I always wondered if the guys that ran the official websites for famous people have a red phone in their house that immediately connects to the subject. Well I found out, they dont. But Dennis Widmyer, who is one of the people behind ChuckPalahniuk.net, does have the next best thing. His personal phone number and email address. Now for many years Dennis has used that power for good. Would Chuck be a best selling author without the website existing? Probably, but he wouldnt have as close connection with some of his fans. Many of the people who frequent the site feel a lot closer to the man behind some classics as Fight Club, Choke and Survivor since they have a place to find updated news about the man and his work.
In 2003 the Edinboro University of Pennsylvania threw the second conference called Postcards From The Future related to the collected works of fiction author, screenwriter, and journalist, Chuck Palahniuk. Of course thousands of fans were unable to make it this year. Thats why Widmyer and friends shot a documentary there which is available for pre-order from the site. Ive seen it and its great. Some amazing things happen in it such as Chuck handing out silly string for the screening audience to fire off during a scene at the Fight Club screening. Multiple weirdoes are interviewed including the poignant story of Dallas who is a young homeless boy who has turned his life around through discovering Chucks work.
Check out ChuckPalahniuk.net and order the documentary.
Daniel Robert Epstein: How did the idea for the documentary come up?
Dennis Widmyer: We tried to do it once at the first conference in 2001. I think I was the only person that thought we could make something more out of it. The people I went with were Amy Dalton who I created the site with, her brother Tim and another friend of mine. It was kind of like a pleasure thing. We were just going to have a good time. Last minute I twisted everyones arms to bring cameras because I didnt want to be the only idiot with a camera. So I kind of cracked the whip and got everyone recording what we could. But there was no professionalism involved, just walking around with cameras and walked away with about 13 tapes of unusable footage. It was really a sore spot. The tapes just sat on my shelf mocking me for about a year and a half. Every now and then I would look at some of the footage. I got the idea that we should go back to the footage to make a real documentary. So I watched all the old footage with a filmmaker friend of mine named Kevin Klsch. We decided we could never make anything out of it because it would be a piece of shit. So we decided to do it right the next time around at the next conference this past year.
Then it became about getting together a crew and it ended up just being my friend Josh. We went about it right. We got everyones permission, better cameras and we wrote interview questions. In the end we used about 5 percent of the 2001 footage for the new one to show the differences between the two conferences.
DRE: Did the people who set up the conference contact you to work with you for the first one?
W: We actually helped them get it off the ground. Christian McKinney at the Edinboro University of Pennsylvania contacted me out of the blue and as the months went by I realized the university was really going to do this conference and they could use our help in promoting it. So I started promoting it on the website in winter 2001. It didnt really get serious until they got Chuck [Palahniuk] on board. I was surprised when he decided to do it because I had no idea how it was all going to work. Once he came on the conference had a structure and the idea formed. A conference in his honor, readings, screenings but the main thrust of the conference will be presentations on his work. For the first conference Chuck was pretty much just a spectator. You would walk into a room and see him sitting Indian style on the floor asking questions.
It was really surreal because here were these people who adored him, writing papers about his work and there he is in the audience asking them questions about their paper. That became the allure of the conference.
DRE: How many people went to the first conference?
W: Maybe about 3000 which I would say was about the same amount of people that went to the first one. The first conference had a lot more exposure and promotion. The second conference kind of happened last minute. They werent sure if they were going to be able to do it. Once they knew it was going to happen they only had about two months to turn it around.
It was mostly locals. Its hard to get people to drive cross country last minute. They would do it for a reading by Chuck but I dont think a lot of people understood what the conference was all about. Then this year they really amped it up. Chuck did his own presentation which is on the documentary and had a workshop earlier in the week.
DRE: How much of the documentary had to get approval by Chuck or any of his people?
