B section
wildlife
That’s deadication
wednesday, october ,
Your guide to the Tucson arts and entertainment scene
Christy Delehanty Arts Editor 520•621•3106 arts@wildcat.arizona.edu
Locals resurrect the annual zombie invasion in Tucson
By Brandon Specktor ARIZONA DAILY WILDCAT There are nights in Tucson when the air is chilled with death, and brainless, bloodthirsty hordes are heard dragging their limbs through downtown streets. Club Crawl is one such night. The Tucson Zombie Walk, which will be celebrating its fifth anniversary this Saturday, is another. What started six years ago as a flash mob in the Rialto parking lot with a handful of nerds in zombie makeup has become an annual, all-ages Halloweenseason event. It’s no All Souls Procession, but like a flesh-eating virus, the Tucson Zombie Walk has seen rapid growth every year since the infection hit downtown. According to event organizers, last year’s walk had about 600 zombies, up from 400 in 2008. The dead are rising — but not on their own. A pair of local organizers and their diehard volunteers have been working the graveyard shift to spread the zombie bug, and this year’s walk could be the biggest yet.
The Rise of the Dead
The local Frankenstein’s monster responsible for organizing the Zombie Walk has the brain of Rosie Zwaduk and the heart of Natalia “Talia” Lopez. At least that’s what Rosie and Talia will tell you. “Rosie handles the logistical parts of the walk, and I handle the art. I’m the one with enthusiasm, but she’s the one who really gets things done,” Lopez said of the partnership. Lopez tags herself as an amateur special effects makeup artist, a fulltime aunt and a lifelong Halloween kid. The Zombie Walk might be the natural nexus of her interests. She’s had a hand in the walk’s expansion since its first official meeting five years ago. “It was still kind of flash-mobby back then, but I started the costume contest, and that got a lot of people excited,” Lopez said.
Mike Christy/Arizona Daily Wildcat
Tucson’s ‘zombies’ cross Congress Street during last year’s Zombie Walk. Close to 600 undead impersonators were in attendance, up from 400 in 2008. Attendance is expected to increase again at this year’s Oct. 23 event.
Lopez met her current organizing partner three years ago when Zwaduk, a local producer at the time, answered a request for help on an online forum. “I didn’t think one way or another
about zombies,” Zwaduk said. “I just answered a call for help … but over the years I’ve grown to love the little undeads.” Zwaduk is a frequent collaborator with the Independent Film
Association of Southern Arizona (IFASA), and in her two-and-a-half years in Tucson has been an actor, production manager, producer and first assistant director on various local film projects. Earlier this year,
she produced “The Cordial Dead,” a zombie apocalypse comedy for which Lopez wrote and provided undead makeup effects. ZOMBIES, page B8
Things not worth doing done exceptionally well ‘Jackass 3D’ commits to That’s what they said … Johnny causing chaos, succeeds
By Christy Delehanty ARIZONA DAILY WILDCAT This is Hollywood. OK, so there is grit, but even that is sparkly. Out the 10th-story window of the Roosevelt Hotel, Grauman’s Chinese Theater and the Kodak Theatre sit, bored between gold-lined granite stars, vendors peddling “Hollywood”-emblazoned everything, and less-thansubtle pickpockets groping for anything that can be pawned or spent. The iconic sign blazes right through them, searching for the best bodies, the highest minds. The street corner sports a Hello Kitty and a BatWoman. But the hotel pool is ringed with palm trees and dimpled with the kind of memoryfoam raft that costs $150 plus shipping from SkyMall. Girls in garter-pinched thigh-highs, rolled down combat boots, and real diamonds move their slow SoCal stares to the loner in a white tuxedo and foothigh mohawk — but only for a second. Behind the decked-out punk sit Johnny Knoxville, Bam Margera, Steve-O and most of the “Jackass” crew. Remarkably, they’re sitting and only sitting. No one’s testicles are in jeopardy and no one is up on the balcony, cheesing for a camera in a thong. But this is still Hollywood, and as these “as themselves” actors filter in and out of the grandiose conference rooms drowning
Knoxville: “Spike, Jeff, the executive producers were like ‘the editors are bottlenecked with footage, you gotta stop.’ That’s the only time I cried in the movie.”
Photo courtesy of examiner.com
in 4 p.m. sunlight. Public relations representatives carry their Budweisers and toss their empty G&Ts. Along with Knoxville, Margera and Steve-O, come Chris Pontius, Jason Acuña, Ryan Dunn, Preston Lacy, Dave England, Ehren McGhehey and director Jeff Tremaine, all in shifts, all dwarfed by the scale of Roosevelt’s historic Blossom Room, which so starkly sets off their tattoos. Of all the institutions of excess in Hollywood, “Jackass” may be the most unswerving. The same “fuck it”-themed commitment one imagines it might take to request two tattoos of your own face and one of a dripping penis (ahem, Steve-O), is present in the
“Jackass” tradition; it is 100 percent what it is. If these wild men are entropy incarnate, hoping for laughs and to help disorder prevail, “Jackass 3D” is the cast caught succeeding. Tremaine seems to agree. “If you get a bunch of chimpanzees and put them together with video cameras and magic’s gonna happen,” he said. “Who’s gotten laid on this trip?” Steve-O has entered the Blossom Room in a state of post-rehab alertness his colleagues appear to lack. This newfound sobriety has improved his on-set performance, Tremaine says. “Dread is something so important … it made him better than ever.”
(Any reason’s a good reason). Knoxville and Margera wander in next, full of intensity and jewelry, respectively. They say they knew it was time for a third “Jackass” when enough ideas got faxed in. “We wait till we have a stack of ideas about this high,” Margera said, stretching his thumb and forefinger to it’s 6-inch capacity. Knoxville: “We have a stack of ideas that high now.” Margera: “Really?” Knoxville: “Yeah.” Margera: “Sheesh.” “Sheesh,” because according to Tremaine, “it takes about four years to recover” from every six to seven months of filming it JACKASS, page B4
Bam Margera on what he wouldn’t do: “I wouldn’t stick a hot poker up my ass and rip my dick off.” Chris Pontius on editing out the bit involving a mouse trap and his penis: “We did it for a good reason — because we got an even better cock thing.” Preston Lacy on watching the “Jackass” movies in theaters: “It’s not really sneak in. I walk in and say ‘love me, love me!’”
WEEKLY FIVE WHY
WAIT
PLEASE
YOU MUST
DON’T FORGET
does the Bookend Café close at 10 p.m.? We need coffee during all hours of library visits, including during panicked paper writing at 3 a.m.
to break out your fall coats and boots a little longer. Though October is almost over, the projected highs for the rest of the month are still pushing 90 degrees.
look out for our Halloween issue next week to get tons of ideas for costumes and cocktails.
visit at least one haunted house before October is over. Tucson offers some of the most gruesome, horrifying haunts to thrill-seekers: See B4 and B5 for ideas.
to start picking through the UA’s course calendar — registration for spring 2011 is upon us.