Mike White, author, "Impossibly Funky"

Author Mike White's book "Impossibly Funky: A Cashiersdu Cinemart Collection" is in many ways a chronicle not only of cinematic musings, a tome on White's life. White turned what could have simply been a flash-in-the-pan film enthusiast's dream into a legitmate work of movie art, a collection of essays, interviews, and rantings on film ranging in scope from, as White says, the arthouse to the outhouse.

Here White chats with the Yap about his fanzine's humble beginnings, and how one grows from a simple fanatic with a thirst for documenting and sharing his thoughts to a published, successful author.

You can purchase "Impossibly Funky" at http://impossiblefunky.blogspot.com/p/cdc-book.html.

Let's start with your fanzine, Cashiers du Cinemart, from which this book sprang. What inspired you to start a fanzine, and how did you make it a reality?

Yes, Cashiers du Cinemart was the name of my fanzine. I prefer saying "zine" really as I wasn't much of a fan of anything. If anything, it was more of a kvetchzine. Just me bitching about things at first: "Reality Bites" (the movie), the hipsters in my neighborhood, the bad production values of porn films, that kind of stuff. Before Cashiers du Cinemart became a zine it was just a title. One I thought of while standing in the ticket booth at the movie theater where I worked. I was probably reading Factsheet Five--the zine of zine reviews--at the time. I didn't read a whole lot of zines when I was coming up but I read about them in Factsheet Five and got my inspiration from them. I've always been fascinated by work stories and loved the idea of writing a zine about working in a movie theater. That was the central idea behind CdC. Ironically, I didn't write a word about theater life until my sixth issue!

The other thing that motivated the zine was the stuff going on in my life at the time. Just before I graduated film school I had done a little video called "Who Do You Think You're Fooling?" which compared Quentin Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs" to Ringo Lam's "City on Fire." I sent out VHS copies of it to a few key media outlets like Chris Gore's Film Threat and the whole reaction to the video began to be a story I wanted to tell. All of those things together convinced me to get my butt on the couch and start pecking out the first issue of CdC. I really had no idea that it'd become my driving passion for the next 14 years.

I got into web development in 1997 and making an online version of Cashiers du Cinemart was my first project. Was it pretty? No. It still isn't. The site's like the cobbler's wife. I spend all day now working on websites but never take the time to make my own site work/look as good as it can. More than being a source of new stuff, www.impossiblefunky.com is where I keep all of the old issues archived along with some stuff that never made it to print. I post new stuff irregularly over at my blog --impossiblefunky.blogspot.com

How do you go from fan to writer, scoring interviews and things like that?

I got to thinking that my zine was pretty hot shit and started sending it all around and to people I wanted to talk to. I used to be pretty good at tracking people down either via the phone or mail. The person that really started the ball rolling for me in terms of interviews was Bruce Campbell. He's from the Detroit-area too and I think he decided to throw me a bit of a bone by giving me an interview. This was back when Cashiers du Cinemart was still being put together with gluesticks and hope. I can never really express how much I appreciated him taking the time to chat with me. My interview with him spurred me on to do bigger and better things. In fact, the issue in which his interview ran was my first foray into desktop publishing.

I still wouldn't call myself a writer, though. I like to say that I put a lot of words down on paper and sometimes they make sentences, usually riddled with grammatical and spelling errors. But, once in a while, I get the order right and manage to entertain or inform people with what comes out of my noggin.

So what brings you to a book?

The idea originally stemmed from Clint Johns, the zine maven from Tower Records (and a prince among men). He'd suggested putting together a book version of Cashiers du Cinemart back before the economic bubble burst. I'd seen a few other zinesters do it and figured I could jump on the bandwagon. I started putting together a proposal and, by the time I turned it in, the bubble burst and Tower Records filed Chapter 11. Yet, the idea still stuck around. Once I decided to take the zine off life support after my 15th issue, I contemplated doing a "best of" issue but the book seemed like even a dumber idea so, of course, I went for it.

Dumber?

Yeah, I already knew how tough it was to pull together an issue of Cashiers du Cinemart so here I was pulling together a book of it. Yes, a lot of the material was already written but I agonized over which pieces to put in and, once I got a list going, I started piecing things together and revisiting/rewriting things that I hadn't looked at in over a decade.

I thought of the book as my opportunity to go back and start grouping like things. I've got a few things that I've written about continously over the years -- Star Wars, Planet of the Apes, Quentin Tarantino, Travis McGee, Black Shampoo -- and pulled these pieces together either into their own sections or into more complete articles. Likewise, I could go back and update pieces with developments that had occurred since they initially went to print. With my piece on the various adaptations of James Ellroy works into film, for example, I couldn't track down "L.A. Sheriff's Homicide" but had done that and more in the intervening months. In other words, I'd like to consider Cashiers du Cinemart the sketch and Impossibly Funky the finished art.

You seem to have wide-ranging tastes in film. Can you talk a bit about your interest in schlock-type cinema?

I'd like to think that my tastes from the Art House to the Out House. Though I've tried freelancing for various periodicals and have had my work turned down as being too low brow for the high brow magazines and too high brow for the low brow rags. This used to piss me off but now I kind of think of it as a badge of honor. Like the old French writers of old that I kind of lampooned with the name of my zine, I try to look at so-called "B-Cinema" and try to find the subtext there.

What makes it so appealing to write about?

I feel that there's a sense of freedom that comes with schlock cinema. Other than to entertain, there aren't a lot of expectations for it and, thus, the filmmakers are free to inject their films with more than just what's going on at the surface. And, too, there might be things happening there that they don't even realize. There are a lot of films that put the "psycho" in "psychotronic" and those are the movies I love.

How about the practical aspects of getting your book published. How did you accomplish it?

I'm all about DIY. Have been for years, if you can't tell. After Tower went out of business but the idea of a book still burned bright in my heart I decided I'd just go ahead and self-publish. Despite that, I still wrote up a book proposal in order to help crystallize the idea in my head (and maybe practice for the sequel -- sequels are always inevitable, aren't they?). I wanted to keep pretending that I was a real writer doing a real project.Sometimes that's the best way to get things done. The one problem with self-publishing these days is the whole distribution angle. I'd made a lot of contacts with distributors over the years of doing Cashiers du Cinemart but the smaller ones went out of business while the bigger ones just didn't seem to care. It was all paperwork and jumping through hoops with them. I didn't want to deal with that malarkey. So, near the end of the process I started casting my eye around to publishers that were putting out books I enjoyed. I came up with a short list and started emailing my proposal around. When BearManor Media bit, we electronically shook hands and were off to the races. Looking back over what I've said here, I think that my secret to my limited success has been just doing what I want to do and not caring about the consequences. To put it another way, I've tried to pretend to have more balls than I do. I go out and put my foot in it and hope for the best.