Latest / Cinema Yūgen / Cadillac Deserts & Drive‑In Dreams — A Conversation with Joe Lansdale

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Cadillac Deserts & Drive‑In Dreams — A Conversation with Joe Lansdale · Cinema Yūgen

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G'day. That's right. It's that time again. Time for Cinema Eugen.
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Yes, welcome back. Ladies and gentlemen, Cinema Eugen catching up with the classics
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fan requested. Kent's classics.
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This classic is Joe R.
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Lansdale, if you're not familiar with Joe Lansdale. He is an American writer
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and martial arts instructor, prose writer of a variety of genres,
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including Western horror, science fiction, mystery, suspense.
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He's also written comic books, screenplays, and several of his novels have been
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adapted into film and television.
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Bubba Hotep, Among them, he is the winner of the British Fantasy Award,
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the American Horror Award, the Edgar Award, and 11 Bram Stoker Awards.
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He is one of my hero's champion, Mojo Storyteller Joe Lansdale.
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Our conversation picks up as Joe eloquently calms me down after I inform him
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that he's my hero and I'm extremely nervous to talk to him, but he immediately calmed me down.
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Here he is, the mighty champion mojo storyteller, Joe. Ah, Lansdale.
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Oh, man. Oh, you don't need to be with me. You don't need to be nervous for me at all.
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You're just like you sat there in my living room, you know? Yeah,
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but if you had told me, like, you know, back in the day when I first read the
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first Joe Lansdale book that I'd be talking to you on the phone,
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I would have said, go and have another drink, if you know what I mean.
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What was your first one? My very first one that I found in a secondhand bookstore.
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It was a, it's a chapbook version. Awesome.
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On the far side of the Cadillac desert with dead folks. Oh yeah.
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Yeah. I remember those. There were several of those that roadkill press, I think it was.
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Roadkill press. And they did several different ones. Yeah. Yeah.
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That was my very, very first one. I read that thing over and over and over and over and over.
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And I just thought, I just thought that's incredible. How you go from,
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from something that's relatively bleak and dystopian.
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If you will, to, to, to just these, I don't know how to describe it.
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It's like flourishes of humor, flourishes of absurdity, but it all works.
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Like it's not, it's, you know, some authors take you some places and then they
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throw you and you go, well, that was interesting, but it doesn't really fit
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with the rest of the story, if you know what I mean.
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Yeah, I think that the things can be, not always congruous, you know,
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when people are working on these things and they think I'll need to have some
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humor in it. I'll need to have this.
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Well, that's not the same. That's like putting together a fruit salad instead
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of blending something up in a blender.
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And, you know, it can be entertaining enough, but there's a conscious feeling
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of those things of a collision of ideas and lines and sort of a blending of ideas and storylines.
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And I think that that's, that's a, that's hard to do, you know,
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and I'm not giving myself any credit because I found it by accident and
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by my own personality but the the thing
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is is and i was influenced by people like robert rock who
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did that kind of thing very well and you know there's a difference though and
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i think when writers do it they have to make a distinction between just bringing
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in humor or and instead of making it a part of the texture of the story do you
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think it's do you think it's as simple as you know how.
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Some people are funny. Like when you go out with someone, you know,
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and you know them to be funny, but they're funny when they're not trying.
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They're funny when they're not trying to be funny.
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Absolutely. Well, and, but there's also the thing, and we'll take it from a more static viewpoint.
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You can take a joke and you'd have 10 people tell that same joke.
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And some people, it'll just be hilarious. And others, it'll just lay there like a dead fish.
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And there's also those guys that come in and they're just talking about their
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everyday life, but they have such a unique viewpoint on it and come from such
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a different angle that they're hilarious, you know, but they're not necessarily
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working at it. They may realize they have a sense of humor.
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They may realize that they can transfer that sense of humor to others,
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but they may not necessarily be making a super conscious effort of it.
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It's just who they are. Yeah, yeah.
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Well, you and like I said at the top of the hour, you and Hank Bukowski were
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a huge influence on my own personal writing. Thank you.
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And that's really what I took away from both.
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I mean, my style is like this weird alchemy now.
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But it has become, like you were suggesting, more of my personality and not...
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Yeah, well, you use the other ingredients. I mean, alchemy was a very good term.
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The thing is, is that, you know, you borrow, I borrowed from Ray Bradbury.
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I borrowed from Flannery O'Connor. I borrowed from Ernest Hemingway.
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I borrowed from F. Scott Fitzgerald. I borrowed from Robert Block.
