John Dies at the End

Previous Entry – Start From The Beginning – Next Entry

New Game Starting Today! (And Every Monday)

John Cheese — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 17:24:46 +0000

We’re starting a game!

For those who haven’t been keeping track because you’re still trying to wipe the first book from your memory, the sequel This Book is Full of Spiders (Seriously, Dude, Don’t Touch It) is scheduled for release on October 2 of this year (you can preorder that shit here, in case you missed one of the other thousand links we have scattered around the site). Yeah, we know that seems like a long time, so we’re setting up some fun sequel-related things for you to do until it ends up in your hands — most likely against your will.

The game is pretty simple. Every Monday on our Facebook page, we’ll be posting a sentence from the sequel, but it’ll be chopped off somewhere in the middle. Make your best guess as to how it ends. Then, each Wednesday, we’ll announce what the actual sentence really said, along with our favorite reader submitted entries.

Things are about to get all kinds of stupid up in this bitch.

Preorder the Sequel

Buy John Dies at the End

Previous Entry – Start From The Beginning – Next Entry

AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER: The Sequel to John Dies at the End, “This Book is Full of Spiders.”

David Wong — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 15:57:13 +0000

In stores 10/2/12, available for pre-order so far at:

————————–

Buy John Dies at the End

Previous Entry – Start From The Beginning – Next Entry

The Movie Premiered at Sundance, Dave was There

David Wong — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 12:21:27 +0000

At midnight on January 23rd, the film adaptation of John Dies at the End debuted in front of an audience at the Sundance Film Festival, a little more than 10 years after I started writing the story and giving it away for free on the internet. I was totally there.

There’s no point in me talking about how great the movie is, as my opinion is obviously biased. So instead I’ll just link to these glowing reviews from Entertainment Weekly and Ain’t It Cool and Film School Rejects and others you can find HERE and HERE and HERE and HERE and whatever you can find by Googling “John Dies at the End” “Sundance” “Review.” These people aren’t fans, they have no reason to lie to you.

From left to right, that’s Robert Marley (Tai Bennett), me, Fred Chu (Jimmy Wong), Shelly the Girl Who Turns into Snakes (Allison Weissman), David Wong (Chase Williamson), Amy (Fabianne Therese), not sure (I think it’s Riley Critchlow, but it’d be really weird if I’m wrong so maybe I just shouldn’t guess at all, let me know if you’re out there), Arnie (Paul Giamatti, who is also Executive Producer), director/screenwriter/horror legend Don Coscarelli and John (Rob Mayes). Not shown is Clancy Brown who for some reason was never photographed with me. I know I have a photo with me and Detective Lawrence “Morgan Freeman” Appleton (Glynn Turman from The Wire) wandering around elsewhere. I’ll find it.

Anyway. Sundance.

Like a month before, I had gotten word from Don Coscarelli that this was going to happen and that they could probably get me a ticket to the screening if I wanted one. Which I did. We agreed that we’d also try to arrange a time for me to meet everybody, because it would be the first time that had happened (I never went to the set of the movie while they were filming, because I was writing the sequel and it would mess with my head to start imagining Chase and Rob instead of the two guys I normally picture when writing Dave and John).

I said they could “probably” get me a ticket because they were impossible to come by – there were four showings and on the Sundance site, all four showed sold out as soon as they were announced. And this was the premiere, the showing where all the cast and crew and industry people would be there. So passes for cast and crew and family were capped and obviously people who actually worked on the production would get dibs over somebody like me.

But I did get a ticket, probably thanks to some strings getting pulled. My wife didn’t, so she made the trip with me believing she wouldn’t get to see it. She was just there to make sure I didn’t fuck it up, and to see the mountains.

So, the first thing you need to know about the Sundance Film Festival is that it’s the Sundanciest Film Festivalest thing you can imagine. If some sitcom did an episode about Sundance and shot the whole thing on a sound stage designed entirely by looking at Sundance post cards, they’d nail the real thing. It’s a gorgeous, tiny ski resort town in the mountains swarming with beautiful movie industry people and hipsters.

I mean, literally when we pulled into town after having gotten off the plane, the very first thing we see is William H Macy crossing the street, like they force him to just wander around the entrance like an Indie film mascot.

We hear through the grapevine that they would release about 30 tickets the day of the show (I guess tickets freed up by visiting LA types who had already frozen to death in the mountains) and that they’d go to whoever gets there first to the box office. They opened at 8, so on the day of the (midnight) showing my wife gets up at 6 am to go down there and finds people fucking camping there from the night before (in the mountains, in January). Still, she got either the last ticket, or one of the last.

