Good morning everybody. I am here live with Jerry Chandler from Synaps Films,
and Jerry is somebody that has been a part of this industry god for a
very long time. At this point we're gonna dive into those details and everything
he does and everything Synapse has evolved doing throughout the years. Jerry, thanks
for coming on here with us. My pleasure, love it, love it
so a lot of people they know for the most part that Synapse is mostly
you and Don May and what we see coming out of Synapse super high quality
releases, everything that you guys touch. But the question is what exactly do
you do for Synaps? Me? Yeah, not much. I'm usually the
per like I'm the business end of the business, whereas Don's the technical end
of the business. You know, no one could do what he does,
so it would be silly to claim that I get involved in that at all.
You know, he's really one of a kind. But you know,
I'm usually the guy who you know, will negotiate the deals and stuff like
that with Synapse. Just so everybody is aware when they say it's two people,
it's genuinely two people. This is an office in Michigan. Don and
Jerry. They compliment each other beautifully. Right before we started recording, Jerry's
got his daughter walking in. It's it's just a small business that runs as
fluidly as they possibly can. And some of the stuff that you guys put
out over the years has made some massive impacts with just two people. So
over these last couple decades, how does it, I know it's gonna be
a big question, but how does it feel just to be like a lasting
presence in this industry? It feels great. I mean, you know what
a question. That's a question it would take me a few hours to ask.
I mean, you have to go back to look at how we started,
you know, and to do that you literally have to go back to
the nineteen eighties. You know, it's a good thing. So exactly how
did this start? Then? It all started back when I was at college
in Michigan State and I was in a comic book store because I have a
huge comic book collection, and I picked up i'm going to say, issue
number twelve or something, some super low number of Fangoria that was being sold
on the newsstand. So of course I turned to the back page and they
used to have subscriber class fight ads. And I remember a billion years ago
when tapes were like literally just starting. Yeah, I made friends with a
guy who wrote a film like a fan fansy, that's what they're called it.
His name was Rick Sullivan and his fansy was the Gor Gazette. I
mean he's vanished. I haven't seen or heard from him in probably, you
know, thirty five years or something, but he's long gone. But you
know, so I put in a subscriber ad saying for my first subscription,
saying hi Rick and Allison, which was his girlfriend at the time. You
know, Jerry is that great? Well, then the year goes by and
I bought a beta player, you know, one of those four hundred pound
eight oh one players, you know, a three hour tape last fifteen minutes
and whatever. I started taping stuff off HBO, and for me, I
was you know, I've been a movie fan mine. When I was a
little boy. My mom used to take me to movies on the weekend.
So I've been a movie fan my entire life. So the whole idea,
like, for example, when I was ten eleven, twelve, I used
to save my allowance money and go to Kresgy's, which was a nickel and
dime store and I'd buy the five minute reels from Rodan or something. You
know, our family had a little Bell and Howell projector. Okay, so
of course, you know, move the clock ahead. I'm in eighteen nineteen
twenty and they got a beta players and you can actually tape a movie off
HBO. And I remember the first movie I tape was the very first Star
Trek movie, and it's like, whoa, I'm taking the player and the
tape to Oh, my friends, look, I'm gonna play a movie at
your house. We don't have to go to the theater, and it's a
big movie. Do commercials. So then I started, of course, like
most electors, I started taping everything, of course, literally everything. And
then when it came around to doing my second subscriber ad. For my second
sub subscription, I put in a thing saying, you know, Beta tape
trader seeking others. You know your list gets mine, and I got started
training with a bunch of people. But I got one particular letter from like
a fourteen year old kid, and I still have it in my desk and
I don't want to waste the time pulling it out, but it's here,
and I've known him done like thirty five years or more, so you know,
I still have the letter. He was fourteen, he said, hey,
here's my list of stuff, you know, send me yours. Let's
start training. And we did. I'm about nine years older than him,
so it was a little you know, but the years go by, right,
and you know, he gets to be eighteen, so I said,
hey, you know, he became my best tape trading buddy because he was
getting some great movies. And I said, hey, man, why don't
you come up and stay with me at my girlfriend. You know, you're
eighteen now, where your mom let you fly up for the weekend. He
goes, sure, Sure, and he did, and that kind of cemented
a lifelong friendship. That's how we got started. So that's how we got
started as friends. Right. So then you know, I'm done with college.
I goes, I started a steel company, and I started, you
know, running that show and stuff. And he goes to college and he
graduates, graduates college, and he calls me up and he said, hey,
I'm you know, I started a business with a guy I used to
do business with at the video store that I worked at, and we need
some money. Could you lend me some money. We're going to do dawn
of the day. I said, sure, whatever, you know, no,
but they got the buddy from somewhere, and that's how Elite Entertainment started.
Well, it was kind of like us the sense that his partner did
all the business and Don did all the work. But Don was never in
town. And you know, I'm just gonna say it like this. Don
showed up at the office one day when he wasn't expected and he saw mail
he didn't expect to see. He called me up. I called my brother
in law, who's an account and a lawyer. And my brother in law
said, grab all the paperwork you can and fly to Detroit. We'll pick
you up at the airport. We'll take a look what's going on. And
it was terrible. Wow. So, needless to say, after three years,
that was the kind of the end of Elite. The other partner went
on for a few more years, but without Don there was no business.
And I said, done, we got you out of that, but you
got to start again. And you know, good luck, and you know
you can do this. And if you're on your own, you won't nothing
battle happen to you or whatever. Right, And he said, look,
man, I can't do it by myself. I said, well, no,
no, I'm just lending you the money to start it. I don't
want a piece of it. You know, I'm busy with my And he
goes, no, no, no, I need you as a part.
I said, why what do you need me for? What do I bring?
He goes, I can't run the business. Look what happened. So
I thought, okay, well that makes sense. You know, what's the
point starting over If the same thing's going to happen. I could keep an
eye on him and make sure nothing bad happens to him. And by now
you have at least a decade of trust between you two. Yeah. Well,
plus we started the company on my money. What am I going to
rest for myself? You know? So, But that was twenty six,
twenty seven years ago. We never looked back, and it was the greatest
investment of my time that I ever made. Forget about the money. The
money I was just given to Don because he was my old friend. I
was doing great in the steel business and I wanted to help him out.