W: He was actually really cool about it. I told him about it but I wasnt sure if he was hearing me loud and clear that we were going to be there with cameras. He seemed like he was fine with it but just to be sure we gave him a release form to sign which he was fine with. We stayed out of his way and he stayed out of ours
DRE: Did you have to pass along the final cut of the documentary along to anyone?
W: No we didnt. Its all our own thing. He authorized it so he will help us out with it. Hes already told me that he doesnt want to watch it because it makes him uncomfortable. Thats the same reason he doesnt go to the website and see his picture in shiny neon. I told him that it is not a documentary talking about how great he is but really its about what he was trying to teach and evolve people that weekend. Pretty much that was his motive going into this thing.
When we came away from the conference we didnt really know what we had at first. We thought we would just have a diary and the people that couldnt go would see what they missed. Furthermore if we could get some exposure for the conference maybe we could do it again at the next one. Then we did find a theme and an arc. It was really in that kid Dallas. We were driving home from the conference and we decided that we should focus on him because he probably has the most sincere story out of anyone. Hes this kid who is a vagabond off the streets of Portland. He had this harrowing childhood and his love of Chucks work helped him turn his life around. Now he is using Chucks work to become a writer himself. We found that structure while editing.
DRE: What scene during the screening of Fight Club did the audience shoot the silly string off?
W: We werent there for it because we were at a bar drinking. But we got footage from someone. It was the scene where Ed Nortons character shoots himself in the head at the end.
DRE: How many people are put the documentary together?
W: Just the three of us. I got the whole thing off the ground, making phone calls and stuff. But we were all literally handing the cameras off to one another. It wasnt like we set up tripods then the event started. The events were back to back. So as a spectator you want to be everywhere at once but we had to be filmmakers. We couldnt totally enjoy the conference because one guy would be wrapping up after an event then two other guys would grab the camera and run down the hall to the next one. Sometimes we would just walk down the hall and jump into one presentation for 10 minutes, tape, then jump out and run into another one for 10 minutes. It became about being the fly on the wall. There were a couple of times where I would walk into one with the camera, knocking into chairs and I would have to set it up while people would be telling me to get out of the way. It was messy sometimes but it was the only way to do it because we had such a small crew.
DRE: Did you guys ever think about trying to get any outside financing before you started?
W: The aim was to just get it done but to be honest the thought of getting financing never even occurred to us because it was such a last minute thing. Now that its all done, out there and on the website Im completely open to the idea that it might have a life of its own beyond the website. Maybe we could put it into festivals. There is some red tape involved because a lot of the rights that were given to us cheaply because we were only selling them on the website. We couldnt go and put it on a channel like Bravo.
A lot of people that helped us out did it because they are big fans of Chucks work. There were tons of times where I would call people and get some snobby person on the phone but once I said we were doing it on Chuck Palahniuk, Id find out they were a fan. I was always touched by that because hes got such a tight knit fanbase. Its not just the website where its a community of people who discuss his work. Ive met complete strangers and maybe one out of three times youll find a fan of his work. It was definitely an interesting lesson.
DRE: How many emails do you get through the site?
W: Not as many as I used to. I got 67 emails today and 63 of them are spam. Its not about the quantity of emails I get but the quality. It seems like its really smartened up. I used to get constant inane emails. Now that the website is on track with people who do the technical stuff, a PR person, an assistant and people like that. We provide all the info on Chuck at the site. If someone wants to email Chuck they dont have to go through me anymore. That cuts down on a lot of the requests I get.
DRE: Did you ever expect it to get so big?
W: I was just in the right place at the right time. It was never that notion of thinking that he was going to be the next big thing. It was just about this great author that no one knows about, how do we let people know about him? Maybe it was some intuition involved but he is the right guy with the right generation.
The documentary was the next logical step. We had done as much as we could with the website. One of the questions I get the most frequently is, why cant Chuck come to a do a signing in their city? Like a lot of Australians, Japanese, Greece and Israel. It basically came down to me telling them that I cant help them with that. They have to go contact his publicist. But I figured there were people out there who love this guy more than I do who have never heard his voice, never seen him read so if we could at least provide them with something that gives them 90 minutes of Chuck. That alone is a reason people will like the documentary.
