Created by Matt Zoller Seitz
Directed by Judith Carter
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
Haruki Murakami
FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING. SIGNED BY TGE AUTHOR.
It started with a simple statement: “I could write about Road House every day for a year and never run out of things to say about it.” Writer and critic Sean T. Collins then spent a full year doing exactly that, penning daily meditations on director Rowdy Herrington’s cult-classic 1989 action flick 365 days in a row.
Essays, microfiction, song parodies, deep philosophical dives into the rules of bouncing, scene-by-scene analysis, close readings of the work of actors Patrick Swayze, Sam Elliott, Ben Gazarra, Kelly Lynch, and more—Pain Don’t Hurt is a year-long journey through what has been called the best “bad” movie ever made. Whether you know and love the film or plan to pay your first visit to the road house, let Pain Don’t Hurt’s crazy in-depth trip through this unique slice of movie magic be your guide.
“I’ve been reading books about pop culture for forty years. Pain Don’t Hurt is something I’ve never seen before. Imagine putting Guy Debord and the cast of Mystery Science Theater 3000 together in the same cigarettes-and-piss smelling dive bar, and hiring Raymond Carver to write a daily newspaper column about it. Yes, really.” —Matt Zoller Seitz
“The deepest of deep dives…Talmudic-scholarly in nature, and it doesn’t hurt. It’s real good, mijo.” —Bill Corbett, Mystery Science Theater 3000 / RiffTrax
“Road House is the story of one bouncer’s quest to free a small town from the iron fist of the guy who is on the verge of opening the area’s first JC Penney. Over half a dozen men will die for this.” —from Pain Don’t Hurt
All copies are new and signed by author Sean T. Collins.
These are the last of this edition that we have.
MZS.Press is the online arts bookstore founded by author, critic, and filmmaker Matt Zoller Seitz and directed by Judith Carter. It offers new, used, signed, collectible, and rare books on film, TV, music, photography, and the visual arts. The store was launched in 2019 on a different platform and has expanded to incorporate arts books published by MZSPress's private imprint: titles currently include Seitz's The Deadwood Bible: A Lie Agreed Upon and Dreams of Deadwood, about the HBO Western, and Walter Chaw's A Walter Hill Film.
Our deepest wish is to promote, encourage, and distribute work by small presses, academic presses, and individuals. Extraordinary work tends to get swallowed up on giant platforms like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The store's inventory of nearly 1000 volumes is currently in the process of being reconstructed after its relocation from Cincinnati, Ohio, to Dallas, Texas. The titles featured here are personally selected by a group of curators and advisors, including Seitz, Carter, and an array of critics, artists, journalists, educators, publishers, and arts mavens who are known for their ability to suss out what Seitz's jazz musician dad liked to call "the good sh*t."
"I feel comfortable using legal jargon in everyday life... I object!" Alicia Silverstone as Cher Horowitz in Legally Blonde, 2001
Matt Zoller Seitz
Critic, Author, Filmmaker, MZS Press Creator
Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large and film critic of RogerEbert.com; Features Writer for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, Contributing Writer for D Magazine and Texas Highways as well as finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism. His writing on film and TV has appeared in Sight and Sound, The New York Times, Salon.com, The New Republic and Rolling Stone. Seitz is the founder and original editor of the influential film blog The House Next Door, now a part of Slant Magazine.
Seitz has written, narrated, edited or produced over a hundred hours’ worth of video essays about cinema history and style for The Museum of the Moving Image, Salon.com and Vulture, among other outlets such as Texas Highways and AARP. His five-part 2009 video essay Wes Anderson: The Substance of Style was spun off into the hardcover book The Wes Anderson Collection. This book and its follow-up, The Wes Anderson Collection: Grand Budapest Hotel were New York Times bestsellers.
Other Seitz books include the New York Times bestsellers The Sopranos Sessions and Mad Men Carousel; TV (The Book), The Deadwood Bible: A Lie Agreed Upon, and The Wes Anderson Collection: The French Dispatch. He is also an interviewer, moderator, and film programmer who has curated and hosted film and TV presentations for the Museum of the Moving Image, IFC Center, San Francisco's Roxie Cinema, and other venues. He has launched a Dallas extension of his MZS Film Series at the historic Texas Theater. On October 3-6, 2024 he brought the legendary filmmaker Oliver Stone back to Dallas for a historic return to the city and the Texas Theatre!
Judith is quoted as saying "his hobbies include exotic dancing, moonwalking, and affixing masking tape labels to every food item in the refrigerator, including eggs. Oh and he has the attention span of a gnat." MZS agreed to it all except the moonwalking.