Cult queen

face=+Bold; Winnipeg film programmer turns her obsession with Italian character actor into bestselling book for the Eurotrash marketface=-Bold;

Reel Life / Randall King

TO the casual bookstore browser, Kier-La Janisse's book A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi, looks like a handy, user-friendly guide to the life and career of an Italian character actor.

But Janisse cops to the fact that the book is the manifestation of a singular obsession.

Your first clue is the fact Rossi, who died in 2005, is truly obscure. As Janisse notes in the book, Rossi's principle contribution to the dozens of spaghetti westerns, giallo thrillers and horror movies in which he appeared was to die an ignominious death. (In The Violent Professionals, the Carlo Ponti-produced film that gave the book its title, Rossi is an escaped fugitive who is gunned down in the first 10 minutes of the movie.)

Fortunately for Kier-La (pronounced Kayla), obsession is a quality that has defined her own chosen, non-violent profession.

Janisse is the assistant to Cinematheque programmer Dave Barber, a position she took up in August after achieving something of a pinnacle in the field of cinema programming. She worked in Austin, Texas, for the previous five years at the Mecca of cult movies, the Alamo Drafthouse, the theatre where Quentin Tarantino and Ain't It Cool News's Harry Knowles hold their own film festivals.

Janisse was born in Winnipeg and raised in Windsor from the age of two. She returned to her city of birth at the age of 15 to live with her father. As a teenager, she was a fan to the bone.

"I was still writing letters to David Cassidy when I was 18," she says. "I was like a total Tiger Beat kid. I had posters all over my walls, and I wrote fan letters incessantly."

But the subjects of her obsessions matured and... darkened.

"As I grew older, I grew more interested in obscure movies, obscure music, whatever..."

She moved to Vancouver when she was 20, and her obsession fixated eventually on horror films. By the age of 26, she was publishing her own fanzine while working at the cult video specialty shop Black Dog Video on Cambie Street. Soon, she was also hosting her own film festival, titled CineMuerte, in sardonic tribute to "Mexican murder magazines." The festival eventually brought her to the attention of the owners of the Alamo Drafthouse, who visited Vancouver and were impressed with the fact that Janisse singlehandedly mounted the festival.

"They were very proactive people and they were fairly young people who started this giant cult movie empire down there and they just appreciate people who are proactive, so they offered me a job." (Janisse might still be there, except for the niggly detail of her Canadian citizenship. When she applied for a work visa, she had no less than Tarantino and director Joe Dante writing letters suggesting she was uniquely suited for her position as a programmer, but to no avail.)

Throughout that time, Janisse still found time to pursue her interest in obscure European cinema, especially when films might have included the blond, Rome-born thespian Luciano Rossi. Janisse says her attraction to the actor was that he simply cut a unique presence in his movies, and his face kept popping up time and again.

"He's actually very handsome," she says. "There are these bit players that you just kind of become obsessed with -- Steve Buscemi or whoever -- and you ask: Who is that guy?

"So it started out like that," she says. "I once saw him in some movie where he had really greasy hair and I just liked that so I wanted to see more movies where he has hair like that. So I was calling European Trash Cinema (a clearing house for obscure European cinema in the market of bootleg tapes) and I was totally annoying him because I was like: 'Do you have any movies with Luciano Rossi where his hair is really greasy?'"

But unlike the transient obsessions of her youth, her fixation on Rossi endured.

"When you're a teen heartthrob, the audience is very fickle because they get saturated with your image and they get sick of you and they move on to the next person," she says. "The great thing about the bit player is that you never get sick of them because you can never see them as much as you want to."

It's even harder to sell a publisher on the notion that they should publish a book about the object of your cinematic desire. Janisse went to the U.K. company Fab Press and pitched the idea to publisher Harvey Fenton.

"He said, 'It's great if you write it but I couldn't pick it up because I'd never be able to sell that book,'" Janisse says. "So I had resigned myself to having to do it myself and publish it myself."

Janisse employed a designer friend Rob Jones, who had done work for The White Stripes, and sent eye-catching, professional-looking finished pages of her project to Fenton to show him she was going ahead anyway.

"These punchy reviews and this crazy full-colour design and so that package was what sold him on it more than the idea of it being a book about Luciano Rossi," she says.

The book was already released in Europe since April and has been on Fab Press's top 10 list, according to the company's website. It's debatable whether the North American release (it's been available on Amazon since late October) will attract as many buyers. But the book has its own undeniable appeal in its juxtaposition of Euro exploitation film savvy coupled with a sweet taste of girlish idolatry.

"All the movies are rated with stars and hearts," Janisse says. "The stars rate how much screentime he has in the movie and they hearts rate how cute he is in the movie."

The book release party for A Violent Professional will include a dubbed screening of the Rossi film Violent Naples. The book will be available for sale too.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Preview

A Violent Professional Book Release Party

Thursday, Nov. 29 at 7 p.m.

