I took part in a horror movie convention over a recent weekend at the Pasadena Center, instead of staying home and enjoying the gala kickoff to the Malibu Film Festival.
I was invited specifically to introduce screenings of a couple of films from the 1970s-“Day of the Animals” and “The Manitou”-in which my original participation kept me struggling on Malibu Road during the good old days. I sat on the stage of a 500-seat theater, mike in hand, and improvised a warm welcome to a scattered crowd of 24 dead-eyed curiosity seekers. That activity killed about 10 minutes. The rest of the weekend was consumed with unrequited greed.
The convention organizers cut me loose early on Sunday, so suicide was out of the question.
Allow me to set the scene.
The convention floor is about half the size of Rhode Island and has no relationship to a familiar hemisphere. The placement of vendors’ booths makes Malibu’s chili cook-off look intimate. Items for sale included toys, games, trading cards, videos, posters, thousands of comic books and T-shirts, all with one theme-gore.
Fangoria, the event was called. Get it? The joint was alive with the dead. Truly. Fang-to-fang vampires from every gravesite in the nation-all capes, falling skin, bleeding eyes and mesh stockings. And their friends. Hardly anybody resembled a person. The “celebrity” autograph room was located on the mezzanine.
Providing me with an autograph table of my very own was the convention’s way of saying thanks for the memory. I’ve traveled this path before and I always assume it might be fun this time.
First of all, forget celebrity. I recognize no one, least of all myself. Redford and Streisand are not on the premises. No. I am sitting at a 6-by-3-foot collapsible table carpeted with my film and TV stills from olden times. I am facing others of a similar ilk. The barely identifiable-all attempting to huckster autographed photos of themselves from movies nobody’s ever heard of. I torture myself by attempting to visualize my personal heroes, Brando and O’Toole for instance, accepting dollars for Best Wishes. On the other hand, I can’t imagine them needing the eggs.
When experiencing moments of convention devastation, I often teeter on the abyss of superiority-the “I’m-too-big-for-this” syndrome. Frequently, guilt breaks my fall, and the result is I overcompensate and become unreasonably sweet and accessible to every body-snatched unfortunate to whom I am attempting to sell my signature.
Saturday, I gave away one photo and sold two. But as anyone in retail will tell you, the customer who gets away is the one who remains in your craw. A chunk of a woman-200 hundred pounds of tapioca, wearing a tutu and a pig snout-stopped at my table and chose to linger and finger my goods. Eventually, she hefted her gaze from my photos to my face. “Is this you?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Boy, have you changed.”
Meanwhile, the unrecognizable gentleman across the room is doing a land-office business based on his role in what I imagine is a seasonal favorite, “The Nightmare Before Christmas.” The lady to my left is a celeb from another nightmare. The one on Elm Street. She breezed in for an hour and my conservative guess is that she returned to real life with about a grand in a suitcase. Elvira, to my right, accommodated a line of fans that reached all the way across the convention hall into the room occupied by Brain Dead Productions. I know, because I took a break to check it out.
Sunday, a burly man in lavender spaghetti straps rescued my identity by buying four photos, which nearly paid for my overnight stay at the adjacent Pasadena Sheraton … where the showerhead settings are illegible, the bathroom mirror magnifies twenty-fold and where the bar pours half drinks for the price of two.
The moral of the story, of course, is that it’s highly unnatural to leave Malibu for the weekend.