Geek culture merging more and more with mainstream

For geeks, this summer is one of excitement and anticipation.

With the iPad 2 already out, the year’s tech craze is in full swing. And, starting in May, a four-month wave of new books, movies and television shows coming out is sure to make us happy.

One excited geek is Matt Campagna, the host of the popular video podcasts Your Geek News and BSGCast. Campagna is a film director, television producer, screenwriter and self-proclaimed nerd.

“Oh, I’ve been a geek since building my first 3D glow-in-the-dark dinosaur skeleton puzzles watching black and white Doctor Who episodes in Mississauga Ontario in the early ’80s,” Campagna said. “It’s in my DNA. From Time Lords and Hobbits to dinosaurs and robots, I’ve loved all things nerdy for as long as I can remember.”

One of Campagna’s passions is the Western genre, and he used that to make his first feature film, 2008’s Six Reasons Why, with his brother Jeff.

But making a straight Western presented some problems.

“A lot of storytellers like me enjoy the charm and character of classics like Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns, but we’ve learned the lessons of 3:10 to Yuma and The Proposition — you can make a great western and nobody will see it,” he said.

So Campagna turned to a genre mashup. By putting together the Western with elements of a post-apocalyptic film like Mad Max, he found a new way to tell the story.

This kind of genre combination is on the rise, from comics like the entertaining Cowboy Ninja Viking to films like Zack Snyder’s disappointing but strangely enthralling Sucker Punch.

“If you make a Western sci-fi like Serenity, or a revisionist history Macaroni Combat like Inglourious Basterds, and hopefully a mash-up cowboy and alien movie, you’ll get enough of a draw to your Western story that you can make a go of it at the box office,” Campagna said. “It’s really nothing new, James Cameron knows the trick. Terminator 2 is a Western if you think about it.”

Along with his filmmaking, Campagna is the co-founder of Mississauga Independent Film Festival, an event aimed at promoting local films made without big studio production. He said the do-it-yourself mentality of Mississauga filmmakers is one of the things he loves most about geek culture, as people are taking things into their own hands to bring their visions to life.

“We’re the generation of chemistry-set and radio-kit geeks. We love working with our hands, but we’ve got some serious brainpower to back it up,” he said. “And short of a DIY moon landing, making a film is one of the craziest undertakings a geek can try. There are so many disparate skills and impossible odds that it’s just about impossible. But not quite. And we just love that kind of challenge,” Campagna said.

This DIY mindset is aided, Campagna said, by the accessibility of technology.

“We have used the one-stop non-linear-edit-suite of a $1000 MacBook instead of the $250,000 Avid that used to be the industry standard for decades. That’s empowering,” Campagna said.

But still he  jokes about technology addiction — even his own.

“But how much time do we spend Facebooking or texting while we try to cross the street?” Campagna asked. “Probably too much.”

As a geek himself, Campagna sees geek culture growing.

Everyone is a geek, in his opinion, even if their interests aren’t traditionally geeky things.

“There are food geeks, sci-fi geeks, baseball geeks, fantasy geeks,” Campagna said.  “They can all read caloric, warp, RBI and Silmarillion stats from memory,” “They’re just geeks of a different flavor. We’ve always been geeks, really, but now we’ll know which geek team we’re playing for.”

And for those who don’t admit their geek status, Campagna says things like summer movies, especially superhero ones, slowly get even the most mainstream of people into nerdy fields.

As a critic and a fan, he already has picked out the one he’s most excited for.

“X-Men: First Class looks like the biggest winner to me,” he said. “McAvoy and Fassbender are both phenomenal, and with the supporting cast of gifted youngsters plus Kevin Bacon and a cameo from Hugh Jackman? And a period piece on top of it all? That baby’s going to sing.”

Rising stars, big action set pieces and the man who ties Hollywood together? In Campagna’s eyes, that will draw in a big crowd, geek and non-geek alike.

 

Nicholas Slayton is a sophomore majoring in print and digital journalism. His column, “Age of the Geek,” Fridays.