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Larry Blamire | |
|---|---|
| Born | Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Education | Art Institute of Boston |
| Style | Illustrator, filmmaker |
Larry Blamire is an American filmmaker, writer and artist best known for the independent film The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra .
|
Larry Blamire | |
|---|---|
| Born | Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Education | Art Institute of Boston |
| Style | Illustrator, filmmaker |
Larry Blamire is an American filmmaker, writer and artist best known for the independent film The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra .
Blamire was raised in Massachusetts and studied illustration at the Art Institute of Boston under Norman Baer, a second generation student of Howard Pyle.
He dabbled briefly in underground comics, writing and drawing the Predator, a vigilante character, in Ace of Spades and Blazing Violence. After several years of various blue collar jobs, Blamire started working as a science fiction illustrator for Galileo, and later Aboriginal Science Fiction, among others.
In the 1980s Blamire began acting on stage on a whim, landing roles at various Boston theatres; the Open Door Theatre, the Alley Theatre, as well as a season at the Boston Shakespeare Company. It was with the Open Door Theatre that he found a home, particularly in their outdoor summer productions at Jamaica Pond by the Pinebank Mansion in a natural formation known as the Kettlebowl. His first play, In the Nations, a dark western which he also directed, received critical and audience acclaim and was followed by his version of Robin Hood in which he played the title role but did not direct. It was later published by Bakers Plays, continuing to be performed worldwide. In 1984 he wrote and directed Interface, a science fiction thriller based on the alleged Philadelphia Experiment featuring ambitious effects and sound design. Performed indoors, it played well with audiences but, like Robin Hood, received a mixed reaction from the press.
In 1985, however, Blamire wrote and directed Jump Camp, a surreal dark comedy about a writer searching for a missing psychiatrist in a ghost town that took the quirky dialogue suggested by In the Nations and elevated it to heights of absurdity. The play was an instant hit with audiences and critics alike, ending up on the year's ten best lists in the Boston Globe , Boston Herald and Boston Phoenix . Moving outdoors again, Blamire's next play, Bride of the Mutant's Tomb, was a comedy about a hapless Ed Wood-inspired director trying to make his low-budget science fiction movie in the 1950s with a group of misfits. Despite less than complimentary reviews, it proved to be another crowd pleaser. In 1987 Blamire next wrote Whyo, a revenge tragedy about Irish gangs in 19th Century New York. It received a grant from the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities and an ambitious staged reading at Gloucester Stage Company. This led to Israel Horovitz commissioning a play, The Chroma Line, a partly autobiographical look at life in a wallpaper warehouse. His last play of the '80s was Ha'nt, a one-act performed as part of a horror anthology. During this period, Blamire received critical acclaim for a series of leading stage roles, including MacMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest , Hotspur in Henry IV, Part 1 , John Proctor in The Crucible , Tilden in Buried Child and Al in In the Boom Boom Room , for which he won The Boston Theatre Critics Circle Award for Best Actor. He also played the rapist in the Boston premiere of Extremities .
In the 1990s, despite revivals of In the Nations and Jump Camp (the latter at the Alliance Repertory Company in Los Angeles) and a lead role as the country DJ host in the hit show A Closer Walk with Patsy Cline at the Charles Playhouse, Blamire found himself moving away from theatre. In 1992 Blamire's comedy sketches were chosen for the HBO Writers Search, and he directed several at the Stella Adler Theatre in L.A. They were also collected in an evening called Larry Blamire's Sketch-O-Rama by a new Massachusetts company, Theatre 9. Towards the end of the '90s, Blamire was writing more and more screenplays on spec, several of which were quarter- and semifinalists in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Nicholl Fellowship.
In 1997 Blamire began working with an internet start-up called Bali Hai Interactive, given carte blanche to develop new cutting edge entertainment. What resulted was The Wise Eye Guys, a quirky interactive nonlinear animated adventure for which he did thousands of drawings and directed the voice actors (which included his wife, actress Jennifer Blaire). Months after the company moved its offices to Los Angeles, it went under in the dot com crash of 2000. Trying unsuccessfully to raise money for the floundering Bali Hai, Blamire, having recently read about developments in digital video, got the idea of shooting an ultra-low-budget spoof of 1950s bargain basement science fiction movies, incorporating elements from Bride of the Mutant's Tomb. The resulting film, The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra , premiered at the Mill Valley Film Festival in 2002. Picked up by Michael Schlesinger for Sony, the film was released in 2004.
