Stephen Romano’s Kingdom: Sondra Locke Has MY Back. Who’s Got Yours?

Stephen Romano |

Aug 31, 2015

Welcome back, kids! I’ve got a heartfelt-fun guest blog for you at my website this week, all about The Kingdom, though the eyes of its one-time Princess. It’s an awesome bit of writing that captures a long gone era in both my life and the lives of many others. CLICK HERE to read it.

Also, some of it was the inspiration for my new novel METRO, which drops this coming SEPTEMBER 14, from Simon and Schuster. So, umm, you know, just to get the important shit out of the way first: BUY MY BOOK. BUY TWO COPIES. MAKES A GREAT GIFT. AND IT’S JUST TWO BUCKS.

CLICK THE SWELL COVER AT RIGHT TO MAKE YOUR MOVE!

Okay, END SHAMELESS PLUG.

Now on to the fun stuff.

For those who might have missed last week’s post, The Kingdom was a palace of trash and excess, attended by many citizens, which I made my home for many years. We worshipped all things wet and slimy and horrific. And if it was tacky, trashy and stupid, it became gospel. For me, the philosophy went along the following lines: If a filmmaker or a writer or a comic book artist (or really anybody) sets out to do something that comes out “bad,” they’re probably just as crazy as someone that everybody likes. Plus, they’re probably really mad about it. Which makes them dangerous. So who would you rather have standing in front of you in a bar fight: J.J. Abrahams or Sondra Locke? Think about it, chum.

All our gods went up on the Kingdom walls. To wit:

See this? It’s what lurked just past the ceiling fan of the living room of The Kingdom. Took YEARS to plaster all that shit up there and this is only a small portion of the madness. Look hard and you’ll see Batman and Max Max mixing it up with The Breakfast Club, along with Stella Star, Fred Williamson and about a billion other lovelies and tough guys. The Black Hole and Starcrash were favorite films on rotation and were sometime watched up to four or five times in a single day. Starcrash is the amazing story of a woman in a leather bikini (Caroline Munro) who gets in lots of trouble with outer space Amazon women, robot skeletons with laser swords, angry troglodytes who do backflips and a giant red lava lamp monster that drives you insane with fear. And then it all gets weird. The Black Hole is similarly amazing, a batshit crazy cosmic/gothic horror movie about a mad scientist who wants to journey to the outer reaches of creation to find the “mind of God” in a super-cool spaceship that looks fucking awesome, yet explodes instantly when he turns the engines on. Oh, and then meteors crash into it. And he ends up in Hell. Having sex with a robot. And this was made by Disney.

Trust me, these films are solid gold.

This is some detail on the collage ceiling, showing more of the posters we had up there. I’m trotting this one out just for you guys because it shows off one of the paperback covers for the movie tie-in of John Carpenter’s The Thing, which is an alternate version of the famous one-sheet, which was finally and famously executed by poster impresario Drew The Thing 2 Struzan. This early version (artist unknown) actually appears to be some sort of re-touched photo, which I’ve always been curious about. If anyone out there knows the story behind this, please don’t keep it to yourself. I like to think that this was a photo study for the final poster, which Drew somehow geniused up as a reference for his stellar art. But then again, I happen to know there were hundreds of ad concepts developed for The Thing in 1982, a film which Universal Pictures had a lot riding on. The novel, by the way, was cranked out by Alan Dean “Old Reliable” Foster very early in the screenwriting process and bears little resemblance to the finished film past a certain point. Also, once the movie was filmed, it experienced a mutation or two in the editing room which left many, many scenes on the floor. One of the great testaments of Carpenter’s focus and skill as a young director is his brutal and intelligent re-shaping of that footage into the taut, no-bullshit masterpiece we all know and love. The first-printing of the paperback (pictured left) is even MORE curious, looking less like a film poster and more like one of my many lurid pulp sci-fi paperbacks, with a really awesome bit of hand-painted art. I happen to know this WAS an early poster design that was scrapped by Universal as “too vauge.” I have two copies of each printing of the book. I affectionately refer to them as Thing 1 and Thing 2. I’m sort of crazy.

THIS GUY is crazier, by the way:

His insane mission is to own an entire bookshelf filled with nothing but the Aliens novelization. Click the image above to read more about it. This guy would have been right at home at the Kingdom. No bullshit. But ANNNNYWAY . . .

More detail on the Kingdom ceiling, showing a few of my favorite films, such as Lugi Cozzi’s Contamination and The Brotherhood of Satan. Also, Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, Phantasm, and Starcrash again. Because Starcrash is just so goddamn cool. I actually wrote a book about the making of that film. And though it was never published, I did get to utilize my research on an awesome Shout! Factory disc set of the film, which I co-produced with the awesome Cliff MacMillan. Lugi Cozzi directed that one too. Because he’s awesome also. And stuff. GO BUY A COPY AT AMAZON! I HAVE AWARD-NOMINATED COMMENTARIES ON THERE! WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR!??? Sheesh.

Our final image from The Kingdom ceiling this week is loaded with all-time exploitation faves, and contains one of the finest posters ever created for a motion picture. That would be The Gauntlet, painted by the legendary Conan artist Frank Frazzetta. According to Sondra Locke’s autobiography, the work had just been completed on Frank’s awesome painting in the summer of 1977 when Clint Eastwood himself arrived at his house to pick the thing up. “The oil was still wet as we whisked it away in Clint’s Ferrari.”

The oil was still wet

Oh, and if you like REALLY amazing things, please read Sondra’s book. It’s the stuff of tacky nirvana for trash-master guys like John Waters, who write entire soliloquies about such mud-slinging awesomeness their one-man shows. Ghastly and priceless. It’s actually called “The Good, The Bad and the Very Ugly.” I own four copies of that, too. I want Sondra to beat people up in a bar while I cower in terror. Really, I do.

I’ll be back next week with a few more stories and a few more pictures. And keep an eye peeled here for some awesome new surprises!

AND . . . buy my book. Please.