I haven’t been to a major pop culture convention since my family and I moved to the Boise area a couple of years ago, but I have been to quite a few over the years and my visits are filled with fond memories. These range from playing True Dungeon at GenCon with Monte Cook (of Monte Cook Games), Steven Schend (of Marvel RPG and other games fame), and Erik Bauer (of Gaming Paper) to having Patrick McDonnell (of Mutts) gasp and say “Wow!” at SDCC when he saw a cartoon illustration my wife had done. He did this when I asked him to frame the image with his characters. Jody had drawn a doodle of our old dog Oreo and asked if I would see if Patrick McDonnell would be willing to do a sketch around it. He agreed and he was genuinely impressed with her illustration style. It was amazing to see someone who inspired my wife’s cartooning show appreciation for her talent.
As cool as those moments were, my favorite convention moment in the world, BANG! (kiss) the WORLD!, comes from a period just before it really blew up. It was still HUGE and TV/Film were there, but so too were comic book sellers in relatively large numbers. The show was also more intimate than it has become. You could still meet celebrities/fandom faves without buying tickets for a photograph and the best way to meet them was often to attend the show’s many panels. My favorite memory is an example of just this kind of phenomenon.
The panel in question was a “chat” with Forrest Ackerman. This chat was essentially an hour long session of him telling stories about the earlier days of pop culture fandom. I was there hoping to hear about the back and forth fight he had with Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, and H.P. Lovecraft over several issues of The Fantasy Fan (more on that conflict in a later post on fandom), but that was not to be. There were about four people total in the audience, maybe as many as seven but the room was largely empty. A part of me was sad to see so few people there to listen to Forry. Not quite as sad as I had been earlier in the day when I walked down Artist Alley and saw Jerry Robinson essentially begging people to stop by his table to chat, but fairly sad none the less since I was one of only seven people who had come to listen. Then an eighth person walked in. It was John Landis, and he decided to sit next to me. Okay, there was one seat between us, but excluding the “I’m going to set my stuff on this seat” seat he was right next to me.
I have no idea why he sat next to me. There was plenty of room. He could have chosen any of the other fifty or so seats in the room, but he chose to sit next to me. I was completely director struck (that's star struck but for directors), but tried to keep cool. I’d lived in Los Angeles long enough to see a lot of industry people around town and my wife was the writer’s assistant for a television producer at the time. But this was John Landis. Casually turning from scanning the bookshelves at the Borders in Westwood to ask Chelcie Ross if he knows what time it is so that Jody and I aren’t late for a movie is one thing, having John Landis sit next to you is quite another. You expect to see actors etc. in Westwood, and I have a number of fun Westwood memories. You don’t expect that kind of interaction to happen at a comic book convention panel that only has eight attendees.
Anyway, as Forry was telling his stories, Landis would look over to me just prior to the punchline/point with a grin. Landis knew exactly what Forry was going to say. I swear to God that he was mouthing the words to the stories as they were being told. He'd listened to the schtick as a fan many times and knew them inside and out. I'm sure he must have heard these tales at least a dozen times, maybe a hundred times. He probably also read many of them in the pages of Famous Monsters magazine.
As each story unfolded Landis would turn his head to watch my reactions. I was someone who hadn't heard the schtick before and Landis knew it. He wanted to see the reaction of a newb and indeed Landis showed joy when I laughed or gasped. Our eyes met a couple of time in shared appreciation. It was like hanging out with a friend, a friend in fandom. All of a sudden, I wasn’t sitting next to John Landis. Instead, I was sitting next to a convention buddy.
It was an amazing fan moment and I let the moment be exactly what it was and didn’t try to turn it into something else. I didn't ask him for his autograph. I didn't hand him my heist movie screenplay (every male writer in LA has a heist movie and none of them should be made). I didn't try to ingratiate myself.
In case you are wondering, my heist movie involves robbing a bank in Reno and all the shenanigans that happen as the robbers travel from Reno to Los Angeles. It’s called Last Stop Disneyland and it’s more A Simple Plan than Oceans 11. No one will ever read it, nor should they. If you are thinking, “it can’t be that bad.” It is. It is that bad. It’s worse than Andy Farmer’s book in Funny Farm. I know it, now you know it. Even yellow dog knows it.
When Forry finally finished entertaining the eight of us, Landis walked up to chat with him. I watched for a few seconds and walked away, letting two "old school fans" geek out and went to meet up with friends to geek out about the experience I just had.
In the many years I’ve been married, my wife and I don’t have a lot of “oh, here comes one of Christian’s records playing on repeat” moments, but we do have at least one. I tell some version of this story to my wife every time we watch a Landis film. If Landis’ name comes up for any reason in our presence, my wife will look over to me and we will share a knowing glance as I telepathically retell this story.
I'm sure she's sick of it and I'm sure my mind remembers it as a bigger deal than it was, but it is still one of my favorite memories and an example of how even big events can become intimate.
A wonderful story.