The Innocent Days
- Episode aired Dec 25, 2018
Kevin talks about his childhood friendships, his filmmaker and video store influences, his first job at Target, his first experience at Alamo Drafthouse, and meeting his first girlfriend.Kevin talks about his childhood friendships, his filmmaker and video store influences, his first job at Target, his first experience at Alamo Drafthouse, and meeting his first girlfriend.Kevin talks about his childhood friendships, his filmmaker and video store influences, his first job at Target, his first experience at Alamo Drafthouse, and meeting his first girlfriend.
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Kevin from the Other Dimension: Most people join LinkedIn with the hopes of finding a job. I know that I will never get that chance. Instead I joined LinkedIn to share with everyone my life story. Sometimes the best way to help people is to use yourself as an example so that others may learn from your life mistakes. In this aspect, perhaps I can finally find redemption for the irresponsible life choices I have made. One thing that you must remember is, that sometimes the best movies are not about likeable people. I am not likeable. If I was a politician, half of the shit I've done throughout my life would be dragged up to smear me. But I strongly feel that you will find my life story to be interesting.
Kevin from the Other Dimension: So how did this all happen? Let's go back to the beginning. As yes, the good old days, when I was a die-hard born again Christian who believed in the love and faith of Jesus Christ, and watched good family programming like McGee and Me, and Bibleman, from the Family Christian Store. The wonder days of Blockbuster Video, back when all the new release films were fun movies from the 1980s, and it actually had a decent repertory library. The days of Saturday Morning Cartoons like The Pirates of Dark Water, Sonic the Hedgehog, Freakazoid, The Thirteen Ghosts of Scooby Doo, and Toxic Crusaders.
Kevin from the Other Dimension: Those were the innocent days. And then one day, I saw it... sitting on a shelf at Blockbuster Video. The Toxic Avenger. Wow. Apparently the Toxic Crusaders got their very own live action movie. I begged my mother to let me rent it, and was promptly shocked to watch what appeared to be an X-Rated movie featuring nonstop sex, blood, and violence. It was from that moment on, that I changed my religion. From that point onward, I would bow down at the altar of my lord and savior, Toxie, who could do no wrong. Some people think that spiritual change is getting baptized in the church wading pool. My baptism was the day I defiantly masturbated in the church bathroom after reading a dirty chapter in the bible. Oh... oh... I'm sorry, was that too explicit for LinkedIn? I'll try to tone it down.
Kevin from the Other Dimension: Yes, it's true. Some people go for the alcohol. Some people go for the weed. My gateway drug to decadence was a film studio called Troma, which opened the doorways to the likes of Sam Raimi & Bruce Campbell, John Carpenter & Kurt Russell, Matt Stone & Trey Parker, Quentin Tarantino & Robert Rodriguez, Kevin Smith & Jason Mewes, and let us not forget Full Moon Pictures. Pretty soon, Blockbuster Video wasn't enough for me. In my neighborhood, there was a mini-mall with a local mom and pop video where I rent every R-Rated movie I could find. Across Parmer Lane from Blockbuster, in the mini-mall with HEB, opened a place called United Video, which had a Horror Section that I could only grow to love. And then there was Encore Video, a place so magnificent that it just couldn't stay in one place for too long. Chuck, the owner, always pulled a publicity stunt to increase sales by announcing that he was a local business shutting down his doors, and then miraculously, he would always open up somewhere else. He got away with this trick for years. In fact, he just announced that he was closing down his record store again recently. Yeah, sure you are, Chuck. See you at the next location.
Kevin from the Other Dimension: Those were the days when I would hook up two vcrs, and copy videos from the local video rentals, and watch them on a loop in my room with the copy protection bars spliced all over them. Meh, you can drown that annoyance out by turning the color off on your tv. I used to watch Evil Dead 2 and From Dusk Till Dawn in black and white all the time. What's that? An FBI warning? This is the late 1990s, bitch. How would the FBI ever know what a teen was doing in the privacy of his own home? In fact, I used to take movies like The Evil Dead series, and Waxwork, and splice them together back to back as one movie on vhs. I would frequently play around with doing fan edits of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, trying to turn it into one movie, where the Shelob the Spider scene matched up with the Battle of Helm's Deep, although my fan edits would never live up to cult superiority of Meet the Feebles and Dead Alive.
Kevin from the Other Dimension: When I was fifteen years old, I attended Lanier High School in Austin, TX. One of the classes I took was intended to teach us how to hold responsible careers, and a part of that class was to get a part time after school job. It was because of the recommendation of my teacher that I found work at Target located a few blocks from the school. Everyday, I would attend class, then run down the road to work the sales floor and emergency cashier. I learned that some work requires you to stand for eight hours, how to memorize aisles to return items that people left behind, and that no matter how unfair it may seem, the customer always gets the last word. And if you don't like it, quit. I also learned that in the corporate business world, life is unfair, and no parent or teacher can make it better. By Texas Work Laws, students cannot be forced to work past a certain hour on a school night. But Target held us to a Catch-22: if you leave before your work is done, they can write you up and fire you for failing to perform your job, thus forcing you to stay of your own "free will". I remember this one incident where they allowed me to man the booth in electronics, and stupid me, nobody ever taught me the rules of writing a check. This woman wrote a check in pencil, and wrote it out completely wrong. And I took the thing and override it for her. After she left, I got a visit from security telling me there was no money in the account. I was never allowed back to that section again. There was a manager there named Matt Chambers who used to bug the living shit out of me. But for all his shit, he stuck up for my job one night when he caught my other manager Peggy upstairs, filling out my termination papers for repeatedly playing with a tape recorder in my pocket at the register. Eventually Matt put in his two weeks notice, but was fired on his last day as he tried to get the last laugh on the store by packing the trunk of his car with stolen merchandise.
Kevin from the Other Dimension: It was during my final school years that I took up screenwriting as a hobby, and completed two and a half screenplays. The first screenplay was called Last of the Dreamers. It was about a Sam Raimi Fan that illegally turns The Evil Dead into an Off-Broadway Musical and gets the show illegally produced by Edward D Wood Jr using the cast from Monty Python. Michael Palin played Ash. When Bruce Campbell arrives in town, the theater troupe kidnaps him so they can continue to put on their show without getting caught. The film was a sketch comedy, largely inspired by the humor of South Park and Monty Python, but was also devoid of originality, often stealing ideas from other movies. I repeatedly trolled Bruce Campbell with this script online until he blocked my email address, and threatened me to stop through alternate emails. His anonymous message was "Do not be mean to me anymore!" One day, I was at Dobie Mall, visiting a comic shop and found a magazine where Bruce Campbell did a whole article about how he burns all of the screenplays that fans send him. Guess who's screenplay made the main article photo? I had the picture framed on my bedroom wall for a while, along with a rejection letter from Renaissance Pictures. The assistant that sent me the letter was Grant Curtis, who would later go on to co-produce Sam Raimi's Spider-man movies along with Drag Me to Hell, Oz the Great and Powerful, and the only new Ninja Turtles movie that doesn't suck. Eventually, seeing that rejection on the wall everyday got to me and I threw them away. Several years later, the Evil Dead actually was turned into a musical that still runs to this day, and Bruce Campbell teamed up with Mark Verheiden to do a no budget comedy called My Name is Bruce, which features the same type of depreciating alternate universe humor where Bruce plays a parody of himself, and gets kidnapped by a fan after taking a shovel to the face in his trailer. Mark Verheiden stated in a magazine interview that he got the idea from an old story about a town that kidnapped a famous pirate to fight a monster only to find out that he's a fraud. Regardless of where Mark got the idea from, I still believe Bruce put the kidnapping scene in the movie as his last laugh to personally flip me off. Otherwise, the two screenplays have nothing in common, it's just a coincidence. I will say that I enjoyed My Name is Bruce and I'm glad they made it.
Kevin from the Other Dimension: The second script was titled The Dark Age, once again, another fantasy film spoof that was sort of meant as a Bruce Campbell follow-up to Army of Darkness. Only my film poked fun at The Dark Crystal, Legend, Labyrinth, The Princess Bride, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, etc. I paid a producer named Craig Kellem to take script notes on my work. He worked as an associate producer on Saturday Night Live during the 1970s, and produced an Eric Idle comedy spoof of the Beatles called The Rutles: All You Need is Cash. He was... shall we say... nice about it. Some poor misguided film student wanted to make The Dark Age as a no-budget computer animated movie like an R-Rated Shrek and even did some animation tests. I irresponsibly never got around to the changes that he needed me to make. I'm sorry I let him down, but it's probably for the best that my old screenplay never got made. If you want a modern day comparison, watch James Franco's Your Highness, and you'll immediately get where I'm coming from.
Kevin from the Other Dimension: Some of my friends still have paper copies of The Dark Age screenplay, but hopefully, Last of the Dreamers is lost and gone forever. I made sure of it. Like George Lucas and his disdain for The Star Wars Holiday Special, every time I found a copy of Last of the Dreamers online, I had it removed, and every time I found a print out script, I shredded it. But you never know, some asshole may pop out of the woodworks one day with another copy for me to destroy. They might even attempt to blackmail me.
Kevin from the Other Dimension: There was almost a third screenplay called The Lunatics Guide to Housesitting, which was intended for actor Kevin J. O'Connor after I had seen his performance in Deep Rising. That screenplay was never completed. I had an online friend named Jonathan E Baez that contributed scenes to it. He tracked me down years later on Facebook and we're still friends to this day. All of those scripts sucked ass because I was fifteen, and I had no taste in movies. I never found the film junkie friends that Sam Raimi had as a child, to learn the proper ins and outs of no budget filmmaking with. I was forced to settle for my life in retail after I graduated from Lanier High School. I thought the cashier jobs would last forever.