We’ve moved!

Please come with us!  Our new blog is right around the corner at http://fangasmthebook.wordpress.com/.

Come on over for all the latest updates, convention reports, interviews and more!  We’d love to see you there:)

The Fan Studies Network -our second anniversary!

The Fan Studies Network -our second anniversary!.

Movie News

So much has been happening with us on the book-front. Get ready for a massive “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” post soon. . . .

Nothing but good things to report about upcoming and finally released films featuring some of our favorite people. Skills Like This co-written by and starring Gabriel Tigerman, is set for release this coming Friday at the Angelika Theater in New York. Check here for some more background on the film.

My Big Break, featuring Chad Lindburg is making the rounds at college campuses and is scheduled to screen at the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association national conference in New Orleans on April 9.

And Ten Inch Hero, starring Jensen Ackles,  is finally going to be available on DVD on April 18th.  You can pre-order the DVD and a teeshirt here.

Canadian Adventures – Part Two

So I’ve been reminded that I left everyone hanging at the end of my first set-visit post. We got in the van and then –

Nothing!

Sorry about that.

There are some things we’re obviously not going to say yet – hey, you wouldn’t buy the book if we spilled all the beans here, now would you? – but I did want to share a few things about perception, since it seemed to come up often over the course of the twelve hours we spent there. So, not necessarily in order of importance:

It’s received wisdom, but surprised me nonetheless, that certain sets looked bigger in person than they do in the show. Cameras are big and need room after all and so the space needs to accommodate that. Other things are smaller, or non-existent. That long stretch of lonely highway Dean drives down? Not long, and not highway. Serge Ledouceur’s amazing lighting, and a stationary car, jiggled with a 2×4, create the illusion of night, movement, the endless void.

Some things, out of context, were amusing. The huge bins of salt in the prop room (as Carmelita, the lovely woman in charge of props, told us “Who knew there were so many different types of salt!”), or neatly labeled instruments of death. Some things were illuminating. A tour of the storage space (think a Goodwill blow-out sale) showed that someone went crazy on the clock purchases. There were a lot of, mostly tacky (in keeping with the motel rooms Sam and Dean frequent) clocks. Seeing them all together like that made me realize though how much the show is about time – time lost, time running out, time redefined.

And the actors. Bigger, smaller, in and out of context. I just spoke with my classes about our tendency to be gobsmacked when we see a celebrity off the red-carpet, in a grocery store rather than on a stage or screen. Being human. It shouldn’t seem strange, but it does. Endlessly. Vancouver was no exception.

No, I take that back. It was the exception.

Actually, it was both.

Simultaneously.

More on this later.

Wither Fandom?

So it’s only five days before classes start up again, and as usual, I am madly trying to update my syllabus. What can I say? I’m a tweeker. If my syllabus were a celebrity face, it would look something like Michael Jackson at this point – reshaped, lightened in some places, darkened in others, unnaturally taut here, still a bit too slack there.

The problem with retooling – yet again – is that it often leads me in directions that I just don’t have the time to go in. Case in point. When looking for images of “Fame” and “Fandom” to tart up my webpages, I came across a film entitled Fandom that, by the look of the trailer, does much the same thing for fans that Trekkies did. Mocks them. Pathologizes them. Makes them objects of fear at worst and amusement at best, even as it sets out to “explain” them. And this is precisely what we set out trying to counteract when we began our own project. We wanted to “prove” (to ourselves as much as to others) that fans were intelligent, creative, big-hearted, passionate people and that fandom was not merely the bastion of nerds and basement dwellers.

I hope we’ve done that. I think we’ve done that. I hope that this semester I will finally be able to convince my students that fandom is not synonymous with the unmedicated. I hope I will have pulled the right bits taut so that the picture finally becomes clear – for their sake and mine.

News on “Skills Like This”

New Message from Gabe Tigerman and the rest of the people bringing you Skills Like This:

Hey there Skills fans!

A new year always brings excitement, but we’re particularly looking forward to 2009. The March release of Skills Like This is just around the corner! Unwrap that calendar your grandmother gave you over the holidays and mark the date. Skills Like This will open March 20th at the Angelika in NYC and then it’s on to LA, Denver and over 100 other cities nationwide. Visit http://www.skillslikethis.com for up to date showtimes.

In the meantime….

There’s a lot you can do to help us prepare for the release of Skills this spring. You can now find us on Facebook, Myspace, YouTube….friend us, become a fan, watch the trailers. Do what you’ve got to do to help us make Skills a success. Nothing compares to good old word of mouth when it comes to packing theaters.

Watch the Skills Like This trailer

Our Canadian Adventure – Part One

I don’t gush.  I’m not given to superlatives.  I don’t use words like “fabulous” or “awesome”.  Ever.  Which probably explains why I was left without words much of the time we spent on the Supernatural set on Friday.  It sounds inauthentic to say that everyone was kind, attentive, helpful.  It would sound hyperbolic if I tried to describe exactly how nice they were to us, how generous all the people we met were with their time and talent.   But to not be hyperbolic would be doing all those people a disservice.

