The Monthly Rag

Clearly having paid some dues with that last brouhaha, a flash of fortune and merciful change of confidence returned late ‘95 to a much better mid-decade affair. In November, I was finally out again in my own apartment in down town Fort Bragg (smaller in scale this time, a studio–but it had hot water thankfully), and the drive to push onward was back during the holiday season. A follow up to our everything Batman edition was produced around the new year and released to the usual parade, so with a kiss goodbye to a particularly rotten twelve months, 1996 emerged.

The machines resumed once again, clicking and whirling, pulling in new ideas. A few old faces even appeared–Summer’s now of age girlfriend was back from juvenile hall, materializing one day on Laurel street while I was out wandering the wastes. Always one for movies, we started hanging out and catching up on old times. During a late night screening of Kids, which disturbed me greatly, the idea to produce a sequel to a movie called A Killer in our Midst that had been made by the 7th grade students of my dear friend Curt Berry appeared and took some indistinct and fuzzy shape. Writing the script in just three days, shooting for the continuing installment was off, and amid the near three months of photography and editing we kept everyone up to tabs on the production through our established printed outlet. We even designed ads to coincide with the May 31st release date–ostensibly a double bill showing with the first Killer flick at Cotton Auditorium, and wallpapered the town with flyers, newspapers, and word of mouth among the youth.

A few extra hands were aiding the process considerably. While off filming during what available time the high school cast had (and when good weather permitted–it was winter), I had the genius idea to send a female out to do the Rag’s dirtywork. Why I hadn’t thought of it before is still beyond me, but once our sweet teenage salesgirls got out there money started rolling in. We never actually made it into the black, but for the most part we could count on having the paper covered once it landed for pressing. Our first womanly go-getter was Alana, dear sister of the Rag’s own Andrew, and clean-up she did with the sales pitching. Without the headache of collecting payments and appealing to new businesses to score additional funds, I was left alone to write and edit and glue shit together undisturbed. This was all very well and good since I was bombarded with production responsibilities on A Killer in our Midst II for a huge duration of my waking time, and with all the pistons churning we plowed ahead like some unfathomable demon engine.

Release approached quickly, and the movie’s producer, my good friend and collaborative partner Sage Statham (who had previously teamed up with me to edit Killer I) and I were locked in the Mendocino ROP video lab cutting our latest excursion together. A new Rag was slapped into form just in time to plug the upcoming show, detailing our efforts and spotlighting the newly made sequel to the middle school-born slasher series. Within the last two weeks before curtain call, our own beloved Joe Jones returned from living in the San Jose area, solidifying the current film team lineup as special make-up effects technician and restoring the long lost favorite Dateline with Ash column, which I had been doing in his absence, back to its former twisted glory. Amazingly, the premiere went without hitch, which would be a rarity for us in the upcoming years, and a nice sized crowd gathered to cheer on the dual screenings. It remains as another of my favorite memories of accomplishment; we had the paper out and going strong, and now our first finished movie for Darkage Pictures, our company, which had been struggling to complete a project from inception to presentation for the past three years. The proceeds from that gig went straight into the bank for the initial Vampyre budget, which began lensing just two weeks later.

Into another summer we forged, dipping right into the frozen sea that was to be our feature effort into film making. The plan was to shoot a half hour High 8 pilot test version of the eighty page Vampyre script I had written, and use it to get some financial backing to do it all over again on celluloid. Documenting the production, as before, was the convenient little newspaper that we just so also happened to run from behind the scenes.

CONTINUE TO PART 13