So I’ve received a few emails wondering why there is no “about me” page on the site anywhere. There’s a simple answer to that. I’m lazy. That and I honestly never thought people would care. But as I now feel somewhat obliged to have some kind of personal information on the site, here we go. Consider this my “about me”.
My name is Dave. Nice to meet you.
I’ve been a lifelong film fan. The majority of my childhood was spent sitting in front of the television watching movies (ditto for my teenage years). While most of my friends were chasing tail and going to parties, I was ingesting cinema at an alarming rate. I watched everything. From Ozu and Bergman to Mikels and Ed Wood, I watched it all, sometimes absorbing 25 to 30 movies a week.
Like most film fanatics, I wanted to make movies. Fresh out of high school, I got some schooling, worked on a few ultra-small budget flicks doing assorted duties like special effects and lighting, and spent hours studying the principles of film theory in order to build a better film. The enthusiasm didn’t last long. I pitched scripts to no avail. I started small films only to have them fall apart (usually do to actors bowing out a week or two into filming). I did everything I could think of to make some kind of lateral movement in the industry. All of it was for nothing.
But I learned something through all of it. Making movies is no damn fun, or at least, not for me. It is extremely hard work (not that that is a bad thing) and a major mental drain. I no longer wanted to be behind the camera, but I did want to be behind the typewriter. I remember looking at some of my unfinished work and thinking to myself “my lord, I’m really not a very good director”. Not that I was bad, mind you. Everything was well-framed and all that, but I approached everything from a very “film theory” perspective. I spent so much time learning what does and does not work on screen that everything I was doing felt so safe it was lifeless. So I gave that up and quickly realized that what I really enjoy doing is writing screenplays.
Writing a movie is fun. Infinitely more fun than standing behind a camera. There are no boundaries or limitations. You don’t have to deal with a cinematographer or grips or producers. You don’t have to worry about logistics or running out of time. There are no shot lists, no guilds to deal with and no working restrictions on actors. You just write. Let the people you sell the script to worry about all that shit.
I also realized that I enjoy writing about movies. I don’t think I’m some kind of amazing critic. I don’t have the wealth of insight that someone like Pauline Kael or the Cahiers du Cinéma critics had. It doesn’t matter. While I have written academically about films before (and still do), I prefer just writing out my feelings on a film. Pedestrian reviews (as opposed to professional reviews) are always more fun to read, especially when they come from a fan of a particular genre or sub-genre. Genre cinema is a vernacular cinema and it is always enjoyable to read a review from someone that speaks the same language as you. I don’t necessarily care about grammar (we’re not going for Pulitzers here, people) or any real kind of film theory insight. I just like reading opinions from someone who knows the difference between John Carpenter’s Halloween and Rob Zombie’s Halloween or can state the differences between the Krimi and the Giallo.
The original banner for Films That Witness Madness.
I started this website in September of 2009 mostly out of boredom. I had posted regularly on horror movie forums before that time and found the constant arguing over opinions tiring. Good, decent opinions on films get lost amidst all the bickering and fanboy overreactions. Now I have no problem with defending my position on a certain film, but it’s hard to do in a public forum without getting lost in the chaos. So I decided to open a small site where I could just post long(ish) reviews of films I had been watching. Films That Witness Madness was a glorified blog of sorts, built from scratch in HTML, PHP and CSS. I originally reached out for contributors and received a very good response, but (as is always the case) those people never quite produced anything to put on the site. A fellow forum member who went by the name of Hammer Fangirl sent me a few reviews and another named Tom contributed a single review. Other than that, I was on my own.
Films That Witness Madness went live with four reviews. I originally planned on having sections for virtually every flavor of film (I think the site originally had 13 or 14 categories). Quickly realizing this was unmanageable, I chopped it down to just four (Italy, Giallo, USA and a catch-all called The Miscellany). My goal was to write four reviews a week, one for each category. As long time readers (and there are more of them than I ever imagined) know, I don’t always update the site on a regular basis, but I’ve managed over 100 reviews in two years, not bad for someone working a full-time job, writing multiple projects and having something close to resembling a social life. I later added a full franchise review section for the Halloween films (I will more than likely add another in the future) and a blog where I can post things that interest me but are not reviews. I recently added a section called The Essentials where I can call attention to really damn good films.
People often complain to me that the films I cover are hard to find. That’s true. Quite a few of the films I write about are films I bought off eBay in foreign VHS sales or downloaded off of Cinemageddon. I should probably do a better job in making sure these films are accessible. I also get criticized for not writing about recent releases. Sorry about that, folks, but I honestly don’t watch many newer films. All in all, the site has received a great deal of support and I am regularly getting emails from other horror/exploitation fans who want to talk about a title or who want to argue. I’m grateful for each and every email I get and every viewer who visits the site.
