COME AND GET 'EM!
EVERYTHING, AND I MEAN EVERYTHING,
MUST BE SOLD BY THIS SUNDAY 29th AUGUST!
TRASH PROJECT UPDATES:
“MACHETE MAIDENS” IS FINALLY UNLEASHED!
Long-time readers will no doubt remember that I have been working on a documentary, “The Search For Weng Weng”, on the midget James Bond of the Philippines...
andrewleavold.blogspot.com & bamboogodsandbionicboys.blogspot.com
Well, a lot has happened since I first picked up the camera almost four years ago. My producer Veronica Fury of Fury Productions pitched the project to ABC TV last year, and the word came back: allow the project to evolve into a documentary on B-filmmaking in the Philippines, and you have a deal! Funding came through from ABC TV, ABC Commercial, MIFF Première Funds, Film Vic, Screen Queensland, and Screen Australia.
At this point I stepped down as writer/director and we offered the driver’s seat to Mark (Not Quite Hollywood) Hartley. He agreed to come on board, with myself as Associate Producer, Research Consultant and Original Concept credits, and set to work crafting an essay-style documentary on the overseas filmmakers engaged in the export trade during the Marcos years of the late Sixties to early Eighties. Now titled “Machete Maidens Unleashed!”, Mark assembled a breathtaking array of intervewees, including Roger Corman, John Landis, Joe Dante and Allan Arkush, Cleopatra Wong's Marrie Lee and Franco Guerrero, and many more (full list is on www.machetemaidensunleashed.com)
I was privileged to attend the world premiere screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival last month, and was bowled over by its almost unanimous praise. The reviews have been rolling in ever since (click www.andrewleavold.blogspot.com) and there's no stopping the buzz; Machete Maidens' international premiere is next month at the Toronto International Film Festival with many more festival screenings to follow, including the Brisbane International Film Festival in November.
“CLEOPATRA WONG/ ONE-ARMED EXECUTIONER” DVD OUT SOON... AND WE DID THE BONUS FEATURES!
US company MPI/Dark Sky are releasing a Philippines Grindhouse double bill in October from director Bobby A. Suarez: kung fu superspy epic
They Call Her Cleopatra Wong (1978) and the amputee revenge flick
One-Armed Executioner (1983). MPI asked for access to the interviews I'd shot in Manila with the casts and crews, including the only ever on-camera interview with the late Bobby himself (see here, then follow the “Bobby A. Suarez” tag for more info and interviews) PLUS I wrote a lengthy essay on Bobby to go with the package. Needless to say we're incredibly proud to be associated with such a (ahem) classy production! The DVD is available to pre-order on Amazon: www.amazon.com/They-Call-Cleopatra-Armed-Executioner/dp/B003WO5MEU
THIS WEEK'S PRESS BLITZ
One of the most comprehensive pieces ever on Trash Video is by Lachlan Huddy for a new e-magazine soon to be launched by former Empire Magazine and SBS Movie Show scribe Michael Adams:
"Schlockbuster was one title jockeying for the prize. I Spit On Your Video and Video Sleazy were all in contention, too. In the end, though, simplicity carried the day, and Brisbane's first, finest and filthiest alternative video store was baptised, "Trash Video".
It's a good filter, says owner-manager Andrew Leavold of the evocative moniker. That kind of passive, mindless consumption that categorises most movie-watchers. It's a good filter to scare them off.
Since 1995, Trash has been the proud purveyor of everything beyond the flow of cinema's mainstream. Shock, schlock, art, grunge, indie, cult, foreign, rare, grotesque or sublime if it exists outside the realm of casual moviegoing, Trash is the place to find it. Burning to take in Microwave Massacre, the self-declared worst horror movie ever made? It's in the Trash stash. Can't track down Leni Reifenstahl's 1930s Nazi propaganda Triumph of the Will for that modern history essay? Pick it out of the Trash. And while you're there, why not indulge some nostalgia and plump for the Twin Peaks Season Three double-VHS pack? Yes indeed, Trash is everything the modern video shop isn't: cluttered with obscurity, disorganised, and bursting with character.
But to speak of Trash is to speak of Leavold, its indefatigable founder; the store is but an extension of the man himself, for whom the creation and consumption of culture's popular and otherwise is more than a business or pleasure: it is a way of life. And has been for a long, long while.
