RRFC (Retro Ryan Fan Club) #6 - 1987: The Ryan Fan Club Motion Picture

RFC Newsletter #9, June 1999

Long before I made my epic Behind The Fan Club DVD, I tried to make a little home movie for all my fans.  It was something they had been asking for.  Well, they actually suggested I have a public access cable television show, but I figured a little home movie would give me an idea about whether or not I'd enjoy doing that sort of thing.

Ryan Fan Club Newsletter #9 was all about the movie, announcing it was finally finished, and even offering a free copy of the movie in a contest!  Fans could buy the VHS tape for a whopping $8.  Seriously, this movie is now a huge collector's item.  I think only about forty or fifty copies even exist.

Unlike my more recent DVD, 1987:The Ryan Fan Club Motion Picture had very little editing, and isn't available for viewing online.
(You can see some clips from it here and some of it is strung throughout "Behind The Fan Club")

The movie was a labor of love.  It was filmed over three days, and I pretty much borrowed a JVC camcorder from my high school and showed up at the front door of RFC Members' houses to get interviews with them.  The point of the movie was to try and be as random as the RFC Newsletter was. 

I was often asked why I named the movie "1987".  Some fans thought it was an homage to "1984" and how I was getting bigger than Big Brother.  But nope, I named it "1987" because that's what I consider to be the greatest year in history.  It's when Appetite For Destruction and The Princess Bride came out, when Aerosmith made their comeback, and Ronnie was still president of the U.S. of A.

1987: The Ryan Fan Club Motion Picture

The whole movie was pretty long.  Even I had a hard time sitting through it in it's entirety.  But it was so much fun to make!

Paired up with my good buddy Crofton, we piled into his mom's car (named The NeoGeo), and filmed whatever we thought was a good idea at the time.  The wrestling sequence was excellent.

There's some really great interviews with RFC Members Brendon Smith, Adam Thom, Rob Trentadue, Sarah Hutchison, and Ashleigh Forsyth.

There's also some really boring footage of Toxika rolling around on a bed for 2 or 3 minutes while the phone rings in the background.

The movie was further proof that I really had no shame in approaching any random person on the street to get their answer or opinion on any random thought that was going through my head. 

One of the highlights of the entire movie is my interview with some university students down by the water.  The look on their faces when I ask, "So what was your favorite memory from Full House?" was just priceless.

VHS back cover

All in all, the movie was a good learning experience more than anything else.  I can think of at least two people who told me they turned it off within the first ten minutes because it felt like it was taking forever.

And it was.

That was when I learned the importance of editing.  While the RFC Newsletter could be super-random and face every-which-way and seem like there's always something new from any angle, a movie can really only go from start to finish.

You can set an RFC Newsletter down and glance at it later to see it from a fresh perspective.  Once you hit the stop button on your VCR, you forgot all about 1987: The Ryan Fan Club Motion Picture.

- Ryan