Happy Halloween!
Tony Hillerman, 1925-2008.
DAVISON — Davison resident Kevin Leffler was scheduled to head to Miami Oct. 22 for a premiere and release of his movie Shooting Michael Moore, a humorous documentary that looks seriously at Moore, the Davison-raised filmmaker. Leffler, a certified public accountant and college professor, said he’s been talking with David Baker Enterprises of Burbank, Calif., for a little more than six months about getting the movie contracted. “We were picked up by American Movie Cinemas,” said Leffler. “The first showing will be in theaters at the AMC Mall of Americas in Miami, five times a day, Oct. 24-30,” he said. “I’m very excited.”
Leffler will be in Miami all week. He’s scheduled to give interviews and answer questions Thursday and Friday.
“If all goes well, the movie will show in New York and California Dec. 5,” He said.
“We took the movie to the University of Miami about six months ago for people to watch, they loved it. It was amazing,” he said.
Leffler also won the People’s Choice Award at the Flint Film Festival in May 2007.
He’s been working on his film, which shows “the other side” of Moore for about four years. “I’m working on my master’s degree in making this movie,” he said jokingly.
Leffler a life-long Davison resident, who went to school with Moore in Davison, said a lot of people think Moore has done a lot of good with his movie releases such as Roger and Me and Sicko.
“I thought people should know there is another side of Mike, that he’s out for himself,” he said.
During the filming process Leffler said he was upset when he found Rhonda Britton, the Rabbit Lady in Roger and Me. “Michael gets $3 million for the film and this poor woman got $100. She ended up going bankrupt and tried contacting Michael for help, and he acted like she didn’t even exist,” Leffler said.
“My question to him is: how do you say you’re for the underclass and the blue collar person?” he asked.
With his movie on the road, Leffler now is looking for a distributor to sell copies of the movie.
He estimates his total out-of-pocket cost for the movie is about $500,000. “I’d like to break even,” he said about movie sales.
Leffler said he will be donating 10 percent of the proceeds from his movie to the Flint and Davison school districts.
While he hasn’t said anything specific about any upcoming projects, Leffler said he has some ideas.
For more information about Shooting Michael Moore, visit Leffler’s website, www.shootingmichaelmoore.com.
Palmer, 27, of Litchfield, Maine, is an industrial-design student at Rochester Institute of Technology. He wears in his headband the IDs of 17 students who had been humans until he tagged them, turning them into zombies.
"I get the biggest kick out of walking up behind someone who's looking all around except behind them," he says as his group prepares to head out into the night. "It gets your heart pumping, that exhilaration."
Welcome to the world of Humans vs. Zombies (HvZ), a tag-like game that is the latest trend in campus entertainment. An HvZ game typically involves hundreds of students and runs 24 hours a day for days on end; dwindling numbers of humans try to fend off and outlast growing legions of zombies.
The rules are fundamentally simple: Zombie tags human, human becomes a zombie. Unlike movie zombies, with shambling walks and undead makeup, zombies in the game just wear headbands to distinguish them from armband-wearing humans. And they are free to sprint.
Humans ward off zombies with Nerf guns or by hitting them with a balled-up sock — a defensive move that stuns the zombie, usually for 15 minutes. The goal is to still be a live human at the end.
A group of students at Goucher College in Towson, Md., is credited with starting the game, which has spread across the USA. Addicted to the first-person shooter video game Splinter Cell, the students wanted to create a live version of it on campus; it turned into tag and then became zombie-fied, says Goucher graduate Brad Sappington, one of the creators.
"It just unfolded like that: 'We like zombies. Let's find a way to make real zombies at college.' It was alcohol-induced, I'm sure."
The Internet has played a big role in the spread of the game. Goucher students created a website (hvzsource.com) that is a repository of information about and rules for the game. And YouTube videos of the game being played at Goucher have found fans at other schools.
Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., hosted its first student-organized HvZ game last fall after one student stumbled across online video footage of the game and brought the idea there, says Jason White, 23, a senior from Indianapolis who is organizing a tournament there this week.
RIT hosted its first HvZ game last fall after Zack Bessler, 21, a computer science major from Lyman, Maine, said he came across information about the game.
"It just sounded like ridiculous amounts of fun," Bessler says. "Does it get any better than zombie-themed tag?"
Daneman writes for the Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat & Chronicle.
Joshua Kaminski, 20 of Flint, prays with actors before they begin at the City of Hope's "Hell House" haunted house.
"We really feel that Halloween has become Satan's holiday," Ginelle said. "The church doesn't know what to do with it. They either try to ignore it, or condemn it and everyone who participates in it."
