Brian: Was writing always something that
you wanted to do or was it a passion that
surprised you later in life?
MJ: "Later in life?" How dare you! I'm not
later in life! I have always written, ever since
I knew which end of a pencil made a mark. And
oddly, although I have occasionally dallied with
a short story or the start of a novel, my primary
interest has always been non-fiction writing. (I
have also always been interested in scripts. I
wrote comedy sketches and little plays at school
and nowadays I write occasional film scripts.)
When I was about
12 or 13 I started sending spec article to
magazines on subjects such as stamp-collecting,
banging them out on my mum's manual typewriter,
which was the size of a small car. I finally sold
my first article to a mag called Record Collector
in about 1990, having honed my craft writing for
sci-fi, comedy and music fanzines. Nowadays, the
writing is basically a paying hobby, You can't
survive - and certainly can't raise a family -
just writing about movies.
Brian:
Do you have a favorite genre to write about? Is
it science fiction (You have written a popular
biography about Douglas Adams) or horror or a
combination of the two?
MJ:
Douglas who? Never heard of the fellow. That
book, whatever it is, must have been written by
someone who looks exactly like me (and has the
same name).
I have been a
science fiction fan for literally as long as I
can remember, because my earliest memory is of a 'Doctor
Who' episode which was broadcast when I
was 19 months old. (Coincidentally, the new 'Doctor
Who' series started when TF Simpson was
19 months so I sat him down to watch it and he
loved it, just like I did as a kid.) I spent my
childhood reading Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein and
all the other SF greats but curiously I only
really became interested in horror about 14 years
ago, when I was doing a degree and decided to
write my dissertation on Frankenstein films.
I worked for
three years on SFX magazine (as Staff Writer,
then News Editor, then Deputy Editor), writing
about all sorts of SF, fantasy and horror in
films, books and TV. Whatever came into the
office, we had to write about it. Now I pretty
much restrict myself to writing about movies,
which I class as 'cult movies' because it's a
handy catch-all description.
I think the area
I love writing about most is actually animation.
I adore (almost) all animation and love
interviewing animators. I think it's a
fascinating area of film-making which has been
surprisingly undervalued and poorly served,
compared with other genres and styles.
Brian:
Speaking of the Sci-Fi Horror Blend - do you have
any feeling about Roger Corman's 'Galaxy
of Terror'? It's one of the first low
budget 'Alien' rip-offs and it is one of my
favorite B movies.
MJ:
Confession time: I've never seen 'Galaxy
of Terror'. You know, there are lots and
lots of films I have never, ever seen. You simply
can't watch everything. Maybe twenty years ago,
at the height of the video boom, you could
feasibly, over a lifetime watch every fantasy,
horror and sci-fi movie ever released in the UK
or USA. But today there are so many indie
features, so many DTV films and TV movies, and
such a vast panoply of foreign films being
discovered every year that you just can't watch
everything.
Maybe one day
I'll watch 'Galaxy of Terror'.
But I have about eight DVDs in my To Be Watched
pile and probably 50 in my To Be Watched Someday
pile, and more arrive every day.
Brian:
Do you still get excited when interviewing
certain people or has that feeling dulled over
time?
MJ:
A good interview is a good interview. There
aren't many people that can make me excited just
to meet them, although there have been a few.
Usually these are people who haven't been
extensively interviewed and whom I couldn't see
any way in which I would ever get to interview
them. And then it all falls right.'Weird Al'
Yankovic was one, Eric Sykes was another. Two of
my comedy heroes, who both gave me long,
fascinating, hugely enjoyable interviews.
What excites me
now is when I get an e-mail from someone, out of
the blue, thanking me for reviewing on my website
something obscure that they made or were in. For
example, I like to review those strange,
Australian, 45-minute animated adaptations of
classic novels that you can often find in bargain
bins. I found and reviewed a version of Jules
Verne's 'Five Weeks in a Balloon'
- and a few weeks later received an e-mail from
an actor named Loren Lester. That had been his
first credit and he went on to do loads of great
stuff including the voice of Robin/Nightwing in
the 'Batman' cartoon series. And
he very kindly allowed me to interview him. That
was a thrill for me, probably more so than if I
ever get to interview Spielberg or Lucas or one
of the other big boys.
