in thinking this is going thinking this is going to be like those. Then you’re going to be like oh, what happened here? The fact that you are educated to know that there were problems and I tried to Alan Smithee it and all that stuff, then you can watch it as a sort of experiment I suppose.

SG: I didn’t know that when I first got the DVD, but I've learned about the whole history of it as it's sat on my shelf.

TW: But knowing that, I would encourage anyone to watch it because everyone in that movie, I don’t dislike any of those people. Good for them. It’s just even people who really like that movie, I don’t feel comfortable taking any credit for it. That movie, I was editing it, it was going well and then everything I did they deleted and someone else started from scratch and re-edited it. I just think they missed what it was. Some people say, “How different could it be? It’s the same footage.” It’s like Dane Cook telling Seinfeld jokes. The material’s fine but the delivery is all fucked up. He’s giving you all this energy and it’s not supposed to be done that way. The material’s still funny but no one’s laughing. That’s how I feel about Cabin Fever. It’s a local band covering a famous song where you’re like, “This is the same, it’s just not as exciting.” That’s how I feel about it.

SG: The longer it gets the more I wonder why I haven’t just watched it yet.

TW: It’ll pop up on Netflix Instant and you’ll see it like that. The Alan Smithee thing would’ve been cool because I would’ve been part of that club. I mean, it’s not a great club to be a part of but at least I could be like historically, I’m in the Alan Smithee club. It’s very hard to get that credit though.

SG: They did a movie about that.

TW: I know and I think that killed the Alan Smithee, it makes it almost impossible to get it now. It’s no one’s real fault. It wasn’t Lionsgate. A whole series of things happened that just didn’t work out.