I tell this whole story about the tickets because I want to point out that we were just there as tourists — I live in rural Illinois, it’s not like when you sell film rights to something that you’re suddenly being helicoptered around with academy award-nominated actors and walking on red carpets and shit. I figured having a ticket to the premiere and a chance to shake hands with the cast was like having a back stage pass. Like I’d won it in a contest or something.

Later in the morning, we get the call that Don Coscarelli wants us to drop in at lunch because some of the cast and crew will be there and it’ll be a chance to meet everybody before they all rush off and do actor things. So, in what had to my wife have seemed like an elaborate hoax, we go in this cafe and Paul Giamatti and several actors she’s seen on TV jump up and say “Oh, wow, great to meet you!” and they start high fiving me. And, from then on we were pretty much allowed to tag along with the cast and crew the rest of the day while they did press stuff.

(John, Amy, Det. Appleton, Dave, Don, Fred, Arnie, Shelly, Marconi)

So there’s a series of press events and then a cocktail party at 9 and at each, the doors are guarded by security people or Sundance staff stopping all the fans, but letting us in, each time making me feel like a spy who has infiltrated the operation. They gave away free stuff at each event, and my wife was able to get three JDatE sock hats, a furry Sundance ear flap hunting cap and a full bottle of vodka.

Hours roll by and everyone is getting steadily more nervous – remember the screening is at midnight so even after the Big Day arrived, everybody had another solid 16 hours to worry about it. It’d be like if as a kid instead of getting presents on Christmas morning, you had to wait until midnight on Christmas day. And you weren’t sure if you were getting any presents or not.

“I want you to act like I’ve been really mean to you.”

So finally the whole gang, me my wife and the cast and the crew, get to the theater with another excruciating hour until showtime. We see that there’s one line for the people who have tickets, but there’s another line for the people on the waitlist, to get a ticket for somebody else who didn’t show. That is, a line of people standing in the snow, in January, in the mountains, hoping for a chance to get a ticket.

So the cast went down there and started handing out JDatE sock hats. The people in line recognize Paul Giamatti and just go nuts. Keep in mind, by the time the movie started, they had stood out there for 2-3 hours or more.

So by the time the movie starts, the crowd is ready to go. It’s like a concert. Paul goes up there first and gives a little speech, and then Don goes up and tries to prepare the audience for a “weird” movie (I’d find out later that only about two dozen of the 300 or so people had read the book – the rest were coming in cold).

Finally the movie starts, and there’s the prologue, the riddle with the axe, done in a breathless montage with the camera whipping around and freeze framing. And when it ends with the dead guy saying “that’s the ax that killed me!” and Dave (narrating) says, “is he right?” The audience erupts into cheers (some people actually stood up). It goes into this CGI credit sequence and they’re just screaming over that whole thing.

Some of you have only read this far because you’re looking for plot details – I assume this is all book fans reading this – but 1) I have no sense of how much I can divulge without getting in trouble and 2) I’d rather you just go in with a blank slate anyway. To enjoy a story you have to let it just take you away, if you’re sitting there with some checklist in your head of which characters or scenes need to be included then you’ve turned off the part of your brain that actually allows you to be transported. It’s the difference between actually enjoying a cookie versus just nervously counting chocolate chips. You know from IMDB that Jennifer Lopez isn’t in it (it’s Amy the whole way), you know from common sense that at 108 minutes it doesn’t include everything from a novel that takes several days to read. All I’ll say is that if you’re not smiling when this is over, you’re dead inside.

Shelly and the Detective

So I found myself in an awkward social situation I had never faced before: I had to use the bathroom really bad like 90 minutes into the movie they made about my book, but didn’t want to get up and give the appearance that I was walking out in disgust.

So I stick it out and the moment it ends, I get up and go and when I get back to find my wife, the producer and publicist grabs my arm and say, “They need you on stage.” And that’s when I found out they were doing an audience Q & A, and further found that I was apparently supposed to be part of it. Somebody captured it all on video:

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zqc4lEJJ2L8

Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_c6Ttd1iVU8

Then it was over and I came home to the cold, disapproving gaze of our pet rabbit. He hates me.

Previous Entry – Start From The Beginning – Next Entry

Adventures of John and Dave

John Cheese — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 18:22:57 +0000

For more of the groundbreaking, award winning comic “The Adventures of John and Dave,” click here!

Previous Entry – Start From The Beginning – Next Entry

Status of the Sequel

John Cheese — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 00:43:49 +0000

Man, do we have some news this month. Let’s get to the really important shit right off the bat. We’ll start off by answering the most common questions we get from fans.

