Media Fandom Oral History Project Interview with Kathleen Reynolds

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Interviews by Fans
Title: Media Fandom Oral History Project Interview with Kathleen Reynolds
Interviewer: Megan Genovese
Interviewee: Kathleen Reynolds
Date(s): August 22, 2017
Medium: aural, transcript
Fandom(s):
External Links:
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In 2017, Kathleen Reynolds was interviewed by Megan Genovese as part of the Media Fandom Oral History Project.

Interview length: 1:06:21.

The Media Fandom Oral History Project is supported by the Organization for Transformative Works, the organizers of Escapade conventions, and the University of Iowa Libraries. For more information about the origins of this interview, where it is housed, contact information, suggestions regarding future interviewee candidates, and how to become volunteer interviewer or transcriber, see the Media Fandom Oral History Project page.

Some Topics Discussed

Excerpts

I had watched Dark Shadows when I was growing up [but I] wasn't aware of any fan base. I don't know at that time if there were any, any gatherings other than just having like a Johnathan Frid fan club and that sorta thing. And I wasn't involved in any of that. But after I graduated from high school in '78, a year or so later, they started showing reruns [on public television] of the first, not the pre-Barnabas episodes, but the first year of the Barnabas episodes. My friend Mary had a video recorder, a VCR, and very few people had them at that time because they were so expensive. So she and I worked out a deal with each other where we would record the publicly broadcast episodes through the week on her VCR if I provided the blank videotapes, which at that time they were very expensive. They were like $25 for one blank video tape. Excuse me. So worked out an arrangement where she would set her timer and record the episodes, and then we would get together on the weekends and watch them. And on one of those occasions, the public broadcasting network advertised a fan magazine called Inside the Old House, which was run by Dale Clark, and Mary subscribed to it. And then the fan magazine, it gave information about an upcoming Dark Shadows festival, which at that time they called ShadowCon, and that was out in LA in 1982. So that was my first introduction to organized fandom, was finding out about these fanzines and the ShadowCon festivals. We went to our first festival in 1983, and it kind of went from there.

Dark Shadows Festival had an art display room where people who were artistic did original paintings and, and they would display them. And we had a dealer's room where people could sell memorabilia and then we had a large ballroom where people did the Q&A, like Jonathan and Terrayne and Diana and Jonathan gave his one-man show, 'Genesis of Evil.' Um, and we also had like a video room where people could go in and watch episodes because at that time there wasn't much availability. It wasn't available for sale, like the NPI, and it wasn't being shown on a lot of networks throughout the country. So anyone who actually had some copies of the episodes, they would try to share them with their friends because not everybody could see the show.

We used to have two to three [Dark Shadows Festivals] a year. We'd have, um, there for a few years we were doing Dallas, LA, and Newark, all in the same year. They had a few years where they had one in San Jose as well. And so I remember back in 1986, I went to three or four festivals in one year. And then it got to be too much for the guests because we were having a festival every few months. And so we started cutting it down to just LA and New York , or Newark, and then it became just one coast or the other, one a year. But yeah, the, the festivals, they had one last year, uh, for the 50th anniversary of the show. And they've gone strong for a long time. This year they did a cruise, Dark Shadows Cruise.

When we took [Dark Shadows Festival] over, it had been ShadowCon, which meant like Dark Shadows convention, and some of the guests were really kind of turned off by the way the ShadowCon had been kind of mishandled. Um, the guests weren't really treated as well as they should have been. There were some issues going on there. So we wanted to distance ourselves from having that feel of being a convention per se, and we thought it would be more pleasant to just call it a festival. Just enjoying getting together with each other and, and let the guests do what they want to visit with each other and, and you know, just have a good time reuniting with each other after all those years working together on Dark Shadows. And a lot of times that would be the only time they would see each other would be at these, at these festivals, at these events. When ShadowCon was doing it, they were so concentrated on trying to do other media as well as Dark Shadows that they kind of ignored the Dark Shadows celebrities at times. And we didn't want to do that. We wanted it to be totally Dark Shadows and nothing else and let the fans and the guests come and interact with each other and just have a good time. So we called it a festival.