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And those authors are all, and there's a longer list, you know,
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Harper Lee, et cetera, et cetera. But the thing is, they're all very diverse.
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But there's somewhere in there that those authors are not just authors I enjoy.
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They're authors that speak to me in a way that's inexplicable to some degree.
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And it may be that it's tied into my background and growing up or,
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you know, wherever my emotional capacities are, whatever it is.
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But then when you take all that stuff, it goes back to running it through the blender again.
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And that's what you're doing when you're saying is bringing your own personality into it.
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You do. But your own personality, by the way, is made up of other people. It always has been.
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It always will be from my parents. We get it from friends.
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And then it gradually becomes our personality over time.
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Do you think it's like, you know, when some people learn to draw and they have
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a particular artist that they like.
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And they sort of just copy him, right?
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But I don't mean copy him in a malicious way. I mean, they copy him.
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No, no, that's what I did too. I mean, I did it with writers.
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I tried to write like Raymond Chandler.
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I tried to write, and that's how you find the door in. Yeah.
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But that's not the room you want to live in. Right, yeah.
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And then you get sick of the copying, so to speak, or the imitating,
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and you get sick of that and then you just start being yourself.
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Kind of like an actor, you stop acting. And you start being...
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It's the same thing like martial arts. You know, Bruce Lee used to say when
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you first start, a punch is just a punch, and then a punch is a punch,
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and then a punch is just a punch,
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meaning that you start out with something that's natural that you know nothing
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about, you haven't thought about, you haven't analyzed at all.
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It's just an instinct, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's a good instinct.
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It may just be flailing, and then you go into something where you spend more
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time learning how to do it, and that's the conscious era.
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And then at some point you have done that so long that it now becomes subconscious
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and it becomes natural and it goes back to being the natural man or woman again.
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You're back to not thinking about it, but just responding.
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So now the punch is as it was when you first started.
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It's not something that you have to analyze and think to use.
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Right sure and that that's the way writing is
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it's exactly that same way martial arts and
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writing have a lot of connections for me and one
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without the other I don't think I would have done well with either one
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I mean I've spent almost 60 years doing martial arts that's you know 58 I guess
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57 57 years doing exactly and that's that's a long time to do something and
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it I've done that in a more you know early on I started writing at four but
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I didn't start selling till I was 23 three,
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but I started martial arts when I was 11 and was really very seriously involved at the time I was 16.
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Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. But with the writing, it's I was kind of,
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whenever I read your stuff now, for whatever reason I hear Phil Giganti's voice in my head.
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Whose voice? I'm sorry. Phil Giganti who does the Happ and Leonard the audio
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in the room? Oh, yeah, yeah, he did the early ones. Yeah, yeah. He did a bunch of them.
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Yeah, and for whatever reason, whenever I'm reading your stuff now,
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I hear Phil Giganti like narrating it.
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And, and my real, my real delight or surprise, if you will, is when I started
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putting my books on, on audio books is a great thing called the ACX is through Amazon and you can,
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you can put out audio books now.
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And i i didn't realize if if i if
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i had got the lansdale in there
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until i had a guy who sounds very much like phil giganti
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read one of my you
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know narrate one of my stories and i said that's fantastic
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it sounds like a joe lansdale novel um so
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so i thought yeah well you know i've got a few
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audiobooks of my own too and it's a great delight to do
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them i just don't wish i had more time did yeah yeah no it's
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it's such I mean because I write little like mostly
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novellas and things like that and short stories too I haven't really tackled
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that's my favorite yeah I haven't really tackled the novel yet I just I don't
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know well you know with the Somerset Somerset Mom I think it was Somerset Mom
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I could be wrong with that but he said a novel is an easy way to write a short
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story and I believe that's true yeah and I,
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think it was James Patterson too I saw in an interview said something like that he said there are great,
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He said, I don't think there are great novels. I think there are great short stories.
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Because he said the short story is more challenging to write.
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It is, but I would disagree that there are some great novels.
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Oh, sure. Yeah, no, I don't know
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where he's coming from. I don't really personally read James Patterson.
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No, no, no. But, you know, there's another side of it, too. There's the pro.
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And there's the guy that if that many people are enjoying him, he's got something.
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And one way he's doing something the rest of us can't do. But it may not have
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anything to do with technique as a writer,
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but it may be as being tuned in to what a larger readership wants,
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which I think is essentially just TV in a book.
