2008-10-10 - Roll With the Weirdness

Roll with the Weirdness: In a very special edition of Squib Central, Jabcuga chats up Master of Horror Stephen Romano, the genius behind the new SHOCK FESTIVAL from IDW Publishing, Don "Phantasm" Coscarelli collaborator, and recovering Archie Comics fan.

Shock it to me, baby!

Joshua Jabcuga: Your latest project, SHOCK FESTIVAL, is being published by IDW
Comics. You're a true renaissance man of horror. In 1992 you produced and directed a demo for Marvel Comics, for what would have been the soundtrack to Todd McFarlane's SPIDER-MAN #1. Unless I've got my chronology mixed up, I get the sense that this was the first big turning point in your development as a professional artist. Would that be accurate, how did you even get to that stage in your career, and what did you learn from the experience?

Stephen Romano: I actually wrote and directed a horror film before that, which taught me some hard lessons about what a young man should choose to spend a year of his life doing. It was just a terrible project, rife with amateur-hour blunders. I mean, some guys go the distance and make EVIL DEAD or EL MARIACHI, others fall right on their faces. But I learned to "roll with the weirdness." So what I did was use the experience to weigh out what I was capable of doing well at that point in my career. And what I was good at -- besides writing -- was creating sound design and music. I come from a very musical background, hanging out in Houston as a kid with my father, who was buddies with guys like Stevie Ray Vaughn and Lyle Lovett. (Lucinda Williams was my babysitter before she got famous!) The sound score I created for the crappy movie I made was not perfect, but it illuminated abilities that I knew I could expand on, if I had the time to do it right. My father owns a recording studio, so I said "hey, let's make our favorite comics into audio dramas!" So that's what we did. And, yes, it was the real turning point in my pro career. We never did get to do Spider-Man, but I worked with some of the guys at Image Comics. It was a very interesting year. I got to act, direct, do music and sound design. It was a training ground for being more organized, having a clearer vision, working with talented people and experimenting with different ways to do things. I still don't think I'd ever wanna direct another movie again, though! That's much harder than just making something sound cool!

JJ: This is an interview for Comics101.com, which is run by comic-book author Scott Tipton, and features weekly contributions from IDW's Editor-in-Chief and Publisher Chris Ryall. With that being said, I suppose I should ask you about your comic-book collecting as a kid. All of us, including you, were a product of the '80s. Do you have any early comic-book memories? Perhaps a hardcore appreciation for ROM: SPACEKNIGHT that you'd care to share with us?

SR: Yeah, I dug on Rom a lot. I had the action figure, too. But my big collecting habit might surprise you: Archie. I was a HUGE fan of those books, and had hundreds of them. My favorite thing to do as a kid was get all the crazy grown-up musician-types I knew in a room together, then gather them around a tape recorder and we'd act out the stories! I was ALWAYS Jughead, my dad was usually Archie, the backup singers in his band were Betty and Veronica. I still have all those crazy sessions recorded on cassettes. Some of them are really wild. (There was a lot of ... umm, "alternative refreshment" on hand in my dad's house in those days.) It was my "training ground" for the audio comic projects I would do later. That's an irony that was never lost on my father, who was sort of the executive producer of the Image stuff we did. I was heavy into the "normal things" that you're kinda supposed be heavy into as a child -- things like Luke Skywalker and Bugs Bunny -- and I bloomed late as an appreciator of horror films and comics. I remember when I was about six or so, I found an old issue of TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED that someone had left on a table at a pizza place, and in one of the stories, there was an Easter Bunny biting the head off a child. I was absolutely HORRIFIED by that. It gave me the creeps for years. I still remember the awful gut-sinking dread I got from looking at that image. I had experienced some really heavy, violent shit as a very young boy, and I think that made me afraid of films like FRIDAY THE 13th or whatever and gave me a very extreme sensitivity to blood and violent images in film and comics. Then THE THING came along, which re-arranged my brain, and it wasn't long before I caught a midnighter of DAWN OF THE DEAD ... and, well, the Archie days were pretty much over, man.

JJ: Were you born in Austin, Texas?

