I was once standing in the lobby of a local theater with my dear friend Russ Bates and the theater’s projectionist. That was back in the days when projectionists weren’t teenagers but were old, fat guys with about a thousand pens in their breast pockets. Russ was talking about a particularly ravishing nude scene in a recent drive-in movie we had just seen, Race with the Devil. Before Russ could go into any further detail, the projectionist pulled his wallet out of his pocket and plucked from its nether regions a frame from the very shot Russ was describing. The projectionist had apparently clipped it out during the film’s run at a local drive in, where he also worked.

This incident was more than a crazy coincidence. It is the nature of the beast. Any (if not most) of the males who go into the film biz in one capacity or another do so for the girls, either to meet or seduce them in person, to collect pix of them, or just to see them in the movies.

Thus, it came as no surprise to me when an especially girl-oriented (so to speak) email dated August 9 that Jeffrey Wells sent to director James Mangold fell into the hands of film biz blogger Nikki Finke. After dissing Mr. Mangold’s new movie, 3:10 to Yuma, Mr. Wells thanks the director for including nude shots of actress Vinessa Shaw and pleading with him to supply Wells personally with any further on-set shots of the starlet in the nude. Ms. Finke then goes on to re-print Mr. Wells’s reaction to the expose. The general reader is bound to think that Mr. Wells has a strange psychology if it can compel him to ask a favor with one hand while slapping the subject with the other, or also bound to think that in his apologia Mr. Wells rather misses the point of Ms. Finke’s post when he says that he likes female flesh and will continue to collect images of it (since the point of publicizing the email seems to be to expose private and sleazy wheeling and dealing), or wonder why he praises Mangold for including the shots of a nude Shaw privately while publicly criticizing the essence of the near-nude scene on his blog later.

Still, one must admire his audacity in sticking to his guns with this heartfelt manifesto on the right to be an eye-rapist.

As it happens I, too, received a forwarded email, this one from the Kubrick estate, apparently sent on the 6th of March, 1999. I don’t know what to make of it, except to think that an obsession with Vinessa Shaw may be a long-term condition.

March 6, 1999 9:54:59 PM GMT
To: Stanley Kubrick
Subject: Eyes Wide Shut notes

Kubeman,
Just wanted to lay it on you, dude, I saw Eyes Wide Shut and though you are usually The Man, I just can’t get behind this new film of yours. Like, it’s so boring. All those shots of the Cruises sitting around in their apt. All talk talk talk. Christ, man, where’s your great Paths of Glory type tracking shots, cause, like, then, man, you at least had a political point. And that scene in the billiard room! Did you save money on dialogue by having Cruise repeat everything everyone said to him? Hey, it’s a sex film buddy. You are the f-ing Master of the Nude Shot! I still get a tingle of pleasure over that blonde in Clockwork Orange. And the blonde in The Shining, at least until she turns all grotty and stuff. You should have had less boring chitchat and more nudity.

But speaking of nudity, man, there is one little favor I have to ask. There’s a chick in your flick that looks really hot to me, a gal named Vinessa Shaw. Man or man, she is stuff. I notice that she didn’t get nude in the film, though, like every other chick, but I realize, hey, we have similar tastes in fine female flesh, so you must have sneaked off a few shots of her in the buff just for your own collection. If so, then, hey, can I get some of that action? Please, please, pretty please, with a titty on top?

One wonders if Kathryn Bigelow, Randall Harris, Rob Pritts, Michael Lehmann, Woody Allen, Jason Freeland, and Wes Craven have received similar urgent requests. Ms. Shaw is an uncommonly comely actress, and any man, or woman for that matter, could easily fall into the erotic mood that demands the victim write to prominent directors, be he a Pitts, a Freeland, or a Mangold, and demand spare private pix of the lass. All I know is this: Kubrick died just hours after receiving the above email, in the wee hours of March 7th, 1999.

Just a few minutes ago the mail carrier delivered my personal copy of the one book that film geeks across the country—nay, the world!—have been waiting for…and for almost a decade. It’s Tim Lucas’s Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark, the Video Watchdog editor’s critical biography of the multi-faceted Italian genre director. From its shiny dust jacket bearing an image from the film Black Sunday, its star Barbara Steele looking unsettlingly like Brooke Shields, to its list of patrons in the back, it’s a massive work. At 1,128 pages, it’s got the dimensions and heft of a family Bible. And given Mr. Lucas’s diligent attention to accuracy and detail as practiced in his magazine since 1990, one can assume, as I assert in a profile of Mr. Lucas slated to appear soon in The Believer, Colors will no doubt be the definitive biography of Bava and possibly one of the best, if not the best, books on a film director ever published. It’s also exquisitely designed, by Mr. Lucas’s wife, Donna. But at $250 dollars a copy, and given that it is wholly self-published, the volume may have a limited impact unless readers and reviewers get the word out.

