WUH: Interview (2019)

We made this. Hello everyone, and welcome to pick Up a podcast and our first episode of twenty nineteen. And today we are going to be talking to Mark Begley, who is part of the wake Up Heavy podcast. Hi Mark, how are you? Hi?

Kurt, Nice to be here, good, Nice to speak to you. Finally, I know that you were really one of the first people who jumped on when I put the call out for for podcasters to come on. And I know there's been a bit of a gap before we get to speak to each other, but I do appreciate you getting in touch just before Christmas there, and I'm sure that we're going to have a great little discussion on your podcast, wake Up Heavy. That is an interesting name and I'm just looking. I'm just wondering one what the podcast is about.

I know what it's about, but what is the podcast about? And where did the name wake Up Heavy come from? The name from a journal entry of mine. I got into the habit of doing that when I was in London for a semester of school. Actually, I think I kept three journals, one for myself, we had to keep one for the program, and then think I had another little kind of date book and I kept doing it off and on for years after, and it was in reference to imbibing in certain beverages and how things had changed with my reaction to that the next morning.

I used to get the spins when I was younger, and then kind of would just pass out and then have a bad hangover, and then it just turned into a physical sensation of waking up and kind of feeling like gravity was pulling you down a little bit extra harder. So it just wrote down wake Up Heavy, and liked it and used it for literary magazine I did in the early two thousands. When it came to do this, I just stuck with it. It has no reference or bearing to movies in general or horror movies specifically. It's my roller skate skinny line that I always wondered what that band's name was from, and then I found out that it was a sentence in Catcher in the Rye, and I just thought it was the greatest thing ever.

Fantastic. Okay, So you mentioned about those literally things there, I mean, what those magazine's about with a bolt films all. No, it was strictly poetry and short stories. I was a huge fan of Charles Bukowski, and I think the first magazine I did another kind of interesting name, is called Smell Feast, and I did that with a buddy, and then I kind of took it over and got a lot of the small press poets that had published alongside Bukowski, and I was kind of ring myself up to write him a letter to submit, because he just submitted to every magazine that would take his poems. Before I could do that, he passed away, and at the time I was writing as well and submitting to these same kinds of magazines, and then that all kind of died off.

That was I think in the late our mid nineties, and then I stopped doing it and then got the kind of itch to go back to that and picked up the Wake Up Heavy Moniker for the second literary magazine, and at that point I started contacting the Black Sparrow Press poets that had kind of been published alongside the Kowski and so it was a lot of that early two thousands Black Sparrow Press group. And the main guy that I ended up publishing a bunch of was Fielding Dawson, and he passed away and that kind of killed the magazine. And then after that I did it. I dabbled in some letterpress printing. I did some cards and prints back in I guess the mid two thousands for a few years and had that actually as my job for a while and didn't use the Wake Up Heavy name for that.

When it came time to do this, I just kind of naturally gravitated back to that name. Yeah, So the podcast you started that late August last, Jeb. I think it was the main feature of it from what I've seen. I know you've mentioned within the podcast that you may venture out a little bit from it is horror. I mean, what do you perceive horror to be owned?

Why specifically horror? Well, I guess it was because that was what I was watching so much of when I was a kid. That's what we rented all the time. It was almost exclusively horror movies. The thing I think we must have rented almost weekly or bi weekly back in the early to mid eighties, and so that and Halloween and and all the ones that I've done, like Phantasm and stuff like Rosemary's Baby and The Shining, It just seemed to be what we rented.

Or if you went to a sleepover or somebody had a birthday party or a Halloween party. It was horror movies. You know. As I grew up, I kind of watched them less and less and started getting into cult films and art films and foreign films. And I think in probably around twenty thirteen, I started meeting a friend of mine who had been in New York in LA for a few years and had come back to Fresno, and we started to make a point of meeting every week.