An alternative, she said, is to create a frightening experience "that rivals the scary scenes of other haunted houses, but portrays the real consequences that people face as the result of their bad choices, including the ultimate choice of true life or death."
The Flint couple has organized similar Halloween events at other churches, but this year's project is different. It takes place, not in a church, but in an empty building located in the midst of other haunted houses and trails.
Hell House is in the former Lemon Wedge Antique Store, at 4476 S. Dort Highway, north of Maple Road, in Burton.
"Finding this building was key," Tennison said. "We're in the middle of other haunted houses. The other night, we had 10 carloads of people who stopped and wanted to come in, and we're not even open yet."
Beginning at 7 p.m. today and continuing for the next two weekends, visitors to Hell House will be met at the entrance by the Grim Reaper, who will escort them in groups of 10 through a labyrinth of dark corridors and grisly settings.
Scenes include a mock drunk driving crash, a party-turned shooting scene and a domestic violence situation that drives a teenage girl to slice her arms with a box cutter.
The actors are adults, high school and college students who "started with our initial ideas and then took off with them," Tennison said. "They're having a blast, and they're very good."
As visitors progress through the corridors, scenes get increasingly intense, culminating finally in depictions of hell and heaven, Tennison said.
"It gets scarier and more emotional until you arrive in hell, which has a fountain of blood and Satan, who tells you, 'You didn't think I was real, but I'm as real as you are.'"
In the final depiction of heaven, volunteers will tell real-life stories of how faith in God changed their lives.
"They've gone through some of the stuff that we're showing in the scenes, but that's no longer the life they're living now," Tennison said. "God restored them."
Hell House is intended for those 13 and older. Visitors who "don't want to be too scared" will be given the option to take a short cut to the final scenes, Tennison said.
All visitors will be given repeated warnings about Christian content "because we want to be as honest as we can be about what our purpose is," Ginelle said.
The ultimate message is one of redemption. But visitors who are brave enough to stay for the entire half-hour experience won't be disappointed, Tennison promised.
"They will feel they've gotten their money's worth," he said. "There's a lot of death depicted. No matter how many times I've seen these scenes, I still get shivers watching them.
"It'll send chills through you."
Former Flint resident Lois Whitmeyer reflects on 'Romper Room'
by Chick Jacobs | The Associated Press
Wednesday October 15, 2008, 7:36 AM
FAYETTEVILLE, North Carolina -- By today's computer-generated, HD-animated standards, "Romper Room" seems pretty tame stuff for kids. Just a show with a cute hostess, puppets and parades, and a "magic mirror" that didn't fool anyone.
But 50 years ago, Lois Whitmeyer notes, that flickering, black-and-white TV show was cutting edge. And in a time when a Do-Bee meant something altogether different from today, Whitmeyer was one of a lucky few starring in children's TV.
"Everybody and his uncle wanted to be on the show," the former Flint resident and host of the locally produced "Romper Room" show said. "It was new, it was exciting."
Whitmeyer's mementos of the early days of kid's TV are tucked in photo albums. She's not sure where the mirror is -- probably somewhere in a box in her Gates Four home.
And no, the magic mirror still doesn't fool kids.
"Really it was two mirrors," she said. "I'd hold up the first one, with a real mirror, and say the magic words.
"Then the camera would blur while I put down that mirror and pulled up the other one. Then I was able to 'see' the kids at home, or that little Johnny hadn't been doing his homework or whatever the parents had written to me.
"We laugh now, but back then it was a big deal to have Miss Lois say hello to you on Romper Room."
Unless you're a transplant from Michigan, you probably don't remember Miss Lois. Each town had a different "Romper Room" hostess. New York had Miss Louise. Baltimore had Miss Nancy. Every show across seven countries was unique.
The message, however, was consistent: Be polite. Viewers were pleasantly reminded to eat their vegetables, not to put rocks in their mouths, say please and thank you and generally do all the things that a purple dinosaur suggested two generations later.
Whitmeyer stumbled into celebrity through a combination of accident and desperation. The wife of TV programming pioneer Ernie Whitmeyer, she was a stay-at-home mom as her husband helped get Flint TV station WJRT (Channel 12) up and running.
One of the first shows on the station was "Romper Room." Lois would watch each morning with her son, Art, as the hostess led children in songs and activities.
"It got to where I knew the show by heart," she said.
One day, Ernie Whitmeyer received a panicked call from the studio. The "Romper Room" lady had been in a car accident and was hospitalized.
