#i have no idea how the chat reporting affects people playing on older versions like me | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

thedeaditeslayer · 4 years

Photo

Exclusive interview: Bruce Campbell is having a renaissance.

Here’s a highly recommended interview which discusses what Bruce Campbell has in store for fans in the future.

Bruce Campbell is experiencing a creative renaissance, of sorts. In a recent chat with the actor, he discussed a return to his horror roots, cutting a comedy album with Ted Raimi and so much more.

Bruce Campbell hasn’t been idle during his time in self-isolation. The actor has been experiencing a creative renaissance of sorts. So, we figured now would be a perfect time to reach out and get some of our burning questions answered.

With so much uncertainty in the entertainment industry at present, rumors are running rampant. We gave Campbell a chance to clear the air so to speak and address some of the myriad of questions that fans have regarding Mortal Kombat 11, the latest Evil Dead incarnation, Ripley’s and whether or not he will work with Sam Raimi in front of the camera again.

The actor also surprised us with some monumental news. He will be returning to his horror roots with the sequel to My Name Is Bruce as well as several other projects that he has on his docket including a comedy album with one of his closest friends.

Get comfy, grab your favorite beverage and let’s catch up with Bruce Campbell.

Mortal Kombat 11, Ripley’s and the State of the Industry

1428 Elm: Thanks for speaking with us, Bruce. It’s always a pleasure. We have so many things to discuss. Recently, a site came out and said that you were definitely going to be Ash in Mortal Kombat 11. It seemed like a done deal the way it was reported. Can you comment on that?

Bruce Campbell: I probably shouldn’t emphasize yes or no because I don’t know. I have not been told. If it is not through my agent or proper channels than it usually means its wishful thinking.

1428 Elm: Apparently, an email from Warner Brothers Interactive was sent to a well-known entertainment site and Ash as well as Army of Darkness was mentioned in it with the trademark from MGM.

BC: The reason why it may not happen, just so you and the readers can know this, a lot of time for legal purposes, that character cannot appear in other things because of the license. If you can’t make a deal, that character is not going to show up. So, we may have been talked to about it.

But I do know with MGM that handles the Army of Darkness licensing that they’re hasn’t been a discussion with them about it. They’re pretty touchy. We have to be careful of ownership.

I honestly don’t know. I think I would have heard something. It’s not like my agent books me without consulting with me.

Even if Mortal Kombat came to me and said they want to put me in it, you still have to make a deal. If my agent says, “Bruce Campbell wants a hundred billion dollars,” and then they say no, the deal is dead.

The answer is we don’t know. No point in beating around about that.

1428 Elm: You might not be able to discuss this but what’s going on with Ripley’s Believe It or Not!? Will there be a Season 2?

BC: We’re one and done. It’s not your father’s Travel Channel anymore. If I wanted to host a ghost hunting show, I’d be on the air right now.

Ripley’s was made for the older school Travel Channel like Drive-Ins and Dive Bars where you go to wacky places around the country. There is a big push for paranormal, mystery and science-fiction, Discovery type stuff. I think we just “out aged” ourselves.

1428 Elm: It would have been nice if the Science Channel would have picked it up.

BC: It’s all good. I remain philosophical about all shows that come and go. There are so many factors involved. You change executives and things change, companies get bought and sold and things change, ratings aren’t what you expected…

After this virus, we’re going to see what shape the motion picture industry is in. It’s going to be a wounded beast. Projects are going to go away.

You’re going to have fewer tentpole movies too. I am hopeful we’ll have a return to low budget filmmaking.

That’s what I hope comes out of it. Each studio will start a low budget division and spend the money wisely.

Number One on the Charts with a Bullet

BC (Cont.): In the meantime, what is nice, I’m finishing up a couple of projects. I’m hoping by the end of the year to put a book of essays out and a comedy album with Ted Raimi.

1428 Elm: A comedy album?

BC: Yeah, we finished it. I’m in post-production on it. I’m putting all the sound effects in now.

1428 Elm: That sounds great!

BC: Who knows? We’ve never done one before so we’re going to find out.

1428 Elm: So, you guys are harkening back to the 1960’s when comedians like Bob Newhart had hit albums?

BC: It’s our version of that. I used to listen to the top comedy albums during the 60’s and 70’s. I wouldn’t dare compare myself to any of the masters like Mel Brooks and the 2,000-Year-Old Man with Carl Reiner. We gave it a shot. I love audio and I like radio plays.

