I was flattered and overwhelmed earlier this summer when editorial design heavyweight Robert Newman asked me to put together a collection of my best Las Vegas Weekly covers and spreads, which would be posted as a retrospective on the official website of the Society of Publication Designers. I took this honor very seriously, and spent many nights in July, August and September digging through my archives and reflecting on the back stories and budgets and aftermath of some of my favorite pieces. By the time I was done, I’d written a 4,500-word narrative, rather than the concise blurbs Bob was hoping for.
You can check out the SPD’s retrospective here. I thought I’d run my unabridged narrative here.
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Introduction
(Since I’m a new SPD member and nobody knows me)
In May of 2000, I dropped out of UNLV’s film school, quit my job as a model builder for casino resort mogul Steve Wynne’s in-house architectural design firm, and joined Las Vegas Weekly as an untrained, entry-level graphic designer. In the next couple of years I moved from changing expiration dates in coupons for sports bars and strip clubs to photographing or illustrating spots and covers on a semi-regular basis. And in October 2002, two weeks after turning 26, I was promoted to art director.
For my first year, my art budget was $100 per issue, and for the next two years it hovered at around $250. I didn’t have another full-time designer on staff until 2005, so I was forced to rapidly develop as a photographer, illustrator and designer. In film school I’d done all my own writing, producing, shooting, animating, directing and editing, so a part of me looked at this as: “Well, at least I don’t have to write all the articles, too.” (Although I did write a few cover stories over the years.)
The Weekly’s editorial calendar was never planned all that far ahead, so almost all of my covers were put together on the fly. I generally formed concepts in the Thursday morning staff meetings, where I’d hear — often for the first time — what the next issue’s cover story was going to be about. I would usually start sketching out ideas as the editors and writers discussed the cover story, and moments later I’d share my plan with the group. From there, I’d have just two business days to execute it — which meant I worked most weekends. I rarely got cover lines more than a few hours before the cover was due to the printer, so there was little time to experiment with type. And of course I had the rest of the issue to design.
Vegas always had two or three alt-weeklies competing for everyone’s attention, so I tried to do everything I could to make my covers stand out. It was my hope to embrace regionalism, and mirror the spirit and history and mythology of Vegas in my work whenever I could.
This was the era of “What happens here, stays here” – the now iconic slogan of the city, which debuted my first year as art director. Vegas was ditching its aim to be a family-friendly destination, and announced to the world that it was embracing its hedonistic roots in an increasingly thriving economy.
I mention all this as a disclaimer, in a way. You’ll see more sin and skin on my covers than you’ll see on those of a typical alt-weekly. I hope you won’t hold that against me. I was merely trying to capture the culture of my city at that time, in as playful a way as I could.
I was laid off from Las Vegas Weekly in October of 2008 – one of many victims of a company-wide downsizing in a now disastrous economy. By that time I’d won best cover designer at the AAN awards, and had my work appear in a book, a documentary, a museum, on America’s Next Top Model, and in a porno called Big Tits at Work. I even received a novelty key to the city from the mayor in an impromptu, half-assed ceremony in his conference room. I watched the Weekly go from newsprint covers to glossy, and from grayscale editorial content to color. And in that time I personally photographed or illustrated over 225 Las Vegas Weekly covers.
Here are some of my favorites– along with a profile photo and a few spreads – in chronological order.
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Warning: Curves Ahead
March 20-26, 2003
Model: Ariel
Photograph by Benjamen Purvis
This, to me, is my first real “Las Vegas” cover: In my homage to the classic Attack of the 50 Foot Woman poster, I cast a giant stripper in clear heels and hot pants, with enormous breasts spilling out of her tiger print top.
I’d briefly met Ariel a couple weeks before I shot this cover, when I photographed the club where she danced for our Readers’ Choice issue. (Since my art budget was so low, I shot or illustrated most original content in the magazine myself.) My Readers’ Choice photo of Ariel caused quite a ruckus, inspiring fan letters and one especially racist handwritten Fax (which closed with the line “You people got NO CLASS” – a line I immediately appropriated and used as the title of my portfolio, and will one day use as the title of my memoirs, or at least on my tombstone). Because of all the commotion that little photo caused, I decided to plaster Ariel larger than life on this cover.
