Mike White, a Detroit native and deeply dedicated cinema fan, has published his first book. Titled “Impossibly Funky : A Cashiers du Cinemart Collection”, the book is an anthology of articles from Mike’s magazine — published from 1994 to 2007. Beginning as a photocopied underground “zine”, Cashiers du Cinemart (CdC) evolved into a record store distributed magazine before ceasing distribution in 2007. [Wikipedia: zine]
I had an opportunity to talk with Mike about the origin and evolution of his magazine, busting Quentin Tarantino, grieving for Star Wars, and how the blaxsploitation romp Black Shampoo changed his life forever.
ASZUROM: You spent 14 years writing a zine you titled “Cashiers du Cinemart”. What ignited this project?
MIKE WHITE: I’d just graduated college and landed a crappy job. I worked the graveyard shift at a cable company doing commercial insertion. It involved lots of dubbing of tapes during which time I didn’t have jack to do other than watch cable or express my myriad opinions on paper. With an old computer and Xerox machine to keep me company, a zine was imminent. But, really, what pushed me to start writing was the desire to tell my side of an ongoing story that wasn’t getting much press.
ASZUROM: You’re referring to your short film “Who Do You Think You’re Fooling?” You sent this to Film Threat seeing them take note of the Reservoir Dogs vs. City on Fire parallelism issue. That’s when you first got on their radar? How did that break down at the end? [Youtube: Who Do You Think You're Fooling]
MIKE WHITE: It went down like this: when I was in college I was a huge fan of Quentin Tarantino and Reservoir Dogs. When I found out from my friend Mike Thompson that Reservoir Dogs was basically a rip-off of a Hong Kong movie, I was incensed. I made a video to compare the two movies. Months later when Film Threat magazine published a story stating the same I sent them a copy of the tape as kind of a snotty “I was there first” thing.
Film Threat’s head honcho, Chris Gore, loved it. He called me up and told me that this could be huge. He told me that my tape needed an intro to explain what was going on for the uninitiated. So, I went into the cable company’s studio and cut a new version with my friend Eric narrating the opening. That’s the version Gore ran with, sending it out to reporters, showing it at festivals.
I have to hand it to Gore. No one wanted to touch Tarantino at the time. He was Hollywood’s Golden Boy. This was the summer of 1994 and Tarantino was hot off his Palm D’or at Cannes for Pulp Fiction.
ASZUROM: Tarantino was a pretty “big deal” at the time.
MIKE WHITE: That’s putting it mildly. With a one-two punch like Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, journalists were falling all over themselves to praise him. I think that biographies were already being written about him.
There were a lot of pieces discussing Tarantino’s influences and he even gave journalists a number of lists of films. City on Fire wasn’t on any of them.
Some reporters thought they were hot shit when they connected the colorful names of Tarantino’s gangsters with the criminals from The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. But that’s about the extent of their digging. This is about the time that I found out that a lot of journalists are lazy sods that just quote from one another and pre-prepared press notes.
ASZUROM: So, in the midst of this stir you caused with “Who Do You Think You’re Fooling”, you launched “Cashiers du Cinemart.” Can you explain that choice of name?
MIKE WHITE: Not enough people get the joke that Cashiers du Cinemart was a play on the Cahiers du Cinema, the seminal French film publication that paved the way for the French nouvelle vague. I got the idea for the name when I was a cashier at a movie theater, standing there selling tickets and jotting down ideas on the back of Super Bucket Combo coupons.
ASZUROM: So, was CdC an atavism of an edgier era of Film Threat? CdC seems “unapolagetic, opinionated, and unashamed.”
MIKE WHITE: I loved Film Threat when I got my hands on my first copy. I admired local hero Chris Gore and his gang of writers. Remember, this was a world in which Premiere and Movieline—two of the most ass-licking publications around—were the only game in town as far as major movie publications in the U.S. Film Threat was a proud middle finger to those kinds of magazines and the whole worship of Hollywood.
I’d never have the balls to compare myself to Film Threat. I never had the reach, the vitriol, the influence. When I threw my hat into the zine ring I was just a gadfly with no illusions that I’d be as big as Film Threat some day. If anything, I was hoping to prove myself as some kind of writer and maybe be brought aboard the ship of fools.