Bruce Campbell vs the Classic Monsters

1428 Elm: So, tell us what is going on with your political satire, House Divided. Are you still working on pitching that once everything gets back to business as usual?

BC: It will be on the sales block. It’s a harder sell. There’s no blood. It’s not a horror movie, it’s a political satire. Associating Bruce Campbell with political satire isn’t the first thing investors whip out their checkbooks for.

To combat that, I just finished writing a sequel to My Name Is Bruce. The idea is we want to take Bruce and have him go through each of the classic film monsters. The sequel is Bruce vs Frankenstein.

We’re done. I finished my draft and sent it to Mike Richardson, my partner at Dark Horse Comics. We’re actively looking for money on that one. It is the Expendables of Horror. I fully intend to load the cast with so many familiar horror faces. It should be a lot of fun.

It would be a cavalcade of genre stars, old, young, on TV now. We really want to cover the bases. A lot of people will be getting killed. Guest star kills. Basically, Bruce bumbles his way into being a hero.

1428 Elm: Will you have to go through Universal to get permission to use the classic monsters?

BC: Some stuff is public domain. I’m not a lawyer but we would figure out a way to do this.

I think the bolts on Frankenstein’s neck are trademarked, as well as certain looks. But you can make a Frankenstein. That story is under public domain.

It’s also a parody of a Frankenstein movie and that gives a lot of leeway legally as well. I don’t think you can say, “Wolfman,” but I think you can say Bruce vs the Werewolf. This is my version of the Bob Hope road movies.

Ted has two parts; I have two parts for Robert Englund and I have a couple of parts for Kane Hodder. If they’re a name, I am going to put them in it.

After we come out of the zombie apocalypse that we’re in and everyone gets back to work, that is what I will be actively pitching. There’s plenty going on. So, I have been self-isolating in a constructive way.

It’s an Evil Dead World

1428 Elm: We’re curious about the 1970’s period piece that you were working on when we talked to you last year. What happened with that?

BC: It’s currently on my action board. I will eventually get to it. I am going to finish my book of essays first and then I am going to get to that one.

The story is set in 1979. The idea behind it is what would have happened if us raising money for Evil Dead went horribly, horribly wrong. It becomes a horror movie in and of itself.

1428 Elm: How did this idea come to fruition?

BC: I was going through projects in my computer. People who have a lot of downtime do spring cleaning. Clean out your woodshed, toolshed when you have extra time. In this case, I went to the head of my projects folder.

This one popped up and it was just an outline that I had written 15 years ago. I thought, wait a minute, this is pretty well thought out.

In the 70’s, filmmaking was real, you didn’t have a lot of options. You had to get cameras from a certain place, you had to have insurance. There were a lot of steps that you had to take that made the process really difficult.

I remember making calls for money from payphones in blizzards and s*** like that. You had to leave messages, you’re getting busy signals, you’re not texting anyone. There are no computers, there’s no email, its old school. You sent things in the mail.

Today, filmmaking is not difficult. I can go to a store and buy a 4K camera. I can make a movie with $5,000 worth of equipment. Probably less.

1428 Elm: Well, you can do it on your phone too. Sam Raimi is on Quibi now with 50 States of Fright, which is entertainment tailored to your device. If his series continues once everything settles, do you think there’s a chance you might appear on the show?

BC: Never say never, that’s all verbally at this point. They have to succeed; they have to survive. Any new format, any new platform, I’m game and if Sam’s involved all the more reason.

1428 Elm: Have you ever thought of doing anything like Quibi?

BC: Not yet. I’m used to writing 90-page screenplays with a three-act format. I can adapt anything too.

I was thinking the other day, I have a few screenplays that might be tough sells but maybe I might convert them to a fricking novel and put them out as books. There’s lots to do. I’ve got plenty going on.

1428 Elm: Has the current situation affected the new Evil Dead? We remember that you talked about possibly going into production at the end of this year. Is that pushed back like everything else?

BC: No, not really. It was so early in the stages that we can keep going. I just read the first official draft today. So, then we’ll give notes and additional writing will take place.

Then you have to budget the thing so you know how much money you need to raise and then you have to get the money. Nothing will stop any of that.

You can make calls for money, you can send the script to people, you can do budgets. The only thing that will be affected will be the actual start date. Which we didn’t know anyway. We may end up not being delayed at all.

