Photo by Emily Bryan

What can you tell me about the creative process, here? Obviously, there was a great love for Ed Wood in your first two films, and then with I Was A Teenage Beatnik, there was a departure into... well, I'm not sure what to call it, exactly.

My style mutates, spindles, and mutilates itself to fit the material -- the Ed Wood flix were a bizarre, occult channeling process, culling acres of Wood's short stories and unpublished scripts to mine it of the more outlandish lines to make it more deliriously Wooden.

Teenage Beatnik is my friends and I, our lives filtered through B-movies. Initially it was a more pastiche-y screenplay I was going to cast in LA with actors and shoot there. I did most of the stopmotion out there, cameos, built odd sets, did the music. Since I was broke and 23 ...I ended up moving back east, chucking most of the script, and the characters who inspired the scripted characters just played themselves and we improvised endlessly. There are hours of outtakes and the band set in motion kept churning along till about 2005. I could keep editing it for years, there are entire excised subplots with other casts that could form entire other movies.

I go back and forth between comedy and outlandish, often boring experimentation.

So tell me about the actual shooting process a broke young creator had to endure.

The 1999 Chicago shoot for Devil Girls was 4.5 days -- it was rehearsed relentlessly and they spat out the dialogue like a play as we bopped from location to location like frantic ferrety pinballs attempting to finish it quickly. There was an initial rough cut with a lot more stock footage during the Criswell interlude to cover up 16mm footage that wasn't developed. In 2006 I finally had that stuff processed and transferred and shot a few weekends of Super-8/8mm inserts to replace most of the stock footage with myself and friends gadding about in sweaters and ties being menaced by drugs, delinquency, and loose women. The restored version of Devil Girls is what I wanted it to look like.

The 2000 Chicago shoot for The Vampire's Tomb was about 4 days but was abandoned due to not solving the Doctor Acula problem at the time and using some chiropractor style standins in the meanwhile... we never shot any of the Vampire Woman footage which was subsequently done in 2006-7 when the tapes were revived and resuscitated and the remaining scenes were completed on various rotting Soviet-era filmstocks to give it a flickering weirdness no shitty late 90s fake film filter could produce. These bits are by far my favorite thing about this weird confusing mess of a movie. The deleted scenes are another half hour of turgid plot that doesn't make the plot any clearer, so don't worry about it. It is to my eternal shame and regret the bulk of these were done like soap operas on video, I wish I scrambled a bit more and sold plasma to shoot them all on super-8 at the very least.

And your projects now?

I try to do that (shoot on film stock) these days, and have destroyed my credit and sanity as a result making films like "A Belly Full of Anger," the three hour adaptation of William S. Burroughs' "NOVA EXPRESS," and "Alfred Jarry's UBU ROI." (Check out youtube.com/terminalproductions for innumerable examples.)

Wait, wait, credibility? What in the name of God is that, and how was it destroyed by Belly Full of Anger? Did your losing it somehow prevent you from creating anything?

(Stares somberly) Why, my undoubtedly huge credibility as an obscure crackpot with no discernible source of regular income pursuing esoteric, byzantine projects that branch out into weird statements about the futility of existence, of course.

What exactly would you consider to be your master project, anyway? What the 'goal'?

Who knows, they are all rotted limbs from the same despicable tree -- competing for sunlight and getting sawed off occasionally based on my own spiteful, self-destructive whims. I'd like to do a long, middle of the night version of Kafka's "The Castle" next in black and white. I shot 20 minutes of establishing shots and gauzy images of it in 16mm and it looks master project enough to obsesses me for two or three years.

Do you have some progression in mind in your film-making?

I'm just trying to suit the material, my own style is pretty weird and I modulate/muffle it when adapting someone else -- it would ruin Ed Wood Jr. to have too much of my stupidity in it, and can you imagine what my jokes would do to William S. Burroughs? As far as progression goes, I just want a fancier sandbox to play in rather than this kitty litter pile in the abandoned sub-basement of cinema. It'd be fun to splash a bit of shekel around and enslave hundreds to my terrible will, laboring month after month to bring something turgid to jaw-clenching life. Until then, I make do and daydream about having clones so I can finish this stuff faster.

Where do you want to go with your craft?

Hoboken. I just want to continue making eccentric films that indulge my perverted interests on small budgets for the next 40 years or so. Unless hit by a truck or terminal illness, I think I'll manage to because I'm just not suited to doing anything else.

Of the videos you've created, your torture video of 'The Paranoia Show' seems to be the most successful of them, at least when judged by Youtube standards. What do you consider to be your best work? What is "success"?

I've heard of this success thing... apparently people with cigars start offering you money and you have to choose between your high school sweetheart and your principles... (I'd like to think I would put up a good 2 or 3 minute struggle before Faustin' it up big-time and signing on the dotted line in my own watery blood.)

I think that's just a fluke, that 400K hits. Just the random luck of a bunch of anonymous internet people searching Youtube for torture porn and instead getting a six year old black and white satirical educational short about interrogation techniques that was cranked out in some basement in New Jersey when that 60 Minutes thing broke. I don't really advertise my stuff too well or play the networking game ... so you get things with TONS of love and effort ladled into them getting 30 hits, and stupid halfhearted jokes pumped out in an hour or so getting 15,000 hits because of tags or something.

Success for me would just be whittling these films out of low-budget wood for a long time and not having labs destroy hours of footage because I took longer than 3 months to pay the bill. I'm looking at you, Black and White Film Factory. Thank you for destroying precious stop-motion animation footage from NOVA EXPRESS, and the whole ending of UBU ROI. That would be success, just being able to finish these things without too much catastrophe happening. Ok, a certain amount of catastrophe to make for good stories... that'll be fine.

The late, great, Ray Dennis Steckler was in one of your films. What was he like on set, and how much does his work influence you?

Steckler! Cash Flagg! I grew up pretty intrigued by stories and articles about his films and they sure managed to live up to their reputations when I finally tracked them down... I especially love the one he shot for Arch Hall, Sr. and starred in as the steak-craving Steak: WILD GUITAR.

I went out to Vegas to meet him and include him in it since it wouldn't have happened without the example he provided -- of making movies with your friends and their homes, using your station wagon in every film, and doing a lot of non-sync handheld camera stuff with crazy angles and colors to keep things moving. Initially it was a little sad and stilted, his video store (Vegas's own Mascot Video, which I live just down the street from. - D) with shelves of his flicks ignored as every customer who entered it walked straight to the porn section the whole time I was there. He seemed pretty bitter about how things worked out and was a bit suspicious and incredibly, hilariously sarcastic. At one point he claimed not to be able to read. Gradually this melted away as we bonded over a Bolex and we taped a few hours of interview as he began smiling and getting expansive... turning the clock back and telling stories about the Halls and his ping ponging around Hollywood.

Afterwards, we had lots of fun improvising together and working up a scene for TEENAGE BEATNIK where I return THE LEMON GROVE KIDS MEET THE MONSTERS late and he curses me to death for not wanting to pay late fees. He signed that tape with a suggestion to remember to always look in the mirror. He told me he got through some of his films and struggles, doubts about acting, etc. by just looking into the mirror every morning and building up his confidence. His version was a lot more poetic and my garbled remembrance is worthless, sorry -- but anyway, there's some sly references to that in the film as I indeed do that. Only to be of course greeted by Cash Flagg's face repeating how I'm going to die.

Who knows what's going to come next from Terminal Productions? I can tell you this: expect something weird. More importantly, expect something you'd find nowhere else.