Just a minute, little lady.
You gotta have a ticket to go in there.
It was kind of the culmination of a dream
that I had ever since I was a kid, which was making a feature film.
And he wanted the script to be a certain way, we all wanted that to happen,
and he was able to make the movie the way he wanted to make it.
Pick a taboo, any taboo, it's in one of the segments.
Necrophilia, kids killing people.
We were all so young, and it's kind of like
none of us knew what we were doing but we were doing it.
Just cobbling together whatever connections we could find.
Jeff is going, "Come on, we need more blood!"
And the guy's going, "It's empty."
I always liked the way Jeff directed.
I liked the energy he got.
Jeff always wanted Vincent Price.
I kept saying, "Jeff, Vincent Price, that's really shooting for the moon."
The next thing I hear is Vincent Price's voice going,
"It's shit! It's shit!"
"I'm not doing it."
...because Clu Gulager murdered his naked wife in a bathtub.
I think you can see the beginnings of somebody trying to be a filmmaker.
We all made mistakes on it, but I'll tell you this, I wouldn't change a thing.
The circus had come to town.
It was going to be there all summer long.
Welcome to Oldfield.
I'd gone to film school at USC, University of Southern California,
had made a film there called "Divided We Fall"
with a guy named Kevin Meyer.
We'd partnered up, and we were going to make this big, epic civil war drama.
We convinced John Agar to be in it who was John Ford stock player for a while
and then later did very famous '50s science fiction movies.
It took about a year to make.
We ended up dropping out of school to finish it.
So it was really just...
It was our "Apocalypse Now" in SO many ways.
I'd worked on it.
I'd done makeup and various things.
His filmmaking skills really advanced, I thought.
So that's kind of what I left USC with, under my arm.
I had that to show to people, to show that I was a filmmaker,
newly arrived, freshly minted, ready to conquer Hollywood.
I remember when Mariette Hartley came down to USC
and said that Jeff was the hope of Hollywood.
Of course, I'm waiting for Hollywood to fall down at my knees,
at my feet and go, "We anoint you the new, whomever."
That didn't happen. Big surprise.
At college, I met a guy named Darin Scott,
he was a chemical engineer major at USC, we were in the same dorm.
Jeff and I were good friends at USC,
and I actually appeared in some of his student films.
Also at USC, Mike Malone, who I'd grown up with and made Super 8 films with,
he actually was in the film program as well, a year behind me.
Jeff and I met initially in junior high school in Dalton, Georgia.
He, sort of, mainly is responsible for me getting involved in film.
We all kind of ganged up and decided,
"Hey, let's really use our talents to make a feature film."
Darin was very good in organization, and he had a creative mind as well.
I was very interested in movies. I love movies.
I love writing short stories.
I think Jeff was the first one to say to me,
"Why don't you stop writing short stories and start writing screenplays”
"because people actually pay for those sometimes."
Mike was the wild-idea guy,
and his bent was much more into comedy, which I love too.
The filmmaking process for me is fun because it's creative and social.
So it was like, "Hey, let's go hang out with friends and do fun stuff,"
"pretend to get shot with guns and roll down hills,”
"do stunts and stuff like that, and do silly stuff."
The two final pieces of the puzzle was Courtney Joyner
who I had gone to school with.
He was at USC as well.
And my brother Bill who moved out to California in 1984.
After graduation we were all looking at trying to start our movie careers,
and I was focusing on writing, and Jeff had already started to work
for Roger Corman a little bit, he was working for Jim Wynorski.
I ended up rooming with Jeff.
When I did that, everybody who was coming into the apartment was somebody
who wanted to be in the film business as he did, and I caught the bug.
So Jeff, and Darin, and Mike Malone, and Jeff's brother Bill,
and I, all lived together in this house up in Tujunga.
It was fun, but it was also...
We all got to make the rent, we all got to get jobs.
We all got to go out and do something,
in the meanwhile we were planning to make this movie.
I was starting to work a little bit at Universal.
