Oh gee is folks, it should die. People say good money to see this movie. When they go out to a theater, they want cold sodas, hot popcorn in no monsters. In the Projection Booth, everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.
Got it off?
Hey, folks, Welcome to a special episode of The Projection Booth. I'm your host, Mike Waite. On this episode, I'm talking with Catherine cold Iron. We spoke with her a little while ago about her book Junk Film Why Bad Movies Matter. She is back talking about her latest book, out There in the Dark. It is a very interesting mix of personal essays with film criticism, and I highly recommend it.
Make sure you follow Katherine over on the socials. Those are all available at our website Kcoldron dot com spelled just like it sounds letter k Coldron dot com. Thanks so much for listening, and I hope you enjoyed the interview. Catherine is great having you back on the show again. I'm so excited to talk to you about your new book.
Thank you. I'm excited to hear what you thought of it.
It's great. I was just talking with someone recently, de Harlan Wilson, about his latest book, which really does that thing of mixing more of personal with film studies, and I love how you're coming at things as well. How did you decide how you're going to write this book and the way that these essays were going to be shaped.
I was in grad school and we read the book I Am Not Jackson Pollock by John Haskell, and Haskell does this thing where he invents scenes in between the scenes of psycho and touch of evil, and as soon as I read that, I went, I didn't know you could do that. I want to do that. That was the beginning of it, was thinking, Okay, what can I imagine around some films that I love that is not real but interesting to think about. And at the time I was already writing hybrid work in terms of like
metatextual short stories and stuff. A lot of them were really terrible. But when I started combining memoir with some film or other, when I crashed those things together, the sparks that came out of it were really great.
Some of the stories get really personal. Was there any fear in that or was it more of a liberating thing to write about stuff?
It wasn't liberating. It was very normal because I'm not at all a private person, and to tell stuff like this to the public at large was something I wasn't really worried about at the time. Some of the stuff that I wrote about I had to think about pretty hard. Some of it was already there, and it was just unburdening ideas and memories that I had for a long time, and a lot of it was just stuff that itched at me and I couldn't figure out how to resolve
it for myself. In my own mind. There's one that I still haven't written that's about the Shining, and there are memories about something in my life that I haven't quite managed to bring up enough to write that essay. I know what I want to say, but I don't one hundred percent know what to braid it with in terms of my own life. A lot of nonfiction writers say that writing is a lot like therapy, and I think that therapy has helped me be a writer, and I think that being a writer has helped me to
be a person. But I don't think of writing as exactly a therapeutic practice. A lot of people do, though.
Did the movies come first and then the rest of it comes later?
It varies. The other thing is I wrote these a really long time ago, Like I spent six years or so trying to get this published when writing braided narratives and experimental memoi criticism was very new to me, And now it just feels like it's been hanging around for so long that I don't even remember the craft of it.
What was it like going back and revisiting these after so many years.
I was very satisfied with what I'd written, and I had worked hard enough on them at the time that it wasn't like I went back and said, Oh, I'm embarrassed or oh I need to fix this. It was just all there, all of a piece from the work that I had done and redone and worked on. And
it also wasn't like I was going back to it. It was more as if I was submitting it to a press and waiting six months, and then in that six months I would send it to a couple other presses, and so it was this rolling period of no, no one wants this, no one wants this, And so it was always on my mind as I was publishing other things and writing other things, rather than something that I put down and then picked up again. Later.
Okay, Yeah, I was wondering because for me, if I write something and I do put it down and come back later, sometimes it feels like another person wrote it.
I found a draft of a novel that I wrote many years ago and abandoned that I'm using as paper, like I'm using the other side of those pages in my printer, and so every time it comes up out of the printer, I see this back page of page two hundred and sixteen of this novel, and I'm like, I don't remember this at all. I remember the vague outline of it, and I remember writing it, and I
remember how I felt when it was over. But I'm looking at the individual pages and I'm like, what when did I write that?
Like a modern palumpest, I'll just use this other book to print my new stuff out on I love it.
I do that a lot.
So you're writing other things while you're shipping this out and seeing if anybody's going to bite. What other things are you writing at the same time.
I finished this book in I think twenty eight eighteen, and between twenty eighteen and twenty twenty five, I wrote junk film, and I wrote a couple of the stories that are in Wire Mothers, and I published ceremonials in Junk Film and Wire Mothers, and I was also working on Last year, I finished a novel that I don't know if it's ever going to work out, but I had been writing that for the last couple of years, so mostly during the pandemic is when I wrote that book.
