2007 DEAD CHANNELS—The Evening Class Interview With Jack Hill

Because I can never get enough of a good thing, and despite the fact that Jack Hill provided generous context and backstory to both Spider Baby and Pit Stop at Dead Channels Sleazy Sunday double-bill, I still had a few threads I wanted to pursue. He was gracious enough to grant me some time Monday morning before heading north to the wine country. We countered the cool San Francisco morning by sitting close to the overhead patio heaters at the Phoenix, until driven away by bullish cigarette smokers.

I won't be the first to mention that softspoken Jack Hill does not come across as the man who was one of Exploitation Cinema's reigning champions, proponent of tits and ass feminism, and blaxploitation classics such as Coffy and Foxy Brown. Perhaps it's all the years of meditation he's practiced that has allowed him to keep his career in moderate perspective and to persevere through the ebb and flow of popular appeal. He certainly comes across kind and centered.

* * *

Michael Guillén: Roland Hill, your dad, was art director in the '40s at Warner Brothers, then moved on to the Disney Studios. He helped create the interior design of the Nautilus for Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and designed Sleeping Beauty's castle for Disneyland, as well as Tom Sawyer's Island. What influence did he have on your wanting to become a filmmaker or on your filmmaking?

Jack Hill: Not so much. My mother was a music teacher so I got into music since I was five years old.

Guillén: Which might explain your original impulse to become a film composer?

Hill: Yes. I was in music. I was a concert and performing artist and arranger and starting to write music. I wanted to learn how to score films. That's how I got into the cinema department at UCLA, so I could learn about films so I could write music; but, then I started writing, and they encouraged me to do more. I ended up directing some student films. I loved music and I loved being in music but I had a little 8mm movie camera since I was 14 and I made some films with friends and edited them myself just for fun. I never thought about it as a career.


Guillén: Warner Brothers back in the '40s appears to have left a strong imprint upon you. I've read that your favorite movie was White Heat, which you consider to be "the last great American film." Why do you say that? What is it about White Heat that you feel sets such a benchmark?

Hill: Because it's got that spirit to it, that in-your-faceness, that impudence that I enjoyed as a style. I and most of my friends used to go see all the Warner Brothers movies. They had much more of a fire to them than the big studio films because they were made with lower budgets under difficult circumstances. They had these great stars, a different kind of star, Bogart and Cagney, people like Virginia Mayo, who were very different.

Guillén: That's what you mentioned yesterday afternoon and I thought that was such an interesting analogy between the Warner films in the '40s made on their tight budgets and limited means—and the creativity that came out of that—comparable to the low-budget rapid-fire independent film making of the '60s-'70s. In both instances, by the grace of good casting some great movies were made. Researching your work, that's one of the comments attributed to your success: the impeccability of your casting. That made me curious about how you went about it. It's my understanding that when you were at UCLA your adviser was Dorothy Arzner? Is this the same Dorothy Arzner who invented the mike boom?

Hill: That's right.

Guillén: So how did that work? You're in film school and you're casting your student projects, did Arzner come in to help you find actors?

Hill: No, not at all. Dorothy basically had the feeling that you needed to make your own mistakes; but, she would let you know you were doing so. "You're making a mistake, but, go ahead." Francis Coppola and I both really listened to her. We worked on each others' student films and, in fact, when he created his theatre he named it the Dorothy Arzner Theatre, in recognition of what he had [learned] from her.

Guillén: Arzner's a director who was nearly forgotten. Most people don't remember what she's done.

Hill: Since the Women's Movement, she's become a little bit more recognized.


Guillén: Speaking of UCLA film school, the one person you didn't talk much about yesterday was Francis Ford Coppola and your interaction with him. My understanding is you did a few films with him? You both helped out with The Terror. IMdb lists about four or five directors on that film. How does that work?

Hill: We were not billed as co-directors. Roger Corman was the main director. But some of us put bits and pieces together over a period of time.


Guillén: Was that the same with Dementia 13? You came in later and added some pieces?

Hill: Francis had not really finished the picture. There was only about 60 minutes of film there, which he finished and then he went on to bigger and better things with major studios. I added some additional sequences that I wrote myself to pad it out to a full-length running time.

Guillén: So your student film The Host, then, was your true first film?


Hill: I had done a directing assignment before then, a 15-minute film; but, The Host was what they called at UCLA a "major production" of a half an hour film. You had sets and a lot more where you could finish it; but—in order to finish the film and do all the post-production—you had to have your own money for it. They didn't have a budget for it. So my edit of The Host sat in my garage for 30 years until Quentin Tarantino decided to put it on the release of Switchblade Sisters as a DVD extra. He got Miramax to pay for the cost of finishing it, to put music with it.

Guillén: Regarding that student project The Host—and I'm sure you've probably been asked this a million times—but, many folks have recognized its influence on Coppola's Apocalypse Now.

Hill: Yeah. [Steve Burum], my camera man on that student film, was the second unit camera man on Apocalypse Now. And there was another fellow who was also a student at UCLA at the time who [served] as an advisor on the film for Francis, and according to [Burum]—who I saw some years later—he said they were making jokes about making Jack Hill's student film. It was the last act of [Apocalypse Now], which was the part that didn't really work.

Guillén: So you don't mind that Coppola "reworked" it?

Hill: No. You always borrow things from other films. I've certainly done my share.

Guillén: Regarding the casting of Spider Baby, yesterday you talked about Sid Haig, Lon Chaney, and the two girls. The fellow who played Peter Howe ("Uncle Peter"), Quinn Redeker—who later went on to become Oscar-nominated for co-writing The Deerhunter—he was such a charming character in Spider Baby.

Hill: He was perfect, yeah.

Guillén: What made his characterization work so well? Did you write his character that way? How did you come up with this guy who was so normal he was odd? He was like a bastion of '50s Americana in the midst of all that zaniness.

Hill: I didn't really understand this at the time; but, the critic who wrote about the film and then in personal messages to me, said that was really me. That was my point-of-view character, totally oblivious to all this craziness going on around him.

Guillén: And very good-natured about it too. That's what I loved and laughed about later when I was thinking about him. He was so good-natured, poking Sid Haig's character in the ribs, inducing that strange facial reaction from Sid.

Hill: The way [Quinn Redeker] played that character was beyond my imagination of what he could do with the part to bring it to life.

Guillén: You were saying that you didn't feel you directed your actors much in Spider Baby; that they basically knew what they had to do and did it for you.

Hill: Yeah. The first rule of medicine is "do no harm" and that was my rule.


Guillén: The pool of talent in Spider Baby is amazing. I was enjoying watching the movie and recognizing faces from other vehicles. Carol Ohmart as Quinn's selfish sister Emily, she'll always (for me) be the woman who backed up and fell into the vat of acid in House on Haunted Hill.

Hill: Yes. At the time I did [Spider Baby], I had not seen that picture. I didn't know she had backed up into a vat of acid.

Guillén: What felt odd yesterday was to recognize her from a movie I loved as a kid. She's remained in my mind all these years. That's one of those cinema moments I'll never forget. Or maybe it was the skeleton on a string William Castle had swooping over the audience in the theater?


Another great character actor you used in Spider Baby was Mantan Moreland, who I recognized as one of the devils or "idea men" in Cabin in the Sky.

Hill: Yeah, I had never seen that film. I knew him from all the Charlie Chan movies.

Guillén: That's what my friend Frako Loden mentioned as well; but, I'm sorely unfamiliar with the Charlie Chan movies. I read somewhere that Moreland ran into problems after the Civil Rights Movement? His style of acting became disparaged?

Hill: Yeah, he didn't feel that his style, his character, was demeaning like Stepin Fetchit, which it really was. He was bitter about it. They lumped him together with those character actors that did demeaning roles, shuffling around. He wasn't like that.

Guillén: I've read that you killed him off early in Spider Baby to symbolically kill off the stereotype?

Hill: Yeah, that was my conceit through the whole movie. Like murdering Santa Claus in the first reel.