DRE: Were you like a quasi-celebrity at the conference because you run ChuckPalahniuk.net?
W: I dont know. I go to readings and no one knows who I am. One or two times people have recognized me from my picture on the website. I got recognized in a mall once also.
Its more about me going to people and meeting them. Its so bizarre and awesome when you have been talking to a person exclusively through email for the past three years and then you meet them and shake their hand. You dont know their name but then they say trigger14@hotmail.com and I remember them. The best thing about website has just been communicating with people. I guarantee that if I am ever in place where I dont know anyone I can find someone to stay with through the site. The site is the first time I check in the morning and the last thing I check before I go to sleep.
DRE: Whats the worst thing about the site?
W: I guess the worst thing is the politics involved. The bigger it gets the more politics there is. Making sure everything is copyrighted properly. Like when controversial things happen I get reporters calling me wanting quotes and I have to become a PR person which is not what I want to do. Im just a webmaster of a fan site. Ive had a lot of good things drop into my lap which I have to pass on because I dont want to step on anyones shoes. Ive got a good thing going with Chuck and Doubleday but that can so easily turn around if I make the wrong decision.
But the website has gotten so big that it wont go bye-bye if I stop doing it. I could even train someone to do it because its pretty self automated at this point.
DRE: How did things change once the website started getting printed on his books?
W: Big time. I both look forward and dread when a new book comes out. I talked to his publicist recently and they both said that 2005 will be his biggest year. It will be his biggest tour ever with new countries and doubling the amount of countries he goes. He will probably be on TV again because the Conan OBrien show said they would have him back. They think it will be his biggest book.
Weve already planned to possibly do another documentary about him on the road. The perfect example is that his new book has already been announced, Stranger Than Fiction. The last week Ive been checking Amazon and it finally went up. So I find a picture of the book, put a link to Amazon and do a little news story on it. Then I check Amazon every few weeks to see the pre-orders. So I might contact Doubleday and try to get a galley of the book so if someone asks me if I liked the book I could promote. If I dont like the book I wont talk about it. Then the next step is that Doubleday will come to me so I could promote the website for the book and thats when the cross-promotion starts. Then the tour dates go up and then the hell starts. Bookstores were emailing me to ask if Chuck could come to their store. Thats when I become that middle man I hate to be.
DRE: Does the guy from Chuck Palahniuk dot com still blow you off?
W: Its not even about him blowing me off. Im here, hes there and we both know how we feel about each other. If the option ever comes up Ill take it because I can guarantee there is a large part of the audience we are losing because we dont have it as a dot com. Its cool he has a link to us but at the end of the day I wish we could work out some kind of deal and be friends.
DRE: When did you first read Chucks work?
W: I read Fight Club in either late 1996 or early 1997. I was going through a phase where a lot of books I was reading were becoming movies. So with Fight Club I had read online that David Fincher had the rights to make the movie. The name intrigued me and I like David Finchers work a lot. I saw it at Borders and I couldnt pronounce the authors name. My friend Kevin worked there so he put it on hold for me and then he started reading it. So I came down and picked up the book. I read about an eighth of it and couldnt get into it. It was just so different than what I was reading at the time, like I was intimidated. So I gave it back to Kevin and he loved it. He gave it to my friend Amy Dalton and she loved it as well. Suddenly I was the only guy who hadnt read it. Then I finally read it and it definitely touched a nerve in me and I became obsessive about it. I was counting down the days until the movie came out and the days until Survivor was released. Then when Invisible Monsters came out, he went on tour, we went to go see him read and then this all started.
DRE: So the documentary exists so you can make your movie.
W: All of it is because we want to raise $20,000 to make our movie, Our Lady of Sorrow. We have other investors interested once we get that initial money.