A lot of this stuff hasn't seen the light of day yet, but some of it has in fact been published in between.
Are you just writing all the time?
No, I have long, long, fallow periods, and then I'll write like crazy for a couple of months at a time.
Have you figured out what triggers you to get back to it?
Oh, my gosh, I've been writing since I was a kid, like a ten year old kid. So I wish I knew, because then I would just trigger it a bunch, like okay, it's it's just right all the time.
Yeah, I figured you could patent that if you knew what it was was. So tell me a little bit about some of the films that you chose to write about with your other stories. Were there particular things that were like, oh, this is just a favorite, or this holds personal memories to me, Obviously the title of the book, out There in the Dark, as a reference to Sunset Boulevard. Is that a favorite? Like how does that play into things?
That is a favorite? And it's a movie that I feel talks about celebrity in a way that not a lot of movies do, and star studies has always been one of the primary things that I'm interested in terms of film, and so Sunset Boulevard is great with that. It's great at talking about the faded glory of celebrities and then by implication, the still existing glory of celebrities
you haven't faded away as Norman Desmond has. But it also talks about what it's like on that side of the screen and what it's like on this side of the screen with the audience. Is the point of the title, I am right here, out here in the dark. That's certainly part of it, Like me being an audience member is a through line for the book. The specific movies that I picked, I think all of them are good except for Alien from La, and most of them are
well known except for Alien from La. Singing in the Rain seemed kind of a natural to talk about my teeth because singing in the Rain is one of those movies that is so beloved and rightly so, but it's also super, super artificial, and there's no way to get around that. And thinking about those two things being true at the same time was really interesting for me because
I'm so wrapped up with authenticity. Apocalypse Now was the war movie that I wanted to write about above Platoon, because I think Apocalypse Now is weirder, and I thought about writing about Platoon, but Platoon is so hard, it's so difficult to watch, and Apocalypse Now is a lot more watchable. I picked the movie because I knew I wanted to write about them, but I didn't pick them without thought about what other ones I could have written about.
Yeah, the story of your teeth was absolutely fascinating to me, and it's something like I never really thought about. But they're with you all the time and you have to take care of them and maybe they'll take care of you. So Yeah, that was tripped down a rabbit hole I didn't know that I needed in my life.
Oh, thank you for saying that. Yeah, people have talked to me a lot about that essay, like either you've never thought about it, or you have tooth trauma. The conversation about dental trauma is huge and it's ongoing, but it's very much buried underground because we're Americans and our teeth have to be perfect, no matter what the costs.
Who ended up biting when it came to pudding.
This out Autofocus is the press that finally said yes, and I am so grateful to them. It is a small press that was in Florida, now based in Pennsylvania, and it's pretty much just this one guy, Michael Wheatness is and I told him when he said he was interested in the book, I said, okay, before we go any further, you should know that I'm a monster and
I don't like to be edited at all. I'm a professional copy editor, so my copy's pretty clean, but in terms of editorial suggestions, like I wouldn't go down that road if I were you, just objectively, I am a bad person if someone tries to edit me. And he said that was okay. He found two typos and that was that.
Wow.
So that's the story of the book, and I'm so grateful to him. I should also say, though Santa fe Writer's project flirted with the book for a little bit and gave me the idea to write an author's note, and I think the book would have been a lot less understandable to audiences if I hadn't added that author's note,
So I'm very grateful for that rejection. I couldn't make up my mind whether to put like a disclaimer upfront, saying I don't actually know anything about Robert Tavall or whether Fred Astaire and Wie Reynolds met on the set of Singing in the Rain. I don't know any of this, but I thought it was fairly obvious that I'm not inside Robert Duvall's hit. No.
Your authors No definitely helped that with that, and by that point in the book, I was used to where you're going with things, so I could understand it by that point. So, yeah, you do a really good job when it comes to the actual structure of the stories and walking us through almost like you're upping the stakes with each essay.
One of the most important things I learned in grad school was that a story teaches you how to read it, and that's true for I think all narrative art. If you walk into a movie and it gives you these cues of okay, this is a horror movie. This is a Western and to put those fine posts in is so important and to leave them out is just going to make your work unreadable.
Did you do the layout of the book?
