Cravenomena

It's Monday, which is Craven's official "Update the Gorilla Gallery" day, so you'll notice a new addition to the gallery -- that's it over there on the right. I'll actually be adding more gorilla covers to the gallery before next Monday, just to get it a little "burlier." More importantly, I have improved the gallery by incorporating Airtight Interactive's lovely Tiltviewer application. If you haven't checked out the Gorilla Gallery in a few days, please check it out -- it's fun ... Read More

One of my goals for this blog was to create a space where I can display some of my work as a filmmaker and animator, as well as discuss techniques and reminisce about past projects. In upcoming weeks, I will be writing about the making of SHOCK! SHOCK! SHOCK!, the strange, low-budget feature I co-wrote and -directed with Todd Rutt about 20 years ago, as well as "Fun For Men!" the live-action/animated short I created a decade later. For the past eight ... Read More

Well, it's been up a bit more than a week, and Craven is reasonably satisfied with the new blog. The great director Jack Hill stopped by a few days ago to comment on "The Stooge That Almost Was," which was a very nice surprise. Thanks to Mr. Hill and everyone else who has commented so far. In an effort to spread his unique sickness, Craven has added a new feature to Cravenomena called "The Gorilla Gallery." You will find a ... Read More

Time and politics play funny tricks on our cultural memory. In this world, it is possible to be among the best-known stars of one generation -- only to be completely forgotten by the next. If you doubt that, consider the case of Mantan Moreland. Chances are, you have never heard of Moreland -- unless you're one of the handful of obsessive film fans who remember him as "Birmingham Brown," playing opposite of Sidney Toler and Roland Winters in the CHARLIE CHAN potboilers of ... Read More

I used to despise MySpace. I mercilessly ridiculed the popular social network's cluttered, butt-fugly profile pages. I couldn't imagine a bigger waste of time than playing comment tag or shooting out bulletins to announce to the world when I'm ready to go to bed. (Of course, this was before I was exposed to Facebook's cretinous apps -- or, as I like to abbreviate them, "crapps" -- or the institutionalized Tourettes cyber-tic called Twitter.) But when I started my Notes Blog and Podcast ... Read More

I was a teenage Straight Man. Okay... so I am once again sacrificing truth upon the altar of a good lead. But admit it: "I was a middle-aged Straight Man" doesn't have quite the same zing, now does it? Among his many vocations, Craven has worked as a professional actor and, on several occasions (all of them, he admits, long after his teenage years), he has been cast as the Straight Man in a comic duo. Many Broadway musicals over the years ... Read More

For some men, it's Angelina. For others, it's J. Lo or Jessica. In past generations, it was Marilyn or Raquel or Farrah. For Craven, it's Donald the Demon. Standards of beauty are funny things, as hard to pin down as shadows. "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder," spoke the Greeks, and Shakespeare, Hume and Barthes all chimed in agreement. Craven finds one of his personal standards of beauty in a six-inch dayglo chunk of plastic molded into one of the ... Read More

Run, man, run. Though your lungs are splayed across your ribs like the tatters of a burst balloon, and your feet are hard lead cakes that send rivulets of white-hot thermite squirting through your nervous system every time they piston against the Times Square cobblestones below — run! Run like your life depends upon it. Because it surely does. There are more than a hundred men hot on your heels, shouting epithets, their teeth bared like dogs and glinting in the pale glow of ... Read More

Jingle Bells, Batman smells, Robin laid an egg. The Batmobile lost a wheel and the Joker got away... Hey! -- Ancient proverb Pee-yoo. Batman stinks. As if he needed further proof that he was secretly born on another planet and walks alone bemusing what strange creatures these mortals be, Craven has listened to the accolades and kudos heaped upon THE DARK KNIGHT, Christopher Nolan's latest entry in Warner Bros.' Bat-Franchise, mystified, nonplussed and wondering if the hosannah-singers saw the same movie he did. Even granting that Heath Ledger's final performance ... Read More

A nervous buzz reverberated throughout the judicial chambers as Senator Estes Kefauver slammed his gavel down that April morning in 1954, his eyes obscured by the glare off the thick spectacles perched atop his large, beak-like nose. Kefauver had stared down gangsters and racketeers during his tenure as chairman of the Senate crime investigating committee, but today he faced some of his greatest enemies -- a cartel comprised of the nefarious likes of Superman, Dick Tracy, Mickey Mouse and the Old ... Read More