WCS 63: Holiday flicks & horror pics
w/: 2024’s top weed strains + Eugene's Asians targeted + Jim Rome
I’ve been in touch with a long-lost cousin who also made the unlikely journey from evangelical Christian Sandusky, Ohio to Hollywood. Cuzzo is a cinematographer, and has been a sounding board while I embark on my ambitious screenwriting project.
Mathias Saunders hit me up with an actual telephone call last week. He didn’t want to talk about Gaspar Yanga though. He wanted to talk about Tubi.
“You know you can get a deal if you come through with a Christmas movie.”
That Fox Corp’s over-the-top platform is the streaming world’s home to independent Black cinema cannot qualify as news. What I didn’t know is that over the past decade Christmas movies have become an avalanche into the game for our folks. Tyler Perry pioneered this, which explains why I was not hip.
That, plus the whole Jehovah’s Witness thing maintained my ignorance.
Horror films are the known indie way in; my cousin himself got his break through horror when he shot the low-budget Prison of the Psychotic Damned 19 years ago. Spooky shit. It was a slight shock to learn that my cousin was working in this genre, as involvement with films like these was forbidden. We were inculcated. It would be hard to imagine, for example, my sister doing one.
Cousin Mathias believes that his ignorance helped him deliver unconventional images.
“Being in Ohio as a Jehovah’s Witness, you didn’t know anything about the demonic scene,” Cousin Mathias told me. “I did not know what was possible.”
He called to say that a couple of new Christmas films that he shot just hit Tubi.
Christmas at the Frathouse is a Greek comedy that happens to play out across holiday season. Charmin Lee’s film has step stuff and some decent performances in an upwardly-mobile Black setting and a few earned laughs. A few. The indie films of Tubi sometimes call to mind The Golden Age of Porn in that back then you would see a scene with a great performance, but the camera would be out of focus. Or, some amateur thespian would be giving the performance of her life, but her clothed acting acting partner was coked out, giving her nothing and the sound was fucked up.
This is certainly not to say that Tubi indies are less professional than peak 70s porn. It’s just rare for newbies to pull together all of filmmaking’s elements.
The platform’s strongest and most commercial indies look like A Merry Switchmas, another film in which Cousin Mathias does some nice things with his camera. A sweet-tempered, class-conscious family flick of the sort whose title gives away all, A Merry Switchmas is not something I would ever watch on purpose. But I know a successful product when I see one.
People are going to be throwing A Merry Switchmas on to settle their youngsters, dependably, over time.
For a lot of reasons, my screen project is unlikely to land on Tubi, though it doesn’t feel distant in spirit from some of that independent product. One has to get in where they fit in, per this game.
The Future is now in San Francisco
An autonomous Zoox vehicle, sighted last weekend in SOMA, on Brannon.
The Full Herb Caen
I’ve been consuming cannabis since 1978, and in an intentional, well-informed way for a decade, and I am still afraid that some strong sativa’s gonna send me screaming into the streets…
Take note of how little play Defense Secretary candidate Pete Hegseth’s drunken “Kill all Muslims” chant has gotten so far…
The closest thing to administrative experience that new Stanford football general manager Andrew Luck has is his father, Oliver Luck, who has run the gang at a number of levels. High-visibility managers who delegate like crazy is the boss trend to look out for…
With its pick up this week of Blake Snell from the Giants, the Dodgers are poised to be like the Trump Administration: Fuckin’ disgusting…
Baseball fans are going to hate that blue LA cap like it’s a MAGA hat…
And if dem bums from Brooklyn bring in Juan Soto next week? Woo…
That diminutive bandleader who has to laugh at Stephen Colbert’s jokes is the hardest-working man in television…
Having said this, Doechii’s medley performance on Wednesday’s Late Show was possibly the greatest musical performance in late-night television history…
Two DEI administrators at the Oregon Department of Education are on leave and people are starting to ask why…
We’re entering a new era of dependence on business morality. May God help us all…
I was walking back from the drug store a few days ago, uphill, and it occurred to me that my walk home was uphill to the last place I lived, in Echo Park. Times can get tricky, I told myself, but as long as I’m heading up to the place where I rest my head, life can only be going so badly…
More Herb below…
And now for the 10 stories that would not vacate my mind this week…
10 That time Jay Z decided selling $50 joints would be good business
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