THE RED SHIRT CHRONICLES: PART 2 — Red Shirt Begins

The sec­ond install­ment of Schlockmania’s inter­view series with Michael Felsher talks about his first expe­ri­ence pro­duc­ing a fea­turette, the fac­tors that led him to form his own DVD sup­ple­ment pro­duc­tion com­pany, Red Shirt Pictures, and dis­cus­sions of some of the early Red Shirt Pictures projects.  Night Of The Demons, Effects and the infa­mous Nail Gun Massacre are just a few of titles cov­ered in this seg­ment so dive in to find out more…

The NIGHT OF THE DEMONS DVD saw you mak­ing your debut as a fea­turette auteur.  Did Anchor Bay hire you to do this piece or did you set out to do it on your own?  Could you tell us the story behind the featurette?

“Featurette Auteur”? That’s a cool term, I gotta start using that!

Well that was a “take the bull by the horns” type sit­u­a­tion.  In late 2003, I began (on my own time) learn­ing the ins and outs of Adobe Première, Final Cut Pro, etc. so I could re-master some of my old short films, and I ended up actu­ally fin­ish­ing the project that went bust on me back in ’92.  I fin­ished it just so I could say it was done, you know?  After that was over, I felt like I had finally taken that alba­tross from around my neck and I was eager to try some­thing new.

I had seen what guys like David Gregory and Perry Martin had been doing with Anchor Bay and I wanted to give it a shot, but since Anchor Bay didn’t nec­es­sar­ily need any­one else at that point on the pro­duc­tion side of things, I knew it wouldn’t be easy to open that door.

One of the many acqui­si­tions I helped research was NIGHT OF THE DEMONS, which was going to come out in August of 2004, and while they had plans for a com­men­tary, that was gonna be about it.  As it turns out, star Linnea Quiqley was going to be appear­ing at a con­ven­tion a cou­ple hours from Detroit in April of that year and I fig­ured I would try and see if I could inter­view her for a fea­turette on her work in the movie.  I would then edit it myself and present it as a fin­ished piece to Anchor Bay to see if they would use it and then pos­si­bly use for me, down the road, for future projects.   At that point I fig­ured I didn’t have any­thing to lose by try­ing. The worst case sce­nario was that the fea­turette would suck rocks, would most likely be rejected, and I would go back to my nor­mal duties at AB.

Anyway, after a series of poten­tial derail­ments includ­ing screwed up air­line infor­ma­tion, a stolen cam­era, and a total lack of prep time, I got Linnea’s inter­view com­pleted lit­er­ally five min­utes before she had to leave for her flight back home from the con­ven­tion.  My good friends Mike Watt and Amy Lynn Best set up and shot the inter­view with me and I came back to Detroit with what I felt was a poten­tially great fea­turette, and one week later I pre­sented a fully edited piece to Anchor Bay called MY DEMON NIGHTS WITH LINNEA QUIGLEY.  They liked it, paid me for it, and put it on the disc.

It was a real spe­cial event for me in a num­ber of ways.  That was the begin­ning of my “fea­turette auteur” career 

When you left Anchor Bay , what inspired you to start your own com­pany?  Did the work come to you, did you chase it or was it a bit of both?

My hopes with cre­at­ing the MY DEMON NIGHTS fea­turette is that would even­tu­ally lead to a posi­tion on the pro­duc­tion side of things at Anchor Bay.  To be fair, I was told then that there was not a clear advance­ment path into that arena even with a com­pleted fea­turette to my name, but I felt I had to hold out hope.  My posi­tion at Anchor Bay was some­thing of a double-edged sword in that while I got to par­tic­i­pate in a vari­ety of ways on the var­i­ous DVDs there, I didn’t have an eas­ily clas­si­fi­able place in the com­pany.  This was no one’s fault really, it was just the way things worked out.

When EFFECTS got placed over at Synapse, I had been hav­ing dis­cus­sions with John Harrison about a doc­u­men­tary that would encom­pass both the mak­ing of the film and the time and place in which it was made in Pittsburgh.  After a while I found out John had shot inter­views in LA and Pittsburgh, and I had assumed that he was going to be com­plet­ing the whole thing himself…which I cer­tainly under­stood.  He hadn’t seen any of my ear­lier work and no rea­son to trust me with such an ambi­tious project, and yet three weeks later I received a box of tapes con­tain­ing all the unedited inter­views with a note from John say­ing “Hey Michael, can’t wait to see what you come up with.”  Needless to say I was both scared and thrilled about work­ing on this, but with my full-time job at Anchor Bay it was gonna be hard to devote the nec­es­sary time to putting it together.