The day before this went to press, I shot writer Kate Silver’s car from my apartment’s balcony. That’s writer Josh Bell pretending to fall out of it. (He’s just sticking his arm out of the open door; the angle of the photo does all the work.) Then I headed over to Ariel’s house, to shoot her in front of her garage. (I had no access to a photo studio back then, so I relied on natural light for almost cover. And the images produced by my 4.2 megapixel point-and-shoot camera had to be enlarged 200% just to fit the cover requirements!)
It had started to rain by the time I made it to her place – rare for Las Vegas – and it was actually gray and drizzly out when I shot this. I spent the rest of the day and night working on this final composite. I even put a silhouette of the shot of Ariel that offended the racist guy on that road curve sign there.
This cover almost didn’t make it to press like this. A small but vocal group of women in the office (including my predecessor) united and complained loudly about how offensive this cover is. It made for an uncomfortable afternoon, but in the end we sent it to the printer just like this. This cover won a Gold at the 2003 Las Vegas AIGA awards, and Robynne Raye gave it her Judge’s Choice.
Budget: $0.
Fists of Fury
May 15-21, 2003
Photographer unknown
One of the great things about working for an alt-weekly is that you get lots of opportunities to experiment with covers. So if you want to work in a certain style, and you wait long enough, there’s a good chance you’ll be able to do it. I’d been wanting to try a boxing poster since I first started working for the Weekly, and I figured this profile of a UFC fighter was as good a time as any to try it.
I went to a Snoop Dogg concert at UNLV the weekend this cover was out, and I heard Frank was in the lobby autographing copies of this issue. I’m told his real signature looks nothing like that fake one I did for the cover.
Budget: $0. (Courtesy photo).
CineVegas: 2003
June 12-18, 2003
Model: Nouie
Photograph by Benjamen Purvis
Ever since I photographed Rudy Ray Moore (Dolemite) in 2002, I’d wanted to try a Blaxploitation cover for the Weekly. Model Nouie just happened to drop off her Zed card at our office when I was thinking of ways to approach that year’s CineVegas cover. I borrowed my nephew’s Star Wars gun, and Nouie raided her mom’s closet for those clothes.
(Because the company that owned Las Vegas Weekly also owned CineVegas, we were required to devote a cover to it every year.)
Budget: $0.
They See Dead People
August 26-September 1, 2004
Photograph by Benjamen Purvis
I photographed Coroner Mike Murphy on location in an empty examining room that lead to another room where about six dead bodies were being kept. Mike opened the door and let me take a peak inside. What a startling and surreal sight! One old guy’s chest was cut wide open, and his tongue was sticking straight out. It was chilling. I was thinking about those corpses for the rest of the day.
It wasn’t until later that night that I decided to frame this cover shot from the corpse’s point of view. But it was 10 o’clock at night — there was nobody around the office for me to photograph. So I tied one of the real toe tags I took from the Coroner’s Office (notice they’re bound with a long, tough metal wire) to my own foot, and photographed myself for the shot. I added a rust texture to my feet in Photoshop — they were a little bit cleaner than that in real life.
That jagged red text banner was inspired by the jagged red EVIDENCE tape coroners use. (I had a piece stuck on my monitor for years after this shoot.) I was concerned that the Coroner’s Office would find this framing tasteless or insensitive, but the city’s PR department happily requested a copy of the final image on their behalf, for promotional use.
Budget: $0.
B@d Cust*mers!
March 24-30, 2005
Illustration by Benjamen Purvis
I’d just bought myself my first Wacom tablet the week before we published this feature about experiences with bad customers, and I thought it would be fun to use it for this cover. Boy, was I was wrong. There was absolutely no fun at all to be had; it was a terrifying and frustrating experience trying to figure out how to use that thing. And I wasn’t just doing the cover in this style, but three accompanying spots as well!
The night before this issue went to press, I was still scrambling to get the three spots done. I swore I’d never try this style again, and I haven’t.
Budget: $0.
The Centennial Issue
May 12-18, 2005
Model: Candice Curtis
Photograph by Benjamen Purvis
Vegas celebrated its hundredth anniversary in 2005, and I wanted to reference a historic photo for the cover of the issue we dedicated to it. I chose one of the city’s most iconic images: 1957’s “Miss Atomic Bomb.” (Above-ground nuclear testing was a major public attraction during the late 1950s, and hotels capitalized on the craze by hosting nuclear bomb watch parties, which usually included the dubbing of a chorus girl as “Miss Atomic Bomb.”)
