On his Twitter feed six years ago, Fango’s Scott Wampler left me some very specific instructions:
I got you, bud.
Last week, following a lifetime of quitting, abandoning, and otherwise half-assing most of his worldly endeavors, Twitter-famous podcaster, writer, and absolute ho Scott Deborah Wampler put a big stupid bow on the whole mess by permanently peacing out at age 40-something. His sudden death was a shock to his fans and to the many friends who called him family but was, in retrospect, completely on-brand with his lifelong track record of bailing on things early, and of disappointing and inconveniencing the people who loved him.
Scott Wampler first entered my life when we were both writing for Birth.Movies.Death. He was loud and showy and, to the relief of his employers and his creditors, great at cranking out snappy, snarky news copy. He was not tall, which often surprised people who, based on his podcast-ready voice and oversized online presence, expected a giant. This means that, yes, Scott let people down the second they saw him.
Despite being a terrible listener who was fundamentally uninterested in anyone’s thoughts but his own, he somehow learned I was a huge fan of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. During one particular Fantastic Fest, he messaged me on the BMD Slack to tell me he had a ticket for me to attend a live score-accompanied screening of the film. I was excited to finally meet him in person, and to watch one of my favorite films with my new colleague.
But when I met up with him outside the Alamo Drafthouse on South Lamar in Austin, I realized he didn’t mean I could have A ticket; he meant I could have HIS ticket. Turns out, after finagling himself a seat for the sold-out event, he decided he just didn’t feel like going. Oh, and it was playing on the other side of town. “Go ahead, enjoy!” he said, waving me off and turning his focus back to sitting on the curb and smoking.
And so it began.
As referenced in the headline, Scott liked to give up on things. And I don’t just mean he was bad at commitment or follow-through. I mean he liked bailing on shit. He had what I can only call the opposite of FOMO, and to see it in action was both frustrating and jealousy-inducing. You see, when it came to entertaining himself, Scott lived by a code: if he wasn’t feeling it, he was out. A movie, a book, a party or a work event — it didn’t matter. He knew when he’d had enough and tapped out without hesitation.
This did not always serve him, and it definitely did not serve me, as a well-lubricated Wampler would frequently roll up to me after a screening to discuss or debate a film he only saw the first reel of and, well, that went about how you thought it might. I bring it up because I think it’s an important facet of who he was. It spoke to a restlessness in his very being, a constant vibe of “I could be doing something better right now” that I could never imagine doing in this line of work. He was not ashamed of this, nor could he be shamed about it. (There’s a great story — that’s someone else’s to tell — in which a filmmaker sent him a link of his upcoming, then-unreleased movie, and Scott replied with “Yeah, I couldn’t get through it.” Not gonna lie, I was green with envy.)
For a while I wrote this quirk off as Scott having Twitter brainworms, a social-media induced short attention span. That might be true. It’s probably true. In my weepy state this week, it’s been tempting to ascribe some kind of magical thinking to his restlessness; the idea that maybe Scott knew, on a subconscious or even metaphysical level, that he was here for a good time, not for a long time. (In reality it was probably something completely diagnosable and treatable, but I’m not a doctor, Scott was uninsured in America, and I’m trying to form a thesis for this thing, so here we are.)
In any event, if you weren’t his people (for whom, it must be said, he had infinite time and patience) you had about ten minutes to get his attention, or he was out. Bands, movies, film festival premieres with the filmmaker in attendance — these things all had the same ticking clock to prove they were worth his time. Many of them failed to do so.
Despite the constant disrespect he showed toward the medium, Scott was beloved by filmmakers and industry creatives, and this came in very handy indeed when, breaking format with a lifetime of minimal effort, he launched The Kingcast with his talented and beleaguered co-host Eric Vespe. Over 500+ episodes, Scott subjected scores of peers, venerated artists, and Stephen Fucking King to his particular flavor of chaos, while Eric (who deserves a medal or three) tried to keep shit from going too far off the rails. His success rate? You decide; I’m told it’s a fun podcast series.
