User:Reggiesummers

Born on September 24, 1969, Charles W. Bailey is an award-winning underground filmmaker, best known for his dark and brooding cinematic explorations of the human condition. Mixing raw, unflinching, sexuality with the darker side of common suburbia, Bailey has crafted for himself, a unique plateau of over-the-top extremes, characters, and body of work that seems right at home written in blood on the backs of the vigilante outlaws and the "good-time" girls that populate his created world. "I don't like using my work to comment on the social climate of the world around it, or what's taking place in the news, right now, "says Bailey. "That's too broad for what I'm trying to do. I'm more interested in life's smaller picture... The dark little cracks of society... America's dark backyard. Otherwise, Machine would've become Rambo and Osama BinLaden would've been next on the hit list... Then the work becomes a cartoon, and I'm just not interested in cartoons."

Bailey was raised in the small northeastern Ohio town of Rittman, Ohio. His father, Charles R. Bailey and his mother, Anna L. Bailey settled there in the mid-to-late 1960’s and almost immediately began young Charles’ initiation to the trash-cluttered, hyper-shock style of drive-in cinema he’s most widely known for. “Going to the local Drive Inn throughout the mid-to-late 1970’s and early 1980’s were, some of my fondest memories. It’s how my family bonded, ” says Bailey with a laugh. “While other families were at home playing Scrabble together, we’d all pile in the car and head off for the local Drive Inn in search of Technicolor and stale, reheated, popcorn. Looking back on it now, I suppose it wasn’t the most savory thing to expose your children to, however, back then, when fellow classmates would brag about seeing “Bambi” or “Cinderella” over the weekend, I got to spill the beans about movies with titles like “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”, “Dawn of the Dead”, or “The Last House on the Left”. I was in heaven.” However, all of that grind house sleaze he was presently exposed to was about to be traded in for Hollywood’s techno glitz as May 25th, 1977 unloaded George Lucas’ epic Star Wars onto the world and an impressionable, Charles W. Bailey. “My god, what a moment in history that was, ” recalls Bailey, his eyes still glinting up at the mere mention of Lucas’ classic space opera, playing in it’s initial theatrical run. “I would have to say that the day my dad took me to see Star Wars was the day my life changed forever. Just like everyone else in the free world who was touched in some way by that movie, the sheer size and scope of what could be done with cinema and how the world suddenly seemed brighter, left me amazed and in awe. When I walked out of the theater that day, I knew what it was that I wanted to do with the rest of my life, win, lose, or draw/good movies or bad movies, in that moment I was on my path to becoming a professional filmmaker and storyteller.”