This Thursday August 29 at 7pm (doors open at 6:30pm) is the Littleton, Colorado premiere of “Triple Fisher: The Lethal Lolitas of Long Island.”

“Triple Fisher” is the number 60,837 most IMDb-ed movie of all time this week.  Thank you to all you IMDb users for making this happen! Because IMDb uses a top-secret weighted algorithm, it is unclear how this number is generated, but whatever you are doing, it’s working! Keep it up.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2630052/

A theme has emerged from the Melbourne Underground Film Festival line-up, and that theme is Lawrence Tierney.  The festival, which is being held from September 6th to September 14th, will present the World Premiere of the documentary “The Last Days of Joe Blow” about porn actor Michael Tierney, nephew of the late great Lawrence Tierney. Michael Tierney will be there in person. The festival is also running a Lawrence Tierney gangster film retrospective.  And on September 8th, “Triple Fisher” will be screened which, of course, stars Lawrence Tierney as Joey Buttafuoco’s father.

Some photos from the star-studded “Triple Fisher” screening:

Mr. Buttafuoco was kind enough to give me the following pull quote to promote the film: “Beautifully edited. Go see this movie!”

Joey also told me that he spoke to Mary Jo the day of the screening, and that she had known about “Triple Fisher” even before Joey did.  He even said that she might have actually come to the screening if she didn’t have to be in Vegas that evening.  He also said that he wished that “Triple Fisher” would have come out 20 years ago, right after the incident because it totally makes fun of the media frenzy that ensued.

One young lady (I won’t mention her name in case she wishes to remain anonymous) was so excited by Joey’s presence that she asked him sign her breasts.

At the Everything is Festival screening of “Triple Fisher,” Joey agreed to answer any and all questions from the audience.  Here are just a few of the amazing things that Mr. Buttafuoco told the audience:

1. Joey’s brother, Bobby Buttafuoco, is a world champion arm wrestler (hence the arm wrestling scene in “Casualties of Love”).

2. The Buttafuocos received $350,000 for the rights to their life story from CBS.

3. Joey was in jail with the Long Island Rail Road mass murderer Colin Ferguson, and Joey punched him in the face when the guards weren’t looking.

4. The reason that Joey pleaded guilty to the statutory rape charge was because Rupert Murdoch paid him $500,000 to go to jail and give Fox the exclusive story. (This makes no sense to me.)

5.  Joey really did snort dirty rain water that he scooped up from a puddle on the ground to wash down the cocaine in his nostrils, as depicted in “Triple Fisher.”

Thursday’s screening was amazing, thanks in no small part to man himself, the real life Joey Buttafuoco, appearing in person!  I was pretty nervous about showing the film to him until I met him right before the show.  I never thought I would utter these words, but Joey Buttafuoco is totally cool.  Even the naysayers who thought it was a bad idea to bring Joey to the event admitted that Joey was an extremely nice and charming guy. Thanks to Cinefamily, Everything is Terrible, and Joey B. himself for making this event happen!

The August 15th screening of “Triple Fisher” is almost guaranteed to possibly definitely maybe sell out!  The real Joey Buttafuoco is scheduled to attend in person!!!!  Join Cinefamily today and go to almost all of the Everything is Festival events for FREE!!!  Do it now or forever hold your peace.  Don’t come crawling to me the day of the show begging me to get you in if this thing sells out.  You have been warned!

….except there was one gentleman there who truly did not appreciate the Threee Geniuses pre-show.

“Made-for-sleazy: A 1990s tabloid princess rides again in ‘Triple Fisher’”

By Cheryl Eddy

Blame it on Amy: Barrymore, Parker, and Milano get into character.

FILM     Before Nancy Grace and 24-hour news channels turned every vaguely salacious story into a screaming headline — and before TMZ.com and Twitter captured and exploded every dark urge in the American heart — there was a more innocently lurid time. Proudly sordid news shows like Hard Copy and A Current Affair zeroed in on names like “Menendez” and “Bobbitt.” Sally Jessy Raphael investigated “Satanic baby breeders.” A white supremacist threw a chair into Geraldo Rivera’s face. In 1999, Vanity Fair dubbed the 1990s “the Tabloid Decade” — and one of the era’s most memorable crimes had to be the one involving Long Island teenager Amy Fisher.