And then it turned into watching movies. And it was just any movie at that point, and then when we would watch horror movies, it just seemed like it was more enjoyable. So that kind of became the trend. And then I just stuck with it, and I thought, you know, I all these years, I've missed a lot of these movies, and they're I guess, the most enjoyable to watch for me. They encompass, you know, they take all of the aspects of film, special effects, the music's very important to movies, to the horror movies.

And is that the duct from the thing? I hope not. Yeah. And then I kept seeing I guess because of Facebook following nerdics or other groups like that where they would talk about new horror, and I thought, oh, and a lot of them would end up on Netflix. I think Starry Eyes was the first one that really made me think, Okay, so we've gotten past the nineties, which is kind of a dead zone to me, at least for horror, and for kids that grew up in the nineties.

I'm sure it's they look at it the same way I do for eighties or seventies films. Anytime I watch one, I think. I just watched I Know What You Did last summer again for the first time in a long time, and it really just didn't do anything for me. But lately there's kind of been a really big resurgence in good quality horror and story Eyes was kind of the first one that really made me think, Okay, there's gotta be more good stuff out there. Even more so this last year, it seems like it's really taken off, and with things like Mandy and Suspiria the remake, and then this year we've got the new Jordan Peel movie coming up and things like that.

So that's os, isn't it. I think the Job the one. Yeah, yeah, So obviously Hotter is a really keen part of your history. And what you had growing up there. So, yeah, you mentioned in one of your podcasts about the element of the likes of one of my favorite directors, David Lynch, and you've recently done a podcast with Mike Quhites as well with you Raise Ahead.

So as you mentioned that the most surreal aspects of horror, I mean, is there a particular type? I mean, you're saying that surreal is probably your most favorite and obviously the nineties stuff like the way you know, I know what you did last summer is not really something that really appeals to you. But from my points of view, I'm not a massive horror fan, but I didn't perceive the thing as a horror movie, strangely enough, because I love my sci fi and I came at that from a sci fi point of view. With you know, there's just some really gruesome and and out there moments in there. So, taking the genre as a whole, is there any particular aspects that you really enjoy all stuff that it's kind of like, it's not for me.

Within the genre itself, well, the stuff that I tend to gravitate toward does seem to be the things that are kind of slightly off and I think the first two that I talked about, Phantasm and Tourist Trap, have that almost unintentionally surreal feel to them where things just aren't quite right. And as a kid, I didn't really understand why they weren't white right, And a lot of it just had to do with like with Phantasm, and it had to do with that they took big chunks of it out and so you're missing connections that probably would have been there, and it just feels like a dream, you know, And it was intentionally supposed to feel like a dream, But there's both intentional and unintentional things that happened in that movie that make it just a little bit off.

And so a lot of the genre that I keep going back to, the of the psychological horror, with the hysterical women and different things like that that we're big in the seventies, it's just more of an unsettling feeling that I tend to enjoy. I mean, I like the gore and stuff, but I'm not a gore. Hound doesn't have to be. Tourist Trap has like zero blood in it, but it's creepy and weird and just off kilters, So that tends to be the stuff that I gravitate to, and probably why slasher films aren't that high up on my list, because those are most straightforward supernatural aspects, but they're not weird. Yeah, although I'm sure people could argue some sequels.

I guess Nightmare on Elm Street two is kind of weird. I mean, the first Nightmare on Elm Street is weird, and I like that one the most because it's dream like. It's not so much about Freddie throwing out one liners. It's just about the kind of blurring between waking and sleeping and all that that makes that that one's successful to me. As I say, I'm not a huge hat of fun, but I do like psychological thrillersm I do like things with elements of the unknown or the surreal, like like I say that David Lynch stuff is really good because it makes you think, and I like things that are explicitly explained to you.

So some of the Slasher ones for me really out really for me. I'm not really interested in them, but I would always go back to them. And if somebody said, no, you need to listen, watch this one because it's got an element that you like, which you like now I'm trying to think of the film that I've been so to watch recently, which was the It was the Donald Suveland film with the Girl in the Red Coat? Was it? Yeah, don't look now, Don't look now?