No, that's something I'm not skilled at the layout of the more unusual as the one where the text is offset in certain places. I did make suggestions for that, because you can only do so much in Microsoft Word. And then Michael took it to in Design and brought it back and was like, is this okay? Yeah, this is fine. My admonition was like, do your best. I know that in Design is not a perfect program, so whatever you can do to make it work is good.
What were some of the biggest challenges with this other than just getting the damn thing published?
Honestly, getting damn thing published was a big challenge. One of the challenges was trying to figure out when I was saying too much and when I was saying too little about basic background of movies. Do I give you enough information about who the stars of the Misfits are before I start to explain that their movie Startum is actually a liability in that film? Did I explain terminology of horsemanship enough in that essay to get you to figure out where we are and what we're doing with horses.
And so I did have some help from friends who I'd send it to them and be like, is this at all comprehensible? Do you have an idea of how interesting and odd Montgomery Cliff is in this movie? And so that was a challenge. I was really thankful to
readers for giving me that feedback. Another one was trying to figure out when I had gone too far into my own brain, whether that was in terms of the film criit that's in there or the memoir that's in there, and I know how it was, and if I can't convey it on the page, then I have failed, And success in that mode is really important to me, so wanted to make sure that I did that.
I have to say The Misfits is on my list of shame. I still have yet to see it, but your essay definitely made me want to.
So I've talked to people who really like The Misfits. I've even talk to people who it's their favorite movie and I don't understand. But I also approach that very carefully because I don't like I don't want to yuck anyone. ZM. And that's not the point of it. I think it's a failed movie, but I think the way that it's failed is more interesting than I am just covering it with shame. That's not what I want to do.
Sometimes that's the most fascinating thing, Like why is this movie a failure? What happened along the way to damage it?
I think we've talked about that a previe iFly, and it is one of the engines of junk film. It's what is it in this movie that's so interesting despite it not working at all? Yeah, it's a mystery. My favorite example actually is Skycaptain in the World of Tomorrow, which is the first movie that I saw that I was like, this is a failure, but it's an interesting failure. And when it was over, my husband and I looked at each other and we were like, what the heck, Like,
why wasn't that better? Yeah? That movie, to me, it's not a success and it's a mystery.
So funny that you say that. I literally just got that two days ago from Diabolic DVD because I'm like, I haven't seen this in forever, but I really want to dig into why this movie is so terrible, because, like you, I was like, what's wrong was it that it was all computer generated? Bringing back Laurence Olivier was pretty audacious, especially at the time. Yeah, it's a fascinating failure.
Tell me if you think this is it, I think that it is trying to do a genre that is expired. There aren't many of these. I think about Flash Gordon a lot, like sort of corny, cheesy sci fi adventure cereal that the world has moved on from that genre. It has evolved that genre until it's something else, and trying to do it exactly the way it was at the time that it was created just won't work anymore. And that's what I think is wrong with Sky Captain. But I'm not sure.
It's almost like if the Rocketeers sucked. There reminds me a lot of what was that one? Where was the Nazis on the Moon movie? Iron Sky? I think it was called, and that was also I know this is a horrible term, but it was so computer generated. It just felt like everybody lived inside of a computer, inside of a Sky Captain. And there are other films kind of like some of oh god, what is that guy's name? Zack Snyder's films like Sucker Punch. It reminded me a lot of that.
I'm a defender of Sucker Punch.
I have the Blu Ray. That's another one though, where I'm just like, why is this the way it is? And then to compare the director's cut versus the theatrical cut, It's another one of those fascinating movies for me.
I'm going to shut up because we could talk for another two hours about Sucker Punch and Zack Snyder. We were talking about Zack Snyder earlier today because we went and saw Superman on Monday. The way people are talking about this Superman versus Zack Snyder Superman kind of bothers me because it's like, the cynical part of me is okay, so you just don't want nuance is really the thing. American audiences want something that's not in shades of gray.
They want something that is the good guy punching the bad guy full stop. I understand that we're in a national moment where that feels a lot better, but also, these kids today can't deal with the shades of gray, and that's a bummer. I'll be dead in the cold ground before I recognize Missuri.
What is all the sticky notes behind you.
This is the timeline for the book that I'm writing now, because I'm writing a book about a Hollywood death in nineteen thirty two, and so I'm using real people in real events, and there's a bunch of stuff that I need to keep in mind as i'm writing. So that's what that is. It's hundreds and hundreds of different events that occurred in the lives of these different people.