He just lost everything. But then he sucked me into the company and I
will come in kicking and screaming because I didn't have the time. You know,
I was doing huge export deals to Thailand and Egypt and India Pakistan for
with you know, ocean going vessels full of steel. You know, seventeen
thousand metric tons was the limit of what you could usually get through the Great
Lakes to the ocean. You know, because we're from Detroit, so we've
looked stuff in Detroit. But so anyways, again it's you know, the
rest is history, you know, if you do things the right way,
and plus if you got a guy like Don who's almost legendary, you know,
you know, I wouldn't say it was easy. It's been very,
very difficult, but it's very you know, so I guess to answer your
original question, it feels great to be here in this position after this amount
of time. It's like we finally got to a place where we're pretty respected
by the people who liked the nice stuff. So for those that don't know,
yeah, it had been since ninety five or ninety six since the first
rumblings of sinnaps started. And the important thing to look back for those that
haven't evolved with the hobby that long, that has seen the evolution of multiple
formats. It has seen the evolution of people having evolving taste. It has
seen the rise and fall multiple times, supposedly of physical media as a whole,
but then also it's got the business changing altogether, primarily because of streaming
coming in. And for those that don't know, some of those first releases
from synaps were legendary laser discs, right sure, sure, yeah, there
is a wonderful I think it was a student film that you referred me to,
called The Sinnap Story. I did watch that. I'm gonna have it
linked in the description below on this video and in the podcast, and it
is a really interesting take from at just over ten years ago or something like
that. Right, No, it's a lot older than that. Oh is
it really? Yeah? Yeah, that was his I think the guy who
made that, his name's Nick. He is now a professor. I think
that might have been his thesis paper or something or what. I don't know
what it was, but it was a project that he needed for his classes
and he came to us. I met him. I actually met him at
my nephew's wedding. I'm sitting down at the table and he's introduced himself and
he goes what you're from, Sinnaps and this is a long time ago ago.
Wow, I guess what's happening? Well, I know, you guys,
you know. And then he made that movie and everything you see at
it, including the end, is exactly as it happened. Those aren't special
effects. That was one crazy night in where were we? We were in
Cleveland when the power went out? Yeah, at Cinema Wasteland in the heyday.
That was crazy. That was one crazy night. So the student film
is really an interesting glance into the life of Synapse. But the cool thing
is it really only covered like the first kind of chunk of synapse, and
a lot has changed since then, so I don't necessarily want to redo what
Nick did. We'll go into maybe a few of the details, primarily laser
discs. So for a lot of the current collectors, they are so far
away from laser discs, many of them had never even seen one played.
Can you can you share maybe some of the logistical differences from back then to
nowadays that Synaps had to face starting out, because well, first of all,
as you're talking about this, maybe you can share some details about what
that first release was, because it made quite a splash you know, I'm
I don't know if the people listening will be able to see us, but
they could, they'll be able to see a big difference between you and me.
The difference is I'm at least thirty years older than you, So I
you know, you're You're gonna have to be specific because my memory of those
titles, we put out close to three hundred releases, so it's very difficult
for me to remember exactly what you're talking about. I know, when we
first came out as Sinnaps, we did three VHS tapes. I think we
did a Better Place, Triumph of the Will and Star Warped on VHS,
and let me think we did a Gamma O laser disc because all we could
get was the laser disc rans GAMMERA a laser disc. I think Dario are
Jento's World of Horror and Documented Dead on laser disk, right, and then
I mean, laser disc and VHS were crashing at that time, they were
they were dying, so we kind of nipped that in the bud because it's
still you know, those weren't cheap to produce either one of those at that
time, right, you know, so we kind of kind of leaned into
a DVD pretty strong, and you know, we were exorciated by some of
our fans saying, why are you giving up on LaserDisc? Why are you
giving up on vhs? They were very, very annoyed, And you know
this very day, we still do DVD of almost everything because we don't want
We understand there's people that don't change their technology as the new stuff presents itself,
and we don't want them to feel like we've left, you know,
we've forgotten them. So you know, I had a question the other day.
Somebody asked me, why are you doing Creature from Black Lake on DVD?
I said, because it's a movie from the what sixties, seventies wherever
there's a lot of people still around, and those people only have DVD players
and it's their movie. I'm not gonna make it so they you know,
oh, it's finally out in a beautiful restored version, but I can't play
it because it's on blue ray. You know, it's not us. And
the big thing that that sort of pushback has happened with every single format change,
and if we go beyond UHD like we're seeing nowadays, it'll happen again
that's just the nature of things, unfortunately. But Donn and I are very
sensitive guys, and if anybody listens to the Sinavs Films podcast, we are
always talking about how, you know, the people, certain fans say things
that aren't nice have heard our feelings. So you know, we're awfully nice
guys, and we're not, you know, we just we don't really,
you know, we listen to what people say. If it's said in a
nice way, we listen and we try and give them what they want,
you know, because after all, without the fans, we were long gone.
It's it's really their business, it's their industry. Everything is in for
them, you know. That's that's the way it is. I can't remember
the Night of the Living Dead, Okay, that might been it, and
then he did Nightmare on Elm Street and they had a lot of big titles
because what was happening was according to my understanding. So I've been told now
by people that if I'm not one hundred percent sure, I have to qualify
everything. My understanding of what happened back then was don and his partner became
friends with a wonderful, wonderful gentleman who's passed away. His name was Jay
Douglas from Anchor Bay if we all remember Anchor Bay. Oh, And what
would happen is, you know they would They had a lot of money being
in them so they could get all these great titles. And after they saw
the work Don did on Neither Living Dead, they decided, you know what,
maybe we could get this guy to clean our stuff up so our dis
look better. And you know, well, what's that going to cost.