Guillén: Well, as a film writer relatively unfamiliar with your body of work and catching up to everybody else—I'm part of your new audience actually—what really struck me yesterday was how thoroughly entertaining and engaging your early films are, in contrast to the seemingly hundreds of current movies I've seen this last year out of Hollywood that I don't even want to write one sentence about; movies that I forget as I'm watching them. What was so refreshingly apparent in the two films I watched yesterday was their heart. There's a lot of heart in your movies. I really cared about the characters in both scenarios. Is that what you're going for?

Hill: That's what makes films work for me. That's what I try to do.

Guillén: I also read that there was some talk a few years back regarding a remake of Spider Baby. Is that still in the works?

Hill: There's actually a couple of things in the works. There's a fellow who I met who was a big fan of Spider Baby; he wrote a script for a remake. It's not really a remake as much as it is a script inspired by the original. The characters are still there but it's a totally different milieu. It was picked up and they were going to make it; but, they had a problem over the rating, blah blah blah, and so they have writers rewriting it. But it's still out there. It went into turnaround for Lionsgate and so he's still struggling with it; but, I was recently approached by another company who wants to remake closer to the original.

Guillén: You have no issue with having it remade? I feel it's so perfect as it is. It has this heart, as I said. My fear would be that these days when they make remakes, the heart is the first thing they take out.

Hill: Well, that's true. But I'm waiting to see what kind of story they come up with. It will be quite different because it's a thing of its time, although it's timeless in some ways. To do a new version, it's a new audience today so they want to make it in a much more up-to-date style. We'll see what happens. If they make a remake, it will make more people interested in seeing the original, I would think, so it's fine with me.

Guillén: Where did the story for Spider Baby come from? You had the script ready to go, so that when the producers surfaced, you were ready to go; but, where did the original story come from?

Hill: It came to me overnight.

Guillén: Did you have the slightest inkling that it would have the influence it would have? It created the template for kooky mutantly-inbred families, with elders in the cellar, that prey upon unsuspecting guests. It's become something of a genre all in it's own and you were one of the first to really do that, weren't you?

Hill: Yeah, I think so; but, I don't know [how much of an influence it had]. The film was not widely seen in the film industry at the time. I don't really think there's necessarily a connection there.

Guillén: Okay. So maybe it was an idea smoldering in the American psyche, just waiting to manifest itself? A way America had of thinking of itself? I do think the idea of the family out in the country that seems ordinary but isn't has definitely become one of the staples of American horror.

Hill: I don't know. People have suggested that some of the other guys who made films like that had seen Spider Baby; but, I doubt that. They wouldn't have been able to see it because it was lost for a long time.

Guillén: That leads to a question that's difficult for me to formulate. You've been around for a while, you've done your work in different climates, different cultural zeitgeists, different mindsets, spanning generations of filmgoers—

Hill: Yes?

Guillén: —Is it weird for you to be a survivor and have all these ascriptions made after the fact? Or to be given titles like the Master of Exploitation?

Hill: At the time I was making films and they were hitting number one at the box office, no one even knew who I was. And the next year no one even remembered the film.

Guillén: Directors weren't that well considered back then?

Hill: No. Most people weren't aware of who was directing a film.

Guillén: Roger Corman. How did you get hooked up with him?

Hill: Through Francis actually. Francis started working for him when we were in school and he brought me in to work with him on some of the [films] he was doing. I had worked with Francis before on these so-called "nudie cuties"….


Guillén: Are we talking The Bellboy and the Playgirls?

Hill: Yeah. I edited that actually. It's actually called The Playgirls and The Bellboy. The original title was The Bellboy and the Playgirls, and then they switched it around and it became a big hit because of the way people read the name; they saw the "playgirls" first.

Guillén: Makes sense, I guess. What was your involvement with The Wasp Woman? On IMdb you're listed as uncredited but it's not really your film?


Hill: No. It was a film that Roger had made. [On] quite a number of little films, the running time was too short for television. He was selling his whole library to television and some of the films were too short. It was only 70 minutes and they needed a [certain] minimum of time for TV. [Roger] assigned me this problem, to add 20 minutes to the running time of the picture. I had to figure out a way [to do that]. The actors were no longer available except one guy who couldn't see anymore and couldn't read a script. He was the only one who was available. I could get him. Basically, what I did was to write a kind of prelude to the film because I couldn't add anything to the story in any particular way without the actors. So I added a new beginning to it and I also added a few bits and pieces to tie that together in different parts of the movie just to pad it out. That was one of those learning experiences Roger had us do. Very valuable.

Guillén: It sounds like you learned a lot from Roger. Not the least of which was these creative strategies in response to low budgets.

Hill: Yes. I don't know whether I would have been able to do some of the things that I did without having had that training; but, Roger had a way of getting a maximum effect with a minimum of means. I see this mistake in expensive movies where they waste a big, expensive set by putting actors against a wall and showing them in close-up. Roger would bring his actors out in front so that you would always have space in the background, a feeling of more size and space, which makes you feel like it's a bigger picture. It doesn't look like it was shot in somebody's livingroom. And there were a lot of other tricks he would use to get a big look for very little money.

Guillén: You spoke so thoroughly about Pit Stop at yesterday's screening that I don't have a whole lot of questions about Pit Stop; but I did want to mention that I grew up in Brawley, California so that—when I saw those sand dunes—I recognized them immediately. As a youngster, I actually was part of that dune buggy culture. That footage of that gathering: where did that come from? Did you piggyback on some event that was going on?

Hill: Yeah. It was a real event and I wasn't really there for all of it, I sent my second unit guy out to do all the camera work. He was a guy named Frank Zuñiga. He later went on to do all these true life adventures for Disney, where you go out and sit in a blind for six weeks waiting for something to happen. He was a clever guy. He did most of the setting up and organizing of the dune buggy [scene].


Guillén: Jack, I have to admit that I loved Pit Stop and I'm not a car person. I don't even drive. I've never even had a license. Cars are not my thing at all. And yet I sat riveted in the theater. That Figure 8 stock car racing was unbelievable!

Hill: It is, isn't it?

Guillén: So your comments about how you were hoping to catch a slice of Americana for foreign markets, you did it! You caught something. Do they even do that anymore?

Hill: I heard recently that they do, in the South. They have some tracks down there where they do that.

Guillén: Still some crazy people down there, huh?

Hill: Yeah. Texas probably. [Laughs.]

Guillén: And the editing was phenomenal. It was so tense. I actually chewed my thumbnail down to the quick.

Hill: I'm sorry.

Guillén: It made me so nervous, especially every time two cars would just miss. When they collided, that was a relief.

Hill: That was the fun of it. Hair-raising.

Guillén: Turning to your current collaboration with Mark Atkins. The two of you are reworking the scripts you wrote for the Boris Karloff tetralogy—House of Evil, Isle of the Living Dead (alternately, Isle of the Snake People), The Incredible Invasion, and The Fear Chamber—which you wrote for Mexican director Juan Ibáñez. I wasn't clear about one thing: are you taking the original Karloff footage and reworking it into a new vehicle?

Hill: No. We're making totally new films.

Guillén: Will you redo them with the same actor in all four films like Karloff did before?

Hill: No.

Guillén: There was a period of time—because of the way distribution patterns shifted in the U.S. and before the video/dvd revolution—when your films were forgotten; when, in effect, you didn't have a film career.

Hill: No.

Guillén: What were you doing?

Hill: I did scripts, which got made, a couple of them. One was for a Mexican company and I was supposed to direct it but the producer, again, just before I fell into the same problems.

Guillén: You have a lot of trouble with Mexicans, don't you?


Hill: [Chuckles.] Yeah. I've had quite a bit to do with them. Then I wrote scripts that were done in a Canadian co-production so they had to have a Canadian re-writers and directors. My last film I directed ended up being called Sorceress.

Guillén: That was a Corman flick also, wasn't it?

Hill: Yeah. That's a long story that's kind of depressing. I don't want to go into it. I had to take my name off of the picture.

Guillén: Corman didn't come through with what he promised, is my understanding?

