Twenty Questions with Streeborama.

Well it’s not exactly twenty questions but it’s the closest we’ve seen in a while.  Here at long last is Grant Dean’s interview with the man the myth the internet sensation they call Streebo.  J.T.McRoberts is one third of the men behind Mutantville Productions and Mutantville.com along with Geo Swanko and S. Brent Bowers.  Here’s everything you wanted to know about MVP but were afraid to ask.

GD:Why the ‘’mutant’’ reference in your company moniker? A big Scifi fan?

JTM: When we first formed what would become Mutantville Productions in 2003, I came up with a long list of potential names for the studio.  I wrote out probably fifty different names – almost all of them having something to do with mysticism or martial arts or the samurai or something like that.  Almost as an afterthought the very last name I wrote was “Mutantville.”   Of course, when we’re going over the names – the one we gravitated towards was Mutantville.  My partner in crime Brento (S.Brent Bowers) suggested “Mutantville Studios” but I knew right away that it had to be Mutantville Productions because then we could build the company taglines and myths around the initials “MVP” although that makes no sense because it should really be “M.P.”

I am a big sci-fi, fantasy and horror fan but the root of the mutant obsession came straight from the X-Men.  Chris Clairmont’s Uncanny X-Men was one of my favorite comics as a kid and doing homage to Marvel’s merry mutants made perfect sense to me.  I always envisioned Mutantville as a company dedicated to all works of speculative fiction (as Harlan Ellison would say) – not just horror.  Horror is simply the easiest genre to work with when working on a limited budget – or no budget as in our case.  I do have scripts in the works for a superhero movie and also a sci-fi horror flick.  Despite our tagline of “changing the face of independent horror,” we are dedicated to all the sub-genres of speculative fiction.

Get the rest of this red hot interview after the leap.

GD: It is obvious you are a huge fan of the horror genre. At what age did you have your first real ‘’horrifying’’ experience? Was it a film or a book?

JTM: It was the combination of a lot of different moments from my childhood.  I grew up in Mississippi which is the real Deep South and to me it was always a climate of fear.  Every time a neighbor’s dog or cat would disappear, it was attributed to a satanic cult that was allegedly sacrificing them.  We were always being told to stay away from strangers because they were all involved in cults that wanted to have sex with us and then kill us – and not always in that order.  I have vivid memories of seeing fully robed Klansmen marching down the streets and I even remember the time they set a cross on fire in a school yard.  Sometimes nothing is more terrifying than real life.

I was raised by a single mother who supported us and put herself through school.  Because of this she could not afford a babysitter.  I would often have to wait on her at the university.  I remember one time after I had been waiting for hours and hours and I was bored so I decided to go look for her.  I knew she had gone through these big double doors into another room so I walked right in.  I entered into this cavernous room like something out of the end of Fulci’s The Beyond that was filled with naked people lying on tables.  As I walked in the smell of phemaldehyde almost knocked me down.  I wondered why all these people were sleeping in this room and how could they possibly sleep with the lights on.  As I got closer to them I noticed that little organ shaped toys were scattered on the tables next to them.  Then came the moment when I noticed they had all been slit open from neck to nuts so to speak. Those weren’t toys next to them and they weren’t sleeping.  They were all dead.  I turned and ran out of the room screaming in horror.

I have vivid memories of watching JAWS on television and being frozen in terror as Quint was bitten in half by the shark.  This was back in the days when network television would just blank out curse words but still showed violence and gore on the screen.  I discussed this on our New Year’s Eve Mutantville Player’s Club podcast recently but I misremembered part of it.  Concurrent with watching Bruce the shark wreak havoc in the oceans of JAWS, I was confronted with the idea that Bruce was terrorizing small inland lakes in the pilot episode of the little remembered sitcom The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo.  In that episode some guy takes the shark from JAWS and puts it in a lake to keep people away from some stash he had there or something.  I haven’t seen it in thirty years so the plot details are murky.  What isn’t murky is the fact that not only was I horrified of going in the ocean because I was sure there were sharks there but now I was terrified of lakes because apparently there were great white sharks there as well!

