In 1978, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes was set loose into the world. Billed as a musical-comedy-horror show, famous for its weirdly catchy theme song, and feted as the Worst Vegetable Movie Ever Made, it's a film in the vein of (and made at the exact same time as) Kentucky Fried Movie and Airplane! , as well as the Mel Brooks and Monty Python comedies that preceded it. Spoofing schlocky B movies from the 1950s and '60s, it follows the course of a seemingly unstoppable tomato attack on America and the brave team of government agents pledged to stop it in its tracks. There are musical numbers, and topical jokes from the 1970s, and lots and lots of people screaming as tomatoes both giant and normal-sized sit next to them.

If you aren't familiar, take 81 seconds to watch the trailer:

It's the perfect tomato movie. Against all odds, it became a part of pop culture, spawning three sequels (including

George Clooney's first second feature film!) and an animated spin-off series. Mention the title to people of a certain age, and they'll either roll their eyes or start giggling uncontrollably. One reviewer called it "hopelessly inane," and the film's creators took that as a badge of honor, putting it on the Director's Cut DVD. It's been 36 years since three friends in San Diego, just out of college--Costa Dillon, John DeBello, and Steve Peace--decided to take a break from their sports-reel business to make a ridiculous movie. And now, as we learned while reporting this piece, a relaunch of the series is planned for 2015. So we thought it was high time to talk to as many people involved with Attack of the Killer Tomatoes as possible, and compile the definitive history of a movie hailed by USA Today as having "one of the five best movie titles of all time."

Costa: I saw Attack of the Mushroom People , and I remember thinking,

How dumb is this? And suddenly got the idea that we could do something even sillier. I don't know why tomatoes came to mind first, maybe because they seemed so innocuous.

John: The idea was that "killer tomatoes" was about the stupidest thing you could come up with. It's probably one of the few films that came into existence because of a title.

Steve Peace*(writer, actor [Lt. Wilbur Finletter], former Democratic California state senator, now senior adviser to the owner of the San Diego Padres)*: We've all agreed to say that Costa came up with the title, because it makes him happy. No, to the best of my knowledge, he came up with the title.

EARLY DAYS: DO THEY ACCEPT TRAVELER'S CHECKS IN BABUSULAND?

Before moving on to the feature-length, 35-millimeter Attack of the Killer Tomatoes*, the trio worked on a number of short, 8- and 16-millimeter films, along with their high school friend (and* Killer Tomatoes leading man) David Miller.

Costa: I came up with the idea when I was still in high school, and two years later, we were all taking a film class at UC Davis, and we made a little Super 8 Attack of the Killer Tomatoes , maybe 15 minutes long.

And we got an A on it.

Steve: John's a filmmaker, and made films from the time he was a little guy, and Costa's just crazy.

John: Gosh, I had done a bunch of films when I was a kid, and actually had received national honors in a Kodak contest, and won some film competitions.

David Miller (actor [played the lead, Mason Dixon], recently retired from a 30-year career in the Mississippi Housing Authority) : I went to school with these guys for years, and we were on the same high school speech team, in San Diego. Our senior year, we decided we wanted to do a senior play--we were going to do A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum , but the administration of the school said we'd have to have the music department involved and all that, so we decided to do a movie instead. One was a short called Danger at the Farm , a Snidely Whiplash-type movie. I played an Indian chief, and had a lot of fun doing it.

Steve: We had also done a documentary, so to speak, on our high school football team, called I Hate to Say It Fellows But Psychology Is a Loser . That line came from an actual time when we were down, I believe, 25-nothing at halftime. We were all sitting in the locker room, and I was sitting right below the coach, and he says, "I hate to say it fellows, but I don't think we can win this one." I was about to take a sip of water and spit it out all over the floor. That's not a pep talk!

I think our team was 0 and 11 that year, and we dove into the deep psychology of a losing high school football team. It was pretty good.

David: Then there was another movie called Do They Accept Traveler's Checks in Babusuland?

Steve: It was an hour-long Super 8 feature film, believe it or not.

David: I played a special agent in that. Then John contacted me a few years later and said, "We decided we're going to do a killer tomato movie, and I want you to do the lead in it."