As a result of my goals to become a producer/director, and the afore­men­tioned fact that my place at Anchor Bay had kinda stag­nated, I left in April 2005 to devote my ener­gies full time to AFTEREFFECTS as well offer­ing my ser­vices up to other com­pa­nies.  The funny thing was that my bosses at Anchor Bay sensed my gen­eral dis­plea­sure in the last few months there, and in our last meet­ing before I left, they all felt that doing my own thing was the next best step for my career.  It was prob­a­bly the most ami­ca­ble part­ing in the his­tory of the video busi­ness.  I still con­sulted with them for a while, and I always drop by the office to visit every now and then.  I wish I had more juicy sto­ries to tell about my depar­ture, but it was as pleas­ant as could be.

I just want to take a sec­ond and say that I don’t regret one moment of my nearly five years with Anchor Bay and it was a life-changing expe­ri­ence in so many ways.  I feel proud to have been part of a com­pany that put out so many great DVD titles of so many clas­sic titles, both known and unknown.  I still miss the atmos­phere and the peo­ple over there a great deal.

Starting up my own com­pany was the next log­i­cal step since I had a lot of indus­try con­tacts due to my time at AB and I really felt like I wanted to be my own boss for a change.  Of course that means you have to blame your­self when things go wrong, and steal­ing your own office sup­plies isn’t nearly as much fun or finan­cially advantageous.

That first year was tough…very tough.  I had EFFECTS to work on, and thanks to my dear friend Don May, Jr. at Synapse Films, he gave me what­ever work he could send my way over the course of that year  but I was very ner­vous about find­ing gigs.  The truth is you have to hus­tle to get work at all times.  You can never assume that you will get that prover­bial call out of the blue offer­ing you a big job.  Now that does hap­pen some­times on occa­sion but not nearly enough to make a liv­ing on.

I would have to say that 90% of the work I’ve got­ten and con­tinue to get are all jobs that I pitched to var­i­ous com­pa­nies over the last cou­ple of years.  They weren’t exist­ing projects that were tak­ing bids from var­i­ous suit­ors.  Sometimes you just have to do the research, make a pro­posal and hope that some­one thinks it’s worth spend­ing the money on.

By the way, what inspired the “Red Shirt Pictures” name?

Well I’d cre­ated a name for my pro­duc­tion com­pany in high school…which was NearDark Entertainment (which was a trib­ute to my favorite neglected hor­ror film, which I later worked on at Anchor Bay…go fig­ure).  Of course that “com­pany” con­sisted of me and a few pieces of note­book paper.  Anyway, when I did MY DEMON NIGHTS I wanted to cre­ate a com­pany name for myself and I felt NearDark was the past and I needed some­thing new.

As I was try­ing to come up with some­thing, I was watch­ing an episode of the orig­i­nal STAR TREK, and it was one of many scenes of Kirk, Spock and McCoy beam­ing down to a strange planet with a generic ensign in tow who almost always ended up dying in some bizarre way.  This unfor­tu­nate schmuck would almost always be wear­ing a red col­ored uni­form shirt.  So many of these guys died on the show over the years, and in the movies and later series as well, that the term “red shirt” was coined.  Call a guy a “red shirt” and he was cer­tainly des­tined to show up early on and die just as quickly…and usu­ally quite painfully.

For some rea­son, the idea of nam­ing my com­pany after these unfor­tu­nate bas­tards really appealed to me, and that was that.  I take pride in that Red Shirt Pictures has lasted longer than the lives of all those crimson-clothed Enterprise crew­man put together.   At least so far…anyway.

On the fea­turettes you assem­bled for EFFECTS and NAIL GUN MASSACRE, you worked with a lot of pre-shot inter­view footage.  What kind of chal­lenges did this cre­ate for you as a direc­tor and edi­tor and how did you deal with them?

As a pref­er­ence, I will always be there for the shoot­ing of any inter­views.  These days that hap­pens a lit­tle less since my being in Detroit isn’t con­ducive being in LA or NYC on a moment’s notice, and that’s where most of the inter­views or com­men­taries take place, nat­u­rally.  Still, as a filmmaker/director/producer/whatever, it is always best to be there on the day for a vari­ety of rea­sons.  You can tweak the set-up, meet and greet the tal­ent, ask the ques­tions in your own way, etc.  But as I said, some­times that isn’t pos­si­ble.  For exam­ple on CHAINSAW 2, I had to inter­view the screen­writer L.M. Kit Carson, but I couldn’t afford to fly myself out to shoot it and I was in the mid­dle of edit­ing FLESH WOUNDS at the time, so I hired David Gregory to pro­duce the inter­view for me.  Of course David is a top pro­fes­sional and a great friend, and so I knew I had noth­ing to worry about as far as the qual­ity of the pre­sen­ta­tion and mak­ing sure the right ques­tions are asked, and so on and so on.  Those are ideal cir­cum­stances of course.  And since then I’ve worked with great folks like Buz “Danger Wallick, Andrew Kasch, and a host of other great cin­e­matog­ra­phers and pro­duc­ers in LA, so it’s less of an issue with me not being there these days.

