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We had a weekend meet for nearly ten years... like a floating crap game, it went from place to place each week. Often it was in the apartment of Mark Williams (above, left) in North Hollywood. Mark was a tall, scary-looking sweetie, a cartoonist, movie SPFX monster maker, and writer. He had jet-black dyed hair down to his ass, tattoos all over (Cecil the Sea Serpent, the She Creature, Alice Cooper, etc., etc.), yet was the most vocal conservative I've ever met.

Tim Murphy (who posts here on occasion) was a regular as well. There was Mike Baker, a aesthic-appearing zine editor and sometime horror writer with stringy blond hair, who worked at an auction house in Burbank (and once had to pose in a diaper worn by Eddie Cantor in ALI BABA GOES TO TOWN with Canton's skid marks still there, 60 years later); me; Dave D'Coteau, a friend who I hauled in for a lark and who became close friends with Mark W, hiring him for several horror flicks. There were other who dropped by sporadically, like musician Brian Benison (in pic, with glasses), who's ghosted for a number of prominent composers, and also did the score for the silent 20,000 LEAGUES on DVD; Courtney Joyner, screenwriter; Ron Ford and his wife Paula. Later on, Stuart Galbraith became a regular, sometimes with his wife Yukio; Jay Trapnel; and my friend Ron Wilson, likewise, though much later in the decade-long saga.

The gang would float from place to place each week, Mark's, mine, Dave's. That's Dave's apartment in the pic. Usually dinner at Denny's or pizza would be the socal glue, that and movie crud. Creeping Terror, Argentine horror, the latest obscurity from Sinister Cinema. And as above, it would be there to be hooted-at, not relished. It was white noise for us, occasionally prompting scandalous and hysterical riffs continuing throughout the night.

Dave called it the Billionaire Boy's Club; Tim dubbed it the Chowder Society ("Are you chowdering this weekend?"). I called it the Friday Night Guys Without Dates Club. Infrequently when I actually HAD one, I'd have to excuse myself. People like Ron & Paula (who had to drive 60 miles in from Oxnard) or Brian Benison, people who actually had lives, appeared less frequently.

The one rule was, you didn't bring work to the group. Everyone save Tim Murphy was in the "biz" one way or the other. Plumping for work or such schmoozing was verboten. This was decompression time, silliness. I made the mistake of showing some of my stuff-- 100 yrs of Horror and an early cut of the monster movie; Dave erred and showed his The Killer Eye; Ron Ford would stop by for approbation for his films. All of us learned this was NOT the venue for appreciation. We were there to ignore and make fun of films. It was a hard lesson.

Bit by bit it morphed and changed. Mike Baker, who always had this tubercular, wracking cough, moved to Nevada for his health and died. Mark Williams ignored the fact that he had grown an extra testicle and died of cancer at 38. Dave moved to Canada. I moved out to Thousand Oaks, the Fords, to Spokane, WA.