Young and Robinson had no intention of entering an exhibition space while the film was touring, but the experience would later sow the seeds for The Big Bad. “The thing I scribbled on a napkin was my experiences with Kay[Lynch]at Salem Horror Fest and Mitch[Harrod]at SoHo Horror,” Robinson says. “They were really great resources for us in terms of how to put together a semi-homegrown festival.”
Group chat
Besides being the ultimate communal moviegoing experience, action movies share another similarity with horror movies: the endless sharing of bite-sized tidbits extracted from the best scenes. A single clip of a fight scene or even a GIF of a spectacular kick to the face can be thrilling enough to make you watch the whole movie just to capture that moment. This makes Twitter fertile ground for action movie fans, with the ability to grab someone’s attention at the speed of the scroll. Sometimes entire conversations can be built around fans simply mentioning each other’s names, with great media attached to it.
Boyka! (Spin kick in the air GIF)
Condor fist?! (Video of Marco Zorror killing a man)
Cynthia Rothrock! (Photo of her with Michelle Yeoh) Yes, madam!
Diving into a proper action Twitter thread can make you feel like you’ve been dropped into a greatest hits playlist of the coolest movies you’ve never heard of. Highest rank of generalis an action Twitter giant known for detailed color grade and audio comparisons of different physical media releases of a single movie. Or you can simply log in and have fun with handles like: Exploding helicopteris actually there to record every time a helicopter explodes in the film.
When Young first discovered ActionTwitter, he says the account added “several hundred” titles to his personal watch list. It was one of the feeds he became obsessed with during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown era, when everyone was living almost entirely online. “I would get up really early and turn on the El Rey Network,” Young says, referring to the genre-heavy cable channel. “From 5 to 10 in the morning, they were playing nothing but Shaw Brothers movies, and I became obsessed with them and started looking for people to talk to about them.”
From there, Young began following writers on Twitter, including Brandon Streusnig, who now spearheads the annual Vulture Stunt Awards, and Priscilla Page, who does meticulous close readings of films like “Star Wars: Episode I: The Last Jedi.” Top Gun: Maverick and Mad Max: Fury Roadand Outlaw Vern, a veteran of Ain’t It Cool News and an independent critic who has written books on the films of Steven Seagal and Bruce Willis. Young uncovered accounts like this: The perfect headshot He was spreading the gospel of Chinese digital TV action movies and the like, as he began to learn that the Shaw Brothers classics he had watched religiously were “inextricably linked to the Scott Adkins and Isaac Florentines of the world.”
I need a montage.
Twitter taught Young the language of action beyond what was getting the most screen time at his local AMC theater. The Big Bad Film Fest won’t happen until 2023, but those awfully halcyon days of Twitter, pre-Elon, spawned the idea of a festival just for action fans. At one point, a suggestion was made on Twitter to create a month of his own dream programming at Quentin Tarantino’s famed Los Angeles repertory theater, the New Beverly Cinema. Young’s slate ended up being almost entirely action movies, and he thought about it enough to message Robinson.
“Patrick texted me one day. I think our collaboration was based on the idea that we were drunk and talking to friends, and it was like, ‘Let’s open a bar!’ But we were sober and we were like, ‘Let’s open a film festival!'” But unlike most peers who dream of opening a bar, the longtime creative partners started doing their homework to figure out the actual logistics: which theater to host it at (near where they live!), creating a DCP (digital cinema packaging file that plays through a projector) for the film so they don’t just throw a Blu-ray on a screen, and getting enough filmmakers to buy into their unknown, unproven festival and put together a weekend-long program.