However, as with EFFECTS and NAIL GUN MASSACRE, I had a sit­u­a­tion where it was footage being deliv­ered to me that I was not directly involved with as far as get­ting it pro­duced.  This can be a huge can of worms and I’ve found you usu­ally end up on the bum side of the deal with sit­u­a­tions such as these, how­ever I lucked out on EFFECTS and NAIL GUN in that the inter­views were full of great infor­ma­tion and sto­ries with enthu­si­as­tic participants.

The Los Angeles inter­views for EFFECTS were done by a pro­fes­sional crew and filmed out­doors in John Harrison’s back­yard.  While I nor­mally dis­like exte­rior inter­views due to the con­stantly chang­ing light, and audio dis­trac­tions (car horns, birds, planes, etc.) what was gained by this was a “col­lege reunion” atmos­phere which wouldn’t have been achieved in a stu­dio.  NAIL GUN MASSACRE was dif­fer­ent in that I had footage that was not shot in opti­mal con­di­tions (there was a loud freezer motor in the back­ground the whole time) but the inter­viewer, Loyd Cryer, had such a good rap­port with the direc­tor Terry Lofton, and their deci­sion to film the inter­view in one of the loca­tions from the film itself gave the inter­view a real laid-back gen­uine qual­ity, even if the audio was a bit problematic.

So I’ve lucked out so far with pre-shot stuff so far…knock on wood.

You’ve done a lot of work for Don May Jr. and Synapse Films.  How did you two strike up your work­ing rela­tion­ship?  What is your favorite title amongst the work you’ve done for Synapse and why?

Well Don and I go way back.  I was actu­ally on the DAWN OF THE DEAD laserdisc box set in the Fan Testimonials sec­tion that his for­mer com­pany, Élite Entertainment, put out in the mid-90s.  I attended an auto­graph ses­sion with George Romero at the Monroeville Mall which Élite was video­tap­ing for the laserdisc set back in 1994.  Don was there, but I never met him.  But some­one taped me and I ended up on the disc any­way.  Well some­how through doing the AB fan­site and my own web­page, I came into con­tact with Don shortly after he formed Synapse Films a few years later.  One thing led to another, and  I ended up run­ning the web­site for Synapse Films for a while, before I went full-time at Anchor Bay.

He ended mov­ing just down the road from me in Michigan and so we always kept in touch, and even­tu­ally started work­ing together once I got into fea­turettes and doc­u­men­taries.  I helped him get EFFECTS which led to me doing that one with him, and he set me up with NAIL GUN MASSACRE, ROCK ‘N’ ROLL NIGHTMARE, and a lot of other titles in 2005 when I first went out on my own.  Don is, quite pos­si­bly the most qual­ity con­scious per­son I know in the busi­ness.  If I had a movie, I’d want him to han­dle the pro­duc­tion of the DVD.  Plus he’s just great guy to have lunch with…the sto­ries he can tell…

As for a favorite, EFFECTS would be the easy choice, but of the other projects I’ve done for him, I really enjoyed ROCK ‘N’ ROLL NIGHTMARE.  Jon Mikl Thor was a real sweet­heart and the lit­tle career ret­ro­spec­tive I did on him for the DVD was a blast to edit.  Also I got to do a music video and a cou­ple of behind-the-scenes com­pi­la­tions as well which was a nice change of pace.  Plus…have you seen the movie?  It’s com­plete ‘80s insan­ity.  Nothing like the sight of Thor with big poofy metal hair, clad only in a dia­mond stud­ded thong, fight­ing a giant demon pup­pet for 10 min­utes mas­tered in glo­ri­ous high def­i­n­i­tion.  Truly unique.

Synapse and I will prob­a­bly always be together in one form or another.  They are fam­ily.  Recently I had actor David “Flyboy” Emge inter­views for both BASKET CASE 2 and THE BOOBY HATCH.  That was inter­est­ing as I really wanted to pri­mar­ily focus on BASKET CASE 2 with David, but his rec­ol­lec­tions of BOOBY HATCH ended up being the high­light of the whole interview.

But I have to say being able to work on the recent STEPFATHER II with them was a fan­tas­tic expe­ri­ence.  It’s the most packed fea­turette I’ve done for them since EFFECTS, and being that it is a Jeff Burr film, I had won­der­ful par­tic­i­pa­tion from him, and his cast & crew.  They all still love him, and the post-production that the film went through was chaotic and made for fas­ci­nat­ing cau­tion­ary tales.  It’s the type of fea­turette you wouldn’t be able to do at a major studio.

How bor­ing would the world be with­out Synapse Films?  Pretty damn bor­ing indeed if you ask me!