- Joined
- Jul 30, 2001
- Messages
- 633
Stuff not in the mothman movie
Having not yet read John Keel's book, this stuff is new to me and maybe to some of you too. I found it here and was posted by Loren Coleman himself:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/official_mothman_site/message/126
It originally came from here:
http://indyspace.com/main.cfm/include/detail/storyid/174453.html
"One character who figured big in the 'actual' event is strangely missing from the film: the Mothman itself. It is seen only once in silhouette to Gere's wife, causing her to crash her car into a tree. After that, it appears only in the victims' drawings and char marks on the side of buildings. Who was this Mothman anyway?
"The Mothman," who got its name from an AP wire reporter in 1966 when Batman comics were in vogue, has its roots in Native American lore. Some residents cite the Curse of Chief Cornstalk, placed on the town by the dying chief after white men tricked him into an ambush. One of the first sightings, by an anonymous woman, occurred near the Chief Cornstalk hunting grounds. Native Americans told stories of "big heads" or "flying heads" that resembled later reports of the Mothman. The screenwriter for Mothman, however, chose to skip over this longer history and unfold the narrative in the present day...
...Sightings of the creature continued, as well as reports of mutilated dogs and "Oriental-looking dwarves" driving black limos and Cadillacs (the scriptwriter left out the dwarves). While every town will have it share of imaginative drunks and high teenagers, the paranormal activity was widespread enough to be experienced by town officials, church-goers, and sober, hard-working people...
...The movie focuses more on Gere's eyebrows than the life of the townspeople, so it misses the spiritual and mystical tradition in which West Virginia is steeped. Chuck Kinder, who is working on a history of the area and whose family grew up there, says "These people are great story tellers. It's like the magical realism. The world of the dead is parallel to the living and when they talk about the dead they are alive among us." He told me that the state is considered to be a 'window area' or an area of strange psychic energy.
In a place where ghosts and UFOs are discussed like a trip to the grocery store, a seven-foot-tall winged man may not be that out of the ordinary. According to Kinder, "It was just a state of mind and when these things started happening it was just another weird thing happening in West Virginia." So it didn't so much induce post-traumatic stress as it did induce partying. "I think [the residents] were pretty excited. On one hand they were being terrorized. But they would go out in caravans to watch the sky." Excitement can be contagious and, mixed with a little mischief, can become an epidemic.
The Smoking I-Bar
To some, especially those looking for cinematic narratives, the sightings led to the collapse of the bridge. There were reports of Mothmen clustered around the piers of the bridge and even one report of one of those "oriental-looking dwarves" speeding away in a stretch limo. "A lot of people after an event go back and try to connect the dots," says Coleman, who received calls about a giant monkey in New Hampshire predicting the September 11 terrorist attacks. "You could say these are banshees predicting disasters but I think that is baloney. I think there was a lot of stretching going on."
Inspectors for the National Highway Safety Board, responding to demands that the collapse be investigated, reconstructed the 38 year-old bridge. They were able to identify the cause as metal fatigue in I-bar 13, a detail the film leaves out despite the creepy numerology of I-bar 13 popping 13 months after the first sighting of the mothman.
According to a reporter at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette who interviewed people in the area in the late 1960's about the incident, "No one said anything about Mothmen or dwarves or any of that." He said that the people in the town were greatly affected by the loss. "It was a terrible tragedy, just terrible," and one that this recent film may cause them to remember. Coleman said that on a recent visit he noticed a dichotomy between people who wanted to forget the incident and others who wanted to use it to boost the local economy. "The Chamber of Commerce desperately wants to save a dying town. Hollywood is going to make millions and they are wondering how they are going to cash in on the Mothman."
With 17 % of its population living in poverty, Mason County can used any extra revenue tourism could provide, but will "Mothman Mania" really catch on and, if it does, what effect will it have on the town? "It is still a very isolated town," Coleman says. "It is not exactly ready for what is going to happen. Mothman Mania is going to sweep it like Roswell. They are just beginning to understand. They just got their first shipment of 1,000 Mothman Beanie Babies from China."
Elizabeth Hoover B '02 is suffering from muscle fatigue in I-bar 13.
