Volume 3, Issue 4 – August, 2000
DragonCon 2000: Magic for Moderns
The magic of DragonCon sneaks up on you like the overture to a summer sleeper.
A young woman’s voice pierces the white noise surrounding the Hyatt Regency registration desk. “I didn’t know I could sleep with 12 other people in the room,” she trills as high and sharp as some exotic tropical bird.
Salvation Army officials in crisp black and white uniforms ogle small groups of men and women toting coolers and trailing more baggage than the Imperial Roman Army. Gray-haired and sheltered in the bureaucracy of their organization, the mostly older Salvation Army guests share their unease in side-of-the-mouth conversations. Their gazes flicker over a prodigious number of shaved heads, body piercings and lethal-looking armaments.
“What genius booked a Salvation Army convention into the Hyatt the same week as DragonCon?” Crescent Blues staffer Teri Dohmen mutters. Plainly, the Salvation Army representatives wanted an answer to that question too.
It’s not as if the city didn’t know they were coming. Roughly 20,000-strong, the peaceable armies of America’s top convention for fans of science fiction, comics, games, film and television invade downtown Atlanta every summer. Unlike many large “vacation” conventions, DragonCon enjoys a good reputation among Atlanta hotels and convention facilities.
DragonCon fans don’t trash accommodations or hotel personnel. They party hard and wild, generally in costume. But everyone works very hard to live their personal fantasies — fantasies which would suffer greatly if real police with real arrest warrants appeared on the premises. Of course, fur-covered handcuffs in a party room qualify as something else entirely.
For DragonCon 2000, the Hyatt Regency Atlanta served as the con hotel, hosting concerts, panels, tabletop and live-action games, elves, Storm Troopers, messiahs and a host of creatures defying categorization from June 29 through July 2. A large Dealers Room featuring artist booths, displays for movies and game companies, autograph lines and even a preview of this fall’s Netherworld (Atlanta’s top Halloween Haunted House) occupied the Atlanta Apparel Mart. The adjoining Merchandise Mart housed the DragonCon Art Show and artist panels. In 2001, the still expanding con will encompass the adjoining Atlanta Marriott Marquis Hotel as well.
After four years of serving as ground zero, Hyatt staff greets the event with almost as much excitement as the guests. The urban legends of DragonCon abound and act as a rite of passage for new hotel employees.
“Last year, did you see the guy with the girl in the dog collar? They walked into the bar. He said ‘Sit,’ and she sat down. He said ‘Roll Over,’ and she rolled over,” the man behind the bell captain’s desk says. He shakes his head as if he can’t believe his own memory. “I’m on the staff, so I’m not supposed to bother the guests. But I had to ask the guy: ‘Does she have a sister?’”
As soon as the Dealers Room opens Thursday afternoon, pedestrian traffic heavy on the eye shadow and Dramatically Dead make-up heats up along West Peachtree and Harris Streets to the Apparel Mart, a.k.a. “Lemming Lane.” The trail gained its nickname in 1998 when the Apparel Mart housed the live action role-playing (LARP), tabletop and card games that form one of the key elements of DragonCon.
Goths and vampires playing The Masquerade® trooped between the Hyatt and the Apparel Mart several times a day, amazing locals and diurnal congoers alike with the infinite variety to be found in shades of black. A management decision to move the gaming to the sublevels of the Hyatt for 1999 and 2000 thinned the herd. But the rich mix of exotic jewelry, exquisite masks, corsets, costumes and swords, books, games and posters sold in the Dealers Room inspires the magpie in every would-be raven’s breast.
The Dealers Room also boasts the “Walk of Fame,” where fans can buy or cadge autographs from stars old, new and never-were. But this year’s mix of Babylon 5, Xena and Battlestar Galactica celebrities and authors like Terry Brooks proves a larger attraction to the “family audience” than those rapt in the creation of their own fantasies.
Back at the Hyatt, TV, print and electronic journalists follow the rolling refreshment tray to the Regency Ballroom and the 4 p.m. press conference for Dungeons and Dragons, the Movie. A blue-shirted contingent from Wizards of the Coast, the gaming company which owns the rights to the Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) game, files into a block of seats in the center of the room ready to provide moral support to their sister venture.
