Paul Cullum

Radio Provocateur

Paul Cullum
Photo by Debra DiPaolo “You can fool some of the people all the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on.” —George W. Bush, 2001 Phil Hendrie is coming to television. Just as soon as someone can figure out what to do with him. Much like Robin......

The Last Picture Show

Paul Cullum
Photos by Ted Soqui “Tell your children how the great age ended.” —Charles Laughton in Hitchcock’s Jamaica Inn, seconds before he leaps to his death Once on Family, a mostly forgotten prime-time soap opera from the late ’70s, the son, Willie, meets a special girl at a revival theater he......

Miss Exotic World: Dixie's Chicks

Paul Cullum
On display in the punishing Mojave heat last Saturday, alongside re-purposed Disney ingénues, Scheherazades, Audrey Hepburns, Theda Baras and Carmen Mirandas, the sweat pouring off them in rivulets, were tattooed leather girls, dominatrixes, carnival performers, performance artists and at least one conceptualist in a giant chicken costume. This was the......

The Misfits

Paul Cullum
Producers are very misunderstood. Of course, there‘s a lot of pigs -- I won’t mention names -- who sit in New York and buy every piece of literary property they can and get a studio to pay for it. But people like Don and Chris are really struggling, because they......
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God Save the King

Paul Cullum
“It‘s dead, it’s a disease, it‘s been going on for too long. It’s history; it‘s grown old. It’s not achieving anything. It‘s just digression. They play rock & roll at airports. It is too much like a structure, a church, a religion, a farce . . .” --John Lydon on......

The L.A. Cinema Club and the Rise of Amateur Filmmaking

Paul Cullum
Photos by Anne Fishbein The very classification "amateur" has an apologetic ring. But that very word -- from the Latin "amator, lover" -- means one who does something for the love of the thing rather than for economic reasons or necessity. And this is the meaning from which the amateur......
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Heir of the Dogma

Paul Cullum
Photos by Anne Fishbein THE SPECIAL-EFFECTS WOMAN IS TALKING ABOUT her third nipple. "We had to test the adhesive, to make sure it wouldn't come off," she says. "I went to the mall and tried on some clothes. I was hoping it would show up on the security camera, but......

The Horror, the Horror,

Paul Cullum
IN 1975, BURGEONING HORROR MAVEN DONALD G. Jackson leveraged his house, car, furniture, job and familial obligations to follow his heart -- in this case, a breathtakingly inept horror crudité called The Demon Lover, about a campus-area Satanist and his guileless hippie minions who conjure a giant kachina doll in......

Watching the Detectives

Paul Cullum
Photos by Greg Bojorquez RESIDUALS IS A NEIGHBORHOOD BAR IN A STUDIO CITY STRIP MALL, WHERE an actor's residual check for less than a dollar used to get you a free drink. It's here, surrounded by barflies, chippies and unacknowledged talents, that you can find a lardy Irishman holding court......

Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome

Paul Cullum
Think about your favorite night at the movies ever. Was it the road-show revival of Lawrence of Arabia at Manhattan’s Ziegfeld Theater? The Texas Chainsaw Massacre at the old World Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, with vigorous audience response? Apocalypse Now at the Cinerama Dome? Now ask yourself: What made it......