Chains are the worst. The Book of Revelations might actually be creepy if, say, Olive Garden and Wal Mart were part of its landscape of the doomed rather than the Whore of Babylon and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I catch a lot of heat from family and friends for my garrulous anti-chain diatribes, but I make no apologies. Chain restaurants, chain music stores, chain hardware stores – they all suck the life out of towns and make everywhere you go look the same. We no longer have identity, as individuals or as a country, and chains are part of the reason why (or maybe they’re a result of..?). The Accidental Tourist, lame as it is, features William Hurt as a man who copes with his son’s death by withdrawing into a grey, bland world and writing books teaching people how to travel the world and make it feel like they’re still in the comfort of their own home town. One accomplishes this by eating at chains (same menu anywhere you go), shopping at chains (same store layout anywhere you go), and staying at chain hotels (same old same old). The stupefying sameness of life in America nowadays is absolutely horrifying to me. In The Accidental Tourist, Hurt withdraws into this world as a coping mechanism because of the death of his son. I can’t tell you why America has done this as a county; maybe as a coping mechanism for the death of our souls? More often then not I look at dumb-ass Americans driving around in cars they can’t afford, living in houses they can’t afford, eating at Taco Bell, talking on cell phones WHEREVER THEY ARE, simply because TV told them to do so, not because they actually need to be talking to any of their dipshit friends at that particular moment, and I think, fuck this, I’m going home and playing with the cats. There’s no thinking in America anymore. There’s no analysis, meditation, or creativity. Just 300 million + consumers, buying all manner of worthless shit at big-box chain stores because our intellectually lazy president and almighty television sets tell us to consume. Spend money, consume, keep the economy rolling. It’s more important than reading a book and expanding your knowledge and mindset, and it’ll keep God almighty happy and protect us from the terrorists. Chains are our worthless lifestyle’s endgame.
There is one chain, however, that occupies a special place in my heart: Skaggs. If you weren’t lucky enough to grow up with a Skaggs, it was sort of like your modern-day Sav-On, only way, way cooler. The Skaggs in Santa Fe, on Cordova near Don Diego (and the Piggly Wiggly), had a pharmacy, liquor store, candy, ear/nose/throat medicines, pain killers, magazines, comic books, and, incredibly, records. Truly your one-stop shop. So many definitive moments of my childhood in 1970’s Santa Fe took place there, I feel compelled to write a sycophantic haiku to founder Samuel M. Skaggs.
But one moment in early 1977 comes back to me tonight as I wade into my 2nd glass of cheap wine: it was February or so, and my mom stopped by Skaggs to grab some toiletries, and, bored 7-year-old that I was, I wandered over to the magazine section to have a look-see. My eyes settled quickly on a magazine called Famous Monsters of Filmland. Its stylized logo made it clear what lay within its pages: some truly spooky shit. The cover painting of Robby the Robot was hot pink and magenta, crying out for all young boys to peak inside, so I grabbed the thing, took a step back, and started flipping through the pages.
Here, then, was something that seemingly spoke directly to me, and seemed to be made especially for me, a 7-year-old boy in Santa Fe, NM, USA: page after page of monsters. Vampires, possessed children, zombies, mummies and aliens. And then the crème de la crème, starting on page 30: four pages of King Kong and Mighty Joe Young stills. My hands were shaking when my mom got back – it was time to go. Mom didn’t buy me the magazine.
But mom did have to endure three days of me talking incessantly about the magazine before she finally broke down and called my father, asking him to pick up a copy for me. He called later that afternoon, unsure of the whole affair; there are some… disturbing pictures in this magazine, he told me. Are you sure you want it? My excited answer was rapid-fire, loud, and nonsensical: YES GET THE MAGAZINE FOR GOD’S SAKE PLEASE BUY ME THE MAGAZINE. Dad broke down and, against his better judgment, bought me a copy of Famous Monsters of Filmland #133.
***
A whole lot of directors and writers, including Steven Spielberg, John Carpenter, and Joe Dante, talk about how Famous Monsters, or FM (as it eventually became abbreviated) was their childhood bible. I imagine there are tens of thousands of us who had the same experience. I caught King Kong on TV when I was five or so, and my life was never the same afterwards. Monsters became my passion, and FM the demarcation zone into this fantastical, overwhelming world. The movies themselves came around catch-as-catch-can on TV (a little more frequently once this new phenomenon called cable TV crept into our lives), but the magazine opened an entire second realm for me, separate and independent from the mundane one I currently occupied. Within the pages of FM I first came to know about Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney (Sr. and Jr.), John Carridine, Peter Lorre, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing… the list goes on and on. I learned that the 1925 Phantom of the Opera with Lon Chaney was the first of three heavyweight film versions of Gaston Leroux’s 1911 novel. Images of movies I hadn’t seen, hell, movies I hadn’t heard of, became etched in my brain. FM had the odd effect of making me intimate with movies I wouldn’t have a chance to see for many more years. I read the magazine, learned about the actors and the plots, and then waited around every damn weekend to see if one of the movies showed up on cable. I didn’t absorb any of the Spanish my frustrated teachers threw at me every day in E.J. Martinez elementary school’s bilingual program, but at eight years old I sure as shit could identify a picture of Lon Chaney from the lost film London After Midnight, and also point out that his son, Lon Chaney, Jr., starred in The Wolf-Man.
