Fellow Stumpers and blogriders everywhere:
2008 continues to be a busy and exciting year. The novella of LAST TANGO WITH MARLON is still on schedule for a July release, with everyone at Fletcher Rhoden.com working to get the word out with readings & signings and associated media interviews. Look for those to start in the fall, lit fans!
There's also a new screenplay in the works, and a new live production, of sorts. Without saying too much about it, I can mention that it would feature both a live appearances tour, along the lines of the TANGO book tour, and will likely have a new non-TANGO DVD release as well. For those hoping for a LAST TANGO WITH MARLON dvd, we'll have to wait until certain union matters are straightened out.
But the main reason for this particular blog is the indie slasher STUMP THE BAND, finally available at Amazon.com and Netflix. Reviews are popping up all over the internet, at each end of the scale. Nobody's been unfair, that's something. DVDs are being given away in contests on various horror sites, and the buzz is really starting to pick up. After a few years of floating around before a proper dvd release, STB has had a period to sink into the public consciousness, for good or ill.
Even more startling is the news that severed human feet having been washing up on the shores of Vancouver, BC. THE GUARDIAN's Dan Glaister wrote a story dated this very day -- this is an ongoing, unsolved mystery. Human feet, encased in shoes, are washing up and nobody can figure out why. Some suggest mafia or gang corpse dumps result in feet which have "popped off" the victims and washed up, protected from decay by the shoes themselves. Two such feet were found in the last four weeks, today's article states.
One foot appears to be a hoax, but others are suggested to originate from such diverse sources as the 2004 Asian tsunami or other maritime or air disasters.
But a more sinister theory is also fascinating those following the mystery: They could be remains of pig farmer Robert Pickton, convicted last year of murdering six women and, according to the prosecution of his trial, confessed to killing 43 others. It is impossible not to notice the similarity between the story and the morbid tale at the heart of STUMP THE BAND. Both center on a rural nutcase who kills women and dismembers their feet. It's a most unusual MO in fact or fiction, but to have them overlapping is astonishing.
Well, it might not be astonishing if one had inspired the other, but as the story writer of STUMP... and the person responsible for introducing the dismembered-foot element of the story (it goes with the title, thank you very much), I was certainly not inspired by Pickton's exploits. STUMP THE BAND's first draft was written around 1996, and I'd used the same MO in a cop thriller I'd written the year before called FOOT OF PRIDE. The crazy, ax-wielding foot fetishist, who was in that version (and is revealed to be this in the final STB film in deleted scenes!) is a former shoe salesman (like myself). I based the whole of STUMP THE BAND around that story idea, tossing in the all-girl rock band for obvious reasons. Once John and Robbie and Jojo got a hold of it, they did a pretty drastic overhaul of the script, keeping the basic concepts, title, characters and a few of the bits and basically rewriting everything else. Still, no Robert Pickton. And since Pickton's crimes predate any kind of release of STUMP THE BAND, I think we can safely say he didn't get the idea from us.
So what remains is a gruesome coincidence, a horrifying implausibility, but it's front-page news in Vancouver (the feet are, anyway.) Makes you think...
Coming up, my delayed follow-up to the CHARM & HAPPY.COM JINGLE, the LAST TANGO WITH MARLON novella and more cool stuff. Stay tuned.
Fletcher Rhoden
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