What should I say about these films? I don't think we're going to show them
in the exact order that they're listed in the program but most of them are
really old. The first two definitely are, and then one is the most recent
film that I've actually put t ogether. It's kind of horrible, but we're
showing the earliest ones and the most recent one. The oldest one is...
Well, just about the oldest one is World Of The Future, which was made in
1973 for $2000. For $2000 you could do a 45 minute film if you real ly
scrounged. That's been my main talent for film-making is scrounging
equipment. The latest film cost $15,000 and is only one minute long. It just
goes to show how things have changed a little bit. Although we were
scrounging by the time we did the MTV/S ubGenius thing. More on that
later...
You'll notice, for those of you who are familiar... A lot of you maybe are
more familiar with SubGenius materials than with these older films, but when
you're looking at the films, particularly World Of The Future, which is the
main one here, and Reprodu ction Cycle, you'll see references that are like,
"Wait a minute! That thing was made in 1973, but he'd talking about, he's
using SubGenius jargon! How can that be?" This is part of the technique we
call Time Control in the Church of the SubGenius, it's p retty scrambled
chronology. Somehow we got this film from 1973 that's predicting SubGenius
stuff that didn't happen until the 80's. And if you look at our 1980's
SubGenius pamphlet, it mentions several films and books you can buy,
including Reproduction a nd World Of The Future, but it also refers to
Arise! which is the SubGenius feature-length film. Recruitment film, which
we're not showing today because too many people have seen it really. We are
selling copies. If you haven't seen it, you should definit ely invest the
twenty bucks, it's not copy protected. None of this stuff is copy protected.
See? You're not just buying one copy. You're buying one legal copy and
dozens of illegal copies for all your friends or enemies. Reproduction Cycle
is the first on e up. It's a claymation porno film. That's what it looks
like at first. It's actually an educational film. About reproduction cycles
of lower life forms underneath the rocks of Mars. It's sort of a prediction
of what the Viking lander scooped up on Mars, but they never wanted to
release the footage. Since it's not right for kids. Ironic that this film,
Reproduction Cycle was picked up by a children's film distributor. Because
the lady who ran the place was so naive and innocent and out of it that she
did not realize that it was pornography! And only when certain teacher and
parents groups started complaining about this film that she rented did she
catch on. I tried to explain it! But they always think you're kidding, you
know...
All of these films are made on borrowed equipment made a little bit at a
time. I'd be working some minimum wage job and I'd make enough money to pay
for ten minutes worth of 16-mm film. And do that, work for a week on that,
and get it processed and then save up for the next roll of film. I should
mention on Reproduction Cycle, it has a strange visual composition to it.
It's shot through an electron microscope to begin with, but aside from that,
it was shot with a Kodak... Oh, I can't remember the name of the camera, but
they're mainly used for shooting high school football games. The bottom part
of the screen has animation, the stop motion in it. The top part of the
screen is all black. You may sit there and wonder, "Well, why the hell can't
we get a lit tle tighter in on that animation down there, and what's all
that black stuff at the top?" The idea was, originally, I was going to
super-impose exotic fish as if flying through the screen up on top. Fish and
other little stop motion creatures. I was going to do several more optical
passes. The problem was when I got the first roll of film back that the
picture sort of jittered like this. You can't tell just looking at it by
itself, but if it's superimposed with something that's shot on a steady
camera or a camera with a differently bad registration, it would become
painfully obvious that the registration wasn't right, so that's why you'll
get this lovely blackness on the whole top half of the screen. What you can
do is imagine the worst things in your wor st nightmares flipping across the
top of the screen and you'll pretty much have it.
[QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE:] What if you have no nightmares?
Pardon me? If you have no nightmares, you should not be in this room. You
should definitely leave before World Of The Future starts! World of the
Future is what you could call a true underground film. It's chopped down to
half an hour. You can actually s ee the slices in some cases. It's a black
and white student film. I was 18 years old when I shot it, using borrowed
equipment from the college I was flunking out of. It's a hard film for some
people to take. I was not a very well-adjusted teenager, and pr aise "Bob",
I never got well adjusted! And I refuse to adjust to the Conspiracy world!
[Audience clapping, "Praise "Bob"!"]
It is a pretty accurate viewpoint of a tormented teenager's view of reality.
I was hyperaware of the Conspiracy as we define it in the Church of the
SubGenius, but I didn't know about "Bob", so in other words, it's the most
hopeless vision of the future that I've ever seen. I like to think anyway.
