For more information, msbhall@gmail.com.
I won’t be in LA at 10:00 PM on October 21st, but if I were I would TOTALLY do this. Gargoyles on the big screen! Watch Bernie Casey in a full-body wetsuit in Carlsbad, New Mexico in the middle of summer rip the door off a car! Watch my mother wrap her tongue around the words “Totaled by a semi!” Watch the poor stunt double they had hanging from the telephone pole for a bit longer than reasonably comfortable!
I was at that shoot with Matt Gaynes. It was the summer before Nantucket ’73, and it was big fun. I made money gluing rubber scales onto wetsuits for the gargoyle costumes. There was an ancient dusty Western pool hall with a cracked window that I actually think about to this day. It made me love that part of the world.
You’ll find one of my favorite stories from that movie shoot close to the beginning of this blog: Fame is Weird https://msbhall.wordpress.com/2012/01/04/fame-is-weird/ If you haven’t read it, check it out — I think it’s one of the best things on here.
But more importantly, if you’re in LA on October 21, 2023, GO!
And a shout out to Joe Vuolo for letting me know this is happening! Thanks for keeping me in the loop.
PS sometime I’ll tell the story about the time I got into a legally mandated screening of Alejandro Jodorowski’s El Topo in upstate New York. They played it once on a Tuesday at a small movie theater n Hyde Park, New York (The Roosevelt, natch). It was some kind of contractual thing, lawyers had to sit through it to check the print or something, and there was a tiny blurb about it in the paper. And I went. And it was…amazing. Weird and unforgettable.
And then later I saw Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome with Mel Gibson and Tina Turner. And…it’s…the… same…movie. Seriously. Same plot, same bad guys the hero has to battle, the same transcendent ending where he frees the children from the subterranean prison-world. The same. It’s a total rip of El Topo, sometimes shot by shot. But nobody ever talks about this, that I’ve been able to ascertain, because El Topo is tied up in all sorts of legal restrictions. Or was, when it still mattered.
Anyway. If you care about deep ’60s acid-drenched westerns, see El Topo. And if you care about an insane Movie of the Week from 1972 with my mother in it…see Gargoyles. It’s infinitely more fun.
PPS Despite what it says in the blurb above, we were out there for more than 2 goddamn weeks! Three at the very least.
Mom’s birthday was, is, and will always be September 18th.
I suggest that at some point this week you go to a steakhouse and order a steak filet, “black and blue but not cold in the middle,” and a glass of chilled dry white wine.
Then order will have been restored in the universe, and the next year will be fine.
Much love, y’all,
Matt
The more I find. Eventually we’ll get to the end of it, but not quite yet.
As always, everything I sell comes with a letter of authentication and a document signed in pen by Grayson or Sam (or, if you like, both), and a movie still or headshot of my mom. Sam didn’t really have headshots, not being an actor and all. Those of you who are repeat customers get older and deeper pics—if I ever accidently repeat, let me know and I’ll come up with a replacement.
Please email me at msbhall@gmail.com for any further communication. WordPress does wonderfully well at many things, but it’s not a brilliantly designed interpersonal communications platform.
The latest offerings:
More objects from the Grayson and Sam Hall collection.
A few things of interest owned and worn by Grayson Hall (and Sam Hall, as well). Not a lot of direct connection to Dark Shadows, which as I’m sure you know my mother acted in and my father wrote, but interesting (and, in some cases, rather personal) pieces nonetheless.
As always, I personalize everything I sell with a letter of authentication which includes an autographed document signed by hand in pen by my mother (or, if requested, my father). I also always send a still picture or two from my mother’s career. Shipping and handling will be added to all prices, as stated below. I will entertain offers that differ from listed prices. I am embarrassed to say it takes me a while to get things out (this is not my primary activity in life, though I take it seriously) but eventually I get to the post office with boxes, I promise, and I try to make everything I send as interesting as possible.
You can reach me at msbhall@gmail.com any time for any reason. Or through the blog, but that’s unwieldy—the gmail account works better.
When I was on the writing team of the NBC Nighttime Dark Shadows—well, that was weird. In the early days, when the plot of the new show was still up in the air, my father and I were working together in a not terribly large office, my father reading scripts he had written 20 years before while in the next room Dan Curtis watched videos of the old show with my mother’s voice booming through the wall—weird. Interesting, but weird. Eventually it got too weird for Sam and he went off to do another show (the soap Santa Barbara) but I stuck it out. And one of the most interesting documents Dan made available was this: the original 91-page bible for Shadows On The Wall, the show that eventually became Dark Shadows.
This is pre-Dark Shadows Dark Shadows. This is Joan Bennett rattling around a big house in Maine with Victoria Winters and Maggie Evans and Burke Devlin. This is…a mid-60s soap opera, gothic but not filled with vampires and witches and weirdness.
But in terms of DS, it’s foundational. It’s the universe as it was originally intended, high on passions and intimations of darkness. And all that unconscious yearning later burst forth into the monsters and passions of the show we all know.
