Status Updates From The Lurker in the Lobby: A ...

I wish that they put the pictures of the short films next to their corresponding names so I could identify them.

The final section is "Short Films" and then I'll be done with this book today!
Which, I'm happy about because I've got one more Redwall book I need to read from the library and I just got the manga version of Frankenstein that I want to read after seeing the movie.

And another example of Hollywood scamming people. This is why I'm staying away from Hollywood. Or, at the very least, do some research on companies there that are more equitable before sending in a résumé.

Bernie Writghtson is another artist I will have to check. His sketches here of the Deep Ones look cool.

[Tom Sullivan]"A Nazi bitch named Ilse Koch enjoyed skinning the prisoners of her husband's concentration camp. She made lamp shades, curtains, and book covers, and other items with the human tissue."
Of all of the Holocaust information that I've read up on, how did this slip by me all this time?! Fuck!

FUCK HOLLYWOOD ACCOUNTING!!!!!!!!! This was in the 70s too, so just before the court case that brought this sort of thing to the public eye. The thing is, it didn't stop it from happening in the future. The shady, unethical bookkeeping that Hollywood does is still happening in all major studios.

So, Tom Sullivan was an artist who did a lot of Cthulhu-inspired artwork including a game. I have a book that is a collection of various artwork like this, so I'll have to check it to see if he's in there and what he did.

[Stephen Parsons]"People love characters that are amoral, unethical, sweaty villains; they always love these characters. Yet the people who give the green light to this stuff go, 'Well, we must have likable.'"
I do get this. But I do think it's a little bit of both. The distributors tend to look at marketability of films and characters, especially outside of American culture. They also look at trends.

That's pre-Internet Hollywood for you. You do any independent work, and if you want to make money off of the overseas market, you have to go through a Hollywood distributor, and they don't honor any agreements to give money back to the actual creator unless it's in writing.

Oooh, a Puppet Master reference.

"It is just like Hollywood. Just like any other studio or material. When you are in the middle of of an oil field you keep drilling until you hit a dry one, and maybe you keep going until you hit a couple more dry ones, then you stop."
And that hasn't stopped after 20 years.

Even back then, filmmaking production workers had unions and protected workers' rights. And Hollywood knew that and knew that it would be more cost beneficial filming there than in the US.

But, yes, his works are racist allegories as he made those before his shift.

Hmm, I read Lovecraft's marriage to his Jewish wife differently. Sure, he was racist and antisemitic earlier in life, but that was before living in New York City. After he left and moved back to his home town due to another ill turn of physical and mental health, his thoughts on racism shifted. This was in the late 1930s, when he heard about the bad things that ($)Hitler and the N@zis were doing.

Ha! "Dagon" was screened at Walt Disney Studios! That's funny.

"Destiny - in Lovecraftian terms - really means genetics, you're a slave to your genetic code and there's no way you can escape what you're going to become. A lot of people have already commented on this, but it is probably based on Lovecraft's fear that he had inherited the genes for insanity from his parents and was doomed to end up in an insane asylum like them." Given his upbringing & mental disorders, I'd say so

Lovecraft may have done a "tremendous amount of research" but his education and understanding of that research is obviously lacking.

Morgue practitioners have a whole lot of gallows humor. I read that del Toro and Oscar Isaac had similar conversations in Spanish when making the 2025 Frankenstein film.

"I was looking for an Aryan guy with the blond hair for the character..."
Ouch. That's really not something you should say on camera or on record.

18 days of shooting film, the last day being a full 24 hours, and then the director drove home?! No wonder he went blind on the road.

A lot of vampire and Frankenstein movies back then? I guess some things never change no matter the year.

"The whole nature of reality, a character learning what is out there, is really a universal idea, the root of all religions and philosophies. The difference with Dick and Lovecraft is that they have taken this visceral paranoid view where the world is very harsh, deceptive place controlled or threatened by very hostile forces." While religion tends to take a more on protective, benevolent side to this argument.

You can always count on studios to meddle with a story by a writer when both the writer and the fans of the original work know that the story is what they want. This is generally done to more fresh and new writers who don't have a name to themselves yet.

From the sound of things, Del Toror wanted his film of the adaptation of "In the Mountains of Madness" to be a big-budget feature like Hellboy, but the studio rejected it.

Guillermo Del Toro! I can't believe that they actually interviewed him.

It's funny that this producer managed to get a movie called The Fast and the Furious," but it's not the one you think of.

Looking ahead, I noticed that all of the interviews were of the men who worked on the movies previously mentioned. No women, whether producers, actresses, composers, or writers, were brought in (not that I checked the IMDb for all of them). Either they died, passed on the interview, or couldn't find the time. I find that to be very interesting.

Trying to get a teenage actress to do full frontal nudity? Yeah, that's not a good thing.

"Lovecraft was always writing about women bearing their breasts in front of Cthulhu entities."
Really? I don't remember that. I'm going to have to re-read his material then. I thought it was a result of adaptations of his works spicing things up for shock factor and that became the norm.

Besides some interesting tidbits of the writing for "The Curse" that was a no-nothing interview.