We hadn't seen any Dark Shadows music videos anywhere. As far as we knew, none existed, and I don't think they did exist. But, um, right after Michael Jackson's Thriller album came out, which, -- I looked this up. It was like November of 1982. Um, I was sharing a house with another friend, and she and I were all fans of Starsky and Hutch and she had gotten her hands on a Starsky and Hutch music video that someone made. And of course you have to stop and think VCRs had just become available, and MTV had just started, and you know, it was early, early days for all of that. So when we watched the Starsky and Hutch music video, it was, it was, like, long runs of scenes set to music, but the scenes didn't really go with the music.

And I remember sitting there watching and thinking, "Oh wow, this would be great to do with Dark Shadows, but I'd really want to edit it more than that. I want the music to fit the scenes." And so I went in my room and got the Thriller album and I was looking at the lyrics to Thriller and I thought, "Oh God, this would just be perfect for Dark Shadows, and we gotta do a music video." So my friend Mary was over there at the time and I told her, I said, "Oh, we've, we've got to do a Dark Shadows music video." And she was, like, "What are you talking about?" "Like, we can do like the Starsky and Hutch and just do Dark Shadows," and she was like, "Oh wow, that's a great idea. "So, um, we didn't get to work on it immediately.

I kept trying to get Mary to get with me and do it because she had a VCR and I didn't. And we had to have two VCRs to do them. So I finally went and rented a VCR and then we got her VCR and we did one with audio dub. And so by the time we got around to actually making the videos, it was like the summer of 1983. The first video we did was, "Who Can It Be Now?" featuring Willy Loomis. We didn't start out with Thriller because Thriller is like an eight minute song and we knew that was going to be pretty challenging. So we started out with a three minute song to do it. And so anyway, we did that one first. And um, we worked on them through the rest of '83. And then when the Dallas Dark Shadows Festival came into play in spring of '84, we had our first three videos ready.

Um, "Who Can It Be Now?, "You Can Do Magic," and "Memory" from Cats. Yeah. So we showed those for the first time at the Dallas Festival in 1984 and we showed them in the ballroom before Jonathan came on stage to do his Q-and-A, and he was just wonderful about it. He came on, and the first thing he did was just go on and on about our music videos and how well done he thought they were. And he loved "Memory" because that was, it was scenes of Barnabas and Josette set to that. It was sung by Barbara Streisand, and he thought it was just wonderful to be "on stage with Barbara Streisand," as he put it. So, um, that was the first introduction. After, after the ballroom cleared from Jonathan giving his Q-and-A, we had people running up to us going, "Oh, that was great!" "Oh Wow. I can't believe you did that. And I just loved the music video and where can I get a copy?" And you know, people just went nuts over it. And at that same convention, there was another fan. Her name is Carol Maschke, and she is from Minnesota. She had actually done some music videos, and they showed for the first time at that same festival. And, she never did show hers again or make them available for anyone to get copies. So I would love to have seen them again, but I never, never got to. And she had done Ghostbusters and "Bless This House", and she did "Delirious" by Prince, with Willie Loomis being obsessed over the Barnabas portrait, and that was a really good video.

In the time, in the years that we did the music videos, when we would go to festivals afterwards, every year there'd be somebody else that had done one there'd be two or three more people that had done them. So it started building, and more and more people were really getting into doing the music videos. So I felt very gratified in that. I thought, I felt like we really started something, you know, in Dark Shadows. So, um, even though we didn't start the first music videos, that Starsky and Hutch, um, I feel like we started the Dark Shadows trend, and it was, it was really pleasing to see what everybody else was doing. When, when they got past doing, um, you know, just using VCRs, we didn't really get into the new part of using the computers to do music videos because I didn't have the equipment to do it and I never learned it. So we didn't go any further. But back when we did it, it was just two VCRs, one with an audio dub, a stopwatch, and a record player. Because at that time CD's weren't out very much. We couldn't get the music we wanted available on CD or cassettes. So, um, we had to resort to just using a record player, and it's very difficult to get a record player needle to set down in the exact same spot more than once. So it was very challenging to get the music time timed right for the videos.