This is a 1990-era xerox of that original document. It is the only copy I have—as with every document I sell, I have not copied and will not copy it. The point for me is to reduce the amount of stuff in boxes in my life. I’m offering this 33-year-old xeroxed document one time only—now, and never again.
With this document I’m also offering a 3.5-page stapled typescript labeled The Quentin Story. It’s from the same period– 1990 NBC DS. It was definitely written on a typewriter; from the shifting leading and XXXX crossouts, I undeniably recognize it as my father’s. (He composed on typewriter— later, keyboard, but that took a while— and his typescripts were all about him capturing his thinking. I spent a fair amount of my early years retyping his raw typescripts into proper readable form.) This is him trying to figure out how to tell the story of Quentin’s trial for witchcraft in the 1990s show. It didn’t happen, of course, but it’s a direct product of that weird period described above, when we were combing through the old show trying to figure out what stories to tell in the new one.
Sadly, this one didn’t get told.
I actually did a similar doc of a ghost ship sailing into Collinsport Harbor, rotting skeletons in ancient clothes on board, with a large trunk labeled for Barnabas. My goal was to get out of the studio, get into the world, do DS on a real boat under real sunlight (and day-for-night moonlight). But it wasn’t an idea from the original show, and Dan ended up going with what he knew. (Also: Seriously Expensive.) That doc is long lost, but I still think it woulda been cool.
As always, everything I sell comes with a letter of authentication and a document actually signed in pen by Grayson Hall, or Sam, in this case, as desired. Or both—that can happen. Plus a couple of pics I throw in as well.
Shadows on the Wall, the Early Dark Shadows Foundational Bible $450 or best offer
In digging through the archeological layers of Grayson and Sam’s lives, these plates popped up pretty trustworthily as being from the late-’60s/early ’70s—perhaps earlier, but certainly no later. They’re in pristine condition, and they’re beautiful.
I trace them to the DS era because they’re the only plates that speak to Grand Guignol, the celebrated French horror theater of the 19th century, even though the puppet version of the same name was designed and intended for children. But during the DS moment, the Guignol aspect (dare we say…branding?) would have been a fit, besides the fact that the plates are charming in their own right. The reality that I only have 3 surviving plates speaks to the fact that they were in use at dinner parties, and some likely got broken through use—three plates is not a set. If I know my parents well—and I do—there was attrition.
Three Theatre Guignol Puppet Theater Plates $300 or best offer
As has been stated elsewhere in this blog, when my mother and father planned dinner parties, they mapped menus the way some people map weekend excursions. And, at some point, mom found this really fairly nifty ceramic piece on which she would write the menu for the dinner party so people would have an inkling of what was to come.
It came with an easily erasable pen, as I remember it; that pen is long gone. And I wish it still had a vestige of whatever meal graced it last. But that got washed off long ago.
I would be careful about whatever pen or writing device you use on this to write down your dinner party menu. Other than that, this is a fun, useful little item that saw a lot of menus in our steady service under Grayson’s hand.
Grayson Hall Menu Presentation Ceramic Thingie $250 or best offer
As always, every item sold comes with a letter of authentication and a document signed by Grayson Hall (or Sam, if you want that). And a couple of cool pics and things I throw in just for fun. Interested? Questions? Comments? msbhall@gmail.com.
Those of you who have purchased the recent offerings of Grayson Hall memorabilia have seen my wife’s signature below mine on the authentication documentation, as a witness to the proceedings. She’s also modeled my mother’s clothing in those pictures in which one sees a model.
Well, she’s a lot more than a signature and a torso.
She’s Rio ’75.
Under that name, she paints jackets and creates wearable art.
She has a Master’s in Performance Studies and a Ph.D. in Trauma Studies from NYU (and another Master’s in English Lit, but that was before all this other stuff), and was an Assistant Dean and Professor at Fordham University. A few years back, she took on the pseudonym Rio ’75 and started a sidewalk poetry graffiti project in New York, primarily in Hell’s Kitchen.
The graffiti gained local traction—people took pictures of her work and put them on social media on the web, trying to figure them out and tie the threads together. (We only discovered these months and months later.)
The graffiti project evolved into an interest in other forms of painting in environmental spaces, which eventually coalesced into painting on jackets.
The Monet-inspired water lilies above, and the horse above that, were both commissions. This work expanded to pants and tote bags and other goodies.
In the last year or so she has developed an interest in Tarot, and has been increasingly using Tarot-inspired imagery in her work. At the same time, she’s become intrigued by the strange and wonderful images in Mexican Lotería. She found a couple of sources for Tarot and Lotería-inspired patches and has been incorporating these into her jackets.
That last one is a work in progress, obviously.
If you like what you’re seeing, you should check out her website, https://www.rio75.net/
To get in touch, her email is rio75art@gmail.com.
Tell her I said hi!
Nantucket '73 