Punching Day: Zen Filmmaking (Patreon)

Hell Comes to Frogtown is a movie in which Rowdy Roddy Piper is strapped with an exploding codpiece and tasked by a female-run post-apocalyptic society with knocking up as many women as possible to preserve the human race. He is opposed by mutant frog people that have taken some of those women captive and armed themselves in a plot to overthrow the dominance of mankind.

If you are a regular reader of this website, you felt nothing at those words — pro wrestlers fighting toadmen over the privilege of having unprotected sex with multiple partners is a normal Wednesday morning for you. You need something a little harder to get you going. I understand. Are you aware that there was a sequel called Return to Frogtown, in which the role of Sam Hell was taken on by Robert Z'Dar?

Oh, you are. That's cool. Yeah, I guess you probably know all about how this time Sam Hell has to rescue Lou Ferrigno, a test pilot transmogrified into a Frog-Hulk.

What you might not be aware of is that the Frogtown series was the work of Donald G. Jackson, a filmmaker who directed over thirty movies during his lifetime. He lived to the age of 60, so if you'll let me do some quick math… that's over three hundred films a year! Six of them are about rollerblading! And as bizarre as Hell Comes to Frogtown is, it does not faithfully represent Donald G. Jackson's vision as an artist. The film was financed by New World Pictures, who put a $1.5 million budget behind it, forced the casting of (relatively) big names, and made Jackson share directing duties with R.J. Kizer, the guy who did the edits for the widely-reviled Godzilla 1985.

Jackson had a terrible time on the set of Frogtown, and when he decided to make a sequel, he opted to go independent. The budget for the Z'Dar-led picture ("Z-Man", as Jackson called him) was roughly a tenth of its predecessor. But here, too, Jackson's mind-landscape of a future world filled with Ninja Turtle cast-offs was impinged upon. This time, the financier took screenwriter credit and, according to Jackson, one of her employees went around being a dick to everybody because they wouldn't let him be the director.

Can you imagine demanding anything of Robert Z'Dar, besides that he make immediate, glorious love to you with his face? He was the Maniac Cop!

Jackson collaborated with Z'Dar on a number of films during his career. Many of these movies also "starred" human third-party Nintendo controller Joe Estevez, when he wasn't busy pretending to be his successful brother in commercials shilling for the American firearms industry. But while both men feature prominently in Jackson's filmography, neither is his true muse. That would be the guy who played Sam Hell in the third Frogtown picture, actor/author/musician/director/spiritual leader/sword owner Dr. Scott Shaw, PhD.

Wait, no, it's "Max Hell" this time, ruining the bit entirely. That's kind of Scott Shaw's entire thing, as we'll see.

Meeting Shaw represented the culmination of Jackson's lifelong quest to find a white guy who owned a sword. This used to be much more difficult than it is today — you couldn't just DM people with anime girl avatars on Twitter.

I love the made-up detail here about Jackson's assistant telling him not to hire Shaw because he would bogart all the babes. He most likely said, "you can't hire this man, he's wanted for questioning in connection with the Caucasian Sword Hooker Murders!" Then again, maybe there was a grain of truth in there.

What's incredible about this picture that Scott Shaw proudly displays on his own website is how much of an effort this woman is making to avoid physical contact with him. Not to brag, but as someone who has enjoyed a rich and fulfilling erotic life, this looks less like an intimate spanking scene and more like a woman desperately planking over a rapidly widening river of lava.

When they weren't busy making women pose for harrowing photographs, Jackson and Shaw worked together to develop "Zen filmmaking," which is coincidentally the same technique for making movies that my friends and I employed when we were fucking around with video cameras in the late '90s.

You might wonder, isn't this just improvisational filmmaking, of the type made famous by Christopher Guest in films like This is Spinal Tap? You fool. You fool! It isn't improv at all. It's a different, more impressive thing where the director guides the actors towards spontaneously creating their lines and everyone claps afterwards.