"I mentioned offhand that it couldn't be that hard," Lois Whitmeyer recalls. "I said I could do it."
The next morning, she was. She clomped around the cramped studio with six children every day while the regular hostess recovered.
Studio officials were so impressed that when the original "Romper Room" hostess moved to a bigger market, Lois was asked to be a permanent replacement.
"Remember at the time, TV was still evolving," she said. "'Romper Room' was a franchised show owned by Bert Claster. Each hostess was required to attend training school in Baltimore, to learn how to work with cameras and lights.
"Since I was with Ernie, I knew all of that from the beginning. Those poor girls were having to learn it. I was living it."
In Flint, she was a local celebrity. Kids would squeal when they spotted her shopping, and the TV station often sent her to events for publicity.
There were some close calls on the air. Since the show was live, there was no way to re-shoot gaffes.
"One time I was leading the children around in a parade, and the button holding up my skirt popped off," she said. "Luckily, the camera guy was quick and just moved the camera up above my waist, and we kept marching."
Whitmeyer proved so skilled that she was retained as a hostess. A few years later, she became one of the few "traveling hostesses" who flew around the country to fill in for others who were sick or often pregnant.
"You couldn't be pregnant and work on TV, even if you were married," she said. Often Art would accompany her, becoming an unofficial child of another city.
"I threatened him to never ever call me mom during the show," she said with a laugh. "God bless him, he never did. Some other kids would call me mom by accident, but he was real good about it."
Ernie's career took him to bigger stations in the mid-1960s, with milestones like the first televised basketball games at Madison Square Garden and the inaugural Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon. Lois retired, returning to the other side of the magic mirror. Eventually the couple retired to Fayetteville.
Ernie Whitmeyer passed away a couple of years ago, and Lois has been battling a variety of illnesses. She doesn't brag about her past celebrity, but with a little coaxing, she can still sing the Do-Bee song.
"It was so much fun, and I feel I've been blessed with a wonderful life," she said. "I guess the only downside is I don't watch TV like most people. I'll sit there and talk to the screen."
Even without the magic mirror.
Chick Jacobs writes for The Fayetteville Observer.
This is the first time I've used DMC Light Effects floss. The colors are beautiful but they are a rayon-pain-in-the-butt! The floss is slippery and the stitches don't lie down like they are supposed to. Fortunately, Deb sells something called Thread Heaven, a thread conditioner which is like silicon beeswax. You run the floss over Thread Heaven to coat it and the floss lies nice and flat just like it's supposed to. Because it's silicon instead of wax, Thread Heaven does not stain the floss or the fabric.
I wish I had been at the West Hollywood Book Fair! Ray Bradbury attended to talk to the audience about his love of writing. Regular readers of this blog (all two of you) know he's my favorite living author and I would love to meet him. I love his stories and I'm always inspired by his essays about writing.The Many Loves of Ray Bradbury
by Erik Amaya, Contributing Writer
Wed, October 1st, 2008 at 7:58AM PST
Updated: Wed, October 1st, 2008 at 8:45AM PST
Well before author Ray Bradbury appeared on stage, the audience at Sunday’s West Hollywood Book Fair eclipsed the number of available seats. When he arrived, Bradbury was greeted by applause. Needing no introduction, the writer began to tell the audience about love. “Over a period of years, [I’ve discovered] the answer to everything is love,” he told the crowd. Bradbury loves films, plays, and people. His passion for these things has afforded him an extraordinary life. With a new production of “Fahrenheit 451” opening soon, many of Bradbury’s thoughts focused around the novel and play. His story began with actor Charles Laughton. “Charles Laughton was my teacher and my good friend. He asked me to write a [stage] version of ‘Fahrenheit 451,’” Bradbury recalled. “He took me to Disneyland and I flew over [Peter Pan’s London] with Charles Laughton. You can’t beat that, can you?”
It was on this trip that Laughton asked Bradbury to write a long-form play. The result was “Fahrenheit 451.” “One night, he called me and took to dinner with Paul Gregory, his producer,” Bradbury said. “Over dinner, they gave me two double martinis before they gave me the bad news. My play didn’t work.”
Bradbury famously wrote the novel version of “Fahrenheit 451” in the basement of the Powell Library at UCLA. “When I first got married, and we had two children, it was hard to write around the house. I needed an office, but I had no money,” he remembered. “I was wandering around UCLA one day at the Powell Library and I heard typing downstairs. I went down to see what was going on.” It turned out there was a typing room in the basement with a pool of twelve typewriters. “You could rent one for ten cents an hour,” Bradbury recalled. “I said, ‘Oh my god! This is going to be my office! I don’t need money!’ I went to the bank; got ten dollars worth of dimes. I went to UCLA, moved into the typing room and in nine days, I spent nine dollars and eighty cents and wrote the first version of ‘Fahrenheit 451.’”
