• Home
• •Archive
• •Separated at Birth
• •Memorial Haiku
• •Pirate Talk
• •Your Age in Fortnights
• •DVDs
• •E-mail

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
Robert A. Caro

Five Easy Pieces

The movie industry needs to find a way to let people know that they're listening to a $50,000 sound system, sitting in a $200 seat, looking at a picture generated by a projector worth up to $100,000 (or whatever) in a multimillion dollar building, and the popcorn machine costs $10,000, and the film company gets 3/4 of the money they spent on their tickets. Then maybe they'll realize they are getting a frickin' bargain for their eight bucks.
Mike Blakesley

The latest book I've read is an autobiography by actor Bruce Campbell entitled "If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor." The clever and geeky amongst you know Bruce; for the uninitiated, he's the guy in the Evil Dead movies and played Autolycus in the Xena and Hercules television series. Still don't know who he is? That's okay; that's the whole point of his book. It's dedicated to the working stiff actors of Hollywood and beyond. For every Julia Roberts and Brad Pitt, there are a thousand Bruce Campbells, workhorse actors who make those "stars" look good. Of course, this guy has a bit of a cult following, so he's sort of a champion for those worker bees.

I've been a fan of Bruce since I first stumbled across Evil Dead II in the late 80s. Me and a couple other guys went to the video store to pick up yet another cheesy horror movie that we could half-watch while we drank. However, this one was a little different; it was actually good. Entertaining. Funny. We loved it.

Of course, we had to find out more about this guy. At the time, there wasn't much. We did learn, however, that they were making a sequel, which would eventually turn into that Sci-Fi Channel staple Army of Darkness. I'll have you know that I was one of the 16 people who saw that in the theater.

Bruce kept popping up here and there. I saw Darkman because he had a five second cameo (plus Sam Raimi, director of the Evil Dead movies and one of Bruce's cronies, had written and directed it). Same deal with Xena and Hercules. Well, mostly Xena.... And he got his own short-lived series, Brisco County, Jr. Bruce had it goin' on.

Like everyone else these days, he has his own web site, Bruce Campbell Online. He contributes a lot to it and has written a series of essays about show business that I've really enjoyed. When I found out he was writing his book, I was pretty enthused. It didn't disappoint. I highly recommend it.

Let's see Brad Pitt do that.