Comic Con Coverage: Butane Checks In!

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San Diego Comic ConAh, the madness that is Comic Con. I have never witnessed such a truly massive gathering of fans from all walks of life before, and it is indeed something to behold. It’s nearly impossible to accurately describe the sheer size of this convention; you need to see it to really know what it’s like.

Instead of the usual Day One, Day Two, etc., coverage that we would do for smaller shows, I think it’s best just to throw some highlights your way since I’m sure you’re really not very interested in hearing about all the in-between madness. Yesterday we had a series of on-camera interviews with some of the Saw III principals, namely director Darren Lynn Bousman, Shawnee Smith, and writer Leigh Whannell. All three were very gracious and cool, and Sean Clark got some good stuff out of them. I’ll be going through the audio recordings and putting the highlights up here (as well as some sweet pics) as soon as time allows. Madness is the order of the day, and very little time is available to actually update as much as I would like to.

Saw IIIWe also hit the panel for Tripper, the upcoming directorial debut from David Arquette that was produced by Steve Niles, co-written by Joe Harris, and stars Jason Mewes, Thomas Jane, Paul Ruebens, and Chris Nelson.

Arquette, Niles, Harris, and Nelson were on hand to show a trailer and discuss the movie, but unfortunately they had lost the tape with the trailer on it on the way there, so the first 15 minutes of the panel were taken up by Arquette apologizing profusely. Still, he did talk about the movie a lot, and it sounds like it should be a lot of fun; if nothing else, it has a great cast. The Tripper is about a group of kids who head out for a weekend of drugs and sex and end up being picked off one by one by a killer with a fixation on Ronald Regan. Joe Harris accidentally revealed the killer’s identity to the entire crowd, but Arquette asked us all not to tell so I will honor that request.

The film was made independently and has yet to find a distributor, but with a pedigree like theirs I’m sure it won’t languish without a release for very long. I will say that David was incredibly accommodating to all those in attendance and had a great attitude about the whole thing, granting many fans’ request for a hug and signing T-shirts and photos while the panel was going on. Now we just have to hope that The Tripper doesn’t suck…

Pans LabyrinthThe last event of the day was the Pan’s Labyrinth panel, which featured the one and only Guillermo del Toro and star Doug Jones. If you’ve never seen Guillermo speak to an audience of his fans, you’re really missing out on something special. He’s always said that he’s a fan first and a director second, and he’s never once compromised when he’s making films for us because he loves them just as much as we do.

They debuted the American trailer for Pan’s, which was amazing and even featured “the voice.” (Guillermo commented that you knew it was American because it featured the words “in a world” and then proceeded to theorize on how the voice talked in his day-to-day life; it was pretty hilarious). Pan’s looks like it will easily live up to the massive amount of fan-driven excitement for it, and Guillermo said many times that he said it’s the film he’s most proud of to date. And Doug Jones would neither confirm nor deny that he’s playing Silver Surfer but did hint that he’s in talks for it, and if he does get it, he promises to be very, very faithful to the comic.

The rest of the night was spent going from party to party, putting faces to names for people I’ve been talking to for years, hooking up with old acquaintances, and prank calling Steven Segal. Today promises to be just as crazy, if not more-so, than yesterday, so expect more good stuff (and a TON of pictures, I promise) tomorrow!

The Pan Panel

Johnny Butane

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