Despite the endless celebrity accolades about FM’s influence, few have dedicated much ink to the magazine’s most important, enduring attribute, the section that acted as the enormous, whipped-cream-topped piece of homemade key lime pie to FM’s main dish of articles: it’s gloriously dense merch section, never even acknowledged in the table of contents. The last 14 pages or so of each issue were devoted to all sorts of books, calendars, records, masks, posters, make-up kits, and super-8 films of monster movies. At that age it was like having heroin mainlined into my consciousness, unconsciousness, and subconscious at the same time without the bother of jabbing a needle into my arm. “UNBELIEVABLE HOME MOVIES!” screamed one page. “HEART-THROBBING-200’ REELS!” Underneath this headline were 15 super-8 movies at $9.95 a pop, with upper-case titles (THE UNDEAD, FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED), a description of each movie (“It must eat you to live!” goes the first sentence for The Spider. “You will be amazed at the size of this beast!”), and a single photograph for each movie, usually a publicity still from the film’s initial release. Although occasionally the titles were off a shade (Battles of Ghidrah was none other than what we stateside knew as Monster Zero), these ads were as educational as anything else in the magazine. I hadn’t yet seen Varan the Unbelievable or The Monster that Challenged the World, but I now knew what each monster looked like, thanks to these super-8 ads. I wouldn’t see Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space for another nine years, but I knew the name Tor Johnson and his fat, bald head from the WHOLE-HEAD HORROR MASKS section in FM’s back pages. Still more tantalizing was the HORROR MOVIE FILMBOOKS page, where I first learned of Alan Frank’s The Movie Treasury of Horror Movies, David Annan’s Apes: The Kingdom of Kong, Richard Bojarski’s The Films of Boris Karloff, and the one book that more than any other I gazed upon fondly, nay, obsessively, hoping one day I would hold it in my trembling, excited hands: Monster’s Who’s Who.
(All of these books, plus many, many others from FM’s merch section sit on my bookshelves today, having been picked up over the years in various cities and countries, at various times in my life. Monster’s Who’s Who, however, was one of the few books I talked my folks into buying for me back then, after becoming fixated on it and applying weeks of relentless pressure. Something about seeing the Wolf-Man, Dracula, King Kong, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and Frankenstein’s Monster all on the same cover made it a top priority. I still remember the day it arrived in the mail in an oversized package, crammed into our mailbox. Its original dust sleeve is long since gone, its spine is shot, but I still have that same copy from 30 years ago.)
But nothing, my friends, NOTHING blew the mind and reduced a kid from a typical middle-class family into a pitiful heap of half-crazed desperation more than FM’s monthly centerpiece, the two-page BACK ISSUES OF FAMOUS MONSTERS spread. My eyes popped out of my head when I first discovered this section. As unbelievably cool as the magazine was that I held in my hands, it was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg; 93 pictures of past FMs populated these pages, all sharp and vivid despite being printed on cheap pulp paper, and underneath each one was an issue number and price. The more current ones were in the $1.75-$2 range, but heading further back into the earlier issues from yesteryear, #s 49, 33, etc., the prices went way up into the four and five dollars range, with the 1965 and 1966 Yearbooks fetching an astonishing $8 each.
FM’s back issues section may have exacerbated my OCD more than anything else during my formative years. I studied these two pages for hours, my mind racing hither and thither: what magic lay behind those covers? There were four different issues with King Kong on the cover. One had Godzilla and Rodan, with “ALL OF JAPAN’S MONSTERS!” written across the bottom. #106 had some fanged monster I’d never even seen before. Gorgo was on the cover of #50. The little blurb at the bottom of the second page didn’t help matters any: “SEE THEM PEER AT YOU FROM THE PAGES OF FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND… THESE HORRIFYING ISSUES CAN BE YOURS… ORDER NOW!” Yes, Christ, I wanted to! But with what? I had no job, no income apart from a miserable 50 cents per week allowance, and these mothers cost money, not chump change. I wanted EVERY DAMN ISSUE, but it was all some crazy, unattainable dream.
I sat my mom down, showed her the magazines, and explained my position. Kind yet rational woman that she is, she consented every now and again to order FM for me, but not so often that she spoiled me. In all, there were nine back issues my folks bought me over the years. They were, in chronological order: the 1965 yearbook (the crown jewel of my collection), #44 with King Kong on the cover, #50 with Gorgo, #55 with Land of the Giants, #101 with Captain Marvel, #125 with King Kong 1977, #126 with Mr. Sardonicus, #132 with King Kong, and #134, which I missed when it first came out. Mom also - perhaps tiring of the incessant requests for more FM? - broke down and got me a subscription that lasted from issue 155 to 176. These were the final years of FM, of course, the circling-the-drain years, when editor Forry J. Ackerman was largely in absentia, and many of the articles were recycled from older issues. Nowhere was this more evident than in the covers themselves, which had transitioned from the gorgeous painted covers of the 60s and 70s into covers with straight-up photographs. With the advent of photo covers, FM lost its identity, looking like any other monster-movie mag of that era (Fangoria, Starlog, et al). But what the hey – I couldn’t help when I was born. Forry Ackerman is as much a hero to me as Faulkner or Captain Sensible. We are all in his debt.