Brian:
Has there been an interview that you would
consider the most interesting? (Not necessarily
the best one, but the most unique.)
MJ:
Last year I reviewed a 1939 black-cast voodoo
picture, 'The Devil's Daughter',
and in researching the film I was amazed to
discover that one of the stars was still alive
and potentially contactable. Emmett Wallace was
96 (probably 97 now) and his grandson had made a
website about his career. That grandson confirmed
that Emmett still had his marbles and loved
talking about the old times, and he very kindly
conveyed some questions and relayed the answers.
They were good answers too.
That was just
extraordinary - interviewing somebody about a
film they made in the 1930s. That's like touching
history. Sends a shiver down my spine.
Brian:
What are your favorite genre films?
MJ:
My all-time favorite film is actually not SF or
fantasy (although it has a very vague mystical
aspect to it and the ending is quite horrific).
And that's John Huston's 'The Man Who
Would Be King'. It's the most brilliant
adventure film imaginable, with Michael Caine,
Sean Connery and Christopher Plummer. Caine also
starred in another favorite non-fantasy film, 'Zulu',
easily the best war film ever made.
But you're asking
about genre movies. I love the original 'King
Kong' with a passion, and I really
enjoyed the recent remake too. I think the
original 'Star Wars' is
absolutely perfect (I know most people prefer
'Empire' but I love the first film).
I don't know if
there are any other specific titles that I could
cite as unwavering favorites. In more general
terms, I love Japanese monster movies, Disney
animated features, Universal horror films and -
more unusually - Asian snake-woman films, which
is an extraordinarily extensive subgenre.
Brian:
A reverse of that question. Which genre films do
you consider your least favorite? (On the
website, I love the review of 'Hellgate'
starring 'Welcome Back Kotter's'
Ron Palillo.)
MJ: Being
British, I have absolutely no idea what
'Welcome Back Kotter' is about or who
Ron Palillo is. But 'Hellgate' is jaw-droppingly
bad. If you want to find especially bad films
reviewed on my site, the other ones to check are 'Kannibal'
and 'The Jekyll and Hyde Rock n Roll
Musical'. I don't like trashing films
unless they're actually offensively, insultingly
bad. Sites that just tear low-budget films to
pieces for being low-budget annoy me. I always
judge a film on how well it achieves what it sets
out to do with what it has available. To
criticize a film (or any artistic endeavor) for
not being something it's not trying to be, or for
not having something which it couldn't have had,
is just pointless and does no-one any favors
However, I think
it is worth thoroughly ripping apart big-budget
monstrosities. The three worst studio features
that I have ever seen are 'The Avengers',
'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen'
and 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy'. All of these treated their
audience with utter contempt. They can all tick
all the boxes: bad scripts, bad direction, bad
casting, bad acting, bad production design and
lousy special effects. And they get a bonus point
for taking as their source material something
which was so highly acclaimed, well-loved and
universally regarded as a classic, then stripping
it of whatever made it so good and having the
hubris to replace the missing bits with piss-poor
new ideas created by (apparently) baboons.
The absolute
worst film I have ever seen on the big screen is
undoubtedly 'The Blair Witch Project'.
An extraordinarily successful marketing campaign
for an absolute nothing of a film. Watching a
blank screen for 80 minutes would have been
scarier and more interesting (and would have had
a better plot and more characterization too).
Brian:
You've appeared in a film called 'Full
Moon Massacre' - Does anything in
particular stand out about your experience
playing a werewolf in that low budget horror
fest?
MJ:
I wish to stress that I don't play a werewolf in 'Full
Moon Massacre'. I play a TV reporter,
presenting a news story about the horrific
killings. I knew the director, Tom Rutter, from
Fred Olen Ray's discussion board. He's only
nineteen (Tom, not Fred) and lives not too far
from me, so he invited me over to shoot some
stuff. It was just me, Tom and his mate,
basically improvising news reports. Great fun.
There's also a very funny sequence among the
out-takes where, every time we try to film, a
series of progressively larger buses keeps coming
round the corner.