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And I don't mean even necessarily like TV now, but TV as it was,
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the CBS movie of the week or something like that, only a little more graphic
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or a little more bloody or whatever.
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But he has a knack to know what a large number of people want.
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And I not only don't have that knack, I mean, I'm successful,
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don't get me wrong, but I don't think of it that way.
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I write like everybody I know is dead. That's my motto.
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I try not to write for anybody but me because I don't know anybody else.
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It's not caring about your reader. It's not knowing or understanding what a
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variety of different people would want. When I finish something,
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I, of course, hope a lot of people like it.
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But when I start out, I have to say, I'm writing for me. I'm not writing for anybody else.
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I'm going to write like everybody I know is dead. So I'm not influenced by that or try not to be anyway.
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I'm not writing for my agent, my mommy, et cetera, et cetera, you know? Yeah.
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Do you feel, I mean, I'm not, I don't have like a schedule like some of you
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do, like you have talked about in the past. I do, yeah.
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You do like three pages a day, like three good pages.
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I try to have three to five, but sometimes I do more, but I just don't try not
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to leave it till I've done three to five.
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Right. Yeah. I, I kind of, I found like I write on a whim.
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Like, like I get, I get these sort of moments where a piece of the story hits
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you like a little meteor in the house.
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And that's how I kind of work. And the mojo, like my wife says she likes it
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when I call it when the magic's happening. Right.
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Yeah. I get what you're saying. That never works for me. I think if it works for you, it's fine.
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The problem with that is just like waiting on inspiration and you're it.
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And the inspiration comes from you.
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And what I found is just one little tip I will give you is that if you start
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a schedule and you can stick to it and it takes a little while to do it,
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I think, and I could be wrong.
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You may continue just the way you're doing it. I'm not trying to tell you it's wrong.
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But you might find that the more you do it, the more you have those magic moments.
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That's the way it is with me.
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I mean, I have magic moments mostly seven days a week.
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I feel like I do. But I also found on those times when I really felt inspired
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and then I read what I wrote and then I read what I wrote.
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When I didn't feel inspired, there wasn't much difference, if any.
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It's just I felt better in that moment writing. But I got to where now,
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for me, it's just so much fun. And the problem with whim writing for me is I
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realized I'm never going to write much.
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I'm going to have something here, something there. But if you have whims consistently,
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then you, you found your method.
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Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and I do, I kind of have them every day.
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They come at weird times, you know, it's almost like, okay, there you go.
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That's a, that's a methodology.
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Yeah. It's almost like, it's almost like, uh, I start to daydream and I see,
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you know, you know, almost like daydreaming when you're a kid and you feel that.
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Yeah. You feel it sort of take over? That's the way it is for me every time, yeah.
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When I start writing, and generally as soon as I put my fingers on the keys,
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there's almost like some kind of emotional electricity that goes on, and I begin to write.
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I mean, I generally do my email, then I say, okay, now it's time,
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and I just go to my, you know, put a file or whatever I'm working on at that
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time, and nine times out of ten,
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more than that, you know, more like 99 out of 100 times 100,
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you know, I go there and it's just there.
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Have you but i also learned i've also
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learned that you have to know when to take time off which is not the same thing
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as goofing off yeah yeah yeah quite right quite right quite right have you ever
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joe have you always typed your stories or did you start long because i still
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write first drafts i still write longhand.
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I'm a longhand man. No, I wrote longhand when I was younger because I didn't own a typewriter.
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And I wasn't selling that. I was just writing, you know.
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And then my mom gave me a typewriter. And it was an old typewriter,
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and you practically had to stand on the keys to get it to work.
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And so then when we always joke, my wife says I married her for a typewriter.
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But when we first got married, she had an old manual typewriter.
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And I had learned to blind type in high school. But when people say,
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what's the most important thing you ever studied in high school,
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I always say typing class and then journalism class and then going to the library and I'm out.
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But what I did was I had that manual and I wrote stories on that manual.
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Of course, we were using carbons and a double sheet of paper and ribbons and
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whiteout and all of that mess.
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You know, I don't miss any of that. But I didn't, my handwriting's so bad,
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and I can't handwrite as fast as I can think of the story, but I can type faster.
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So for me, that was best. But, you know, if you have that method and it works
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for you, then it's a good method.
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My friend Neil Barrett, one of my favorite writers, that's how he did it.
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He wrote everything in longhand first, and then switched to the typewriter and later the word process.
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Yeah, the newest novella I've got coming out, which I think you'll dig.