That same year, Blamire wrote and directed Johnny Slade's Greatest Hits (now Meet the Mobsters), produced by and starring John Fiore and some of The Sopranos cast. In 2005, he wrote and directed Trail of the Screaming Forehead . Though continuing the retro science fiction spoof theme, the film had a different look and feel, in widescreen and color, under the Ray Harryhausen Presents banner, with a title song composed by Blamire and sung by The Manhattan Transfer. After festival screenings, it was picked up by IFC, playing VOD in 2009, slated for DVD release in 2010. In 2007, Blamire formed a company, Bantam Street, with his core group of actors and technicians. Their acclaimed web series Tales From the Pub launched that same year. In 2008, Bantam Street made two films back-to-back; The Lost Skeleton Returns Again , a sequel to The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra , and Dark and Stormy Night , a stylistically authentic takeoff on 1930s "old dark house" movies. [1] Both feature Bantam Street's ever-increasing pool of veteran character actors, including Betty Garrett, H.M. Wynant and James Karen.
In 2009, Blamire published two books; Tales of the Callamo Mountains, a collection of his western horror short stories, and I Didn't Know You Came With Raisins, a collection of his surreal cartoons. He also completed a screenplay of Steam Wars, an ambitious longtime project with copious illustrations. Blamire continues to keep his hand in graphics, working in both Photoshop and acrylic paint. His paintings tend toward surrealism.
Blamire has contributed writing and art to a number of the They Came From...! TTRPG books, including They Came from Beneath the Sea!, [2] They Came from [CLASSIFIED]! and They Came from the Cyclops's Cave!
Blamire is the nephew of British actor Bert Edgar. Blamire has two sons—Cory, by his first marriage and Griffin, by wife Jennifer Blaire, whom he married in 1998.
John Howard Carpenter is an American filmmaker, composer, and actor. Most commonly associated with horror, action, and science fiction films of the 1970s and 1980s, he is generally recognized as a master of the horror genre. At the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, the French Directors' Guild gave him the Golden Coach Award and lauded him as "a creative genius of raw, fantastic, and spectacular emotions".
Skeleton Crew is a collection of short fiction by American writer Stephen King, published by Putnam in June 1985. A limited edition of a thousand copies was published by Scream/Press in October 1985 (ISBN 978-0910489126), illustrated by J. K. Potter, containing an additional short story, "The Revelations of 'Becka Paulson", which had originally appeared in Rolling Stone magazine, and was later incorporated into King's 1987 novel The Tommyknockers. The original title of this book was Night Moves.
Sir Kenneth Charles Branagh is a British actor and filmmaker. Born in Belfast and raised primarily in Reading, Berkshire, Branagh trained at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and served as its president from 2015 to 2024. His accolades include an Academy Award, four BAFTAs, two Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and an Olivier Award. He was appointed a Knight Bachelor in the 2012 Birthday Honours, and was given Freedom of the City in his native Belfast in 2018. In 2020, he was ranked in 20th place on The Irish Times' list of Ireland's greatest film actors.
Richard Stanley is a South African filmmaker, known for his work in the horror genre. He began his career making short films and music videos, and subsequently directed the feature films Hardware (1990) and Dust Devil (1992), both of which are considered cult classics. He was the original director of The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), but was fired early into principal photography due to creative differences, an episode recounted in the 2014 documentary Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau. In 2019, he returned to feature films after more than 20 years, directing the H. P. Lovecraft adaptation Color Out of Space.
The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra is a 2001 American independent science-fiction parody film directed by Larry Blamire. The film is a spoof of B movies released during the 1950s. The film was videotaped on a budget of less than US$100,000, and was converted to black-and-white film in post-production. Larry Blamire acted in and directed the film, wrote its screenplay, and provided the voice of the film's titular Skeleton. Jennifer Blaire, who performs Animala, is Blamire's wife.
Beginning of the End is a 1957 American science fiction film produced and directed by Bert I. Gordon. It stars Peter Graves, Peggie Castle, and Morris Ankrum. An agricultural scientist, played by Graves, successfully grows gigantic vegetables using radiation. Unfortunately, the vegetables are eaten by locusts, which quickly grow to a gigantic size and attack the nearby city of Chicago. Beginning of the End is generally known for its "atrocious" special effects, "and yet," writes reviewer Bill Warren, "there is something almost compellingly watchable about this goofy little movie".
