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Inevitably, in Hollywood, you cross paths with a celebrity, or a director, or a writer, or a musician... but it's always odd to me who I end up totally geeking out on. And one of my more naked geeking out moments was when Richard Stanley randomly showed up at a signing for the Punk Rock Book of Lists at Skylight Books, just a block over from my apartment. Turns out, Richard Stanley's involvement with the book itself was somewhat ephemeral -- he'd contributed a list that was so punk it got censored by the publishers. But Stanley has a history of creating ephemeral works... his cult classic sci-fi & horror flicks Hardware and Dust Devil have always been notoriously elusive. When copies do show up, they tend to be adulterated, butchered versions of his intentions -- gutted in the editing room or hopelessly muddled by the squabbling of squads of international producers bickering across the continents. Most infamously, his edgy reinterpretation of The Island of Dr. Moreau was wrested from his grasp in the midst of production -- the resultant, deliriously mad mess of a movie being the famously insane Marlon Brando / Val Kilmer debacle. (Stanley, banished from the set, allegedly hid in the jungle and was transformed into a "dog-man" by the make-up crew so he could chronicle the decline and fall of the project from within.)

He has a reputation for bringing the Crazy -- camping out with the Mujaheddin to shoot a documentary on Afghanistan, participating in an initiation into voodoo and provoking occupying American military forces in his Haitian documentary The White Darkness, tracking down the daughter of an SS officer who supposedly went on a quest for the Holy Grail in his documentary The Secret Glory. Of all his movies, this trilogy of documentary excursions into the extreme were the most elusive bits of his body of work... I'd been trying to track down The White Darkness, in particular, ever since I stumbled across an excerpt from his 2000 article in The Fortean Times chronicling his misadventures in Haiti. I thought I'd never ever get to see this film...

Until I overheard some enthusiastic co-editor of the Punk Rock Book of Lists, his face a brighter red than the wine he'd been drinking, gushing over a late arrival -- a dark angel with a five o'clock shadow and a self-deprecating smile. From what I overheard of the conversation, it was pretty obvious that this odd duck was Richard Stanley. I had to interject; I'd been trying to track down The White Darkness for seven years. Was there any place where anybody could watch the goddamn thing?

It turns out, Stanley had gotten all three of his impossible-to-find documentaries added as extras to the "limited collector's edition" of Dust Devil, finally available in his director's cut. (And like all truly great men, Richard Stanley is at heart, a geek: he made some mumble comment about slowly getting all of his old work, "out of the Phantom Zone" -- finally busting free, "like General Zod.")

I finally picked it up at Fry's the other day -- $19.99 for a package that's a veritable embarrassment of riches... the Dust Devil director's cut, his original work print edit (which he was unable to reconstruct, since much of the original negative was lost), a disc featuring The Secret Glory, another disc featuring The White Darkness and Valley of the Moon; the Dust Devil soundtrack -- and not one, but three separate booklets: Dust Devil production notes, detailed notes on the three documentaries and a short comic book spinning off from Dust Devil.

Of course, there's no way any of this could live up to my expectations.... and I almost balk at posting this, because I haven't even had a chance to pick through the whole package to give a reasonable evaluation of its contents. (So far, the Dust Devil director's cut benefits greatly from its extended length, which gives its weird visual textures greater room to breathe (though, if you don't dig on Clive Barkerish occult serial killer stories, you might not be able to get past the hurdle of the film's limitations to appreciate its odd and unexpected riches); and The White Darkness is more a triumph of sticking one's nose into hard-to-reach places, more than it is an example of truly great filmmaking. But I just had to write down, somewhere, how jazzed I was to meet this unusual human and to finally get my hands on these hard-to-find movies.