Who is Bava? It’s possible that most people have seen at least one of his films without really knowing it (one of Mr. Lucas’s goals in the book is to unveil the “hidden” films of Bava’s filmography). He did Spaghetti Westerns, a Hercules movie, an adaptation of the comic book Diabolik, and probably invented the giallo or Italian slasher movie. His most famous titles are Black Mask, Black Sabbath, which influenced Quentin Tarantino, Planet of the Vampires, and Danger: Diabolik. Kill Baby Kill is widely held to be his masterpiece, an exotic mood piece about a doctor who stumbles into a town tormented by the ghost of a dead child.

A cinematographer turned director, Bava is most famous for the moody lighting and use of strong color in his films, and the book comes with an introduction penned by Martin Scorsese, who extols Bava’s use of color. Yet there is also broad scope to his word. His early black and white films are lustrous, and one of his last films, Rabid Dogs, is a mostly hand-held real time heist-gone-bad tale. Suffice it to say, if there is anything you’re ever going to want to know about Bava, it’s going to be in this book.

In his column the other day Mr. Jeffrey Wells bid farewell to the DVDJournal, and did so with his usual lack of real news and with a surfeit of inexplicable bile and vitriol. Despite his reputation as a reporter, Mr. Wells didn’t reveal anything that readers couldn’t have learned from the DVDJ site itself, though like a real reporter he got a lot of facts wrong. Mr. Wells wrote that the reviews at the DVDJournal, one of the most popular DVD review forums on the Internet, were anonymous, and they were … until 2002, perhaps the last time he visited. One of the reasons I know this is because I have been a contributor to the site since about 1999, and was privy to aspects of the internal debate over signed versus unsigned reviews.

Mr. Wells also affects that the “nameless editor”’s final editorial is vague on the reason for signing off. I happen to know why the DVDJournal is closing shop and it is for the exact reason the editorial gives, that “Our own world has changed in the past decade as well, with marriages, children, new homes, career changes, and various other things that happen to sensible people when the subtle business of adulthood creeps up on them unawares.” People are moving on. I’m not sure how the editorial could be any clearer than that. Should there be some secret, scandalous cause that Mr. Wells can salivate over?

I can still recall my debut reviews. The first was Bringing Out the Dead. I got the disc (slipped through my mail slot by the “nameless editor” whom I still hope to see in the flesh sometime) the same day I returned home with my first DVD player, which I couldn’t figure out how to turn on until another (future) contributor came over and showed me how … by pushing a single button. My second disc was American Movie, and the third was Fight Club. Off to a good start, I’d say. And I still have those three discs, plus the … at least … 200 more I’ve reviewed for the site since.

If Mr. Wells did a WHOIS search for the registration of DVDJournal.com, he would have been confused, as WHOIS gives Laredo, Texas as the home location. Home base is actually Portland, Oregon, and one of the peculiarities of Portland is that numerous DVD websites originate there. Two others are DVDTalk, now a mini-empire, and Binaryflix, seemingly inactive since January, but still up. I’ve written for all of them at one time or another, but my loyalty has always remained with the DVDJ.

On Wednesday, August 29, the DVDJournal announced its closure. In an touching, finely-crafted final editorial, the owner combined a history of the DVD format with the saddening announcement that, though the site would remain up for the time being, no new reviews would be added to the 4000-plus already accumulated.

The operator of DVDJournal likes privacy and I won’t violate that wish here. I will say only that the DVDJournal deserves its reputation as the New Yorker of DVD review sites, thanks to the consistently informed and elegant prose of its contributors, which include Kim Morgan, Betsy Bozdech , Clarence Beaks, the ever alluring Alexandra du Pont, Greg Dorr, J. Jordan Burke, Damon Houx, David Walker, Joe Barlow, Dawn Taylor, and Mark Bourne, among others. These writers didn’t just give you a review of the DVD and its supplements; they attempted to write the definitive review of that movie. A perfect example is Mark Bourne’s reviews of the two Time Machine movies, both the 1960 and 2002. Both are exhaustive in their attention to history and detail. And all he was paid were the DVDs themselves.

Its popularity was boosted by the fact that the DVDJournal was one of the best designed and most attractive websites on the ‘net, easy to read and easily navigable. The editor introduced the phrase “yak track” for audio commentaries, which I’ve been stealing ever since, and another contributor came up with the idea of offering up excerpts from said commentary tracks in text form (a practice too laborious and time consuming to maintain for long). The DVDJournal also had the best release calendar of all similar sites, proved by the fact that others piggybacked on it.

The reader learns of none of these qualities from Mr. Wells’s mysteriously motivated and hostile summary, which goes on to say that, “I read the nameless editor’s statement (posted yesterday) about what’s going on, only he doesn’t really say anything. There’s an acknowledgment that the DVD market share is going down and that this may have something to do with ad revenues or the moon’s orbit or whatever, but he definitely has trouble with the concept of just spitting it out. Real men put their cards on the table.” As obits go, this is yet another grave-pisser.