It’s frankly a miracle that someone with Scott’s dearth of ambition and absolute lack of attention span co-conjured up a show as successful as The Kingcast. I suspect Eric did most of the actual work; now that Scott can no longer talk over him, perhaps the truth can finally come out. Nevertheless, at a live Kingcast taping in Bangor, I got to tell Scott how proud I was of him for creating his own path, for taking an idea and building it from the ground up, and having it become the resounding success it did. He thanked me and cut it out of the finished episode. Whatcanyado, as he often said, moving on before you realized that he wasn’t really asking.
But, as confirmed by my overheating iPhone this weekend, Scott’s true creative legacy was being hilarious on Twitter, as his 50,000 followers dug up old tweets and threads and jokes and pictures of Thicc Thanos and turned my feed into an All-Wampler affair. I was tagged in just enough to go down a few of Pop Pop’s rabbit holes myself, and I scrolled in disbelief. I of course unmuted him from time to time to see his tweets as they happened, but this week is when it really hit me: Surely no one has turned sitting on their ass and dicking around on their phone into the art form that Scott Wampler did.
Twitter was where Scott was maybe his most self-actualized, and seeing all his tweets over the years shared back to back in my feed this weekend provided an authentic mosaic of his voice, which contained nuances and multitudes, despite his wide reputation as a guy with three jokes on repeat. He showed how far a man-of-the-people attitude, a sense of humor that could find the joke in anything, and a minimal whiff of earnestness could take you. (Or take him, I guess; there’s a lot of imitation Wampler out there. Gross.) Scott was truly a self-made giant of Twitter — aside from his occasional, loudly announced three-day breaks, from which he’d return like the Dalai Lama, delivering the sage advice that you, too, should get offline for your mental health — and there have been times during Twitter’s ongoing campaign to destroy itself that I genuinely worried what Scott would do without that platform. In passing, he’s at least done me the service of taking that concern off my plate. Thank you, bb.
And now, in death, Scott gets the last laugh, as I and a close circle of friends are forced to interact with real world businesses and event professionals to help make sure Scott is sent off in… well, in a very stupid way. In a very Scott way. The conversations we’ve been forced to have with actual grownups about the graphics alone… that sonofabitch. He got our asses. He’s gonna get the epic hang he always felt entitled to and, as in life, he won’t be around to help clean up afterward. Classic Wampler.
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Okay, man. I’ve tried, but I can feel the “roast” nature of this piece tapering off. You and I busted each other’s chops endlessly (sometimes employing crowdfunding to do so) and it’s easy to make jokes that I know you would dig. But the truth is, as you said when I left BMD to relaunch Fango, you were my brother. And since people don’t usually bring their brothers with them to new jobs like I eventually did with you, I suppose you were more than that, weren’t you?
I tried to articulate this on the Kingcast the other day, but there have been many times over the past ten years when you were the only one in the room with me who got it. When someone is swimming upstream trying to make something cool or funny or silly happen in the genre coverage space, we all want that person in the room with us who just gets it. I’m more alone in those rooms than I was last week, and getting through those rooms will now be that much harder.
It can’t be overstated how you literally talked your way into all your many successes, and sometimes you did it so well that we got pulled along with you. I of course have a few pictures of you and me, but I’d rather share this one, which I’m not in but which I took. It was on the night we flew to Las Vegas to see Nine Inch Nails, and both the tickets and the backstage conversation with Trent Reznor were the result of your singular gift — your talent at winning people over simply by running your mouth. Just by being pure, uncut Scott Wampler (and despite you mailing him a $5 Arby’s gift card one Christmas), you and Reznor formed an online friendship which culminated in you being invited to meet your musical hero. I was honored to tag along. (I know I wasn’t your first choice, but you liked to keep me humble that way.) It was the happiest I ever saw you. The happiest I will ever see you.
As the two of you posed for the photo, Reznor said to you, “Thank god you’re not tall.”
You were a giant.