Yeah, And I really really enjoyed that film. That's down my street. That's the sort of thing that I really am reading into. Yeah, that showed up on shutter over here, and I had it had been on there, I think a couple of years ago, and I for some stupid reason, didn't watch it and watched it a couple of weeks ago, and I was like, oh, yeah, I remember really really liking this movie and still really really enjoy it. And it's barely horror.

I mean, I think the last five minutes are about the only thing that could be considered horror. Yeah, But the dynamics between the two of them and the strange editing and the flash forwards and all you're unsettled and not totally sure what's going on, And that's the kind of stuff that's really intriguing to me. That's a great movie. Yes, I've absolutely loved And you mentioned the flash forwards. I mean, I'm I'm a stickler for those type of things.

I love repeating films. I love likes of Groundhog Days and various sort of things like that. And I love anything that kind of throws you off edge on that way, and I would prefer that over something that's that's gory. As you say, it's certainly something that's great that You've got the aspects of surrealism, sci fi, you've got psychological thrillers in there. Everything you can throw at the horrorge enm where you could you could potentially find something from it.

Now you decided to get into the podcasting world. What was the major factor in in that? And how did you go about your first recording? How? How did you research what was going on in the past.

Did you look at what other people were doing? How did the podcasting world enter your your life? I have Facebook, I think again to blame for starting this whole thing. It was ten movies over ten days, and you were just supposed to post the poster or a picture and not talk about it, right, that's kind of the rule. And I wasn't really tagged by anyone.

I just saw everybody doing it and I did it. But I could not write something about the movies. I thought, well, maybe I start a blog or something because I really like talking about movies. But I don't have anyone to talk to about movies, and I don't see my friend as often as I would like, and well, what could I do? And I kind of jokingly at one point said to my wife, let's go find a decent digital camera.

I'll do a movie review show. You can do a workout show, and our daughter can do a little toy video review and who knows, maybe we'll make a little bit of extra cash or something. And quickly realized I don't want to do a video review show and just bothering with the clips even and I mean, it just seemed like it entailed a little bit more knowledge than I had. And also just hearing about people with getting their stuff pulled from YouTube for copyright in front general, I didn't want to get involved in any of that. And I thought, well, you know, we listened to podcasts in the car.

I don't didn't listen to very many on my own. I would try a few, kind of maybe not care for the dynamic of that particular show, and other than the ones that we would listen to in the car as a family, like Lower and Myths and Monsters, I think is the other one. And I didn't really listen to that many, and I thought, well, if I'm going to do this, I need to listen to some. But I don't want to listen to the point where I am regurgitating the same types of thing or aping anybody's style, or you know. I didn't want to be too heavily influenced by anything in particular.

And I think I did a search for ten best movie podcasts, and not even horror, just movies in general, and one that came up was the Faculty of Horror, and I read the description and I thought, oh, this might be a good place to start because it's totally different than what I have in mind to do for myself. And it was done by two women, which I thought, well that's good too, to get another totally different viewpoint from my own. And it's academic, so that was a good place to start. And I listened to a bunch of theirs and realized, oh, they're running clips, so I can do that, you know, just an audio clip is fine, And that kind of started the whole process. And then I went to YouTube and watched garage band tutorials and things like that.

On how to get started at least, and it didn't seem to be that difficult. And then I realized, oh, yes, the computer in our spare bedroom is a Mac and it has Garage Band on it. So I just went and started fiddling around and did some really early versions of what I ended up doing as full episodes I did. I think I started with the eraser head and just kind of sat there and talked into the computer for an hour and a half. That was something I was going to pick upon as well, because your style and so far we recently had Mike Whites on Folly Raiserhead.

