The new issue of UVC is out now, and included with it is my interview with Kyle Baker. Thing is, though, Kyle gave me a lot of stuff. A lot of great stuff. It was very difficult to decide what to leave on the cutting room floor, so to speak, and after I finished the article, I found I still wanted to present this material somewhere. What better place, then, than here?

Part 1: In depth on Nat Turner

So I was watching Amistad and all these movies and I didn’t have to worry; they all just completely, deliberately missed the boat. I mean, there’s gotta be a thing where whenever you’re adapting a real-life story, you’re looking for the most dramatic episode. If I’m doing Lawrence of Arabia, you’re gonna pick the most dramatic parts of his life, with the most action, the biggest fights of his life, right? That’s what he’s famous for: ‘Oh, I hear he blew up a train! Oh, you gotta put that in the movie; that’s gonna be a good movie!’ So you have people reading these stories and somebody goes, ‘Hey, sharks were following the boats.’ ‘Oh, we better not put that in.’ [laughs]

Part 2: On marketing and sales

I think if they’re smart, the retailers get behind what they think they can sell. Some of them are dumb. An example I always use – I hate to repeat myself, but it’s a great example – if you went to Tower Records or Virgin Megastore and you said, ‘You have the new Eminem album?’ and the owner says, ‘Y’know, I don’t like Eminem, so I didn’t buy it!’ [laughs] …You did see a little bit of that on the Captain America thing [Truth: Red, White and Black], which is really funny. You wouldn’t know it, but that book was actually popular, if that makes sense… [Marvel] said, ‘We’re trying to get the cool kids. The hip-hop crowd. You’re the Vibe magazine guy [Robert Morales]. You’re the guy who does KRS-One videos. That’s what we want.’ The people that they were trying to get, they look at it and go hey, that looks like a KRS-One video. That’s cool…