DRE: Whats Our Lady of Sorrow about?
W: Its about a husband and wife that move down to an unnamed town from New York. Its obvious they are having problems in their new marriage. You realize something weird is going on in town because all these teenage girls are disappearing over the years. What happens is the husband and wife get into a fight wife and the wife takes off to a bar and never comes home. Then he spends the rest of the film looking for her. It sounds like a mystery but its really a character study of this guy.
DRE: I read about some movie you worked on called The Empath.
W: Yeah that was the first movie I ever worked on. It was a local film shooting on high definition movie. I was a production assistant and thats how I was able to get into bigger films.
DRE: Like what?
W: I was an art assistant on Zoolander, The Duplex and The Guru. The art department is the place to work because you avoid the set where all the egos are.
DRE: Art department must have been fun on Zoolander.
W: Oh yeah, you couldnt imagine the stuff they were building. I was constantly going to this one place in the city to get the huge posters of Ben Stiller on fake magazine covers.
DRE: Where did you grow up?
W: On Long Island.
DRE: Where did you go to college?
W: Long Island University. Its a humble little school. No where as good as NYU but the cool thing about it was that it had talented professors like David Sterritt and Michael Atkinson they were really hands on people.
DRE: Any fans of Chucks ever scare you?
W: Oh yeah. Ive gotten phone calls from people. About two years I got a phone call from some guy and right off the bat I knew there was something wrong with this guy. I got a call and he asks for me. Right off the bat I got a real bad feeling. I asked how I could help him and he says So you like Chuck Palahniuk? I said to the guy that I would talk to him but only through emails and stuff. He hung up and I hadnt heard from him since. I got a call on my cell phone from a girl about a year ago after we had a t-shirt raffle on the site. She was pissing me off because she gave me the wrong address and her shirt kept getting bounced back. Her email address wasnt working so I finally tracked her down. She finally called me and gave me her address. Then she started getting all flirty and I thought it wasnt so bad but it was still weird.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
In 2003 the Edinboro University of Pennsylvania threw the second conference called Postcards From The Future related to the collected works of fiction author, screenwriter, and journalist, Chuck Palahniuk. Of course thousands of fans were unable to make it this year. Thats why Widmyer and friends shot a documentary there which is available for pre-order from the site. Ive seen it and its great. Some amazing things happen in it such as Chuck handing out silly string for the screening audience to fire off during a scene at the Fight Club screening. Multiple weirdoes are interviewed including the poignant story of Dallas who is a young homeless boy who has turned his life around through discovering Chucks work.
Check out ChuckPalahniuk.net and order the documentary.
Daniel Robert Epstein: How did the idea for the documentary come up?
Dennis Widmyer: We tried to do it once at the first conference in 2001. I think I was the only person that thought we could make something more out of it. The people I went with were Amy Dalton who I created the site with, her brother Tim and another friend of mine. It was kind of like a pleasure thing. We were just going to have a good time. Last minute I twisted everyones arms to bring cameras because I didnt want to be the only idiot with a camera. So I kind of cracked the whip and got everyone recording what we could. But there was no professionalism involved, just walking around with cameras and walked away with about 13 tapes of unusable footage. It was really a sore spot. The tapes just sat on my shelf mocking me for about a year and a half. Every now and then I would look at some of the footage. I got the idea that we should go back to the footage to make a real documentary. So I watched all the old footage with a filmmaker friend of mine named Kevin Klsch. We decided we could never make anything out of it because it would be a piece of shit. So we decided to do it right the next time around at the next conference this past year.
Then it became about getting together a crew and it ended up just being my friend Josh. We went about it right. We got everyones permission, better cameras and we wrote interview questions. In the end we used about 5 percent of the 2001 footage for the new one to show the differences between the two conferences.
DRE: Did the people who set up the conference contact you to work with you for the first one?