 

I vividly remember my first terrifying movie going experience coming not from a horror film – but from Disney’s goofy attempt to cash in on Star Wars – The Black Hole.  For some reason as a child I was absolutely terrified by the red killer robot Maximillian.  Every time he appeared on the screen, I would hide behind the seats.

The first horror film I saw in the theater was Stephen King’s Creepshow 2.  My estranged father came to visit and as always asked which movie I would like to go see.  I replied Creepshow 2 not because I was interested in the movie itself  – but because it was a horror film and something that my mother would never allow me to see.  There is a moment in Creepshow 2 in the segment entitled “The Raft” where these teenagers are surprised by this evil man-eating glob of black goo.  That moment stuck with me forever because I wasn’t expecting it.  It was my first real moment of realization of how horror can unfold unexpectedly in a horror film.  Now just as I’m getting over my fear of great whites in the local lake – I have replaced that with a fear of floating black goo.  That doesn’t sound right.

GD: I’ve been hearing the term ‘’guerrilla filmmaking’’ a lot lately. Care to define it for me?

 

JTM: At MVP, “guerrilla filmmaking” has a lot of meanings.  Firstly it means making a movie by any means necessary.  Secondly, it means doing things in a very do-it-yourself type manner.  Guerrilla filmmakers never ask for permission to shoot in public.  You just do it.  A guerrilla filmmaker must be ready to move the camera at any time and capture the little miracles presented to us.  Guerrilla filmmakers are a close band of brothers that are literally waging a war against Hollywood and their wasteful ways of filmmaking.  Where a Hollywood product would involve one hundred crew members to shoot a scene of two actors talking in the park – the guerrilla filmmakers will have three crew members to shoot the action.  All you need is someone to hold the camera, one guy to hold the boom and one guy to yell “action.” The trick is finding the balance between guerrilla and professional. We still want to treat cast and crew to amenities on the set such as food and drinks – but there are some niceties that will often be missing.  For example, actors will often have to come to set “camera ready” meaning they need have their own hair and make-up ready before they arrive or be prepared to do it themselves.  The way I see it – no one is paying me to write, produce or direct this movie so I’m giving everything I can to make the best movie possible.  This means in effect that I want everyone involved to look as good as possible.  We are all working toward the common goal of creating something great that will reach the fans.

GD: Tell me about the C for Chaos film. The premise sounds pretty wild.

JTM: C for Chaos tells the story of Art, a troubled young comic book artist, who finds his life in turmoil after his girlfriend dumps him and his friends suddenly start dying at the hands of an enigmatic serial killer known only as the Numbers Killer.  I wanted the film to be a supernatural slasher in the vein of A Nightmare On Elm Street where there were no rules to where the horror would come from.  The movie came about because the owner of the local comic shop offered to let us shoot in his store.  I originally want to do a more family friendly comedy ala Kevin Smith’s Clerks but no one wanted to be involved.  After people kept asking if there were zombies in it – I decided we better make it a horror film.  I changed the love story plot to fit into a horror film and put every horror element that I could into it.

I approached C for Chaos with the attitude that we would never get the chance to do another movie so this one had to be good.  We had a great cast and some really cool ideas but it took almost three years to shoot the entire project.  In that time, actors came and went and the script had to be adapted on a regular basis to overcome challenges.  Most indie productions would fall apart but we made it through to the end.  All credit for that has to go to our lead actor Scott Thomas who saw it through and never gave up.  To repay Scott I cast him in our second full length feature G.H.O.S.T. which will be out on DVD later this year.

Unfortunately, in post-production, I encountered a lot of problems and had to step away from it for a while.  We had over one hundred and ten hours of footage and the first cut of the film reached the three and a half hour mark before I could even edit the ending.  It just didn’t work in a linear fashion so I had to step back and think about what to do with it.  Fortunately I discovered Ralph Rosenbaum’s book When the Shooting Stops, the Editing Begins: A Film Editor’s Story. 

In his book, Rosenbaum chronicled how he had been brought in to save several productions that were having the exact same problems I was having with C for Chaos.  He helped save movies such as Mel Brookes’ The Producers, Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, A Thousand Clowns, and many more.  At it’s simplest it came down to changing the linear flow of the films to a non-linear flow – very much like what Tarantino would become famous for fifty years later with Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction.  At present I am restructuring C for Chaos to be released as a horror web series.  It’s something that’s never really been done properly before so I’m very excited about getting it out there for people to enjoy.