Hill: Yeah, right. So I took my name off of that. For a long time I was doing writing and then I fell into Groucho's paradox, where he said, "I wouldn't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member." The only [films] that people could really see me doing, I didn't want to do. I didn't want to do exploitation films anymore. I wanted to do real movies. It's ironic that the kind of films that I did are [now] almost considered a legitimate art form. At the time I wanted to get out of them.

Guillén: They are art! And that's an advantageous perspective you have that's so intriguing. You had this period of time where—you didn't go away and were still creating—but, for all effects and purposes your career was at a lapse. Then video brought your films back and a new audience discovered you and loved you, Tarantino among them. Is this a conflict for you? That this new audience is still appealing to your old films when you want to move on? Or are you being able to use that rekindled interest in your old films to move on?

Hill: Of course it helps a lot that my name is known and I got a little bit of respect for movies that were not respected at the time. That helps a lot. But the issue for me right now is finding the right [film] that somebody will let me do. You can't get financing. My wife and I have written a romantic comedy set in England that we've been trying to get done for a couple of years and there has been some interest in it, but….

Guillén: Is that A Perfect Wife?

Hill: Yeah, it's called A Perfect Wife. It's a beautiful script, the best work I've ever done, y'know? But a Jack Hill romantic comedy sounds like a joke so I have to do some other films first….

Guillén: It's like you have to start all over!

Hill: Yeah. I need to get one film out that gets attention so that I can be in a position myself that I can have the [creative control] to do a film like that.

Guillén: I would say that yesterday, watching Pit Stop, you meant for that to be an art film and it is an art film. Not only is it a valuable and historically significant slice of Americana, but it has this Mephistophelian theme that's universal. As I said before, I watch so many movies as a film writer, so many of them negligible, but I loved Pit Stop. This is a really good movie.

Hill: Thank you.

Guillén: So yesterday when Mark asked who among the audience wanted to see a new Jack Hill film and everyone cheered, that's a clear signal that we're hungry for your work, your vision, and we can only keep our fingers crossed that some producer who's paying attention will take a chance on your romantic comedy. I understand you also have another project emulating the '40s era of Warner Brothers? Tangier?

Hill: That's one I've been trying to get done for 20 years. It's a script written by a friend of mine, a very good writer, and I rewrote it heavily. It's a script that everyone who reads it thinks it's a great script; but, it's so offbeat they don't quite know what to do with it. It's the kind of [vehicle] where I'd have to get a major star attached to it in order to get it done. It's not a small film.

Guillén: Is it known that you're looking for a major star to get attached to the project? How does that work?

Hill: Nobody knows how it works. It's tough to do.

Guillén: And even moreso these days, it seems. You're saying it's a little offbeat and eccentric that people don't know what to do with it; yet, that was the allure of film in the '60s and the '70s and now most Hollywood product seems so homogenized and repetitive. Or it's a remake of a remake of a remake.

Hill: Well, this one is really original. There's never been anything quite like it. It's a really clever story. But another thing against it, it's a period picture. It's set in 1938. I will get it done someday.

Guillén: I really hope so, Jack. Thank you so much for your time today. I genuinely appreciate it. Enjoy the rest of your visit!

Cross-published on Twitch.

2007 DEAD CHANNELS: JACK HILL ON….

Not only did Jack Hill provide killer prints of Spider Baby and Pit Stop for Dead Channels Sleazy Sunday double-bill, but he attended the screenings to introduce each film and to field questions afterwards. His audience, though slight, was respectfully enthusiastic, filling the Roxie Film Center with their audible appreciation. This was my first opportunity to watch Jack Hill films on the big screen and—along with my filmbuds Michael Hawley, Jonathan L. Knapp, Frako Loden, and Joe Loree—we agreed this Sleazy Sunday event was one of our favorites in recent memory. I've conflated his two introductions and his two Q&As into the following entry.

On Spider Baby

For me to be places like this—and I've been quite a few places all over Europe where they got their first shot at seeing Spider Baby—it's gratifying because Lon Chaney was such a wonderful actor, under-appreciated, and this was one of his greatest performances. It gave him a chance to do comedy, which nobody else would ever think of him doing, and he poured his heart into it. It's heartbreaking for me that he passed away before he had a chance to see how much appreciated his performance would be. It's in his memory that I really get a thrill out of seeing audiences seeing the picture today.

We do have for you hardcore Spider Baby fans the original home video version of Spider Baby, which all these years was a rapid rip-off with the lab that refused to give me access to the negative. I found out that the original distributor, who I knew, what his logo looked like so I made it up on my computer and faxed him a simple order form for doing video transfer in the video department. I went in there, transferred the negative to video, paid cash, and got out of there. When the heads of the lab found out what had happened, they hit the ceiling. They were all worried about lawsuits in those days.

Things have changed, for which I'm grateful. Quentin Tarantino and Miramax were able to get me the negative because Miramax puts all their work through that lab. So this new transfer is also direct from the negative but we had a chance to do it in high-def and balance the contrast with a camera on the receive to get the sound just right. The original transfer is just fine because I had a great camera man—I didn't need much change—but, this is perfecto.

On Spider Baby's Initial Distribution

I don't know what it is about this movie that gets people; it gets me a little bit sometimes. It's just so bananas, I guess. I've been at conventions where this has happened more than once: 15, 16-year-old girls tell me how much the movie means to them. It must be just an example of unconditional love in the family, where—no matter how naughty you are—you'll still have that love. I didn't know that. I didn't think of that. But that must be it. Anyway, I wasn't even aware the picture was being distributed. When it was finished, the guys who had financed it had been in the real estate development business, which at that time really went ups and they were losing a lot of money. They went into bankruptcy and the film was locked up in litigation. The distributor who had seen it when it was first finished in the lab, kept track of it all the time during those years of litigation—about four years as I recall—and he kept the film. Finally, when it was cleared, he distributed it one summer all over the South and did very well with it. The companion picture [was a] picture that he himself made, which I don't remember what it was. I think it was another Lon Chaney movie. Some horrible film rightly forgotten today.


Then he distributed it again the following year as The Liver Eaters. Those guys used to do that in those days. They would change the title so that the owners of the picture wouldn't be aware that they're out in the boondocks distributing the picture and not paying [the owner]. The distributor, by the way, came up with the title Spider Baby. This was the genius of this guy. The original title was Cannibal Orgy. Or The Maddest Story Ever Told. I thought it was funny because there was a big movie out called The Greatest Story Ever Told at that time; but, four years later, it didn't really ring a bell. So he came up with that title. Anyway, the distributor had this great catch line for the re-release: "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, if the bloodsuckers don't get you, the liver eaters must." I wasn't even really aware that the film had been released. As far as I knew it was gone, forgotten, lost.

On The Scenes Cut From the Distributed Production

They had the idea that there was something wrong with the film before they ever actually showed it. They got more and more scared about the opening action sequence where Virginia kills the mail carrier. They felt that the scene should be cut. I guess they got squeamish about it or something. I get squeamish about it myself when I know it's coming up when I see the movie. Anyway, so they cut that scene and—without that scene—the feature makes no sense whatsoever. In fact, when they first saw the new answer print with that scene missing, they realized that was a mistake. "Oh my God, what have we done?" But anyhow that's the print they sent out because time was short, they were in bankruptcy and the axe was about to fall. So that's the print that they sent to the New York studios and, of course, no one would touch it. That was the end of everything.


Then, of course, when the distributor—who had seen the film originally and had kept track of the film through the bankruptcy [until] it was released—when he saw it, he was absolutely appalled and couldn't understand what had happened. Fortunately, the missing elements were [intact] and he restored it and that's the film we have today.

On the Extra Footage Found on the Upcoming Directors Cut DVD Release

I can't say it's particularly better. It adds something to the picture mostly for people who are familiar with the original. It gives a little bit more of Lon Chaney. It's a scene that was cut—which the film gets along okay without—but, it adds a little bit. Besides that, it's copyrightable. The film was unfortunately not copyrighted but—since this particular scene was not in the picture when it was released—it is copyrightable. So there's a double reason for putting that scene in. Actually, it's a scene that I like. It has some good stuff in it. I think the picture is a little bit better for it.

