DAYS OF WINE AND RAMEN

All my life I have lived under the poverty line. Making films was a way of fooling people into thinking that my Art was important; that I was important. Twenty years later, I'm digging through the reviews that you will find in this book. The overall effect of being completely unique, and necessary for the bland times in which we live seems to have worked, but my “folk-nude” hasn't changed my poverty line. Consumers like things made by hand, but not necessarily when it comes to film.

Hey, wait a minute. This isn't the way it was supposed to be. If John Waters can be assimilated into the mainstream, why can't I? Is it easier for a gay rich kid who filmed a transvestite eating dog shit off the streets of Baltimore to make it in the film business than a poor redneck kid from Mississippi who....

Never mind. Don't you hate it when you live the answer?

I think those grand expectations of success, at least the monetary kind, have to die - just as the 20th century, and all it's superior icons have died. I didn't want it this way, but it's time to move on. I'm killing Guerrilla Monster because it just didn't need to evolve. This pop-art company was never built to sell out - or to parade itself in chains. You don't tell King Kong what to do. You just steal his girlfriend then kill him (and make sure the fall is spectacular).

JMM foto by Ronnie Harris

Guerrilla Monster had it's perks. For instance, it was so pleasant not waiting on someone else's capricious whims or failed promises. It seemed there was a pill - not made with formula - and I swallowed it. Then I took my personal life (what I knew about it) and injected it into my own flawed pieces of Art ...within a genre called Exploitation film. 

Confusing? Well, friend, I wasn't making it for you.

The South produces great artists because the South is rough on it's artists. It hardens them. Sometime's it kills them. Sometimes they just move away. Move away from Memphis? You've got to be kidding me. I think I'll quit while I'm on top. Then I'm going to enjoy the fall.

There are so many more films I would like to make, but I'm tired of doing them for nothing. The inescapable urge to have expectations is as strong in me as the depression that always follows. Perhaps Guerrilla Monster should have ended when the underground film scene ended in Memphis in the year 2000. What followed was an apology of sorts, where I was proclaimed 'the godfather of indie cinema'. It's an odd title for a loner in a cinema soup line. I think I'll reject it outright it since I've never made an indie film, let alone been invited into that world.

But it sure would be nice to be asked.

I abandoned my comic-book character “Helvis” on page 13 of his comic book back in 1993 (imagine his expectations). I feel I owe him a few more pages. I think it's time he falls in love with “Cadavera”, the girl made from the parts of dead movie stars. That's one Guerrilla Monster film that I could never seem to make. In comic-books, there is no budgetary worries, only the cautious movement of a windsor-newton zero brush filled with speedball ink.

Guerrilla Monster was last seen toting a naked woman over the edge of a cliff. She, pounding on the chest of the beast 'til the last. Mind you, the tombstone should read, "”Baby, we had nothing to lose".

JMM
June 26, 2014