Can you tell us a bit about the man’s background?īill Landis’ claim to fame was that he founded Sleazoid Express magazine in 1980. The author recently discussed his new book with Rue Morgue.īill Landis was a polarizing individual and a maverick in film journalism. Through faults and accomplishments innumerable, Landis’ chronicle is one of reverence, and Preston Fassel’s latest book, LANDIS: THE STORY OF A REAL MAN ON 42ND STREET (from Encyclopocalypse Publications), pulls back the curtain on the larger-than-life anomaly. By way of his self-published periodical Sleazoid Express, he gave a platform to a community of film fans that otherwise wasn’t afforded one. Landis was a forefather of many things and left an impression – sometimes good, sometimes decidedly less so – on all those with whom he engaged. To Bill Landis, those people were his people, and sharing the stories encompassing this grindhouse subculture is his legacy. For the viewer whose tastes ran counter to the mainstream, the midtown Manhattan grindhouse scene, and its assemblage of drug-addled outcasts, pimps, vagrants, and queers, was home. Patrons curious to see Joel Reed’s Bloodsucking Freaks or Frank Henenlotter’s Basket Case couldn’t simply wander into any old respectable movie house and buy a ticket, because their screens would never play host to such reprehensible garbage. In the ’80s and ’90s, exploitation cinema was still a dirty secret.
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