It's pretty cheesy, I mean, it's as low budget as you can get, but that's
part of the charm of it in a way. That film and Reproduction Cycle are both
inspired more by the old underground comics from the late 60 's and the
early 70's: the work of Robert Crumb, Robert Williams, Esclay Wilson, Justin
Breen, and several other people. My life's ambition was, "God, if I could do
something as pissed off as these guys have done, then I can die." I'm still
pissed off and I'm not dead yet, so... we still have got a ways to go. And,
people are familiar with those types of comics, which they weren't really
funny funny books. Crumb's getting a lot of attention now. I'd love to see
Esclay Wilson and some of the other guys get what they deserve. Which is
probably to be nailed up on telephone poles and pelted with crap from the
Normals, which is what they'll probably end up getting. This film has a lot
in common with a lot of those comic books. The audiences of the time who wer
e mostly nice hippies of the 70's did not like World of the Future. World of
the Future is sort of like a punk viewpoint ten years before it's time, I'm
proud to say. It's black and white, it's abrasive. It hurts to watch. There
are some moments in it tha t are very, very un-PC. Not to exactly put a
disclaimer on it, but there are a couple of things in here that by today's
standards would appear to be terribly homophobic, racist, and sexist. If you
were familiar with the underground comics of the time, wha t it really is is
a reverse bulldada switch-around satirical thing about homophobia, racism,
and sexism. But now-a-days, you have to explain that to people or they don't
get it! I'm really disgusted that it's come to that but over the intervening
20 years , it has gotten to the point where you cannot just do your satire,
you have to tell people: "This is a satire, by the way." Just because it
shows someone being killed doesn't mean we advocate killing policemen or
whatever. It's disgusting that people are so uptight.
Which brings to mind the one rule... You know, most religions have lots of
rules. The Church of the SubGenius only has one, pardon my language: Fuck
'em if they can't take a joke! That's the only rule that a SubGenius has to
follow. And you can live by t hat, actually! We give you lots of other
red-herring rules that you can try to live by, heh! Go ahead! But that's the
one that really seems to have the most meaning for most of us. Anyway, I've
learned my lesson from World of the Future, because I've seen people get
pissed off and walk out. There's also a seen in there that's pretty hard to
take if you've ever been in a situation or even know someone in the "ugly
boy who is in love with the pretty girl who loves the handsome guy" routine.
That situation, well... I probably don't have to worry about that in here,
there aren't any handsome guys so... You'll probably all identify with it,
but be prepared. It's stripped down to the bare raw nerve endings. It's
called the Bozo Mating Scene. Towards the end of World of the Future. David
Osman of the Firesign Theater used to borrow prints of the film and show it,
but he'd always walk out when that scene was on. He couldn't bear to watch
it because it's a little bit too real. So be prepared if you've ever had you
r heart broken over and over again. It's about to be, the knife, stuck in
deeper and twisted.
Oh! There's another old film that's scheduled to run called Duks Yaz Yaz.
I'd just assume this one not be shown because it's not particularly a good
film. I did it when I was 16, I was a senior in high school, but I think the
reason they're running it he re today is because it's based on a Robert
Crumb comic strip. The situation behind it was I was big Crumb fan, but I
can't draw. I can animate, but I can only animate clay. This was the only
Crumb story that could be done with live action. Unfortunately i t's one of
the more dull Crumb stories, but keep in mind that in 1969 or 70, whenever
this was, grainy black and white hyper-realistic depressing movies were in
vogue. Star Wars hadn't come out, and Midnight Cowboy was one of the more
impressive, widely-i mitated sort of movies at the time. In fact, it has a
fake New York City. It was all filmed in Dallas, but was designed to look
like New York or Chicago or someplace. We had to use public restrooms for
subway entrances and things like that. Robert Crumb d id get to see Duks Yaz
Yaz many years after it was made and he wasn't very impressed. I don't blame
him a bit. You'll see what I mean, but if you were into those old Zaf
comics, you'll remember the story from Zaf #0.