THE MONEY: PUT ME IN, COACH

Costa: After college, we formed this company, Four Square Productions, making sports films. We did highlight films and high school football films, international volleyball association, Indiana State football games--we became the go-to place for analytical films and highlight films. Before videotaping, teams would shoot the films, take it to some lab, they'd process it, and the players would watch it the next week. We bought our own developing machine and rented an old cinderblock garage and set up a whole developing system--what we would do is on Friday nights we would find all these football games in high schools in San Diego, then have drop off points where photographers would drop the film off, process it that night, and then have it on the doorstep of the coach on Saturday morning.

We were making some money with this kind of really routine ordinary filmmaking, but there wasn't much creativity to it.

John: Like every indie film that ever existed, you start close to home--friends and family and people who know you and, for whatever reason, want to take a chance.

Costa: We raised about $90,000, just from friends and relatives.

We didn't know anyone in Hollywood, none of us knew anything about the business.

Steve: Later on, there were a few Christmases of awkwardness, because everyone at the table had put money in the deal.

Costa: When you're 23 years old, you think you can do anything until someone tells you you can't.

THE INSPIRATION: A JAPANESE HORROR FILM COMEDY MUSICAL COMMENTING ON THE DIFFICULTY OF THE MODERN BUREAUCRACY

John: I was, like Costa, always a big fan of the '50s thrillers and horror pictures-- The Crawling Eye , The Blob , the thousand variations thereof.

Steve: This was post-Vietnam, first of all, and there was an emergence of satire--a very light level layered with "What if you did a Japanese horror film that was a comedy musical that was really at its core sort of commenting upon the difficulty the modern bureaucracy has of dealing with big problems and distasters?"

Costa: We were movie nerds. I could tell you all the writers on The Tonight Show , we would sit there and try to guess what writer wrote which parts. I look at these Judd Apatow things, we never wanted to do that--never wanted to do the cheap scatological humor. We always wanted to something we thought was clever, whether or not anyone else thought it was clever. There was a late '70s sort of new wave of humor that was coming out.

When Airplane! came out a few months after our movie, we looked at it and said, "That's our movie with a budget."

Steve: The Wilbur Finletter character, with the parachute dragging behind, came out of the original college short. We shot a scene on a windy day where I was just going down a cliff, and the wind caught the parachute, and it was a hilarious scene. You tell anyone in that outfit to try to get down a cliff with the wind going, and it was a good three minutes of getting knocked down, total cinema verite.

And all of us have deep military roots, we've all been around the linear, eye-on-the-ball-don't-distract-me-from-my-mission tunnel vision. Guys who you tell them to go get a pizza, by god they're gonna go get a pizza. [Finletter's] mission is the tomatoes.

THE TOMATOES THEMSELVES

Costa: We had what I called "stock tomatoes" and "star tomatoes." Stock tomatoes were the ones we were going to smash and throw, but we would buy first-rate tomatoes for the stars. We'd get the stock ones cheap because they were blemished, or starting to rot.

Nothing smells better than tomatoes sitting in a garbage can for a couple weeks.

The opening scene with the tomatoes was a little tricky, they wouldn't do anything until we parboiled them for a few minutes, but then they would splat really good.

John: It was wonderfully, remarkably low-tech. We made all these different giant tomatoes we used to take around in a trailer truck. To get them to move, we'd just roll them, it was totally absurd.

Costa: For the big tomatoes, we tried all kinds of things. We tried to make a framework out of PVC, we tried papier mache, they looked awful.

We tried a balloon; that looked ridiculous. What we ended up using was this soundproofing material they were using inside the walls of the BART cars.

Steve: My wife's dad was at Rohr, a big manufacturing company in San Diego, and they had a bunch of this extra stuff.

Costa: We would dig semicircles in the ground, put this stuff in, dig it out once it hardened, and cement the two halves together. We could roll it maybe two or three times before it disintegrated.

Steve: Little do people know that when they take that nice, comfortable ride in a BART car, they are insulated by...killer tomato!

PRODUCTION: THE HELICOPTER, OF COURSE, ACTUALLY CRASHED

Principal filming ran for a month in 1977, to be followed by pickups in 1978 after another round of fundraising. Production went about as well as could be expected.

John:

Other than crashing a helicopter and almost killing three people, there were almost no problems at all.

Costa: It was a hoot. If we needed to block off a road for a chase scene, we just went and got some road-block kind of things and put them up for an hour or so, filmed, and took them down and left. Everyone just assumed it must have been somebody from an official department. We just did it.