I was thinking my friend Mary Overstreet was reluctant to really want to get into it as much as I was, and she was a big Willie Loomis fan. So I thought, okay, the first one needs to be about Willie Loomis. So I remembered watching these episodes, and there were so many episodes where he was going to the door; he was always answering the door. So, um, the Men At Work record, Who Can It Be Now, was very popular at that time. I thought, "Oh, that's perfect for Willie." So, um, I followed the song and then what I would do is take a legal pad, like a big yellow legal pad and write down the lyrics to the song, and then as I watched Dark Shadows videos, I would make notes. As I was watching Dark Shadows episodes, I would have the lyrics in front of me and I'd think, "Oh, that'd be a great scene for that lyric, and I would make a note what video tape it was on and like about how far, you know, what episode it was--that particular segment was in. And so I had like this, um, this mapped out on the legal pad, and then I would play the song and watch video clips from the scenes to see how it was going to kind of time out and being like, "Oh yeah, that's, that's going to work. That'll be good." So then when Mary and I would get together, we had the stopwatch, so we would take the record, and we would play the lyric and see how many seconds it lasted. And then we would play the video and see how many seconds the video lasted. And so we either had to trim the video or rephrase it, the music, to get things to fit. So we kind of had a plan laid out, and then what we had to do was, um, find the particular video clip and record it from one VCR to the other. And then we had to play the music and see if it matched. And then we had to go back and lay the next section of video and go back and play the music together to make sure it was still matching. We had to piece it together one little scene at a time. And so we got all the scenes laid down on video. And then we had to go back with the audio dub and play the music and get it timed, time it at the right spot at the beginning to make everything match.And it was, it was difficult in some ways because, like, in Thriller, the lyric, um, you hear the door slam? Well, there was a video where the door was being slammed at the old house, and we wanted to be sure the sound of the door slamming matched up with the doors slamming on video. So it took many, many times to get that to time out correctly. So I know it's much more complicated than it is now, the way people can do it on the computer. But that's all we had to work with at the time.

[snipped]

And we had people in later years that would see the videos, just complain about, "Oh, the quality's so bad. Why didn't you guys do a better job on it? Why didn't you get better copies? Why didn't you get better quality music? You know, "Why didn't you use a CD?" Why didn't you do, why didn't you do? It's like, it didn't exist when we made them. We worked with what we had. And, um, I, I envy people that are able to do it on computer now because it seems like a much cleaner process.

[Vids were] great. So it took off from there. When we went to the Newark Festival and showed them, people went nuts over them. Shortly after that we ended up meeting Humbert Allen Astredo. He was doing a play in Austin, Texas, and we went down to see him and met him in person. And after we met him, we're like, "We need to do another music video with Humbert in it, with Nicholas Blair. So then we made, um, It was great. So it took off from there. When we went to the Newark Festival and showed them, people went nuts over them. It was great. So it took off from there. When we went to the Newark Festival and showed them, people went nuts over them. "What About Me?" with the love triangle between Joe and Maggie and Nicholas Blair. And after that, um, we decided to tackle "Thriller." We finally finished Thriller in 1985 or '86--I'm not sure which--and after that it was kind of, it got complicated because Jim Pearson had gotten involved with Dan Curtis Productions, heavily, with working for them. And there became all this, I dunno, tension about how we couldn't really be doing this because it's copyrighted material and Dan Curtis Productions owns the rights to the videos and you really can't be doing this And so we just didn't go any further because it was really kind of squelched from there.

The music videos I think would have taken off a lot more than they did initially if it hadn't been frowned upon from a legal standpoint. Um, you know, we, we got all these things like "You're going to be hit with a cease and desist letter if you don't quit showing them at festivals because it's copyright material and the music's copyrighted," and you know, so forth. And my thing was, well, we're just showing it to an audience of fans. I don't think anybody here is going to be upset or do anything with it or try to copy it or anything. Then we ran into a difficulty with one fan at a festival, did record our music videos when they were being shown in the ballroom and he started trying to sell -- Well, he actually did start selling them to the public, um, like through fan publications and stuff. He was making them available. Our videos for called Tower Room Music Videos. So as soon as we saw these ads, we knew that they were ours, and then we saw the music. I mean, it was our videos. So we, we tried to put a stop to that by making them available ourselves, and we were just charging the cost of the videotape and the shipping. Well, once we started doing that, of course we didn't advertise it in public anywhere. It was just through fandom. But Jim Pearson was pretty adamant that we stop, you know, doing that. So, um, it just got to be kind of sticky legally. So we, we didn't pursue it anymore.