Well, they made a great deal. They would give Elite laser disc rites
in exchange for Elite letting them use Don's master for their whatever when Elite can
only do the laser disk nice. So that's that's how they got movies like
Nimar on Elm Street and all that, but not Neither Living Dead. Don
actually made did the work himself and made I believe he made the deal directly
with George and the other people. Yeah, and that obviously the way that
a lot of these decisions go down have changed over the years. There's a
lot more hands involved nowadays, it seems like. And back in the nineties,
I'm just imagining the outlet for some of these because first of all,
the number that was produced on a lot of these tape releases and early DVD
releases had to be vastly different than what we're seeing in sales today. Can
you on that? I mean, they made money, The elite made a
ton of money. Things aren't like that anymore now. I mean, that's
my biggest fear for the industry is when Don and I are gone, there's
not going to be any real super restorations anymore. There are some other companies
that do really good jobs, but there's only one done, I mean,
and that's take that people listening with. You know, it could be me
just bullshitting, or it could be figure it out for yourself, but yeah,
there's only one done. And like, we ran into a rocky road
when we started synamps. Our titles sold pretty well, but then it kind
of quickly moved into the what they call it the the sites that would upload
your stuff and people could steal it all free, yeah, torrent sites.
Once those got super popular, are we we are? Sales tanked. I
mean, we went they went very very low because you know, for a
while, they're all people wanted to do was build up their digital library,
you know, and it almost killed us, but we survived, and you
know, and then the early days of video on demand, where you'd give
companies your library and they you'd never see any revenue, so we'd have to
try and get everything back. And then there's certain huge, gigantic companies I
could say names, which I don't want to, but there's one, one
of the biggest in the world. You could license them stuff to put up
on their streaming site, but you can't get them to take it down ever.
They just they don't answer you. You know, it's been We've had
some titles up for a couple of years that are out of license and they
keep sending us checks but they won't take them down, and we're trying to
get them taken down. It's impossible. So the business is still pretty tough.
I mean, you know what's helping us is we do these wonderful special
editions that we sell ourselves. We don't really sell them through our distributor,
and we sell them at full price, which we're forced to do because being
a national company, you know, our titles are available at various retail outlets,
and those retailers are not going to want the producers of the disc to
compete with them, and of course we shouldn't, you know, those are
our customers. So we sell it full retail on the website, and it's
mostly as a service to people who can't get to the store or you know,
whatever you know. And it also so naturally when we have a limited
edition, we're going to sell it directly through our website and that that's allowed
us to stay in business and do more restorations. You know, a lot
of people they think the price is a little on the steve side, and
honestly it is, but we try and give you value for your dollar.
We try and pack it full of really cool extras and the work Don does
speaks for itself. And the thing is, the grim reality is if we
can't make enough money to pay for these restorations, we can't do any more
restorations. So don't feel bad about supporting if you like what we do.
I would love to leave that topic in the dust, but that is going
to lead to this question where like I said, a lot of the videos
that we have on here are educational in range at least in some points.
And my all time favorite release from synaps is one that I just saw the
poster on the wall is Masker at Central High And when this got announced,
from Synapse. There was a lot of people upset with the price, and
obviously this is a premium release. It's a really nice steal book. There's
lots of extras on here. The restoration and we're going to talk about Don's
perfectionism in just a little while, I'm sure, but the restoration on this
movie is freakin magnificent. It looks ridiculously good. It should not look this
good, and this movie is kind of still sadly like an underseen gem.
And the people that see this immediately go, oh my god, where's this
ben all my life because it's now one of my favorite movies of all time.
This release, can you share, maybe not necessarily exact specifics on the
deals or anything, but why does something like this at release cost? I
think it was like fifty five something like that, fifty five dollars, I'm
not sure. Whatever it is, it's very simple. The work. If
you want perfection or as close to it as we can get, that's expensive.
You literally have to do the work frame by frame. It takes an
enormous amount of time, and that time people are working, they have to
be paid. Everybody's got families and mouse to feet. Okay, it's tremendously
expensive. Couple that with the other effect of the fact that there's not enough
collectors left. There's still a lot of people perfectly happy to rip it from
the internet or just watch it or whatever, but they don't want to own
it. So that market's very small. It's very small. And what it
means is if you want us to do the next title we got, we
gotta at least break even on this title. Plus we gotta pay for our
rent, and yeah, we got things we gotta pay for. And it's
a small market. That's why there's only a few companies left. You know,
when sinnef started, who was in the business, it was pretty much
elite, which we have left in Synaps and then came Blue Underground, and
then came a few other and that a lot of people came into the business,
and over the years a lot of them went away because you can't survive.
And there's not many of us left. There's just a few. You
know, you got Vinegar, you got Severin, you got us. I
think we just lost code Red. It's not because business is great and there's
thousands of people. You know, we have rabbit front of fans that love
this stuff. But you know, if you want to keep this going,
it's just you know, it's not like you know, you looked around the
office a little bit. I moved the computer. You know, it's not
a New York high rise, right, you could tell. It's uh,
you know, we do the best we can. But you know what,
we're happy. We love doing this and we we make enough and it's enough
and we're happy and I could see doing this we ride off into the sunset.
You know, last year was a bit tough. I had a surgery
and Don had a couple surgery, So you know, we're getting a little
long in the tubes. Yeah, but you know, we're still fighting a
good fight and we love doing it every day. And the releases continue to
be high quality, and that's why I continue to shout it from the mountaintops
that Synapse is still somebody to follow because they are incredible. The newest release
is a Creature from Black Lake. You just mentioned this a few minutes ago.
I literally just got this one in. But again, new four K
restoration on this. It is one that is making a lot of people happy,
seemingly that people are getting it and watching it, and I do want
to shout out one thing that Sinapsa has continued to do and that is evolved,
like I kind of alluded to earlier, and one of the things that
you've done best is the podcast. You guys are incredible on the podcast.
The stories that we get to hear, the insight, the fact that fans
can ask a question and get a national public response and everybody here is an
answer at the same time is so important to keep these communities growing. How
how's it been doing the podcast? Are you having fun with it? Yeah?
I mean, but again, this is something where I could take zero
credit. This is all our friend Tim O'saban who you know, He's in
three different national bands. He's a musician, just an amazing guy. And
I became aware of tim you know, I started seeing him at the horror
film conventions that we do and he'd show up from time to time and we
started talking, I think about football of all things, and we became friends.