Oh wow, is it fictionalized or pure nonfiction?
No, it's fictionalized. I'm writing from the perspective of three dead people, so you know, I have to imagine what their thoughts were. But it's about the death of Paul Byrne, who was a producer in early Hollywood. He married Jean Harlowe in nineteen thirty two, and two months later he was dead. And when I was learning about this, I realized that three of the people in his life who were closest to him, his friend Jack Gilbert, his boss Irving Thalberg, and his wife Jean Harlowe, were all dead
before the age of forty by nineteen thirty eight. That's not suspicious, but it is interesting because it means that we'll never really know what happened to him. Everybody who knows is dead, and what happened to him was the studio said that he committed suicide, but he probably didn't. So who killed him? Why? And the answers to those questions are really interesting. So I'm writing a book about it. It's a book about the unknowable.
Basically, have you done anything that audacious before? That seems like a great project.
Thank you for saying that. Actually, yes, my last novel was even more ambitious, but this one is. Yeah. I'm really excited about this project, and I'm really looking forward to being done writing about Irving because I don't like him, and it's very hard to get in his head because I just don't. I don't think he's a good guy.
Is your last one out? Are reading? Or are we still waiting for that one?
No? The last one is very unlikely to be published. It is a book that I wrote based on the movie Casablanca. I wanted to write the story of Ilsa because I felt that she was underserved as a character in the movie, and so I wrote this novel that spans a bunch of European cities from nineteen thirty six to nineteen forty one which, as you may imagine, involved an awful lot of research into a very turbulent time. And so like I went to Norway, I went to Sweden.
I did all this different stuff. I learned about fashion, I learned about war, I learned about the Holocaust. It was like two years of work. And I need Warner Brothers permission to even pitch the book because they own the characters. And no one that I have spoken to who could help me with this is interested.
Maybe her name is actually Milsa.
Other people have suggested that, but I feel like I lose a huge sales hook if I don't stick with the characters. If you're going to leave this part in, and if any agents are interested, who want to go toe to toe with Warner Brothers on a legal issue, which I'm sure there's lots of them out there. I think it's a great book. I have showed it to people who have thought it's a great book, but it's there's nothing I can do in the indie world with it.
Somebody did it in nineteen ninety eight. It was a guy who wrote this book called As Time Goes By, which is basically a spy thriller and in terms of feminism, the exact opposite of what I was trying to do, but that was published by Warner Books, which no longer exists.
Yeah books, Who needs them anymore? Right?
Yeah? No, certainly not, David Zaslav.
So what other projects are you working on? Because you always have such fascinating things you're doing. It seems like the Thalberg thing, but just keep you busy, night and day.
I've written about two thirds of it, so once I finish with the Ballberg part, then I'm going to start assembling it. And it's actually going to be a collage novel with a lot of quotes from all the books that I read to write this, because they all said things so much better than I could say them, like all the books that I read, and so I wanted to give them their moment. I'm also working on a
series of Western Kutula mythos stories. I'm trying to write twelve of them, and I keep running out of ideas, but I've written I think four, and they all take place in kind of this what will eventually be New Mexico Town where there are creatures from HB. Lovecraft's world, and it is so much fun to write Western weird fiction. It is so much fun. So I'm working on that interminently.
Next winter, so December twenty sixth, I will have my first urban fantasy novel out with castle Bridge, and that is going to be the first in a series, and I'm really looking forward to that because I wrote that in twenty twelve Wow, and have been trying to sell it ever since.
That's kind of feel fantastic to finally see something you wrote so long ago. Reach Till Light a Day.
Yeah, that one I'm looking forward to because, like I wrote, my favorite character I've ever written is the main character of this book, so I'm really looking forward to people meeting her.
Do you have the sequels already written or no, not written but planned. You are so freaking ambitious. You put me to Shane Catherine.
I don't have a full time job, so.
I'm sure that helps. Just being independently wealthy from all the book publishing, I'm sure.
Oh yeah, okay, yeah. My husband is very reliable as a human being and as a source of income, so I've been very lucky.
It is always so good talking with you. I hope I can have you back on the show again soon. I'd love to talk to you maybe about Skycaptain the World of Tomorrow.
I also love talking to you, so whenever you'd like me to come, I will be.
There, all right. I appreciate it. Thank you so much, Catherine. This is great.
You're welcome.