Yeah. For some reason, uh, because it was video, because we were showing actual clips from the show, that was considered more copyright infringement than doing fan fiction. Um, now it seems that they got past that hurdle at some point because I see them on YouTube and I don't see anyone having an issue with that or a problem with that. I don't know if that's because Dan Curtis has since passed away or, or people just kind of gave up trying to enforce it or, you know, I don't know what happened there because I've seen fan music videos on Youtube, so that's certainly much more available to the public than ours ever were because ours were just at the conventions.

I've enjoyed everybody's videos [in recent years]. I think it's great. And like I said earlier, it's really gratifying to think that, that may be, they got the idea of doing it from us from a starting out years ago. I don't know that they did, but, you know, it's nice to think that maybe we inspired some people to do it. I mean, I know initially we did because the next year after we showed ours the first time, all of a sudden there were all these music videos, you know, at the next festival. And that was really, really nice. I love seeing all this creativity because you know, before that we had the art work that people would do, but not everybody's an artist. You know, I, I can't draw a straight line to save my life. And then we had people doing fan fiction and poetry and you know, doing the zines and stuff. But I personally am not a writer, so that was not my thing either. And then you had people that would come and do the costume contest that would express their, their fandom and their creativity through making the costumes and maybe doing a skit or something. Um, and you had like the Collinsport Players that would come and reenact a scene from the show and you know, do, do a skit or whatever. But the video was my creative outlet--doing the fan videos--and I loved it. And of course after that, because, um, video became available to the fans, people started doing other things as well. Like, um, there was a video, a fan video called A Doctor Remembers where someone had, this guy had dressed up in drag as Julia Hoffman and he went up to Seaview Terrace and filmed video as if he were looking back over his life at Collinwood as Julia Hoffman and, and being in love with Barnabas.

You know, the whole experience going to the [Dark Shadows] conventions and meeting the people that you'd watched on television, and, and getting to be involved and getting to know them a little bit was, was such an exciting experience and one I wouldn't take for, I mean it was, it was really great. And the thing is you start out being all, um, you know, like in all of them because you watched them when you were a kid and you know, you're seeing them in person and then you get to know them as a person, and then they become friends. And you know, there's so many of the Dark Shadows people that have come to these conventions for years and years and years that they've developed real relationships with a lot of the fans, like really good friendships.

And to me that's just incredible because I don't know any other fandom that's like that. Like, you know, if you go to a Star Trek convention or any other convention, the stars are usually paid to come and do a Q-and-A and sign autographs and so forth. Well, with Dark Shadows, the guests came without being paid a dime. They just came. And we would take care of their airfare or their hotel expenses, you know, meals and stuff, but they didn't ask for a dime of, of pay to be there. And they would show up and not just be there for a quick autograph session or quick Q-and-A. They would stay the whole weekend. They would come in on Friday and be there till Sunday night for the banquet and make themselves available for autographs and to talk to, and they are the best group of actors and actresses that I can think of. I don't know any other fandom that the people that were on the show giveso much back to the fans at these events. I've never seen anything like it since.... Even when they were busy on other projects like John Carlin, you know, it was doing Cagney and Lacey, you know, weekly, weekly show, and David Selby was doing Falcon Crest, you know, a weekly show. They would still come and they would spend the weekend and they would spend time with us and you know, they, they were busy people, but they took the time.... It's a very special fandom. It really is like a family in many ways. I've had--I've heard many of the celebrities say that, you know, but it's the Dark Shadows family, and there've been many times over the years where I've heard, I've heard many comments from the celebrities about how much warmth they feel from the fans, and, and the fans feel it back from them. And it's, uh, it's really a nice fandom. It's really good.

References

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