Special Report: Spectacular Optical

Kier-La Janisse wanted to be a film programmer. Instead she became a publisher and a filmmaker, because the festival that gave her a website in 2011 handed it over when it stopped reaching Quebec audiences. She turned that domain into Spectacular Optical, a book imprint that started in 2014 with Kid Power, partly because Canadian grants were easier to win for books than for magazines. Janisse joins Mike for a freewheeling walk through the catalogue: the anthology model that lets a book come together fast, Satanic Panic and the care it took not to hurt real people, why Kid Power sat unsold until everyone rediscovered weird kids' movies, the 2017 pair The Yuletide Terror and The Lost Girls, the Jean Rollin book that sold out, and Truth & Soul: A Robert Downey Sr. Reader, the book she co-edited with Clint Enns because a hole needed filling. She also previews Sharp Edges, a book for Severin Films' 20th anniversary, and explains how a woman who never wanted to make movies keeps making them for Severin. Her work lives at spectacularoptical.com.

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