I used to have a friend who loves movies as much as I do. He was the kind you could discuss popular movies with, but he could also discourse on Goddard, Bergman, Fellini. I introduced him to the work of Dario Argento, and he was appreciative. He in turn gave me an issue of Film Threat Magazine. This was the early, independently-published magazine, before editor-publisher Chris Gore made a deal with Larry Flynt Publications.
There were a lot of fascinating things in that issue of FT. I had merely been a horror fan at the time, and I had no idea about some of the stuff in there. Yes, Film Threat discussed filmmakers I knew, like John Waters, David Lynch, and Jim Jarmusch. The magazine also covered a lot of truly indpendent cinema. Things way, way outside the mainstream.
One article was particularly interesting. It was about a filmmaker named Nick Zedd. It wasn't just an article, but an obituary. It stated that Zedd had died after ingesting tainted pig intestines on the set of one of his movies. Yeagh, I was pretty grossed out. I found out later that Nick Zedd wasn't dead. The article was a parody. It seemed that Zedd used to refer to other members of the underground as "dead" when they sold out or offended him in some other way. Zedd wasn't dead after all. Film Threat wrote the tongue-in-cheek piece to indicate he was dead to the magazine.
Nick Zedd was discussed in Film Threat a lot. It was almost always in a derogatory way. The director and the magazine had a strong love-hate relationship, with an emphasis on hate. There must have been at least some amicability because Film Threat Video ended up distributing Zedd's anthology tape, Steal This Video.
If you didn't know, Nick Zedd was the founder and poster boy for the Cinema of Transgression. This was a movement to defy all elements of style, taste, and conventions of accepted filmmaking. "Continuity to us is when the film runs through the projector" was one of their sayings.
I bought the Zedd tape, which I mostly found to be brutally unwatchable. The term, amateurism, doesn't begin to cover the ineptitude in the short films. You think Ed Wood was bad? He was freaking DeMille in comparison.
Nick Zedd's masterpiece, such as it is, is Police State. In genuine underground fashion the short begins with Zedd sneaking up to a squad car and using spray paint to change Police Dept to Police State on the side of the door. A risky move, but Nick Zedd was a true guerrilla.
You couldn't call Police State good, but everyone I saw it with laughed. It's pretty funny.
Most of the other shorts are terrible. Zedd did get some interesting images and ideas into his films, but they weren't enough to really recommend them to anyone. Of all I have seen, War is Menstrual Envy is the best and most ambitious of the movies.
Film Threat eventually died, and though it was reborn, they rarely write about the kind of thing Nick Zedd was doing. He kept busy, making shorts and some music videos, but his best days of creative filmmaking, such as they were, were in the eighties.
I thought about Nick Zedd now and then, and I'd do a search. I'd see him ranting and railing against the capitalist system. He always had radical political convictions. I never met him, and I honestly do not regret it. Zedd had a reputation of being almost unbelievably contentious.
Nick Zedd made a small splash on the culture, even if it was a splash most people would hope to see washed away with bleach. His work did reach a lot of people. Quentin Tarantino based his Pulp Fiction character, Zed, on him. John Waters allegedly modeled his Cecil B. Demented character on Nick Zedd.
Today I think I'd as soon drink gasoline as watch a Nick Zedd movie. I was unhappy and angry when I watched that sort of thing. Now I am a lot more stable and comfortable. Zedd would undoubtedly think I am a tool of the murderous, capitalistic, military-industrial machine.
Nick Zedd had been very sick for a while before he died, but I knew nothing about it. He had cirrhosis, cancer, and Hepatitis C. His wife started a Go Fund Me drive for him, and had I known I might have thrown in a few bucks. I heard he had been living in abject poverty in Mexico for quite some time.
I'm not sure Nick Zedd made the world a better place, but he was an interesting mutant who lived by his own rules. He survived for sixty-three years, which is a lot longer than he probably thought he would. He was a hero to a few, an irritant to many, but virtually unknown to the greater world. In some ways I think that is what he wanted.
Written by Mark Sieber
There were a lot of fascinating things in that issue of FT. I had merely been a horror fan at the time, and I had no idea about some of the stuff in there. Yes, Film Threat discussed filmmakers I knew, like John Waters, David Lynch, and Jim Jarmusch. The magazine also covered a lot of truly indpendent cinema. Things way, way outside the mainstream.
One article was particularly interesting. It was about a filmmaker named Nick Zedd. It wasn't just an article, but an obituary. It stated that Zedd had died after ingesting tainted pig intestines on the set of one of his movies. Yeagh, I was pretty grossed out. I found out later that Nick Zedd wasn't dead. The article was a parody. It seemed that Zedd used to refer to other members of the underground as "dead" when they sold out or offended him in some other way. Zedd wasn't dead after all. Film Threat wrote the tongue-in-cheek piece to indicate he was dead to the magazine.Nick Zedd was discussed in Film Threat a lot. It was almost always in a derogatory way. The director and the magazine had a strong love-hate relationship, with an emphasis on hate. There must have been at least some amicability because Film Threat Video ended up distributing Zedd's anthology tape, Steal This Video.
If you didn't know, Nick Zedd was the founder and poster boy for the Cinema of Transgression. This was a movement to defy all elements of style, taste, and conventions of accepted filmmaking. "Continuity to us is when the film runs through the projector" was one of their sayings.
I bought the Zedd tape, which I mostly found to be brutally unwatchable. The term, amateurism, doesn't begin to cover the ineptitude in the short films. You think Ed Wood was bad? He was freaking DeMille in comparison.
Nick Zedd's masterpiece, such as it is, is Police State. In genuine underground fashion the short begins with Zedd sneaking up to a squad car and using spray paint to change Police Dept to Police State on the side of the door. A risky move, but Nick Zedd was a true guerrilla.
You couldn't call Police State good, but everyone I saw it with laughed. It's pretty funny.
Most of the other shorts are terrible. Zedd did get some interesting images and ideas into his films, but they weren't enough to really recommend them to anyone. Of all I have seen, War is Menstrual Envy is the best and most ambitious of the movies.
Film Threat eventually died, and though it was reborn, they rarely write about the kind of thing Nick Zedd was doing. He kept busy, making shorts and some music videos, but his best days of creative filmmaking, such as they were, were in the eighties.
I thought about Nick Zedd now and then, and I'd do a search. I'd see him ranting and railing against the capitalist system. He always had radical political convictions. I never met him, and I honestly do not regret it. Zedd had a reputation of being almost unbelievably contentious.
Nick Zedd made a small splash on the culture, even if it was a splash most people would hope to see washed away with bleach. His work did reach a lot of people. Quentin Tarantino based his Pulp Fiction character, Zed, on him. John Waters allegedly modeled his Cecil B. Demented character on Nick Zedd.
Today I think I'd as soon drink gasoline as watch a Nick Zedd movie. I was unhappy and angry when I watched that sort of thing. Now I am a lot more stable and comfortable. Zedd would undoubtedly think I am a tool of the murderous, capitalistic, military-industrial machine.
Nick Zedd had been very sick for a while before he died, but I knew nothing about it. He had cirrhosis, cancer, and Hepatitis C. His wife started a Go Fund Me drive for him, and had I known I might have thrown in a few bucks. I heard he had been living in abject poverty in Mexico for quite some time.
I'm not sure Nick Zedd made the world a better place, but he was an interesting mutant who lived by his own rules. He survived for sixty-three years, which is a lot longer than he probably thought he would. He was a hero to a few, an irritant to many, but virtually unknown to the greater world. In some ways I think that is what he wanted.
Written by Mark Sieber
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