The Story of a Blacklisted Bootlegger (Paperback)

Kevin Neece was born and raised in Austin TX. He grew up an only child, watching a non-stop onslaught of vhs tapes from the local video rentals, and got into the hobby of copying the video tapes using multiple vcrs and editing video mixtapes. He was raised on a diet of Troma Films and Dark Horse Comics anti hero series: Comics Greatest World and The Mask. Kevin got into screenwriting around the age of 15, but quit after three screenplays and went on to focus on raising a family and working in retail. He met his first wife in 2002, married her in 2003, had a daughter with her in 2004, and remained married to her for 15 years. Sometime around 2008, he was drafted as the volunteer webmaster for director Josh Becker's website where he spent a lot of time watching old movies at the recommendation of Josh's Extensive Film Knowledge. In 2009-2010 Kevin lost his career in retail and took a dishwashing job at Alamo Drafthouse Lake Creek out of desperation. It was there he met his friend Austen Crothers, who edited the lobby videos, and helped give him some insight into the making of their Cult Thursday screenings. Kevin noticed the line-up of films wasn't very good, as if they were just pick cheap $5 films out of the bargain bin, and offered to help pay the licensing fees to get some better cult films, and his fascination with the Preshow Mixtapes got him back into Video Editing. Kevin's ambitions were admirable, and he got a line-up of The Projectionist, Simon King of the Witches, Boss N*****r, and Fairy Tales, but in the process of paying the licensing fees, he accidentally "booked" the movies, and he did it without running it by the creative director. Being undermined by a dishwasher, this started a personal vendetta between Kevin and Alamo Drafthouse. Kevin saved his money and tried to get into 35mm print collecting, and got his hands on a 35mm print of Ken Russell's Lisztomania, and privately screened it for his co-workers, curating the preshow, and about twenty people showed up. But none of his bosses did. After putting so much time, money, and effort into putting on a show only to be intentionally dissed by the management, Kevin walked out three days later on his daughter's birthday. Kevin had plans to move his family to South Austin to live in his grandmother's house for free rent, working as a caregiver, and once he got a dayjob, he could use the extra money to go into renting out theaters to put on film screenings and editing video mixtapes. But the jobs never came, and Dobie Theater shut down. Kevin started putting his efforts into a music video mashup style of preshow editing, but the damage had been done. Alamo Drafthouse refused to look at anything he made, stating that no theater in America would ever run his work. In 2011, Kevin became fascinated with an Alamo Drafthouse show called Horror Remix, and knew that some of the employees had discarded leftover copies from past shows. Upon getting some from a friend, he made the mistake of telling EJ, the show's editor, that he had copies, and it accidentally resulted in one of Kevin's projectionist friends losing his career. Somewhere around that time, Kevin was introduced to the Anime Series, Ah! My Goddess, via a theatrical screening of the first disc of Flights of Fancy as a part of their Anime at the Alamo Series. From that point on, he was hooked and watched everything the show and the manga had to offer two times over. As job after job turned Kevin down, he began to fall into despair. But he experimented with editing mashup shows similar to Horror Remix, and even learned how to remake the Horror Remixes at home that he didn't have access to. In 2014, Kevin began to attribute his backtracing trick to the Alamo Drafthouse Preshows, where he realized that they were outsourcing a majority of their preshow material off of youtube. Kevin collected around 350 preshows over a period of four years, and as his own private joke revenge, gave the preshows back to the