The first Zen film was arguably Roller Blade Seven, the third installment in Jackson's Roller Blade pentology. (Hexology, if you count the movie Rollergator.) If you're surprised that a man would make six movies about roller blades, I have something to tell you that will utterly shock you: in 2003, Jackson claimed to have invented the term "roller blade."

I mean, the guy was on his deathbed when giving this interview, so why not say he invented inline skates? On the other hand, I wish I had the kind of single-minded genius that would enable me to make such a ludicrous claim and actually believe it.

In the final analysis, Donald G. Jackson was kind of a weird guy who made a bunch of movies that will, for better or worse, be remembered mainly as joke fodder for Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Rifftrax. But Scott Shaw, the heir of Zen filmmaking? He's the real deal — a true internet lunatic whose ego is matched only by his insecurity. He was the apprentice to Jackson's Sith Lord, but he has since far eclipsed him in his madness.

Scott Shaw is the kind of guy who adds things to his own Wikipedia page and gets mad when someone else edits it down, when he should be grateful that anyone on the planet even knows who he is.

He's the kind of guy who has been editing his own Wikipedia article anonymously for twenty years.

And it would be cruel to say this if it weren't true, but Scott Shaw is the kind of guy who gets so mad at Wikipedia editors that he spends hours reading and writing about his own article on Elon Musk's Grokipedia.

It's incredible that he's hit so quickly on the only real use case for AI — helping self-obsessed weirdos masturbate.

But Scott Shaw is deranged in so many ways that it's hard to know where to start. To bring it back to his actual film work, he always seems to play the same guy: Scott Shaw. Except the Scott Shaw we see on film is the avatar of post-Matrix adolescent cool. He's always in a suit, he always wears these stupid little sunglasses, and he always has guns or a sword. Here he is in Max Hell, Frog Warrior (also available as a black and white silent film, a "Zen speedflick," and in the "Zen first cut").

Adorable! He thinks that pose has moistened every observer's undergarments with urine and/or erotic discharge. Maybe if the frog man wasn't just standing there like, "alright buddy, put that away before you hurt yourself. My human wives and I just want to go have languorous frog sex, ribbit."

Now here's Scott in The Guns of El Chupacabra, ritually decapitating his dear friend the chupacabra after he shamed his chupacabra daimyō.

You might not have gotten this from these photos, but in addition to his film work, Shaw is also a martial arts master. He has black belts in Taekwondo and Hapkido, the latter of which is one of those martial arts that sounds clever if you don't know anything about fighting. Using your enemy's momentum against them is a great idea if you're Mr. Fantastic fighting the Rhino in a 1970s cartoon. In real life, it seldom works. That is, unless you're Scott Shaw.

There's a good chance he'll find this article, so let me just say in advance: thank you, Scott Shaw, for not traveling to my location and destroying me in a street fight by gracefully stepping aside and letting me run off of a cliff like Wile E. Coyote. Just kidding, man. You're 67 years old, you're a master of two martial arts forms primarily used to keep children occupied at rec centers while their parents cheat on each other, and the warranty on your strip mall sword is almost certainly void by now. I've been to upwards of several BJJ classes and have trained kickboxing for 18 months. If you attempt to joint lock me or cast ki magic in my direction, I will simply execute the Monkey Grabs Oxen's Tail technique and pull your head clean off by the ponytail.

You've gotten a taste of Shaw's writing by now, and I need you to know that I didn't just catch him on a bad day with the Grok stuff and the "why don't people thank me for not crane kicking them to death" post. Scott Shaw blogs a lot. That's fine! It's good, even. I'd rather we all went back to posting daily on our own websites rather than enriching a handful of pedophile billionaires and driving one another into insanity spirals on social media. But Scott's blogging might qualify as compulsive. He has published no fewer than thirty-two paperback book compilations of his blog posts, by which I mean he has created that many print-on-demand listings on Amazon and nobody has ever bought them.

