A few months back I hosted an author talk at Mid-Manhattan Library for John Bloom's latest book Eccentric Orbits: The Iridium Story. It was a fascinating look at a project that few know about, but which provides a life-saving communication tool used the world over. When I chose to host the program it was due to the topic, but when I began looking into it I discovered that I actually knew about the author as well, just under his television personality's name: Joe Bob Briggs, the host of Joe Bob's Drive-In Theater on TMC and TNT's Monstervision.  

Joe Bob's Drive-In Theater was The Movie Channel's highest rated show, and Joe Bob Briggs hosted it for over a decade. Just a few months after the show ended he popped up on TNT hosting Monstervision which ran for four years. He's written several books, appeared on more than 50 talk shows, and spent two seasons as a Daily Show commentator.

I grew up without cable, but whenever I was babysitting or visiting people who had it I often tuned in to the excellently campy, gory and wonderfully weird late-night movies he hosted. Needless to say I was excited to meet the man who brought such entertainment to my life, and to ask him a few questions about his reading and writing habits.

What are you reading at the moment?

I just finished reading Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, but it wasn’t the first time I’ve read it. I consider it one of the top ten foundation works in American journalism, or at least the part of journalism that I think matters. I was asked by the Wall Street Journal to review a book called The Kingdom of Happiness: Inside Tony Hsieh’s Zapponian Utopia, by Aimee Groth, and the author claimed to be doing “gonzo journalism” in Las Vegas. She wasn’t. It turned out to be an uneven account of some privileged Silicon Valley people trying to create a mini-Brooklyn in downtown Vegas—to disastrous effect—and her approach was not at all “total immersion,” which is what gonzo requires. At any rate, I’m forced to read so much for work that there are always books that are waiting on me—what I want to be reading, as soon as I finish all the required stuff. Currently on that tantalizing waiting list are Debriefing the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein by John Nixon, His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet, How the Hell Did This Happen?: The Election of 2016 by P.J. O’Rourke, and Buccaneer: James Stuart Blackton and the Birth of American Movies by Donald Dewey.

What three books (or other media) do you keep coming back to again and again?

Once every few years I read William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, which I consider the greatest American novel. I was an English major at Vanderbilt University, which is steeped in southern literature, so maybe that affects my biases. And like all hopelessly geeky English majors, I always return to Shakespeare and Wordsworth. One of the great things about living in New York is that you can see Shakespeare performed by great actors, the way it was intended to be experienced.

Much of your career was focused on “Drive-in Movies”. What drew you to this medium and was there one in particular that really grabbed your interest?

I have a soft spot in my heart for The Grim Reaper, about a terrifying cannibal—well, not that terrifying—who lives on a Greek island and eats tourists. It was the first movie I ever reviewed for my “Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In”

column at the Dallas Times Herald. The Grim Reaper was originally titled Anthropophagous, but it was common practice at the time to change the titles of European horror movies to make them more America-friendly when they were released in grindhouses and drive-ins. You have to remember that, at the time I started writing about exploitation movies, they were totally ignored by the mainstream press. I reviewed them at the drive-ins of the Deep South, and a gay New York journalist named Bill Landis reviewed them in the grindhouses of 42nd Street for an outlaw publication called Sleazoid Express—and we were the only two critics who paid them any attention at all. They were considered expendable trash, beneath the dignity of newspapers and other media outlets, and in fact a New York Times critic named Janet Maslin actively campaigned against them. Fortunately some very far-sighted

academics at Bowling Green State University had just invented the term “popular culture,” and over the next decade we would see the evolution in perception that persists to this day. I make movie presentations at theaters all over the country, and young people aren’t really aware of the censorship battles that had to be overcome for low-budget horror, sci-fi, action, youth comedy and martial arts flicks.

You’ve written several books on movies, and recently one on the Iridium Satellite System. You’ve also been a reporter with writing ranging from sports to movies, and you were nominated for a Pulitzer for your work on 9/11. Does your process differ greatly depending on the subject at hand?

I can’t really say it does. I’m a perfectionist, which is annoying even to me, and which is why it takes me so long to finish a project. I spend just as much time investigating the genesis of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as I do studying the radiowave spectrum so that I can speak knowledgeably and succinctly about it in Eccentric Orbits. My first job as a writer was as an apprentice at the Arkansas Democrat in Little Rock when I was 13 years old, so my teachers were a lot of chain-smoking alcoholic old school types who often lacked even a high school education, but the thing they instilled in me was, “Remember, no matter what you’re writing about, somebody out there reading it knows more about it than you do. Don’t write it until you know it.”

When you were writing Eccentric Orbits you had to read a lot of highly technical engineering documents. Did you do anything to prep yourself to digest such dense fare?

It was like being back in college. Hitting the stacks. You settled into your cubicle and you didn’t come out until you’d read and digested a certain number of pages. Fortunately some of the characters in the book were extremely smart Ph.D.s in engineering, especially Ray Leopold, the principal inventor of the Iridium system. I would frequently call Ray and ask him about some esoteric matter that had to be put into lay terms. At one point he said to me, “John, you were an English major, right?” And I confessed that I was, yes. “Well,” he said, “when I was in high school I was a science geek—all I wanted to take was science courses—but they made me take English. Then when I went to the Air Force Academy I was an engineering major, but they made me take English. Then when I went to New Mexico State for my graduate degree they made me take more English.” I finally asked him what his point was, and he said, “My point is, how many engineering courses did they make YOU take?” And he has a good point. Knowing what I know today, I should have been forced to take at least one.

Did libraries play a role in your research for your books?

Yes, definitely. First of all, Rebecca Brock, the librarian for the Chapmanville, West Virginia, Public Library, has been my chief research assistant for my last three books, and that allows me to avoid Internet searches as much as possible. I think there’s an overreliance on the Web these days so we always try to go back to original source material. If we do use the Internet, it’s to locate books, articles and archives—we start out with a healthy mistrust of anything that originates online. Second, much of the material I used was released by the government pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act request, and the documents were housed at the William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Library and Museum in Little Rock, Arkansas. I spent several weeks there going through several thousand pages of documents.

What was your favorite behind the scenes moment from your shows?

As you may know, we rarely had guests on my shows—MonsterVision on TNT, and Joe Bob’s Drive-In Theater on The Movie Channel—so most behind-the-scenes moments consisted of sandwiches in the break room! When we did have guests, our shooting pace slowed to a crawl and many of the actors were nonplussed by my practice of never shooting a second take. I was trying to keep a “live” feel to the show, since we were interrupting a movie, but when I would tell them, “We’re going straight through—if we screw up, we just soldier on,” they would freak out! And in many cases it was the most accomplished actors who would bristle at the no-second-take policy. If I had to choose favorite moments, though, it would be our “Scream Queens” promotions, because who doesn’t want to be surrounded by drop-dead-gorgeous actresses all day long?
 

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