The Home Stretch

Let's start off the first Bava book update of the New Year with a belated Christmas present -- a never-before-published photo of Mario Bava that actually didn't make it into the book. It dates from 1953 and was taken during the filming of a picture called BALOCCHI E PROFUMI ("Toys and Perfume"), which Bava photographed. Any picture of Bava is solid gold, but we ultimately rejected this shot because we found better material on the title.

Pictures are our big preoccupation as we find ourselves in the home stretch of production. In short, we have to get back to work on VIDEO WATCHDOG at the beginning of the month, so Donna and I are regarding February 1 as the book deadline. She's been working her magic on the book's pictures since after Christmas, working 'round the clock and on average getting through 40-50 or more pictures per day. If she doesn't do this, some might look too dark or too bright or too dotty. It's important to do this, but I've been trying to impress upon her what is too much attention to detail. (After all, the words are going to have to carry this book to a certain extent, right?) She's currently in the midst of the 1965 chapters -- and when I say she's working on 1965 now, she was working on 1964 yesterday and 1963 the day before that. This is a good thing, because the chapters begin to get shorter (I mean less than 100 manuscript pages) after 1965.

We're now eleven days away from the end of the month -- call it two weeks. Depending where things stand, we may have to postpone our start of work on the next issue till the second week in the month, but our goal is to get through this and press on to the business of producing a monthly magazine.

I was hesitant to post an update now, thinking it better to wait two weeks and surprise everyone by saying "We're done!" But we got our first "hey, how about an update?" e-mail in awhile today, and I know you must all be curious as we haven't posted since the end of November. Hold good thoughts for us and check back at the beginning of the month for what should be a sigh of relief.