Many thanks to Bruce Campbell for chatting with us.

#Bruce Campbell #Ted Raimi

32 notes · View notes

news-mashable-yahoopartner-blog · 6 years

Text

How the worst parts of the internet helped shape me as a kid

This post is part of Mashable's You're Old Week. Break through the haze of nostalgia with us and see what holds up, what disappoints, and what got better with time.

a/s/l?

If you know what those three letters stand for, there's a good chance you grew up on the internet like myself. An internet filled with opportunities to steal your innocence.

There was something special about the internet of the late '90s and early 2000s that can never, ever be replicated. It was mysterious, misunderstood, and truly a free place of exploration. More importantly, it was mostly anonymous, or at least it appeared that way.

SEE ALSO: How creepy YouTube channels trick kids into watching violent videos

As parents currently grapple with how their children interact with the internet at such a young age, it's important to take a step back and look at how we got here. Let's relive some of the horrors I witnessed growing up on the internet and consider what lessons their lingering effects hold for this generation.

Chat rooms

For those utterly lost, a/s/l stands for age, sex, and location, and was commonly used in chat rooms during the golden era of the internet — 1995 to 2005-ish. Thanks to Facebook and the rise of social media, much of what we now do on the internet is tied to our real names. But back in the day, we hid behind usernames and screennames, and we changed them often.

I don't exactly remember any vivid conversations I had on the internet with strangers, but I do recall frequenting Yahoo Chat rooms when I couldn't find any of my friends to chat with on AIM. Remembering that today, I'm kinda horrified.

While those chat rooms around the internet had plenty of normal people just looking for conversations, they were also riddled with who the fuck knows trying to get off or take advantage of a young kid. There was even a dedicated section just for teens. Even worse, you could chat with people based on a specific location.

A screenshot of Yahoo chat from the year 2000.

Image: yahoo.com via waybackmachine

Yahoo Chat rooms were rife with catfishing long before the internet term was ever coined. You could be whoever you wanted to be when someone asked you a/s/l? And people were pretty upfront about seeking kids to chat with. While, thankfully, there were no To Catch a Predator scenarios for me in the days of the early internet, it's highly likely I interacted with plenty of scummy people looking to take advantage of kids during that time.

Back in 2005, Yahoo finally shut down user-created chat rooms in an agreement with law enforcement. "Yahoo removed or barred the posting of 70,000 rooms whose names suggested illegal conduct, including the promotion of sex between adults and children," CNET reported at the time.

Yahoo permanently shuttered its public chatroom feature in 2012.

Somehow, I made it out unscathed, and was smart enough to know better, but the chat rooms of the early internet were truly a terrifying place.

Rotten.com and gore galore

Just last year, the internet lost one of its earliest and most disturbing websites, rotten.com. For now, at least.

"The soft white underbelly of the net, eviscerated for all to see: Rotten dot com collects images and information from many sources to present the viewer with a truly unpleasant experience," a welcome message reads on an archived version of the website from 1999.

A screenshot of Rotten.com from the year 1999.

Image: rotten.com via waybackmachine

Simply put, rotten was a compilation of the worst images the internet could find. From pictures of dead celebrities to photos of brutal crime scenes, car crashes, and botched surgeries, the shock site was capable of disturbing just about anyone who made their way to it.

Rotten.com was introduced to me by an old boyfriend of my sister's when I was probably 11 or 12. I recall seeing a photo of a man involved in a motorcycle accident, his head splattered across a highway, and another picture of a guy sucking his own dick. The picture of the accident still fucks me up; the photo of the guy giving himself a blowjob is still impressive.

While I (thankfully) never became a frequent visitor of rotten.com, the disturbing images I saw on the site desensitized and prepared me for the awful internet of today. As I grew up with the internet by my side, I can recall seeing countless beheadings. I watched the entire video of Saddam Hussein being executed in 2006, an unnecessary amount of shootings, car accidents, and just about everything else that would make a normal person vomit.

Seeing those pictures and videos at a young age absolutely helped me cope with some of the things I see on the internet today. Would I be better off not seeing them? Maybe.

Porn, porn, and more porn

I was about 11 or 12 when I was sitting at my computer, probably playing 3D Pinball when I overheard my dad and his friend talking in the kitchen, just down the hall.