The last... Well, I don't know if it's the last... We may have Duks Yaz Yaz
queued up for the very last. After World of the Future, you'll see the most
recent film that I've got to video. I haven't put my film-maker's cap on,
really, in quite a while, bu t in 1991, these guys from MTV on their
promotions department which is the part of MTV that's good. They're little
tie-ins between the videos. These are the guys who set up the little clever
animation pieces. And they do a thing, or at least they used to do, little
things they called "Art Breaks" or "In Your Eye", where they approached
people who weren't necessarily film-makers, but costume designers or
painters or whatnot and say "We'll put you with a film-making crew and you
can make a one minute film a nd we'll see what happens." Well, they called
me up and said, "Hey! Reverend Stang! We're MTV! We're the Conspiracy! We'll
pay you to make a SubGenius commercial and we'll provide a film-maker to
help you." They didn't know that I was a film-maker by trad e. In fact I had
started making movies when I was 10 years old. I said, "Now wait a minute!
You guys are the Conspiracy!" And they said, "Well, yeah." I said, "Well,
what's the catch here? You're going to give me a pittance to make this film
or do this th ing but, do I have say something nice about MTV in it?" They
said, "Well, you have to have our logo in there somewhere, but it doesn't
have to be presented in a positive light. You could show somebody shooting a
TV that's got the MTV logo on it. Or someth ing like that." And I said, "Oh!
Well, OK. I guess that's Dobbs-Approved. We can work with that." Especially
since I really needed the money, what little there was. The hardest part was
talking them into letting me produce and direct it. Because they didn 't
know me from Adam as far as film-making credit went. Most of my credit is
from business film editing and stuff. So, I made a very elaborate storyboard
and that's what sold them on it. They realized that I had thought it out and
knew how to do the effec ts and so forth. They questioned whether or not I
could pull it off on a $15,000 budget, and that's where the Church of the
SubGenius connection came in really handy. I have a radio show, and was
doing a show in Dallas, and was able to not only round up c rowds for the
crowd scene, but even costumes. We needed a big room of people all dressed
identically to look like SubGenius zombies praising "Bob", just for a few
seconds. Well, we didn't have any idea for costumes, you know... Where could
we get the, say , Doctor suits? That was the easiest thing, or lab coats,
for everybody to wear. Well, one of our SubGenius ministers worked for the
drug enforcement agency. The DEA. He worked in the lab analyzing people's
confiscated speed or whatever. Put it under the spectre-graph and say, "Oh,
that's part speed and part battery acid." Keep some for his retirement. That
was his gag about it. But, anyway, so the DEA provided the costumes. We got
the computer animations from SubGenius animators who had regular jobs doin g
logos and stuff and were so bored with that that they were happy to work for
third price doing little bits of computer animation for us. And that's where
we worked in the MTV logo. You see the MTV building being destroyed by a
flying saucer being pilote d by "Bob". It's kind of hard to read, but it's
there. It was fun! I had been a writer and a radio and all this other stuff
that I'd been doing with SubGenius for several years and I hadn't done a
film in a long time, and not only did I get to do a film a gain, but we were
able to PAY everybody! Not what they normally get paid, but they were
getting paid and this is the one, the shortest little film on here is the
one that people got paid on, and it was a lot of fun to do. I'd love to get
back to making mo vies again, and I have a feeling we're going to, but I
think it's going to be in the medium of CD-ROMs. Trying to make a feature
film these days, you can do a low-budget feature film, but you can't get it
distributed. That's always been the problem with m ovies. There's a million
really fine independently produced movies sitting on shelves or being shown
on battleships somewhere at best, or maybe you can find them in video
stores, but unless you're some kind of a film geek like most of us are, you
wouldn't even know they exist. But the CD-ROM technology is kind of like...
I've worked on a really elaborate CD-ROM game here that's being filmed and
put together and animated here in Chicago by a company called Run-and-gun.
The game is called "Dual Environment" . It's not out yet. But working with
those guys, I've realized this is the way to go. For a quarter of a million
dollars, you can have aspects of a feature film, but it's more interactive,
it can have animation, or live action or whatever, and it can have endless
amounts of text. So, for something like a SubGenius project, it's perfect.
Because we like to play games with all the various kinds of media and kind
of mix 'em up. Use them inappropriately, if you know what I mean. Hopefully,
when our CD-ROM com es out, it will carry a virus that will utterly mess up
your computer. It'll mess up the user too. And all those diseased,
mind-controlled users will sit back and say, "Praise "Bob"! I need to send
them that $30 for that minister's card."
But I guess that, yeah... It's time now to shut up and roll the movies...
Talk to me at the SubGenius table if you want to perform SubGenius
marriages. I don't know if you really want to. Let's have at it. Thank you.
[AUDIENCE CLAPPING: AT THIS POINT, THE FILMS WERE SHOWN]
...I don't know how instructive that is. We're not saying we're smarter than
everyone else, we're just saying we're BETTER! That's why it's SUBGenius.
