To call Graham Skipper a creative dynamo, would certainly be an apt description. From appearing onstage as Herbert West in RE-ANIMATOR: THE MUSICAL, to roles in numerous respected indie genre films such as the alien possession film ALMOST HUMAN, Mr. Skipper is always moving, creating, and re-defining himself as an artist.
Now to that kaiju-sized list we can also add “book author”, and what a book it is!
The recently released GODZILLA: THE OFFICIAL GUIDE TO THE KING OF THE MONSTERS is a beast of a book; as formidable as its namesake. Heavily concentrating on the visual side of things, the book spares no expense, with hundreds of pictures from the films’ production, many of them never seen before. Lovingly printed on glossy stock pages, it encapsulates the entire history of our titular kaiju, ranging from every film up until that point, to his comic book and video game appearances in the modern age. While the text is fairly minimal, the writing itself is not only informed, but full of tidbits new to even the most knowledgeable Godzilla fan. The plot breakdowns and factoids in the book are presented in a way that will be palatable and relatable to everyone, from older, seasoned readers, to younger fans budding up from within the fandom. While also being an authority voice, it is also, at its core, a book for everyone.
So please, read on, because the story of the project’s genesis is as fascinating and glorious as the book that came from it. Now, without further adieu, let’s get into the guts of the “how”s and “why”s behind GODZILLA: THE OFFICIAL GUIDE TO THE KING OF THE MONSTERS with its author, Graham Skipper.
The Interview:
JACOB – Hello, Graham! First off, thank you so much for sitting down with us today. I’m excited to be here with Sean, and dive into this awesome book.
GRAHAM – Thank YOU guys for having me. I’m a huge Godzilla fan myself, so this project means a lot to me.
SEAN – Starting off, when did you first decide to write the book anyway? How was the project born?
GRAHAM – Well, actually, right before the pandemic hit, Toho Studios had reached out to me about helping them produce and write some comedic shorts, and I helped them do that. They were called Godzilla Tales and I worked throughout the first chunk of the pandemic on that with them. Then about two years ago, they reached back out to me and said, “Hey, you know, we are wanting to write this book. Would you be interested in being the author?” Because they knew I knew everything about the franchise and that I loved it, and that I could write. So of course I jumped at the chance, and I said yes, because you know, what a dream job, and what an amazing opportunity to be even a small part of this incredible franchise.
SEAN – Wow. The fact Toho came to you, and not the other way around, is pretty amazing.
GRAHAM – Oh, yeah, for sure. I was, and of course still am a massive fan. So the experience has been pretty special for me, and a real honor.
SEAN – Can you remember your first exposure to the Godzilla films, and the expansive surrounding universe of kaiju that Ishiro Honda and co. created?
GRAHAM – You know, the first Godzilla movie I saw, I was probably like five years old. My grandparents used to have one of those gigantic satellite dishes out on their farm that would pick up all the, like, sort of extra channels that we didn’t get at home, and I was always a movie kid, I was an indoor kid, you know. So whenever we would go visit my grandparents, I would hang out in their bedroom and watch their TV and I would turn on HBO, like early, early HBO. You know.
SEAN – I remember those days, cuz I’m old (laughs). It came on at five or six at night, on weekdays, and I think around noon on weekends, run to like midnight or one a.m., then sign off. You’d get your monthly little HBO guide too, which I actually own a digital collection of now.
GRAHAM -Yeah, exactly! I can still remember vividly the moment when they were advertising the next movie up, which was King Kong Vs. Godzilla. As a little kid, I had never seen either movie, but I certainly knew who King Kong was and I knew who Godzilla was. And I loved, loved, loved monsters. I love scary stuff. So, I thought, well, I’m sure I’m going to like this! So, I watched it and of course, totally fell in love. From then on, I would scour the channels for any time a Godzilla movie was playing, which led to over the subsequent 30-ish years, seeing all of them and loving all of them for different reasons, and just becoming a huge fan.
SEAN – So Jacob, what was your first Godzilla movie as a kid, and what was that initial affect it had on you?