On Lon Chaney

He was a sweet guy. He was just great, wonderful. He was bitter and frustrated because he felt he was a [much] better actor than he was being given credit for. He was jealous of Boris Karloff—"That guy's not one bit better than I am"—but, of course, Boris didn't drink and the reason Lon wasn't hired was because he was an alcoholic. He stayed on the wagon for this picture because he really wanted to do a good job. He wanted to play comedy and he loved the other actors and he wanted to really do his best. Little did I realize that the orange he was having for a mid-afternoon snack was heavily laced with vodka. But he needed that to get through the day.

[Spider Baby] was shot in August on a little sound stage with no air-conditioning and—during the scene—he would break into a sweat and was soaking wet. We had a guy standing by with a bucket of cool water and a chamois [to] wipe him down.

[The werewolf sequence was written] with [Chaney] in mind. He liked that too. It was just a miracle of casting because all the players just really loved each other and they loved working together. Lon loved the girls. It was just a really fun thing. Twelve very hectic days, I can tell you that; but, it was fun.

On Beverly Washburn and Jill Banner

The two girls played off of each other so nicely. Jill [Banner], the girl who played Virginia, the Spider Girl, had never done anything before. I don't remember how we found her but somebody sent her in. She came in not expecting to get much, just hopefully get a line or two or something like that, and she came in and described herself; she said, "I'm a lot of fun to have around." The way she said that, we all looked at each other and we just knew. She had a certain rhythm. All she needed was to be encouraged that she was doing well; she was very unsure of herself, of course. She, by the way, had never been to acting school or anything like that. Everything she did was just instinct.

The other girl who played Elizabeth [Beverly Washburn] had 20 years experience in films, since she was a child. And yet they worked together just absolutely beautifully, as you can see. Just amazing.

On the Illustrated Opening Credits & Film Score

I thought the guy did great titles and it was very important to the story because he showed you by the titles that the movie was going to be a comedy. Otherwise, people wouldn't have known what to make of it. They don't know what to make of it now.


[Having Lon Chaney sing the title song] was the composer's idea. Ronny Stein did most of the [scoring] for the [Roger] Corman movies. He was a wonderful composer. He had the idea to do this and Lon was all for it. He kind of rapped it. The new DVD that's coming out in September has a whole little documentary about the composer. Ronny Stein wrote the score in one weekend without touching a piano, flew it down to Mexico and recorded it with an orchestra, and brought it back; $2,100 for the whole finished score. He loved the picture and wanted to do it. For you filmmakers working with low budgets, write something people just love to do.

On the Film's Location

The existing house was in Highland Park. [The cellar] was in a sound stage in Glendale. The reason I could write this on a low-budget was because—to have a pit in a film—the set would be very expensive. It would cost too much because you would have to build a false floor and everything above it to have a pit; but, you see, I had used this particular studio before and it had originally been an automobile repair garage so I knew I had a pit before I wrote the script. It was the second time I had used it. I had used it in an earlier film called Blood Bath where I had a mad artist who [filled] the pit with wax and dipped dead models in the wax and pulled them out. So I had some experience with that.

Ray Storey designed the sets. It was very economic. You're seeing three different floors of the building. We just basically moved walls around. Except for the basement. That was built separately. He did a very good job on a very low budget. The whole picture cost $65,000 to make, including the score with the orchestra.


We did a documentary for the DVD where I went back to the house and showed where we shot this, where we shot that. Today, of course, it's been remodeled and people are living there and it's probably worth a couple of million.

Are any of the interiors shot in the house? Yes and no. The only time we put the camera inside the house was for the shot of the mail carrier looking through the window inside. That's the only time you ever actually see any of the interior of the house, basically just around the window. It was interesting too because the camera man [Alfred Taylor] was very clever. We had no electricity in the house because it was abandoned. He brought the light in with reflectors. There was a reflector outside and down the hall reflecting into the room and other reflectors on the actors to balance the exterior light with the interior—anyone who knows photography knows that the sunlight outside is brighter than the light inside the dark room—so that's low budget for you.

On A Sequel to Spider Baby

[Vampire's Orgy] was the title. Actually, I've just rewritten it. I've given it a new title: Spider Baby 2: S.Q.U.I.R.M. "Squirm" is an acronym for Special Quest of the Intersection of Resurrected Monsters. It's about a secret division of Homeland Security and a 4,000-year-old Babylonian vampire that's been sent to destroy the United States by infecting everybody, blah blah blah blah, y'know. Originally it was in a vampire mode but I've just recently rewritten the script—as I just mentioned—and you can tell in terms of [its] modern considerations. Believable, I think. Of course, when I wrote the script it wasn't really a sequel. In one sense it was a continuation of the couple that ended up on honeymoon where they shouldn't have gone. A bad choice of a town to have a honeymoon in. But I wrote it for the same cast so it has similar characters. Right now it's being shopped around looking for takers.

On Pit Stop

The beauty of black and white film. This print of Pit Stop is what we call an "answer print" from the lab. The lab used to do answer prints on a very special high quality film stock, Agfa, which the theatre goers never got a chance to see because they made the release prints on cheaper Eastman stock. So this is the original answer print and it shows you how beautiful black and white film can look.

Roger Corman financed and distributed this picture. He said, "We could make some money making a stock car racing movie." At that time they were making a lot of stock car racing movies [with] Frankie Avalon, which to real car fan addicts were just laughable. I wanted to do something that would be realistic. So I said I didn't want to make a stock car racing movie. I hated stock car racing movies. I didn't want to do it. I wanted to make an art film. So [Corman] said, "Okay, make an art film about stock car racing" and I thought he was making a joke. I said, "Okay, I got this idea. I want to make the first stock car racing movie where the hero loses the big race." He said, "No, Jack. The hero wins the big race in a stock car racing movie." I came up with the idea that the hero wins the race but loses his soul. So that's my art film.


When I see this movie today, I can't imagine how on Earth I ever got all this stuff together to do this; but, I had the idea when I first saw Figure 8 racing. That's what made me want to make a movie about car racing because I thought, "This is the most insane, typically American insanity, that would appeal to foreign markets. People overseas want to see this American racing." Not only that, but the dune buggies and all that kind of stuff. Unfortunately, they never got a chance to see it because by the time the film was released, foreign buyers wouldn't even look at a black and white movie.

Was there ever a colorized version? No. It would have been too expensive. You know what, though? If I had had the idea, what I could have done…. You see, we couldn't have done this in color. The night time racing is what got me going. Night time racing had never been seen in a movie before. All the smoke and the dust and the sound effects and the lights; to me that was very exciting. We could not have done that in color at the time. We had to use a very special high speed black and white film to shoot the races. I could have just done those night time races in black and white and the rest of the picture in color. That would have worked. But it didn't occur to me at the time, unfortunately.

[Pit Stop] was the last great action picture in black and white.

On Pit Stop's Original Title

The Winner was the original title. That's why this print—the original answer print from the lab—has that title. The title was changed because there was a racing movie being made at Universal with Paul Newman called Winning and [my] distributors were afraid there would be confusion with the title, so they called it Pit Stop. Probably a better title for the audience they were [targeting].

On the Actors in Pit Stop

As far as I know, [Pit Stop] was [Ellen Burstyn's] first feature film. She came to me because I was looking for an actress for that part. After I had done Spider Baby, I realized that I really didn't know anything about directing actors. I was just lucky with Spider Baby. I got actors that didn't need any help. I spent a year in an acting class with Jeff Corey who was one of the very finest acting [coaches]. Many well-known players came from his class. I called Jeff to have him recommend somebody for this part and he sent over Ellen McCrae. Her husband's name was Burstyn. She took his name professionally when she got a divorce. Strange.


Here we're talking about acting classes and Beverly Washburn I don't think ever went to a class in her life. And yet, she's so wonderful in this movie. It's hard to imagine that this same actress was in Spider Baby.