The company needn’t have worried. If ever a story was tailor-made for DragonCon, the story behind Dungeons and Dragons, the Movie was it. Avid 19-year-old D&D player Courtney (Corey) Solomon buys the movie rights to the wildly popular role-playing game. After ten years of playing David to the Goliath of Hollywood and its heavy-handed marketing machine, Solomon realizes his vision in a $35 million, full-length feature movie starring Oscar-winner Jeremy Irons, Lois and Clark favorite Justin Whalin and Waterworld veteran Lee Arenberg. Think Horatio Alger…with dragons!
Of course, Solomon brought a bit more to the table than your average D&D player. The son of a Canadian film production coordinator, Solomon worked on over 20 films and television shows before he made his bid for the game’s movie rights. He formed his production company, Sweatpea Entertainment at 21, and put together the funding and distribution packages himself in addition to directing the D&D movie.
The movie, currently in the final stages of post-production, will be released in late 2000 or Memorial Day 2001 depending on the final distribution deal. Either way, it will mark the first major live-action fantasy film release in over ten years. (Current plans call for a December 2001 release of the live-action Lord of the Rings, at earliest.)
“Dungeons and Dragons will do for fantasy movies what Star Wars did for science fiction movies,” Solomon says, undeterred by fantasy’s traditionally soft box office appeal. He knows from personal experience the size and passion of the game’s audience. He also knows how to deliver the effects needed to lure jaded audiences into the theater.
“The ending is an 11-minute scene of red and gold dragons fighting over a 3-D city. That’s 280 shots of the movie. As a sequence, it’s taking six to eight weeks to complete the effects, and the movie won’t be out until the final effects are done,” Solomon says.
“We want you to make this movie big, so we can make more of them,” Arenberg enthuses. The acknowledged wild man of the cast and crew, Arenberg quickly established himself as the point man for any crazy stunt Solomon wanted. He would do anything for a shot, including slide head-first into the ancient underground sewers of Prague.
The attitude fits Arenberg’s character, Elwood the Fire Dwarf, who audiences will first meet passed out drunk in a pile of garbage underneath a tavern sign that reads: “No dwarves allowed.” Initially reluctant to play a dwarf, Arenberg soon changed his mind. “All my life I’ve wanted to be this character,” he says. “As an actor, you get this vibe — you just have to be this guy.”
“One of the things that really got to me was that this is largely an untapped market,” Whalin says. “We’ve never had a fantasy movie that did for fantasy what Star Wars did for science fiction. It’s time this genre had its time in the sun. There are a trillion movies to be made in this genre.”
For Whalin, who portrays Ridley the Thief, the movie provided his first real introduction to the close-knit world of gamers and their rituals — but not to fantasy. After years on Lois and Clark, the New Adventures of Superman and a featured role in an as-yet unreleased Dean Cain science fiction film, Whalin’s firsthand experience in the genre approaches Solomon’s.
Yet Whalin still nurtures a few fantasies of his own. When asked about future projects, Whalin replies softly, “Well, I’d really like to play Spiderman.” One wonders if fellow DragonCon guest Ted Raimi knows who will act out that particular dream.
The doors to the press conference open on a local television camera crew interviewing Karen Black, star of Day of the Locust, Nashville, Alfred Hitchcock’s Family Plot and many other films. Most recently, Black starred with TV’s original Kung Fu fighter, David Carradine, in Lightspeed. A science fiction thriller shown at Cannes three years ago, Lightspeed waited until DragonCon 2000 to make its U.S. debut.
DragonCon 2000 boasts enough premieres, movie promotions and sneak previews of new films and upcoming television series to qualify as a film festival. The con’s Pocket Program touts three midnight screenings of the soon-to-be released The Crow: Salvation, the third film in the series based on James O’Barr’s illustrated novels. Locally produced horror films Terror at Tate Manor and Dumpster Baby, a new Troma Films parody (Terror Firmer) and Joe Christ’s My Struggle also compete for congoers attention. Not to mention advance information on everything from Andromeda (the latest legacy of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry), Dungeons and Dragons and Lord of the Rings.
In the press room, the publicity brigade for Battlefield Earth tries to drum up press interest in the flagging film and an “interview opportunity” with director Roger Christian. Despite many longstanding friendships with DragonCon media staff and promises of free food, the reporters scatter like cockroaches in the light.