When is the sequel coming out?

Good news on that front. The raw manuscript is now in the hands of the publisher. Which means that now it undergoes the long, arduous process of editing. Depending on how many references to dicks they want removed, that could take a while. But it’s good news for fans because it means it’s in the “balls deep” stage of becoming an actual book that you can buy and read with your face eyes. As far as an actual date, we still couldn’t give you that. Nobody could. It is entirely dependent upon how quickly the editing process goes and whether or not they feel that they’ve been tricked into publishing these things.

But be patient. You don’t want to read a messy pile of shit any more than Dave wants to produce one. It’s coming.

Image by Lostro

Do you have a title yet?

Hell yes! It’s called This Book is Full of Spiders. And luckily the publishers are not only on board with the title, but when they heard it, they insisted that it be used. We can’t stress enough how lucky Dave was to find a publisher like St. Martin’s Press who gets the premise behind the books as well as they do. He could have very easily gotten a publisher who said, “Ok, this is good, but there are a few parts we need to address that are — how do we put this delicately — completely fucking stupid.”

Will you have another ARG for the sequel.

Yep! But we don’t know when we’ll be starting it just yet. We’ll give an announcement ahead of time through our Facebook page and our Twitter.

I will provide no explanation for this picture.

What’s up with the movie?

In case you’ve been living in a hole — and I don’t mean that figuratively… I once spent four months living in an actual hole — the trailer for the movie is already out, and you can watch that by clicking these words. At the end of that trailer, you’ll see the announcement that the movie is coming in 2012. We have no idea when in 2012 that will be.

But again, you’ll have to be patient for the same reasons stated above about the book’s sequel. We want the best possible movie Don can make, and so does he. And we couldn’t ask for a more competent, awesome guy to pull that off. As he’s announced through his own Twitter and Facebook, they’re finished with the majority of it, and have moved on to the editing. It’s getting close.

In the meantime, you can find out everything we know about the film through http://www.johndies.com/. Including awesome tidbits like when Don Coscarelli announced that Camel Holocaust will be in the movie! You’ll see a row of tabs below the trailer that has their social media sites and Youtube channel. Keep in mind that the John Dies movie and the John Dies book have completely different sites and social media pages. So don’t think that if you’re already a fan of our Facebook page that you have everything covered. The movie network of sites is a completely different universe, and they’re totally worth following.

I think those are the four most common things we get asked, so hopefully that’ll soothe your curiosity for a bit. As soon as we get more news, we promise that we’ll post it.

On more personal news, some of you may remember quite some time back on this site that Dave announced my attempt at sobriety. Not the character of John Cheese, but the actual guy behind that character — me, Mack Leighty. I just wanted to let those of you who followed that very real side story that I am two years sober as of today. Not a single drop. It was not only the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but it’s the thing I’m the most proud of in my life.

If any of you want to send me a trophy or maybe some money or a trophy made out of money for my efforts, you can do that by mailing it to [removed by DW] or Paypaling me at [removed by DW]. Let’s face it, I deserve it.

IT’S RIGHT HERE HOLY SHIT IS THIS A WEIRD FEELING

Previous Entry – Start From The Beginning – Next Entry

THE MOVIE TRAILER IS HERE! HOLY SHIT.

David Wong — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 05:23:51 +0000

http://twitter.com/#!/DonCoscarelli

Previous Entry – Start From The Beginning – Next Entry

The Status of Everything David Wong and JDatE

David Wong — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 06:14:03 +0000

Hi, everybody. I want to quickly answer all of the most frequent questions I’ve been getting:

“When is the John Dies at the End movie coming out?”

Shooting has been finished since early this year, then it was in editing and now they’ve moved on to effects. I don’t have a timetable for when that’ll be done, and if making movies is like most other creative ventures, nobody knows exactly. It’s the part of the process that takes the longest (even on a big-budget film, the FX takes a full year after they’re done shooting, and you’re a lot more limited on a lower budget movie like this).

If you want movie updates straight from the horse’s mouth, you can either follow JDatE Producer/Director Don Coscarelli on Twitter, or if you don’t use Twitter, you can still bookmark this page and occasionally look at it to see if he’s updated:

“When is the sequel to the novel coming out?”

The sequel, This Book is Full of Spiders, is right here:

That is, it’s in my hand, not in the hands of the publisher yet. I’m going to do another round of edits and then mail it off to them probably in late September or early October.