(The woman in this photo was the last and most famous of the “Miss Atomic Bomb” girls.)
By this point I was using a nice SLR instead of my little point and shoot camera, so the images didn’t have to be blown up before they could be placed on the cover. Model Candice Curtis was wearing a bikini in the original photo; I just removed the straps in Photoshop. That desert landscape was just down the road from the apartment I was living in at the time, and not too far from Las Vegas Weekly’s office.
Soon after this one came out, the curator of the Las Vegas Atomic Testing Museum contacted me about displaying this in his museum’s collection.
Budget: $100 for hair and makeup.
The Dirtiest Story Ever Told
August 25-31, 2005
Photograph by Benjamen Purvis
Let me tell you what a good sport Penn Jillette is. Minutes before he arrived for our noon cover shoot, I had this moment of clarity, where I realized the cover concept we’d all agreed upon was totally irrelevant to the feature. Penn was promoting his new documentary about the dirtiest joke of all time, The Aristocrats. It was suddenly obvious that he needed to have a bar of soap in his mouth for the cover shot. So I sent my designer, Wes Gatbonton, to the store to get some Irish Spring, because I immediately pictured this in black and white, with a burst of green.
Well, Penn is such a good sport that he didn’t balk at all when I told him about the change of plans. He was amused by it, in fact, joking and laughing with his wife and manager about it. That is, until Wes opened that box of Irish Spring, and its unmistakable fragrance filled the room. My mouth began to water (not from hunger; from preparing to vomit). Penn blurted out, “Real soap?! I thought you were talking about fake soap! Haven’t you ever heard of special effects?” The laughter in the room was now coming from nervous discomfort. I offered to send Wes back to the store for Saran Wrap, but Penn just bit the bullet and jammed that bar of soap into his mouth for a quick round of photos. I got what I needed for the cover right away, but I wanted his mouth covered in foam and bubbles for the opening spread. Penn sneered at me, then begrudgingly walked to the sink and spread foam around his mouth, his wife and manager laughing in the background. “I look like someone shot a load in my face,” he complained.
(The Weekly’s editorial content ran in grayscale at the time.)
Budget: $3 (soap).
Strip (Production) Shows
September 30-October 5, 2005
Photograph by Benjamen Purvis
When I started working on this cover, I didn’t know much about Avenue Q, which had just premiered in Vegas. So I did a lot of Google image searching to see what I was dealing with.They have some great puppets, but I thought Lucy the Slut had the most potential for a Las Vegas Weekly cover.
I thought it’d be funny to have her pose naked, wearing only sparkling jewelry, with her hair blowing in the wind. I used a Lil’ Kim CD cover as reference for my sketch, then sent off my proposal to Avenue Q’s New York headquarters.
It was really exciting to have the puppet creator and the voice actress come to the studio with two Lucy puppets, each in different, stitched-on clothes. An assistant got right to work on removing all the stitches, and we all laughed like crazy as we meticulously put this shot together. This, too, was one of my favorite experiences shooting a Las Vegas Weekly cover – there was just so much joy in the room.
After this was published, Avenue Q playwright Jeff Whitty wrote this letter to the editor:
“I love this cover more than I can express. I have almost no Avenue Q paraphernalia in my house, but I would proudly display the cover for all to see. I’ve seen a lot of PR pictures for the show, and Lucy covering her breasts is my hands-down favorite. Is there a way I can buy three copies?”
This photo appears as a two-page spread in the official Avenue Q book (the one bound in orange monster fur).
Budget: $0
50 Things You’d Damn Well Better Be Thankful For
November 24-30, 2005
Photo illustration by Benjamen Purvis
A couple weeks before the Weekly’s annual Things You’d Damn Well Better Be Thankful For cover story (always tied to Thanksgiving weekend), Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman made national headlines when he said in a televised interview that anyone caught doing graffiti should lose their thumbs. (Goodman is well known for being “colorful”. He’s a former mob lawyer, the self-proclaimed “happiest mayor in the universe”, and he brings at least two showgirls to all his public appearances. He was also a big fan of Las Vegas Weekly’s girl covers, he told me. He even posed for a goofy photo where he pretended to ogle an issue of the Weekly that had a model on the cover.)