This drew applause from the crowd. “So it was a dime novel, wasn’t it?” he joked.
Written during the McCarthy era of suspicion and paranoia, Bradbury had a hard time placing his novel for publication. He recalled the person that eventually did publish it. “A young man came along. He was starting a new magazine. He was roughly the same age as I was.” Bradbury was twenty-six at the time. “He said, ‘I don’t have much money, can you sell me a story of some sort?’ I said, ‘Look, I’ve got this new novel in three parts, ‘Fahrenheit 451,’ can you buy that from me?’ He said, ‘Yes, I’ll give you three hundred dollars.’ So, in late winter of 1953, ‘Fahrenheit 451’ appeared in the first issues of Playboy Magazine. Hugh Hefner has been a good friend for fifty years.”
Around this time, twenty-seven of Bradbury's stories were adapted by EC Comics. “They stole the stories! I caught them at it!” he recalled with a smile. “I trapped them and they started to pay me and the adaptations came out very well. The illustrations were beautiful. I am very proud of my association with that comic magazine.”
Despite the way that situation began, Bradbury feels his stories appearing in comics form made sense. “I started my life with comic strips. When I was nine years old, Buck Rodgers came into my life. I looked at Buck Rodgers. He pulled me into the future and I never came back. Buck Rodgers is one of my fathers. It’s natural I would want to be in comic strips.”
Shifting from the stage and magazines to the screen, Bradbury talked about his early cinematic experiences. “I started going to films when I was three-years-old. I saw ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’ with Lon Cheney. I saw ‘Phantom of the Opera.’ I saw the dinosaur film, [The Lost World], when I was seven and dinosaurs changed me for life. I met Ray Harryhausen when I was eighteen and we promised each other to someday do a film together.” In 1952, Harryhausen created the creature for “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms,” based on Bradbury’s short story, “The Foghorn.”
“The Foghorn” grew from Bradbury’s boyhood love of dinosaurs. Like “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms,” that love would lead to another film, John Huston’s 1956 version of “Moby Dick.” “[‘The Foghorn’] was the first story in [the short story collection] ‘The Golden Apples of the Sun,’” Bradbury explained. “I gave a copy of that book to John Huston. He read that first story and later told me he gave me the job because he read my story about dinosaurs.” Working on the film was not the happiest of experiences and would later form the basis for the novel, “Green Shadows, White Whale.”
It was during this time that the stage entered the circle of Bradbury’s loves. “I went to work in Ireland for a whole year writing screenplay of ‘Moby Dick,’” he remembered. “While I was in Dublin, I saw the work of Sean O’Casey on the stage there. I saw George Bernard Shaw’s production of ‘Saint Joan’ and these productions began to teach me to write for the stage.” All the while, he would receive letters from friends sure that Bradbury would come home and write something about Ireland. He would write back with, ‘No, I don’t think I will.’ Eventually, that position changed. “When I’d been home about a year, a voice cried out inside my head, ‘Rick, darlin’!’
“I said, ‘Who is it?’
“He said, ‘It’s your cab driver that drove you every night from Gillcock to Dublin and
“I said, ‘Yes.’
He said, ‘Would you mind putting it down?’ So I began to write one act plays about Ireland and I didn’t know if they were any good or not.”
Eventually a friend of Bradbury’s asked about the plays. “He said, ‘Come to my house next Thursday night. I’ll have some actors there and they’ll stand up and read your plays to you and you’ll be able to tell if they’re any good.’ So, the next Thursday night, I went to his house and he had actors there and they read my plays and we fell on the floor. The goddamned things work! So at long last, I was thirty-seven-years-old, [and] I was beginning to write plays that worked.” This would eventually lead to his long form play about Ireland, “Falling Upward.”
Working out of Desilu Studios (now part of the Paramount lot), Bradbury put on productions of plays such as “The Pedestrian” and “The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit.” Performed with amateurs and minimal lighting and direction, Bradbury discovered despite the technical difficulties, his plays really did work. He opened “The World of Ray Bradbury” in New York in 1964. “You feel your way, don’t you,” Bradbury said. “You love something and you do it. Then it works, or it doesn’t. Then you do something else that you love.”
Eventually, Bradbury even made that stage version of “Fahrenheit 451” work.
Audio book: The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, read by Ray Bradbury