Then, they’ll take a few months and make a bunch of editing suggestions and send it back, then I’ll do another round of edits based on their feedback, and this process continues until everyone is happy with it. Then they start working on layout and fonts and what-not, and we start picking out a cover, and then they’ll set a release date.

“What is it taking the movie so long to come out? The rights sold back in 2007!”

Long, compared to what? The zombie blockbuster World War Z hit shelves a year before JDatE, and the film isn’t due until December of next year. And that’s a runaway bestseller by a famous author, and a big-budget movie starring Brad Motherfucking Pitt… and it still will be more than six years from book to screen.

Lord of the Rings took 46 years to make it to screen.

But to say that it’s normal for books/comics/etc to take years to get turned into films isn’t accurate — the vast majority never get turned into films, even after the rights are purchased. Stephen King finished the Dark Tower series in 2004. The huge-budget film version of that, to be directed by Ron Howard and starring the bad guy from No Country for Old Men, is due to hit screens… never? Universal just killed the project. Remember the big-budget Halo movie that was supposed to be directed by Peter Jackson? What’s the last you’ve heard of that?

A movie isn’t like writing a book, you’re trying to get a shitload of elements and piles of money to all come together at the same time. What if the actors you want are tied up with other projects? Quentin Tarantino first approached Uma Thurman about doing Kill Bill when they were shooting Pulp Fiction in 1993. It would take ten years for their schedules to line up (including one delay of several months due to Thurman getting pregnant). It’s a long process, there is no way to speed it up.

“So what’s your excuse for the book taking so long to write? You started on it in 2005!”

I’m not a full-time novelist. It took me five years to write JDatE (working two jobs the whole time) and six years working off and on to write the sequel (now working 16-hour days at Cracked).

But even if left to do nothing but write novels, I don’t know how long it’d take. The process is dictated by how long it takes ideas to occur to you. It’s not like painting a house, where you know roughly how much house you have to cover. Some of the best ideas in the sequel are things that occurred to me over the last year, due to things going on in my own life.

To get an idea, try this:

Get a piece of paper and write down 20 uses for an office chair, other than sitting. How long did it take you? Did you get stuck after coming up with four or five? Some of you can do all 20 in five minutes, some will need a month, because the part of your brain that generates creative ideas is an involuntary muscle.

That’s why Silence of the Lambs came out seven years after the novel it was a sequel to (Red Dragon). It’s why George RR Martin needed six years to get the most recent Song of Ice and Fire book out. And while it’s true that JK Rowling was able to crank out seven Harry Potter books in ten years, she also spent five years outlining them before the first one got published. And those authors had the advantage of being them, while I am stuck being me.

“Are you afraid the movie is going to wind up being different than the book?”

I keep getting asked this in interviews, and I’m realizing this is one of those questions that makes sense to a fan but not to a writer.

For me, asking if the movie will be different from the book is like asking if a poem about Abe Lincoln will be different than the statue. Well… of course it’ll be different. They’re not the same medium.

I don’t mean that to sound sarcastic, it’s just that I know from doing this for a living that film has a specific structure — it’s three “acts” in a screenplay that’s about 100 pages — and that my book has nine acts (JDatE being three distinct episodes in one novel) over 350 pages.

Filming it scene for scene would literally make the film six hours long. Don’s job is to use his skills as the greatest cult horror director on earth to take this very long novel and create something that is his own — lean, brutal and utterly fucking insane. It should make the viewer leave the theater feeling the same way a reader felt when they closed the book.

I mentioned Silence of the Lambs earlier. Now, Thomas Harris is a great writer and has sold more books than I ever will. But Hannibal Lecter is not a horror icon because of Thomas Harris. You can thank Anthony Hopkins for that. The look in Hopkins’ eyes was worth 500 pages of description.

What I’m trying to say is, film is not a writer’s medium. It’s an actor’s medium and, to a lesser extent, a director’s. As a writer, you’re just trying to give them the best raw material possible.

“Are you going to do a fun Alternate Reality Game like you did leading up to the hardcover release of JDatE?”

I’d love that, that was a lot of fun but took an absurd amount of time. I’d have to learn heavily on Mack “John Cheese” Leighty to help me with it but suddenly he’s very busy these days (in addition to his weekly column that I just linked to, he is now employed in the layout/graphics department at Cracked). I’m not sure how many fewer hours we can sleep at night before it becomes an actual medical problem. I’m not complaining — I’m doing all of this by choice. Just recognizing that there is a limitation my capacity to do things and that people get mad when I over-promise.