Something Wicked This Way Comes is a 1962 dark fantasy novel by Ray Bradbury, and the second book in his Green Town Trilogy. It is about two 13-year-old best friends, Jim Nightshade and William Halloway, and their nightmarish experience with a traveling carnival that comes to their Midwestern home, Green Town, Illinois, on October 24. In dealing with the creepy figures of this carnival, the boys learn how to combat fear. The carnival's leader is the mysterious "Mr. Dark", who seemingly wields the power to grant the townspeople's secret desires. In reality, Dark is a malevolent being who, like the carnival, lives off the life force of those it enslaves. Mr. Dark's presence is countered by that of Will's father, Charles Halloway, the janitor of the town library, who harbors his own secret fear of growing older because he feels he is too old to be Will's dad.
Thomas Lester Tryon was an American actor and novelist. As an actor, he was billed as Tom Tryon and is best known for playing the title role in the film The Cardinal (1963), featured roles in the war films The Longest Day (1962) and In Harm's Way (1965), acting with John Wayne in both movies, and especially the Walt Disney television character Texas John Slaughter (1958–1961). Tryon later turned to the writing of prose fiction and screenplays, and wrote several successful science fiction, horror and mystery novels as Thomas Tryon.
Larry Stark is an American journalist and reviewer best known for his in-depth coverage of the Boston theater scene at his website, Theater Mirror. In newspapers and online, Stark has written hundreds of reviews of local productions and Broadway tryouts from 1962 to the present. His Boston readers have given him such labels as "head theater angel of Massachusetts" and "Dean of the alternative theater critics."
John Skipp is a splatterpunk horror and fantasy author and anthology editor, as well as a songwriter, screenwriter, film director, and film producer. He collaborated with Craig Spector on multiple novels, and has also collaborated with Marc Levinthal and Cody Goodfellow. He worked as editor-in-chief of both Fungasm Press and Ravenous Shadows.
Brian Howe is an American actor. He is best known for his portrayal of stockbroker Jay Twistle in the film The Pursuit of Happyness.
H. M. Wynant is an American film and television actor.
Andy Mangels is an American science fiction author who has written novels, comic books, and magazine articles, and produced DVD collections, mostly focusing on media in popular culture. As an openly gay man, he has been a longtime advocate for greater visibility of gay and lesbian characters in various media, especially comics, including the coordination and moderation of the annual "Gays in Comics" panel for Comic Con International since it was begun in 1988. He is the founder of an annual "Women of Wonder Day" event, which raised over $136,000 in funds for domestic violence shelters and related programs during its seven-year run. As of 2011 he has had three books on the USA Today "best-selling books" list.
Andrew Lawrence Parks is an American film and television actor.
Jabba Desilijic Tiure, more commonly known as Jabba the Hutt, is a fictional character and major antagonist in the Star Wars franchise. Created by George Lucas, Jabba is voiced by Larry Ward with several puppeteers inside a one-ton puppet portraying him in Return of the Jedi. He was originally supposed to first appear in Star Wars (1977) as a stop motion character with Declan Mulholland as his stand-in. Jabba was later added into the film as a CGI character when it was re-released in Special Edition in 1997. He also appears in the prequel movie The Phantom Menace. The character is a large slug-like creature based on annelid worms and originally designed as an apelike figure.
Outlaw of Gor is a 1988 adventure fantasy science fiction film directed by John "Bud" Cardos. A sequel to Gor, it is loosely based on the Gor novel series by John Norman, but has strong plot and qualitative differences from the original 1967 book Outlaw of Gor.
Larry Moss is an American actor, director and acting coach. He wrote the acting textbook, The Intent to Live, and has directed numerous theatre productions, most notably The Syringa Tree and Holding the Man.
Dark and Stormy Night is a 2009 independent film spoofing the haunted house and murder mystery films produced by Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s. Larry Blamire directed and acted in the film and wrote the screenplay. The film also includes many cast members from Blamire's previous films.
Big Meat Eater is a 1982 Canadian comedy science fiction film.
Trail of the Screaming Forehead is a 2007 American science fiction comedy film written by, directed by and starring Larry Blamire.