Cinematheque

Cult queen

face=+Bold; Winnipeg film programmer turns her obsession with Italian character actor into bestselling book for the Eurotrash marketface=-Bold;

Reel Life / Randall King

TO the casual bookstore browser, Kier-La Janisse's book A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi, looks like a handy, user-friendly guide to the life and career of an Italian character actor.

But Janisse cops to the fact that the book is the manifestation of a singular obsession.

Your first clue is the fact Rossi, who died in 2005, is truly obscure. As Janisse notes in the book, Rossi's principle contribution to the dozens of spaghetti westerns, giallo thrillers and horror movies in which he appeared was to die an ignominious death. (In The Violent Professionals, the Carlo Ponti-produced film that gave the book its title, Rossi is an escaped fugitive who is gunned down in the first 10 minutes of the movie.)

Fortunately for Kier-La (pronounced Kayla), obsession is a quality that has defined her own chosen, non-violent profession.

Janisse is the assistant to Cinematheque programmer Dave Barber, a position she took up in August after achieving something of a pinnacle in the field of cinema programming. She worked in Austin, Texas, for the previous five years at the Mecca of cult movies, the Alamo Drafthouse, the theatre where Quentin Tarantino and Ain't It Cool News's Harry Knowles hold their own film festivals.

Janisse was born in Winnipeg and raised in Windsor from the age of two. She returned to her city of birth at the age of 15 to live with her father. As a teenager, she was a fan to the bone.

"I was still writing letters to David Cassidy when I was 18," she says. "I was like a total Tiger Beat kid. I had posters all over my walls, and I wrote fan letters incessantly."

But the subjects of her obsessions matured and... darkened.

"As I grew older, I grew more interested in obscure movies, obscure music, whatever..."

She moved to Vancouver when she was 20, and her obsession fixated eventually on horror films. By the age of 26, she was publishing her own fanzine while working at the cult video specialty shop Black Dog Video on Cambie Street. Soon, she was also hosting her own film festival, titled CineMuerte, in sardonic tribute to "Mexican murder magazines." The festival eventually brought her to the attention of the owners of the Alamo Drafthouse, who visited Vancouver and were impressed with the fact that Janisse singlehandedly mounted the festival.

"They were very proactive people and they were fairly young people who started this giant cult movie empire down there and they just appreciate people who are proactive, so they offered me a job." (Janisse might still be there, except for the niggly detail of her Canadian citizenship. When she applied for a work visa, she had no less than Tarantino and director Joe Dante writing letters suggesting she was uniquely suited for her position as a programmer, but to no avail.)

Throughout that time, Janisse still found time to pursue her interest in obscure European cinema, especially when films might have included the blond, Rome-born thespian Luciano Rossi. Janisse says her attraction to the actor was that he simply cut a unique presence in his movies, and his face kept popping up time and again.

"He's actually very handsome," she says. "There are these bit players that you just kind of become obsessed with -- Steve Buscemi or whoever -- and you ask: Who is that guy?

"So it started out like that," she says. "I once saw him in some movie where he had really greasy hair and I just liked that so I wanted to see more movies where he has hair like that. So I was calling European Trash Cinema (a clearing house for obscure European cinema in the market of bootleg tapes) and I was totally annoying him because I was like: 'Do you have any movies with Luciano Rossi where his hair is really greasy?'"

But unlike the transient obsessions of her youth, her fixation on Rossi endured.

"When you're a teen heartthrob, the audience is very fickle because they get saturated with your image and they get sick of you and they move on to the next person," she says. "The great thing about the bit player is that you never get sick of them because you can never see them as much as you want to."

It's even harder to sell a publisher on the notion that they should publish a book about the object of your cinematic desire. Janisse went to the U.K. company Fab Press and pitched the idea to publisher Harvey Fenton.

"He said, 'It's great if you write it but I couldn't pick it up because I'd never be able to sell that book,'" Janisse says. "So I had resigned myself to having to do it myself and publish it myself."

Janisse employed a designer friend Rob Jones, who had done work for The White Stripes, and sent eye-catching, professional-looking finished pages of her project to Fenton to show him she was going ahead anyway.

"These punchy reviews and this crazy full-colour design and so that package was what sold him on it more than the idea of it being a book about Luciano Rossi," she says.

The book was already released in Europe since April and has been on Fab Press's top 10 list, according to the company's website. It's debatable whether the North American release (it's been available on Amazon since late October) will attract as many buyers. But the book has its own undeniable appeal in its juxtaposition of Euro exploitation film savvy coupled with a sweet taste of girlish idolatry.

"All the movies are rated with stars and hearts," Janisse says. "The stars rate how much screentime he has in the movie and they hearts rate how cute he is in the movie."

The book release party for A Violent Professional will include a dubbed screening of the Rossi film Violent Naples. The book will be available for sale too.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Preview

A Violent Professional Book Release Party

Thursday, Nov. 29 at 7 p.m.

Cinematheque