Author: Richie DeMaria
At first glance, Senior Payroll Technician Jerry Schneider seems like an M&Ms fanatic. With an office chock-full of merchandise for the candy-coated chocolates, you could easily imagine Schneider to be a devotee of the colorful confections. You would be wrong.
The M&Ms came to him initially as a gift-and the gift kept on giving.
“Five or six years ago, someone gave me one of these as a present, and then a student started giving me ones he found at a swap meet,” he said. “People thought I collected them, so people started giving me them as gifts. Technically I do not collect M&Ms, though maybe I should start.”
In truth, he cultivates a different obsession: the world of pulp fiction and B-movies. When not sorting through time sheets and paychecks, the 12-year Oxy employee researches old movie filming sites and fosters his fascination with the Tarzan book series, written by Edgard Rice Burroughs. The author of several books and host of an archival website, Schneider chronicles comics and cinema, not candy.
Rather than decorate his office with Tarzan toys and cliffhanger collectibles, though, Schneider prefers to keep his valuable collections in a secure place.
“Everything I collect, I keep at home where they’re safe,” he said. “This place may burn down when I’m gone.”
A former dance instructor, Schneider began working at Oxy 12 years ago as a temp and took over when the previous payroll technician retired. He intended to stay no longer than a year, but the people he met and the resources he found changed his mind.
“When they first offered the job, I thought to myself, ‘I’ll stay a year and then go back out,'” he said. “But I like it here. The people are nice, I like working with the students-it’s just a nice place. Plus there’s a perk: I get to use the library.”
When not working at the office, Schneider spends time researching his passions. He maintains his own publishing company, Pulpville Press (www.pulpvillepress.com), which publishes a variety of vintage pulp fiction and anthologies.
“Mostly the only thing I do is work on the publishing company, mainly publishing Edgar Rice Burroughs,” he said.
He has authored Edgar Rice Burroughs Tells All, a compendium of non-fiction articles and poetry by Burroughs, as well as articles written about him during his lifetime. Schneider traces his interest in Burroughs to an incident just before his entrance to high school.
“I grew up watching [the] Tarzan [TV series],” he said. “Watching the credits roll, I saw the creator’s name. Around when I was getting ready to enter high school, I was in the grocery store with my mother and I saw the first 10 books on sale.”
Schneider bought one, and has been hooked ever since.”[Burroughs] keeps you interested in the story all the way through, even though you know it’ll be okay in the end,” he said.
In addition to compiling the works of his favorite author, he researches his favorite kind of movies: “the bad ones.”
“I’m into B movies,” he said. “I like them better than A films. A’s are talky, B’s are full of action.”
He’s also particularly drawn to old movie locales. He has spent hours researching where his favorite movies were filmed.
Initially, he used his Oxy webspace as a platform for his studies, but eventually decided to write a book, The Definitive True History of the Ray “Crash” Corrigan Movie Ranch, about the B-movie star Ray “Crash” Corrigan’s property, at which several movies were filmed. He is also in the process of completing both a Corrigan filmography and bibliography, the first of their kind.
“Corrigan had a ranch, and he would open it to the public,” he said. “My mother took me there as a kid. I took some photographs and put it up on the webpage, and people who used to work there started e-mailing me. One rancher sent me 4,000 negatives to keep. That was extremely nice of him. I never expected it. I’m probably one of the only people who has professional negatives.”
His website, Movie Making Locations (http://employees.oxy.edu/jerry/index.html), has allowed Schneider to get in touch with others who share his passion, and even to meet the moviemakers themselves.
“I got to meet lots of actors,” he said. “The bad guys are some of the nicest people in the world. Some of the good guys are the worst.”
He sees his website and archival work as a way of keeping the memory of a vanishing era alive. “It preserves something that is now gone,” he said. “Most of it has been subdivided.”
Part of the thrill in researching, he says, comes from recognizing familiar locations.
“The old Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers was filmed where I used to live,” he said. “I’d seen the movie over 100 times [as a teen], but the only thing I recognized were the Sierra Madres. It wasn’t until I was older and trained to look at the background instead of the foreground that I began to recognize the location—I used to park in that parking lot! I used to go up those stairs!”
In general, Schneider doesn’t watch new movies, though he does consider himself a fan of some recent TV shows, including Canadian teen drama series Degrassi: The Next Generation.
“I came in at the end of the junior high series,” he said. “One day I was flipping through channels and saw the new generation and got hooked on it again. Even though it’s a kid’s program, it’s fun to watch. They do things you wouldn’t normally see even on an adult TV show. It’s got killings, rape, drugs. And they have good actors.”
Besides writing books on B-movies and Burroughs, Schneider also dabbles in dance. As a child, he took folk dancing lessons with his mother, and in college, he decided to explore folk dancing further.
“When I was in college, I saw a folk dance class offered, so I signed up for it for the fun of it,” he said. “Turned out that the teacher only knew one type of folk dance: Mexican folk dance, also known as Folklorico. Well, that was okay with me since I was one of about four or five men in the class, and there were about 30 or 40 females!”
He went on to direct his own dance company, which lasted for 10 years.
“My proudest moments have been watching the people I have taught display their talents on stage and having my original teachers compliment me on the way I have trained other people,” he said.
Needless to say, when it comes to the M&M man behind Oxy’s student payroll, there’s more than meets the eye. As long as there are filming locations to be found or Burroughs tales to be told, Schneider has his work cut out for him.
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