I like to write for actors that I know. It helps me create a character. With Sid [Haig], I knew his personality. This is him. He grew up in Bakersfield—or Fresno—what's the difference? He really knew these kind of people; but, the interesting thing is that he did not know how to drive a car at this point. There's one scene in there where you actually see him driving—he's driving the pick-up truck into the wrecking yard—so, he had to be able to do that and—when he backed up to set up the shot—he backed up into a parked car.


Richard Davalos, you might recognize him. He played James Dean's brother in East of Eden. He really didn't know anything about cars. He didn't know what a throttle was. I had to tell him, "Accelerator pedal."

I ended up with Brian Donlevy because the price was right. He was in tax trouble. We paid him $3,000 under the table for three days work. This is another Roger Corman thing you learn. You learn to have a star who's only going to work for a few days but you want to have the feeling that he's all through the movie. I think I was able to do that. You feel that he's all through the movie but he actually only worked three days.

George Barris was in the movie. There was no other famous hotrodder in there. That was another thing I wanted to document: George Barris's salon where he creates all these weird cars. He had them right there. Some car that was on TV a lot was the one he was working on there. He was happy to do it. He liked being in the movie. All of it was very authentic. In fact, all the talk about engines and all that stuff was very authentic. I didn't know a thing about them. I got the information from the people who were there and I gave it to the actors to talk about. This movie has become a real cult movie among a certain mixed audience of car nuts of that period. It turned out that the wrecking yard that we used is famous among these people. The bar where we shot is famous. It's really weird. There are some weird people out there and I just happened to connect with them.

[The old guy who trains Rick Bowman (Davalos) was a non-actor.] He was the photographer at the race track and I thought he was an interesting character. It was a little awkward because he couldn't really do lines. That's why there's some odd editing in there because he screwed up his lines; but, he was quite a character. He was a real former race driver, just like he said. He was the real thing, like the Italian neorealists. Of course, the worst actors in the picture were the stuntmen who I gave acting parts to do the stunts.

On the Conscious Use of Black Actors In His Early Films
Presaging His Later Blaxploitation Films

No connection. [In Spider Baby] I just happened to love Mantan Moreland and he just happened to be black. The other guy [in the opening scene of Pit Stop], I don't know, it just seemed kind of natural. This was at a time before there was really a lot of consciousness about that kind of thing. But, I'll tell you something interesting now that you've seen the movie and it won't spoil it for you. The black guy who was walking across the street in the opening sequence, he didn't show up the next day. He showed up one night and the next night he didn't show up. So we had to dub his voice and we dubbed it with Sid Haig, which you don't recognize because he hasn't appeared in the movie [yet].

On Editing Pit Stop's Car Crashes

The miracle of movies. Obviously, you would never see a race like that [with so many car crashes]; it would be impossible in a single race because—every time a car crashes—they would stop the race. But you couldn't make a movie like that. So over and over and over again, you get caught up in it and you don't really notice it, you see a place where two or three cars crash and roll over and two seconds later you see the same place and there's nothing. It was my hope that you'd get so caught up in the action that you wouldn't really notice it or—if you noticed it—that you wouldn't care. This seemed to work that way.

I'll tell you how we did this. We spent six weekends with five cameras shooting these races. I took a spot by the intersection [of the Figure 8] myself because we didn't have insurance and that was the only really dangerous spot. You can see the back of my head quite often here as another camera pans by. I wore the camera on a harness. I basically took all the best crashes and exciting moments and cut them all together. Then we took the crashes and I just duplicated the car with the number on it and the color and everything and showed the actor in it, right? It was kind of a documentary in reverse in a way.

As I was saying, God knows how I was ever able to put all that together like that. I don't know. Making movies, you get caught up in it and you do things that you wouldn't think you could normally do. For example, in the middle of the production schedule, we had an actual race in Riverside, which we were going to film and it was a part of the schedule and, at the last minute just as we were about to go, they cancelled that race. I was stuck with this problem of having a climactic scene in the picture with no race to shoot. I actually persuaded the owner of the stadium racetrack and guaranteed that—if he put on a race—he wouldn't lose money on it. Of course, I could do no such thing. He actually agreed to do it. He put on a race. God behind me, he broke even. That's how we were able to get that race. This is the kind of thing that goes into making guerilla movies; you need grace.

On Crashing Cars Into Houses

In the opening scene where they have the drag race in the street and [the car] crashes into the house, that was done in one of the beach cities—I forget which one—they were having an urban renewal program so all these houses were going to be torn down. We actually built a false front on the house because we couldn't really crash a car into a house; it would destroy our car. So we built a false front out of balsa wood. But the city people from this community who had given us the okay to do it, had second thoughts. They were worried because this house was on a slope and they were afraid the house would fall off [its foundation] and roll down the slope onto somebody else's house. They were seriously worried about this happening. When you're standing there watching, it's a joke because those things don't make any noise, it's just paper and balsa wood; but, they were there really worrying that they had goofed up by giving us [permission to shoot].

On His Use Of Rear Screen Projections

Every time you see one of my actors behind the wheel with the race going on behind them or some scenes where Dick Davalos and Beverly Washburn are driving around with the streets behind them at night, that was actually rear projection done in the camera man's driveway. Everybody used to think that—in order to do rear projection—you had to have synchronized projector and camera. Not so. We found that out. Basically, the trick is to use a theatre projector with a double blade. Every frame, instead of being just one, is actually double. What happens is that—when you have your camera and your projector—[they] don't always have the same frame. Sometimes it's half of one and half of another; but, it always adds up to 100%. It's really really strange. Anyway, we got the theatre projector and we made all of our plates for the races and everything. The camera man lived in an apartment and his bedroom fronted on the driveway. We put the projector in his bedroom, projected into the driveway into a mirror and then in the back window of the car we had a sheet of Eastman translite, which was a product made for photomurals, and it was a transparency. It was like a really fine screen that we projected [onto] and ran the actors through, one car after the other, and did it all in one night.

On the Dune Buggy Scene

I had heard about [this dune buggy gathering]—they don't allow that anymore; it's devastating to the environment—but, when I heard about it, I thought this would be something that would, for one thing, give us a break in mood, which we needed. You know how in a symphony they have three sections—in the middle it's kind of slow, which gives you relief from the intensity—that was one reason. Another reason was that I felt it would be something I wanted to document in the film for foreign audiences and for history. I felt that wasn't going to last and I wanted to have it on film. It worked in the story. [The dunes were in] Brawley, [California]. The Brawley Dunes. That was quite an adventure too.

On Driving the Race Cars Himself

I tried one of the race cars out on the track just for fun and it scared me because the slightest little pressure on the throttle—vrrrooooom—there was no inbetween. You were either full out or stop. It scared me. But I did drive my own Volvo around the track; my Volvo, which you saw in the movie there [with the gas tanks] if you were watching closely. That was one of them. I had two Volvos. I had the 1956 station wagon that looked like a little delivery truck. It was small and had a great little engine in it.

If you've ever seen Bergman's Shame, the central character, the musician, drives exactly that same car. In Sweden it's very well known, right? I went to this film festival in Sweden where they showed Switchblade Sisters where I have the girls loading—they used my car—and the first time that Volvo wagon appears in the movie, the audience broke into applause and cheers.

On Pit Stop's Schedule and Budget

We didn't really have a schedule and we didn't really have a budget. It ended up costing about $75,000; but, a lot was added to that by the company. That is, all the people I was working with were participating. The expenses would have been considerably more if everybody had gotten paid normally, including myself. But I never made a quarter out of it.

On Pit Stop's Score

This is another thing about guerilla filmmaking. I had absolutely no budget for music in this picture. I didn't want to have to cut in music from other movies or canned music. I came across this group called The Daily Flash from Seattle, four guys. I offered to pay them what would be union scale for their recording time and they prepared the music themselves. I ran the picture on the Moviola so they would get an idea of what it was like. They came into the studio, we ran the movie, and they improvised the music to the film. I thought it was just awful. I couldn't stand that kind of music. And yet—when critics talk about the movie—they rave about the score. One of the guys didn't even show up [on time]; he was an hour late. Most of it was just three guys, two guitars and a drummer, and yet it sounds rich and full. The guys just turned out to be really good. Just luck again.