A director there named Virgil Vogel had read some scripts of mine
when I was in college, and so I was working with Virgil.
Jeff was great 'cause he'd come over to Universal, and we'd go out
to the set of "Airwolf" together, and all the things that we were working on.
I was actually working at Procter & Gamble as an engineer while rooming with Jeff,
and I knew that I hated the corporate lifestyle and working for a big company,
and I wanted to do something independent.
I wanted to get into a creative field.
Jeff came to me one day and said that I should quit my job and throw in with them,
and we're going to go and we're going to make this movie.
The original intent was, with this company Conquest Films
which was the film company name that I had from my Super 8 days,
the original intent was to make a road movie called.
"Last Stand of the Shaffner Sisters"
that Mike and I had conceived and done some work on,
and Courtney did the D-draft of the script.
That really was a much too ambitious movie and a very oddball movie,
but much too ambitious to really try and do for a first film.
So we decided, instead of that, we would make a horror film which...
I was a huge horror fan.
Of course, this was at the time when independent movies...
This was the time of "Friday the 13th" and "Halloween",
and, of course, VHS was getting ready to explode.
So there was money to be had particularly for independent horror
because independent horror had done so well.
Of course, we loved horror movies, and that was our focus.
We just really started talking that that's really what we should try and do.
I had an idea of a haunted Southern town that emanated evil, whatever, historically,
called "From a Whisper to a Scream" but I hadn't written anything other than
just that little basic idea and the title.
At that time there hadn't been a lot of anthologies.
We all loved "Tales from the Crypt" and "Asylum", and the Amicus movies,
but that format had gone by the wayside a little bit.
We thought, and I think it was an extremely smart strategy,
that if we do, basically, a series of shorts,
we're raising the money independently.
If we fall short of the money at any point during the production,
we don't end up in that position of having a movie
that's three quarters of the way done.
So this was, in a way... We wanted to do an anthology
but it was also a very sound stopgap.
So that, if we ran into trouble at any point,
we would have actually completed segments of something.
We could then do it.
As I remember it, I had this idea,
"Let's just pick a bunch of taboos,"
"and then we'll write a story around each taboo."
The stories were divided up.
Jeff wrote one, Courtney wrote one, Mike and Courtney wrote one,
and Darin wrote one. Jeff wrote the Civil War episode.
And then Mike wrote, actually, a draft of the Clu Gulager episode,
and it was very funny but it wasn't really the tone.
But it was so creative and so interesting!
Everyone's a little squeamish about funny episodes in horror anthologies
because sometimes they work great and sometimes...
Mike had done such a terrific job but he was very gracious and said,
"No, I can rewrite it to what you feel it should be."
The episode I scripted was about a gangster
who gets shot by some of his associates
and is discovered in the woods by a mysterious old man who, it turns out,
is several hundred years old and has the secret to immortality.
Of course, the gangster wants the secret to immortality,
and he gets it, but he doesn't get it like he really wanted.
The carnival episode actually had begun as an idea I had for a short
that I wanted to write for myself, very much kind of old EC comics, 1930s.
A guy eats a bunch of glass, and it comes blowing out of his body.
If you look at "From a Whisper to a Scream", you'll notice
that there are some very twisted things in it, and that came out of that process
of young guys trying to be as shocking as possible.
We really didn't see each other's work until we were kind of at the end,
and it was all put together, and we were all kind of flipping through the pages.
It wasn't...
Everybody kind of wanted their own voice which Jeff would...
Jeff was great, and he let that happen, and Darin did too.
Then, the roundabout, the bookends with Vincent Price.
There, really, the big struggle was coming up with the appropriate vehicle
that connected the stories.
Basically, the town historian there lives alone, there at his library,
and his daughter has just been executed for murder,
and he doesn't even go to his own daughter's execution.
He doesn't.
He's completely removed himself from that experience because she was doomed,
because she was born there, as he was.
We all kind of gave ideas to each other's stories etc.,
and came out with a script that was coherent and, we thought, ready to go.