W: We actually helped them get it off the ground. Christian McKinney at the Edinboro University of Pennsylvania contacted me out of the blue and as the months went by I realized the university was really going to do this conference and they could use our help in promoting it. So I started promoting it on the website in winter 2001. It didnt really get serious until they got Chuck [Palahniuk] on board. I was surprised when he decided to do it because I had no idea how it was all going to work. Once he came on the conference had a structure and the idea formed. A conference in his honor, readings, screenings but the main thrust of the conference will be presentations on his work. For the first conference Chuck was pretty much just a spectator. You would walk into a room and see him sitting Indian style on the floor asking questions.
It was really surreal because here were these people who adored him, writing papers about his work and there he is in the audience asking them questions about their paper. That became the allure of the conference.
DRE: How many people went to the first conference?
W: Maybe about 3000 which I would say was about the same amount of people that went to the first one. The first conference had a lot more exposure and promotion. The second conference kind of happened last minute. They werent sure if they were going to be able to do it. Once they knew it was going to happen they only had about two months to turn it around.
It was mostly locals. Its hard to get people to drive cross country last minute. They would do it for a reading by Chuck but I dont think a lot of people understood what the conference was all about. Then this year they really amped it up. Chuck did his own presentation which is on the documentary and had a workshop earlier in the week.
DRE: How much of the documentary had to get approval by Chuck or any of his people?
W: He was actually really cool about it. I told him about it but I wasnt sure if he was hearing me loud and clear that we were going to be there with cameras. He seemed like he was fine with it but just to be sure we gave him a release form to sign which he was fine with. We stayed out of his way and he stayed out of ours
DRE: Did you have to pass along the final cut of the documentary along to anyone?
W: No we didnt. Its all our own thing. He authorized it so he will help us out with it. Hes already told me that he doesnt want to watch it because it makes him uncomfortable. Thats the same reason he doesnt go to the website and see his picture in shiny neon. I told him that it is not a documentary talking about how great he is but really its about what he was trying to teach and evolve people that weekend. Pretty much that was his motive going into this thing.
When we came away from the conference we didnt really know what we had at first. We thought we would just have a diary and the people that couldnt go would see what they missed. Furthermore if we could get some exposure for the conference maybe we could do it again at the next one. Then we did find a theme and an arc. It was really in that kid Dallas. We were driving home from the conference and we decided that we should focus on him because he probably has the most sincere story out of anyone. Hes this kid who is a vagabond off the streets of Portland. He had this harrowing childhood and his love of Chucks work helped him turn his life around. Now he is using Chucks work to become a writer himself. We found that structure while editing.
DRE: What scene during the screening of Fight Club did the audience shoot the silly string off?
W: We werent there for it because we were at a bar drinking. But we got footage from someone. It was the scene where Ed Nortons character shoots himself in the head at the end.
DRE: How many people are put the documentary together?
W: Just the three of us. I got the whole thing off the ground, making phone calls and stuff. But we were all literally handing the cameras off to one another. It wasnt like we set up tripods then the event started. The events were back to back. So as a spectator you want to be everywhere at once but we had to be filmmakers. We couldnt totally enjoy the conference because one guy would be wrapping up after an event then two other guys would grab the camera and run down the hall to the next one. Sometimes we would just walk down the hall and jump into one presentation for 10 minutes, tape, then jump out and run into another one for 10 minutes. It became about being the fly on the wall. There were a couple of times where I would walk into one with the camera, knocking into chairs and I would have to set it up while people would be telling me to get out of the way. It was messy sometimes but it was the only way to do it because we had such a small crew.
DRE: Did you guys ever think about trying to get any outside financing before you started?
W: The aim was to just get it done but to be honest the thought of getting financing never even occurred to us because it was such a last minute thing. Now that its all done, out there and on the website Im completely open to the idea that it might have a life of its own beyond the website. Maybe we could put it into festivals. There is some red tape involved because a lot of the rights that were given to us cheaply because we were only selling them on the website. We couldnt go and put it on a channel like Bravo.