Quick recap: Fisher was a 16-year-old temptress (or victim, depending on whom you believe) who hooked up with auto-body shop owner Joey Buttafuoco, 20 years older than her and inconveniently married. Their relationship grabbed national attention when Fisher strolled up to Buttafuoco’s front door and shot his wife, Mary Jo, in the face. (She survived, though they later divorced; in 2009, she penned Getting It Through My Thick Skull, a tell-all about being “married to a sociopath.”)

Naturally, pop culture couldn’t resist sinking its fangs into this deliciously trashy tale, and three made-for-TV films quickly went into production: Lethal Lolita — Amy Fisher: My Story, which aired Dec. 28, 1992, and starred Noelle Parker; The Amy Fisher Story, with Drew Barrymore; and Casualties of Love: The Long Island Lolita Story, with Alyssa Milano. (The latter two aired opposite each other on Jan. 3, 1993.) Two decades later, the Roxie hosts Triple Fisher: The Lethal Lolitas of Long Island, a campy, crazy-quilt film that mashes up the best (and worst) moments of all three docu-dramas. Obviously, I had to speak to the man behind the madness: Los Angeles filmmaker Dan Kapelovitz.

SF Bay Guardian It’s been years since l’affiare Buttafuoco. What made you want to revisit the story with Triple Fisher?

Dan Kapelovitz I actually had the idea [to edit the films together] right when they came out — so, over 20 years ago. I had some time off [recently] between jobs and I said, “Now’s the time to do it!” I called a friend of mine who was an editor, and we worked on it together. I mainly did it just as a fun thing. It’s gotten a lot bigger than I thought it was going to get. I’ve been showing it all over the country and people seem to really like it.

SFBG Did you watch all three when they originally aired?

DK I actually did. Two of them aired at the exact same time, so I had to tape one of them. It was a big media event at the time.

SFBG What did you find fascinating about the story, and why does it hold up today?

DK It was the first time in TV history that they made three films all about the same event. I think now the story’s almost kind of quaint, given 9/11 and everything that’s happened since. I don’t know, today, if that story would even get as much play as it did back then. I talk to young people, and they have no idea who Amy Fisher is, or Joey Buttafuoco. Some people say, “Oh, wasn’t that the guy whose wife cut off his penis?” They think it’s John Wayne Bobbitt.

I think people like Triple Fisher because it’s funny even if you know nothing about the story. And there are still tons of these made-for-TV movies. I just watched the Jodi Arias story. I watched the Anna Nicole Smith one. HBO now does these kind of high-profile ones, on people like Liberace and Phil Spector. I love ‘em all. Some are better than others, obviously, but it’s a good genre. And they crank them out pretty quickly. These Amy Fisher ones, the trials went through September or so, and the movies came out late December, early January. So they’re almost in real time. Considering how quickly they were made, they’re actually pretty good.

SFBG How did you decide which segments to take from each film?

DK Some things I wanted because they were so hilarious on their own. Sometimes, the three movies would depict the same thing, but they’d be slightly different, so I’d want to put those together. Or sometimes I might want to repeat something that I thought was funny, like Lawrence Tierney saying “Shut up!” [in a scene from the Alyssa Milano version]. I went through it millions of times and kept improving the jokes, re-editing it.

SFBG Did you have a favorite among the three movies?

DK At first, my favorite Amy Fisher was Noelle Parker, the least-known one. I thought she was the most realistic, and the most sympathetic. That film came from Amy Fisher’s story. The one with Alyssa Milano comes from the Buttafuoco point of view. And the Drew Barrymore one is from a journalist’s perspective, so it’s supposed to be more objective.

But now I think I like the Alyssa Milano one the best. I think it’s purposely funny, and then it’s also really dramatic. And I love the [sidekick] character played by Nicky Corello, who [has the line] “Way to go, Joey!” He has all the funniest lines in the movie. I actually called him up and he came to a screening. It was really cool because he had the original script and he let me have a copy, and he was telling all these crazy stories. He’d never even seen the original movie.

We’re doing another screening in LA [Aug. 15 at the Cinefamily], actually, and Joey’s going to come. I wonder what he’s going to think of it! It should be pretty wild.