And so I will gush.  And because I can’t seem to do anything lately without looking through a self-analytical lens, I will no doubt pick apart my own fraught relationship to the project that we seem to have brought to a conclusion this weekend.

Our hotel proved the first instance of the move to both squeal like little girls and take a step back and say “What?”. Academics, as a rule,  don’t travel in style.  (I still curse Chaucer for setting up the stereotype of the poor scholar who teaches for the love of the profession and not from any aspiration of monetary gain.  Thanks Geoff for setting the bar so damn low!!)  The hotel we were told to stay at proved the intimidating exception to that rule.  It was posh and I was not worthy.  The place announced its quiet mission to cater to those who were used to being catered to the moment the doors were thrown open for us.   As it turned out they were quite proud of their reputation of catering to the stars or those who just wanted to feel like stars by association.  We were informed in the “About the Hotel” literature that actors frequented the place and that if we wanted to see them in their natural habitat (ok, those were not the exact words used) then we need only hang out in the bar in the evening and wait.  Thrilling and puzzling at the same time.  Shouldn’t the presence of people who presumably want to lay low and relax after a long day of working remain discreetly uncommented upon, rather than be used as a selling point for the hotel?

Boundaries, once again, were becoming a theme.

Adventures to be continued . . .

Vancouver Dreamin’

Geometry fails. Every time we think we’ve come full circle, gotten back around to where we started, something happens to show us how wrong we were. Or perhaps once again, it’s language that fails. “Full circle” suggests that you’ve come back to the place you started, but that’s impossible (unless breakthroughs in time travel have been made that I am unaware of). The place you started is never a place you can get back to, in the same way lost innocence stays lost. It’s like finding out Santa Claus doesn’t exist or reading “Pierre Menard” for the first time.

The news that came on Friday night, the news we weren’t expecting and didn’t even bother hoping for, is a case in point. We’re heading to Vancouver again on Thursday, a little over a year after our last visit. At first blush it *feels* as if this is indeed “full circle”. The last time we were there was as fans and researchers. We’re still fans. We’re still researchers. But we have access now, and the process of gaining that access has changed us and the nature of the project. The place may be the same, but we’re not.

Vancouver gave us the name of the book, and the initial structure of the thing was decided while we sat in the airport on the way home, jacked on caffeine and the desperate need to process all we’d seen and done in a few short days, to talk it all out as quickly as we could, to put into words, to fix in place our experiences.

I’m wondering what this trip to Vancouver will give us – aside from what we already know it will. An interview with Jared and Jensen, a peek behind the scenes, perhaps another article for the magazine. And an ending for the book? A sense of closure?

Which gets me back to that circle, misleadingly holding out the possibility for closure that doesn’t really exist if points don’t meet, if the circle can’t be closed because it’s really not a circle at all. “Full spiral” isn’t an option. Geometry doesn’t allow it.

My Big Break Screenings

Getting practical here for a change. The screenings of My Big Break are coming together – finally. The screening at George Washington University is set for January 30 and the screening at the Popular Culture Association conference in New Orleans is scheduled for April 9. I am almost giddy about showing this film to my classes next semester. Seeing this film (and the odd juxtaposition of seeing it originally at a fan convention is not lost on me) rather forcefully demystified “celebrity” for me, even as we were in the process of chasing down various celebrities for book interviews. Admittedly, it’s a process that was already well under way, but My Big Break certainly pushed me over the edge, giving me an entirely new and rather liberating perspective on both sides of the celebrity/fan divide. As I dive into a reading of Fame Junkies (my end of semester, I’d rather be reading than grading escape book) I’m struck by the similarities in Halpern’s undertaking, Tony Zierra’s film, and Stalking Fandom . We’re all confronting issues of distance, perspective, knowing when you’re too invested, being seduced by the trappings of fame without understanding the consequences. It seems I’m back to those questions we are still grappling with.

So much for being practical.

Do the aca-fans have a point?

I read a paper today from a student who was indignant about media bias and I found myself, strangely, asking him whether that was such a terrible thing? Aren’t we all biased, I asked. And hadn’t we grappled with the question in class of whether or not there was such a thing as unbiased writing? And yet, he resisted the idea that the bias could be so blatant, as if the more subtle variety would be the lesser of two evils? No, I wanted to scrawl across the paper – the more blatant the better!

Later I realized some of this may have been a defense mechanism. We’ve been at this “research” (I’m reluctant to take the quotation marks away – is real research supposed to be this much fun? Is it valid if it is?) for a year and a half, immersing ourselves in all things Supernatural. But there are times (ok, many times) when I question whether we’ve dug in a little too far, and wonder if that isn’t why all the aca-fans out there don’t keep that distance we were originally rebelling against for a reason. The anthropologists have gone native, we care too much, know too much.

At times like these, I berate myself for a while and then swing in the other direction. Do we need to be objective? Is it possible to write lucidly about something we love passionately? And if we don’t love it passionately, can we write about it at all? We’re still working these questions out.