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I saw a meme about a fake movie called Bears on a Submarine,
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and I kind of took the, you know, it's like taking the Hollywood action movie and subverting it.
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But this whole thing I dictated, I, I set this time and I, I,
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I had a recorder and as the story came to me, like I told, I told,
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I sat and told the recorder the story.
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That's how I wrote this, this last one.
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I sat and told, I sat and told the tape recorded the story, just like I was
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telling a dude at the bar or I was telling a, telling my son in bed or something like that.
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And, you know, here and there leaving little, you know, editorials for myself
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when I would listen to it and type, you know what I mean? And so I'm, yeah.
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And I have to say it came out really, like really smooth. It's only a novella, of course.
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It's not like, you know, I didn't compose like Gone With the Wind on a tape
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recorder, but, you know.
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Yeah, you know, some people can do that. And I had a hard time writing a story
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on a tape recorder, you know, putting it into a tape recorder.
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But I've known people that that's just their tool, you know,
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and I think that's I think that's it.
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You've got to find your tool and your methodology as long as you have method.
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You know, a lot of times when people say and you explain this,
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not what you do, they say, I work on whims.
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They really mean exactly that. And those women might be three and six months apart.
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And so, you know, I had other friends that say, I just get up in the morning
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and eventually for the day's over, I get some writing done. Yeah,
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I mean, yeah, and that's kind of how I am too.
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I know I say, like, I work on these whimsies, but, you know,
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I don't go a day without writing something, you know, but like you...
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No, you're letting the ship float until it runs up on the shore,
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you know, and then you're ready.
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Yeah, because like you, and one of the other inspirations I drew from you is your diversity.
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Like, I don't just write novellas, I write screenplays, I write for, obviously for this,
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website I do these interviews and do little write-ups for you know films that
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are you and stuff like that so there's a lot of different writing so so there's
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there is you know before the Sun sets there's writing getting done.
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In some form. So I feel good about that.
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Well, when I started out, for me, I was all over the place.
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I tried outlining. That didn't work for me. I tried doing synopsis.
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That didn't work for me. I've had to do a few here and there for certain things
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over my career, but generally I never follow them or can't follow them because
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I found that once I did that, I lost my interest in writing the stuff.
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I felt like I'd almost kind of told myself the story.
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So I'm very much a seated the pants rider, but I do believe that I probably
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plot subconsciously, and I think that's why when I wake up in the morning,
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I'm ready to go, because at night, my mind has put it together, but it's not a strain.
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I don't feel that sense of urgency like I wouldn't when I was trying to sit
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down and figure out what happens next, and there's also, when I get into the
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story, if I have characters I like,
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there's a sort of natural flow from one event to another that I like,
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And there's also a sort of, I guess,
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you know, a jazz component to it or a, the actor's component where they want
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to know what's, what's my, what's my motivation or in jazz, where,
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where is this going? What, what door is this opening?
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And so I just find that my characters are sort of leading me and, and the storylines are,
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you know, they have importance, but they're the least important thing to me
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of all is having a decent character and a, and a,
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and a, and a, an interesting idea and then being able to write good prose and
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dialogue and the rest of it, it takes care of itself.
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Well, Joey, we don't have a lot of time. So I want to talk about the film as
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well, but I just, while I've, while I've got you on the phone,
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because I never thought I'd ever,
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I've, I've got a couple of the way I look at your work is almost like movies
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and there's great lines in movies and I've just sort of gone through,
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I've got all the Joe Lansdale books in front of me here.
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And I've just sort of gone through and picked just a couple of lines out of three of my favorites.
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Just to, you know, I know you probably don't remember.
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You might remember where you were or how you were when you wrote it.
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But I just thought on the off chance, you know, just to go through a couple of my favorite lines.
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Of course, my absolute favorite one is still the first one I ever read,
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which was On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks,
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which is a title better than some people's short stories,
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you know, which is fantastic.
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And it's a line from, where are we? It's from Calhoun.
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And he says, you know, they've just gotten in from the tour of Jesus land.
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And he says, Goonie Light Show.
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This ain't no miracle. This is for shit.
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Get the nun on the bus out there to bend over his shit and perfectly round turd
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through a foe at 20 paces, and I'll call that a miracle. Mr. Fucked Up T.
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But this Jesus Land is the dumbest fucking idea since dog sweaters.
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Well, you know what? You develop an ear to listen to people.
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Yeah. I just, I mean, that character, of course, to the modern audience is a very grotesque.