A lot of people that helped us out did it because they are big fans of Chucks work. There were tons of times where I would call people and get some snobby person on the phone but once I said we were doing it on Chuck Palahniuk, Id find out they were a fan. I was always touched by that because hes got such a tight knit fanbase. Its not just the website where its a community of people who discuss his work. Ive met complete strangers and maybe one out of three times youll find a fan of his work. It was definitely an interesting lesson.
DRE: How many emails do you get through the site?
W: Not as many as I used to. I got 67 emails today and 63 of them are spam. Its not about the quantity of emails I get but the quality. It seems like its really smartened up. I used to get constant inane emails. Now that the website is on track with people who do the technical stuff, a PR person, an assistant and people like that. We provide all the info on Chuck at the site. If someone wants to email Chuck they dont have to go through me anymore. That cuts down on a lot of the requests I get.
DRE: Did you ever expect it to get so big?
W: I was just in the right place at the right time. It was never that notion of thinking that he was going to be the next big thing. It was just about this great author that no one knows about, how do we let people know about him? Maybe it was some intuition involved but he is the right guy with the right generation.
The documentary was the next logical step. We had done as much as we could with the website. One of the questions I get the most frequently is, why cant Chuck come to a do a signing in their city? Like a lot of Australians, Japanese, Greece and Israel. It basically came down to me telling them that I cant help them with that. They have to go contact his publicist. But I figured there were people out there who love this guy more than I do who have never heard his voice, never seen him read so if we could at least provide them with something that gives them 90 minutes of Chuck. That alone is a reason people will like the documentary.
DRE: Were you like a quasi-celebrity at the conference because you run ChuckPalahniuk.net?
W: I dont know. I go to readings and no one knows who I am. One or two times people have recognized me from my picture on the website. I got recognized in a mall once also.
Its more about me going to people and meeting them. Its so bizarre and awesome when you have been talking to a person exclusively through email for the past three years and then you meet them and shake their hand. You dont know their name but then they say trigger14@hotmail.com and I remember them. The best thing about website has just been communicating with people. I guarantee that if I am ever in place where I dont know anyone I can find someone to stay with through the site. The site is the first time I check in the morning and the last thing I check before I go to sleep.
DRE: Whats the worst thing about the site?
W: I guess the worst thing is the politics involved. The bigger it gets the more politics there is. Making sure everything is copyrighted properly. Like when controversial things happen I get reporters calling me wanting quotes and I have to become a PR person which is not what I want to do. Im just a webmaster of a fan site. Ive had a lot of good things drop into my lap which I have to pass on because I dont want to step on anyones shoes. Ive got a good thing going with Chuck and Doubleday but that can so easily turn around if I make the wrong decision.
But the website has gotten so big that it wont go bye-bye if I stop doing it. I could even train someone to do it because its pretty self automated at this point.
DRE: How did things change once the website started getting printed on his books?
W: Big time. I both look forward and dread when a new book comes out. I talked to his publicist recently and they both said that 2005 will be his biggest year. It will be his biggest tour ever with new countries and doubling the amount of countries he goes. He will probably be on TV again because the Conan OBrien show said they would have him back. They think it will be his biggest book.
Weve already planned to possibly do another documentary about him on the road. The perfect example is that his new book has already been announced, Stranger Than Fiction. The last week Ive been checking Amazon and it finally went up. So I find a picture of the book, put a link to Amazon and do a little news story on it. Then I check Amazon every few weeks to see the pre-orders. So I might contact Doubleday and try to get a galley of the book so if someone asks me if I liked the book I could promote. If I dont like the book I wont talk about it. Then the next step is that Doubleday will come to me so I could promote the website for the book and thats when the cross-promotion starts. Then the tour dates go up and then the hell starts. Bookstores were emailing me to ask if Chuck could come to their store. Thats when I become that middle man I hate to be.