Cashiers was once described by Sarah Jacobson as “Film Threat’s snottier younger brother.” That’s about right. They were located in Los Angeles at the time so I’m thinking they were in the Larry Flynt era. They were still doing some great writing and covering pieces like Alex Winter’s Freaked. This is before they started highlighting shit like Corman’s Fantastic Four movie and Double Dragon.
ASZUROM: Chris Gore, founder of Film Threat, wrote the introduction to your book. He explains that he thinks you have every right to hate him, for how he screwed you over on IFC’s Ultimate Film Fanatic gameshow. It sounds like he has a serious respect for your work. How did this intro piece come about, and can you summarize your relationship with Gore?
MIKE WHITE: Gore and I had kind of an antagonistic relationship for a while. I think it was the old thing about two people being so similar that they hate each other. We’re both opinionated assholes (I say that with love) who are into movies. I took his mag to task when Film Threat started to fade and didn’t make a lot of friends by doing so.
When I wrote to Gore to ask him to write the intro for my book I figured he’d either not write back or just give me a terse “fuck you.” What he came back with nearly brought a tear to my eye. It was pretty cool of him.
ASZUROM: How did you attract a reader base initially? How big did your readership get by the end?
MIKE WHITE: I sent it to friends and other zines listed in Factsheet Five. These zines would review mine and I’d review theirs. People that saw the review of my zine would write and ask for a copy and send me some money. Eventually I started getting into stores.
I started off with Desert Moon periodicals. They were famous for carrying zines. Then as I got bigger (and better?), so did my distributors. Around issue 9 I got picked up by Tower Records. By then I was done with Xerox machines and dealing with print houses. Other distributors picked me up and I was up to a 5,000 print run by the last few issues.
I didn’t have very many direct subscribers at all and that was how I wanted it. I didn’t like being beholden to people, and I didn’t make anything on subscriptions anyway. I charged $20 for four issues at one point and it’d cost me $12 to send the issues — that doesn’t include the price of printing. That’s just postage.
I did 15 issues in 14 years with the last six or so issues were clocking in at around 100 pages each. As soon as I was done with one issue, I’d start in on the next.
ASZUROM: Why did it end?
MIKE WHITE: Tower going out of business robbed me of one of my major distributors and the death of Mom & Pop stores robbed me of outlets for my other distributors. Plus, my bank account was in dire straits. If I wasn’t paying for printing and postage, I was paying for movies/books/etc. for research.
ASZUROM: What inspired creating a compendium of articles in book form? Was there an itch left to scratch, or Cashiers du Cinemart hadn’t had the last word yet?
MIKE WHITE: It was an idea that was given to me years earlier by Clint Johns at Tower Records. He wanted a book proposal and I took that opportunity to think about combining some of my commonly themed pieces into sections. I got together with Mike Thompson and Lori Higgins in early 2008 to go over the idea. Also, I combined a lot of articles like multiple pieces I wrote on Planet of the Apes. And I was able to revisit pieces and update them.
ASZUROM: You claim “13.2% new content”. What’s new?
MIKE WHITE: Like Human Centipede, that number is 100% mathematically accurate. I’ve revisited nearly every piece in the book and have either cleaned it up, added new material to update the piece, and combined a lot of similarly-themed articles. There are also a few never-before-published pieces like my article on Jean-Claude Van Damme.
ASZUROM: You dedicated the book to Rudy Ray “Dolemite” Moore. Explain.
MIKE WHITE: I’ve been a huge Rudy Ray Moore fan since I was a teenager. We used to watch Rude quite often. I asked him (or his representative, rather) if he could give me a quote for the book and that’s when I found out he wasn’t doing too well. He passed away a few days later and I felt it was proper to dedicate the work to him. I’m a huge fan of Human Tornado and Avenging Disco Godfather. Ciff Roquemore is like fucking Jean-Luc Godard, dude. His jump cuts and lack of narrative cohesion – it’s like the nouvelle vague all over again.
ASZUROM: Let’s talk about Midichlorians.
MIKE WHITE: Why must you taunt me this way? Being a Jedi should be a way of mind, not a blood-borne pathogen. That just turns it into an elitist club of people with the “right” DNA.
