Schlock-Wire: CINEMA SEWER VOL. 3 Update (With Exclusive Robin Bougie Interview!)

First off, some impor­tant news for Cinema Sewer fans.  The release of Volume Three of this beloved zine’s book-style com­pi­la­tion series is nearly upon us — in fact, it will hit the racks in August (get more info here).  If you order the new book directly from author/editor Robin Bougie, you can get a per­son­al­ized illus­tra­tion on the front page (please note: per­son­al­ized draw­ings are avail­able for Volume Three only).  Visit this page at Bougie’s Cinema Sewer online shop for all the early-order details:

http://cinemasewer.ecrater.com/p/11590544/cinema-sewer-book-3-presale-this

And that’s not all for this news update — Robin was kind enough to offer a brief inter­view with this news so Schlockmania took him up on the offer.  Here are the ques­tions Your Humble Reviewer dreamt up and Bougie’s col­or­ful, detailed answers for each.  Be sure to check out the last ques­tion as it describes some of the con­tents of the 80 new pages of mate­r­ial included in Cinema Sewer Volume Three!

1) You’re well-known for the art in CINEMA SEWER and your other comics but your writ­ing is often quite impres­sive, par­tic­u­larly the jour­nal­is­tic pieces.  What arti­cle are you most proud of as a writer from any past CINEMA SEWER issue?

Well, the thir­teen page overview of gnarly post apoc­a­lypse films from around the world in Vol. 2 is one of my favourite arti­cles (and gen­res) in CS, but it doesn’t really fea­ture my best writ­ing or the most amount of research I’ve done for a sin­gle piece. For those, you’ld prob­a­bly have to look at either the writ­ing I did debunk­ing the Snuff urban leg­end from book 1, the his­tory of the under­ground fart­ing Tilton tape (aka “Pastor Gas”) in vol. 2, or the overview of the Marc Wallace porn indus­try HIV scare in vol. 1. On each of those, I put in about a years worth of research and plan­ning. I’m also pretty proud about the scoop I got on Thora Birch’s par­ents being for­mer porn stars from the 70s. I was the first one to drop that in print.

2) One of the most dis­tinc­tive ele­ments of CINEMA SEWER is how it treats porn as part of the cult movie world instead of sep­a­rat­ing it into its own artis­tic ghetto.  Could you describe the phi­los­o­phy as a fan/critic that informs this point of view?

To me porno is very sim­i­lar to com­edy — it’s all about tim­ing and giv­ing in to the pri­mal act of laughter/arousal. Only sneez­ing is more invol­un­tary than the two of those. The sim­i­lar­i­ties stack up fur­ther when you note that every­one has a dif­fer­ent idea of what is funny and dif­fer­ent idea of what is sexy. Besides, I’ve hung out with come­di­ans and porn per­form­ers, and it’s amaz­ing how much they have in com­mon. They often act out and seek atten­tion because they’re exhi­bi­tion­ists, have low self esteem, and had prob­lem­atic child­hoods. Porn also has a lot of sim­i­lar­i­ties with the musi­cal genre, in that the story comes to a dead halt so that the “dancers” can per­form their “dances” (wink wink, nudge nudge) together. When the “danc­ing” is amaz­ing, it is con­sid­ered a great film. Same with porn.

We don’t put musi­cals or come­dies aside and treat them as “the other”, a mis­be­got­ten enter­tain­ment shit-scab unwor­thy of respect. A genre where your career is tainted and ruined in the main­stream if you dare set gen­i­tals in it. It’s funny, because the intro­duc­tion to my new book, Cinema Sewer vol. 3, has a cute lit­tle his­tory les­son about the very first piece of pornog­ra­phy in human his­tory, the inven­tion of the word “pornog­ra­phy”, and why soci­ety acts as if porn has been a blight upon mankind as long as human his­tory — when in actu­al­ity it has only existed for just over 150 years. It’s like being born into a cult now — where gen­er­a­tions grow up, live, and die, never ques­tion­ing why depic­tions of nudity/copulation are kept behind closed doors — or won­der­ing if there ever was a time when they were not.

3) If you were given the financ­ing to write and direct a porn film, what would it be like?