On Yasujirō Ozu

At this particular time you may have noticed that the camera work for the film was still. I was under the influence of Yasujirō Ozu, the great Japanese director, who never moved the camera. I used to think that was great. I used to just let the actors do it. I understand that. I read in the paper recently that in Francis Coppola's new film that he made, he's talked about Ozu and [Coppola] never moves the camera in this one. He finally caught on too.

We had a theatre in L.A. called the Kabuki Theatre where they played all the Japanese movies that you would never see anywhere else. I went to see all the Ozu movies. To sit for three hours with a still camera was wonderful; he was the Shakespeare of Japanese cinema.

I strive for character-driven dramas. It might be an old-fashioned idea. That's the way drama's supposed to be. There's other types of movies. Different kinds of movies. I'm a big fan of Alain Renais and people like that, Godard, but Ozu's a good example. [His films] are nothing but the characters. You can watch an Ozu film and you go on and on and you think nothing's happening and all of a sudden something will happen and it will put together all these little details that you didn't pay attention to and something really powerful happens. That, to me, is mastery.

On Other Influences

I grew up with Warner Brothers in the '40s. My father worked at Warners. He was a set designer and art director. Warners movies at that time, the directors had to work on low tight budgets. If you see movies like Key Largo, they've got these phony-looking trees blowing in the hurricane with wires pulling them. They had to work on very low budgets so they had to have ideas, know what I mean? They had to have ideas to replace not having stuff on the screen and they had actors like Bogart, Cagney, Bette Davis, Virginia Mayo. The big studios like MGM, what did they have? Robert Taylor? What? So that was an influence on me, the way that they were able to get—again—maximum effect with a minimum of means.

On the Jack Hill Imprint on Quentin Tarantino

He'd be the first to admit that. He's kind of nutty that way. Coffy's on his list of the ten best movies ever made. C'mon…. It's all right, but, y'know?

On Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop

I didn't see Two-Lane Blacktop until just a few years ago actually. It's not fair to ask me my opinion of someone else's movie, especially somebody I've worked with. I think he was very jealous of me because my movies were big hits and his movies were flops; but, that doesn't mean they weren't good movies. They just didn't find an audience. Two-Lane Blacktop, I didn't like it when I saw it and I'll tell you why: it was totally unbelievable. It was over the top with trying to get too cool, know what I mean? Too distanced. It didn't work for me. I like to get into characters and then something happens. The idea of making movies about people who don't give a shit doesn't appeal to me. But that's just my [opinion]. A lot of people think it's a masterpiece and I can't argue with that.

[Tom Sutpen revisits Two-Lane Blacktop for Bright Lights Film Journal.]

On Contemporary Films

I don't really go to see a lot of movies. I go see all the French movies when they have the French Film Festival in L.A. every year and some of them are really good. They can do things we can't do here because they have government financing. Some of them are not good at all but they're very different. What happened with the American film industry is—well, thank God there are means now by which people, who never before would have been able to make them, are out making films and some of these are going to be really wonderful if they get distributed, which is very difficult. But the major companies are just making the same crap over and over.

I saw Pan's Labyrinth. It wasn't for me. It was just so over the top. I like [films] dealing with real people and real [situations]—what is it?—"Happy stories about happy people with happy problems"? I'm just kidding. My wife and I just recently wrote a romantic comedy, which is where my heart really is. That's what I really want to do: make movies about love, not about revenge.

The thing that's really got me upset is the [torture porn] that's going on. A friend of mine, Mark Damon, produced this movie Captivity; I can't understand why anyone would want to spend their time [watching] something like that. I don't really mean to criticize somebody else's genre, but I think it's sick. [Laughs.]

On the Aspect Ratio Of His Films

When I had the control to do so, [my films] were shot [in the Academy Ratio (1.33:1 or 4:3) and framed to be projected at 1.85:1 with no loss of information] because that's the screen ratio the theatres were projecting; but, I made sure that my camera man framed everything so that all the necessary information was within the TV port so that the pictures could be shown on television without having to be panned and scanned. It was a multiple thing in my mind. Later, in the [films] that I did for the studio, they were basically framed 1.85:1 and I was not able to make that [TV] choice because the studio controlled. It's not a matter of aesthetics. My view was, having a picture panned and scanned totally destroys it; but, they didn't have widescreen TV then so my solution was to make sure that everything would be within the TV frame so that it could be just as effective shown on TV.

On Becoming A Blaxploitation Director

It was an assignment. When I first got the assignment, Larry Gordon—who was the head of production at AIP, which was making a lot of blaxploitation movies—called my agent and my agent sent me in. He told me he wanted to make a black film. At first, my heart just sank because I didn't think I would know how to make a black film; I didn't think I was qualified to do that. But he told me what he wanted. He said, "I want a black woman revenge movie." I thought, "It's a great chance to work with Pam Grier." I could write a part for her and bring out her qualities, which I thought were outstanding. I had done two pictures with her. I had "discovered" her—if anybody can be discovered—by giving her her first real role in a movie and that got her going. By the time we got around to Coffy, she'd been in several pictures, including one more with me, one of which—Black Mama, White Mama—was fairly popular and The Arena kind of did okay, so she had a little bit of experience; but, the studio wasn't sure they wanted to use her. There were some other black actresses they were considering but I said, "Nobody else can do this." So they went with me on that. The rest is history.

[Incidentally, Coffy is being screened Saturday, August 18, 2007 at the Bridge Theatre as part of Peaches Christ's Midnight Mass.]

On Remaking the Four Scripts He Wrote For Mexican Producer Juan Ibáñez Starring Boris Karloff

Boris loved it because he got to play four characters in four weeks. It was a very complicated thing. I think only the advantage of having studied filmmaking with Roger Corman [qualified] me to do this; but, I actually had to write four scripts, which could be shot in such a way that all the stars and scenes were shot together and then the rest of the pictures could be finished at leisure … in a foreign country … by another director. The producer died of a heart attack, which was no wonder. The films were finished long after and it turned out that the producer knew that I couldn't go to Mexico to direct the pictures because the Mexican union wouldn't have allowed it. He just disappeared on me. I never heard anything more about it until many many years later I heard they were floating around on video. I picked up one of them and looked at it and I was so appalled I couldn't get myself to look at the other pictures. Our idea is to take the original scripts, update them, bring them into line with modern sensibilities and do them the way they should be done today.

Cross-published on Twitch.

2007 DEAD CHANNELS: RED HARVEST—The Evening Class Interview with Dylan Griffith, Collin Armstrong, and Samantha Simon

The crop is excellent, it's been properly packaged to travel—so it's time to deliver the bud and get paid $40,000. But be careful not to run over any children on the way.

Dylan Griffith's 22-minute short Red Harvest screened as part of Dead Channels' "Short and Really Scary" program. What drew me to the project was awareness that it was penned by Twitch teammate Collin Armstrong. I welcomed the opportunity to meet Collin—who accompanied the film to San Francisco, along with director Dylan Griffith, and actress Samantha Simon—and to sample some of his screenwriting. I'm happy to report that Red Harvest is effectively creepy and I hope the short is transformed into its originally-intended full-length feature to take advantage of Collin's intriguing backstory of a rural landscape saturated with buried blood. How appropriate that Red Harvest is produced by Venogram, with its allusions to veins. In its abbreviated form, however, Red Harvest succeeds precisely for what it does not disclose. With a touch of Edgar Allan Poe's "A Telltale Heart" (can you ever really bury a family secret?), a touch of H.P. Lovecraft's "A Shuttered Room" (what is running around upstairs in the attic?), and just enough homage to J-horror to startle one's wits, the revenge of the dead over the living has never seemed so foreboding.

Over beers and Mayan appetizers at Mi Lindo Yucatan, I talked with the creative team of Red Harvest.

* * *

Michael Guillén: Collin, you wrote the screenplay for Red Harvest. How much time passed between your penning the story and it's transformation into a short feature?