Some of you may have noticed the small banner on the homepage that advertises two films coming in 2012 from myself and some guy named Michael Bonomo. That is true. Mike and I met a long time ago on the Bloody Disgusting forums. Mike was running his own review site and I was just starting to set up FTWM. He was recommended to me by a mutual friend as a possible contributor. We started talking and quickly realized that we had a lot of things in common outside of just liking to watch movies. He was, like me, a wannabe filmmaker. We began exchanging ideas and stories (Mike lives in Los Angeles, California and I live in Lancaster, Pennsylvania; believe it or not, in all the years I’ve known him, we’ve never met face to face) and soon hit upon the idea of making a film together. Months and months of work gave birth to a project called Muse, an art-house horror piece that plays like a mix of Clouzot and Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe’s Faust. While Mike went about making short films, we kicked up our efforts to getting Muse made.
Plans got derailed however late in 2011 when we realized Muse would be a much pricier film than we thought. So we pushed back production to raise more funds. Meanwhile, Mike made a little short film with an actor by the name of Bill Oberst Jr. That short film, Assassins, led Mike to think about making an ultra-low budget flick that would star Bill playing his Assassins character. When Mike false started a couple times, he asked me to have a go at it. I wrote a treatment in a week and a week later we had a full first draft of a script. A few rewrites later, we had an honest-to-goodness feature film. At the time of this writing, Assassins is scheduled to go into production in June. If everything goes well, Mike and I are on our way to making movies. Of course we may only end up making an independent film once every five years (films which may not ever receive widespread distribution) but at least we will be doing something. At least we will be contributing.
While all of that is going on, I’ve been working on a few other projects. One of those projects is a book about the giallo film. To say it is an ambitious undertaking is an understatement. Using a modified form of evolutionary theory, I am working through 230+ gialli (in order of release) to see how the giallo film evolved. Using audience reaction, box office gross and popularity as my natural selection criteria, I am attempting to trace the evolutionary history of the giallo from the early 60s to the present with more than a few stopovers in the lands of Krimi, sexploitation and slashers. It’s an enormous undertaking requiring more than 500 films to be watched in order of release. I am so far up to 1968 and my pages of notes, summaries, research and criticism has totaled 1,834 pages (and I’m only in 1968!). Tentatively titled Death Stalked the Cinema, this is the largest project I’ve ever taken on. Hopefully it will pan out. I guess it all depends on how long my attention span holds out before breaking.
The other project is a fanzine. I used to write for fanzines when I was a teenager. I remember spending hours in front of a typewriter, pounding out copy. I had to type my reviews in pre-set shapes to fit the mold of the fanzine (everything was cut up and pasted into templates). When I was done, I’d hand off my reviews to friends who would piece the fanzines together. Every one and awhile I’d have to go down to the library and make the copies or staple the pages together. Sometimes I had to draw the artwork. We never made any money on these things (although we got more than a few VHS tapes for free from local video stores in exchange for advertising their stores) but we didn’t do it for money anyway. We did it for the love of doing it. I miss that experience. So I am planning on putting together a bi-monthly (or quarterly, perhaps) fanzine. The internet has made it infinitely easier to do this kind of thing and InDesign is light years away from typewriters and glue sticks. How long the fanzine lasts will depend on how popular it is and how long I feel like doing it (hopefully I’ll attract some contributors for real this time), but I’m not planning on doing it for years and years. It is just a kind of experience I enjoyed when I was a kid. Why not have another go at it?
I’ve had to give serious thought as to how I can manage to do all these projects (website, fanzine, screenplays, book, etc.) at once and still work a regular job and see friends from time to time. At some point I’m sure one of those projects will have to go bye bye. The only thing I’m certain of is this: it will not be this site. I like having a website to call my own. I like the ability to redesign it whenever I want and how I want. I like having the ability to write whatever I want whenever I want about whatever I want. There were times when updating the site felt like a chore. There are times when I half-assed reviews just to have something to post. But getting emails from viewers makes me want to keep doing this. Sure I get hate mail (Friday the 13th fans are a tough group of people to please) but I also get serious emails from interested film fans. I’ve made friends through this site. In some circles, I’ve made a reputation for myself through this site. I’m certainly not proud of every review I’ve written, but they are, more or less, pieces of my brain, uploaded for everyone to see. In five years, Films That Witness Madness will still be here. I can guarantee that much.
Unless Mike and I make it big and score million dollar deals, that is. I mean, come on now. Would you blame me?
