State of the Temple address

Things have been so busy around the Temple lately that I’m afraid if we don’t take care of some business right now it’ll never get taken care of, so let’s get down to it. First and most importantly, I don’t want to let another day go by without thanking everyone who helped make our Jerry Lewis Week such a success: the Keeper of the Pit (a Temple dweller since 1988), Don Guarisco of AllMovie.com, Steve Puchalski of Shock Cinema, and those incredible Flying Maciste Brothers (Howard S. Berger and Kevin Marr), who contributed not one but two amazing posts. A big round of applause for all of these guys, please, they sent in some wonderful stuff.

On a related note, I started at least five different posts for Jerry Lewis Week that never got finished and are currently languishing in “draft” mode. I’m sure some of you have noticed that we sometimes back-post two or three days, and we’ve even gone back a week or two to finish things we started and then abandoned. I imagine this is a big no-no with a lot of bloggers, since these posts get buried instantly, but because Temple of Schlock is largely about the unearthing of things buried, I really don’t have a problem with this practice. I return to back issues of Psychotronic Video, Shock Cinema and Sleazoid Express all the time and find reviews I missed the first time or articles I read and then forgot about. If people can spend minutes hunting around a DVD menu screen for Easter eggs, surely they won’t mind occasionally checking the sidebar directories for late arrival posts. I think most people who visit the Temple probably have a little bit of archaeologist blood coursing through their veins anyway. That said, I’m still not sure what I’m going to do with those unfinished Jerry pieces, but if you see a “Jerry Lewis Week” link appear in the sidebar sometime next week, check it out, because it’ll probably contain five or six surprises.


A couple of people have e-mailed to remind us that Roger Corman’s birthday is this coming Sunday, and why aren’t we having a “Roger Corman Week.” Expect to see a handful of Roger-related goodies in the next few days, but no week-long blowout is planned. We’re still recovering from the Lewis love-in, so Cormania has been postponed until 2010. Who knows, maybe the Academy will do the right thing and Roger will have an honorary Oscar this time next year.

Speaking of doing the right thing, we’re as thrilled as the next person to see that Warner Brothers is opening their archives and releasing buried treasures like DUSTY AND SWEETS MCGEE, even if they’re charging $20 each for DVD-R’s and $15 for downloads. Fingers crossed that they’ll finally release Bill Gunn’s STOP, a vault item if there ever was one. I wonder if anyone at Warners even knows why it’s been locked up for almost 40 years. Meanwhile, Criterion is putting out THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE on DVD, so if you go back to my Top 100+ No-Shows on Region 1 DVD from a month ago, you can scratch two posters off the list.


And finally, yes, we are accepting submissions, so if you have any pulp paperbacks or obscure movies you’d like to review, send us an e-mail and run some titles past us for approval.