About
Cinemad started as a printed film zine in 1998 and had six issues, getting distributed to 400 bookstores nationally and Tower Records when that was a thing. In 2002 it switched to online articles and interviews and is currently a podcast too.
It covers many types of movies but leans towards films that are on the edge. After decades of working in movie theaters and film festivals, the Cinemad staff started to help some films get theatrical distribution, because movies should be in movie theaters.
On July 21, 2001, the first show listed as “Cinemad presents” was the S.O.S. Boxcar event at the Hazmat Gallery in Tucson, AZ. Bay area filmmakers Craig Baldwin and Bill Daniel came to Cinemad home base Tucson on one of their film tours in Bill’s legendary van. The show consisted of Baldwin’s spoken word/video piece Press Play to Agitate about culture jamming and prank videos, then his new feature Spectres of the Spectrum, shot by Daniel. Around the gallery, Daniel set up installations on various 16mm projectors. The gallery was an old train depot and the rails still ran out back, so Daniel took one of his projectors and raw footage from his upcoming Who Is Bozo Texino? documentary, throwing images of train-hoppers and graffiti artists onto the passing trains. At the end of the show we found a broken switchblade. Almost two decades later, the same space reappeared in And With Him Came the West, as it was the site of a wild west shootout.
