BILL LANDIS, a Real Trash Cinema Hero.

I never met Bill Landis. I never emailed him, like I had planned to. No one cataloged or preserved the memory of the old days of trashy and sleazy New York quite the way he did. By the time I got there, it had long been Disney-fied, but that didn't stop me from trekking to See Hear to pay $10 a copy for his zine SLEAZOID EXPRESS and the same for his wife Michelle's METASEX. I ended up spending around $60. And it was worth it, as I still reread those zines to this day.

This was made one step better in 2002 with the legit publication of the seminal historical tome SLEAZOID EXPRESS: A MIND-TWISTING TOUR THROUGH THE GRINDHOUSE CINEMA OF TIMES SQUARE. Not a compendium of reviews, but more of a memoir of the times and places, which, sadly, will never be around again. To this day I dream of getting threatened at knife-point by a tranny during a Sonny Chiba screening. If you don't have this book, buy it now.

I learned, through Twitter of all places, that Bill died of a heart attack at the age of 49. I'll never get to send that email, but he should be regarded as a real patron saint for all fans of cult, trash and exploitation film. A statue right in Time Square seems fitting, right guys?

For further reading, check out this exhaustive interview by Dan Taylor that originally appeared in CARBON 14.