And then at some point a few years later he had me do he
had a podcast, a weekly podcast, and I think it went on for
ten years. I don't think he missed the week. I know there were
over five hundred episodes. So he said to me Jerry, you know,
I've never had you on my app on my podcast. So we started talking.
One day, he said, let me start recording this, and then
before you know it, you know, three hours had gone by. So
he made it into three different podcasts, and he said he got a lot
of great response. At the same time, he got into a disagreement with
the guy he was doing the podcast with and they came to the conclusion that
they were going to part ways and stopped doing their podcasts. So a couple
of weeks later, Tim called me and he goes, hey, Jerry,
you know what you guys need. I go what He goes, a podcast?
I said, whatever you want to do. So he started asking me
questions. I said, here's the one thing I'm not going to do.
I'm not going to tell you how to do a podcast. You've got five
six hundred podcasts. I've got zero. I don't know anything. Won't ask
me questions. You want to do it. If people like it, I'll
keep doing it. I want to have other people on it. I wanted
the fans out there. If they really like synaps, then they should know
it's more than me and Don. We have some very dedicated people starting with
my daughter Noah, who work so hard getting all the orders out and coming
up with new merch and handling all that stuff. She does all the photography
for the website and everything. And then we have people like Sean who's our
Canadian. We call them our Canadian Synaps guy. You know, Don and
I we're getting too old to schlep the boxes around from show to show,
so Sean comes in. He's a super fan, knows a lot about everything,
and he does a lot of the gruntwork for us. We got him
on the podcast. I'd like to have him on again. We got the
couple that Synaps brought together, Ryan and Jen and if you've listened to our
podcast you'll know the story. But they met at our table and you know
they're a lovely couple. They come and do shows. There's Dave Kosanki.
All these people we've gotten on the podcast because we want we want people to
know who they are. They all are part of what makes us up.
Sin AFS isn't really just me and Don. It's more like a feeling,
you know what I'm so it's great. One of the things that I had
some people ask a question about is, especially over the last couple of years,
you guys have been doing some joint releases and this is one of them
with Aero Video in the UK. There's been some questions like how do how
do those deals work out? Who handles what? And this I just want
to say one of the best releases, maybe of all time. Demons.
I always say that this is possibly the best gateway to Italian horror film that
somebody could watch if they've never dipped in. And this release just a prized
possession, the moment I had in my hands. Thank you, thank you.
You know, I can't really get into the specifics. You know.
Part of the reason is because I really don't know what the specific are.
I'm not a great planner, right yeah, I run the business, but
I feel I'm a tremendously lucky person. I'm like the blind guy walking through
the minefield that just happens to take the right steps. I mean, you
know they say, if a million monkeys are typing on a million typewriters for
a million years, one of them is going to type out the complete works
of Shakespeare. Ye, I feel like I'm that monkey. You know,
just things that you think about that you never think the other company would ever
agree to. Sometimes two people from two different companies have the same thought and
it just worked out. You know. The conversation went basically like, you
know, you know, you know, even in business, you have friendly
competitors and you have unfriendly competitors, you know. And I always said,
I like to be friendly with my quote unquote competitors because all we compete for
is the title. Once the titles are distributed out to the various companies,
my creature from black Lake isn't competing with your whatever. If somebody wants black
Lake, they're going to buy it. If they want your movie, they're
going to buy it. So we can be friends. But not everybody sees
it that way. So we have companies who are very friendly with I always
bring up Vinegar Syndrome and Severn we love those guys, and Arrows another one.
We love those guys. So there was a discussion something like, yeah,
you know, to do these restorations are so incredibly expensive. Well what
if we pulled our resources and did them together and split everything, and you
know, you could help us with titles that we're working on, will help
you with titles you're working on, and whatever. So there's going to be
more. There's gonna be some other really cool releases. And I mean it
was. I can't really get into the specifics of how it came, I
mean, of course, but I can tell you that it's been wonderful.
They are great people to work with and we've had a lot of fun.
And it allows you to kind of like let your hair done, you know,
it builds a certain amount of trust. So you know, I think
it's worked out really good. I think they're very smart to you know,
for agreeing, and us we're smart for agreeing. But lookuid we got.
We got our costs alleviated a little bit, and they got Don's eyeballs.
And just to show you the difference between us and a lot of other companies,
you know, they would show us something and Don would give them a
list of what to fix, and sometimes they would say, okay, well
we're a little late. So you know, some things got fixed more than
others and some things didn't. But Don sees everything. And to have access
to somebody like that, at least you know, if you can't get to
something, you know where the problem is. And if somebody you could prepare
a response, if you know, there's so many different things that make it
cool to work together. But if you just expand it out to life itself,
life is always happier when you're working with people instead of anxiety from stress
from work against people. So this is always going to be a preferable thing
to work together. We make a little less money each but you know,
we live a year longer because of the stress we didn't have to live with
for the year. So, you know, great greatest thing we've ever done
in business, I think is you know, hooking up with the arrow Folk.
Wow, that's pretty strong words. And maybe for those that you know,
a lot of people have heard about Don's reputation as being a perfectionist,
but maybe the actual gravity has not hit a lot of people. And Don
notoriously is somebody that can look at single frames and pick out things that nobody
else can. And because of that, things like master at Central High they
can almost look like they were filmed last week, they are that well done.
And I'm curious if there's any you know, either fun or maybe notorious
stories in the past that haven't gotten a lot of light or play that you'd
like to share. Maybe something at the very last minute, Don said,
hold on, I just randomly discovered this or anything that would be fun for
you. I can't tell this story for the third time. I did it
on one of our early podcasts, and then Tim made me go back to
it a couple of weeks ago. Yep, I'll just tell this story one
more time, and if anybody out there has heard this story, please forgive
me. I got other stories, but no story answers his question like this
one. Well, what's funny? Hearing it again is what made me ask,
because I think more people need to hear the story. Unbelievable. Okay,
so we're at a chiller convention. This is like one hundred and fifty
years ago. Yeah, and uh, you know, back then, I
was a much younger man. So on Thursday nights and Friday nights, we'd
get in on Thursday and set up and then we party. Friday nights,
we really party. So Saturday morning, you have to be at your table
at ten, which means you have to be down there around nine, which
means you have to wake up around eight. I must have been out till
four thirty five o'clock, got back to my hotel room, and I just
plots down in bed, and you know, I'm sleeping in. About seven
o'clock. I get a phone call and it's done, and he goes,
dude, we're fucked. Excuse my language of everybody, you free freak.
