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.

The Fox bean-counters speak: Funhouse interview clip "blocked" on YT

I received a notification the other day from YouTube telling me that one of my videos had been “blocked” by a copyright holder. Not taken down, mind you, but blocked (what that means I discuss below). The clip in question is from my interview with Gerrit Graham, which concludes with a 50-second snippet from Phantom of the Paradise, illustrating what we’d been talking about in the interview.

The clip clearly serves as a promotion for the movie, which Fox released on DVD a few years back. Whoever trolls on YT for that company didn’t feel that way, though, and that makes for some serious stupidity. What makes the situation even sillier is, again, the fact that they didn’t have the clip taken down, just blocked — which means if you already have the URL you can view it, but it can’t be searched for in the site’s search engine, and if you go to the mediafunhouse channel (where it is still visible), you cannot click through to see it.

This is of course much ado about nothing. But Fox does like to make this kind of trouble — a previous notification from YT informed that the company had made note of my using a clip from The Panic in Needle Park in a clip from my interview with Jerry Schatzberg. In that clip the claim was patently ridiculous, since the footage was overlaid onto Schatzberg talking about the film — thus, as I called it in the clip description, “the audio commentary that never was.” Thus the studio was all right with it remaining on the site. Goddamn, glad you were, guys, the fucking thing only serves to draw attention to a movie you released on DVD, but pretty much "buried" in the process.

This “burying” by Fox of their cult items is fascinating. The many fans of Phantom of the Paradise — 24,000 (!) of whom have watched my Graham interview clip to date — are well aware that the U.S. DVD release of the film contains no extras, whereas the French two-disc release has a host of wonderful supplements, including a full-length featurette that includes comments from all of the key participants, including De Palma.

The fact that Fox hasn’t seen fit to acquire and release these extras (which are, natch, in English) in the U.S. speaks to the fact that they really don't care much at all about the film. In the meantime, here is the contested clip, which can indeed be linked to in a blog. You are outta your ever-lovin’ mind, Fox bean-counters!

UPDATE: I re-upped the clip, minus the "offending" footage:

Gerrit Graham: the Funhouse interview

Regular viewers of the show saw my two-part interview with veteran character (and very funny gentleman) Gerrit Graham a few weeks back on the show. Two clips from the chat, conducted at the Chiller Theatre convention back around Halloween of '06, are now up on YT. In the first he discusses his work on Brian De Palma's Greetings (1968):


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and in the second he talks about one of his fan-favorite roles, "Beef" in De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise (1974):


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