GB: This Todd A. Britt fellow is apparently a very capable FX man. Where did you meet up with him?

JTM: Todd A. Britt is extremely talented and I feel very fortunate to work with him.  On any horror film – regardless of budget – the special make-up FX can be the make it or break it element.  Todd calls his work “makeup illusions.”  I met Todd through our mutual friend S.Brent Bowers as they were childhood friends.  Brent and Todd made tons of short films as teenagers over the years with such awesome names as The Zombie Killers, Vampire Narc and Rednecks vs Ninja.  Todd never had a formal education in make-up FX.  He learned it all by studying Tom Savini’s books Grande Illusions I & II and by good old fashioned trial and error.  Several of their early movies are available on Youtube. You’d be amazed at how sophisticated some of the FX were considering the fact that they were made by teenagers.  Todd doesn’t get enough credit from the local film community – but once they realize the extent of his talents they’ll start trying to steal him away from us.  Todd is essentially the fourth leg of MVP.

GD: Ever have any mishaps on the set? Any funny stories to tell us about?

JTM:  There is always something unexpected happening on the set.  There are so many strange stories that I’m starting to lose track of them all.  We’ll always do something goofy like take our actors in full make-up out to eat for dinner.  During C for Chaos we took our actor Ronnie Cruz, who was adorned in traditional Peking Opera Monkey King attire, to the local Japanese restaurant to eat.  It took three hours to put that make up on him so there was no way we were wiping it off just so he could eat.  It was funny to see the squares stare and whisper.

One of the funnier moments came on the set of G.H.O.S.T.  We were shooting what has become known as the “zombie scene.”  We wanted to have a nice shot of a zombie rising up out of the ground so in true guerrilla filmmaking fashion this meant digging a hole and throwing an actor into it.  We put our teenage P.A., Jeremy Mullis, in zombie make-up and buried him in a hole so he could burst up out of the ground.  It’s late March so the air is still cold and the ground is even colder so we couldn’t leave him buried all day.  We quickly covered him and scattered leaves over him to make sure he was obscured.  As soon as we stepped back and rolled the cameras, Brent’s dog Sugar comes running in and feverishly decides to dig Jeremy up!  When we tried to hold her back she got really worried for Jeremy and kept trying to help him.  It was a really funny moment.  Fortunately we were able to hold her back long enough to get the shot. Sugar calmed down as soon as she saw Jeremy was alright.  There is footage from that day on our Mutantville Players Youtube account if any wants to see it.

GD: Any favorite horror films on your ‘’preferred viewing’’ list?

Wow, there are so many great films it’s always hard to name just a few.  When I want something transgressive I go with Cronenberg’s The Fly or Shivers.  When I want to remind myself of the basics of horror I watch Robert Wise’s The Haunting.  When we’re working with slashers, I love studying John Carpenter’s Halloween.  When I want pure guerrilla filmmaking inspiration – I’ll go with Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead.  If’ I’m just relaxing and want something fun to play in the background I like to watch Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses or Vicor Salva’s Jeepers Creepers.  My favorite zombie movie in recent years is George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead.  I never understand the hate that movie gets from horror fans – but all of my filmmaking buddies love it.  Diary seems to be a filmmaker’s horror film.

GD: Any advice for the fledgling filmmakers out there?

JTM: Yes, find some good partners and go make your movie.  Know your role and do the best that you can.  Don’t try to do everything by yourself because you will burn out quick and make something that no one wants to watch.  If you’re the writer then bust your ass on that script.  Get critique from your friends and rewrite it as many times as it takes.  If you’re the director – then study the great directors.  Go watch Hitchcock, Welles, Ford, Romero, Carpenter, Craven, so on and so forth.  Don’t just study horror filmmakers – study GREAT filmmakers.  You must study your craft and hone your technique every day.  There are a million other independent filmmakers out there and your work has to cut through them like a lightsaber to the gut.  Most importantly never take “no” for an answer, believe that you can make it happen and you’ll find that anything is possible.

~Fin

Special thanks to Grant Dean for the interview.