March 2, 2010 Zine Scene

The Johann Liberation Army

by Christopher Olson

In Ontario journalist Adam Thomlison’s downtime, he self-publishes his fiction through 40 Watt Spotlight, a publishing house he founded to release his first book of short stories, We Were Writers for Disastrous Love Affairs Magazine.

His latest release is The Johann Liberation Army: A Motionless Picture, a film script designed purely for reading that uses suicide bombers as a metaphor for the disastrous effects of a couple’s breakup.

The Link: What is a “motionless picture?”

Adam Thomlison: Well, the joke is that I wrote this little screenplay without intending to have it filmed. I wrote it because I enjoy reading screenplays and I think they’re a valid medium just for reading. Stage plays have gotten that kind of respect for a lot longer—I mean, they’ve been around for a lot longer. Shakespeare is a great example. [He] wrote plays but more often they’re read than they’re staged.

I have to say, I like the way your zine is presented.

I tried to set it up as much like a tiny manuscript that would get passed around to film producers, like with the manila envelope, the small-sized paperclip to go with the small-sized paper. The format was part of the whole gag.

Do you think it would defeat the purpose to actually produce it as a short film subject?

I’ve been questioning that myself because the entire stated goal of The Johann Liberation Army is this is a screenplay that’s not ever going to be a movie. But at the same time, to write it, I had to picture it as a movie. I knew very well that it wasn’t going to be a film, and so I played with things—like I reference songs that would cost me millions to get the rights to [laughs], like Phil Collins and Stevie Wonder. I didn’t have to consider monetary issues with clearing song rights. I used that as a liberating aspect.

Have you always gone the self-publishing route?

There’s a lot I enjoy about self-publishing and I think that I always will even if I do end up selling a book to a publishing house. The hands-on aspect is something I really like. I love design as much as I love writing and so I would miss not getting to design my books and do the covers. I have a couple of novels that I’ve finished that I’m currently shopping around to other publishers while I work on publishing other people’s stuff through 40 Watt Spotlight.

Your self-published book, We Were Writers for Disastrous Love Affairs Magazine, actually picked up some reviews. How did that happen?

That’s the strange thing, that as soon as I took something that I normally would have released in a hand-stapled zine format and bound it like a book, all of a sudden people were taking it seriously. In fact, two of the stories that are in there I had released as zines and, I mean, they did fine, but they didn’t get anything beyond that. Put them into a book, and then it seems as if people know what to do with it. People know how to review a book, they know what it is, they know what to look for. So the reviews came that way.

You say in your bio that you were banned from Parliament Hill. Why?

I was working at Frank Magazine, and we did this piece about the lack of security on Parliament Hill and how hypocritical that was compared to the talk of security that the government was putting out at the time and using it to justify a lot of shocking rights violations. So what we did was sort of an exposé on how lax security was, where we went in and went to all of the places that you’re not allowed to go. And we went everywhere, absolutely everywhere we wanted to. We hung out in the prime minister’s personal bathroom—like, all of it. And as a result [laughs] we were banned from Parliament shortly after the issue came out.

Are you proud of yourself?

I think that we did a great story, I know that we had a lot of fun. And you know, I think people really enjoyed the piece. And yeah, I’m quite proud [laughs] of having been banned from Parliament.
Copies of The Johann Liberation Army can be purchased online at 40wattspotlight.com.