Chainsaw Revisited - The unmasking of a massacre

TCM project to launch Wed. Oct 11

Coming soon: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - Unmasked, only on dallasnews.com

Leatherface

Just wanted to let everyone know that I made it back alive from my rendez-vous with Texas Chainsaw Massacre history. We toured the sites and got some sufficiently creepy video and plenty of interesting sound bites. Yesterday, I had the honor of interviewing Gunnar Hansen, the actor who portrayed the original Leatherface, as well as Allen Danziger who played Jerry. Today I will be interviewing John Dugan, the "grandpa," and tomorrow morning I will talk to Marilyn Burns who played "Sally." This is really a fun project to work on...so much that I'll almost be sad to see it complete. And don't worry...I'll link to it here (and everywhere else I can) as soon as it's up.

Inspired by a true story...

Well, this weekend was pretty great. Finished 214th out of 488 people in the Big Tex 5K this weekend, which was exciting (since it's always exciting to have more people behind you than in front of you in a race.) I also had the opportunity to go to my first, real-life Texas rodeo in Mesquite, which was quite an experience. Seeing several hundred children chasing a couple of cows around a dirt-filled arena was the highlight of my weekend. No, I really do mean that. Seriously! It was great fun.

Tonight I head down to Austin with two of my coworkers, twenty-something female graphic designers, where we'll stay the night and get an early start tomorrow for our video project. We're doing a behind the scenes on the film locations of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, in honor of Halloween, the new film's release, and the fact that it's one of the biggest urban legends in Texas. No, it didn't actually happen. Our tour guide will be the movie's biggest fan, host of texaschainsawmassacre.net and president of the TCM fanclub, Tim Harden. I know, this in itself is the recipe for a good horror flick: cute twenty-something girls, touring horror movie film locations for a story, horror movie fanatic joins them. But I'm confident that we'll be just fine. And when I return, I plan to write a book about it, and it'll be "inspired by a true story" just like TCM was...only, just like that film, less than half of it will have actually happened.

So don't any of you go writing books...cause I'm taking this moment to copyright my idea!!! So nah, nah, nah. (Yes, my college education taught me maturity...)