Collin Armstrong: About two years.

Guillén: Did your story translate into film as you imagined it?

Armstrong: I'd have to say I'm really proud of the job Dylan did, especially considering what we had envisioned and what we ended up actually being able to do from our own pockets. It ended up having the tone that I wanted. I wanted it to feel classic. I didn't want it to be overloaded with gore or visual bombast.

Guillén: Red Harvest is technically well-structured. Its jump-cut editing and sound design pull you right into the atmosphere of the film. That's not something that can be written into a script. How did you guys develop that?

Armstrong: Dylan and I worked together a lot on the script. I wrote a couple of drafts. The first draft was set entirely inside the van. They never left the van. We realized that the rule to save the rule really didn't make sense and it was easier to move it outside. We were finding all these ways to cheat that idea. We decided to push it beyond the van. But he and I worked pretty closely. We worked on a lot of the scenes together, discussing how they should flow, what it should look like and feel like. We have different tastes but we know what each other likes. We've been friends about 10 years and we're always sharing different creative endeavors that we enjoy with one another. We have a good bond in that way.

Dylan Griffith: Everybody that's involved in the movie, we try to bring in [to the creative process]. We try to be selective about our creative collaborators. We collaborate on everything together. Almost all the creative aspects of the movie, we were all involved in one way or another. Collin and I—when he's writing a script and I'm looking at it trying to decide how I want to approach the material—we play a lot of "what if?" games and scenarios. We try to find the characters and put them through this [or that] scenario. The characters and the back story to the short and feature are moreorless the same; but, then the stories are different. It's a different story with the same elements.

Armstrong: In terms of the technical elements that really stand out in the film, there's a lot that I showed and talked to [Dylan] about and vice versa, and a lot of that informed how the movie ended up, working on those levels, beyond the story [to] how we're actually telling it.

Griffith: We do a lot of sharing of other elements. We have everything from movies to books to comic books that we try to share with each other and discuss how we think that sort of storytelling or character development might work in our story.

Guillén: There are nice touches in Red Harvest that are recognizable as influences yet don't call too much attention to themselves. A touch of Lovecraft. Some J-horror. Other influences?

Armstrong: I really enjoyed '70s American cinema, specifically the types of horror movies that give you more atmosphere and character than gross-out segments; [films] that built tension. An example: that old TV movie A Cold Night's Death, which I wrote up for Twitch. It's one of my favorite films of all time. I thought about that a lot when I was writing characters in a confined space and out of their natural element.

In terms of sound, we looked at another made-for-TV project—I can't think of the name of it but it was based on a M.R. James story—but it took natural sounds to bizarre proportions. Like taking the noise in the fields [in Red Harvest] to a level where you recognize what it is but it doesn't sound quite natural; there's something off about it.

Guillén: That works. Like that moment in Val Lewton's Curse of the Cat People where the shriek of the bus always makes me jump out of my skin. To this day that remains one of my top 10 cinematic scares. That amplified sound goes right into your body. That's what I admired about the sound design in Red Harvest; it went right into my body and—in the scenes in the cornfield—it effectively circled my body. Very visceral.

Samantha, what was it like for you playing such a "compassionate" character ["compassionate" being a code word for stupid].

Samantha Simon: It was so much fun. I grew to really like her. One of the things that attracted me to the project was what Collin was saying about how it was more character-driven. It wasn't all cheap scares. It was really about the relationships [between the characters]. The fact that I had a feature-length script to look at before it was cut down to a short helped me and the other actors to be able to develop a full character and full relationships. It made it easier for us to work together.

Armstrong: If it wasn't so painful, I'd say we should write feature scripts for all our shorts. But the disappointment of what happened was too much.

Griffith: Yeah, we spent a year auditioning and rehearsing for this feature.

Armstrong: [Addressing Samantha] How long were you cast before they actually shot the movie?

Simon: I was cast a year before we shot the film.

Griffith: So we kept [the actors] on hold and they were all so excited about doing the film but at some point we realized we weren't going to get enough money to do a feature. I called them all up and told them we still wanted to pursue this project, but that we would get back to them. I'm sure they were all like, "Sure. Whatever." We finally called them back at the end of the next summer and said, "We're shooting a short. It's going to be a totally different script but we're going to use the same characters." They all came. Blaine, by that time, had moved on and moved out West. We didn't do any rehearsing for Red Harvest at all. We just showed them the script and said, "It's totally the same characters and back story but a totally new plot." And they just jumped right in and did it. They had really internalized and understood the characters at that point by learning them for the feature. It was just a different take on the same idea.

Guillén: So Red Harvest has shown at a film festival in Indianapolis and now at Dead Channels; where to next?

Griffith: We're waiting to hear back.

Armstrong: Yeah, we're waiting to hear back from about 15 or 16 other festivals.

Griffith: This is our first time on the festival circuit. This is our third movie but our first as a company so this has been a big learning experience for all of us. We're seeing what plays and what doesn't play very well at these things and, hopefully, our's isn't usually the latter. So far, so good.

Guillén: Your short is a solid piece of filmmaking and I hope you can turn it into a full-length feature. If you do, will you keep the same sound design?

Griffith: We'd like to. Our sound designer came on later after we [shot] it, but he now has a real passion to follow the movie through and shoot it from the beginning. He wasn't there for field audio and the guy we had originally dropped out.

Armstrong: 85% of the movie was ADR. Our on-set audio just didn't work.

Griffith: I'm proud to say that the people we worked with and brought along on this project and others have always wanted to work again on something else without my asking or looking for someone else.

Guillén: Any critical response on Red Harvest?

Griffith: Of our very few write-ups, one of them was in Indianapolis and it was a series of backhanded compliments. "Nice movie, stupid." [Laughter.]

Guillén: Does the film's rural setting stem from your living in Indiana?

Armstrong: Yeah. Wherever you live, if you're there long enough—and I've lived on and off in Indianapolis for 20+ odd years—there are things about [Indiana] that if you think about it long enough, seem strange or possess those qualities. I wanted to play with some of that. These endless fields when you're driving from point to point in the state, [I was] just thinking what would happen if you had to pull over and you did end up at someone's house and something seemed off? It comes from having spent a lot of time there and maybe, actually, I don't know, wanting there to be an aspect to it that's maybe a little bit more off than it is. Because it's also more ordinary most of the time and—within that ordinariness—when something's so normal, there's something strange about it.

Cross-published at Twitch.

2007 DEAD CHANNELS: POSTAL—The Evening Class Interview With Uwe Boll

In appreciation that Bruce Fletcher programmed his latest film Postal at the historic Castro Theatre as the opening night feature for Dead Channels, Uwe Boll presented Bruce with a t-shirt that read: "This shirt was funded with Nazi Gold."

By way of introduction to Postal, Boll sourced his film to the Running With Scissors video game of the same name, which is allegedly not allowed in Northern territories because you can shoot and piss on children, and Bush and Bin Laden. Basically, Boll enthused, Postal broke all the rules.

At the same time, when he sat down to write the first draft of Postal, Boll was equally broken because Bloodrayne had bombed at the box office. He thought, "Ah fuck" and decided to finally write a script again, like he used to when he started making movies. He was pissed about himself, his career, the reviews, but especially by so much of what is going on in the world, all of which keenly influenced the writing. Postal became not only a movie made out of the video game; but, in a further sense, "Postal is post-apocalyptic."


Boll finds it "kind of funny" that people support Al Gore's movie and the Bill Clinton Foundation—even though it's admittedly a good AIDS foundation—while we're still all moving closer to the edge and down the drain. "Politics," he asserts, "have no power anymore. We're trying to save the Earth but the people that rule us are fucking retards." On one hand, stupid Islamic terrorists are completely flipping out and—on the other hand—Bible Belt retards are completely flipping out. Aid keeps funneling to the weapon and oil industries, and when all these factors come together, "We are in the middle; We go down the drain." His main reason for making Postal was to hit really hard with a film the major studios would never do.

