The Funhouse interview: Kathryn Leigh Scott and Gerrit Graham

There are a number of interviews that I’ve featured on the Funhouse TV show that have fallen through the cracks in terms of Net exposure. I’m aiming in the next few weeks to get clips from these chats onto that nefarious (see below) Net-nexus, YouTube. Below are two such items, one from an interview that hasn’t previously been online and one that was online and had a “worldwide block” (!) put on it by the morons at a major movie studio owned by the Murdoch Empire.

The first interview is with the charming and talented actor-author Kathryn Leigh Scott, best known for starring in Dark Shadows (the classic daytime gothic series, not the recent Tim Burton film that has already faded from memory).

In the Eighties, Ms. Scott became an independent publisher with the company Pomegranate Press. Here she speaks about the moment when Dark Shadows was transformed into a “horror soap”:

The second clip is one that was previously on YouTube and received tens of thousands of hits. The first time I uploaded it, I appended to it a 45-second clip from the film we’re discussing, The Phantom of the Paradise, that illustrated what Mr. Graham was talking about. This 45-second sliver made the Kopyright Kops at Twentieth-Century Fox, the studio that owns and distributes the film, put a “worldwide ban” on the clip.

Two facts make this a mega-moronic move: first, several other clips from the film are on YT and have stayed up for years at a time (including a ten-minute chunk of the film’s rock-opera segment); second, the clip provides promotion for, and background information about, the film.

Then again, Fox has chosen to release this hardcore cult film on DVD in the U.S. with NO extras, whereas there’s a full-length documentary about the film (in English) on the French DVD, as well as other supplements. So, in essence, they care about the film enough to ban my interview clip, but not enough to provide it with a proper DVD release….

The interview took place on the premises of the Chiller Theatre convention in 2006.