Subscrap

My day at the Los Angeles horror convention

Remember back a few posts* when I made a banner for my appearance at a horror convention in an attempt to exploit my slasher movie past and grow my substack? Total flame out!  An interesting flame out, a bizarre and in some ways compelling flame out, maybe even a uniquely human flame out, but a flame out none-the-less.

First of all, I got bad advice on the banner. It was way too big. My banner was three times the size of Fred "the Hammer" Williamson's banner. That's insane. Fred the Hammer is a god. A pro football and blaxplotation movie great who, at eighty-five, still has more game than I will ever in my life. And there I am, two booths over, my enormous banner making it seem as if I need to compensate for something, and if I’m trying to measure up to "the Hammer," I most definitely do.

Second of all, there is a huge difference between watching movies and reading books or reading anything. Or let me say it this way: This idea I’ve been holding onto that I can somehow tap into the viewing audience of the movies I have been involved with as either a writer or actor and turn that audience into a prose readership is completely absurd. No one cares. You hear that Swerdlow? Certain people might get all a titter when they find out you wrote Cool Runnings but that does not mean they want to read your fucking detective novel. Most of them don't want to read at all and if they do, they don't want to read you. Maybe they'd go see Cool Runnings 2 or Puss in Boots 16, or watch you in a Howard the Duck reunion TV special but they do not want to sign up for your substack. They don't even know what a substack is, though I did try to explain it to them in my own gregarious way. To my credit (and often detriment) I will never be accused of taking myself too seriously, and when you watch the video included here (shot and put together my gifted co-conspirator John de Menil) you will see that it was neither my shyness nor over-literate pretentiousness that got in the way.

Back to Fred the Hammer-- He was the highlight of the whole thing for me and I forgot that he played on the 1970 Kansas City Chiefs team that won Super Bowl IV, a team I loved and remember almost all the players from. Every time I had a free moment (and I had a lot of them) I moseyed over to “the Hammer” and played the baby-boomer fanboy while secretly or not so secretly showing off how much eight-year-old Tommy remembered about the Chiefs. We talked middle linebacker Willy Lanier and defensive tackle Buck Buchanan (the Hammer's best friend). I asked about my personal hero, wide receiver Otis Taylor and Jim" the gem" Marsalis, the Hammer’s partner in the defensive backfield, and I was just getting warmed up.

When I wasn't loving the Hammer I was acting the fool, calling out to anyone in a Chucky mask or Chucky overalls or carrying a Chucky doll. I don’t want to spoil the video ‘casue why tell when you can show, but the question I would ask people as they walked by was, “Do you read?” A strange query for a forty-six year-old Filipina woman dressed as Freddy Krueger.

I actually did a little business pulling in about five hundred clams, but I couldn't fully embrace the whole trading on my past for money angle when I didn't really need the dough. No one else seemed to mind but I found it uncomfortable asking a young Latina mother of three to fork over twenty bucks for an autographed photo of me in a movie made thirty-five years ago when she'd already shelled out $160 for them all to get in. This is why I gave everyone a copy of either Straight Dope (my detective book) or Poop Poems (a collection of post-dump texts I would send to my dear friend Deirdre after I took a dook) to go along with their autographed picture. To me they were buying a book.

What I actually did enjoy was not all the desperate has-been actors hawking their wares (Fred the hammer excluded, of course) but the elaborately costumed fans who saw the convention not as a place to gather autographs or meet actors but as a huge airplane hangar sized theater for their performance art. It always blows my mind how intensely people fetishize pop culture, especially when it’s pop culture I have been involved in. To me, signing an autograph is a dissociative act, but also absurdist fun, as if the real acting gig is playing this Tommy Swerdlow guy who was in this movie. I find that role far more nuanced and interesting than the cop I played in Child’s Play. 

I’ve gone on long enough and I want you to watch the video, but I want to tell one final Fred the Hammer story-- There was another actor in the stall between Fred and I, Donald Fullilove, who plays Goldie Wilson, a small but memorable role in Back to the Future. For those who don’t know, Back to the Future is such a cultural juggernaut that there are Back to the Future cruises or picnics or some such thing. Donald, who was a great guy, was telling me BttF is a whole cottage industry and giving me the lowdown on the convention circuit writ large. He also reminded me that “people are here to spend money and we are doing them a service by taking it.”

Donald, used to convention grind, brought a speaker so he could rock some tunes during the slow patches. He started playing some Coltrane later in the day and I was grooving along, snapping my fingers. That’s when Fred looks over and says. “Look at this white boy, snapping on the wrong beat. You got the worst rhythm I’ve ever seen.” Ouch, ouch and double ouch. Me, Tommy Swerdlow, a fedora wearing Coleman Hawkins fanatic and lover of all things hip and black called a no rhythm white boy by one of the great African American gods of the 60s and 70s?! What was I to do? I’ll tell you what I did. I said not so fast Fred the Hammer. I am not rhythm-less. I am snapping on the off-beat, which Duke Ellington, an even badder cat than you, says is the very height of cool. I dug out my phone, dialed up the internet and showed him Duke’s quote, but the Hammer didn’t buy it. Why should he? I had already bought an autographed $40 action shot of him making a clothesline tackle in Super Bowl IV.

*That post is called “Banner Year” if you’re new and want to go back and connect the dots.