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Character but he's got all the yeah and he's he's
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a bad guy yeah and but he's got he's
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got all the best lines in the story i think oh yeah
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the bad the bad guys usually do you know another thing
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about that it reminds me i'll let you get back to where you're talking
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but the thing about writing too is it's not about pretty manners and we're and
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and i'm very socially liberal you know so i and i get a lot of the stuff that's
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going on now and i'm all for it but i think that it's gotten to the point to
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where people have gotten so politically correct that no matter what's said,
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people are splitting those hairs.
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And in literature, if you're writing about people and how they naturally talk
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when they're not trying to impress somebody or how bad people talk or people
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that aren't good or people who don't think about, am I woke or am I what? I just am what I am.
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If you're writing about those people, then you shouldn't be,
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you know, you shouldn't exclude any manner of expression.
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And people now get their feelings hurt so much they have little quiet rooms
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to go into so they can deal with it.
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And, you know, life is about dealing with harsh things sometimes.
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And that doesn't mean, you know, I'm out to offend people just to offend them.
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But there are exceptions to that. Sometimes I do just that.
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But the idea is if I'm writing about characters and I want to have you understand
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where that character is coming from, Whether they're one of life's innocence
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and have no idea that this matters,
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or if they're one of life's malicious and they know exactly what they're doing, I think you...
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You can't have a monitor. And, you know, that's what I fear about writing is
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it's moving into this super politically correct zone.
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And writing was never about that. You can have bad characters that are gay.
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You can have good characters that are gay. You can have bad characters that
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are any race. And you can have good characters who are any race.
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You can have bad women, good women, bad men, good men, noble dogs,
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and the dog that bites you when you aren't looking. I mean, you can't have these
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lists of bullshit that people lay out for you and say, well,
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now, if you do this, you have to do this.
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As soon as it does that, I retire, because it's not what writing's about.
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I mean, when I read Faulkner, and he uses a certain language, or Harper Lee,
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or certainly Mark Twain, I never think, oh my God, those racists,
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because when I read Huckleberry Finn and Harper Lee, they're the things that
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taught me what I didn't entirely understand or know about.
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And had they not used that language to connect with the people I had heard using
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that kind of language and shown how, you know, you could think it differently,
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it would not have had the impact on me.
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It's like writing about Nazis and then when it comes to writing about concentration
24:20
camps, they just say they went in there and didn't come out.
24:24
And that's that's powerful, too.
24:26
But sometimes the nastiness of these things should never be forgotten because
24:30
we don't want them to happen again. and we don't want them to continue.
24:34
Quite right, quite right.
24:35
On that note, another funny line comes from, I love the Ned the Seal,
24:40
the Ned the Seal stories.
24:43
These are just a couple of lines that when I came to sort of laugh out loud,
24:48
you know, and it completely changed things for me.
24:52
The big Martian ape says, if he's been released, he says, I'm invigorated.
24:59
After being tied to that wheel, I thought I might drop down and die.
25:03
But now I feel like I could beat the living shit out of 20 more.
25:07
Fuck a hole in a watermelon and give head to a pack of monkeys.
25:15
Yeah he's excited yeah that i
25:18
mean that's that's that's that's gold joe and
25:21
doesn't matter what thank you but yeah
25:24
well you know no you gotta just let you know there's a third net and
25:27
seal book coming out this fall that's fantastic i can't wait
25:30
for that one can't wait i've been uh you know because it's
25:32
always said ned the seal trilogy but there hasn't there hasn't
25:36
been that third one so that's good no there hasn't been but now there
25:39
is there's there's three now that's fantastic i can't wait to get a
25:41
hold of that and the other one other one before we talk about
25:44
the documentary real quick is actually from my favorite of
25:47
the drive in books the sequel and it's
25:50
a little moment where they uh the the
25:54
they meet up with with
25:57
fred and he's talking about how he you know
26:00
he buys all this stuff from kmart and the
26:03
last the last thing he remembers is his toes of his kmart boots coming up and
26:09
he goes but it didn't kill you grace said he goes no it didn't i woke up and
26:13
the first thing i saw was my elbow and my toes and then boots again and then
26:18
grace says were they still from kmart and he's like still from kmarts.
26:22
But, yeah, that's one of my favorite bits, too.
26:26
I think one of the lines, because I heard somebody say it once,
26:30
was in the big blow, was it was hotter than two rats fucking in a wool sock.
26:34
And that's always been one of my favorite lines. I heard somebody say that once,
26:38
and it just took me totally by surprise. I just laughed my ass off, you know.