It happens, but has been that you were podcasts and solo. Was that Was that a conscious choice at the beginning of the outset? I was it just beauty because you just wanted to get your head around the way of a podcast in the way that you wanted it to run. It was mainly by default. I've figured that you needed a co host, and I thought, who in the world am I going to get to co host this?

And getting the hold of friends and nailing down a time when you're both free was going to be virtually impossible, and I thought, well, I'll just start and do the first couple on my own and see how that goes. I don't know of many movie podcasts that do. I can't even think of one that's just a solo act that isn't kind of like what you do where they have a guest every week or something where it's just one guy or girl talking about a movie. I don't know. That may just be because I don't really still don't have a very wide list that I listened to, but I haven't come across one yet.

There are, I know, you know, like I mentioned lower, and that's just that guy talking the whole time. It's more of telling a story. But I figured, well, you know what, I'll just give it a shot and see what happens. And I've asked a few people and it just hasn't lined up yet. And I probably wouldn't have done anything yet if I was waiting on other people.

So yeah, you've got to start somewhere. Yeah. Yeah. And also as well, just while we're on that subject, so far, you've you've done them on your own, as it was one particular one that you've done with my White again into his Head, and another one with your daughter, which found was amazing and she's a great interviewer, and if she ever needs to co host for me or Cup of Me, I think I'll be in touch. Which I thought was it was really really good.

I thought that she did really well and that was a nice little introduction to the show. Was it was that something that you would had asked her to do? Or was she did she wants to get involved? How did that all come about? I think I asked her I had done and probably like five different intro episodes, and I just kept talking and talking, and I thought, I need I need a structure to this.

I went ahead and wrote out the questions that I ended up having her ask. Yeah, we just sat there and recorded her end, and then I went in and answered the questions afterwards. So she gets a kick out of it. I don't know if it's something that she wants to do all that often with me, but you know, I've had her do I had her do a few extra things for the eraser Head one. And if something pops into my head where I need a break or a kind of a segue into a different topic or something, then I'll ask her, will you record something with me?

And you know she's eleven, so I think she's happy to be asked, but then acts impatient, you know, like it's a bother or something after a while. So you mentioned there that you were talking about the sections and breaks and things. Was something that I had noticed listening to to the podcast, was that you do have these parts, and you do have sections that are broken up by ivy using clips or by saying part one and part two, and especially with the I know we talked talked about raised ahead that rather than go down what many of the people would consider the usual roots of having guessed on and talking about it and the guess goes and you finish off. It was actually it was in the middle of the of the podcast itself, so there's been a considerable I think it was about thirty five minutes, yeah, before Mike was introduced.

So what was how do you go about thinking about split it into pots and the sections that you've put in. What were the fault processes behind that? With the erased your head in particular, it was I have to have some kind of structure or all just bladder on about things, which is probably what happens Anyway, I don't know why I stuck that in the middle to be honest with you. I knew I had recorded something, and then I think I trashed it, and I thought, well, let's see what we talk about and then I can kind of gear the solo stuff around that and not try to duplicate too much. And I ended up taking quite a bit out of the conversation on my end because I knew that I would talk about it more in depth on my own.

Some things that we didn't get to that there were key points for me. It just didn't come up in the conversation with Mike. I felt like I was sort of aping projection booth with that. It seems like their interviews come sort of late in the yeah, in the episodes, So maybe that was just what I was thinking. I'll copy him on that on it.

He certainly a good one to copy put it that way. Yeah, And with regards to clips, I know it's it's it's something that some people do and some people don't. Was a conscious effort on your parts who put clips into the production? Yeah, I did think it was important. I like it.

And like I said, when I first started listening to Faculty of Horror, I thought, Okay, they're doing it. It makes sense to do it. On an audio thing instead of you a video review. And on some of theirs when they were doing foreign films, you know, they were playing audio and I'm like, well know subtitles, but I don't care. You know, that's cool.

I'll listen to this French language version of the clip here and not know what's going on, because that's perfectly fine. Obviously. You want to do it when it's interesting dialogue or something maybe funny or gross or scarier or whatever, also to kind of give it give a break from me just talking. I think it's worked for the most part. In the episodes, I try to keep it short.

