Thursday, July 23 – San Diego Comic Con

EVERY OTHER DAY IS HALLOWEEN
Has West Coast Premiere at San Diego Comic Con
 
Thursday, July 23, 2009 at 6:10 p.m.

Washington, D.C., July 7, 2009—Broadcast at this Time Pictures is proud to announce the west coast premiere screening of C.W. Prather’s new documentary, EVERY OTHER DAY IS HALLOWEEN, Thursday, July 23, at 6:10 p.m. at the San Diego Comic Con International Film Festival.

 “Ghoulish Film Fun!” 
–  The Washington Post

“A Fantastic and Inspiring Documentary!” 
–  BadLit.com

EVERY OTHER DAY IS HALLOWEEN is an up-lifting feature length documentary detailing the career and impact of television personality Dick Dyszel, whose popular characters “Bozo the Clown,” “Captain 20” and the iconic “Count Gore De Vol” have inspired generations of fans and artists.

Using interviews with Dick Dyszel, writer Steve Niles (30 DAYS OF NIGHT), filmmaker Jeff Krulik (HEAVY METAL PARKING LOT), “scream-queens” Eleanor Herman and Leanna Chamish, as well as a new generation of television “horror hosts” including John Dimes (“Dr. Sarcofiguy”) and Jerry Moore II (“Karlos Borloff”), along with rare, never-before-seen footage, EVER OTHER DAY IS HALLOWEEN also tells larger stories of children’s entertainment, the de-evolution of local television, the rise of the internet and media on demand, and ultimately how inspiration in any art form can come back around and re-inspire itself.  Mr. Prather, Mr. Dyszel and Mr. Moore are all scheduled to attend on July 23, which will include a Q&A session to follow.

EVERY OTHER DAY IS HALLOWEEN had its world premiere screening in front of a near capacity audience at the American Film Institute’s AFI Silver Theatre in Silver Spring, Maryland on Saturday, June 27. Future screenings will be announced soon.

C.W. Prather (Director, Editor, and Producer) is a Telly Award winning producer, author, filmmaker and founder of Spooky Movie: The Washington, D.C. International Horror Film Festival. He is the co-producer for Festival of Horrors, a successful DVD anthology of short horror films from the festival circuit. EVERY OTHER DAY IS HALLOWEEN is his third feature documentary; later this year Prather’s first novel, co-authored with Bob Hinton, Underpants of the Dead, will be published by DarkHart Press.

Illustration courtesy of Brian Maze

Video Round-Up

OFFICIAL TRAILER:

Vodpod videos no longer available.

 

more about “Every Other Day is Halloween – Offici…“, posted with vodpod

 

 

MORE:

* ABC Television Piece – Arch Campbell

* Count Gore Pt 1 – includes introduction (AFI Silver)

* Coung Gore Pt 2 – includes Q&A (AFI Silver) – coming soon.

Opening Night Photos

More photos from opening night.

“A nostalgic and witty movie…!”

Matthew Langley weblog wrote:

C.W. Prather has put together a great documentary on Washington DC living legend Dick Dsyzel. Every Other Day Is Halloween is a documentary of TV horror movie host, Count Gore De Vol (or Count Gore for short). Count Gore hosted Creature Feature here from 1973 to 1987. For those of you not in the know, “horror hosts” were usually regional personalities when local TV stations provided regional content instead of being outlets for national networks. Channel 20 was particularly good at this as both Count Gore and Petey Greene were both huge presences in the culture of DC in the seventies (side note: you might remember the Petey Greene bio pic with Don Cheadle).

While not every community had a horror host, in Every Other Day Is Halloween, Prather has made a nostalgic and witty movie that makes you wish you had a Gore De Vol for your own. In fact you do, you just don’t know it. Yet. Take a look here for proof. One thing you might find interesting was that Count Gore was not the only role Dsyzel had – at the time he was also Bozo the Clown and Captain Twenty for the afternoon kids oriented programing.

Back the the main story… I’ll admit I’m biased as my friendship with the film maker is over 15 years old however don’t just take my word for it, Every Other Day is Halloweenhas just been accepted to the Comic-Con Film Festival in San Diego, and will soon have another viewing at the AFI in the fall.

