Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Friendly Encounters

This is a regular series featuring friends who have met celebs.

Last week, when I was looking for some help with the Chiller Theater event in NJ, Mikey Hersh was one of the first to offer to share his photos and stories.  He wrote about meeting Ace Frehley of Kiss.
Mikey went to the latest Chiller Theater event and sent a report my way.  I will let Mikey take it from here...
I have a bunch of movie lists with the most important one being the list of the Top 100 Movies I Enjoy. Number Five on that list is the 1984 classic, Revenge Of The Nerds. I will take the Nerds four pack (Nerds, Nerds In Paradise, The Next Generation, & Nerds In Love) over the Harry Potter series any day of the week. Thanks to watching Revenge Of The Nerds for the first time when I was seven years old, I learned my first new dirty words including a term for female pubic hair and a word that starts with d and ends with g. I also got my first taste of what to expect when I grew up and would go to college thinking panty raids and belching contests were the norm. I was fortunate to have met Robert Carradine (Lewis) and Curtis Armstrong (Booger) at the last April Chiller show. This time around, I could get my Nerds II: Nerds In Paradise poster 80% complete by meeting Larry B. Scott (Lamar) and Andrew Cassese (Wormser).
Poor Larry B. Scott! He portrayed the most feminine pansy in the history of movies, and most people expect him to be just like Lamar in real life with the limp wrist. Guess what, everyone? Larry is not gay, well at least not gay in the homosexual way, but gay in the real happy way. (Conversation Highlights: Doing those cheesy dance scenes in Nerds IV in order to attract the in the closet but obviously gay butler was a real blast for him. The reason for having very little screen time in The Karate Kid was because he was filming Revenge Of The Nerds at the same time and was traveling back and forth from Arizona to California. He enjoyed filming Space Camp and knowing the cast from Space Camp all moved on to bigger and better things. Larry kept shouting "Nerds here!! Get your nerds here!" to entice more people to come visit him, and how could anybody resist the chance to meet a Tri-Lamb? He thought about marketing Nerds javelins to bring to the show and sell but it would have cost a fortune to produce and ship. The rumored next generation Nerds movie is actually a done deal. Larry told me it's already in the can, but doesn't know if it will ever see the light of day. It had better never get released or I will protest and boycott just like I have done so for Larry B. Scott's other remade movie, The Karate Kid)
Andrew Cassese arrived a little bit late because he got stuck in traffic coming back from New York City after doing some voice over work.  I wasn't sure what he was going to look like since the last photo I saw of him was in an issue of Maxim for a Revenge Of The Nerds reunion feature and he looked awful.  This time around, he looked more like an older version of how he looked in Revenge Of The Nerds II.  He was very laid back, but a really nice guy and appreciative of our love for his work in the first two Nerds movies.  (Conversation Highlights: He also had caught wind of the remake of Revenge Of The Nerds script and was shocked that it wasn't a train wreck.  When asked why he didn't appear in the courtroom scene at the end of Revenge Of The Nerds III, he said that nobody even told him about it, and would have done it if asked.  Since he aged between the first two Nerds movies to the point of nonrecognition, he figured most people just assumed it was him even though it was character actor Sean Whalen instead.  Andrew told us he doesn't do much in front of the camera anymore, but does a lot of voice-over work that we probably knew but didn't recognize as being his voice.  The reason he looked so different and unshaven in the Maxim Nerds feature was because he was doing a play at the time and wasn't allowed to shave.)
Like Mikey, I also loved the Nerds movies.  Great stuff.  Great stuff, too, from Mikey.  I appreciate Mikey sharing his experience here and to future reports from him.  In the meantime, check out his site MisenPOPic, for even more great stuff!
Mikey Hersh, Andrew Cassese, Larry B. Scott and Scott in Parsippany, NJ-May 2011.

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