26:42
One of my wife's favorite, because my wife's from Virginia originally.
26:47
And one of the favorite ones she heard when she came over here is we say,
26:51
it's going off like a frog in a sock so that
26:56
was that was one she liked but anyway let's talk about
26:58
the documentary all hail the popcorn king it's
27:01
a it's a fabulous yeah new documentary it's about
27:04
you which is a good thing and thank you
27:07
yeah it it's it's it's a wonderful little piece
27:11
and and it it seems what i like about it
27:13
is it seems very it it's got
27:16
a nice personal touch it's not one of those puff pieces like
27:19
like for a show like joel lansdale was born
27:22
in the frigid winter of blah blah yeah and and
27:25
it's not like the whole thing and they talk to all your
27:28
relatives and then they talk to the celebrities and you know
27:31
the natural sort of flow of these documentaries go and
27:34
they kind of become mundane and boring like even though you're
27:37
interested right but you you are
27:40
you know rightly so you are at the center of
27:42
the documentary and it's you telling about your you know
27:46
your town and your past and things you're interested in
27:49
because that's that's really what people are
27:52
fascinated by like where who you know who is the guy that comes up with these
27:55
stories and and and where did he get the mojo from and all this sort of stuff
28:00
but it really is would you say joe it really is a product of of where we come
28:05
from like i mean i like i like yourself come from a very small i like yourself
28:10
come from a very small place.
28:12
Yeah, it is. It's where you come from. You know,
28:15
East Texas is about the size of France, but it has a culture that's a mixture
28:20
of Southern culture and, you know, Southwestern culture and a little bit of
28:24
Cajun culture and now more and more Hispanic culture.
28:28
And all of these different things blend.
28:31
And, you know, if you grow up in those and you grow up in an environment where
28:35
there's lots of trees, because East Texas is not like the movies.
28:38
It's trees and water and lakes.
28:41
And, you know, it's got lots of rivers and creeks. It's full of animals of all kinds.
28:46
It's more of almost a tropical climate compared to the rest of Texas and more
28:50
what you think of of Louisiana or Arkansas without the mountains and,
28:54
you know, more southern bales than cowboys.
28:57
So that that's what you know
29:00
that's what for me certainly yeah yeah and
29:03
it's it's it's wonderful to you know
29:06
there are there are people obviously bruce campbell and and joe hill and everyone
29:12
gets involved but it's i find it's nicer because it's not just like talk it's
29:17
not too much talking heads you know documentaries yeah documentaries have a
29:22
a dreadful capacity to fall into a talking head pitcher.
29:26
Yeah. And, and it's, it's good. I mean, you know, they're, they're fair enough.
29:31
There are interviews and stuff like that. You can't get around them.
29:34
But some of the, one of the nice little tweaks or quirks that I found interesting
29:39
is, obviously, they interviewed Bruce Campbell on the phone,
29:45
or they interviewed Joe Hill on the phone, or whatever.
29:49
And it plays almost like a score, if you will, over footage of you meeting people
29:57
and footage of, you know, different things.
29:59
So it's, it's, it's, it's really the version you see had the martial arts stuff in it.
30:05
Oh, a little bit. I don't know if I've seen like a, yeah, a little bit. Yeah.
30:09
There's just a little bit. I didn't know which version you would say. Yeah. Yeah. No, I agree.
30:14
I, uh, at the first showing in, in Austin, uh, you know, they gave us,
30:17
they have pages where everybody gave notes. So they all gave her some notes.
30:21
So I think there'll probably be some little additions and stuff,
30:24
but I was really very happy with it and very flattered and a little bit embarrassed.
30:28
Yeah. Yeah. Did you, when you're approached to do things like that,
30:33
is it sort of like, well, look, I just do what I do.
30:36
I'm not, I'm not. Yeah, I didn't approach her about it. I was approached by
30:41
her and she wanted to do it.
30:43
And I went, okay, you know, I don't, because I didn't think it would happen.
30:47
I just thought, well, she'll realize that I'm not that interesting a subject.
30:52
And then it did happen, you know, and she did it.
30:55
And she, I mean, she needs a lot of glorification for the dedication she had
31:01
and the amount of work she had to do to do that because,
31:06
you know, she had to come to Nacogdoches and she had a couple of times,
31:10
one time just sort of visit with me.
31:12
But I think that's before she really had the idea to do it.