I gotta say it as it happened. We're fucked. I go, okay,
hour, we fucked. He goes, you gotta come and see this.
You gotta. I go but down. I just want to sleep.
I gotta get up at another You got to see this. Well there I
am walking down. His room was on the same floor. You know.
It's like I got one shoe on the coat. The robe is half open,
and I'm stumbling down. Here's all of that. I come in and
he goes, sit down, Okay, opens up his laptop and he goes
watch this, and he hits play. I'm watching the end of the opening
credits of basket Case two are going up the screen. The screen turns black
and the movie opens up. There. Did you see it? Yeah,
I saw the end of the opening credits. They're perfect. You know,
Hen and Lauder did a great job with that. He goes, no,
no, you didn't see it. I said, no, don I didn't
see anything. Why did you bring me down here? He goes watch plays
it again. I didn't see it again, plays it the third time.
I didn't see it a third time, and he's now he's getting angry because
he doesn't understand people cannot see what he sees. He's got a third eye.
None of the rest of us do. I go don So he goes,
okay, watch and he goes back, and he goes click click,
click, click, click, one frame at a time. Sure enough,
there it is. The frame had ripped and it had been spliced back together,
and you could see a little lightning pull through. One frame. Wasn't
a series of frames, it was one frame. And he saw it,
and I go, I hardly think we're fucked. I mean what, He
goes, No, dude, we gotta fix it. Okay, this wasn't
my first rodeo, so arguing is not going to do any good. Besides,
it's half his company, and his reputation is what made our reputation and
his work and not me. No one's saying, hey, you signed a
nice contract. I'm a huge fan of saying no. You know, it's
all him, So I gotta let him do his thing. So I said,
all right, how much is it going to cost? He goes three
hundred bucks to fix the one frame. I said, Okay, how long
do we have to delay the title? He goes a month, which is
not great. You know, nobody likes that. The license or doesn't like
it, the distributor doesn't like it. We had to do it. But
that's a very good example. And there's literally no exaggeration in that story whatsoever.
If you find the other two versions of it, you'll find that all
three versions of that story are remarkably similar. I appreciate Don's eye, I
love and respect his eye, but at the same time, I can't imagine
the anxiety that he can see one frame and thinks that basket Case two having
a split frame on the opening credits will ruin synapse. And that's how much
you can tell he genuinely cares about this stuff. And to think genuinely that
the company is fucked because of that is like, none of us can comprehend
that. That's crazy. Ryan. All I'm going to say is, who
are we to argue? Right exactly? And we don't have that talent,
so we built a reputation. It's him. So you know, I've learned
in my life to stay out of people's way, right and they know what
they're doing, stay out of their way. You might have a different idea
or whatever, but you got to remember if they're an expert in their field,
sometimes you just got to take something on faith. And you know,
that's where we are these days. These days, don and I never argue
about anything. It's like, oh, we need to do that, Okay,
got to do that, whatever it is. And same with me.
I could tell him, don't do anything until you know I have this work
down in that way, fine, you know, we we just worked so
well together. It's like we were born to work together. I don't know,
all because of Fangoria's subscription letters. That's that's amazing. That's it.
That's how we met. One of the earlier titles in the the Blu Ray
you know, Era of Synapse that I really wanted to talk about because this
is a great film that a lot of people for some reason either have never
seen or they'll they'll recognize the poster but never discuss it. Anything about Intruder
that you can share with us, you know, tracking down what came for
this release, because this is genuinely still I think one of my favorite releases
from Sinnaps. This movie is amazing. All I can say is that's a
Don story about the restoration. But the restoration is incredible. Yeah, there's
another version of that movie available. I think it's only available on DVD,
but that's unrestored. It's missing scenes, it looks terrible. Don was able
to recreate the film and it's amazing. It's kind of all I can tell
you. I mean, I don't even remember the deal. It's been a
while on that one. That's that's that one's been a few years, and
I mean, that's that's maybe a good time to bring up. There are
a lot of these restorations that people see synaps either tease or you know,
talk about how they're working on it, and then they start to get a
little irritated because then it takes, you know, two and a half years
to come out and or five years. Yeah, that's true, area,
or in the case of The Kindred, what was it, sixteen years,
seventeen years. I mean, yeah, that's why you'll notice we don't talk
about anything that we haven't released yet. For the most part. Sometimes something
slips out. I mean, people know we're working on Deadly Spot a four
K, and they know we're working on some other things, but we're really
not talking about it. Because the most difficult of the hate was Suspiria.
You know, we were working on something special and the guy from Germany wanted
to work with us, and Don said, look, he's got nothing that
he's bringing to the table. I can do this better than him. What
do I need to work with him for? I don't We're doing this,
so we let him know and he wasn't happy about it. And Don had
a relationship with Tivoli, the director of photography, and they they did it
together, and the German version came out before ours and it looked decent.
So on places like blu ray dot com, you almost had a European contingent
of people telling everybody how the Synaps one was going to be terrible and the
German one was how it's supposed to look and blah blah blah blah blah blah.
And there were a lot of North American fans that say, well,
we're not going to judge till Synaps' version is out. But it got pretty
ugly and Don and I we don't post. We don't post because people wait
for you to post so they can attack you. Oh yeah, literally,
and you could say the nicest thing and they'll figure out why you're an asshole
for saying. So we don't post generally, but it's difficult to see people
shredding you when you want to say, hey, dude, you don't know
what the hell you're talking about. You don't understand this business. How could
you make that statement? Or how could you say this? How can you
say that? But because they don't understand the business, they're not going to
take your criticism of their opinions nicely, and you're just going to open up
a case that you know, that horrible. So we keep our mouth shutting.