I recently met up
with Tom again to shoot some scenes as a
newspaper editor for his second feature Mr.
Blades. I enjoy acting (I did a lot of - drama
when I was younger) so if any other directors
want me for parts in their films, get in touch.
(You will need to live near Leicester or be
prepared to pay my travel, I should stress.)
Brian: I
am thrilled about your Elsa Lanchester biography.
(One of my favorite possessions is a c.d. of her
singing bawdy Cockney songs!) What drew you to
her as a subject?
MJ: When
I was researching the Frankenstein dissertation
mentioned above, I watched some of the Universal
horrors and became intrigued by the way that Elsa
and her character had become horror icons despite
only making one appearance on screen, whereas the
other iconic actors - Lugosi, Karloff, Chaney,
Carradine - each had a bunch of credits. I looked
up a list of Elsa's films (in a book - no IMDB in
those days) and discovered that she had made
stacks of movies including classics like
'Witness for the Prosecution' and that I
had actually seen her in things like 'Mary
Poppins' and 'Murder by Death'.
So I bought her autobiography, and that's where I
encountered something remarkable. The book, Elsa
Lanchester Herself, published shortly before her
death in the early 1980s, is actually all about
her husband, Charles Laughton. After a few
chapters on her early life, Elsa disappears from
her own autobiography. This was, I have since
discovered, because she wrote it as a biography
of Charles, couldn't find a publisher, so very
slightly rewrote it and sold it as an
autobiography. There's masses in there on
Laughton's dealings with Bertholt Brecht and so
on but no mention at all of things like Elsa's
Oscar nomination or the film she made with Elvis.
Basically,
Charles' story has been told several times but
Elsa's has never been told at all. And it's a
fascinating story, in terms of both her career
and her personal life. I always say, the best
reason to write a book is because you want to
read it and no-one else has written it yet.
That's certainly the case here. I want to read a
biography of Elsa Lanchester and the only way
that's going to happen is if I write the damn
thing myself. It will be published by Tomahawk
Press in the UK, who have published excellent
books on 'Night of the Demon'
and 'Zulu'.
Brian:
Is there some tidbit about her that you\rquote ve
found fascinating that you'd like to share with
the Racks-n-Razors readers? Also- when is the
book coming out?
MJ:
It's not really a question of interesting
snippets because, as I say, Elsa's entire life
has gone largely unrecorded. Nobody has ever
considered her body of work, which includes 60+
films stretching from the silent era to 1980,
more than 100 British and American radio and TV
shows, plus records, theatre, cabaret, even
classical ballet. And nobody has ever considered
the Laughton-Lanchester marriage from Elsa's side
of things. For me, the most interesting part so
far has been uncovering what a huge, huge star
she was in Britain in the 1920s. When she married
Charles, she was actually the more famous of the
two but he rapidly eclipsed her and now she is
viewed as just a side-story to his life. That's
what I want to change with this book. Having said
that, the thing that most people will probably
pick up on, because sex sells, is that despite
what the rumors may have you believe, Elsa was
not a lesbian or even bisexual.
When will it be
published? When I finish it. The problem is that
I can only really work on it when I get a day to
myself without interruption from Mrs. S or young
TF, and that only happens very occasionally.
Brian:
Finally, are there any future projects that you'd
like to tell us about?
MJ:
I have several other books that I want to write,
but I don't like writing a whole book on spec.
Once I've written a proposal, I see no point in
going any further until I have a publisher
interested. And the non-fiction market is not in
a good state. Take a look at the shelves of your
local bookstore and mentally remove everything
which is connected to a TV show in some way or
written by someone 'famous' and you'll see how
rapidly the range of books shrinks. There aren't
many publishers and those that do exist are
generally small and have limited scope for new
books. It's a tough market.
I have a book on
space exploration which I want to write and one
on animated films and a biography of a famous
American inventor. All of these are books which I
want to read but they don't exist yet. I just
need to get publishers interested. Frankly, if I
get the right contract I could have another book
out before Elsa. Meanwhile, I continue to add new
stuff to my website, write articles for Fangoria
and other mags, and try to sell some scripts.
Thanks for this
interview. It's been fun and useful to put all
these ideas down in words. |