I would guess that at least 90% of Scott Shaw's blog entries are just him getting mad that other people aren't writing about him enough, aren't writing about him in a laudatory enough way, or are writing about him too much. Whenever he mentions anyone talking about his work, which is way too often for a guy best known as "Space Sheriff Jack B. Quick" in The Guns of El Chupacabra, it's to complain that they're mischaracterizing or misinterpreting him.

See, it used to be that you had to have a job to criticize things. I mean, it used to be that you couldn't make movies for $500 with a video camera either, but that's not what's important. What's important is that by discussing Scott Shaw's films and bringing them to the attention of a much wider audience than he ever could have garnered on his own, the internet has done incalculable damage to his psyche.

You just like… you don't get it, man! You'll never get it! Fuck you for making YouTube videos about my work. You're making money off me, Alison Pregler of Channel Awesome fame!

Going full Daddy Derek of Cool Cat by howling about the misuse of Copyrighted Footage and threatening to sue YouTubers may not be "on fleek," as the kids say, but consider that Shaw is owed hypothetical millions from the dogs and/or stoned college students that have watched his films online.

It's only right that critics should have to pay to use Scott's footage in their videos!

If Scott got a dollar for everyone who watched his movies or used clips of his movies online, and, I don't know, a dollar a month from everyone who followed him on social media, a dollar every time someone read one of his blog posts, and maybe a dollar whenever he published a new book of his blog posts, he'd be making over $2,000 annually!

Maybe you're tempted to feel bad for Shaw here. After all, he's not wrong that platform holders shaft the people actually making art in the content economy. But stifle that urge. Remember that this is the guy we're talking about.

Now, despite the audacity of so-called internet critics, you might think that Shaw would be happy about how cheap digital cameras and editing software have made it possible for more and more people to make movies. After all, that's what Zen filmmaking is all about:

Quite the opposite, in fact!

Scott Shaw is mad at the kids. He's mad at the critics. He's mad at protestors.

Scott? Your qualifications for being in films are "Caucasian male, has seen upwards of several samurai movies." I'm not sure you want to get into a big thing about the cluelessness of white people, buddy. Not when you could be getting mad at your own family!

But crucially, he's not mad. Don't put it down in your YouTube video that he's mad.

Scott Shaw has been on the internet since the early '90s. He has studied Zen for most of his life. And yet somehow, he has never attained the self-awareness to understand that there are three paths one can take in response to online infamy. You can embrace it, which requires an ability to laugh at oneself that few maniacs possess. It is possible, though — the Time Chasers cast and crew went to a live taping of the Rifftrax version of their film and had a good time!

Alternately, you can ignore it and continue doing your own thing, letting people think whatever they want to think. This is the Way of Breen. Buddha's Middle Path.

Lastly, you can resist it. This is inarguably always the worst possible choice. But of course, it is the first and last resort of the ego-driven fool, the type of person who claims to publish dozens of books, films, and albums each year.

We cannot control the world or how others perceive us. We can only control how we react. And nowhere is this more evident than in the contrast between Sam Hell of Hell Comes to Frogtown, a reluctant hero with some measure of rugged charm, and Max Hell of Max Hell Comes to Frogtown, a guy whose name isn't even a fun joke and who is so intent on looking cool that your body automatically attempts to dunk his head in a toilet on sight.

Any one of us who ventures into the nightmare dimension that is the modern internet, any one of us who makes ourselves vulnerable by producing art and putting it out into the world, could become subject to forces beyond our control at any moment. So the question each of us has to ask ourselves is: do you want to be Roddy Piper in the wasteland, rolling with life's punches and cracking wise when your genitals are held hostage by the government?

Or do you want to be Scott Shaw, raging against YouTubers, critics, your family, and life itself for failing to recognize how wonderful and precious you are?

Choose wisely, my friends. Choose wisely.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Jared MountainMan, who is pouring one out for the original looksmaxxer tonight. Robert Z'Dar woulda mogged the shit out of clavicular, mid jestergoon or not.

You can read this article and every other one on the much better in every way 1900HOTDOG.COM