One of the best reasons to watch Monstervision and Joe Bob’s Last Call is its hunkalicious host: Joe Bob Briggs. Don’t get me wrong though, Joe Bob is a lot more than beefcake! He is hilariously funny, and is able to give incredible insights on even the most low-brow, low-budget film. Obviously, Joe Bob’s head is used for more than holding up those incredible cheekbones – so who’s in there? The answer: John Bloom.
The following is (hopefully) a fairly complete and accurate biography of John Bloom. The sources I have drawn from are linked at the bottom, please check them out! However, any inaccuracies are of course my responsibility, please let me know if one has slipped past me.
John Bloom was born in Dallas, Texas on January 27, 1953 before moving to Little Rock, Arkansas where he grew up. He is tall (6’4"), lanky and has wonderful wavy dark hair. He also has a limp from a bout of polio during his childhood. He started writing at the tender age of 15, doing sports for the local paper. After graduating from highschool, he attended Vanderbilt on a sports writing scholarship and graduated first in his class as a literature major. He wrote for the Dallas Times Herald beginning in 1978 before being hired by the Texas Monthly as an investigative reporter three years later. His journalistic writing earned him two nominations for the National Magazine Award and he was the winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Social Reporting.
In 1981, John Bloom returned to the Dallas Times Herald as a film critic, reviewing current releases as well as foreign films. This led to the birth of Joe Bob Briggs on January 15, 1982 with the review of The Grim Reaper with the title, "Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In." In this review John Bloom introduced the redneck, oft-married, Texan B-movie critic to the world. The Joe Bob Briggs column which stuck to B-movies, was successful – in fact, several books of the best of Joe Bob’s columns were published. In 1984, Joe Bob’s columns were nationally syndicated and John Bloom’s crime novel Evidence of Love (written with Jim Atkinson) was published. (It was broadcast as ABC’s A Killing in a Small Town in 1990.)
However, the next year was not as kind to John Bloom as 1984 had been. On April 11, 1985 the Dallas Times Herald cancelled the Joe Bob column after complaints about a "We Are the World" spoof by Joe Bob. John Bloom quit the Dallas Times Herald in protest. Joe Bob Briggs' column continued at Dallas Observer through Universal Syndication and he began a line of video releases. After the Dallas Times Herald, he only did about a dozen columns for D Magazine as John Bloom.
John Bloom (who studied acting in New York City) began "Joe Bob’s Drive-In Theater" on The Movie Channel, where Joe Bob Briggs introduced B-movies. It was the network’s highest rated show for seven years and was nominated twice for an ACE award. In 1994, he switched networks to TNT and began hosting MonsterVision. He has appeared three times on the Tonight Show, been on Letterman, Married with Children, and the miniseries The Stand. In the years following John Bloom’s departure from the Dallas Times Herald, he has also appeared on the big screen:
In 1996, he began the "Godstuff" segment Wednesdays on Comedy Channel’s The Daily Show. Unfortunately, his on-screen successes meant there wasn’t time for the newspaper column and he ended Joe Bob’s column on November 30, 1997.
Currently, when not taping MonsterVision at the AMS Studios in Addison, Texas (he lives in Greenwich Village), John Bloom is a contributing writer for the religious satire magazine The Door. He has also been working on a Joe Bob Briggs movie script for the last three years, and hopes to put together a national Joe Bob Briggs tour.
Links
These wonderful sites helped provide me with the information to put together this page – Hazel says: check ‘em out!
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