The studio schedules multiple screenings of Battlefield Earth at the same theater hosting The Crow: Salvation. But few of the folks who catch the free shuttle buses to the theater admit to viewing anything but The Crow. Perhaps the studio should’ve offered food to the fans.
Even if you take advantage of the munchies provided in the con hospitality suite, you don’t eat cheap at DragonCon. Fans trade horror stories about the high prices of hotel food the same way Hyatt staffers share outré costume encounters. A diverse mix of restaurants, including Atlanta landmark Pittypat’s Porch, line the streets surrounding the hotel, but sampling their delights could run a body’s daily food bill as high as $50-100.
Instead, most fans survive on the contents of their coolers supplemented by breakfast or lunch from the Corner Bakery across the street and the food court of the Peachtree Center mall. Unfortunately, both staples keep business hours. The Corner Bakery closes Saturday and Sunday. Food court hours mirror the mall’s. Vendors roll down the shutters early in the evenings and keep them locked all day Sunday.
The arrival of Good Day Atlanta stars and camera crew in the wee hours of Friday morning interrupts the first big cycle of LARPs. A large contingent of Star Wars Storm Troopers and the drawn survivors of various vampire nests converge on the Hyatt’s main concourse area outside the Centennial Ballroom for the 6-8 a.m. live broadcast.
For Salvation Army conferees, the broadcast serves as the first real taste of DragonCon things to come. “Elevator Hell,” the annual slowdown of the Hyatt’s atrium elevators begins around 11 a.m. with the first wave of costume addicts, revived LARPers and fans. Moving at speeds that would embarrass a snail, these elevators will remain packed until Sunday morning.
Reporters and fans of a sardonic bent treasure Elevator Hell as a kind of celebrity lottery. The strange elbow sticking out of your armpit could belong to Bill Mumy. You too could trade zingers with Andreas Katsulas, and neither one of you will recognize each other in the morning.
At the same time, the convention’s more than twenty programming tracks and special events — covering everything from Buffy, the Vampire Slayer to professional wrestling — make the jump into hyper-drive. You quickly realize you can’t cover everything. If you want to pursue the Pern Track (the worlds of writer Anne McCaffrey) you will miss the panel on on-line comics led by some of the new medium’s fastest rising stars. But if you arrange your schedule carefully, you might be able to take in a reading by Laurell K. Hamilton or some late night filk singing.
The con becomes inescapable. A Salvation Army official leading a group of Filipino delegates on a tour of the Merchandise Mart accidentally turns into the hallway leading to the DragonCon Art Show. Through the glass doorways glow brightly colored abstractions of lovers united, a dreaming mermaid and several pegboard panels of completely respectable alien landscapes.
The official flings herself across the open doorway to the Art Show, arms outstretched. “You can’t go there!” she yelps at her charges.
“Why not?” asks one of the women in the group.
The official casts a wild-eyed glance into the room. Watching her from one of the benches across the hall, you wonder what she thinks she sees. “Ah, ah — it’s too expensive!” the official stutters at last and hustles her charges away.
“There’s going to be trouble,” Teri Dohmen says.
“No, there won’t,” I reply. “This is the Dragon.”
My assistant editor doesn’t believe a word. “No, there won’t,” I repeat. “The proceeds from this year’s DragonCon charity auction go to the Salvation Army. Think of it as Christmas in July — only without the bells.”
In a strange way, the atmosphere of the con really does resemble the old blessing: “And on earth peace to men of goodwill.” For a time in Atlanta, good will extends to all — except maybe the Klingons, the most durably popular of all Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek creations.
Raucous laughter and snatches of incomprehensible Klingon battle songs shake the theoretically sound-proofed partitions separating the Crossed Swords’ demonstration of film swordplay techniques from a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine panel. “Would someone tell the Klingons to shut up?” Nicole Harsch, the distaff half of Crossed Swords, asks her audience. Then she thinks better of it.
“Would someone with a whole lot of insurance tell the Klingons to shut up?”
Everyone laughs, but no one moves. Harsch’s partner in swordplay and matrimony, Mike Sakuta volunteers: “We’ve got lots of swords. We could arm the audience. Yeah! Let’s go fight the Klingons! You go first…”
Deciding among the evening’s entertainment options proves harder than picking between panels, readings and demonstrations. In the early evening, the DragonCon Awards Banquet honoring Georgia fans and multi-genre, multiple media contributions to science fiction and fantasy compete for attention with Joshua Kane’s one-man show (A Date With the Devil) and still more programs.
