You said you’ve got a national audience, you go out all over the country…
“Well, it’s internet-based, so technically all over the world. We do occasionally hear back from people in other countries, and it’s kind of weird that first time, like, ‘Hey, we listen to you in Australia,’ and I’m like, ‘really? Ok.’”
And yet you said your lowest numbers are here in Louisville. After four years, how does that happen?
“Yeah, that’s the sad part. Louisville’s got a weird crowd; sometimes they latch onto stuff and they find that niche and they really love it and get into it… I think it’s like that across the board, especially with art-related things. You talk to half the people that had bands in Louisville and their biggest following is in Chicago and Cincinnati and then they come here and they’re just some guy that has a job the rest of the week... There’s stuff that we totally get into and support, and there’s stuff that just kinda gets lost in the cracks… There’s so much out there anyway, it’s hard to find an audience. Especially on the podcast thing, there’s still a good percentage of people (not just here but around the country) that still don’t know what a podcast is, so you’re still fighting that uphill battle of trying to get people into the technology, which isn’t very technical, by the way… Other than that, sometimes I’m not sure, because I’ve put the word out with a lot of people, through the internet, and I’m putting cut-and-paste flyers out there. There’s one behind me right now! I guess there’s only a certain percentage of people, and a very specific type of people I guess, that even still look for that kind of stuff.”
Could you talk about one of your favorite discussions over the last four years? I know it’s a lot…
“At a convention we sat down with one of the directors, Albert Pyun, who is one of those who most people don’t know by name unless you’re into cheesy drive-in movies … I guess probably the biggest he’s directed is ‘Cyborg’ with Jean-Claude Van Damme… We had him sit in for our Sofa Theater discussion. I let him pick, and he picked ‘2001 [A Space Odyssey],’ so we listened to him talk about how much ‘2001’ inspired him. He was a teenager and his dad took him to see it, and he’s sitting there in the theater mesmerized by the orchestra starting and the screen opening up to the super-widescreen format and just the visuals, so you’re sitting there listening to this story of pretty much what turned him into a filmmaker, and I think that’s pretty fascinating.”
What’s your favorite movie, if you could pick one, or a couple…?
[Laughs]” I can’t!”
Yeah, nobody ever knows…
“I know I can’t because when I put together our little list of bio stuff I originally was going to pick ten movies, but I couldn’t even narrow it down to ten. There’s just too much amazing stuff. I think I rounded it off to a big fifty… I think it leaves it incomplete just picking one movie. But, again, I think that’s a geek thing; I think normal people can just be like, ‘Oh, I love “Jaws!”’ and they just pick a movie because it’s not ingrained the way that it is when you’re a hardcore geek… I like everything; I like the ridiculous ones… and we get a lot more interesting conversations out of those, I’ve realized, especially the bad ones. Sometimes you’ll get a way more interesting conversation out of a terrible movie instead of the general praise you’ll end up giving something that’s well-received across the board… I like old-school stuff like Hitchcock, and Orson Welles is amazing… And then I grew up on the drive-in, kind of the drive-in mentality… I like ‘Death Race 2000,’ I love that movie. And when I discovered ‘Faster Pussycat Kill Kill’… Russ Meyer gets no respect for his visuals… He really is kind of a talented director, and doesn’t get credit for that… Sometimes we’ll occasionally go to the movies and watch a normal mainstream kind of movie... I’m somewhere in the middle of that; I’ve kind of got the high-end old-school movie, like classic Hollywood stuff, I still think is amazing… We’ve worked in some of the classic stuff like ‘Harvey’ or ‘Rebecca,’ and then we’ve worked in ‘Showgirls.’”
Could you pick a favorite director?
“I’ve realized over the years how impressive John Carpenter is… I look at how many of his movies are some of my favorites; ‘The Thing’ is at the top of that list… I think story-wise it is just so tight and so suspenseful... That era of special effects was so good - those practical effects still hold up… Every once in a while you can tell it’s prosthetic, but at the same time it still looks ten times better than CGI… He was one of those who was massively influential in the late-seventies, early-eighties run… Each one of his movies there set the bar, like ‘Halloween’ for slashers and ‘The Thing’ for weird sci-fi.”
What kind of plans do you have for the future? Do you want to go another four years?
"I’m fine with that, really. For me, it’s a ridiculous amount of work… but I think the reason I’m ok with doing that much work is that I’ve tried to make it as genuine as possible… I try to make it, like I said, like hanging out with your friends… I would want to be doing that anyway, even if I wasn’t recording, so I make myself a little more work by turning it into a show, but, in a way, I kind of always want to be doing that. So if I can still find a way to make it a show and people want to listen to it, if I still feel like it’s something useful out there, yeah, I kind of like putting it together and I like being able to structure it into a show, as it were. I kind of like turning it into something that otherwise would just be you wasting a weekend on the couch. You can kind of take that and channel it into something productive really, and something that’s kind of interesting."
Movie Meltdown is available for download on Saturdays. Listen in on the next episode for a discussion on “Black Christmas,” a holiday-themed slasher film by director Bob Clark (“A Christmas Story,” “Porky’s”). Episodes can be found through the website, or more directly, here. [4]
Photo courtesy of the podcast’s website.
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