I don't want to go on forever. I think with The Racer Head there wasn't too much in there because there one thing, isn't a lot of dialogue, and when there is dialogue, there are long pauses between the Lynchian pause. Yeah, even more so in that movie. There's Yeah. I always had it into my head that there's like twelve lines of dialogue, but I actually counted, kind of counted, you know, when I watched it before the Free four.

I did that, and I think there's about seventy lines of dialogue or something like that. And then I just if I had it on DVD, all loaded up onto the computer and I just record the audio. I don't have any special tools. I know there's I think there's something you can get to rip audio off of YouTube, but I'll either use my disc if it's streaming, I'll use that version, or if I have to go to YouTube, I'll do that and I just record the audio onto garage band. I think I finally realized I needed to do it a little bit louder.

It seems like it automatically drops a couple of decibels when you do that through garage band, and finally realized I needed to up a little bit. I mean, I can always play with the volume and the track, but it would vary so much. I didn't want to have ten tracks just for ten different clips. The future moving onto way you i'll see the podcast going. Have you reached out to any of the podcasts focused on your show?

Are you going to be doing the show just generally on on your own? As we speak of what can we expect in the next few months from myself, I was going to put a call out on Twitter and like, hey, if there's any female writers or podcasters that want to talk about Taxi Driver contact me, and I didn't because I don't know what I'm going to do with the taxi driver episode. Yet there are a few people that I will be contacting to appear on something. And I had always had in mind to ask people tell me what your phantasm was or your tourist trap. But what was that horror movie when you were a kid that you caught, you know, either you snuck out of your bedroom and watched or that you just saw some Saturday afternoon and it really struck a chord And talk about their recollections of horror as opposed to mine.

You know, I'm open to that from anybody that wants to talk about something like that. I'd be more than happy, even if it's a movie that I haven't seen or that I don't like, because I can ask. You know, it doesn't matter what my thoughts are on it if we're doing your movies. So that is definitely an option. And I do have some friends when are we going to do this?

And I think with my friend Ronnie, who is the guy that I was watching movies with back in the twenty thirteen and on, I think we're going to do Rosemary's Baby together. I'm not sure we haven't really nailed it out down. I'm going to see him this weekend, so maybe we'll talk about it some more. But we've tossed around a couple of different movies that we could do. I think we always circle back to Rosemary's Baby.

I don't really have anybody specific in mind. I always kind of get a little gun shy about asking somebody. I felt comfortable asking Mike because we had a Twitter and Facebook relationship, and I just was like, he hasn't done any Racerhead yet, and this is going to be kind of the crowning achievement of this season. And it would be helpful if there was someone else on this because it's, you know, such a rich movie, and I mean, I could talk about it for three hours, but nobody wants to listen to that. You've done your first few episodes, you've started doing something called why Didn't I Rent This?

I thought that's an absolutely brilliant idea, and I like the way that you've done that. From the patroon side, do you want to just just go start for it for a few moments, just to let the audience know what that is and what your thoughts were behind that. It was because I was seeing movies that were from my childhood that I didn't watch, and I thought, well, I can't do a full episode on that. It doesn't fit the format which I'm not beholden to. I mean, I did one on Black Christmas, and I didn't see that movie as a kid.

For things that I saw in the video store that were intriguing. When I finally watched him as an adult, I'm like why when I actually asked, why didn't I rent this when I was a kid? I mean, I watched the thing a hundred times. I could have taken a week off and watched The Beast Within or Messiah of Evil or something like that. So I thought, well, you know, I'm not going to expand this into a long one because I don't know that much about the movie.

I don't have a history with it, and that's part of the main episodes of the show. But I kind of want to talk about it, and I thought, well, maybe I'll just do a review and throw that on the blog. And every time I think that, I just immediately tossed that idea aside because it's not I don't know what it is. But to me, thinking about writing at this point is a total bore. I would just rather tinker around with this stuff on the computer and sit here and record and maybe get a fifteen minute episode out.

