I spent nearly the entire first half of 2000 blissfully submerged in a resurrection of Dante’s Info. I recall these chilly months working at Xenia Kroger spending every break and then going home and spending nearly every waking minute obsessively reading all of the published works on Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy and toiling over this newsletter. The reason: I had gotten the bright idea to try and put together an informational newsletter for every single monthly tent meeting.
At the October 31, 1999 tent meeting, I proudly and mysteriously announced on my Tonight’s Film Program schedule Coming Soon: D.I.Y.2.K – meaning, of course, Dante’s Info 2000. Then at the November 28 meeting, the last of the old millenium, I announced: NEXT YEAR: Learn your Laurel and Hardy forwards and backwards. At this point, I hadn’t created an issue since the Summer of 1997 and was eager to thrust myself back into it.
This was one of my big flops, although the idea was noble. I envisioned creating the ultimate guide to Laurel and Hardy films via this newsletter. The idea was to screen the films monthly at the meetings, starting with both their first film and their last film at the first meeting in 2000 and then working inward chronologically – all the while cranking out one issue every month which would serve as a reference guide to each film. I called this the “Backwards and Forwards” series. It exhausts me just to think about it.
Although I intended to add as much new info as possible, the bulk of the work was assembling the information about each particular film from a variety of already-published sources and including it all in the newsletter. I would also give biographical information of the films’ main co-stars, and spotlight the main players as they made their first appearance with L&H.
One of things I hated about Dante’s Info was printing them, folding them, stapling them, mailing them, etc. – all of the grunt work. So for this series, I decided to print the very bare minimum of issues. Pages including color were printed on Dad’s Epson printer and I would take the black and white folios to Kinko’s. This meant I had to make a trip to Brookville at least once a month with a floppy disc and the photos to scan in hand.
The inherent irony here is that, although there was tons of work going into producing it, it wasn’t being seen by that many people at all –
maybe 30-40 at most. In addition, attendence at the meetings was poor. We would rarely have more than ten at a meeting, if that.
We held these meetings on January 30 (The Lucky Dog and This Is Your Life), February 27 (Utopia), March 26 (The Bullfighters), April 30 (45 Minutes from Hollywood and The Bullfighters), and May 21 (Duck Soup and The Big Noise). I titled the meeting on meeting on June 25: SUMMER BREAK! A Hiatus from the Forties. Of course, it was really a hiatus from Dante’s!
The other problem was that I was stealing info left and right for inclusion in the newsletter without citing any of it. 
I assumed incorrectly that no one would mind since this was such an informal newsletter and planned to publish a catch-all bibliography in an upcoming issue. Problem was that it did not look informal; it looked almost professional, hence a threatening letter from the author of one of the books I had gleaned from.
That was the last straw. It was too much work and it wasn’t appreciated, so I quit Dante’s Info – for the time being. Looking back on it, I guess I was having fun doing it for the first five months of the year, but I wonder how distant I may have become from Lisa while encompassed in this strange hobby I had embraced.
I would briefly re-visit the idea of the Backwards and Forwards series a couple of years later.
More on 2000 coming soon…
Leave a Reply