I recently read an "editorial" in Premiere. It wasn’t so much an opinion piece as just a bit of obligatory fluff used to introduce the staid articles to come. In this one, Editor-in-chief Peter Herbst discussed a few films that "will stay in your mind for weeks."
I’m sorry, but if films are a feast for the senses, movies that manage to stay with me for weeks are just empty calories—sugar-coated cinematic creampuffs that my hips can do without. While not every film discussed in the pages of Cashiers du Cinemart is a filmic feast that will haunt your every waking moment, there’s hope that partaking in some of the choice cuts highlighted in this issue will have a bit more impact than weeks. Hell, I still hear from a friend who was scarred deeply by Surrender Dorothy and ruminates about it to this day!
We hope you enjoy our fourteenth issue—and that it sustains you for quite a while. We may not take another two years (!) to get CdC #15 together but there are no guarantees. We can only promise that Cashiers du Cinemart will stick around. We won’t fade away or flee for the Hollywood hills with your subscription dollars or retreat into the tempting cyber sanctuary of www.cashiersducinemart.com. No, despite the heartaches and headaches, print is far too much fun and rewarding.
No apologies, no lame excuses, no wasting your time with reasons why we took two years to put out this issue. While this issue gestated I learned some important lessons, the most important being that I just don’t play well with others. I came to that conclusion after I had a very odd month in which I was kicked off of eBay, banned from the Mobius message board, booted from a few Yahoo groups, and had a major falling out with one of my long-standing video trading partners. Any one of those things on its own would have filled me with righteous indignation and left me crying, "Unfair!" However, to experience all of those during a few short weeks (some on the same day) left me troubled.
More straws to load on my broken back came when a rather reputable video company turned down my request for a screener, saying that they’d only send it to me if I could find a weekly or daily rag to publish my review—as if there were a "shelf life" to movie reviews. Likewise, several smaller filmmakers thumbed their noses to requests for screeners, opting for no press coverage rather than good press coverage.
Another sign of my social retardation surely must be all of the people that I’ve emailed and written that have suddenly stopped corresponding. Over the last few years, I’ve had interviews lined up with Dusan Makavejev, Michael Ninn, Chuck Palahniuk, Trey Parker, and The Cramps, only to have them fall through for various reasons. I’m still scratching my head about all of those, wondering what I did to ruin these opportunities.
Despite all that, I hope you’ll join us in celebrating ten years of publication. CdC #14 brings us full circle in a lot of ways. The first night I started writing what would become "The Tale of the Tape"—the heart of CdC #1, I was watching John Daniels in Getting Over while steaming mad about being put on Chris Gore’s "pay no mind" list. At once, Cashiers du Cinemart has always been a celebration of all things related to Black Shampoo and a chronicle of Gore’s treachery. In this issue you’ll be able to read my "dream interviews" with Daniels and his Black Shampoo director, Greydon Clark. And, you can also take in more activities of fellow Metro-Detroiter, Gore.
In CdC #14 we continue to satisfy our goal of spreading the word about movies our readers may appreciate but might not have encountered otherwise. We’re not unearthing anything close to the cinematic oddities in our favorite fellow film zine, Shock Cinema, but here’s hoping you’ll want to become intimately familiar with everything in our Modern Day Midnight Movies list along with some of the other films herein from the oddities of Shuji Terayama to the attractive oeuvre of Patrice Rohmer and all points in between.
Back to Issue 14