"You can just type lingerie into the search and you wouldn't believe what comes up," he told my father, revealing that there was actually porn on the computer in the living room, which he literally never touched at that point.

"No wonder he spends so much time on that thing," my dad joked, clearly referring to me. Jokes on you, Dad, because I had no idea of the obscenities that were available just a few clicks away.

A screenshot of sex.com from the year 2000.

Image: sex.com via waybackmachine

Of course, the first moment I was left alone after hearing there was porn on the internet, I typed something like "boobs" into AskJeeves or Yahoo search. I surfed my way to a crude porn site as fast as my 56k modem could bring me, only to be greeted with an age disclaimer asking me if I was 18 years of age or older.

After thinking it over for a few seconds, I decided to risk it and click "yes." Despite thinking the FBI was going to raid my house for this very serious offense, this began my exploration into sex. I never got "the talk" from my parents. It didn't matter — I had the internet.

It's worth noting here that the internet moved at a grueling pace back in the late '90s when 56k was still king. So navigating a web page with photos, like porn, took a very long time. Given this fact, and that at the time my computer was shared with my family, I decided to do what any preteen would do with a color printer.

That's right, I printed out porn. My mom found it in my sock drawer, and still occasionally makes fun of me for it.

While there are more than a few think pieces on how learning about sex through internet porn is terrible for a young boy's mind, and will turn them into sexist monsters with unrealistic expectations, I'm thankful for the unfiltered internet as a useful resource in my horny pubescent youth.

Talking about sex with anyone — even friends — can be humiliating at that age, and at the time sex education provided to me in school was laughably bad, sometimes even frowned upon. That said, there are definitely more appropriate ways to learn about sex, and as a society, we have much to improve upon.

Weed, drugs, and an online education

When I was 14 years old, I smoked weed for the first time.

This wasn't some spontaneous decision made in a dimly-lit room forced by peer pressure. I wanted to try marijuana, I sought it out, and I learned everything that I need to know about smoking weed through the internet.

Weeks before lighting up, the topic came up among a few of my good friends at the time, and we decided we were going to do it. I won't lie, I was pretty terrified of what would happen, so I did my best to sift through the bullshit pushed upon us by D.A.R.E., and find out the truth about marijuana. I found Erowid.

While there were plenty of websites dedicated to cannabis in 2001 and 2002, Erowid was, and remains, one of the best sources for information on drugs. The thing that makes Erowid so great is that it provides real information from real people about their experiences with various drugs, including dosages, effects, and experiences.

A screenshot of Erowid.org in the year 2001.

Image: erowid.org via waybackmachine.

I'll be the first to admit that I adopted cannabis use way too young, and I'm sure that it affected my school performance and my brain development. But teens and young adults aren't going to stop experimenting with drugs and alcohol, and at least the internet informed me of the real dangers in a way that wasn't preachy.

Would I have tried cannabis without the internet? Definitely, but using the web to learn about drugs was an invaluable resource that was not available elsewhere. I consider myself lucky for landing on Erowid, and not a forum with irresponsible users suggesting people us harder drugs.

Are the kids gonna be alright?

I've been thinking a lot recently about how the internet has shaped me as a person, and how it's affecting the youth today. Before muttering their first words, kids have probably already watched a YouTube video. They have Instagram accounts before they're able to read, and hashtags dedicated to their entire lives.

But for me, the internet was a choice. I sought it out, and all of its opportunities to corrupt my youth. For kids today, it's become nearly impossible to disconnect.

And again, when I discovered corners of the internet I shouldn't have ventured to as a kid, it moved at a snail's pace. Today's web is fast, pictures load in the blink of an eye, and HD streaming video is basically expected, thanks to YouTube.

It feels like the internet is at a breaking point, and we as a society are finally questioning the experiment. It's incredibly important for us to ask ourselves how the internet has altered our lives, and not just the convenience factor with 2-day free shipping, but really, how has the internet changed who we are? It certainly changed me growing up.

I do still value the internet as an important growing up tool, which helped me learn about life, both the good parts and bad. But in the back of my mind I'll always wonder what would have happened to me if I never logged on.

WATCH: You know you're getting old when you remember using these phones

#_uuid:cdef7de6-6b47-3f67-adef-4c1cecbc5715 #_author:Brian Koerber #_lmsid:a0Vd000000DTrEpEAL #_revsp:news.mashable

0 notes