We knew a darkly humorous cover would be perfect for this. I had a grinning head shot of the mayor I’d snapped at his office a year earlier, and editor Scott Dickensheets had hedge clippers, so I decided to do a photo illustration. I used a co-worker as a body double, and matched the lighting to the head shot as closely as I could.
In the end, we got a lot of laughs with this cover. But what followed was especially embarrassing for me.
The following week, rival alt-weekly Las Vegas CityLife published an article calling my “rather real looking” photo illustration “an abuse of technology and of readers’ trust”, and chastised me for not prominently labeling it “photo illustration” on the cover. (The table of contents revealed the source photo and body double photo, and explained that it was a composite image.)
Either that, he said, or I should have done it “in such a way that there’s no doubt what you’re seeing isn’t a real picture”.
Budget: $0
A Regular Las Vegas Guy
February 16-22, 2006
Photograph by Benjamen Purvis
A few days after John Wayne Bobbitt was acquitted of domestic violence — not in the famous case involving Lorena; in a subsequent domestic violence case — writer Joshua Longobardy got to know him over beers and decided to write a profile on him. I got a call from Josh on a Monday afternoon – the day before this profile went to press, and the first time I was even made aware of the article! – asking if I could photograph John Wayne in three hours. “What’s this story even about?” I asked. “That John Wayne’s basically just a regular guy,” he answered.
I immediately pictured John with a cold beer in one hand, and a ketchup-soaked corn dog in the other. So I went to Wienerschnitzel for probably the second time in my life, to get a couple corn dogs for John and a plain brown bag with their logo on it. Turns out they only had plastic bags with crazy designs on them, so I had to Photoshop their logo onto a brown lunch bag that I bought on the way to the studio.
Good thing I grabbed two corn dogs. John guzzled down beer and gulped down the first corn dog before I even positioned him in front of the strobe. He couldn’t fake eat the next one to save his life; he just kept holding it up and smiling all cheesy, cracking himself up. (I think it’s safe to say he was drunk before he even made it to the studio that night.) I basically just gave up and told him we were done, and that he could go ahead and eat the rest of the damn thing if he wanted it so badly. Then I snapped this shot as he prepared to devour it.
The thing that stopped me in my tracks was when John asked me if this photo was going to be used in an ad for Wienerschnitzel. I turned to Josh, who’d driven John to the studio, and was babysitting him during the shoot, and gave him a look that said, “Is he for real? He’s John Wayne Bobbitt! I just had the guy bite into what looks like a bloody half-penis!”
Josh shook his head and gave me a look that said, “I’m afraid so. John Wayne Bobbitt is for real.”
Budget: $10 for corn dogs and lunch bags.
The Heat Issue
May 18-24, 2006
Illustration by Autumn Whitehurst
I’d been a huge fan for years, so it was a big deal for me to finally be able to commission Autumn Whitehurst. Since my art budget at the time was $400 per issue, it required lots of saving. I have a print of this illustration, sans cover lines and logo, hanging in my kitchen. I just love it.
Budget: $1,800
CineVegas: Film Threat
June 8-14, 2006
Photograph by Benjamen Purvis
For eight or so months leading up to its 2006 film festival, CineVegas un-ironically touted itself in ads as “The World’s Most Dangerous Film Festival”. I thought all their posturing was embarrassing, and wanted to address it in my cover.
I left work on a Friday with a cover that was approved and ready to go to the printer that Monday, but the image was bothering me ever since I committed to it. It had no bite to it.
Sitting at lunch on Saturday, I sketched out some other ideas on napkins. It was mainly classic movie imagery, like the characters featured in the “Let’s All Go to the Lobby” ad. Then I remembered the Fandango ads that had been everywhere for the past few years. And I still had 49 brown lunch bags in my cabinet left over from the John Wayne Bobbitt shoot!
I went to a thrift store and gathered up some accessories to make my film festival enthusiast puppet, whose attendance at “The World’s Most Dangerous Film Festival” leads to his mysterious death. I really enjoyed creating this guy, from finding that bad little kid Hawaain shirt, to shattering his glasses with a hammer and nail. I even gave the editors the headline (I used to read Film Threat magazine in high school).
For the feature opening spread (which, like the rest of the editorial content at the time, ran in grayscale), I covered the guy in a white sheet, and hastily illustrated a bag and crossbones warning to all Fandango puppets that this was a very dangerous festival.