Previous Entry – Start From The Beginning – Next Entry

Oh, You’re Gonna Love This…

John Cheese — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 21:26:13 +0000

Ok, first of all, let’s get this out of the way because Dave has made me watch it about 10 times now. The other 200, I’ve watched on my own without provocation. Make sure your sound is turned up; otherwise, you won’t get why it’s so awesome.

I don’t know who that is but if we had known about him before the John Dies at the End movie finished filming, we would have used every resource at our disposal to somehow get him at least a bit part in it. Which is to say that Dave would have sent Don Coscarelli a polite email.

Oh, wait, you didn’t know about the filming being done? Well you should have been following this site and Don’s Twitter more closely, you buttass! Then you wouldn’t miss little awesome things like this:

I never thought I’d be so happy to read the phrase “heavy visual effects.” That’s awesome news because even though I’ve heard Rob C Mayes is a very talented actor, I’ve never met him, so I don’t know his dong situation. If he’s not packing heat, that may be what the heavy visual effects are for. At least that’s what I’m assuming.

Wait, if you didn’t know about the movie being in the VFX mode, did you also not know about this:

What’s that? It’s Dave’s whiteboard — a picture he posted on Facebook a week or two ago. Why is a picture of a blank whiteboard important? Because that’s his “To Do” list for the sequel. The fact that it is blank means THE MOTHERFUCKING SEQUEL DRAFT IS FINISHED!

Just to be clear on this, there is a LOT of editing to do, so discussing release dates and all that right now isn’t even possible because that’s not even a thing yet. What this means is that the meat of the dish is finished, and now it has to be seasoned, and the sides made, and the — holy shit, I’m hungry. What was I talking about? Oh, the sequel. But it’s still great news because it’s now something Dave can physically hold in his hands as a rough completed work with a beginning, middle, and most importantly, an ending. Basically think of it like this:

The book is already on its way out of the dog’s asshole and will soon be on your proverbial car speakers. It’s just that there’s a lot of air between that butthole and the back dashboard. What do you call that shelf in the back? Is there a name for that? Whatever it’s called, I’m saying that Dog Dave is about to shit all over it. I’m not good with analogies.

Regardless, what that means for us, personally, is that we can finally afford to get our hair done the right way!

Or maybe get an awesome new phone.

Don’t get comfortable because there’s even more awesome news. Dave did an interview with Holy Taco, and it’s most definitely worth checking out. What he has to say about “the-book-is-better-than-the-movie” syndrome is just great. It’s one of his best interviews, I think. And I’m not just saying that because there’s a picture of both of us standing with Michael Swaim and Daniel O’Brien.

On top of that, he has a new article up over at Cracked where he talks about some of the world’s most soul-destroying jobs. What we do for a living isn’t on there, but then again we’re not entirely sure that the things we destroy are souls. They’re definitely a spirituality of some sort, but defining that is kind of technical. That aside, it’s a pretty damn interesting piece. You should read it before I whip out my dick and start whipping people.

To be fair, I’m going to probably do that anyway.

Previous Entry – Start From The Beginning – Next Entry

News, News, and More News

John Cheese — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 17:56:22 +0000

Oh, we got all kinds of news up in this bitch. We’re about to get our news on. Newsin’ it up. First off…

That’s ten thousand fans on the JDatE Faebook page, baby! I apologize for getting sentimental on you, but I do want to take this opportunity to show my heartfelt appreciation and give a sincere “thank you” to myself for all of the hard work I put into manipulating ten thousand people into clicking the “like” button. It wasn’t easy. Bending the wills of that many people takes an extraordinary amount of effort, and I just wanted you all to know that I haven’t overlooked what an incredible feat it was on my part.

In other news, David Wong has done an interview with Asylum UK. I’m assuming that since I never received an email asking to be interviewed, that my inbox has been broken into and destroyed by a hacker. So I apologize to anyone who has attempted to email me lately because I never got it. I’ll have to call up Benjamin Yahoo, owner of Yahoo Inc. and have him look into it.

There’s also good news for UK fans. The book has finally been released over there! And even better, it only costs 5.11 of those weird “E” looking things.

Is that a currency? Or maybe some sort of object that you harvest like corn? Either way, if you happen to possess five and eleven-one-hundredths of those, you can trade them for a book over there in Spain or wherever that is. I don’t know geometry very well.

And yet in other news, we have this:

Those are of course from Don Coscarelli, the man who is making the JDatE movie. You should seriously follow him on Twitter because he lets loose with movie news from time to time, and if you read it there, you’ve gotten the news exactly as fast as Wong and I. It’s where you’ll find out things like this:

In the meantime…