When Postal finally wrapped, Boll showed it to the first major studio who expressed interest in distributing it. The studio's representative laughed his ass off but said, "This is a movie that everyone wants to see but nobody will distribute it. Sorry." Boll persevered and now there is a prospective release date in October; but, he's nonetheless having problems with powers that have political issues with the film who are trying to force him to cut it before they will screen it in their theaters.

Then he got sued by The New York Post. After seeing no more than 20 seconds of the film, The Post published a negative review, labeling it unpatriotic for spoofing the victims of 9/11. Boll countered that what he thought was unpatriotic was sending young people to Iraq to die every day in the streets and that President Bush—with all of his lies—should be in jail for what he's done to this country. Complicating matters, on his flight to San Francisco he checked his Blackberry and found out the MPAA had disapproved Postal's website, demanding its removal before allowing the movie American distribution. So with these purposeful attempts to block distribution of the film, the October release date might be in jeopardy.


Twitch teammate Collin Armstrong colored himself excited when the first YouTube trailers emerged for Uwe Boll's Postal and Todd Brown followed suit and ate crow, declaring Postal was "brash, bold, smart when called for and stupid when required and—most importantly—…frequently and intentionally laugh out loud funny."

Count me among those entertained by this film. Lovers of the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker films (Kentucky Fried Movie, Airplane!, The Naked Gun, etc.) will feel right at home with the film's broad comedy; but, it's the film's punctuated moments of acerbic political satire grounded on the strength of its convictions that lift it above mere slapstick (even if not as often as I would have preferred). Without question, the film's opening sequence is darkly brilliant, enough so to piss off The New York Post.


Protagonist "Postal Dude" (Zack Ward) lives in a rundown trailer park with an obese shrew of a wife in a town pointedly named Paradise. Graffiti on the walls proclaim: "Paradise sucks." I suspect that dispersion refers not only to the setting of our story but to the notions of divine real estate on both sides of the Atlantic—name your faith—both gung-ho intent on achieving Paradise even if it costs us Earth. Hopefully, amidst the laughs, Postal will encourage questioning such ambitious zealotry.

The film was received well by its Castro audience, several of the cast members joined Uwe Boll on stage for a Q&A (which I'll transcribe in due course), and after generously signing autographs and allowing himself to be photographed with fans, Uwe and I sat down for a quick talk.

* * *

Michael Guillén: Uwe, I'm not a gamer. I don't play video games; but, I do love my comics. So I'm curious what the difference is between adapting a video game into a movie and a comic book into a movie? And how do the respective industries support or not support such film adaptations?


Uwe Boll: There are two things. In a game, you have a lot of visual ideas basically for art design, for fighting styles, for props, wardrobe, even more than you get from a comic book. A game is more "filmish" compared to making a movie out of a comic book. On the other hand, it's tougher to fulfill what you have in a game and bring it all to the screen. Also, on Postal, we could pick only a few things of what you do basically in the game—like the trailer park, the big wife, the cat [as] a silencer, the dog, the welfare office—these things are also in the movie; but, if you don't put them together in a real story, you have no movie. The biggest problem with the videogame-based audience is that they have the movie built in their heads already—they play the game over and over again—so you cannot satisfy these people.

Guillén: Does that account for the fierce criticism you receive from a constituency you would assume would like your film? They've come to the theater with too many preconceptions?


Boll: Absolutely. You can do whatever you want but you'll [still] get bashed. This is the thing. If I talk to gamers—and I go to game conventions also—I say, "Look, are you not in general happy that someone made a movie out of [this game]?" Right? And then they admire it all; but, I have that feeling also that—the 2,000-3,000 people on the Internet who are constantly kicking my ass are more the people that really don't like it—but, there are maybe 20,000-40,000 people that don't go on the Internet and they are gamers and they like it.

With every movie—House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark or Bloodrayne—in the U.S. alone over a million DVDs [sold], huge numbers. Only big movies like Underworld that make $40-$50 million box office sell [that] amount of DVDs. If nobody likes [my films], I don't know why anybody buys [them].

Guillén: In your introduction, you touched upon The New York Post lawsuit as a conservative effort to halt distribution of Postal. Is it true that the Red Cross has also sued you? Because of the brief allusion to Dr. Mengele's First Aid Station?


Boll: A company [complained] saying they represented the Red Cross; but, we don't [directly] make fun of the Red Cross in the movie. I think the Red Cross does a great job; but, look, if [we] can't parody, if we can't make a gag out of anything anymore, then what are we doing here? The same with The New York Post. I would not have started that New York Postal website if they wouldn't have written that article about the movie after only seeing 20 seconds of the film on YouTube. I said, "Give the movie a chance. See the whole movie before you write something. Or interview me at the same time you write an article about the 9/11 victims and print what I say about them." But they didn't do that. That pissed me off so I thought, "Okay, let's make fun of The New York Post." [The New York Postal website basically replicated the look of The New York Post with mock news, prompting The New York Post to sue for copyright infringement.] The New York Post is not the best newspaper in the world, yeah? And this is the point, not only freedom of speech but the right to make fun of something. It's allowed. I don't know how many gags I've seen on MadTV or Comedy Central where they use a Coca Cola or a MacDonald's sign and make a gag out of it and that doesn't mean it brands that [signage] as a piece of shit. In a way, The New York Post should be happy that we made a little fun of them.

Guillén: You gave them a little bit of publicity. Lord knows I've never paid attention to The New York Post before this brouhaha. Speaking of Comedy Central, I understand they are backing you up in trying to help distribute Postal?


Boll: Yeah. I was very surprised by the South Park people. They actually liked the movie and [they said] we can actually use South Park lines and use Postal as a presenter of the new South Park episodes in September. It's great because South Park has power. I hope this will help us a little.

Guillén: What I admired in your objection to The New York Post article was your criticism of the American canonization of the victims of 9/11. Tragically, they are victims—no doubt about it—but this strategic shift to transform them into victim-heroes hazards dangerous consequences. This subject came up recently for me in an interview with Steven Okazaki and his documentary White Light, Black Rain, where he likewise objected to the tendency to transform victims into heroes or saints. What is that hypocrisy in Americans to sanctify our victims while turning away from—let's say—all the victims at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the victims in Rwanda and Darfur? Why should our victims be more sancrosanct than the victims of other countries?

Boll: I wasn't in America during 9/11 but I shot Postal after. It was the biggest terrorist attack ever. The whole world was shocked. The whole world was ready to join forces—and did—with America to find the terrorists [and bring them to justice]. But one or two weeks after the attack, in America the political power—the Bush party basically—they turned it into [a strategy] of using that attack to fulfill [their] obligations to the oil and weapons industries. They made something up. It was important to stylize the victims of 9/11 as heroes. Everyone in the World Trade Center was not a victim of a terrorist attack, they were heroes.


Though it's a slightly different subject matter, that's why I was super pissed about Oliver Stone making [World Trade Center]. A guy like him 15-20 years ago—when he was maybe not so desperate to make some money—would never have made a movie like [World Trade Center]. For me, this was a shocking element that Hollywood can now buy an Oliver Stone to make a movie like this; the same guy who did Salvador, JFK, Born on the 4th of July and Platoon, where he criticized American [political policy]. This was shocking. That was also one of the reasons why I [included] that [opening] scene in Postal; to say, look, if everybody says these people are heroes, then one must say the opposite side, even if it's also wrong. You have to play the devil's advocate. You have to present the other point of view.

Guillén: One final question, you did Postal at the same time you did Seed. How did you handle the two projects together?

Boll: We shot Seed first and then Postal but I wrote both at the same time. Seed was a project I had long in development and Seed is actually like the dark brother of Postal. They are both dark movies; but, in Seed there is no humor. Seed is about the death penalty that suggests maybe we all deserve to be killed; that maybe the planet would be better off without humans. Seed is the bitter, depressing brother of Postal. It helped [to write both at the same time] because in Postal there is also a lot of hate. It helped to write something parallel that was depressing. Otherwise, Postal might have been way more depressing.

Cross-published at Twitch.