Budget: $10 on thrift store items and microwave popcorn.
Roller Grrrls
August 3-9, 2006
Photograph by Benjamen Purvis
I’ve photographed lots and lots of people who aren’t used to being photographed, including this team of roller derby girls. Devil’s AdvoKate was really photogenic, and totally turned on the attitude and charm when she got in front of the camera. Most of her teammates were making catcalls at her as I shot this. It was a really fun atmosphere.
Budget: $0.
Jazz Hands
September 21-27, 2006
Photograph by Benjamen Purvis
Mike Jones is an accomplished jazz musician, and the pianist for the Penn & Teller show. He has a reputation for having magical fingers –but so what? I had no idea how to play that up on a cover! Even as I walked Mike to the photo studio, I was casually chatting with him, but secretly panicking about what to do once we got there.
The inspiration for this concept was totally random: someone else had used the company’s camera for a shoot prior to mine, and left a wide angle lens attached. As I started to replace it with the portrait lens, I thought, “Why not do a poor man’s Platon shot here?” I asked Mike to stretch his arms out as far as they’d go, and to look down at his hands as though they were monstrously over-sized. It looked really funny, so we went with it. We did this totally in-camera, in a matter of minutes.
Budget: $0.
The Music Issue
April 26-May 2, 2007
Photograph by Benjamen Purvis
Hey, look! Esquire-style type treatment!
I was excited to put local punk hero Dirk Vermin on the cover, because I’d known about him since moving to Vegas as a teenager in 1994. I saw this as a chance to reference the aesthetics of the punk scene, and as an opportunity to take a stab at Esquire-style type treatment. My concept was to make the cover look like the original art that would be reproduced onto a flyer. So the sources are in color, and the Scotch tape is visible (in theory, they’ll be wiped out in the contrasty grayscale photocopies to come from this).
I asked Dirk for some funny lines that could be placed in a word balloon next to his mouth on his first-ever Las Vegas Weekly cover. He thought for a second, then offered, “It’s about fuckin’ time!” I had him write it in his own handwriting. Angry Youth Comix creator Johnny Ryan drew those little Elvis Impersonators originally for the A&E section, where they were fixtures for years.
I decorated the feature opener with staples and black and white photocopies of the cover (in Photoshop).
Budget: $0.
Why Won’t This Man Be President?
May 31-June 6, 2007
Photograph by Benjamen Purvis
Comedian Doug Stanhope showed up at the studio on his way to his hotel room for a shower after spending four days in the middle of the desert. He was sunburned, dirty and exhausted. (One of the reasons a lot of the people in my Las Vegas Weekly covers ran in black and white is because I didn’t have time to deal with color corrections. But another reason is because people sometimes showed up for photos in clothing whose colors I just didn’t want to work with. This is one of those cases.)
I added the smoke in Photoshop — it came from my collection of incense smoke photos, which I use all the time.
Budget: $0.
Free Magazine
August 23-29, 2007
Photographs by Benjamen Purvis
For this feature about the secret life of free stuff on Craigslist — which documents people who devote significant amounts of their lives to pouncing on anything posted as free on the site — I thought it would be funny to remove the “free” sticker graphic from our cover and replace it with the headline “Free magazine.” I styled the cover to look like a typical Craigslist page, complete with out of focus product photography. I wrote the first paragraph, and added “Free to good home.” to the paragraph editor Scott Dickensheets wrote.
In keeping with the spirit of the article, I posted an ad for a free magazine on Craigslist the day this issue hit the stands. I used the same words, bold type and photos you see on this cover. My only addendum was the line, “Available all over Las Vegas.” I thought people would have a sense of humor about it, but free stuff enthusiasts reported it and had the post removed within 20 minutes.
Budget: $0.
Me and My Gun
October 4-10, 2007
Photograph by Benjamen Purvis
Our staff writer wrote an essay about becoming a gun owner and, subsequently, enthusiast. I immediately thought of the James Bond fantasy that must go through the minds of a lot of gun owners. Luckily, the writer had his own tux, so the most difficult thing for me was backwards engineering the James Bond style gun barrel. (Never rely on online tutorials for this kind of thing. They’re usually written by people who don’t know what they’re talking about, and their results look nothing like the effect you’re going for.) After some time consuming experiments in Illustrator, I finally came up with a technique. Then I added lighting effects in Photoshop.