David: They never asked permission to do anything. There's one scene where I drag Lieutenant Finletter [played by Steve Peace] around with his parachute stuck in my car door. We were in a residential area, and he was laying on some kind of a board with wheels on it. They said let's do a practice run, and had someone else driving the car. They were dragging him along, go around a curve, and he flanged out, into a parked truck. He went under and hit his head on the axle, and

I turn to John and say, "I think he's dead." He said, "Damn, we weren't filming."

We drug him out from underneath the truck, and he was knocked out cold. But when he came to, the first thing Steve says is "Did we get that on film?" We say no, and he says, "Damn, well move the truck and let's do it again."

Steve: This is how stupid we were. In Do They Accept Travelers' Checks? , a young woman who is now my wife played the role of a young woman who was to be shot. Mike Grant, this guy who was a year below us in high school, he was like our MacGyver. He put wax bullets in a real gun and tested the amount of gunpowder by trial and error to see when it was non-lethal, then put red ink in the wax, so when it was shot out it would spread, and look like blood.

We just stuffed a book down her blouse, and said don't worry about it.

Costa: We rented the San Diego Stadium for the entire day for $200, and just spent the whole day smashing tomatoes. And that fancy hotel in San Diego, we were the first film to ever be allowed to shoot there. It's interesting, San Diego in 1977 was still not a very large city, and they were thrilled to have us filming, even though we were this tiny movie. We were a SAG film, though, which was unusual for a low-budget movie. Even though you look at them and say, "I can't believe these people are professionals," we paid scale.

John: One day, we were filming outside Rohr, and a couple hundred yards away someone in a forklift forgot where he was going and sliced right through the high-tension power lines, blew up a bunch of power boxes, and put the whole giant plant into darkness.

Costa: And then the helicopter, of course, actually crashed. That was part of the '78 pickups, and we scraped together a little more money to get Jack Riley [a regular actor on the Newhart show] to come do that one scene.

John: By the grace of God, two things happened. One, the actors were unhurt, and two, one of the cameramen had the presence of mind to keep the camera rolling. I used to love this moment watching it in the theater--you're watching this schlocky-on-purpose movie, and all of a sudden ten minutes in, there's this spectacular helicopter crash. This was the age before digital, audiences didn't just yawn. For years, people used to ask if that was real.

Costa: The guy who had the helicopter was a crop duster friend of somebody's. In Hollywood, you can rent anything, and they don't care who you are as long as you've got money--guns, police cars--it was great fun driving down the interstate in a cop car, seeing people slow down.

But the day when we drove out to the tomato field, where the helicopter crashed, the people working there at the time started running for the hills as soon as we pulled up. In a couple of scenes, 300, 400 feet from the border, people would keep walking through our scenes while we were trying to film, we were on their route north.

David: I had already moved to Mississippi with my wife by the time they wanted to do the pickups, in '78--they asked me if I'd come out and fly in a helicopter and all that, and I said I'd be happy to if they sent a plane ticket. They contemplated, and decided they didn't need me all that bad.

What ended up happening is this helicopter came flying in, and the tail tipped and hit the ground and broke the rotor, and it spun around and around and crashed.

John: I actually ran in and pulled these guys out of the helicopter.

I would have been really embarrassed if I had to tell their agents they were dead.

Everyone was miraculously just fine, but then there's this lovely helicopter that's starting to burn up, and I'm thinking to myself: I should ask them to go and crawl out to build a scene out of this. And thinking, that's so so wrong to ask.

And as soon as I think this, Jack Riley suggests: "Hey, why don't we go crawl out of the wreckage and ad lib some dialogue?" I said, "Hey, that's a great idea!"

Costa: Riley was on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson playing that clip, talking about almost being killed filming a low-budget movie.

THE MUSIC: ATTAAACK OF THE KILLER TOMAAAATOOOOOES

John: I wrote the theme song. That was my contribution to American culture. It was played on the Space Shuttle, and it closed the CBS Evening News one night, so I've done my part with Irving Berlin.

Costa: We wrote all the songs, and the music was written by Gordon Goodwin. He's quite renowned now.

Gordon Goodwin*(Grammy-winning composer for* Animaniacs*,* Con Air*, and a number of other films, leader of the big band the Big Phat Band)*: My roommate, who was a guy I didn't even know that well, his brother was making a movie down in San Diego. You'd think if you could trust the fate of your score to someone, you would want to hear that they knew what they were doing. Which I didn't.

But the truth was I would have paid to do it. Really, I practically did--I remember I got the check, it might have been three years later.