And so that was sort of the impetus for that was just there's a ton of movies that I didn't watch from back then that I've watched now that are great, and it's not costing anybody any money. If I feel like talking about something, I'll talk about it. I guess the Patreon thing, I guess it's just something that every podcaster ends up doing. And I sort of wasn't sure I would ever do it, because you know, I'm not overwhelmed by response to begin with. Yeah, so I thought, well, what's the point, you know, what's the point of that There's going to be these episodes that nobody listens to because they're going to have to pay for him?

But I thought, well, you know, what's screw it. I'll just go ahead and do it. But I wanted it to be exclusive content just because of the way I am. I don't carve out time to listen to episodes early, and that seems to be what a lot of the podcasts do, and there's nothing wrong with that. I think that people they're obviously doing it because people like to be the first to listen to something maybe, and that idea just didn't appeal to me as a listener or as a podcast so I thought, well, I'll just do things that don't fit any formula so far, just something a new discovery or non horror or whatever.

Whenever it strikes my fancy, I might throw up on there. It's certainly a good way of looking about it. I think a lot of people would do it. One way is to I mean, as many people will know that you can start a podcast quite quite cheaply, but it does cost money to host some on certain areas, and by releasing earlier, earlier ones, you can obviously reclaim some of that money back, and especially when you get bigger and bigger than obviously that's that is a main concern. I decided to do this podcast because I got the bug for being on a podcast and for doing it, and what I naturally felt was I struggled with being a guest, but actually enjoyed hosting and enjoyed intervion, so hence the reason why this podcast was born.

I appreciate you you're coming on today. It's been absolutely fantas I really do appreciates it. Where can people find wake up heavy? I'm on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram as wake up heavy. If you just type in wake up heavy on any social media, it should come up.

Patreon is wake up heavy. On the blog is wake up heavy dot com. I broke down and bought the domain, and I don't know, didn't make anything easier, I guess, but it's just kind of nice to not have to type in blog spot. Yeah. Yeah, any social media platform, it's just all one word, wake up heavy.

There isn't a whole lot of other wake up heavy stuff out there, so it's a phrase that comes up every once in a while, I think in reference mainly to people who work outright lift weights or heavy metal, I think sometimes. So those are the only other references I've seen with the hashtag. So all those years ago, you've definitely come up with a unique phrase. Yeah, and you know, it actually lends itself to changing. I was just thinking about this the other day because I will eventually run out of movies that I watched as a kid that left a big impression.

I mean, it's a it's a finite number. Yeah, that's why kind of why I had added the subtitle of Recollections of Horror, because that can always change, and the title is so vague or you know, there's no reference point to it. I could start talking about all the cult movies that I fell in love with sort of when I took a break from horror, or just even regular dramas and action movies. So I mean it's you know, a little bit harder if your podcast is called Nightmare on Film Street. Yeah, so you know which is That's a fine podcast, and and there's hundreds of horror movies to talk about.

But since I was being so specific about what I was going to start with, I guess it seemed like maybe I shouldn't be so specific with the with the title. Thank you so much for coming on to pick up a podcast. Thank you for starting twenty nineteen with a blast with yourself. I look forward to hearing your podcasts moving forward. It's been an absolute pleasure, and I will no doubt speak to you on Twitter again in the near future, and all the best with your podcast, and we'll speak to you soon.

Yeah, thanks so much, Kurt, and thank you for taking my suggestion of myself to be on your show. I just wanted to make sure that everybody knew that I actually contacted you. And well, the more people that contact me, the better because it makes my job so much easier. So thank you for that, and again, thank you so much for coming on and we will speak to you soon. Meanwhile, we are part of the We Made This Podcast Network.

Thank you so much for listening, and we'll see you next time.