Six Degrees of Scott Baio

My co-worker mentioned two things outside my door the other day. A.) She doesn't watch many scary movies and B.) She likes Scott Baio.

She was wondering whatever happened to him.

"If you watched scary movies," I said, "you'd have seen him in Cursed."

"Is it a big role?"

"Kind of an aside," I said. "He played himself."

Long after that discussion I remembered I have a six degress of separation from Scott Baio story.

I've told the story here before about the round about way one of my comic books got reviewed (but not optioned) by 20th Century Fox, but I've never written down the tale of how Scott Baio's brother's producing partner came to call me for a copy of my first novel, Azarius.

I went to high school with Faith Ford, and her also talented sister, Suzonne, for that matter, and our families knew each other and thus their folks knew me.

After Faith went away to New York and later Hollywood, once her character was murdered on Another World, somewhere along the way she met an actor named Johnny Venocur.

When Faith came back to Louisiana for her wedding in the late '80s, Johnny called her house to wish her well and wound up talking to her mom and telling her he had partnered with Steven Baio and they were interested in making horror movies.

Faith's mom told him he should look me up because Azarius was fairly recently out at that point. He actually gave me a call. (I seem to remember it was at my desk at the newspaper so he probably called my dad's number and received a referral from him. My dad was about as free with my work number as he was my unlisted home number.)

So anyway, I talked to Johnny who was a nice guy, and I sent him a copy of my book and despite the length of this post that was pretty much the long and the short of it. I suppose Azarius called for too many special effects.

As Kurt Vonnegut might say - "So it goes."

Years later, when it finally occurred to me to check the Internet Movie Database--to my credit they had to invent it first--I found Johnny and Steven did produce Evil Laugh and Hard Rock Nightmare right around the time we talked.

If things had turned out a little differently there might have been a B movie with my name on it in the rental bends.

And I might have even met Scott Baio, don't you know?