An Attempted Murder in Hollywood, and an Odd Friendship Remembered

If you hang around the film business long enough, horrible news will eventually find you.

I remember as vividly as if it was yesterday that moment 14 years ago when I first learned a close acquaintance of mine (I’m not going to say his name) went insane, partly because of a bungled movie deal though there was far more to it than that, and then killed two of his loved ones and himself. It was very hard to resist some kind of facile equating of the fantasy veneer of the film industry with the crazed delusions that led up to this tragedy. There was a correlation in there somewhere, but no causality, as the behaviorists might say.

It is important to state: mental illness is a far more vast topic than some flippant pop culture analysis piece linking it to the movies can ever responsibly deal with. But there’s a type of person, who, as they slip toward some twilight form of homicidal thinking, gravitates toward the movies, almost as a form of self-medication. We often talk about the experience of movies as taking one out of the self: “celluloid dreams” we call them, mechanical hallucinogens used as a non-narcotic form of “escapism.” And who needs escapism more than a person whose mind is souring, and turning poisonous?

Then this morning, I was Googling on the name of an old friend who I haven’t seen for awhile but who I worry about: Michael Copner, the former Editor of Cult Movies Magazine, someone I met when I interviewed him for a documentary feature I was making called Schlock! The Secret History of American Movies (2001) back in 1997. Mike was more than just an interviewee on that project, which trafficked in stories of a world he knew far more closely than I initially did. He was an occasional sounding board and a consistent cheerleader, and we became friendly enough that I took him out to dinner at his favorite restaurant (a Denny’s on Sunset Blvd. where the fringe people he gravitated toward hang out) at least half a dozen times, and to lunch at my favorite restaurant (the old Sun Palace on Vine Street, which vanished in a puff of gentrification a few years ago) many times more.

The reason I worried about Mike enough to Google him regularly is because he hadn’t been doing so well lately. The magazine (which he did an excellent job writing for and seeking out material for but a pretty bad job managing) had gone under after Mike and his former girlfriend split up - she was clearly the organizational brains behind the nuts-and-bolts business-related aspects of the publication, and Mike couldn’t even find the subscriber lists after they split. He’d also been getting increasingly weird and paranoid; he told me he was taping all his phone conversations and that he had the goods on his many business “enemies.” All his business relationships seemed to be ending in elaborate scenarios of betrayal that seemed at least partially delusional, stories he recounted to me with unbearable bitterness - and this from a man who, despite some strange cinematic passions and fixations, had been one of the sweetest and kindest people I’d met in recent times.

There’d been a couple of nasty moments in my relationship to Mike as well. With Mike and the original copyright holder’s permission, I had re-used a colorized image from a back-issue of Cult Movies in the cover design to my film’s DVD. Mike later accused me, in spittle-flecked rage, of “stealing” the image and then later still of “stealing his life” by making a documentary on a topic he cared about. (The movie was scripted and in full production well before I ever met Mike, and his appearance in it was duly credited, as I pointed out to him at the time; my credits thanked both Michael Copner and Cult Movies Magazine).

Mike’s demeanor in saying this last -- “You’re stealing my LIFE!” - was very unnerving. His voice raised to the level of a shriek despite the fact that we were in a public place, and the memory of the agitated look on his face left me shaken for days. He later seemed to snap out of it - he even posed for a picture with a copy of the DVD box when the home edition of Schlock! came out, and I thought everything was fine. But when we had a launch event for the home version at LA’s Rocket Video Mike attended but refused to pose for pictures with some of the more famous participants in the movie, and when I produced a mock-onesheet and asked him to put his autograph on it, he refused to sign.

We mended our relationship anyhow. To placate Mike, we re-did the box to the video and gave Cult Movies an additional credit. I steered some ad revenue to him from my distributor and also wrote up a bunch of articles that were published in Cult Movies during its final days as a way of trying to make Mike feel better, and also of helping him through what was clearly an increasing financial bind. There were medical issues - a car accident, possibly related to an epileptic seizure; an alleged mugging; and claims Mike made about brain tumors that sounded simultaneously terrifying and imprecise (he’d had some grand mal-style seizures, but it didn’t sound like he’d managed to get a true diagnosis of what was going on). We still got together from time to time, but I have to admit that Mike was beginning to frighten me a little, because his personality was changing noticeably.

The last time we had dinner was just under two year ago, after which he moved again (apparently he became itinerant and almost homeless after that) and we lost touch. On the final night I saw him, Mike was complaining about some medical issues. He was talking smack about anyone who’d ever worked for him - his writers, his two former publishers, his ex-girlfriend. He had tapes recordings of their phone calls - he could prove they’d all ripped him off, he said, with great intensity. A one-off attempt to revive his fortunes with a new issue of Cult Movies had come and gone; the issue had tanked, the investor had fled. He brought galleys with him for a half-finished additional issue of Cult Movies that would never see the light of day. He said he wanted me to invest. I joked that I’d invest by picking up the check.

It all left me very sad, and not knowing what to do.

That was the last I heard about Michael until I Googled him once again this morning and learned that Mike had attacked and seriously injured Eric Caidin, another fixture of L.A.’s “cult films” scene who had helped me research my documentary. Mike went at Eric with what’s been described as “a sharpened screwdriver,” attempting to blind and kill a man who in some ways was the best friend Mike had.

Hearsay reports circulating on the web say that after a psychological evaluation, Michael Copner has been charged with attempted murder. He’s in the LA County jail system, and some people unaffiliated with the case are speculating that it is possible given his health issues and state of mind that Mike Copner may never come back.

My mind goes to the day I interviewed Mike back in 1997. We talked about his whole relationship to cult cinema; how in his baby boomer boyhood, he eagerly awaited each issue of Forrest J Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland; how he’d sit in the neighborhood moviehouse with his friends back in the day, watching cheap horror pictures and talking back to the screen, yelling “Fake! Fake!” when a particularly cheesy horror effect came up. But somehow the phoniness never made them dislike the movie - they were still captured by its fantastical visions of mostly misunderstood monsters, seeing a little bit of those creatures inside of themselves.

In those days, Mike told me, parents tried to keep their kids away from horror books and horror films, and that whole world of twilight culture that he was always so drawn to.

He said it was because exposure to that sort of stuff would supposedly warp young minds…

Michael, you remain a nice man and a good friend in my memory.

Sometimes the world is just so inexplicable, and so hard.