Rolling Roadshow Screenings Keep Corey Feldman Alive
By Carl Kozlowski
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Imagine you're bobbing on a lake, floating on an inner tube while watching Jaws on a giant inflatable movie screen.. Just as John Williams' infamously terrifying score builds to an impending shark attack, the surface of the water you're sitting in starts to ripple and break. But before you can wonder what is happening, and just as the people onscreen are running for their lives, an underwater diver grabs your feet and gives you the scare of your life.

Welcome to the world of movie-going through the demented minds of Harry Knowles and Tim League, two guys from Austin, Texas, who are revolutionizing the way movies are made, marketed, and seen.

Knowles is the founder of the powerful film geek Web site www.aintitcoolnews.com, which boasts 1.4 million unique readers a month, a number greater than the circulation for Rolling Stone. League, meanwhile, created the Alamo Drafthouse theater chain, where you can watch movies in outrageously creative settings or order from a full array of alcohol while enjoying everything from new releases to cult classics inside their three Austin locations.

With the impending launch of Drafthouses nationwide, League and Knowles recently devised the Rolling Roadshow, an 11-stop tour, in which classic and cult-classic flicks are shown near the locations in which they were filmed.

Whether bringing Goonies star Corey Feldman to Astoria, Oregon, for a 20^th anniversary screening of the film, screening Close Encounters of the Third Kind at the base of Devils Tower in Wyoming, or devising wild road rallies for Repo Man in Los Angeles and Bullitt in San Francisco, the Roadshow offers film geeks a chance to see their favorite films in a wildly new way.

"My biggest score ever was taking over an entire summer camp, renaming it Camp Hackandslash, and convincing hundreds of slasher-film fans who look like crazy-haired, dark-eye-shadow Goth kids to put on blue summer-camp shorts and play kickball all day before showing an all-night marathon of  movies," Knowles laughs. "By the time [Freddy actor] Robert Englund and [Jason actor] Ken Kirzinger arrived and looked out at the crowd, they were worried an entirely wrong audience had shown up."

Yet, while the pranks are what Knowles lives for, these screenings hold far greater meaning for cast members like Corey Feldman as they experience anew how much their films impacted their fans.

"I hadn't seen The Goonies in 15 years, other than recording the DVD commentary track, which was a lot of fun but you're not really focusing on the movie as much as goofing around," says Feldman, who at 34 still looks like he could slip back into his teen roles. "To come here and watch the movie on Astoria's football field, see the Goonies house and drive by all the other places we hung out at is incredible."

Knowles and his band of Ain't It Cool insiders have been stunning the industry since 1997, when just a year after launching the Web site they gained an early look at the script for Titanic and are generally credited with turning around a sea of negative buzz and helping the film ultimately prove to be not only a Best Picture winner but the most financially successful film of all time.

Now, the pair sheds light on how filmmaking impacts people on the most profound and intimate levels.

"One of the things I love about film is its ability to not be about anything in the world around me, but be a place I can only go to when the lights go down," says Knowles. "You look up at the screen with a crowd of people all gathered for the communal sharing of a story. We may not agree on religion or politics, but everyone can be impressed by a great movie."

Knowles often waxes poetic about films, pointing out that while most people say things like "it's just a movie," some people change their entire lives based on what they see or hear in a cinema.

"When [people] go to Mt. Rushmore, are they going just because of the presidents' faces or because Cary Grant pretended to run across it in [Hitchcock’s] North By Northwest?" asks Knowles, who goes on to outline how he gained an entire life philosophy from films. "You see your favorite films over and over again, the same way that some people read certain books over and over and over -- they want to revisit the experience."Indeed, Knowles estimates that he's seen his favorite film, the 1933 version of King Kong, more than 1,000 times, and. judging by his general enthusiasm, you've got to believe even that claim. His giant passion for the medium matches his own famously oversized body (which he caricatures on his site), and his excitement seems to make him nearly leap out of the wheelchair a broken ankle has forced him to endure throughout the nearly three weeks of the tour.

Part of the reason for his excitement is the location in which he's sitting during this interview: the tarmac of a small airport just outside Shafter, California. Shafter is a tiny burg about 12 miles out of the hell known as Bakersfield, the kind of place most people would normally never give a second thought to -- if it weren't the location of one of the most iconic scenes in film history.

"We're just outside the cornfields that Grant was chased through by the crop-dusting plane that opened fire on him in North By Northwest," explains Knowles. "And even better, Tim [League] arranged for the man who flew the plane in the movie to come talk about chasing Cary, and we've got three other crop-dusters buzzing in and out of the airport to fly over the crowd and let them pretend to run for their lives."