Costa: We've seen a lot of elements of our films stolen since they came out. Tim Burton directly stole the "exploding because of obnoxious music" idea for Mars Attacks! We came up with "Puberty Love " because

Donny Osmond was popular, and, ugh, every time it came on the radio it was like nails on a chalkboard.

We were not big fans of 8- or 9-year-olds singing about love.

Gordon: John and Costa wrote the theme song, but I arranged it, and kind of came up with the sound of it. I used a mini-moog, one of the first synthesizers, to play the bass line. I remember I was really influenced by Henry Mancini, who wrote the score to Silver Streak with Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor, which I had just seen, and John Williams's Star Wars stuff, and then Lalo Schifrin, who did the jazz score for Bullitt , with Steve McQueen. I stole a lot of that.

DISTRIBUTION: WHY NOT JUST TAKE YOUR MONEY TO VEGAS?

Costa: We lost our shirts in distribution. We didn't pay our bills. And we learned later that we were doing things totally against the standard operating procedure of low-budget films. You're supposed to raise a lot of money, pay yourself a huge portion of it, and then make a movie with whatever was leftover. Our problem was that we wanted to have a movie we liked.

John: I always got a kick out of dealing with the distribution stuff. We distributed it region by region, which was fairly common back then, and made separate deals. That way, if one company went under, it wouldn't destroy your whole picture.

Steve: We eventually hooked up with Harper Paul Williams at Pacific Film Enterprises, and he convinced us to stick to it, reshoot some stuff, raise more money, and distribute it ourselves. If we hadn't done that, we wouldn't own it today.

Costa: I still have the Daily Variety printout sheets from 1978 showing we were in the top 100 films at the time. If you look at the one-sheet for the movie, it says at the bottom, "distributed by North American International Entertainment," which was a name I came up. It was just grandiose enough that people thought they'd heard of it before.

John: There was one distributor in Los Angeles, a guy who had been in the business for years, had to be late 60s, early 70s. In 1978, you figured he started watching movies when they were still silent. His kid was probably 30 or so, and his kid thought Killer Tomatoes was really cool.

The dad actually asked us if we used a script or made it up as we went along. But still, they put it out, and it did alright.

But afterwards, the father asked a very fair question. He looked at me and said, "Why didn't you just take your money to Vegas and put it on red?" He never understood why people liked it, and that's emblematic of the movie--

you either get it or you don't.

Costa: Another accidentally good decision: we shot it on negative film. It was way more expensive than positive film, but the quality for reproduction was way better. So what happened was when video tape came along, in the early '80s, we were fortunate enough to be one of the first 100 titles. It's hard to remember, but major studios didn't like videotape at first. We didn't care. And if you had a brand new video deck and there are only 20 films to rent in a little store, you're gonna watch all of them!

Steve: The breaking point for us, in terms of marketing, was a call from this guy buying pictures for Wometco, the biggest theater chain in the Southeast. He was onto the sneaky distribution practices of big companies, who in those days forced theater owners to buy the pictures sight unseen, without even trailers.

One distributor had a particularly big film scheduled to come out in the summer, and this guy was going to be smarter than his peers, and had seen our trailer, and would book that instead. He wanted 125 prints, and we only had about 25, and they cost $1,500 each. A lot of money, and the way it worked was you only made money once the up-front costs had been covered.

We debuted, and actually did very solid numbers, but unfortunately

the picture that this guy had turned down was a little film called Star Wars . So Killer Tomatoes played in the South for years to work off the debt.

THE BIG BREAK: THE WORST VEGETABLE MOVIE OF ALL TIME

Michael Medved*(conservative radio host, author of many books, including* The Fifty Worst Films of All Time and The Golden Turkey Awards*)*: It would be misleading to say that the nomination of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes for Worst Vegetable Movie was the result of intensive or exhaustive research regarding the treatment of fruits or vegetables in films.

John: I don't think he had even seen the movie, just heard the title, but Harry Medved called and said, "We're doing the World's Worst Film Festival, and would love to have Attack of the Killer Tomatoes ." I said, "You can have it on one condition: that we win." So the fix was in for Worst Vegetable Film.

It's a classic lesson to this day: it hasn't happened unless it happened in New York. The Wall Street Journal had the poster on its front page, the CBS Evening News used the song to close their credits. When people heard the title, just like when I heard the title, people loved it.

Costa: It's a pretty small category, since

Attack of the Mushroom People would have been a fungus movie, technically.