It's hard. But one day that German guy posted something and I told
don okay, enough's enough. Grab his disc and take ten pictures and then
take ten frames from our disc that we haven't released yet. Put them up
on blu ray dot com. Don't put any text there, don't say anything,
just put this version, the Sinance version. Okay. That really got
people going, oh, you know, And then there was arguments. The
best picture was the one of the girl on the stage was all red on
the German one, but you could see her purple shoes on ours, and
that really embarrassed the German guy, and he came out and said, you
weren't supposed to see that color. You know it was mine, is right,
But Tivoli said, no, you are supposed to see that. That's
purple, and we made it purple and whatever. But of course we couldn't
answer him, We couldn't say anything. But somebody just basically shut him up
by saying, well, if they wanted it all red, they would have
given her red shoes. You know, you got purple shoes, so come
on, And this went on and on. Now, like one full year
of the five years was waiting for us the major studio to release the four
point zero audio for us, because we wanted that because that was so rare
and very few people ever saw it with that original audio that took a year
to get a year the studio would not give it to us. We had
to keep jumping through hoops, We had to fill out forms, we had
to change the title this and that for I mean, but after a year
we finally got it. So of course, you know, once that we
finally put it out and people saw how nice it was really, that shut
down all the hate. But we still had to live with it, and
it was very tough, and we decided at that point no more announcing things
in advance. And then, of course you held up the four K.
I don't know if people realize this, but we didn't just up convert or
make our Blu ray for four K. When we went to do the four
K, Don went back and started from scratch. So because four K is
a different color space than our Blu ray, and a lot of people will
just up convert their Blu rays and whatever not, Don, So we got
a very positive review in a very unlikely place because I never saw mover reviews.
But when we put out the four K for Suspiria, Forbes did an
article on it. Wow, So if anyone wants to fact check, just
go to Google and type in Suspiria Forbes review or Forbes Saspiria review or whatever.
I'll put the link in the description below. I mean, that's I
don't think I was aware that something was posted to That's pretty damn cool.
They said the Blu Ray was the best Blu ray ever created, and they
said the four K was the best four K ever created. So that's high
praise, you know, that's high praise. And the titles went very well
for him, and that's funny enough. I did bring that out because I
wanted to get that question out there because a lot of people they saw the
Blu Ray come out and it was less time than five years before the four
K come out, and people said, oh, well, obviously they just
sold the Blu Ray to make money off of fans and then just immediately put
out the four K. And I don't think they understand the dawn may of
it all, because there's no way he would let that stand. No,
you would have seen it. It would have would have had pixelation and crap
like that, and plus the color wouldn't look as good as it does.
Let me listen, I'm not here to win arguments or to people want to
think whatever they want to think. It's part of what why they love the
industry. And I've said this on my podcast before. I don't want to
necessarily set everybody straight. People don't want to be set straight. This is
fun, this is collecting, and this isn't you know. I mean,
sometimes I think they want to hear that we're fighting with other companies. Sometimes
I think, you know, if I was a fan, I don't want
to see these guys fighting with those guys and having a winner. I'd like
to see them working together and more movies and great stuff, but you never
know, the fan. The business is about the fans. Without the fans,
we're all gone. You're gone, and I'm gone. We're all gone,
and so is Vinegar, and so is everybody else. We're all gone.
It's their industry. I don't want to, you know, lift the
curtain and you know and see that it's just an old man sitting behind the
curtain. It's not Oz the great and powerful, you know, it's just
we're just human beings, right, So we let them have their fantasies and
they're you know, they're you know, whatever they want to think. But
in this particular case, you know, we're not really double dippers. I
mean, if you want to look at some egregious things, in my opinion,
look at Anchor Bay one hundred and fifty years ago when they did the
five versions of Evil Dead with five different covers. Man, that's a money
grab. I I you know, listen, if enough people like your stuff,
you'll make enough money, you'll stay in business and you'll have a nice
life. You don't have to get every single dollar out there. That a
fan has in his pocket. You know, when we do two covers,
generally we do dual sided, so you can pick out and put on whatever
cover, whichever one you like better, you already have the other cover,
right, you know what I'm saying, it's tasteless. But then again,
Anchor Bay, to be fair, they had a much bigger overhead than we
had, right, they were huge. They paid bigger licensing fees and they
had you know, so who am I to say? I just said as
a fan because I remember standing in a Best Buy. It was not in
this business when that came out. I go, I don't want five.
These are covers, but I don't want five? Which one do I get?
So uh, Anchor Bay? And that was That was back in the
day where a limited edition was like fifty thousand numbered copies and completely different were
literally a fifty thousand numbered edition. I think people nowadays you know upset that
you know, like the Snaps release of Phenomena. I think it was six
thousand for the limited edition or something that is such a high number, like
you have no clue. And you know, we keep some back because we
take them to shows, right, because we get a lot of fans that
want to buy some stuff from us at the shows to show us in person
that they support us. So we always like to bring those pieces there and
make them available for them, you know, and stuff like that. We
always save some. I think I have twenty Suspiria Blu Ray Steel books.
Those sold out five years ago. In the first couple of couple of weeks
or whatever, there was a lot of them. They all sold out,
but we put a couple of boxes away for a rainy day for that fan
that says, you know, I really miss that, I'm so sad.
Well, guess what, pal here. You know that that's probably one of
my favorite things about, you know, in this business, the chance to
you know, interact with fans and do something nice that completely drops their jaw.
You know, you have no idea how much. That is the perfect
segue for the last thing about SYNEPS that I wanted to talk to about the
only reason that I got to get Jerry's contact information is because a friend of
the channel, his name is John, reached out to SYNAPS because he was
looking for some old DVDs from Synaps and they're from I guess align is what
we would call it, a little sub label, maybe that you used to
do for Casannegra and John got one or two DVDs direct from Jerry literally talked
on the phone with you. And that is the type of thing that sets
Synaps fully apart in my eye, because without that, it's it's literally just
a curtain with people working behind it. But the way that you have,
I mean the feel of it. Literally it's just like a mom and pop
shop doing the best that you can to get by but also delivering the highest
quality to make people happy. That is like the perfect story. And without
that sort of relationship with fans, there's not a lot of substance to it.
