By Andrew Whalen
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Though writer and director Don Coscarelli was only 24 when he made the horror classic Phantasm , he already had two other movies under his belt, which have gone largely unseen, presumably neglected (though hopefully not moldering) in some studio vault. So when I had the chance to talk to Coscarelli about his new memoir, True Indie: Life and Death in Filmmaking, my first question was about his second movie, Kenny & Company: will I ever get the chance to see it?
Anyone who might be curious about Kenny & Company has some high hurdles to jump. No, it's not streaming anywhere. It's sole DVD release is available for $124.00 on Amazon. Your best bet is a Japanese Blu-ray (one of the best chapters in True Indie, published last month, follows Coscarelli and the cast to Japan, where Kenny & Company became a surprise hit).
A coming-of-age movie, inspired partly his own childhood and by Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows, Kenny & Company follows three friends in the days leading up to Halloween. Kenny has to defeat the bully, deal with town eccentrics and try to score his first kiss. The vibe, at least in the trailer, is a little like a younger-years version of Dazed and Confused.
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"I'm working at it," Coscarelli told Newsweek, though there are numerous obstacles that make a release unlikely… for now. Even before considering what Kenny & Company has to offer as its own movie, it's fascinating for the ways in which it presaged what would become one of the most essential American horror films. Coscarelli held out the possibility of a specialty distributor, like Well Go USA or Shout! Factory, re-releasing Kenny & Company, just so long as the Phantasm angle was played up.
Both Kenny & Company and Coscarelli's first movie, Jim, the World's Greatest (originally released as Story of a Teenager and shot when Coscarelli was a teenager himself) feature actors who would go on to appear in the five-movie Phantasm series. Reggie Bannister, who would go on to play Phantasm hero Reggie—an ice-cream truck driver who wields a shotgun against the dimension-hopping Tall Man—appears in Kenny & Company as a teacher. For the titular Kenny's best friend, Coscarelli cast Michael Baldwin, who would later star in Phantasm as Mike, whose nosiness makes him the Tall Man's main target.
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"You could go to any of them and say, 'Oh yeah, I've got this older movie, can you put it out?'" Coscarelli said of distributors he's worked with. "And they'd go, 'Oh sure, as long as we don't spend too much and push it at the Phantasm fans, because it's got Reggie and Mike.'"
Coscarelli captures the process of assembling his troupe of regular actors in True Indie, but even outside the memoir, it's long been one of the great pleasures of his work—the consummate indie director, Coscarelli's films can sometimes feel like family reunions.
But there's a bigger obstacle to making Kenny & Company available to a wider audience than merely motivating Phantasm fans. "Those rights, in particular, reside at 20th Century Fox. I don't even know where to start there. I'm going to have to cold call: 'Hey, I made a movie there 35 years ago, can you put it on Blu-ray for me?'"
Fox opened Kenny & Company in a single test market, Orlando, where it performed well at daytime matinees. But night-time screenings were empty. "In hindsight, I think the Fox marketing team completely missed what Kenny & Company was about," Coscarelli writes in True Indie. He describes a marketing campaign aimed at kids, when he had intended the film to be a nostalgic look back at childhood for adults. "Their key tagline, 'Have a happy day, Kenny & Company are coming your way,' certainly didn't do us any favors." Fox declined to expand the movie into other urban markets and, at least in the United States, it sunk into obscurity.
"It's a special movie for me. As I write in the book, that was kind of the weird curse of my career. I spent a lot of years making these first two movies and both of them were pretty much unseen by the general public," Coscarelli said. "That's why I was so focused on making Phantasm a commercial success. And I went about it in a completely weird way, by making it surreal and dreamlike. But it's just my nature, I guess."
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