Santo Gold

"Goodwill message for today: 'Say something nice to the very next person you see.'"

– An infomercial for a movie about Russian wrestlers suplexing mummified aliens.

"I've got bracelets for your arms!"

– Santo Gold, Blood Circus.

"We were on the verge of greatness. We were this close."

– Definitely Orson Krennic on the fate of Blood Circus, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.

Introduction

Santo Gold is a fictional character that first appeared in the remaining footage of the lost 1985 science-fiction horror film Blood Circus, which was produced by the mail-order Santo Gold jewelry company situated in Baltimore, Maryland. The character was played by the company's founder, Santo Victor Rigatuso, and makes a relatively brief appearance in the film. According to fliers and online plot summaries, the film tells the story of bloodthirsty, humanoid aliens from the distant planet Zoran who challenge American and Soviet professional wrestlers to ultimately gruesome matches in the ring. According to late-night infomercials, Gold sings a musical number prior to the matches, primarily to advertise his company and their products with little to no relation to the film's events. The production budget of Blood Circus cost Rigatuso up to $2 million, but it was only able to be shown at several private screenings in the Baltimore area (of course, it was!) before being pulled altogether, never to be officially distributed. A 35mm copy of the original print was discovered by the Santo Gold company in 2008, but no producers signed on to distribute it. An auction for this copy was launched on eBay for $21 million in 2011 and $3,500 in 2015, although no bids were placed both times. The last time the film has been seen was during a private screening at the Alamo Drafthouse Ritz in Austin, Texas in 2014, which is a tragedy that makes the removal of practical effects from 2011's The Thing look like an easy truth.

Rigatuso supposedly struggles with tics brought on by his Tourette's syndrome, dropped out of high school at age sixteen, and became involved in numerous entrepreneurship schemes before founding Santo Gold, according to a 2011 article posted by user atomictv on a Baltimore-based blog site. Rigatuso became a subject of interest by the U.S. Postal Service and Maryland state government after his company offered fake credit cards exclusively for purchasing Santo Gold-produced jewelry to customers with bad credit histories. As a result, he was forced to pay up to $2 million in restitution to his costumers. A U.S. District Court judge held him in contempt of court, which resulted in him following his attorney David B. Irwin's advice and pleading guilty to mail fraud and tax evasion charges, for which he was sentenced to ten months in prison in 1989. Despite reportedly being referred to as "a sweet guy" by Irwin, this, when added to his usage of the pseudonym Robert "Bob" Harris in the film's credits—just one of his many business aliases—indicates that Rigatuso ranges anywhere from a less-than-reputable individual to an embarrassing liability to capitalism. It should come as no surprise that, after apparently purchasing his wife a house near his prison, a crowd of five hundred former Santo Gold factory workers danced around the house and condescendingly sang the sarcastic tune "Thank You Very Much" from Scrooge, the 1970 CBS television adaptation of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.