So they were twenty seven years. I don't know how many times people
have said it, but from John and all the other people, thank you
and thank Don. But cosanegra I gotta ask any chance we ever see any
of those films on Blu ray, because no, those are great. Come
on, as do you have time for a quick how this happened? I
still have Jerry questions. I want to ask. We still have ten to
fifteen minutes at least. Okay, quick, I'll tell you real quick.
Back in the day, there were two guys, wonderful people. Matt Kennedy
and Mike Liuza, and they formed a company called Panic House and they did
a bunch of Asian films and stuff, and then they went on to do
some of those Mexican horror films. So they formed the Mexican label by the
name of Cosenegra. They didn't, as I understand it, they didn't own
the labels. They were doing the labels for big company. And I'm not
so sure that the guy wants me to use his name or his companies.
I'll leave it out of there. But he's a guy who does a segment
on the Howard Stern Show. He's very popular, and things didn't weren't going
too well. They You know, there's many different challenges in this business,
and one of them is you don't want to overpay for titles that don't sell
stuff, and they were doing some of that. Plus they were making some
bad decisions. They felt that there's a lot of Mexicans in the US,
and so they would do some of the movies and just leave them in Spanish,
because you know, they would sell whatever they were, like Mexican children's
films Pabello and Pepedo or Cibello and Pepito, Pepito and Tobello whatever. It's
funny because one movie was Pepito and Tobello and the other two were Cibello and
Pepedo. So my confusion. But they didn't. I guess they felt well.
I mean, one, I'm trying not to say anything, of course,
as racist, because they am not a racist. But I kind of
think that maybe their market is like people sending money back to Mexico to support
their families. They're not buying DVDs, they don't have TVs and stuff.
Well, guess what, they didn't sell any of those, and they were
running into some pretty severe problems, so they kind of handed the whole thing
over to the guy who was financing them. And I don't even know how
I came across them, but I said, hey, you know, are
you having problems there? And he goes yes. I said, would you
like us to help you out? He goes yes. So what we did
was we purchased the inventory of Casanegra and Panic House. We purchased their inventory.
We couldn't do their licenses or anyth thing because they were non sub license.
But in the industry, if somebody has pressed a number of units and
you buy them from them. You could sell those units for as long as
you want. It doesn't matter if you have a license to the title.
You're not creating new stuff. You're selling a limited amount of goods that you
purchased. I think it's called the law of Oh. I shouldn't have said
that, because I can't remember whatever, But that's how that came about.
And of course, you know, there were six really decent titles, which
were the Mexican Horror ones, and the biggest title of all was The Vampire
Double Feature, and that sold out rather quickly. We got one hundred back
a number of years later when we switched distributors in Canada and they found a
box of one hundred and they said, can we send it back to you
for a refund? And I said yes. So we still have a few
of those lying around upstairs if anyone wants. It's called the Vampire Double Feature.
And then we still have the other five. I don't think it's on
the website, but you call me. If you call me, are my
numbers in the catalog, you know, we'll make sure you get them.
That's amazing. They are still sought after. I just gosh, I think
it was about two and a half three weeks ago. I interviewed one of
these contributors producers for some of these discs, and after we were done recording,
we just chatted for another twenty minutes after, like I do with most
of the people, and she was saying, you know, I really love
this film, and I got to think. I said, I think that
was a Costan Neigra film. And I went and looked, and I said,
yeah, and look, it's in stock And I gave her the link
to Grindhouse Video in Knoxville and she went and purchased it and there. It
is so yeah that people are still clamoring for some of those titles. Yeah,
I mean, it's possible that the Mexican license or can find another company
willing to put them out on Blu Ray, but it's not going to be
a huge win for whoever licensees because there's just not a It's such a small
demand for those Mexican titles. It really is. That makes sense. So
finally, now that we've got a big grasp on synaps, I would love
to have just a couple things inside the mind of Jerry to bring a human
side to close this down. You mentioned you were a big fan of films
since you were very young. Do you happen to remember what your earliest memory
with film is. I told this story too, and it's so embarrassing.
That's a good thing. That's me, you know, I'll tell it.
I guess it's very embarrassing, but I'm you know, I was born without
the embarrassment. Jeane, you know it's embarrasing with it, Yeah, but
I don't get embarrassed good. I was three years old. The year was
nineteen sixty two, and we were living in Oak Park, Michigan. And
I remember one day I had two older sisters, my little brother wasn't born
yet. My dad goes, come on, put on your coat. I'm
taking you to the movies. Okay. So he takes me to the movies.
And what it was. It was a one of those Italian Mondo movies.
And we sit down and what happens. I remember we're like five minutes
into the movie and a bunch of topless women are skiing down the mountain side
holding lit torches. And I was three years old, and I remember when
the movie the credits were going, I go to my dad, Dad,
can we stay and watch the beginning? Again. So we get on from
the movie and I told my mom, because I was just three, I
didn't know what I was seeing. I just knew it. I liked it,
and I wanted to see it again. And I remember my dad got
in some trouble. I just remember it was yelling, you know, you
see the little like in a cartoon, the little dust ball with the fists
and the lightning bolts and all that crap. But I think my dad was
relieved to a certain extent that I said, oh wow, I got excited
at the right parts, I guess. But yeah, that was my first
memory. That's my first memory of a movie. If you said, what's
your first memory of getting into horror? Around the same time I was three
years old was the year the Outer Limits, the original Outer Limits camp and
the Twilight Zone was already going. But the Outer Limits was so much better
because every episode had a monster and they were scary. And my parents would
not, absolutely not allowed us a three year old to see it. But
we had very small houses back then, and my room was right off the
living room, and my parents and two sisters would be I'd be in bed,
they'd be here. I love that song still, you know, and
I live, and I would sneak out of bed and I'd crawl and get
underneath the living room lamp. It was on a little table and there was
a space for me to crawl in and they wouldn't see me until my mom
would go up to get a water or whatever she was getting up to.