Michael Medved: With the first book, The Fifty Worst Films of All Time , it was just a throwaway concept in a list of book proposals I had, but it got a contract and I was stuck actually doing it. Meanwhile, I had all these other projects, and a lecture schedule. So I spoke to my then-15-year-old brother, Harry, to ask if he would be my research assistant. He was thrilled, and kept working on The Golden Turkey Awards , the next book.

Harry Medved*(Michael's brother, now works at Fandango)*: I grew up in Los Angeles watching the Late Late Show, in the days before infomercials, when late-night TV was old creature features, and shows called Movies Till Dawn. Matango, the Fungus of Terror [also known as Attack of the Mushroom People ] was one of my favorites, and there was a guy named Seymour who hosted these movies, and would do a little schtick between commercials--after Attack of the Mushroom People , he had a musical interlude "from the Mushroom Tabernacle Choir." It's exactly what you want to see when you're 12 years old.

So I heard of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes when I was 17 years old, and thought, With a title like that, I've got to see it . It wasn't even playing for a full week, just four days, at this rundown third-run theater in the San Fernando Valley--it was like going to hell and back. But it's so stupid that it's good, and I thought it was worth celebrating.

Steve: That actually resuscitated all the activity in the South--Wometco recovered their money, we recovered our money, just because of the news exposure from New York. But just as important, all these little independent theaters started making money off of Rocky Horror midnight shows, and figured they could double-bill with Killer Tomatoes , and also run Killer Tomatoes as a matinee.

John: This may be the only movie ever that had huge audiences for midnight showings and matinees. The people who dug the tomatoes and all the stupidity were college kids and 8-year-olds. High school kids had no idea what it was.

But then it became one of the best settlers in this new thing called videotape, because it was a niche movie. It was not designed to play in 1,000 theaters.

THE RETURN: FROM MUPPET BABIES TO GEORGE CLOONEY

Costa: What happened after is that we did another movie, not particularly famous, called Happy Hour , with Jamie Farr and Rich Little, for New World Pictures. There were so many cooks and hands in that thing that by the time it was done, we didn't even like it.

But there was this show called Muppet Babies , a cartoon show based on all the Muppets, and they showed a clip of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes . Something to do with nightmares, or something. [ Ed note: In the episode "The Weirdo Zone ," Fozzie Bear recounts his adventures with an "Attack of the Silly Tomatoes"--they were, of course, attacking him for telling bad jokes. ] It turned out to be their most popular episode, and New World had some connection to Muppet Babies , so they contacted us, and asked if we wanted to do a sequel. We said, "Not particularly, we've moved on from that."

But then they used the magic words: we'll pay you.

David Miller: When I was moving to Mississippi, John had come to me and said, "If this is real successful, we want to do some sequels, why don't you stick around?" I said no, I'm moving, find somebody else.

Ultimately, they found George Clooney. In a way, I gave him his big break. I don't know if he knew that or not.

John: Return of the Killer Tomatoes was George Clooney's first movie [ Ed note: technically, his second in a lead role, but his first as a star ], and he somehow managed to survive.

Costa: The second one is really a film about sequels, and the mercenary business of Hollywood. Since they were willing to have us make another one, we wrote the script, same thing, Fox picked it up as a cartoon show, and we had toys and lunchboxes and all that stuff. We didn't really intend to go back to Killer Tomatoes .

LIFE AFTER KILLER TOMATOES: WHY NOT LIE ABOUT A GOOD ONE?

John: It was all shot in San Diego County, but people would insist it was shot in New Jersey, or shot in Kansas. I ask, "Why do you think it was shot in New Jersey?" They say a friend of theirs worked on it. There are people who have claimed to have directed Attack of the Killer Tomatoes .

If you're going to lie about directing a movie, why not lie about a good one?

Steve: The only time that it was ever a liability in a campaign was right after we had made that film Happy Hour . My opponent was a social conservative, I think that is the politically correct terminology. And if you remember video cassettes, every single one has an FBI warning on it about theft. So my opponent put this mailing out attacking me because I make movies that are so scurrilous, the FBI has warned people against even watching them.

I got the best of him, though. Four Square Media did the media campaign for his opponent later on, and we stumbled on a tape recording of him giving a speech claiming that the U.S. Army had embraced and endorsed the office of an official witch, and promulgated the notion that there are witches and witchcraft. We did a television spot with a little animated witch on an Air Force jet, aired in all in the week before Halloween, and it was hilarious: he was running in a very safe Republican district, but lost to a Democrat who, three years later, was busted for prostitution and had to quit.