ASZUROM: Your piece “Triumph of the Whills” is testament that no bad idea is allowed to just die in Hollywood. I think your best statement in there was “Episodes I-III are extrinsic.” Everything in the prequels was best left for our imaginations to flesh out the allusions to the past made by Kenobi, Lars, and Vader. The point is driven home by the realization that Lucas referred to a character from his first hack rough draft, and brought him forth as Mace Windu in the prequels. These observations by you seem conventional critique now, but you were calling it out right at the time, and not in retrospect.
MIKE WHITE: Thanks. I’ve given a lot of thought to Star Wars, probably too much. I saw it the first time when I was five years old and the movie just kind of grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. It really shaped the way I played as a kid and the way I watched movies. Mom used to take me to the movies all the time as a kid. That was our “thing”. Star Wars kind of ran my childhood.
ASZUROM: What’s your favorite movie, then? You have a whole section of the book devoted to the blaxsploitation marvel Black Shampoo. Should I guess that? You seem a pretty devoted fan.
MIKE WHITE: My favorite film would change from day to day but probably I’d pull from a pool of a hundred or so movies. Today I’m feeling that it’s Alvin Ecarma’s Lethal Force. The movie feels like it was made for me with its mix of action and dry comedy. It nods to Spaghetti Westerns, chambara, and heroic bloodshed films—three of my favorite genres.
I don’t remember if Black Shampoo was the first blaxploitation film I ever saw, but it was definitely the most outrageous. We do still try to have reunions every 12/26 to commemorate the first night my friends and I saw it. I’ll also be taking the film on the road with me to tour it around at various book signings.
ASZUROM: The title of your book, “Impossibly Funky”, is homage to the John Daniels film “Getting Over.” Are you sending him a copy of this book? How about Greydon?
MIKE WHITE: I may send a copy to John Daniels. When I was doing the zine I had a policy of sending a copy to anyone I mentioned – good or bad – if I could do so. I shouldn’t have done that as it was yet another expense. With the book there’s no way I can afford that. While I was getting ready for the book to come out I started a project on IndieGoGo to help me buy advertising. Greydon was nice enough to put up some bucks – more than necessary to secure him a copy of Impossibly Funky. He’s already gotten his in the mail.
ASZUROM: The impassioned and reverent tale you lay out of the first viewing of Greydon Clark’s Black Shampoo seems like a passage into a new reality, more than just a bonding moment between friends. You speak of this movie as if it were some cinematic messiah, that delivered you across the veil from “have not” to the ranks of the “have seen”. You got blaxspoitational religion?
MIKE WHITE: Yes, sah. I’m a convert now and I’m proselytizing the good word of Black Shampoo wherever I can.
ASZUROM: You got to have your dream interview with John Daniels. I want to reprint a piece of that here:
Tommy Chong was playing guitar in the band that backed up Bobby Taylor & the Vancouvers. They had a big hit out at that time, “Does Your Momma Know About Me?” We booked them into the club, and after the show Tommy came upstairs and said, “Hey, man, I’ve got a partner and we do comedy — would you give us a chance?” I was known for taking a chance on something new. They came in and stayed at the club for a long time. And, boom Lou Adler signs them eventually and the rest is history. So, I’m standing in a theatre line, and who should be standing at the front of the line but Tommy Chong. I went up to him and said, “Hey, do you know me?” He said, “Do I know you? I wouldn’t be who I am if it wasn’t for you. I know you very well!” I never take it for granted if people know you, because a lot of them can make it heartbreaking.
That’s the sort of stuff you turn up that amazes me — and you do it so consistently in this book. I had no idea there was one degree of separation between Cheech & Chong and Black Shampoo.
You were like Black Shampoo‘s obsessed creepy stalker. You interviewed the actors, the director, even the *band*. When they released the movie on DVD, you were asked to write the liner notes.
Mike White: VCI Entertainment, the company that put out the DVD, had no idea about me. I was put in touch with them by my good friend Dion Conflict from Toronto. I gave them permission to use my interviews on their disc and begged to write the liner notes. It was something of a dream come true. My next goal is to help get Candy Tangerine Man on DVD somehow.