I have to say, it was very weird having a real gun pointed at me during this photo shoot.
Budget: $0
Vegoose
October 25-31, 2007
Illustration by Justin Wood
Justin Wood is another illustrator I’d admired for years. His style seemed perfect for my The Day the Earth Stood Still concept for this music festival cover. (Have you noticed by now the impact that my film background has on my work?)
Budget: $1,500
The Reading Issue
November 1-7, 2007
Illustration by Autumn Whitehurst
For our annual Reading Issue, I always put pulp-inspired imagery on the cover. I had Autumn Whitehurst reference black widow vamps for this one.
Budget: $1,800
Our 9th Anniversary Issue
November 8-14, 2007
Model: Shannon Stewart
Photograph by Benjamen Purvis
Beginning with the Weekly’s seventh anniversary issue, the magazine held a lavish party each year for staffers, contributors and advertisers at a top Las Vegas club. The company’s marketing department would theme the event based on my cover for that issue, so each year we had to dedicate a cover to our own anniversary — and we had to have a girl on that cover. (Distribution was always on us about putting more girls on our covers – they sent pickup rates through the roof. And now Marketing was on us about doing it.)
We in editorial weren’t too thrilled about the annual anniversary issue mandate, and I especially didn’t enjoy the added pressure of coming up with a theme for an extravagant party on top of all my weekly editorial duties.
Even though I knew it was approaching, I procrastinated with this one, because by the time I got to my third of these anniversary covers, I was feeling stifled and resentful. So at lunch the day before I had to photograph the cover, I came up with the devious, subversive concept of a prisoner marking time in a jail cell. I thought that was the perfect metaphor for my feeling about doing these covers, but I was sure they’d see right through it. To my surprise, though, everyone went for it. So now I had to deliver.
I went to a Halloween supply store and found the fake rusty chain (which I thought would add to the look of the lurid pulp magazine cover I was going for) and “sexy prisoner” outfit — which I ravaged with scissors and rocks in my backyard, then let soak overnight in a mixture of Diet Coke and soy sauce. (In the studio the next day, I tried to mask the outfit’s smell with Febreze, but that only added fuel to the fire. I still smell that awful scent when I look at this photo today.)
While the makeup artist did her thing, I discovered a dozen plastic tubes lying in a corner of the company’s shared photo studio. I quickly taped them up to a mobile clothes rack, and put the contraption in front of my light to mimic prison bars.
When I arrived at the Weekly’s big party, I was astonished to see a look-alike model in a prison outfit and chain on display outside the club’s entrance. She even had a striped cupcake with a little tiny escape key stuck in it! And inside the dancers were all dressed in variations on that sexy prisoner outfit. It was unbelievable – totally surreal to see my subversive criticism of the anniversary cover mandate celebrated like that.
That issue had the highest pickup rate of any we put out in my eight and-a-half years there.
Budget: $200 for clothes, props and hair and makeup
Cops Behaving Badly?
April 3-9, 2008
Photograph by Benjamen Purvis
The case of the Henderson police officer who fatally shot a 42-year-old ice cream truck driver in front of her husband and children was one of the most controversial cases in Vegas’s recent history, and it was all over the news when the Weekly put this cover story together. I wanted to do something powerful and visceral for the cover, and I had a lot of faith in this quickly conceived concept. But the editors weren’t convinced that it wouldn’t come off as insensitive and unintentionally funny. I could see why; it was a little hard to imagine how it would look in the end. So I went out and bought some ice cream and cones, and had an editorial intern join me in the studio for a quick shoot. An hour later, I showed this image to the editors, and they immediately went for it.
I hesitated to include this in this gallery, though, because I’ve always hated the headline. I wanted it to run without any cover lines at all.
Budget: $5 for generic ice cream and cones.
CineVegas 2008
June 12-18, 2008
Illustration by Mark Thomas
I wanted this cover to look like a poster for the most extravagant B-movie ever made, with zombies, UFOs and giant monsters. I sure got it! One of the things I insisted on was monochromatic “scenes” from the festival, which illustrator Mark Thomas and I had a lot of fun coming up with.
Budget: $1,500.
That John Wayne Bobbit story is classic!