There he is again, should go back, and I mean like literally right
out of bed, right back, And yeah, I loved it. I
knew back then that the Twilight Zone just didn't match up. I mean it
was great. I mean, as an adult you appreciate the Twilight's On so
much more because the writing and all the different authors and the actors and how
wonderful it was. But for a kid out of limits man, yeah,
I was an outer limits chunkie grown up too that that song will still grab
me and all immediately it's okay, let's sit down. I can't wait.
Yeah, I love the under Limits. That's great to have it. That's
that's my history of horror. Final thing, and this is one that is
something that it seems like people watching have really been grabbing on too lately.
Is the community aspect behind these these movies or even something like TV. Is
there any really memorable experience in your life where you've had like a great community
event watching a film, whether it be at a theater at home, something
that you just man, that was such a great way to take part.
There's been a number of them, and I could run the gamut from I'll
tell You Too real quick. When we were wrapping up Suspiria, but it
wasn't quite the discs weren't quite ready yet. We had screening at Fantasia in
Montreal, but we had another screen a few days later at Flashback Weekend in
Chicago. I was at that one in Chicago and I got to hear that
four point zero audio swirling around the theater the entire movie, and people were
I mean, when the movie was over, we got a standing ovation and
we were up in the balcony. You know, no one who we were
there and if they just stood up, and that was a thrill. That
was a thrill to actually see what Don had did. I made the deal
for the movie. Don made the movie, you know. You know.
The other one was Once upon a time we got a hold of a rather
controversial documentary called Graphic Sexual Horror. And what that was was it was a
documentary on a torture website. It was real. The guy got in a
lot of trouble and I guess the bottom line was that there was too much
torture and not enough sex. So the government went after him. And it's
funny because they couldn't shut him down. I want to say, legally,
they couldn't shut them down. So what they did was they squeezed the credit
card companies into not accepting charges. They had a website that would have six
thousand people a month watched their live streams at a cost US sixty bucks.
So he was making tons and tons of money. And when they choked off
the credit card business, he went out of building. You know, he
shut down. They went on to do the name of the website was called
Insects, and the people split off to become kink dot Com and device Bondage.
And if you are a follower of modern day pornography, you'll see that
both of those sites do have their bondage or whatever, but they have a
lot more sex and a lot less torture. So this movie was made from
two women who worked on the site. One was a camera person, one
was a scenario writer. And of course it's been we can't get the movie
up even though we're only selling their documentary. We cannot get it up on
any vod We get pushed back from Sight saying the credit card companies don't want
to accept charges. We can't take this whatever. It's terrible and it's a
great documentary. It's a heartbreaking documentary because they talk about the models and stuff
the people were submitting to this stuff. It was really a great documentary.
But anyways, make a long story short if it's possible. We were at
Friday Night film Fest in Louisville, Kentucky, and one particular evening, I
think it was a Friday evening, we were screening Graphics Sexual Horror. Of
course, the room was completely packed, and I was sitting right next to
Barbell, the lady who made the movie, and she was the scenario writer,
and she was sitting right next to me. And you know, if
people are interested the podcasts I could give, there's anecdotes I've already told about
this particular evening, but I'd say half the audience was gone by the halfway
point of the movie. They were they couldn't take it. But the funny
thing was was when the movie was over, she did a, Q and
A for a half hour, forty minutes and everything. And when we walked
out of the screening room, there was everybody who left waiting to talk to
her. They didn't leave because it wasn't a good movie. They left because
they couldn't take what they were seeing. And I thought, wow, you
know, that's really cool that these people, you know, they're not judging.
They want to talk to her. They're fascinated. She made the subject
fascinating to them. And I tell everyone it's a you know, it's a
great little movie, but it's tough if your sensitive. It's tough because they
did things that weren't nice. You know, if anybody has seen this kind
of stuff, usually when people are doing these kind of things, they have
what's called the safe word, and what it means is if you say,
okay, I want you to spank me, tie out my hands, tie
on my legs, and spank me, hit me real hard, and the
person says, well, okay, what if I'm hitting you too hard and
you're really crying and you want me to stop? How am I going to
know this isn't role playing? Well, the safe word stop or whatever it
is. They always had that, but they didn't always listen to it.
And when you see some of the things that was going on that what I
just said will hit you like a ton of bricks. Right now, it's
just words. If you see graphic sexual horror, if you watch what was
going on and then you see, oh, they weren't stopping when the person
would say the safe word, That in itself is horrifying enough, because forget
about being kidnapped and tortured. What if you walk into it yourself? What
if you put yourself in that position? I mean, not some trauma morrifying
than reality. Right Yeah, Oh, Jerry, this has been amazing.
That's a great, great story to end on too. I love it.
The education on the BDSM scene for us again, I do want to highlight
a genuine face to face from somebody that doesn't always get to say this.
Thank you for you and don The contributions literally over the last twenty seven plus
years are legendary. They continue to evolve and respond to people's taste and opinions.
That's one of the biggest things on sinnams. Somebody will write and say,
hey, maybe I would like this on the next release, and you'll
see like, hey, some of those things have been listened to over the
years. Oh yeah, but I gotta say this. I mean again,
you're thanking me, and that's nice, but I'm thinking you and all your
listeners and everything, because again, without you, guys, we're not even
here where there's nothing to talk about. It's all you, it's all your
fans, it's all those people who are going out who want and they go
out and they buy and they watch and they talk. You are the ones
who put us here, and we're here till you don't want us here anymore,
pretty much. So thank you, Ryan, and thank you to all
your listeners, and thank you to everybody else out there. We love it.
We hope it continues for a lot more years. And Don protects those
eyes because they are serving a big spot in this industry. And I hope
maybe with some more announcements we can get you back on here to highlight some
stuff for us. Jerry, come on anytime you guys want to talk to
me. That's one thing we do. We're very friendly. We love the
fans. We don't love being abused by the fans, but we do love
the fans. It's their business. Been the ones that are mean to us
and not nice to us. It's their business too, and I'd rather have
people talking about us than not talking about us. So everybody continue. I'm
not telling anybody how to behave, but I'll be any time you want me
to talk about any that. That is an amazing promise. Enjoy, Enjoy.
Everything that you're working on right now is stay warm. I know Michigan's
a little little chili right now. Hey, thanks for your time, Jerry,
it's a pleasure. Bye bye. Tell me you know