SR: No, but I've lived in Austin for many years. I was born in Houston and spent a lot of my youth in Fayetteville, Arkansas. I actually started a band when I was a teenager called THE ROCKERZ, and we opened for all the cool guys in "H-Town." We even played a toga party with Otis Day And The Knights. I remember those cats just blew us away at the soundcheck, but they never got to do their real set because the Fire Marshal raided the place after we played our opener!

JJ: Speaking of Texas, I have a copy of your short-story collection here, THE RIOT ACT, which features an introduction by one of the greatest storytellers of our time, Joe R. Lansdale, himself. Obviously one can't work in this genre, or really, one can't be a writer and not appreciation what Lansdale brings to the table. And then the icing on the cake is when Lansdale compares you to another master, David J. Schow. That's awesome praise, man. Had you met or corresponded with Lansdale prior to the MASTERS OF HORROR episode that you worked on?

SR: Yes, Joe read a novel I wrote in 1997 and really liked it. That was INVASION OF THE MUTANOIDS, which is featured in SHOCK FESTIVAL. (I'm embarrassed by it now.) Joe is really big on being neighborly, so he gave me his number and I'd call him for free advice and stuff. When Don Coscarelli and I became friends, we realized we had Joe in common as a buddy. It was total synchronicity, man! I asked Joe if he would intro my book at lunch one day during INCIDENT, and he said "well, send it on over and I'll see what's what." Joe does favors, but if he doesn't like something, he just won't put his name on it. He's a real straight-shooter. I sent him the manuscript and held my breath, then got a call from him a week later. "This is great stuff, man." That was the first review I ever got for my short fiction, which I don't believe in scalping off to magazines. THE RIOT ACT is almost like a novel in that the stories follow a series of themes that move to a certain beat, and they are totally original, having never appeared anywhere else. Getting the comparison to Dave was really a trip, too. You know, my posters from SHOCK FESTIVAL are actually featured in Schow's new movie THE HILLS RUN RED directed by my old buddy Dave Parker! Synchronicity. It's not just for breakfast anymore.

Thank you Easter Bunny! Clearly that old issue of TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED has left its mark on Stephen Romano.

JJ: Here's a technical, "writer's workshop" type question. You really fleshed out "Incident On and Off a Mountain Road" and managed to hit a home run without shitting on the source material. (This was the debut episode of Showtime's MASTERS OF HORROR series, adapted from a Joe R. Lansdale short story. It was also the best-reviewed entry in the series and with good reason.) I don't mean to sound crude, but as a genre fan, and I know you are, too, there's always that fear that when a writer works on another's story,
there's a high potential for bastardization, for ruining the original. And then we as fans get all bitter and piss and moan about how we could have done it better. But your episode was quite easily the best of the series. Head and shoulders. You quite obviously know the slasher genre inside and out. Having director Don Coscarelli at the helm can't hurt, but there were a lot of other "Masters" involved with the series and none of them came close to your script. Your main contribution seems to be the additional dialogue you provided. In my opinion, this might be the most difficult task, especially since you were trying to make it flow within another writer's vision. Coscarelli seems to have taken you under his wing, though. What have you learned from him about the craft of storytelling?

SR: Well, for starters, THANK YOU for your kind words about INCIDENT. I had a very unique experience on that show, in that I was allowed a lot of creative rope to hang myself with, then I came to the set at Don's invitation and helped him with the day-to-day shooting particulars. He would actually call me over in front of the camera between takes and we'd conference right there about new ideas, revisions. It freaked people out. Writers are usually not so welcome in the process like that. Don and I would dream up shots in the car on the way to the location, then just jump out in the middle of the road and shoot them! I'm not kidding! Don is an amazing artist, and a real genius. He understands that his function as a director is to find out what people do best, and then inspire them to do it for him, and he brings years and years of practical wisdom and skill. (BUBBA HO-TEP is a classy feat of low-budget filmmaking, man.) He's not a man who is ruled by ego, but by the prospect of creating the best possible movie. Lots of ideas come from lots of people on a Coscarelli film. And MOH was a TOUGH SHOOT, too. People don't realize how little we had to work with. Don pushed for details and quality when others did not or could not -- he can be a very demanding director -- but the script was solid going in, and the results pretty much speak volumes about his Vision. He doesn't get uptight, there's no bullshit, no yelling. I mean, he's there to make a movie and he's very focused and serious about it, but he treats his people well and has a lot of perspective. I'll never forget that we were shooting on the same stage as Gene Roddenberry's ANDROMEDA, and the spaceship set they built for that show was still standing right next to us. That's where Don had his office . . . so whenever we needed to get in a huddle about something, Don would say "meet me on the bridge, boys!" David Hartman spent all his time "on the bridge," drawing storyboards. We did Angus Scrimm's makeup test "on the bridge." Ate a lot of craft service "on the bridge." It was pretty wild. A lot of hard work, too.

