Editor’s Note: Rob Fitz is the owner of the Magic Parlor, a new NCA member located in Salem, Massachusetts. NCA Executive Director Ed Avis met Rob at the HPE show in January, and learned that not only is he a costume and makeup retailer, he’s also a film maker. In this interview, he discusses those passions.
How did you become interested in movie makeup and film making?
Rob Fitz
I always loved monsters and Fangoria Magazine and blood and gore and all that stuff. I loved everything horror related. When I was a little kid I watched the movie Dawn of the Dead. And I was like, oh my God, this is what I need to do for a living. I ended up going to the School of Visual Arts in New York City the late ‘80s.
Did you graduate?
I actually ran out of money and had to go back to New Hampshire and lived at the folks' house. And then that's where I kind of hatched my plan to break myself into the film industry in New England, because it was very small then. And as the years went on, they discovered tax incentives in Massachusetts, and all of a sudden everybody was filming in Massachusetts. And I had already established myself in the independent film crowd. And boom, there I was right in the middle of it.
What were you doing in the film industry?
I did makeup. That came naturally to me. But I needed a regular job, too, so I was working as a janitor. I liked that job, they were really great people to work for. But after a while I started getting more of these makeup jobs, and then one makeup artist said, “Hey Rob, your work's really good. Do you want to work for us all summer?” And I was like, okay. And I had tell the janitor job: “What I make in one day doing makeup is what I make with you in a week, so I got to go.”
How did that lead to you making a film of your own?
I came to a certain point in my age where I was like, you know what? I want to make a film, so I'm just going to do it. And I started making this little indie film called God of Vampires. I got together with a friend of mine and we decided to create a script about Chinese vampires. It took us eight years to make this movie, to shoot it.
And during that time, I discovered that working on other indie films helped me make my movie. I would work on a film and they were at the end of their shoot, they were like, well, we want to get rid of all this stuff. And I would come in and say, I will take all this stuff off your hands for free. So I got all this stuff from various little indie films, and I used it to build my own sets. That's how we were able to make a movie that looks like it was made for $300,000. We made it for $26,000 because we didn't spend any money at all. We even filmed in abandoned buildings.
When was the film released?
I released it in 2010. I released it with a little company called Midnight Releasing, and they didn't do a very good job with it. They just kind of threw it in the trash heap with all the other crappy movies they were releasing. But we did get it internationally released. So that was cool. I mean, I guess there's copies of the movie in England, and there's copies in Singapore and Thailand and other weird places. We actually were on Netflix for a year. And we did have a couple of screenings in movie theaters. There was one theater in Oklahoma that showed it for a week. And we appeared in the trade magazines as theatrical release, limited theatrical. So that gives street credit, I guess.
But now there’s new interest in the film, right?
Yeah, sometime this year it will be released on BluRay. And hopefully somebody talks about it on the right podcast and then all these kids go crazy and buy copies, hopefully collectors, because there's a lot of collectors now. I think that people now are appreciating it more. It was shot on film, and it was made with the kind of love of film that classic horror filmmakers had. Like Sam Raimi doing Evil Dead and George Romero doing Night of Living Dead and all these, it's that kind of film. I think it has a little cult following now.
Congrats on that! Now how did you come to own the Magic Parlor?
Well, every October I would go to the Magic Parlor and I would do makeup and vampire teeth on people every weekend. As a result, I made bank there. No one else was really doing it, I was like the belle of the ball in Salem. And at a certain point, the owners wanted to sell the business. I said, “Well just tell the people you sell it to that I'm here and I'll do their fangs in front of their shop.” But after three or four years of trying to sell it, they decided to dump the business. And I said, well, I can't have that! So I bought the business from 'em in end of 2015, beginning of 2016.
Tell us about the business.
It is basically like a witch shop where we sell herbs and crystal balls and candles and that kind of stuff, and incense. But we also sell magic and jokes and gags. We sell monster masks. We sell jewelry. Anything that you really can't get normally anywhere else. There's something for everyone at my store. You walk in and it's like an assault on the senses.
How did you get into costumes?
During the pandemic, there was a shop in Boston called Dorothy's Costumes that went out of business. Dorothy's had been there for 45, 50 years. I made an offer to the owner [for the left-over inventory], and he accepted. I pulled up a 27-foot moving truck to the warehouse, and I literally filled it front to back and top to bottom. It was boxes of costumes and props and everything you can imagine from a costume shop.
Then late last fall the owners of the business next to us chose not to renew their lease, and I took that spot as well. We cut a hole in the wall, and now I occupy the shop next to me. So I threw boxes and boxes in my truck and made a dozen trips to the shop and we started putting stuff up. And it's a really interesting thing when you buy a bunch of stuff and you don't even know what it is, open up a box and be like, oh God, I have that. What? It's kind of fun. It's like an adventure every day.
That sounds like fun! So this coming Halloween will be your first?
Yeah, and Salem is insane on Halloween. So yeah. So I think we're going to do pretty good. I think this is going to be where the Magic Parlor really cements their impact on the city.
Good luck, and welcome to the NCA!