Costa: Everyone in the Park Service knows this is my background. Once, I was landing a helicopter for Manuel Lujan , a Secretary of the Interior, lighting flares on the ground so he can land. He comes out, and the first thing he says is "Hi, I'm Manuel Lujan. Are you the ranger who wrote Attack of the Killer Tomatoes ?"

David: This woman who I didn't really know that much came to me one day and asked if I would come to a big party where she was showing the film, so she could tell her friends she knew me, and I could talk about the movie. I was working on some play or something--I've been very involved in local theater in Mississippi--and she said, "Oh well, but I'm going to brag that I met a famous star."

Several weeks later, this woman saw me at the grocery store, and told me she was disappointed. She said, "I had all my friends over, and I said I was going to point you out, and I never did see you in that movie."

I said I'm a bit older, you know, I was 24 when I did that film. I was the guy in the blue suit being chased by the tomatoes, and she looked at me like, what was I talking about? So I asked, "What movie did you watch?" She said, " Fried Green Tomatoes ." Close, but not close enough!

John: I'm all over the world working, and the stories never stop. I went to the Planck Institute in Munich, and some honcho from MIT lit up and told me Killer Tomatoes was his favorite movie of all time. And a chef at a restaurant in Montana told me he used to sing "Puberty Love" as a kid. The whole point of the movie is people just smile when they hear the name.

David: My brother-in-law was in the Navy for years, and he was telling me that they would go out and do target practice, send up a giant balloon and shoot at it from the decks of the ship. They called the balloon the killer tomato.

THE FUTURE OF THE KILLER TOMATOES

Chad Peace (Steve's son, Attorney, Consultant at IVC Media) : What we want to do is the remake.

Steve: We're in the process of new conversations on a relaunch of the whole property. But it's sort of the next generation.

Costa and John and I are too old to do this stuff--and already proved that we screwed it up.

Chad: We want it to be a remake of Killer Tomatoes , we don't want it to be something that it's not, and go over the top. We've talked a lot about internationalizing it, which really wouldn't be anything dramatic, just that the subtle jokes would be more commentary on an international scope.

Right now, the timeline as it stands is that we would like to start production in line with next year's San Diego Comicon, almost a year from today. Optimally, there will be an event where we would shoot the tomato stomp scene, and by buying a ticket, you're buying a spot as an extra, stomping tomatoes. And then the following year would be the release date.

THE RECIPE BOX

Ford Fry*(chef at Atlanta's JCT Kitchen, host of the annual Killer Tomato Festival )*: We just had our fifth year of the festival. I love the Georgia tomatoes and the varieties in general, and when we started, local farmers, at a certain time of the summer, just had tons and tons of tomatoes, so they were practically giving them away. I thought it would be fun to avoid the hoity-toity food festival, where people put their hats on and they go and it's more of a highbrow wine thing, and just give chefs the opportunity to do something quirky.

David: Last year was the first year they had me come out, and I judged--well, I don't drink at all, so I didn't judge the mixed drinks, but I did the food. This year I talked a little bit about the movie and all that. They asked me if I can come next year, and I said, "Lord willing, I can come every year if you want." I'm only about two and a half hours away from Atlanta, I live up in Tennessee.

Ford: Since it's during the day, it's hard to screen the movie. It's more of a food festival. It was awesome this year, probably our biggest one, about 1,500 people came, and 42 chefs and bartenders, and bands play. There's a chef band, too--once people are looped up a little bit we'll get up there, and people are dancing and going crazy by that time.

At this point, we've started asking chefs from out of state to bring their own tomatoes, because we're struggling to find enough tomatoes now. We buy out the farmers.

Steve: I've never been a real fan of tomatoes myself, from a food perspective. As a young kid, I never ate them. I do a lot now, though. I'm a big Caprese guy.

Costa: To me, cooking is a science experiment I like to eat. But I shy away from tomatoes now, I don't do many tomato recipes.

John: I don't have any tomato recipes. But at this point, I've heard every tomato joke every told.

The intellectual level of tomato jokes is usually about second grade.

Here's one of the oldest, though, along with the chicken crossing the road: What'd one tomato say to the other tomato?

Ketchup.

All archival images courtesy Costa Dillon.