Tim Bullard's Article on Bill Oberst, Jr.

Bill Oberst Jr. is a Christian, having portrayed Jesus Christ at Precious Blood Catholic Church, but right now industry executives are taking note of his work in horror movies, many of which you can find now at Red Box locations across the country.

"Take This Lollipop" garnered him a Daytime Emmy. If you know horror genres, you know this is the year Jonathan Frid died, having been born in 1924. Oberst has studied horror since he was a kid.

"I’m in South Carolina doing A Christmas Carol at Brookgreen," he said.

Jason Zada directed "Take This Lollipop" which was an innovative thriller Oct. 27, 2011 with more than 13 million "likes" and more than 100 million unique hits on the Internet.

The daytime Emmy is presented by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences I nthe category of "New Approaches-Daytime Entertainment." It beat out Ellen, The Today Show and The Bold and The Beautiful. Ever had a nightmare about a cyberstalker? Watch this flick.

It is a Facebook application.

You are walking down a dark hallway and see movement from the light in a room. There is a man hovering over a computer, typing. It is the Georgetown native, showing his dirty fingernails.

He puts in his password at Facebook, and you get a close-up of Bill, sweating. There is weird music, and Bill is agitated. He starts looking at addresses, then he looks at the screen, at you.

The Strand Theater is presenting "Bill Oberst Jr.’s Weird Tales with two shows only Saturday, Jan. 12 at 4 p.m. and at 7 p.m.. Call 843-527-2924. The tales are from the stories of wonder from Poe, H.P. Lovecraft and Ray Bradbury.

Since he is a native of Georgetown, he wants to get the word out, and he is excited about this show.

The one-man show begins a national tour in the spring. Oberst was named "The King of Indie Horror" by the U.K. horror fan site Erebus Horror in March. He arrived in Los Angeles four years ago and has been in more than 80 film and TV credits.
Oberst performed "Pillar of Fire" by Bradbury in Bradbury’s hometown of Waukegan, Ill. Halloween weekend as part of the Ray Bradbury Storytelling Festival.

All of the tales are "profoundly strange," he said. "I’m doing Poe, Lovecraft and Bradbury in their own words, using the exact texts that they wrote," he said. "That’s important to me. I fell in love with language at an early age. I’d be so happy if one young person was taken enough with hearing those words to read more of these authors, or if one adult was inspired to go back and re-read them. That would be enough foe me."

CNN called him "an emerging horror icon" in a profile this summer. He received a Golden Cobb Award from the National B-Movie Celebration Festival as Best Rising B-Movie Actor beating out Tom Sizemore and Joe Esteves. He won a Best Actor Award at Hollywood’s Shockfest Film Festival for his lead role in "Children of Sorrow."

Reserved-seat tickets for the premiere performances of 'Bill Oberst Jr.'s Weird Tales' are $15.00 and are available by reservation from the Strand Theater box office at 710 Front Street in Georgetown, SC by calling 843-527-2924. There will be two performances only, both on Saturday, Jan. 12, 2013 at 4 p.m. and 7 p.m.

"I'm humbled and a little nervous to be previewing this show in my hometown" say the actor, "but I've loved the Strand Theater since I was a kid. Besides, it's sort of a good luck charm for me. I previewed 'An Evening With Lewis Grizzard' at the Strand in 1999, and it went on to run for a dozen years and 2,000 performances on tour. I'm happy that my home folks are willing to have me there."

Poe wrote some of his work in South Carolina.

"Poe was stationed in the Army in Charleston at Fort Sullivan," said Oberst. "He wrote a short story called ‘The Gold Bug.’ It was set down there. He’s definitely got connections to the South."

Oberst was the director of the chamber of Georgetown County, he said.

"I performed Jesus in churches and all up and down the coast," he said. He gave a stirring performance of Jesus at Precious Blood Catholic Church.

He attended USC and the College of Charleston. He did theater for 14 years. His first live performance was in high school, Winyah High.

"I got the bug early on," he said. "I’ve always loved horror."

He has just been signed on to do the movie "Cell Count 2."

If you know the horror world, you may already know that "Cosmopolis" will be out soon on DVD with S.C. native Will Patton doing the voice on novelist Don DeLillo’s super-strange book. Robert Pattinson of the "Twilight" series stars as a billionaire who lives in a futuristic world, losing his fortune.