ASZUROM: I think the book really caught me when you got into the analysis of what went down in the development of Aliens, Payback, Highlander, Gremlins, 8mm, Hulk and the exhaustive list of all the Superman attempts that thankfully never flew. It’s a dissection study of whodunit in the chain of events that resulted in some legendarily flawed works. It’s the sort of “how could they screw this up?” answers fans have always pondered. You lay it out, play by play.
I’m surprised at the background knowledge everyone on staff seems to have had. For example, revealing to us that Gibson’s “Payback” was the Nth iteration of a film version of Richard Stark’s “The Hunter” series. It’s also amazing to me that, like “Indiana Jones and the Sauncer Men”, terrible killed scripts resurface to haunt us later. Where did you guys get all the insider dirt on these scripts? How does a script get “out” and passed around anyway?
MIKE WHITE: I wish I knew. I’m just glad that there’s a network of doing this. It used to be rather tough to find scripts. One had to attend conventions or “know a guy” but now the internet has made this kind of piracy even easier.
ASZUROM: You have several interviews in here with some real legends of the cult scene. Bruce Campbell and Dr. Demento are the obvious low hanging fruit to mention here. You’ve also got Keith Gordon, James Ellroy, Crispin Glover, and more. What can you tell us about getting access to these people? Anything about the interviews that stands out in your memory?
MIKE WHITE: Before everyone and their neighbor had blogs it was something of a rarity to write a zine (by comparison of numbers). I think that showing this kind of chutzpah helped me score some of these interviews. Also, trying to be polite and talking to people who could tell I was a real fan of their work. It was great, for example, talking to Rich Koz (Svengoolie) about watching his show in Detroit when I was a kid. It was a blip on the TV radar but I remembered it and appreciated it.
ASZUROM: Who would you want to do an interview piece with now, if you were able to get anyone you wanted to sit down with you for it?
MIKE WHITE: I’d still like to talk to Sam and/or Ted Raimi. Even after Spider Man 3, I’m still a fan of Sam’s work and I like Ted’s work ethic.
ASZUROM: Wrapping up at the end, you said you appear in The People vs. George Lucas. Oh, do tell.
Mike White: I wish I could tell you more but I have yet to see the movie myself. I’m never in the right place at the right time so I’m asking that people get on the People Vs. George Lucas website and vote for it to come to their city. I’d like it to get some kind of wide release so I might be able to see it soon. I heard from a reliable source that some of my bits are intercut with those of Chris Gore. How’s that for ironic?
ASZUROM: How did you decide to enter film school?
MIKE WHITE: I went to University of Michigan in Ann Arbor from ‘90-‘94. Like most people, I went into college without any direction. My counselor asked me what I liked and put me into a film class my freshman year. The first one, taught by Hubert Cohen, really impressed me and I took more my second semester. It snowballed from there. One thing to keep in mind, though, is that U of M is far more of a film theory school than a film making school.
ASZUROM: That gave you a theory soapbox to rant from? How does this education change the way you watch movies? Is “analyst mode” something you can turn off and just watch a movie, or are you compelled to dig into it?
MIKE WHITE: I can let a movie wash over me and enjoy it for what it is. I find myself getting more into the nuts and bolts of a film when it’s at the extremes; something I love or loathe. I want to find out why I’m reacting the way I am.
ASZUROM: Explain the “film theory” process some. We take for granted that we know what that means – but how do they teach it? What do you come away from it with?
MIKE WHITE: There’s a lot of reading and more Freudian and Lacanian theory than even some psychoanalysts need to know. The purpose is to get below the surface of a film and read what’s going on. It goes beyond the “this movie is good/this movie is bad” dichotomy (the “thumbs model”) to look for the meaning. Another fun thing to do is to look at films of a certain period and look for themes to see what was going on in the world at the time.
ASZUROM: Once the book tour winds down, what’s next? Are you going to keep blogging casually, or get on another serious project?
MIKE WHITE: I’m still blogging here and there, yeah, but I’ve also been fortunate enough to have some pieces picked up by Paracinema magazine, Mondo-Video.com, etc. I’ve also got the inevitable sequel in the works. The working title is Blue Harvest. Just kidding. The working title is “Is This the Movie?” It’s something I’ve been asking myself more and more often as production company credits get so elaborate that they often look better-produced than the film that follows.
Full info on the book is available here.