Young and Robinson hadn’t planned to step into the exhibition space when they were touring with their films, but those experiences ended up planting the seeds for Big Bad later on. “The napkin doodles were actually our experiences with Kay (Lynch) at Salem Horror Fest and Mitch (Harrod) at Soho Horror,” Robinson says. “They’ve been really great resources for us in terms of how to put on a semi-homemade festival.”
Group chat
Aside from being the ultimate collective cinematic experience, another way action movies mirror scary ones is the endless shareability of bite-sized portions taken from their best scenes. A standalone clip of a fight scene or even a GIF of a spectacular kick to the face can be thrilling enough to entice people to watch an entire movie just so they can catch that moment. This makes Twitter, where you have the speed of a scroll to capture someone’s attention, fertile ground for action movie fandom. Sometimes entire conversations are built around fans simply telling each other their names with awesome media attached.
Boy! *GIF of spinning kick in the air*
The Fist of the Condor?! *clip of Marko Zoror tearing up a boy*
CYNTHIA ROTHROCK! *photo of her with Michelle Yeoh in Yes, ma’am!*
Getting into the right Action Twitter feed can feel like getting into a greatest hits playlist of the coolest movies you’ve never heard of. You can dive right in and go the more technical route with accounts like Supreme Shogunan Action Twitter megamind known for his granular comparisons of color grading and audio across the various physical media releases for a single movie. Or you can just jump in and have fun with the controllers like Explosive helicopterwhich actually exists to document every time a helicopter has exploded on film.
Young says that account expanded his personal follow list by “hundreds” of titles when he first joined Action Twitter, and was one of the channels he latched onto in the days when everyone lived almost exclusively online – the Covid lockdown of 2020. “I would wake up really early and put on my watch list and watch the videos I’d watch.” Red The King“Young says, referring to the genre-focused cable channel. “From five in the morning to ten in the morning, all they had on were Shaw Brothers movies, and I became obsessed with them and started looking for people who were talking about them.”
From there, Young began following writers on Twitter like Brandon Streussnig, who heads up the annual Vulture Stunt Awards; Priscilla Page, who does rigorous, in-depth readings of films like Top Gun: Maverick and Mad Max: Fury Road; and Outlaw Vern, a veteran of Ain’t It Cool News and freelance critic who has written books on the films of Steven Seagal and Bruce Willis. Young uncovered stories like A perfect headshot who were spreading the gospel of things like Chinese digital television action movies. He began to learn how those Shaw Brothers classics he was listening to “go hand in hand with the Scott Adkins and Isaac Florentines of the world.”
We’re gonna need a setup
Twitter was teaching Young the language of action beyond what you see at the most popular AMC theaters, and while the Big Bad Film Fest wouldn’t launch until 2023, it was those awful, halcyon days of pre-Elon Twitter that gave birth to the idea for a festival created just for action fans. At one point, a proposal circulated on the platform for people to create their own dream month of programming at Quentin Tarantino’s famed repertory cinema in Los Angeles, the New Beverly CinemaYoung’s schedule ended up being almost entirely action films, and that got him thinking enough to text Robinson about it.
“Patrick texted me one day. I feel like our entire collaboration has been the drunken theme of talking to your friend and being like, ‘We should open a bar!’ Except we do it completely sober and say, ‘We should start a film festival!’” But unlike most colleagues who dream of opening a bar, the longtime creative partners began doing the legwork to figure out the actual logistics: which theater to set up shop at (one close to where they live!), sourcing DCP files (digital cinema package files that play on projectors) of films so they don’t just put Blu-rays on a screen; and rounding up enough filmmakers to say yes to their unknown, untested festival to develop a full weekend of programming.