It's not intelligence that counts, it's sense. Common sense, sense of humor
obviously, and most importan tly, dollars and cents, dear friends. I mean
let's be practical here. And, by the way, we're not kidding about the hate
stuff. It's like all religions are basically centered around hate. In most
cases, it's not that they love the Lord so much as they love the idea of the
rest of us going to Hell. And, we just try to take that basic essence and
boil it down to that. At least we're honest about that. Our church was built
not on some rock, but a shifting sandy beach of hypocrisy. Where would any
religion be without it's hypocrisy? At least we're honest off. When we rip
you off, you know. You're GLAD to be ripped off because you're being ripped
off by "Bob" and by yourself. As "Bob" said, "Pull the wool over your own
eyes, and relax in the safety of your own delusions." We try to turn people
into mind-controlled dupes, and then we KICK THEIR BUTTS for falling for it!
If you read through our books, and this is the way it really happens, it's
all set up, it's you'll be reading through it, "ha-ha, that's very am using,
ha-ha..." and you keep reading, "you know, actually, this kind of needs to
be said, and I guess that we have to catch it in this sort of satirical
form". And in the middle, further down, you're going, "this is true! "Bob"'s
right! I've finally foun d somebody who might have some fucking sense!" and
then immediately we pull the rug out from underneath them and go, "Look, you
owe us a lot more, dumbass!" So, it's not a good way to make a lot of money,
to tell the truth. It really is an organization fo r people who are not
joiners, and not many people join! Although it tends to be good through the
context.
[FROM AUDIENCE, UNINTELLIGIBLE QUESTION]
Well, Dobbs himself isn't really a very good preacher. I don't think he
remembers even starting the Church, to tell you the truth. Every time he's
ever appeared in public, one of us has to kill him. In fact, on our video,
Arise!, there's some rather excit ing footage of the first time he was
assassinated. The thing is, there's a lot of idiots and ninnies running
around that like to say they're "Bob" Dobbs. And, we have a very simple
policy, and it's kind of borrowed from the Buddhist philosophy: If you mee t
"Bob" on the highway, KILL HIM! If it was "Bob", they'll probably resurrect,
and if it wasn't, GOOD RIDDANCE. We've got an answer for everything. Fifteen
years in the making, you better believe we've got an answer for everything.
Anything else?
[FROM AUDIENCE: How about a little rant?]
What do you mean a "little rant"? WHAT DO YOU THINK I'VE BEEN DOING?!?
Jesus! No! No, I'm not going to stand here and go, "Ok, one, two, three,
rant!" Number one, I could make it up. Number two, I don't have the dancing
girls, the boys, the muscle men, th e magicians, the body piercing freaks,
the background videos and the band that we have to have in order to do a
proper SubGenius devival. Next one coming up is Cleveland, and I'm coming up
on August 5th, so see you there. It's not just me, though. I'm get ting too
old for this, I'm trying to make way for the younger preachers.
[FROM AUDIENCE: Are there going to be any devival in Chicago?]
No. Pope Flores threw a big SubGenius convention here in '92 that was a
pretty classic. A lot of people were injured. There were several
miscarriages, abortions. It was like Woodstock. Dokstock is the same. But, I
don't know. Talk to your local trendy nig ht-club or art museum or whatever.
Scare up about three grand and we'll have a party.
[FROM AUDIENCE: Actually, the best part about that was all the Normals that
ran out when the head launching started. It was...]
Oh your people start getting scared when they start seeing the decapitation.
They don't understand that we're not killing SubGeniuses...
[FROM AUDIENCE: How does one go about becoming an Altar Boy of the Church?]
Well, the simplest thing is to send your $30 to the SubGenius PO box in
Dallas. I'll take your money now, I don't have the packages with me,
unfortunately. Ran out of them at the sci-fi con in Atlanta last week, and
you get your minister's credentials...
[FROM AUDIENCE: Oh, but I want to be an Altar Boy!]
You can be anything you want! You can be the damned Pope! You can declare
yourself anything, whatever. King. Emperor of all SubGeniuses. We're not
picky about that. We don't tell you what to do. The Conspiracy will tell you
what to do! All we're selling y ou is a few pieces of paper that will get
onboard of the escape vessels of the Sex Goddesses on July 5th, 1998.
Eternal salvation or triple your money back. It's also a subscription to a
magazine, but I will admit...
[tape runs out]
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