Well, I already pro­duced a XXX porn film a cou­ple of years ago — the first het­ero­sex­ual bib­li­cal porn epic: THE CUMMING OF JIZZUS. It’s got faith-filled fist­ing, prophetic piss drink­ing, and even some les­bian lep­ers! JIZZUS had a ridicu­lously tiny bud­get though, and there are so many other things I’d like to do with the genre, but I just have not a sin­gle ounce of pas­sion for the process of film­mak­ing. My pas­sion for cre­ativ­ity resides in print. I’ve got a mas­sive, engorged, veiny, pur­ple boner for the printed page, the writ­ten word, and the illus­trated pen+ink line. But you said if I were “given the financ­ing”, and the con­cept that money would be no object sud­denly does remind me that I’ve always wanted to make a XXX post-nuke end-of-society film called HUMP MONKEY WASTELAND. H.M.W. would fea­ture ROAD WARRIOR style vehi­cles, destroyed build­ings and rub­ble, grease-smeared vio­lent girl-gangs wear­ing head­bands and foot­ball shoul­der pads, and all kinds of filthy sex mixed with dystopian vio­lence. There would be des­per­a­tion, revenge, romance, action, and freaks. Back when I was actu­ally seri­ously think­ing it was some­thing that was fea­si­ble to do, I’d even found a guy here in Vancouver who had a hole in the side of his cock, would inject lighter fluid into the hole, would set his piss stream alight, and could lit­er­ally SHOOT FIRE OUT OF HIS COCK! He was gonna be my star. Man, what could have been, Don. What. Could. Have Been.

4) If you could pro­duce a spe­cial edi­tion DVD for any unre­leased cult film, what would it be — and what kind of spe­cial fea­tures would you include on the disc?

Fuck man, good ques­tion, and I’m gonna have to give two because it’s a tie!

THE KILLING OF AMERICA (USA. 1982. Dir: Leonard Schrader and Sheldon Renan)

Featured in Cinema Sewer Vol. 2. This is my fave mondo of all time, and also one of the most prized doc­u­men­taries in my col­lec­tion. There is a rare dvd that came out in region 2, but there has been no domes­tic North American release — and that breaks my heart. This movie needs to be seen.

Extra fea­tures:

* An hour long fea­turette about the movie, it’s after­math (a guy was arrested for own­ing a copy in the UK in 1992), and the man who made it, Leonard Schrader. He was such an inter­est­ing guy, you could make a whole movie just about him and his brother, Paul “Taxi Driver” Schrader, and it would just totally slay peo­ple dead.

* A pop-up video style text com­men­tary track that gives insight, con­text and infor­ma­tion on the peo­ple places, and events that make up the vio­lent jaw-dropping caught-on-camera clips in the film — many of which have never been seen any­where else.

My sec­ond fan­tasy dvd would be:

THE DOGVILLE SHORTS (USA Circa 1929 to 1931)

These thing are just jaw-droppingly bizarre. A series of black and white short films star­ring dog actors wear­ing clothes, and moved around sets on wires as if they were liv­ing pup­pets. Some of them learned to walk on their hind legs and did the scenes that way, but they look even more weird. Only DOGWAY MELODY has ever made it to dvd as an extra fea­ture on one of the BROADWAY MELODY releases, but the rest of these fuck­ing things need to be unearthed too. There is one where dogs play col­lege foot­ball, and the entire audi­ence in the bleach­ers are all dogs as well. It’s just mad­ness. Search “dogville shorts” on youtube and get a whiff.

Extra fea­tures:

* Something, any­thing, explain­ing whose idea this was, and how the fuck they pulled these things off. Dogs act­ing as dogs are hell on a set at the best of times, it must have been pure mad­ness try­ing to get them to act as humans. A com­men­tary by a knowl­edge­able clas­sic film his­to­rian would be great. Eddie Muller is always keen for that kinda poop. He knows his stuff.

5) CINEMA SEWER VOL. 3 will con­tain 80 pages of new mate­r­ial.  Can you describe any of the new fea­tures in these pages for poten­tial buyers?

For sure. I’m actu­ally pretty excited about the exclu­sive new stuff, as I believe it is some of the best work I’ve ever done in Cinema Sewer. There is an 8 page arti­cle about my favourite clas­sic porn star, Rene Bond, and it fea­tures one of the very few inter­views she ever did before she passed away. A fea­ture on Indonesian action star, Peter “Rambu” O’Brian. A giant 12 page fea­ture about Golan-Globus/Cannon films, and what I con­sider to be the 50 best movies they pro­duced through­out the nine­teen eight­ies. A great arti­cle writ­ten by you, Don — about the most note­wor­thy clas­sic “Southern Discomfort” (aka Hillbillies mis­treat city-folk) exploita­tion cin­ema. A fea­ture about rare 1970s doc­u­men­tary that starred a wheelchair-bound per­vert who ran a town in Indiana called “Naked City”, lived in a giant geo­desic dome, and hired naked women to push him around and sit in his lap. All that, and the answer to this stumper of a trivia ques­tion: Which Russ Meyer girl is now a con­ser­v­a­tive Obama-hatin’ repub­li­can blog­ger? Anyway, that is just the tip of the tur­d­berg. There is far­rrrr too much new stuff to list here!