C.W. Prather is also the Director of the internationally acclaimed Spooky Movie Film Festival

“The movie was a hoot!”

From the Blog “Red Nose“:

Last night Joe and I went to a world premiere movie at the AFI Theater! It was a documentary, part of the theater’s renowned documentary series, Silverdocs. I read about this film in the newspaper yesterday morning and immediately knew we had to go.

Had. To. Go.

The film was Every Other Day Is Halloween — it’s about the career of Washington D.C. personality Dick Dyszel, who worked for the new UHF television channel WDCA back from the early 70s to the late 80s. Some people remember him as Bozo the Clown — yes! Bozo, that famous franchise clown. Other people remember him as Captain 20, pointy-eared host of the Captain 20 Club, an afternoon kids’ show with cartoons and contests.

But Joe and I remember him best for his late night horror movie show, Creature Feature, which he hosted as Count Gore DeVol. Here’s the Count in person, posing with the Countess Von Stauffenberg, a recurring character on the show.

Count Gore was a vampire. He was a more, say we say, adult character than Bozo and Captain 20. He had a full size poster of Vampirella on the inside lid of his coffin. He had Penthouse Pets as special guests. He hosted champagne parties on set.

And he showed terrible horror movies late on Saturday nights. They were so cheesy, and so much fun; just the thing for hippies who were too stoned to get up and go out on the town. Much better to sit in the lounge and laugh at the Count!

The movie was a hoot. The audience included other horror movie hosts and a whole bunch of Count Gore’s fans, from grown-up kids who watched Ultraman on Captain 20 in the afternoon and then snuck out of their bedrooms to watch Creature Feature with the sound turned low late on Saturday night to people like us, horror and monster movie fans who got their fix from the courtly Count.

We had a great time! Now we keep in touch with the Count and the movies on his site, where he still runs a weekly movie. The Count is dead; long live the Count!

****

Just a note to clarify: SilverDocs finished their programing the week Every Other Day Is Halloween premiered, at the same theatre. but it was not part of any SilverDocs program.

News Channel 8: “Every Other Day is Halloween – World Premiere”

For anyone that grew up around here and is old enough to remember Channel 20 in the 70s and 80s, this documentary chronicles the career and legacy of Dick Dyszel, whose television alter-egos, “Count Gore De Vol,” “Captain 20” and “Bozo the Clown” helped raise generations of Washingtonians. 

The world premiere is on Saturday, June 27 at the Silver Theatre in Silver Spring and the Count himself will be making an appearence.  Tickets are $10. 
More about the movie: 
https://everyotherdayishalloween.wordpress.com

“Great film. Great, great film.”

From the Blog “Chandler’s Bar & Grill“:

Fast forward just shy of two years. I get an update email from Gore’s site about some little doc being screened at the AFI Theater in Silver Springs, Maryland on the 27th of June. The subject of the doc was one Dick Dyszel and his long career as Washington, DC’s Bozo the Clown, Captain 20 and, most important of all to me, Count Gore de Vol. The tickets were $10.00 a pop and, on top of the movie, there would be a chance to chat with the man of the hour and see some memorabilia from good old days of DC’s then locally programmed Channel 20.

My wife took one look at it and said “NO” in a very firm voice that made it clear that no argument would be allowed on the matter.

“No,” she said’ “I am not putting up with 25 plus years of you complaining about that like you did with your parents. Buy the tickets right now and we’ll stay the weekend with my sister up there. But I plan to be married to you for at least 25 years and I am not putting up with 25 years of complaining about not getting to go and see Gore de Vol in person and how it was all my fault like you’ve done to your parents since you were a teenager.”

So, despite a bout with poison ivy (that actually worked in my favor) early in the week and more road construction than I thought you could drive through in one trip that short, I found myself here on the evening of the 27th.