At more or less 9 p.m. (accounting for the disruption of the time-space continuum known as “Con Time”), David Carradine and Karen Black emcee DragonCon’s third annual Dawn Look-Alike Contest. The most popular character in the Sirius Comics stable, Dawn boasts an addiction to garter belts, frequent changes of hair style and color, and a tattoo of three tears trailing from her left eye. The judges, including Dawn’s creator Joseph Michael Lisner, declare Tracy Hunnewell as this year’s most luscious — er, best Dawn.
In the pool area between the Hyatt and the Marriott hotels, a collection of percussionists playing everything from skin drums to tambourines to zills, detergent pails, and even a plastic water jug pick out an infectious sequence of rhythms. Costumed bellydancers, LARPers and mundane-seeming fans in t-shirts dance between the musicians until a long-haired drummer wearing a leather vest trimmed with cowry shells suggests forming the drummers into a circle around the dancers.
Drumming and dancing weave a spell around participants and viewers. Imagination recasts the reflective glass walls and concrete latticework of the patio as the adobe courtyard of a fantastic caravansary. A man in a skull cap and flowing white shirt capers like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof. A young woman wearing a discreet printed dress with wide, medieval sleeves and a coin belt — a woman who might be considered ordinary in any other circumstance — grows gorgeous in the snakelike undulations of her dance.
Dancers wearing dragon masks and leather bustiers, a pocket vampire in a slinky red dress, refugees from dinner parties and con receptions all take their turn in the drummers’ circle. A drunken hotel patron decides he can make a grab for one of the dancing women. Dancers and percussionists swell around the interloper and, without ever touching him, ease him from the circle. Jugglers spinning glowing red balls and light sticks interpose themselves between him and the drummers, and the man staggers back into the hotel, shaking his head in subdued befuddlement.
The drummer in the leather vest steps back from the line to flex his hands and wrists. He shrugs off expressions of concern for his rising blisters. “After a certain point, you hit the zone, and it just doesn’t hurt anymore,” he says. “But I’m really going to feel it tomorrow. I work at a booth in the Dealers Room, and I pick up small objects all day.”
Shortly after midnight, DragonCon staffers emerge from the operations center and press room to take in a late night concert or movie or just find a place to crash. All volunteers, most return year after year for a prolonged dose of round-the-clock craziness that starts days before the con and continues until everyone collapses in a relieved and giddy heap several hours after the closing ceremonies.
Typical is the experience of Cassy Gordon, who edits the Pocket Program and the con’s daily newsletter, and oversees all DragonCon signs. “I got the copy for the Pocket Program Sunday night (June 23), and as usual, I had one night to get it to the printer.
“This year Ed [Kramer, DragonCon chairman] made a big announcement that all the copy for the Pocket Program had to be in a week before the printer’s deadline, and I was still doing it Sunday night,” Gordon says.
“The Pocket Program can’t be more than 64 pages. In 5-point type, the text for the front part came to 105 pages. I had eight hours to cut it down to 30.” Gordon laughs. “The funny thing is I work for a pharmaceutical company that makes a drug for obsessive compulsives.
“But I can’t not do this.”
The Salvation Army closes its Atlanta conference with a parade down West Peachtree Street Saturday morning. Whether due to the charity auction or the general sense of good feeling pervading the hotel, open conflict between the presumably tightly wound Salvation Army delegates and the allegedly loose screw fans never materializes. The black and white Salvation Army uniforms and the multi-story banners celebrating the organization’s 135th anniversary vanish from the Hyatt atrium before the last sausage disappears from the hotel’s breakfast buffet.
But the crowds continue to swell. Downtown Atlanta becomes a photographer’s dream — and worst nightmare. Do you shoot Alexandra Tydings of Xena, Warrior Princess, or the eight-foot-tall, razor-toothed ghoul heading straight for your light kit? If you take the picture of the lady in black leather with X-ed electrical tape marking the spots on her otherwise naked breasts, you miss the Ghostbusters taking on the Fighting 501st Stormtrooper Legion.
Everyone comes to the con on Saturday. Each track features their biggest stars. Trailers and clips from Dungeons and Dragons, Lord of the Rings, Andromeda, even Richard Hatch’s trailer for what he hopes will become a new Battlestar Galactica compete for attention.