Basically this was an idea that I had when I was ten, Leavold says. It's a July afternoon and we're talking over the counter of Trash's current store in Brisbane's West End. To the left sit neat piles of rental DVDs stacked thirty and forty high; to the right the store computer is near-buried under posters and VHS and other bric-a-brac your local Civic would've sold off by now. There's a touch of gloom in the air, but we'll get to that later. For now there's only Leavold in a Coney Island T-shirt, with his errant blonde hair framing a wild-eyed face, telling Trash's tale. It is, he says, a story of childhood obsession taken to ludicrous extremes.
The son of a civil engineer, Leavold spent his early years globetrotting with a father who tended to accept filthy overseas jobs throughout the Middle East. Starved of pop culture care of the slim pickings on Arabic television, Leavold took his first step along the road to Trashy treasure with the advent of betamax (a videotape format, for all you post-Gen X-ers). Late-night gems like old Vincent Price films and the most grotesque horror films that were just coming out as part of the Italian New Wave infiltrated the Middle East through pirate video networks, the betamax grapevineand found a spellbound audience in ten-year-old Leavold.
The Indian guys who used to run the local video store used to wait for me to come in, he recalls fondly. I'd pedal up on my bicycle and they'd go, "Ah! We have a new zombie film for you. But don't tell your mother!" And they would feed me vile garbage. It got to the point where my mother had written to every one of the video shops I was a member of saying, "Do not give my son any more horror films".
But it was too late for little Andrew: an idea had taken root. All the time, I kept dreaming about having a video shop that had all these movies that I loved in it. This kind of anal obsession as a ten-year-old to control culture.
It was an obsession anal enough to persist throughout high school and into his first job, during which he was blowing every paycheck on a pile of VHS. When his trove hit critical mass at somewhere around 2000 tapes Leavold went public and Trash Video was born, its first home a little walk-up from indie music club The Zoo in Brisbane's Fortitude Valley. It was a fine neighbourhood to raise an alternative video store: grungy, unpretentious and not quite suitable for the under-twelve set. But time waits for no cult film fan, and after five years, when Trash's stock had more than tripled, the Valley had mutated.
"Trendy f*ckheads on bad drugs", Leavold laments. When all of a sudden you find yourself surrounded by stores that sell $80 can openers, it's time to go. The lease was up; we thought it was either sink or swim time. We either try to do this somewhere else on a larger scale or give up. And luckily one of our readers on our email said, "Why don't we try West End?" That was ten years ago.
"You know", he says, gesturing around the shop, "you spend seven to ten hours here, you have very little enthusiasm for anything else".
Ah. Remember the touch of gloom in the air we were speaking about earlier? Here it is. According to Andrew Leavold, digital's killed the video shop. After fifteen years as Brisbane's - and Australia's - largest cult video store, Trash Video is closing its doors against the harsh light of a changing media landscape, in which the likes of Foxtel IQ, Netflix and Bigpond Movies are rendering quaint local video stores, with their physical contraints and limited stock, all but obsolete.
The idea of an old-fashioned video shop has well and truly had its day, Leavold says, and it isn't the voice of bitterness, nor defeat, but the voice of a man content to move on. The onus now is on ownership. It just means that we're consuming culture in a different way now. Much more immediate. And, I think, with the switchover of technology, that's our cue to exit as gracefully as we can.
With the day winding down, I finally take my leave from Trash. I've stayed far longer than I'd planned, but it's an easy place to get lost in. I pause, peering down the aisles at the rows and rows of VHS and DVD, thinking of the films inside each, the weird, the enchanting, the scandalous. Somewhere here is the mutant fish baby from Corman's Humanoids from the Deep; the mad, murderous, Buddhist Jew-burner from the nutso Czechoslovakian horror The Cremator; the prehistoric stop-motion wonders from dino-western The Valley of Gwangi. Soon they'll need to find new shelves from which to ply their strange nightmares and stranger dreams and perhaps no-one will take them in. It's a mournful thought, and I almost feel that words should be said, some goodbye prayer.
TRASH VIDEO: We all thought the end of the world was 2012,
and for Trash at least, it comes two years early!
1/73 Vulture St , West End Qld 4101, Australia
ph 07 38447844 (or intl code + 61 + 7 + 38447844)
OPENING HOURS: 12pm to 7pm, til Aug 29, 2010
e-mail: trash@trashvideo.com.au
website: www.trashvideo.com.au