Patton stars in the TNT series "Falling Skies" as Captain Weaver. He is proof that a Charleston native can make it in Hollywood, having already climbing his way up from the N.C. School of the Arts, The Actor’s Studio, "Dillinger" and "The Assault on Reason" voiceover.

Oberst said anything he does he wants God to be involved in.

By Tim Bullard

www.timbullard.com

Savage Featured in Bigfoot Filmography

A few years ago a writer named David Coleman approached me and asked if he could get some Savage stuff for a book he was publishing at the time called Sasquatch Cinema. We gladly obliged and send him pictures, articles and even did an interview for the book. Well lo and behold, the book was released earlier this year under the new title, The Bigfoot Filmography. 

The book is a little pricey at $49.95 listed on Amazon.com, but if you're a fan of Bigfoot and Bigfoot movies this book has nearly 350 pages full of Bigfoot in the cinema. You can also get the Kindle version for only $16.49. 

If you want to check out what they printed about Savage, pick up a copy. If you love Bigfoot movies and want to see what you've been missing, pickup a copy. If you blindly do what others ask you to do, pick up a copy. At any rate, we thank David for including our film in his compilation and encourage everyone to... pick up a copy!

Buy The Bigfoot Filmography from Amazon here

Check out The Bigfoot Filmography website for photos, clips and excerpts from the book here

Bold Prediction for the Future of FX

I came across an article today about the new Wacom Intous5 tablets. Now if you're just a hardcore horror buff and you don't know what I'm talking about, Wacom produces tablets used mainly be designers, artists, etc., but trust me once you get the hang of them you won't go back to using a mouse. Basically this tablet is a flat mouse pad that you use a stylus to draw or move the cursor with on your computer. Very handy if you're doing art or design work where you need superb control. By now you're thinking, who gives a shit, tell me more about horror crap. Okay, we'll get to that. Recently Wacom introduced their new series of tablets which offer up a lot of multi-finger control. Ooooo, "multi-finger control" perked you up, did it? It's not what you think. Basically you use your finger or fingers to do multiple functions. Think of the new personal tablets or smart phones that allow you to expand / reduce frames, click on items, etc. but with many more options. Like Minority Report but much cooler.

Okay, let me digress so we can tie this all together. Back when I was in college studying makeup FX for film / TV there were two camps, practical FX and computer FX. The two didn't like each other. Could be that way today but I see a lot more marrying of the two mediums than when I went to school. Back then the coolest stuff was creating your own lightsabers while we thought our shit didn't stink since the world was still primarily a practical FX one. Ah, but then the tide began to turn. Computerized visual FX have much greater range and can do things my practical colleagues could only dream of (I refer to my colleagues because I never was any good at practical FX). Take Rise of the Planet of the Apes for instance. In a practical world the FX would look not much better than they did when Tim Burton took a stab at his ill-fated remake back in 2001 (which he also combined computer FX to give his apes more range than their makeup would allow). Side note: excuse my overuse and probably misuse of parentheses (I like to use them if you hadn't noticed). Then you look at Rise and it's amazing what computers can do these days.

So back in the day, one camp was building FX with their hands and the other with computers. Now flash forward to the present. Wacom, and I'm sure there are other devices out there, are using the artist's hands to help create computer images. Flash forward another 5, 10, maybe 15 years from now, if you can, and visualize a world where the practical artist and the digital artist meet. Think of a device that would allow that artist to sculpt with their hands, adding details not with a mouse or stylus, but with their fingers and sponges like they still do on the practical side. No more dried, cracking hands covered in clay or casting agents (I used to hate that part) <-- There are those parentheses again!

As much as I was entrenched in the practical FX camp, I can see the future. Digital FX give filmmakers far greater range than practical FX, they are becoming cheaper and cheaper and nearly anyone with a computer can learn a great deal of them on their own, they allow the filmmaker to do thinks they only dream of whereas they once couldn't have afforded them, and if done right, the results are astounding.

In this bold new future, there will no longer be two camps, but one large conglomerate of artists. We will bring our hands, they will bring their computers, and in the end we'll all be happy... maybe.