Best Foot Forward - Take a look at the pilot episode of MASTERS OF HORROR, which Stephen co-scripted with Don Coscarelli.

As far as collaboration with Coscarelli at the screenplay stage, it's always really fun and a challenge. We have worked on about nine or ten projects. Mechanically speaking, Don's method is to map everything out to the letter and know all the beats -- I mean every damn one of them -- before one word is typed into a Final Draft document. While it sometimes creates other problems, in that I tend to work more on instinct, the way a lot of prose writers do, Don's approach has really been a school of screenwriting for me. Though we never worry about traditional concepts like three-act structure -- which I think is a myth and even rail on a little in SHOCK FESTIVAL ("This kind of screenplay diagram was invented as training wheels for students who haven't figured out how to write well!") -- Don's approach is that we hash it out in multiple "spitballing" sessions, we create a comprehensive outline, then usually I write the scenes and he rewrites them ... or the other way around ... and he has the power of unilateral veto on any concept in question (unless I can talk him out of it), which makes him a sort of executive editor, which is a good thing to have in a partnership where one guy is this crazy thermodynamic workaholic from Texas and the other guy is a visionary L.A. movie writer-director with years of experience in the biz. We do a lot of back-and-forth rewriting, too, once we get going, fixes on dialogue, condensing things. I like a lot of description, because I'm a prose guy, but many times you're just jerking off when you flower things up too much. I AM pretty proud of the sequence in INCIDENT where Moonface jumps across the moon. One fellow in the media, whose name I will not mention, accused us of being too "heavy metal" with that image, but I saw it in the tradition of PHANTASM II, which I love, of course. PHANTASM II has a glossy, flowing, bigger-than-life quality to it and I knew we needed at least one moment like that. (I called it a "Batman Shot" when we were spitballing the outline.) I wrote the shot into the screenplay and it was the ONLY image-specific thing in there that ended up on screen, exactly as I imagined it might look. Most of my other visual beats were changed and I had to make strong cases for a few others, which almost got eliminated, yet ended up in the film in some form. Movies are like that. Things always evolve as you go. For example, one of the coolest visuals in the film was a beat Don invented during the last hour of the first day of shooting -- the image of Ellen's eye widening in shock through the thumbhole in Moonface's knife, which was really in line with our "eyeball violence" theme. So that was a lesson. It was cool and sort of a vindication that my "Batman Shot" ended up all over the place to promote the series! It was in all the commercials.

Also, as you mentioned, I AM a guy who knows the "rules" about slasher flicks, and we really wanted to play to the best of them, and break a few others. When you see Moonface fall out of the window, he fucking DIES, but we keep that whole card facedown on the table. The movie still has fifteen minutes left! You know he's coming back . . . but it turns out that the movie is really about something else entirely. That twist belongs completely to Joe Lansdale, but our handling of it was more like a slasher flick. All of those little triggers that keep you expecting Moonface's big return were written explicitly into the screenplay, right down to Ellen's head turn just before she pops the trunk on the car. (They used that shot in all the commercials, too.) It was everything that happens later, when Ellen seems to go over into the dark side, that interested me most. Bree really sold it, too, didn't she? It all gets real complicated. Don's favorite line that I wrote is "roll with the weirdness." We have at least one character say that in all of our scripts now! Whenever I talk to Don on the phone, he always tells me he's "rolling with the weirdness." (Sidenote: Chris Ryall changed the line in the comic-book version, the cad!)

Joshua Jabcuga is the author of SCARFACE: DEVIL IN DISGUISE, from IDW PUBLISHING, and THE MUMMY: THE RISE AND FALL OF XANGO'S AX, also from IDW Publishing. When not writing Squib Central, Josh Jabcuga is looking for more shite to write.

You can visit him at: http://jabcuga.blogspot.com and at www.myspace.com/BuffaloHack.

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