WILMINGTON — On recent episodes of the Midmost Coast, hosts J. Allen Henderson and Sean Gallagher have tackled the history of “bizarro Wilmington,” (i.e Brunswick Town), the highs and lows of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Raw Deal,” and the relative merits of the region’s many sausage-egg-and-cheese biscuits.
More on the last one, later.
Don’t overthink the name
There isn’t much story to the name, Henderson said. After starting in March of 2016, the two hosts got down to business, melding their two driving interests of history and film.
Henderson is the cinephile of the two. With a background in video editing and production, he moved to Wilmington while Screen Gems was booming: “Dawson’s Creek” was still filming and “One Tree Hill” would start production two years later
“I have a home studio – and I had plenty of experience doing audio production – and so it was a good opportunity to try things out and experiment with it,” Henderson said. “There was a lot of film and TV happening here and we just started having fun getting into it and picking apart the lore and how the films got made.”
Gallagher, meanwhile, brought his history interest to the podcast.
“My interest is in history, I’m not as well educated in film as Allen is,” Gallagher said. “But I love history — our first podcast on the battleship, I warned people, I can talk about it for hours if I’m not interrupted. I’ll be downtown and someone will ask a question about it – not to me, just to the air – and I’ll already be answering it.”
A little bit R-rated
The two try to take on their combined interest with a light-hearted sense of humor, although the hosts do work blue.
“It is a little bit R-rated,” Henderson said. “It is an adult podcast.”
Gallagher added that much of the hosts’ mutual sense of humor has come from the quality of the programs they have reviewed.
“Some of the films we’ve touched on have been pretty… well, really, really not good. Like ‘Maximum Overdrive’ not good. TV shows too, we did the pilot of ‘One Tree Hill’ and we were pretty ruthless,” Gallagher said. “It’s going to be interesting when we get to good films. We’ve been having fun picking apart some not-so-good films, but it’s like we’re running out of those and then all of the sudden we’ll be reviewing ‘Blue Velvet’ and it’s going to be a whole new ball game.”
With a side of fruit
Then there are those sausage-egg-and-cheese biscuit reviews.
“When we first started talking, we were talking, and we’d rhapsodize on silly concepts that couldn’t be a full podcast,” Henderson said. “One idea that didn’t make was Sean was going to review bathrooms of restaurants and diners, another idea was – well, Sean’s favorite breakfast is a sausage, egg and cheese biscuit, with a side of fruit, he’ll tell you, it has to have a side of fruit.”
Now the podcast includes Gallagher’s review of local breakfast biscuits – and accompanying sides of fruit.
The future
https://youtu.be/cSCSTkEMjlQ
Henderson said he would to take on some more serious issues in the coming year.
“We do want to do a more in-depth history piece on Wilmington, it has changed so much, I think we’d do from the renovation from the 1980s to now,” Henderson said. “We’d also like to do a piece on the 1898 riot.”
That, Henderson said, would require “tweaking” the show’s sense of humor a little.
“We’ll have to find a balance, we’d need to find the right tone. The thing is, with most history stories, there’s some positivity, even if it’s war, there’s a shared history. With a story like that (the 1898 riot), where nothing good came from it, I can see why people wouldn’t want to talk about it,” Henderson said. “We want to deal with it, but we’ll find the right way to do it.”
But the podcast will stick mostly to its roots, Henderson said, and there are some big movies ahead on the Midmost Coast docket.
“Obviously we’d like to do the big ones – ‘Iron Man 3’ for one – but we’d also love to do ‘Super Mario Brothers.’ It was for a long time just that weird movie that ruined ‘Mario Brothers,’ but now it’s starting to develop a cult status, so it’d be fun to weigh in,” Henderson said.
Gallagher, meanwhile, had a different movie in mind.
“Allen might not like me saying this, but I’ve told people that this whole podcast experience is a long con to get him to watch ‘Dune,’” Gallgher said. “I don’t know if it’s good in the traditional sense, and it wasn’t filmed here, but it’s David Lynch and I love it. We’ll see how someone really versed in cinema feels about it.”
There’s more planned for the upcoming season, Henderson said, including video segments, ramping up production to twice-monthly episodes, and – of course – more sausage biscuit reviews.
“We’re ramping things up, we’ve got some cool stuff coming — stay tuned,” Henderson said.
More information – and archived episodes – are available here. For ways to listen to the show, visit Midmost Coast’s “how to listen” page. You can also follow @sausagebiscuitreport on Instagram for “late breaking sausage news.”
Send comments and tips to Benjamin Schachtman at ben@localvoicemedia.com, @pcdben on Twitter, and (910) 538-2001.