31:14
And then she came and spent a few days and I took her about,
31:18
took her over to where I was born and where I grew up and, you know,
31:21
the usual stuff. but it was her dedication on a limited budget and with a plan
31:27
to make it look like it wasn't a slick,
31:30
piece you know like it was more like a drive some of you see the drive-in theater
31:34
and i think she did very very well yeah have you been approached by other people
31:39
before because i know there was there was bits of clips there was one yeah there
31:43
was bits of clips and it was very similar.
31:46
Right there was there was a long version done that once it got edited i think
31:52
that there was were some complications with the producers and stuff like that
31:56
but what there was originally one that was probably full length,
31:59
and it was called Once We Were Children.
32:02
And then there's a 30-minute version, I think, roughly 30-minute version that you can see online.
32:07
And it was done quite a few years before that one. And it's a totally different kind of documentary.
32:14
It's a much more serious sort of thing, tonality-wise, because it's dealing
32:20
with a lot of the stuff that or the nature of a lot of my darker works, you know.
32:25
But it's interesting, and I've always sort of hoped that someday they might
32:31
release the fuller version of it.
32:32
Yeah, yeah, it's great. But for right now, we've got All Hail the Popcorn King
32:38
from Hansi Oppenheimer. I hope I pronounced her name correctly.
32:43
And it's a film about the number one champion mojo storyteller, Joe R.
32:51
Lansdale. He's, well, you're my surviving hero. Hank's dead.
32:57
Yeah. Yeah, he is. God love, did you like Bukowski?
33:01
You read Bukowski? Yeah, I did. I never, you know, I didn't read him until maybe,
33:06
I bet it was the 90s before I ever read him.
33:09
And I started out reading a couple of his novels, like Post Office Women,
33:15
and I can't recall all of them off the top of my head.
33:18
He had that kind of trilogy, you know, Hamel, Rye, and that sort of stuff.
33:23
I read those, and then I read the poetry.
33:25
I'm not really a big fan of poetry, but when I read, there are certain poems
33:29
I like, but when I read his poetry, I found, you know what, these are just little stories.
33:32
They're vignettes, and I find them real interesting.
33:36
So, you know, he is definitely my favorite poet. Yeah, no, I mean,
33:41
because a very good documentary to check out if you're ever interested in watching
33:46
a documentary about another writer is...
33:49
Oh, I saw it. I saw it. My son said it to me. Yeah, yeah, no,
33:52
it was very good. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
33:54
And I mean, he, I mean, again, his very much,
33:59
Bukowski's life informed Bukowski's work very similar to, to yourself,
34:04
you know, I mean, if, if he hadn't lived that, if he hadn't lived that life,
34:07
I doubt we would have gotten the work.
34:11
We got from Bukowski, you know? Well, yeah, and there's also the fact that he
34:14
didn't entirely live that life, because some of it I think he may have exaggerated,
34:18
but the exaggerations came out of reality. Oh, sure, sure.
34:22
But you know what they say, Jay, never let the truth get in the way of a good yarn.
34:26
Right, absolutely. I had a friend who knew him, Jory Sherman.
34:30
Jory wrote a book about him.
34:33
Jory was a little bit controversial, and he definitely knew Bukowski.
34:37
He's been in several of the biographies dealing with Bukowski or dealing with
34:43
Brodigan, you know, Richard Brodigan.
34:45
And he wrote a piece on, you know, he always felt like he was Bukowski's best
34:49
fan, but a lot of people may have had a different opinion about that.
34:53
But he told me a lot of personal stories and things like that,
34:56
and I've seen those pop up elsewhere because other people were also present.
35:00
So, you know, it's, it's, it's interesting to have known somebody that knew
35:05
him and had some perspective on, on, you know, him as a creator.
35:10
Yeah. Yeah, sure. But yeah, like, like you say, there's, there's,
35:14
there's some myths that we play out for public, public purposes.
35:20
And then, you know, what, what I, what I liked, there was one quote in the documentary
35:24
where about him that they said.
35:26
He had to pull back on his drinking, which means he had to be less than his myth.
35:31
I think that's a great line.
35:36
You know, he had to be less than his myth. Yeah, you know, people can get,
35:39
and I think this happened with Dukowski, people can get trapped in those mythologies.
35:43
I've always been very, very clear that I'm influenced by my real life.
35:46
I borrow things from real life, but I write fiction primarily.
35:49
I mean, I do do some nonfiction. But what I'm doing is that I'm writing a mythological
35:55
version of the influences that I've had and the experiences I've had,
36:00
and those are called novels and short stories,
36:03
you know, and that's what I do.