JACOB – Well, my first one was 1972’s Godzilla Vs. Gigan. I rented that back when Hollywood Video was still a thing. I’m a little younger than both of you, so that was during the last days of home video rental shops. I was out with my grandmother every weekend or so, and we’d pick a movie to watch together. I found this weird “Godzilla” movie, with cool-looking giant monsters on the box art (A weird chicken monster with metallic, menacing hooked hands, and a big, buzzsaw belly!), and I rented it. The rest is history! What about you, Sean?
SEAN -Mine was the original Godzilla, but the Raymond Burr version, of course. So I guess it was “half” original? I was also around five years old too. As an early 70’s Saturday Afternoon Creature Double Feature kid, that was my first. I was already deeply obsessed with King Kong, and Ray Harryhausen, so yeah, Godzilla became an immediate favorite. Then, living in Baltimore and being raised up with surrogate uncle types, all of them film students also into the same genre stuff, I was taken to see MOTHRA at Johns Hopkins University not long after.
JACOB- I wish I was around for those horror host days! What great entryways into this amazing fandom, though. There’s always an accessibility point.
SEAN- Going back to your book Graham, what was involved as far as research and accessing to all the photographs you’ve been able to include? Does Toho have all the archives digitized now? Or, did you get to go to Japan, and crawl through boxes of the stuff at the studio itself, unearthing the relics by hand?
GRAHAM – Everything’s digitized. They sent me a link to a massive online cloud drive. The thing was, a lot of it was not organized. There was a lot of stuff that that was just loose, and floating around in the file repository. I’d find these amazing photos, but then I’d have to figure out, “All right, what movie is this from?” Who’s in this production photo? When was this actually taken? You know, stuff like that. So there was definitely a lot of archeology like legwork involved there. Fortunately, Toho basically gave me carte blanche, so I sat down at my desk, and methodically went through all the photos. Then I just chose the ones that I thought looked the most interesting, as well as ones I hadn’t seen before, and was pretty sure no one else had either. One thing I especially loved was a lot of the the prototype ad documents. There were some really cool images from some of the films that were used for stuff like lobby cards, some clearly Photoshopped and kind of cut together, after the fact, and I find that stuff really interesting.
Also, a lot of the behind the scenes stuff where you can see the actual suspension wires. So, I just went through and spent a good solid couple of weeks of of the process just combing through all of the images, logging the ones that I particularly liked, and figuring out, due to the page count restrictions and the size restrictions, which ones should go where, etc. But, you know, obviously that’s a whole lot of fun. I mean, what what a great job, right?
JACOB – That sounds like the dream to me! I did notice as I was reading through the book that there’s indeed a lot of great photos in there. Yet, I also happened to notice that there were very few, if not any, behind-the-scenes photos that featured the suit actors from the films. Nothing really featuring Haruo Nakajina, Kenpachiro Satsuma, Tsutomu Kitagawa, or any of the other gentlemen that have carried the mantle of Godzilla. Was that because there was more of a focus on the GODZILLA character as a whole, instead of deep-diving every aspect?
GRAHAM – You know, to be honest with you, there weren’t a lot of images available that were a part of those archives. I know those photos exist, but they weren’t a part of the archives owned by Toho. So, that’s why we didn’t really feature a lot of those, simply because we didn’t have them. A lot of these photos that have made the rounds on the Internet, you know, like the famous one of our Nakajima-san, with the head off the Godzilla suit, smoking a cigaret in Godzilla costume, is actually not owned by Toho. It’s just not part of their archives. Thankfully though, we had a plethora of amazing stuff, an absolute wealth of great photos to choose from but certainly, you know, as with everything, there’s more that I wish I could have included. Still, we’re very happy with what we were able to select.
SEAN – Did you have to stay exclusive to using Toho’s archives? Was reaching out to the Tsubaraya estate not something Toho wanted done?
