He also found work at a PR management company, swiftly rising up the ranks – he was Jamie Foxx’s first publicist, then managed Chaka Khan for two years. I’m giving up everything, and I’m gonna join a gym.’” And in a flash I just thought: ‘You know what, no more. I didn’t know how I got home, I didn’t know who I was looking at in the mirror. Then, one morning in 1988, he got out of bed “amazed I had woken up.
Barry's bootcamp crack#
Crack was a favourite: “I was big on overdosing.” The therapist thought I liked horror because horror movies actually end In 1983, at 20, he left New York for Los Angeles to pursue songwriting, but before long “was on every drug you can imagine”. Jay’s was not a traditional path to moviemaking. He watches a different horror film every night. Next to his bed, he says, there’s a Chucky doll. His office is covered in horror film posters and memorabilia, including a 6ft model of Halloween’s Michael Myers, wielding a knife. Forever sweet and chirpy, Jay is speaking from his home in Nevada. His adult escape room is rather different. Killer Therapy … Jay wanted to include some personal experience.Īs a child, and then as a young man ill-at-ease with his sexuality, Jay sought refuge in the storage shed of a neighbouring apartment block. Because I had no idea when the fear was going to end.” I can see that: comparisons to my life where I couldn’t do that. “The therapist thought I liked horror because the horror movies actually end. The house resembled a lot of the violence. Jay grew up in a “really rageful household” dominated by his “very angry” father in Monsey, a suburb of New York. I was under height, underweight, quite a target at school and in the neighbourhood.” “Of seeing people in peril.” Therapists have credited this to his traumatic childhood.
“There was an attraction to that feeling of chills running down my spine,” he says. But two years ago, aged 55, he retired to make horror films. There are now 70 Barry’s across 14 countries. I n 1998, Barry Jay co-founded a gym called Barry’s Bootcamp in West Hollywood.