Yesterday, we told you a little bit about the films of gore wizard Herschell Gordon Lewis. But what we didn't tell you is that since his days in the movie business, Lewis has become one of the world's foremost experts on direct marketing. A prolific author, columnist, and all around brilliant guy, Lewis recently took time out of his busy schedule to chat with us about movies, showmanship, and the current state of advertising.

Firstly, I apologize for [phoning at the wrong time] yesterday. I assumed you still lived in Chicago.

Well, somebody has to, but I gave that up years ago.

So with all that time spent making movies in Florida, you developed an affection for the place?

I developed an affection for decent weather. You see, wintertime in Sydney or Melbourne is not the same as wintertime in Chicago.

Though Chicago has a few good months a year. It’s a great city in the summertime.

It’s a good business town. That’s about all I can say for it. I grant you that it has cultural advantages that South Florida doesn’t have. But I threw away my heavy overcoat. Of course, I still need a coat—we spent Christmas and New Year this year at the Ice Hotel in the Northern end of Sweden. So that reminded me why I moved to Florida.

I wanted to talk to you about these two movies—Bloodfeast and 2000 Maniacs!—that are screening here in Austin on the weekend. They’ll be screening at an actual ghost town, which I would think is the kind of thing you’d find very agreeable. Do you miss that kind of “showman” marketing? Because it doesn’t seem to happen much any more.

It doesn’t. Showmanship seems to have vanished, because everything now is done on a bulk level, and things are all built around huge television campaigns. It’s like political candidates—I think it’s rather parallel, because here we are, there’s an election in 2008, and candidates are already withdrawing from the Iowa primary because they don’t have enough money to compete on TV. And I thought, gee, that really parallels the movie business in which the hype causes… I mean, look at that Spider-Man movie. With all that hype, it opens gigantically, and then in the second and third week it fell apart. Which is no surprise, by the way. The difference with the kind of movies we talk about is that they gradually build instead of opening like a rocket flare and then suddenly disappearing.

But of course, you also have the polar opposite with a movie like Snakes on a Plane, where everyone was talking about it before it came out. And when it opened, no one went.

[Laughs] Yeah. You give a party and nobody comes.

Which I guess speaks to the deceiving nature of the internet. People talk about things on the internet, and you assume that the internet is the world.

It is, for many people. It’s not just their bible, it’s their prophet. Both p-r-o-p-h-e-t and p-r-o-f-i-t. The two words are synonymous there.

Do you think that the theatrical experience has changed much since the days when [Bloodfeast and 2000 Maniacs] were released?

Well, the complexion of the theatre audience certainly has changed. We used to go to the movies, and it was really a “night out”. We sat there enthralled. Today, a TV audience goes to the movies, and everybody talks. It’s interactive! Instead of being a viewer, you become a participant. It’s stupefying! But oh well. Now we have multi-screens where people walk into one and think, “nah”, and go on to the next room.

There are also companies that simultaneously release movies to theatres and to DVD at the same time. So you can see the same movie at home with no delay at all. I don’t know whether that’s good or bad, and I don’t really care because it doesn’t affect me that much. But you can see the change in the whole complexion of mass entertainment.

Netflix has a “Watch Now” feature now. There is a whole list of movies that you can just watch on your computer.

Well, we get Netflix, but I’m not subscribing to that. I’m not going to sit at my computer [and watch a movie]. The benefit, to me, of Netflix is another contemporary change—we’re on the five movie program, and sometimes we’ll look at two of them in an evening, and we’ll get ten or fifteen minutes in and say, “eecchh”. And we’ll take it out an try another one.

That’s a good point. The current generation, though, will watch movies on anything. They’ll watch movies on their telephones.

Oh yeah—they’ll look at it on their phones. And that’s the reason we’re going to have a lot of business for eye doctors in a few years.

Somehow, despite the change in demographic and the change in the moviegoing experience, these two movies, Bloodfeast and 2000 Maniacs, have survived. And like you said, they’ve actually become even more popular as the years go on. What is it about these kinds of movie that has helped them survive?

Well, there are a couple of things that might help them survive. And one is that for some of my movies, they have historical merit. That is that people recognize that they began a movement. Now, whether that movement is positive or negative, it was still a movement [laughs].

And second, there’s a rawness to them that people don’t feel challenged by. That is, they understand that this is just a movie. Some of the realistic effects you see in contemporary horror movies are so realistic that it turns people off altogether. That problem doesn’t exist with my old crap.

Which I guess must be sort of bittersweet. On the one hand you invented the entire genre of gore, and on the other hand it’s grown into something that’s not at all in the spirit of the kinds of movies that you were making. Is there anything contemporary that you like watching?

If it shows up on Netflix and I watch it all the way through, that’s a triumph for the producer.

[Laughs]

Last night we watched The Queen on Netflix. I had looked forward to that one, but not enough to go to the theatre to see it. We did go to the theatre to see the Last King of Scotland, because I wanted to see it on the big screen. But for The Queen I thought, “we’ll wait until it comes out on DVD”. And then Helen Mirren won the Academy Award, and I looked at this movie and thought, “there’s nothing in it”. So the technique of judgment apparently changes too based on the kind of picture it is.

People look at Spider-Man movies through a different set of eyes then they would look at The Queen with. Or that they would look at 2000 Maniacs with. It’s almost as though we have a three-way switch, and people adjust that switch in anticipation as they go in.

It’s interesting that you moved from moviemaking to marketing, because they seem similar businesses in a lot of ways. These days, advertising is a business that has all of these sort of artistic pretensions, but really, it’s about the bottom line. And I know that's the kind of thing you had expressed distaste for in the movie business.

Well, yes. It’s a “business”. The movie business. And what I resent most deeply is when people go into this thing and it becomes an exercise in egoism rather than an attempt to entertain somebody else.

Certainly. But what I mean is that these days, ads are criticized as if they were movies.

Well, look at the Geico commercial with that strange lizard in it. That would be a reason for me never to have Geico handle my car insurance. But that’s an individual reaction—you either attract somebody or you repel somebody.

You don’t like the Geico lizard?

I think the Geico lizard is absolutely… it’s at the bottom of my snake pit. When you sacrifice salesmanship in favor of entertainment, that’s a cop-out. That’s the creative team saying, “look how creative we are”. What matters is market share, and I understand that Geico’s market share is dropping, and that pleased me.

[Laughs] But you have to admit that as an advertiser, it’s harder and harder to get your voice heard because there is such an over-saturation of advertising.

Sure there is, but again that becomes like a political campaign—the guy with the most money gets the most business. And that’s not right either, because if that’s the case, and spending the most money gets you the most business, then eventually we’re going to have one company in each field, swallowing up all the competitors with less money.

So if you don’t have the money to be everywhere, and don’t want to go down the gimmicky entertainment road, what do you do as an advertiser?

That would take up an all-day seminar, and I would be very glad to deliver it. To replace your dollars with brains.

* Bloodfeast and 2000 Maniacs! will screen this Saturday, March 26th as part of the Alamo's Rolling Roadshow series. Tickets and info here.