GRAHAM – Yeah, yeah, there was some exclusivity involved in the agreement. I mean, to be fair, that was the deal, right? So if there were specific images that we wanted, for example some of the video game images, you know, Toho just wouldn’t have done, we were able to kind of reach out and get those from different sources. But for the most part, for all the film stuff we really tried to keep with specifically what Toho already had.
JACOB – Was there anything Toho specifically did want in the book?
GRAHAM – No, no, no. They gave us a ton of freedom. Of course, when I had my final draft of the book, I then handed it over to Toho so that they could look through it. In their hands, they could read it and and approve it, but most importantly, I wanted to make sure that I got everything right. You know, checking to make sure I didn’t misspell or misquote something incorrectly. I mean, there’s a lot of history here, and I certainly wanted them to double check my work. Honestly, the only light main thing that they changed, which I found really fascinating, was when I had initially written the book I had given Godzilla a gender identity, as a “he” throughout. Godzilla is referred to as the King of the Monsters, right? So, the one major change that Toho made, which I love, and which I personally found really fascinating, was they changed all those “he/him” references of Godzilla to “it/them”.
When I asked them about that, their reply was “Would you refer to an earthquake, or a hurricane as a him? Godzilla is a force of nature”. Godzilla is not a conventional creature like we think of. I found that to be a really amazing viewpoint and one that I’m really happy to now know and understand. Toho’s official perspective on Godzilla, which I think is correct, is that Godzilla is, as they said, is a force, of nature, of destruction, of vengeance, whatever. Godzilla just exists.
JACOB- That’s incredible! So interesting that approved releases have referred to him as King of the Monsters, yet their official, canon answer is that Godzilla is, like other omnipotent beings of fictional nature.
SEAN – That’s really cool! So, Graham, when you were combing through the archives, how were you getting a grasp on any textual information in Toho’s archives? Do you know Japanese? Was the text information in English?
GRAHAM – You know, I don’t read or speak it. Well, actually, I speak a very small amount of Japanese because my wife and I went to Japan a number of years ago and tried to learn a little bit, but that’s it. Basically my day was, I would get up in the morning, I would watch whatever the next film was that I was going to be writing about, and then I would dive in and start doing the research. Blu ray commentaries, and various articles, interviews with the actors, interviews with the directors, essays that are written by different historians. You know, that kind of stuff.
SEAN – Aww darn, I was hoping there might be things like detailed shooting diaries, hell, maybe even catering receipts in those Toho archives! (laughs)
GRAHAM – (laughs) Right? I wish they had that too! But no. They really left me alone and just let me sort of dive in, you know, via the Internet to see what I could find. And obviously for some films there was more than others.
Truly though, when I was a kid, one who loved horror movies, my dad bought me this incredible picture book that had all the movie monsters. You know, it had, Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolfman, and it also had the modern icons like Jason, and Freddy, and Leatherface, and Pinhead, all those newer characters. So, as a kid, before I was old enough to even see these movies, I was already fascinated with reading about them. Each chapter of this book would have a little bit of a of a story about what happens in the movies where this character is present, and a little bit of backstory about them. So going into my book on Godzilla, and all the films, I said to myself “I want to be that book for Godzilla. I want some 12 year old kid that maybe, you know, likes monsters but doesn’t really know much about Godzilla. to be able to crack open this book and and and get a same kind of sense for it, overall. Because, wow, there’s over 30 films in this franchise. It’s potentially a very intimidating prospect for somebody to dive into. What I was hoping was that with this book, it would get people excited. It would give people a a sense of the legacy of the Godzilla franchise, which I obviously find to be very important, but that it also would give people a sense of what each movie was about and and why each movie is cool and unique in its own way and allow people maybe to pick and choose.
Somebody might look at, you know, Godzilla VS. Megalon and go, “Yeah, this one looks good for me” and then watch that. If that gets them hooked, great, or if somebody is like, “Man, we’re watching that new Shin Godzilla. That looks like it’s for me”, and that gets them fantastic. I just hope to be that resource and, you know, hopefully I succeeded. I mean, my very favorite things that I get are people who who bought these books for their kids and then seeing a picture of some ten year old kid sitting in his bunk bed reading this book just fills me with such absolute joy.
JACOB – How did you find the balance between having a book accessible enough for young readers, while at the same time, having something appealing to the older readers? You know, people who have been following Godzilla all of their lives? Because, wow, there were some things in your book even I didn’t know about, and I’ve deep-dived for many, many years!
GRAHAM – You know, I really I don’t know! (laughs) I just I just tried to put the stuff in there that I found really fascinating, cool, and interesting because I figure, well, I’m sort of the target audience for this, as well. So, what would I want to read about? What would surprise me? You know, I thought that I knew everything, but some stuff really shocked me, there’s certainly still so much more out there. I mean, this is by no means the absolute comprehensive last word everything. You know, I’ve had people that have contacted me online and said, why didn’t you mention more about X, Y or Z? And it’s like, Well, ummmm…
SEAN – Ugh. I can get a little chaffed by critical fans that have zero idea of how a project like a book, or a film, is put together. The juggling and overview required is something not a lot of people, who have never done it, fully understand.
GRAHAM – You know, we did have page count restrictions, I couldn’t just write a thousand pages on everything, so it’s it’s definitely a balance of of what is, like you said, accessible, and what an acolyte might appreciate. What pictures and information are the most interesting, and what’s the best as far as providing readers with a comprehensive but still entertaining overview of the franchise?
SEAN – One of my favorite things about your book is, while it’s admittedly light on word count, the text really lives up to the almost accidental phrase . The. Words. All. Count. It’s tightly written, comes of professional and knowledgeable without being up it’s own behind, and is a really inviting read. It’s not too opaque.
JACOB – I agree, wholeheartedly. It flows. I personally wanted to thank you as well, because I think this is the first official encyclopedia book for Godzilla films, in a number of years. There’s one that’s extremely out of print from before my time, and very inaccessible to new readers. Also, a couple in the nineties, but those were unofficial. They didn’t work with Toho, to my knowledge. And this is the first time in the 25 years or so that there’s been a complete encyclopedia book like this, and I’ve been waiting a long time. I really appreciate how much love and care you’ve given Godzilla.
GRAHAM – Awwww, you just gave me goose bumps, and just made me so happy. Thank you. Like I said, I it was such an honor for me to be able to, one, just work with Toho because, I mean, they’re legends. Then, to be able to to just be a small part of this and to think that, you know, again, like if one if just one kid gets into Godzilla because of this, that’s truly making a mark on something. That’s what it’s all about, right there. I’m really, really proud of it. I’m so thankful to Toho, who were really amazing to work with, you know? I am just as thankful to the fans that that have embraced it, as well.
JACOB – I have a silly question, something just for fun. As I was reading through the book cover-to-cover, I saw that Godzilla Vs. Charles Barkley was one of your all-time favorite pieces of Godzilla lore!
GRAHAM -(laughs) Yeah. It sure is.
JACOB – That’s pretty funny. Why, though?
GRAHAM – Well, I mean, it’s so silly. In fact, you know, it’s funny you ask this. Around two weeks ago, three weeks ago, I was in a comic store and one of the special comics that they had behind the counter was indeed the Godzilla Vs. Charles Barkley one off. So I, of course, had to take a picture with it, and I was really excited to see it, and get to thumb through it. I mean, I just I love stuff like that. I love stuff that is a total one off, and based on a commercial of all things. I find it fascinating that somebody in an ad department was insane enough to suggest “You know who could stand up against Charles Barkley? Godzilla…”
In fact, I got to interview the amazing director John Carpenter for Scream Factory a couple of months ago, about the Godzilla franchise because he’s a huge Godzilla fan. It’s also no small secret that his second love is being a massive NBA fan. So, I referenced Godzilla VS. Barkley and I asked him… If you were to make that comic today, who would Godzilla be going up against, and who would Godzilla take on in a game of one-on-one? He said Steph Curry, but the same time, he also thought that most of the L.A. Lakers would also be needed at some point, to actually take Godzilla down!
SEAN – So Jake and I play a game where we name people or characters we would have liked to have seen go up against or even team up with Godzilla. Mine is Elvis and Godzilla, working their shit out with each other against the backdrop of the Hawaiian islands. I’m actually kind of halfway surprised that was never suggested. (laughs)
GRAHAM – Oh man, that would be hilarious, and potentially great.
SEN – Jake, what would be yours?
JACOB- It’s rival studios, but I’d like to have seen Daimajin and Zatoichi mix it up. That’d be dope!
GRAHAM – Oh, there you go! That’sa good one, yeah!
SEAN – Your turn, Graham. You can have anybody or anything go up against Godzilla. Bring it.
GRAHAM – I mean, maybe mine would be way more commercial in a very literal sense, and I would see this as like some sort of a Saturday morning cartoon special, but… what about Godzilla versus the Jolly Green Giant?
(a good ten seconds of laughing)
SEAN – Oh, boy. I thought you were going to say Scooby-Doo, or something.
GRAHAM – That’d be great too, Scooby-Doo and the gang dealing with Godzilla, but I was trying to think of somebody big, you know, and…yeah, getting Godzilla to eat his green beans would awesome to see.
JACOB – Graham, I have just one more question, and it’s definitely a closer. What does Godzilla mean to you?
To me, he’s an old friend. I can always come back and he’ll be right there. No matter where I am in life, or what’s going on, Godzilla will remain a constant friend, welcoming me back with open arms. I really appreciate the community I’ve found that share this love for Godzilla, and I wouldn’t be doing Kaiju United without him.
GRAHAM – Wow. Good question. I mean, obviously my relationship to Godzilla has has changed since doing this book. It has has become a an absolute part of my DNA since being able to do this project, but I think in general, Godzilla to me is sort of the epitome of what art can do. You’re in the wide spectrum of art and what art is capable of, with the thirty-five and counting filmography at your hands. You have popcorn fun, and sometimes mindless entertainment. You also have inspirational stuff for kids. You have cartoons. You have deep philosophical meanings of the original film, and the serious metaphors in others. You have deep cultural meaning. You have really profound cultural criticism. You have all these things. For me, the Godzilla franchise has all of that. You know, the franchise every flavor in at some point. Depending on any day, I know there’s always a Godzilla film or a piece of Godzilla media that I can go to to fit the thing that I’m looking for. And very, very few artistic creations can lay claim to that.
That, to me, is why I think I just find the collective films so profound as as an artistic creation and as an artistic statement. Ultimately, this character encapsulates, to use an overused phrase, every single aspect of the human condition. I just I find it endlessly fascinating, and constantly entertaining. I just find it really, really amazing in the truest sense of the word, that within the same franchise and with the same character, if I am looking for a Citizen Kane level cinematic achievement, I can find that. Yet, within the same character, in the same franchise, I can also find a a live action Saturday morning cartoon that I can sit and watch with my six year old niece and she’ll friggin’ love it. That that is what Godzilla means to me. For me, it’s definitely one of the ultimate artistic creations in the history of cinema. I can’t help but admire that, with pretty much every fiber of my being.
JACOB – I wholeheartedly agree. That’s what it’s all about right there.
SEAN – Yup. Well said Graham. Thank you so much for spending some time on the horn with us here at Kaiju United. We are very grateful, both for you carving out a place for us in your schedule, and for the lovely book.
JACOB – Which every Godzilla fan should absolutely own, in my opinion. We also hope to have you back for another conversation at some point, because this was really fun!
SEAN – Any final words, for now, Graham?
GRAHAM – I’d like to thank Kaiju United for having me, and may a whole new generation keep discovering Godzilla!
To order GODZILLA: THE OFFICIAL GUIDE TO THE KING OF THE MONSTERS click HERE
Graham Skipper’s Filmography:
ALMOST HUMAN
BEYOND THE GATES
THE LEECH
His directorial work, SEQUENCE BREAK