DRE: Does the guy from Chuck Palahniuk dot com still blow you off?
W: Its not even about him blowing me off. Im here, hes there and we both know how we feel about each other. If the option ever comes up Ill take it because I can guarantee there is a large part of the audience we are losing because we dont have it as a dot com. Its cool he has a link to us but at the end of the day I wish we could work out some kind of deal and be friends.
DRE: When did you first read Chucks work?
W: I read Fight Club in either late 1996 or early 1997. I was going through a phase where a lot of books I was reading were becoming movies. So with Fight Club I had read online that David Fincher had the rights to make the movie. The name intrigued me and I like David Finchers work a lot. I saw it at Borders and I couldnt pronounce the authors name. My friend Kevin worked there so he put it on hold for me and then he started reading it. So I came down and picked up the book. I read about an eighth of it and couldnt get into it. It was just so different than what I was reading at the time, like I was intimidated. So I gave it back to Kevin and he loved it. He gave it to my friend Amy Dalton and she loved it as well. Suddenly I was the only guy who hadnt read it. Then I finally read it and it definitely touched a nerve in me and I became obsessive about it. I was counting down the days until the movie came out and the days until Survivor was released. Then when Invisible Monsters came out, he went on tour, we went to go see him read and then this all started.
DRE: So the documentary exists so you can make your movie.
W: All of it is because we want to raise $20,000 to make our movie, Our Lady of Sorrow. We have other investors interested once we get that initial money.
DRE: Whats Our Lady of Sorrow about?
W: Its about a husband and wife that move down to an unnamed town from New York. Its obvious they are having problems in their new marriage. You realize something weird is going on in town because all these teenage girls are disappearing over the years. What happens is the husband and wife get into a fight wife and the wife takes off to a bar and never comes home. Then he spends the rest of the film looking for her. It sounds like a mystery but its really a character study of this guy.
DRE: I read about some movie you worked on called The Empath.
W: Yeah that was the first movie I ever worked on. It was a local film shooting on high definition movie. I was a production assistant and thats how I was able to get into bigger films.
DRE: Like what?
W: I was an art assistant on Zoolander, The Duplex and The Guru. The art department is the place to work because you avoid the set where all the egos are.
DRE: Art department must have been fun on Zoolander.
W: Oh yeah, you couldnt imagine the stuff they were building. I was constantly going to this one place in the city to get the huge posters of Ben Stiller on fake magazine covers.
DRE: Where did you grow up?
W: On Long Island.
DRE: Where did you go to college?
W: Long Island University. Its a humble little school. No where as good as NYU but the cool thing about it was that it had talented professors like David Sterritt and Michael Atkinson they were really hands on people.
DRE: Any fans of Chucks ever scare you?
W: Oh yeah. Ive gotten phone calls from people. About two years I got a phone call from some guy and right off the bat I knew there was something wrong with this guy. I got a call and he asks for me. Right off the bat I got a real bad feeling. I asked how I could help him and he says So you like Chuck Palahniuk? I said to the guy that I would talk to him but only through emails and stuff. He hung up and I hadnt heard from him since. I got a call on my cell phone from a girl about a year ago after we had a t-shirt raffle on the site. She was pissing me off because she gave me the wrong address and her shirt kept getting bounced back. Her email address wasnt working so I finally tracked her down. She finally called me and gave me her address. Then she started getting all flirty and I thought it wasnt so bad but it was still weird.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
VIEW 4 of 4 COMMENTS
Sg.com and Cp.net are probably the two sites that I've dabbled with the most over the course of the past year. I've known about Dennis, and who he was... but I really didn't look all that far into it. I love getting the behind-the-scenes story about some of the things that grab my interest. The workshops are awesome, as are the forums... sort of gives you a place to open up, and boy have I ever. A newfound respect has been developed for you, Dennis.. and I hope you keep up the good work.
Get some.
(: