Goodbye to Ro-Man

I first met W. Shawn Murphy on the set of Rob Zombie's Halloween 2. We'd just recently moved to the Atlanta area, and as I'd been working from home, I had been rarely leaving the house. After about a year-and-a-half, I desperately needed to socialize with someone besides my wife and my pugs. So I started going to the Plaza Theatre, mostly to check out the Splatter Cinema and Silver Scream Spook Show film series. Shawn was a fixture there, and I'd seen him a bunch of times, but had never met him proper. One night, the Plaza had a sign-up sheet for people to be extras in H2. So I signed up. I worried that work would conflict with it, so I was planning to take that day off. Turns out that immediately before the day we were to shoot, I got laid off. Solved that problem.

So I still didn't know a whole lot of people there. At the time, I knew a couple of the guys involved, but not that well, and they were off getting things set up for the sequence to be filmed. So I was sitting around eating and playing some zombie shootout game on my iPhone. Shawn came up and introduced himself. He was going to be dressed up as Ro-Man from Phil Tucker's amazing Robot Monster. Amazing. That'd always been one of my favorite movies, I said. We talked about how accurate vs. inaccurate his costume was, and that I thought it was astounding that he'd gotten as close as he had on next to no money. We talked for a while, and then he went off to get his stuff ready, and I went off to get costumed by the wardrobe department because I was lame and didn't come dressed up as anything.

After the shoot was over, Shawn sat with me on the interminable ride back and we talked some more. We had a ton of stuff in common, turns out. We liked the same movies. We liked the same music. We hated people as a general rule, but the folks we loved, we loved (though he was always a little more curmudgeonly than I am). We loved Tiki. We loved drive-ins. We loved tourist traps and roadside attractions. Side shows and carnivals. Poster art and Japanese toys. Mad Magazine and Dr. Pepper (which we both would stockpile). Pinball and Elvis. Bacon and liquor. Tattoos and pin-ups. Monsters and Redd Foxx. Regional soft drinks like Kentucky's Ale-8-One and Chick-Fil-A Dwarf Houses. Our birthdays were a day apart -- he was exactly one day younger than me. From one bus ride, I felt like I'd known this guy my entire life. And when I overslept the next day and missed the bus to the next day's shoot, I was disappointed. Not that I had missed the shoot, but that I wasn't going to get to hang out with Shawn again.

He found me on Facebook after that day, and we ended up constantly going back and forth on topics both there and whenever we'd get together. Which wasn't as often as I'd have liked -- I live outside the city, and it made getting together more difficult than it should have been. He always took pains to introduce me to whoever it was he knew when we'd see each other, and he knew *everybody.* And this was kind of unique for me. I'm a generally shy person by nature, and it's hard for me to meet people. I just never mastered that talent. As a result, most of my friends have always been people I've worked with. Shawn was the first person in a fairly long while to be my friend just because he wanted to. And most of the friends I have now, I have because I met them through him, or because we were at the same events at the same time. One of the last times we got together, he introduced me by saying, "this is my buddy Aleck. His birthday is one day before mine, so we agree on pretty much everything." It meant a lot to me that he considered me to be that close to him in mindset.

Just over a month ago, November 4, we were supposed to meet up to see Ghost Riders Car Club play at a local Vietnamese noodle house, Pho Truc. He never showed. I texted him from the show, asking him where the hell he was; that the band was great, and the pho was insane. I asked a friend of his at the show if he'd seen "the Professor" (Shawn's nickname) around. Someone else at the counter with us said, "The Professor? Where is he? Wherever he is, he ain't happy. He's complaining about it."

Saturday, November 7, people started posting on his Facebook wall, saying that they were going to miss him. I immediately grabbed my phone and texted him again; asking what the fuck was going on, and was he leaving town or something without telling me. Then someone posted a message ending in R.I.P. And I felt my brain disconnect from my body, and I broke down like a little girl. Like I've done regularly ever since. Like I'm doing now.

Shawn took his own life. I didn't know he was in pain. I don't think any of us really knew. I knew he'd gone through a lot of shit this year; stuff that would have wrecked anyone less superhuman than he. but he seemed to be coping exceptionally well with it all. My wife Jenn, though, could see through it. She told me long before anything happened that Shawn was putting on a "tough guy" act to cope with it all. I wrote it off. He couldn't be putting on *that* good an act, surely. Fucker deserved an Oscar.

The memorial service was this past Sunday. It was held at the Plaza, which was appropriate. He'd have complained about it. He'd have been a smart-ass about the technical goof-up with the slide show. He'd have scoffed at how emotional everyone was being. He'd have gone off a bunch of times to get more liquor out of his car. I swear, I saw the bastard twice walking up the Plaza's aisle to the exit, because if you were at the Plaza and Shawn was there, that's what you'd see. I will probably always see him out of the corner of my eye, striding up that aisle, heading to the exit. Just now, I know he won't be coming back.

Seconds of Terror

Hey, movie trailers! Stay tuned, kids! But before I get into the bulk of this post, let me clarify a tangential point I made in an earlier rambling bit of discourse...

I was reading back over my posts, as I do, and I realized that I'd said a few posts ago that my dad was never big on movies. I left out an important word there: "horror." My dad's never been huge on horror flicks. He's always been more of an action and comedy guy, and I can't tell you how many times we've sat together just drenched in tears of laughter watching old Pink Panther movies, or Wile E. Coyote employing every invention from ACME in hot desert pursuit of a scrawny blue bird, or the oft-mentioned Young Frankenstein. It's just that horror has never been his particular cup of tea. As evidence, there's the fact that he nearly leaped 9 feet in the air from a seated position during The Exorcist; a feat that nearly broke the world's record and for which there is still a memorial plaque in Lanett's city hall to stand proud testament to my pop's athletic achievement. So, no. Not big on the horror movies is my old man. Big on physical comedy, an unapologetic fan of "Road Runner" cartoons, devotee of action stars from Bruce Lee to JCVD and from Arnold to Sly. And hell, he's the main reason I ever watched one of the greatest films ever made, Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. So no complaints from this quarter on his taste. Just a bit of clarification there before we get to the meat of the matter...



Holy christ. Movie trailers. TV spots, particularly. These scared the bejeesus out of me back in the day. The above one, for Dario Argento's 1977 classic Suspiria is one that I remember. The great thing about these is that they felt free to just throw some nonsensical bullshit at you that wouldn't have anything in particular to have with the movie at hand, but would just scare you senseless. A similar approach to the above was used in the trailer for Roger Watkins' Last House on Dead End Street...



Or hell, maybe they ripped that off from Suspiria instead of vice versa. It was the same year, and they ripped off elements from at least two other movies in its promotion: the "It's only a movie..." tagline from the (similarly titled) Last House on the Left and the "demonic little girl with the turnaround head" from The Exorcist. So I'm going to assume that the unscrupulous bastards who distributed the movie (without Watkins' knowledge -- he didn't even know that the movie had been playing under that title, or that it had ever been released) just ripped all of that off from the get-go. But if you're a prepubescent kid and you're seeing this stuff just pop up all unannounced on TV, it's going to scare the unholy hell out of you. And that was what was so frightening about it all: there was no warning. You'd be watching Sanford and Son or something, having a grand old time, maybe you'd see some "John Davidson Sings the Hits of Tony Orlando & Dawn" commercial, and then, POW! -- you're reduced to a quivering blob of jelly trying to hide from the short, sharp shock of the unexpected TV spot. Man, the one that did me in, though, was this...



I mean seriously. Who does that to people? Just 30 seconds of a ventriloquist's dummy in extreme (and tightening) close-up, reciting some insane rhyme that tells you absolutely nothing about anything, which concludes with the line "Magic is fun!...when you're dead," and some ultra-realistic eye motion. Who were these goddamned monsters??? Can they be punished now for their past crimes???

Going way back, the first one that got me was this one...



It's 1974, and there's something wrong with the Davis baby...It's Alive. Even the posters got to me, based purely on this TV spot. And from the same year, there was this unrelenting montage of pure, unbridled eeeevillll...



Now, you'd think that maybe being traumatized by these things would have forced me to run like hell from anything having to do with horror movies. But instead, it had the opposite effect. Because the folks in advertising may be evil, but they're evil geniuses. There's something intoxicating about the buildup and release of adrenalin you'd get as a kid seeing these blasts of fear. It's like a minute-long rollercoaster ride that tempts you with the notion that if *these* things are bad, the movies themselves might just kill you! And so you'd dare yourself. You'd quietly wish that these TV spots would come on, just to see if you could make it through them without screaming this time. And the thing is, as completely silly as these ads are today, they still creep me the hell out. I'm sitting in a dimly-lit basement right now, typing this blog entry while watching and re-watching these clips, and I'm almost literally on the edge of my seat, looking over my shoulder at every random creak I hear. These traumas don't disappear. I don't know if kids today have anything comparable. Stuff might be more explicit now, and you can probably get away with a lot more in a trailer nowadays than you could back in the 1970s; but with most modern movie trailers, you get the feeling that you've been told the entire movie by the time it's over, even if it's just a minute-long TV spot.

So now that we've gotten movie trailers and TV spots out of the way, next time, I think I'll talk about longer-form horror on TV from my days as a kid. Including the golden age of the TV Movie of the Week.

Drive-Ins, Spook Shows, and Time Slip Away

The local drive-in was just outside Lanett, where I grew up, in the town of Shawmut, AL (which would later get incorporated into Valley, AL; a more nondescript name for a conglomeration of related burgs you couldn't come up with if you tried...you might as well have called it "City, AL"). At the time, the Hi-Way Drive-In seemed like paradise. You could go in your pajamas, watch movies, fall asleep in the back seat (hey, I was under 10, and not able to enjoy the more steamy attractions of the drive-in), and still come away with memories of great movies. Or at least memorable movies. And if your folks wouldn't let you go see certain movies, you at least had the titles to engage your imagination. Coupled with the ads in the local papers, and tossed around with a heaping helping of TV spots, you could pretty much come up with a pretty decent approximation of the lurid grotesqueries being projected on the billboard-sized screen. And folks who lived closer to the theater than I did swore that if you crawled through the right patch of kudzu, you could see (if not clearly hear) all the restricted entertainment you wanted.

I remember all sorts of movies coming through town. Sunn Classic Pictures' offerings, any number of Kung-Fu flicks, the almighty Young Frankenstein (which I finally got to see there after having to miss it during its first run), the Cheri Caffaro vehicle Too Hot To Handle, and the requisite onslaught of horror movies. I'd give my eye teeth to actually have a listing of everything they showed in my childhood. How many movies that I've "discovered" during the years had their titles planted in my brain by passing by that marquee every day? They'd also occasionally have a fair back there as well to keep things interesting. Rickety rides, spookhouses, games and the like. It was the place to be. It might not have been the classiest establishment, but the place was lousy with atmosphere. I probably didn't see that many movies there, but I know I slept through a whole hell of a lot, the tinny soundtracks pouring into my unconscious brain from the window-mounted speakers as my folks sat in the front.

Sitting right in front of the Hi-Way was the Royal Rocking Chair Theatre. The big enticement there, of course, was that the seats rocked. They were also falling apart, but nobody let that stop them. It was your classic one-room auditorium with an enormous screen the size of the back wall. It was the kind of place where the floors were so sticky that after you left, you could walk up walls. As much of a monolithic establishment the Hi-Way was, I actually have more memories of the Royal. I'm sure this is at least in large part because the movies at the Hi-Way started so late, it kind of prohibited me from being able to attend as much as I'd wanted. But there were two incidents that took place at the Royal that branded themselves on my brain...One was seeing a gorilla in a cage (okay, a guy in a gorilla suit) outside the theater's doors. I don't know what it was in regards to. I don't know what it was promoting. But there was a goddamned gorilla in a cage out there. This was the kind of thing I could get into. This was showmanship. I didn't care what movie was going to be showing, all I knew was that if there was a live gorilla involved, it had to be good. Unfortunately, I couldn't have been more than 3 or 4, and there was no way my folks were going to let me go to this thing. I know that I raised holy hell about it, much as I did demanding to see any horror movie that came through. Shortly afterward (it could have been a year, for all I know...the time flows together in these twilight days), a real live Spook Show came to town. I wish I could remember the name of the guy who put it on. I just remember the newspaper ads promising "live snakes crawling down the aisles!" and "monsters come alive and sit right next to you!" Again, as much as I demanded, this wasn't going to involve me. I distinctly remember either my mom or hers telling me that I could get bitten by the snakes if I went, in a futile effort to scare me out of wanting to go. They probably knew best, after all, seeing as how I once nearly had a nervous breakdown seeing some guy doing a ventriloquist act with a Frankenstein's Monster dummy. But that was the last time either one of those things happened when I was a kid, and in these recent years as I've learned more about the classic Spook Shows of old, I've come to regret that I never got to experience one of them firsthand. I'd have lost my mind in fear, I know. I'd have come away traumatized somehow, I'm sure. But knowing that the time when these showmen took their acts on the road and entertained theaters full of kids with monster movies, magic acts, and horror-related fun'n'games; and that those days were just outside of my reach...so close that I could see their set-ups outside the theater but far enough away that I could never realistically experience them...well, all I can do is sigh. That, and be happy that there's the Silver Scream Spookshow in Atlanta (last Saturday of every month at the Plaza Theatre!) to bring back those halcyon days of yore.

I eventually went to the Royal pretty often. I'd go along with my folks, with birthday parties, etc. Every now and then, they'd have the "kiddie shows" on early Saturday mornings, which is where I saw a lot of sci-fi flicks I don't really remember the names of, and the insanely beautiful Toho production of King Kong Escapes, which I couldn't forget if you brainwashed me. As I got older, when I didn't require my folks being with me all the time, they'd drop me off and I'd call to have them come pick me up outside after the show. Thank goodness that my parents were lenient and that the ticket sellers at the Royal didn't give a shit, because otherwise I'd have never gotten to check out stuff like Return of the Living Dead and see Linnea Quigley dancing nude in a graveyard in between bouts of zombies seeking out the brains of the living.

But the Hi-Way closed down eventually, in that post-'70s malaise when for some reason, the vast majority of drive-ins closed up shop across this great country. The Royal continued on, though, holding on for a few more years. But in the early '80s, the home video revolution got under way, and it cut a huge dent in their profits. There were nights when they just closed up shop because nobody showed up to see anything. Movies promised as "coming soon" never came. They set up some spinning racks of VHS tapes in the lobby, and eventually that's all anyone came in for. And seeing as how almost all of the tapes were "rented out" because the people working the theater would let their friends just take stuff and never return it, people stopped coming in for even *that*. If people wanted to go see movies, they'd head down to nearby Auburn or Columbus, where the theaters were built next to malls and restaurants instead of next to a bowling alley in Shawmut. Or they'd rent them from Video Land (and more on them in a later post).

With a sense of surrender, the Royal closed, and was torn down. For days, the only thing left standing was the wall with the screen on it. Taunting us all, as if to say "though you wouldn't come in to look at me, you'll all be forced to see me now, for this last time."

For a while, in the space once occupied by both theaters, a grocery store-centered strip mall operated. Now, I think it's some local telephone company call center or something.

 All good things come to an end. Even if you don't know that they were good things at the time.

(Note: I was going to illustrate this, but could find no photos of either theater. These places are nothing but memories now.)