So we figured, "Okay, well, how do we get this made?”
That's where my brother came in.
Bill was a real sharp salesman type of guy.
A real charmer.
He knew how to talk to people, and we realized pretty early on
that he would be the guy to try to sell the investment.
We were inspired by guys like Sam Raimi and Tobe Hooper
who had either made limited partnerships, formed limited partnerships to raise money.
The Coen Brothers did this for "Blood Simple".
What happened was, I wrote up all the paperwork and the perspectives
and the limited partnership agreements and did all that on my computer.
We gave that all to Bill, and Bill flew off to Dalton, Georgia
where he proceeded to have meetings with all of these
wealthy people in town trying to raise money for the film.
But in the mid-eighties, it was an easier thing to do,
and movie making was a little more exotic back then, I think.
Dalton, Georgia was a town where they made 60% of the world's carpet at the time.
So you pretty much knew who the rich guys in town were
because their names were on all of the carpet mills,
and he made appointments with these guys.
He had presentations.
And I supplied kind of the enthusiasm for the project
and the artistic vision when we were raising the money.
He just could never be deterred.
Everybody should have a producer who's so absolutely focused
in his determination to get something made.
He had it because he wanted to make a movie.
He wanted to make a movie with his brother.
And, lo and behold, we raised a very small amount of money to make this movie.
We promoted the film as Dalton's first feature film.
Here are two hometown boys coming home to make a movie
and to take the landmarks of Dalton, and to put them in front of the entire country.
I think people got pretty enthusiastic about it.
So I went back to Los Angeles,
and we started casting the movie and looking for the crew.
The casting of the movie was unusual in one sense
because there was no casting director.
It was just me. There wasn't a middleman.
It was just... I had an idea of someone I wanted and then tracked them down.
Terry Kiser we knew socially because I knew the director Steve Carver.
We would go to his house, and we would meet Terry there.
He was a great guy and a terrific actor.
I was always very impressed with him and just loved his work.
So I thought that was a perfect fit.
What the goddamn hell do you want?
And then Harry Caesar, Jeff and I met Harry Caesar at a memorial for Robert Aldrich.
Actually, we were at the Directors Guild and sitting right behind him.
That's how that happened.
It was, really, like the sixth degrees of separation casting.
It was like, so-and-so knew someone who knew someone
who then knew the person that I wanted to get to.
Rosalind Cash, who was just so terrific.
She was a good friend of ours, of a director that we knew named Oscar Williams.
Oscar had written "Truck Turner”, and he wrote and directed
a very cool movie called "Five on the Black Hand Side".
He'd been around, and he had a lot of really good advice for me.
And Angelo Rossitto also was in the carnival episode, and that was just great.
Jeff and I really wanted him, of course, because he had been in "Freaks".
Some of them had kind of fallen out of favor, maybe, in the mainstream,
like Cameron Mitchell who had done just tons of movies
but hadn't done a lot of studio stuff in a while except on television.
And Cameron couldn't have been greater.
We went down to Palm Springs and met with him.
Jeff and I just drove down there, and he said, "Well, come on by the condos."
We go, and we meet him, and he says, "Sure, no, this sounds great."
"Let's go to a party.” That was Cameron Mitchell.
It's always exciting, I think, for actors to work with a first-time director
because they invariably will work differently than a lot of people,
especially if you've done a lot of television or something.
There's maybe a different way of working with a first-time director
than some of the directors they had worked with
throughout the years at Universal or wherever.
Everybody wanted to lend us a hand.
If they couldn't do it personally, then they knew
somebody else who would, or they had phone numbers, or...
Just the amount of generosity that came around the movie
was pretty astounding, actually.
Clu Gulager, I'd had him in mind for another part.
A smaller part in the movie.
I was doing a small documentary on Don Siegel.
We did a tribute to Don at USC, and Clu got involved with that.
Jeff and I went down to his acting workshop.
He started acting with me because he wanted to learn how to communicate
in that department, the acting department.
