Well, today’s October 15—the big day when Homemade Hollywood: Fans Behind The Camera hits the shelves! A full 10 years after I first had the idea for this baby, it’s finally out of my head and into the real world.
Here’s a goofy idea: If you see a copy of the book out in the wild, whip out your camera phone, take a shot of yourself with it and send the photo my way. I’ll collect up the best ones (i.e. funniest, coolest, cutest, hottest, ugliest, etc-est) and run them here on the blog sometime as a set. So if you ever wanted zillions of people around the world to see your smiling/snarling face, here’s your big chance.
In the meantime, in honor of this being the official publication date, here’s the equally official press release explaining what the book is about:
FAN FILMS: FUN, FREE AND TOTALLY ILLEGAL!
Who would swing off a six-story building for a homemade Spider-Man movie? Why would newlyweds with a baby spend $20,000 on a Star Wars film from which they can never profit? How did three nobodies blow Steven Spielberg’s mind with an Indiana Jones flick they made as teens in the Eighties? They’re all part of the Fan Film revolution—an underground movement where amateur filmmakers are creating illegal movies starring world-famous characters, from Batman to Captain Kirk to Harry Potter.
Homemade Hollywood: Fans Behind The Camera follows their stories and more as it traces fan films from the 1920s—when con men made fake Little Rascals movies—to the YouTube videos of today. Regular people are using camcorders, computers and classic characters to make movies that fans want to see—and which lawyers, copyrights and common sense would never allow.
Blending pop culture history with guerilla filmmaking tales and an exploration of Big Media’s changing attitude towards its audience, Homemade Hollywood gains insights from the filmmakers themselves, while Hugo Award-winning author Timothy Zahn, director Eli Roth (Hostel, Cabin Fever), punk icon Tommy Ramone, fandom scholar Henry Jenkins (Convergence Culture), Don Glut (The Empire Strikes Back), Andrea Richards (Girl Director) and many others discuss their roles in the history of fan films. A foreword from Chris Gore, founder of Film Threat and movie expert on G4TV’s Attack of the Show, sets the tone. Homemade Hollywood is a fascinating and highly entertaining study of this overlooked corner of the filmmaking world.
ISBN: 978-0826-42922-3 / paperback US $19.95 / 308 pages / Continuum Books
Available at Amazon.Com and bookstores everywhere.
I’ll be at Borders Columbus Circle today!
Congrats! My copy’s been ordered on Amazon.
The is still unavailable at book depository.
http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/WEBSITE/WWW/WEBPAGES/search.php?key=homemade+hollywood&by=title&Button1.x=12&Button1.y=16&Button1=Go