By KEVIN HOOVER
In the ’80s and ’90s, exploitation cinema was still a dirty secret. Patrons curious to see Joel Reed’s Bloodsucking Freaks or Frank Henenlotter’s Basket Case couldn’t simply wander into any old respectable movie house and buy a ticket, because their screens would never play host to such reprehensible garbage. For the viewer whose tastes ran counter to the mainstream, the midtown Manhattan grindhouse scene, and its assemblage of drug-addled outcasts, pimps, vagrants, and queers, was home. To Bill Landis, those people were his people, and sharing the stories encompassing this grindhouse subculture is his legacy.
Landis was a forefather of many things and left an impression – sometimes good, sometimes decidedly less so – on all those with whom he engaged. By way of his self-published periodical Sleazoid Express, he gave a platform to a community of film fans that otherwise wasn’t afforded one. Through faults and accomplishments innumerable, Landis’ chronicle is one of reverence, and Preston Fassel’s latest book, LANDIS: THE STORY OF A REAL MAN ON 42ND STREET (from Encyclopocalypse Publications), pulls back the curtain on the larger-than-life anomaly. The author recently discussed his new book with Rue Morgue.
Bill Landis was a polarizing individual and a maverick in film journalism. Can you tell us a bit about the man’s background?
Bill Landis’ claim to fame was that he founded Sleazoid Express magazine in 1980. At the time, horror journalism was almost a completely different animal from what it is today. The two big publications out there were Famous Monsters of Filmland and Fangoria, and even Fangoria had just recently come out and was still figuring out what it wanted to be. The first issue of Sleazoid came out roughly in conjunction with what fans of Fangoria popularly called The Shining issue, which was issue #7 and was the first to exclusively focus on horror content. Their primary focus was on special effects tutorials and behind-the-scenes information that was sort of the internet for horror fans before there was an internet. Famous Monsters of Filmland was this big nostalgia publication; it was all about the golden age of horror. Serious critical assessments of horror cinema hadn’t become a thing yet. Guys like Joe Bob Briggs and Michael J. Weldon were just coming on the scene, and at the forefront of this was Bill Landis.
Landis was a military brat who bounced around before finally ending up in New York City as a young man in what he calls the “midnight cowboy days” of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In addition to having a naturally curious mind, he’s also something of a savant; he was constantly skipped ahead in school, and by the time he was 20 years old he already had a master’s degree. He starts going to see these movies on 42nd Street, and the combination of being there at this special moment in the evolution of popular culture and his being such an inquisitive and intelligent mind gives birth to Sleazoid, because he wondered why nobody was talking about these movies in a more serious, critical way. The other unique thing is that Bill was kind of an amateur anthropologist; he was fascinated with this unique subculture that had grown up around the theaters of 42nd Street because it wasn’t just some average suburban audience – it was sex workers, African Americans, Hispanic people, and they formed this outsider subculture. In a sense, they felt welcome there because everybody was equally unequal. Bill wanted to preserve the stories of the people who were coming to see these movies, and that was Sleazoid Express.
As a young man years removed from 42nd Street’s heyday, how did you become so enamored with Landis?
I was born in Houston, and up until I was 12 years old my family and I lived in St. Louis, when my dad took a project headquartered in Oklahoma. Having grown up in St. Louis, I suddenly found myself in a place called Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, which at the turn of the 2000s was a very rural place. It was a completely different change of scenery, and this is where I really came of age. One year, there’s a big winter freeze and school got canceled for something like four days, so I figured that since I’m going to be stuck in the house, I’d need stuff to watch. I’m 16 or 17 at the time, so I drive in the middle of this oncoming blizzard to Hollywood Video. There was a section at the back of the store called the “cult section” and it was this sort of catch-all for movies they weren’t certain where else to put. I made the decision that I was going to work my way through the entire section, and in preparation for the storm, I rented a few VHS tapes. One was called Heartbreak Motel and I picked it up because the cover of the box was this lurid, weird pastel-colored photo of a dead Elvis impersonator.