36:05
And sometimes I reach outside of my experience and try to, you know,
36:09
do things from things that I'm interested in from research or other people's
36:12
experiences that they've told me.
36:14
I never limit myself, but I also try never to fall into that sort of mythological
36:20
life instead of the mythological story, which is a different thing,
36:25
because then you have to constantly fill that up.
36:28
I think it happened to Hemingway as much as anyway. Hemingway was a great writer.
36:32
He had a lot of interests I don't have, and he had a lot of ideas I don't agree
36:39
with, but that's beyond the point. There was a guy who wrote beautifully and
36:43
changed the way people wrote in the 20th century.
36:47
Not everybody was influenced by him, but most everybody was,
36:51
either directly or indirectly.
36:53
And I think that if you just talk about style and influence,
36:56
he's the most important writer of the 20th century.
36:59
And another, I mean, before I go, another, another writer that we both have
37:03
a passion for that you actually did, uh, you wrote a little,
37:06
uh, forward for one of his books that you published. One of his books was Henry Kuttner.
37:12
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I love him. Yeah.
37:15
I mean, that's, you know, there's a great, you know, they talk about when a,
37:19
when a writer's really in the groove that there's a musicality to the language.
37:24
Yeah. Whether it be like you've often been regaled as a back porch storytelling
37:32
kind of, you've got that sort of back porch raconteur type thing going.
37:38
Couldn't have had that great musicality, I feel, into his work as well.
37:44
Did you feel the same way? Absolutely.
37:48
And you know, another writer, Charles Beaumont, in some ways he was the best
37:53
of both Bradbury and Richard Matheson.
37:55
And in many ways he was certainly his own thing.
37:59
But he wrote some of the most musical prose I ever read. And Henry Kuttner did that.
38:05
Cheryl Kornbluth, when he was rolling, really did that too. But I would say
38:10
there's a book called The Best of Henry Kuttner that Bradbury wrote the introduction to.
38:15
And I do believe that for the most part, that is the best of Henry Kuttner.
38:19
And those stories in there have a sort of music to them, a rhythm to them.
38:24
And Charles Beaumont was a guy who worked with The Twilight Zone.
38:30
Sometimes he wrote movies with Richard Matheson, and they were very, very good friends.
38:35
But Beaumont is a writer that I fear is being forgotten like Kuttner.
38:40
You know, he wrote this story called The Black Country.
38:44
That is absolutely one of the most genius piece of work that I have ever read.
38:48
It's not science fictional or fantasy or anything like that.
38:52
It's just this brilliant short story that first appeared in Playboy back when
38:57
they actually, you know, you could also not only look at the photographs,
39:01
you really could read some good stories in fiction.
39:03
I mean, I mean, fiction and nonfiction and this story appeared there and it
39:08
is absolutely brilliant.
39:11
Fantastic, fantastic stuff. Well, listen, Joe, I've taken up more time,
39:16
more of your time than I had wanted to, but you've been very gracious to let it go on.
39:23
That's okay. I knew you were calling from arranging this thing from a distance,
39:29
so I wanted to give you the time that you needed.
39:32
Well, thank you. Thank you, Joe, for going the distance with this big fan and
39:36
fellow author, From a Smaller Artist to a Greater One. And it's been an absolute,
39:41
it's been an absolute. We won't say that.
39:43
Just from one writer to another. Yeah. A couple of scribblers having a powwow.
39:48
There you go. There you go. And it's been an absolute pleasure,
39:51
Joe. And it's a wonderful documentary.
39:53
I hope, I hope it continues to do well on the festival circuit.
39:57
Can't wait for the next. Yeah.
40:00
All right, Joe, you take care, mate, and look forward to all the work and I
40:04
hope the documentary goes well.
40:05
And yeah, take care. Thank you for this opportunity, my friend.
40:09
Bye-bye. Yes, Joe R. Lansdale. Get down to the links in the description.
40:14
If you don't know the man, you should know the man.
40:16
All of his work, the adaptations, the man himself is extraordinary.
40:21
He's a writer to behold, enjoy, explode, explore.
40:26
Get it where and when you can once you get into Joe R. Lansdale, I promise.
40:31
There's riches to be had. Go check it out. Check the links in the description.
40:38
And as always my little Eugenites thank you for listening to us on Spotify or
40:45
wherever you choose to listen to your favourite podcasts I'm Kent Hill and until
40:48
next time you've been listening to Cinema,
40:52
Zero Game.