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Loren Coleman clarifications: The beanies are made in America, having been shipped from Pennsylvania, not China! And news sent to me of NH's giant monkey was never presented as predicting Sept. 11th. Oh well. - http://www.lorencoleman.com"
Having not yet read John Keel's book, this stuff is new to me and maybe to some of you too. I found it here and was posted by Loren Coleman himself:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/official_mothman_site/message/126
It originally came from here:
http://indyspace.com/main.cfm/include/detail/storyid/174453.html
"One character who figured big in the 'actual' event is strangely missing from the film: the Mothman itself. It is seen only once in silhouette to Gere's wife, causing her to crash her car into a tree. After that, it appears only in the victims' drawings and char marks on the side of buildings. Who was this Mothman anyway?
"The Mothman," who got its name from an AP wire reporter in 1966 when Batman comics were in vogue, has its roots in Native American lore. Some residents cite the Curse of Chief Cornstalk, placed on the town by the dying chief after white men tricked him into an ambush. One of the first sightings, by an anonymous woman, occurred near the Chief Cornstalk hunting grounds. Native Americans told stories of "big heads" or "flying heads" that resembled later reports of the Mothman. The screenwriter for Mothman, however, chose to skip over this longer history and unfold the narrative in the present day...
...Sightings of the creature continued, as well as reports of mutilated dogs and "Oriental-looking dwarves" driving black limos and Cadillacs (the scriptwriter left out the dwarves). While every town will have it share of imaginative drunks and high teenagers, the paranormal activity was widespread enough to be experienced by town officials, church-goers, and sober, hard-working people...
...The movie focuses more on Gere's eyebrows than the life of the townspeople, so it misses the spiritual and mystical tradition in which West Virginia is steeped. Chuck Kinder, who is working on a history of the area and whose family grew up there, says "These people are great story tellers. It's like the magical realism. The world of the dead is parallel to the living and when they talk about the dead they are alive among us." He told me that the state is considered to be a 'window area' or an area of strange psychic energy.
In a place where ghosts and UFOs are discussed like a trip to the grocery store, a seven-foot-tall winged man may not be that out of the ordinary. According to Kinder, "It was just a state of mind and when these things started happening it was just another weird thing happening in West Virginia." So it didn't so much induce post-traumatic stress as it did induce partying. "I think [the residents] were pretty excited. On one hand they were being terrorized. But they would go out in caravans to watch the sky." Excitement can be contagious and, mixed with a little mischief, can become an epidemic.
The Smoking I-Bar
To some, especially those looking for cinematic narratives, the sightings led to the collapse of the bridge. There were reports of Mothmen clustered around the piers of the bridge and even one report of one of those "oriental-looking dwarves" speeding away in a stretch limo. "A lot of people after an event go back and try to connect the dots," says Coleman, who received calls about a giant monkey in New Hampshire predicting the September 11 terrorist attacks. "You could say these are banshees predicting disasters but I think that is baloney. I think there was a lot of stretching going on."
Inspectors for the National Highway Safety Board, responding to demands that the collapse be investigated, reconstructed the 38 year-old bridge. They were able to identify the cause as metal fatigue in I-bar 13, a detail the film leaves out despite the creepy numerology of I-bar 13 popping 13 months after the first sighting of the mothman.
According to a reporter at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette who interviewed people in the area in the late 1960's about the incident, "No one said anything about Mothmen or dwarves or any of that." He said that the people in the town were greatly affected by the loss. "It was a terrible tragedy, just terrible," and one that this recent film may cause them to remember. Coleman said that on a recent visit he noticed a dichotomy between people who wanted to forget the incident and others who wanted to use it to boost the local economy. "The Chamber of Commerce desperately wants to save a dying town. Hollywood is going to make millions and they are wondering how they are going to cash in on the Mothman."
With 17 % of its population living in poverty, Mason County can used any extra revenue tourism could provide, but will "Mothman Mania" really catch on and, if it does, what effect will it have on the town? "It is still a very isolated town," Coleman says. "It is not exactly ready for what is going to happen. Mothman Mania is going to sweep it like Roswell. They are just beginning to understand. They just got their first shipment of 1,000 Mothman Beanie Babies from China."
Elizabeth Hoover B '02 is suffering from muscle fatigue in I-bar 13.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Loren Coleman clarifications: The beanies are made in America, having been shipped from Pennsylvania, not China! And news sent to me of NH's giant monkey was never presented as predicting Sept. 11th. Oh well. - http://www.lorencoleman.com"