Fans and celebrities, both in costume and apparently mundane, move in and out of each other’s worlds. The heat and humidity of summertime Atlanta recede as excitement builds towards the DragonCon Masquerade, the traditional climax of the fantasy. Meanwhile, con staffers mingle with the fans, snapping Polariods (r) of striking outfits for the Hall Costume Contest, which will be judged by fans voting at the costume registration desk.
The schedule always calls for the Masquerade to begin at 8 p.m. Sometimes, it does. Sometimes, the management succeeds in limiting the number of entrants to the specified 30 slots. At DragonCon 2000, Babylon 5 star Katsulas and Deep Space Nine siren Chase Masterson usher over 50 individual and group entrants across the stage.
Adults, teenagers and children compete in categories ranging from anime to Star Wars. Attitude rules. A pint-sized Puck captures the prize in the children’s division with his energetic swordwork. A grown-up Queen Amidala impersonator pulls a violin from a billowing tulle cape and plays John Williams’ Star Wars overture. When futuristic soldiers confront the alien from Alien, they find themselves facing not only fangs and slime — they have to cope with the monster’s victory boogie too. The horror!
As always, Masquerade fortune favors bared skin and group efforts. The male celebrities who comprise the majority of the judges panel try to storm the stage when a bottom-cheeky cyborg detective saunters into view. A mildly amusing Dick Tracy skit suddenly becomes a contender when the detective’s girlfriend strips down to a skimpy leopardskin bikini.
Following the announcement of the winners, the contestants face a gauntlet of professional and amateur photographers before they can escape to private parties and the concerts running until dawn. Make-believe takes over. DragonCon veterans recount stories of friends who fell in love on Saturday night but failed to recognize the object of their desire Sunday morning. Make-up, clothing, persona temporarily redefine reality, with or without the aid of alcohol.
But when the sun rises red-eyed on Sunday morning, the world looks deplorably ordinary. Congoers and guests — even those who strictly rationed their intake of Saturday night enchantment — shuffle listlessly from panel to panel. In front of the Hyatt, departing fans drift to sleep leaning against their luggage.
A bemused sense of good humor persists. Reports circulate that the call for information regarding a missing 13-year-old issued at the Masquerade produced results. Child and parents reunited sometime around midnight. A purse mislaid by a harried reporter is returned to the press room, cash and valuables intact. Another congoer learns that someone found the driver’s license she lost at the airport and called her home to assure her parents of its return.
Artists and dealers close their final sales, strike their booths and displays before joining friends for dinner and a recap of the con’s best memories. And sooner or later the discussion drifts to the concept of magic and what it might mean in 21st century America.
DragonCon embraces the notion of magic and a host of fantasies some people find shocking or sinful. Yet despite the studied outrageousness of the participants and the gleeful naughtiness of their poses, this four-day gathering of 20,000 (very) odd people remains a remarkable safe place to be.
An earlier conversation with David and Cecilia Long of Boston keeps returning to mind. The Longs began going to science fiction and fantasy conventions about twenty years ago, but they don’t do costumes…at least not anymore. Cecilia Long manages a fast food franchise and leads Girl Scout troops. David writes software that analyzes a few billion dollars worth of investments for a Fortune 500 firm and balks at traditional notions of fans as costumed losers trying to relive the glory days of this or that cult television show.
Would they trust their kids to DragonCon?
“Oh, yes,” David said. “We did last year.
“We took a chance,” David continues. “They said they were having kids’ programming, so we said, ‘All right, let’s bring the kids.’ Our youngest never wanted to leave the kids’ programming, with the games and videos and everything else. Our biggest surprise was our oldest started getting into [Anne McCaffrey’s] Pern. Our daughter’s biggest disappointment was that she wasn’t 16 yet, and couldn’t become an official member of the fan club. Otherwise, she would’ve signed right up.”
The Longs credit J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings with inspiring their daughter’s love of reading and helping to prepare her for success in school.
“After we get back home, she’ll be leaving for three weeks of archaeology camp at the Carlisle campus of Johns Hopkins University,” Cecilia said. She added, “That’s the main reason she’s not here — because the camp’s expensive. But that’s college stuff. That’s what we spend money on: books and reading and college for the kids.”
And maybe a little bit of magic.
Jean Marie Ward
Additional material provided by Teri Dohmen