Great film. Great, great film. As much as I loved American Scary I found this one to be better by far in every way. I don’t know if that’s just because it was so much better or because I have been a fan of the subject of the film for so long, but it was just a great way to spend the evening in a theater and, from what was said, will be an even better filled out DVD later this year. Even the “poor” wives and friends that we of the Gore fandom dragged to the show were laughing out loud and loving it. Plus the Q&A was great (did learn something a bit odd and very funny about my favorite Forrest J. Ackerman interview) and I finally got to thank the man for how much entertainment and joy he’s given me for all these years. So, yeah, 25 years is way to long too wait for some things, but it was worth it.

“It is about 3 am and I am still awake…”

Sean Kotz is a documentary filmmaker currently finishing his documentary on Virginia based television horror hosts, Virginia Creepers:

I was at the premiere of EVERY OTHER DAY IS HALLOWEEN tonight and I found my anticipation rewarded … greatly rewarded. Nicely cut and very well researched. 

A film like this could easily slip into stumbling disarray, blind hero worship, or solipsism. The fact that it does not . . . and that it is very conscious of the legacy factor of Dyszel’s influence on other hosts and DC aboriginals . . . is a mark of genuinely invested filmmaking.

I think the first question in the Q&A said a lot . . . “when will it be on DVD?” People were asking it before they had seen the movie, of course; but they did not HAVE to ask it afterward.

It is about 3 am and I am still awake, and I think it is because I got a nice, sweet blast out of the movie.

“Popcorn & Candy: Creature Teacher”

DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.

Every Other Day is Halloween

SILVERDOCS is over, but the AFI just can’t quit the documentaries. While they’re returning to the retrospectives that were running before the festival interrupted, they’re featuring limited runs of three documentaries as their prime offerings over the next week. Included among those is the fantastic 1984 documentary, The Times of Harvey Milk, a film that formed the basis of much of last year’s excellent biopic Milk, and is even more moving than Van Sant’s narrative version. And on Saturday, the theater is hosting the world premiere of a documentary on a local legend: Dick Dyszel, (aka Bozo the Clown, aka Captain 20, aka Count Gore De Vol).

If you grew up in the D.C. area in the 70s or the 80s, chances are you’re familiar with at least one of those aliases. Dyszel got his start on local television on WDCA 20 as one of the many Bozos across the country, before moving on to long stints as children’s programming host Captain 20 and, perhaps most famously, asCreature Feature host Count Gore De Vol (a subject DCist has looked into before). It was in this last incarnation that he had the most impact, serving as the gatekeeper to classic horror movies for a generation of Washingtonians, and becoming one of the most well-known horror hosts in the country short of Elvira. Always one to push boundaries and stay close to the cutting edge, Dyszel resurrected the Count a decade after his television run had ended to become the first host of a streaming web program, an online show that continues to this day. Director C.W. Prather’s documentary charts Dyszel’s career, from clown to count, and features interviews with other famous horror hosts, and commentary from local fixtures like Arch Campbell and Jeff Krulik (director of the iconic Heavy Metal Parking Lot). Krulik will also be on hand at Saturday’s premiere to moderate a Q&A with Prather and Dyszel after the screening.

View the trailer.
Saturday at 8:20 p.m. at the AFI.

DCist

“It’s a fantastic and inspiring documentary!”

More from BadLit.com:

June 27
8:20 p.m.
AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center
Silver Spring, MD

Hosted by: Midsummer Night’s Scream II

Every Other Day Is Halloween is director C.W. Prather’s documentary about Count Gore De Vol, the beloved Washington, D.C. TV horror movie host. Portrayed by Dick Dyszel, De Vol was a major cult celebrity in the nation’s capital during the ’70s who fell victim to ’80s media consolidation. After being tossed off the air, De Vol turned to the Internet where he has led a renaissance of horror movie hosting. Also, the “Other” of the title refers to other characters Dyszel portrayed on TV, including Bozo the Clown and the sci-fi themed kids show host Captain 20.

You can read Bad Lit’s review of Every Other Day Is Halloween here. It’s a fantastic and inspiring documentary.

The screening will feature director Prather and Count Gore De Vol in person. The post-screening Q&A will be moderated by D.C.’s own documentary filmmaking legend Jeff Krulik.

C.W. Prather is also the founder and director of Washington D.C.’s Spooky Movie Film Festival.

For more info, please visit the AFI website.