VONSHOLLYWOOD: March 2012

Friday, March 23, 2012

Book 2!

Look for an announcement from TwoMorrows soon! Something like: "Got Monsters? We do! Monsters so huge, so powerful, so numerous they couldn't be contained in a single book! Pete Von Sholly's MONSTERBOOK volumes 1 and 2 are jammed with almost 400 pages of monster art, storyboards, comics, cartoons and dinosaurs and are replete with pithy commentary on all of the foregoing. Pete, a Disney Imagineer and career feature film storyboard artist, comics writer and artist, satiric magazine creator and all around bon vivant treats you to tons of behind the scenes material and dozens of misc. pieces which he does for the satisfaction of the muse and have no proper place in the world at large- until now!"

Thursday, March 15, 2012

Moldy Oldie?

This was supposed to be published a while back but... well, let's just say it didn't work out and leave it at that! Anyway, there has been some renewed interest from another source so we shall see.... I'll let ya know. I still think it would be a riot.

Block Party

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

EXTRAS! EXTRAS! SCREED ALL ABOUT 'EM!

So you're watching a movie and everything's moving right along and suddenly there's a FACE on the screen that doesn't belong and stops the whole show for you... let's take Stephen King for example. (A good example cause he's who I had in mind and one of the principal offenders.) People who make his movies seem often to need to suck up to him or something and so they stick SK in a scene... not exactly sure why they do it but the effect is always jarring. You would never cast him for an extra would you? He's too WEIRD looking! Suddenly there's this big lantern-jawed squinty-eyed, coke bottle glasses wearing MUG filling the screen. He can't act. He can't even say a line that sounds convincing. (In CREEPSHOW he was at his best cause he played a blathering hayseed who was soon covered with green moss and then blew his head off. That one worked for me.) Stan Lee is another one. Every time he appears he seems awkward and confused and his appearance seems trimmed to the bare amount of frames they could possibly use and still claim he was in the movie. And can't they even give him a decent wig??? This is the MOVIES after all. (He was best as himself in MALLRATS cause he wasn't TRYING to act. Every other time he shows up you go "Oh God, Stan Lee again!" and if you don't know who he is, you probably go "who is THAT old perv and why is he in the movie?") Then we have DIRECTORS who cast themselves and even give themselves *HUGE SPEAKING ROLES under the delusion that they can act... and since they're the directors, who is going to tell them "no"? In short (finally) they stand out like... oh you know. Allow me then to present the "SORE THUMB AWARDS for the WORLD'S WORST EXTRAS!" (Suuuuuuure I believed that M Night Shamalamadingdong was Mel Gibson's rural neighbor in SIGNS. He fit right in... cough...)
Another one would be Forry Ackerman but he's just dead so let's not pick on him. Besides he was never in a movie anybody SAW so he hardly counted... except THE HOWLING where he does indeed stand out like the aforementioned inflamed digit. But his face is not as well known to the mainstream as these other guys so the effect is lessened. *I guess the huge speaking roles make them technically not "extras", but I don't care. I'm not changing this thing again- I've already fixed about ninety typos and I've about had it. But even Quentin and M SOMETIMES appear briefly so they qualify anyway come to think of it. Never mind.