Read Online Midnight Movie: A Novel by Tobe Hooper Alan Goldsher - Free Book Online Page A

me was sitting at a table right by the door. He raised his beer at me, gave me one of those chin-nods, and said, “Sorry, man. ’Roid rage. It happens. Let me buy you a drink.”
    I said, “Fuck off, asswipe.”
    He laughed. “I hear you, man. Too bad you missed the flick.” He pointed at Tobe and said, “Can’t wait to hear what this dude has to say.”
    I must’ve looked royally pissed, because Janine draped her arm over my shoulders, guided me to the other side of the room, and said, “What say we sit down and listen to your hero regale the masses?”
    I said, “That sounds good.” And then I thought,
It’ll be even better if you keep your arm around me
.

TOBE HOOPER:
    In general, Q & A’s are either awesome or terrible, and what with most of my viewers off in Never Never Land, this one wasn’t looking good. I didn’t know what was going through those folks’ heads, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t a question about how I lit that alligator scene. There were other factors, too, factors that I personally will foot the blame for. How can it be a good Q & A if the dude who’s being Q’ed doesn’t know any of the goddamn A’s?
    They pelted me with questions about how I got the dismemberments to look so realistic, and what kind of cameras I used, and how long the shoot was, and where I did my editing. After each question, I yelled over to Gary, “Do you know?” Everybody laughed. They thought I was kidding. I wasn’t.
    Finally, after about fifteen minutes of this utter nonsense, I said, “Anybody want to ask me something about
Chainsaw
?”
    Some wag yelled out, “Screw
Chainsaw
. What happened on
Poltergeist
?”
    Ah,
Poltergeist
. Lot of rumors about my involvement with that one, and you’ll hear only rumors because nobody’ll talk about it, myself included. I said, “No comment. Next question.”
    Silence.
    I said, “All right, y’all, I’m outta here. Thanks for coming. And I’m glad you enjoyed your ride on the
Destiny Express
 … because I sure as hell didn’t.” Then I ran to the back of the room and gave Gary a quick good-bye hug, told him I’d call him when I got back to town—and I meant it, this time—then told the bartender to get me a cab and get me a cab fast.
    The taxi showed up ten minutes later. There was a hotel room booked for me across town, and my flight was scheduled to leave three days later, but I had a case of the willies like nobody’s business, so I went right to the airport and traded my ticket in for the next flight out, which turned out to be six o’clock, so I had to sit in the terminal for three hours, but I didn’t care, because I wanted out.
    Hell-Lay had never,
never
sounded so good.

 

 
    AUTHOR’S NOTE:
Today, if you do a Google search of “The Game” and “virus,” or maybe “The Game” and “symptoms,” you won’t find much of interest. Why? Nobody’s really sure. See, a goodly amount of the Net coverage of the Game evaporated into cyberspace. Much of that, I suspect, was due to personal choice; a lot of the writing about the disease—especially from those who were suffering one of the harsher symptoms—is at once appalling and embarrassing, and if it were me who posted it practically against my will, I’d want it erased, too
.
When the Game was at its worst, a shocking number of websites fell off the map, and this was one area where I was unable to track down any concrete information. Nobody in the government would speak with me, no reputable tech reporters would talk, no nothing. It was the one time during the whole process that I wished I had some honest-to-goodness press credentials
.
But I was able to track down a wonderful hacker who was able to resurrect a number of blogs and chat boards that were thought to have been gone forever, and even though he was unable to offer any answers as to why this stuff disappeared in the first place, we should all be grateful that