I go home and watch it and it’s a completely despicable film – it’s utterly indefensible; a twisted, southern fried rape-revenge movie. When it was done, I remember thinking to myself, “What the hell did I just watch?” I went online looking for information and discover that it’s the producer’s cut of another movie called Poor Pretty Eddie, which had extensive coverage in a book called Sleazoid Express (a title shared with Landis’ periodicals). I ordered it from Amazon and was just blown away. 17-year-old me had no idea that stuff like this could or did exist. But the book was also this sort of travelogue of 1970s and 80s Times Square where Bill and his wife Michelle Clifford documented all these different grindhouse theaters: their histories, the sort of audiences they attracted, and some of the most famous movies to play there. It opened up this completely new world to me.
For what reasons did Bill presume there’d be an audience thirsty for his written accounts of exploitation films?
I think that one of the big reasons why he wanted to do it is because he knew that proper society wasn’t giving these films a second look. Where the mainstream would see some salacious cash-in, like a twisted, sleazy thing to try to make a quick buck off, Bill looked at it and said, “Here’s the story of a trans person that somebody is trying to seriously tell.” He looked at the underside of humanity and saw humanity, and that’s appealing to me about his writing. He didn’t think these types of movies had any less artistic merit than something that was playing at a film festival. He was conversant in the language and history of higher standard art house cinema, but he didn’t see any delineation between high and low art. I think he felt that if nobody else is going to cover this stuff, he would, because it’s worthy of coverage and needs to be documented.
You make a comment in the book that, just as important as it was for Landis to critique grindhouse films, it was equally so for him to discuss the goings-on surrounding them. Did Bill feel that the “experience” of 42nd Street was as important as the films themselves?
Absolutely, because it wasn’t about just the movies, it was the fact that these movies had created the subculture. The grindhouse theaters of 42nd Street were this weird, safe space for different groups of people that didn’t necessarily fit in elsewhere and certainly wouldn’t have been welcomed in suburban theaters. For example, the LGBT community had a large presence there. It was important for Bill to document the experience of being on 42nd Street because the story at that time was the story of these groups of people. He felt compelled to write about these experiences, so when he’s writing about fist fights or drug deals or about the friendships that he made and the characters he met, he’s working to preserve those ways of life that he felt were disappearing as Times Square was being gentrified.
Before his untimely passing at the age of 49, Bill’s life was filled with tribulation as much as it was triumph. Why was he never able to mature out of the 42nd Street lifestyle and its excesses?
Bill had a lifelong struggle with drug abuse, and I feel like that was a self-medicating measure. I talk a lot about experiences he went through in his childhood and that was compounded by a traumatic adolescence. He spoke about how, because he had skipped ahead in school so much, he couldn’t really hang out with people his own age. Then, as a young man in the early 1980s, he’s working on cocaine-laden Wall Street which certainly was not a positive environment for anybody, let alone somebody with the developmental trauma that Bill experienced. I don’t think that he ever really learned to cope healthily with his formative years and even though he was able to eventually move into the suburbs and become a husband and father and keep it on the rails for so long, at the same time he was always struggling with this trauma that he’d never addressed. That’s really what ended up catching up with him.
This book is as much a discussion of an integral part of cinema history as it is a personal labor of love. How important was it for you to be able to provide an in-depth biographical look into your muse?
This means the world to me. I’m grateful to Encyclopocalypse and Mark Miller for giving me the space, and to everybody at Daily Grindhouse where the article this book evolved from first ran. When I found out that Bill died, I was devastated. Even though I never knew him, I felt like I owed him this sort of cosmic debt. My first book, Our Lady of the Inferno, is all about 42nd Street, and a lot of the real-world information included in it I gleaned from reading Bill’s writing. It’s incredibly sad to me that he died so young and so troubled; that he died before he was able to find any kind of emotional or spiritual peace and repair damaged relationships. He should still be with us and should still be writing: an elder statesman of exploitation horror. I wanted to preserve that because he’s somebody who deserves to be remembered. I want this book to tell the story of the real Bill Landis: husband, father, scholar, anthropologist. A magazine founder who was a real human being that died far too young.
LANDIS: THE STORY OF A REAL MAN ON 42ND STREET is available for purchase on Amazon.