I asked to be in that film. They weren't going to hire me.
They wanted my wife.
I said, "Let me be..."
"Let me play this captain in the Civil War."
They found one of the great film actors of Hollywood to play it
who was on the down spin and an alcoholic.
And when he read the script, he goes,
"You know what? I would love to play Stanley.”
I said, "Well, let me play it."
"Let me play this part opposite Miriam."
She played my sister.
It was originally written as a totally different, much younger character, etc.
And had nothing really to do with what ended up on the screen.
I thought about it for just a little bit.
I thought, and I really mulled it over in my mind,
"You know what, that would be a really interesting take,"
"and having Clu in that role could bring something to it"
"that's not there right now."
I think, "Yeah, that's the idea. Let's get Clu."
He did also... By that time, he's done,
actually, "A Nightmare on Elm Street 2" and "The Hidden".
So Clu's involvement with horror was becoming
more and more prominent, and that was terrific.
I remember Darin just initially snap judgment-wise, going,
"Oh, that is a shitty idea. I can't believe that."
"Him though? That's totally wrong."
Because it was wrong as written.
Of course, Miriam, his wife, is so wonderful in the movie.
She was known primarily though, as a comedian,
from "Barney Miller" and movies like "The Big Bus".
The casting process was one of my most enjoyable things in pre-production.
Just being able to meet and then get these actors that I admired for so long.
It was just wonderful.
Most of the small roles were cast out of Atlanta or Dalton
where the film was shot, and that was just incredibly eye-opening,
because there were some just hilarious auditions
that were just totally unexpurgated emotion.
It was just amazing to see how different the approaches to material could be.
We'd had then in our mind that the "connecting device"
would probably be shot in California,
but we'd scheduled it actually in our first schedule.
We had scheduled it to be shot in Dalton where the movie was shot
but we kind of always had it in the back of our mind,
"Well, we might need to shoot that in California"
"because we're trying to get a big name for it."
And the big name we were trying to get from the very beginning, was Vincent Price.
I was actually a naysayer.
Jeff always wanted Vincent Price, and I kept saying,
"Jeff, Vincent Price, that's really shooting for the moon."
"Let's be a little more realistic.”
But he was absolutely bound and determined to get Vincent Price.
We're trying to figure out how do we get him.
How do we get to Vincent Price? We're young kids.
We don't have any connections in Hollywood.
We don't know any agents.
But we did know one thing, that back in the eighties
you could buy people's, and I'm talking about celebrities', addresses.
There was a service that would sell you anybody's address for $10.
I am sure they are out of business now
because they'd be sued to death, but at that time this was going on.
So we went, and we paid $10 for Vincent Price's address.
Fascinating. A little far-fetched.
Darin, and Jeff, and I, we go out to his house on Swallow Drive,
and we're just sitting there in the car.
We're just staring at his house, and we're scared to death.
And I'm saying to Jeff, "Well, you know, you're the director."
"You go up there and knock on the door."
And Jeff's saying to me, "Uh-uh, you're the producer. You're supposed to do that."
"You go up and knock on the door."
Both of us were afraid to do it.
So we decided we'll both go.
We both went up with our little red-bound copy of "From a Whisper to a Scream”,
fresh off the printer, went up to his door, knocked.
Vincent Price opens the door.
He is in an apron, because he had been baking bread.
We tell him who we are.
We tell him what we want, and he lets us in.
So we go into his living room, and we sit down, and he was incredibly gracious.
He was very, very nice.
I told him that I'd seen him on stage at the Tivoli Theater in Chattanooga
doing "Diversions & Delights", the Oscar Wilde play written by John Gay.
And I'd actually met him, just shook his hand
as he came out of the dressing room after the play.
We were there 20 minutes while he talked about art, talked about film.
We drank iced tea.
It was a dream situation.
So we gave him the script, and then we heard from him a couple of days later
saying, "You know, I read the script. It's very interesting,"
"but I've tried to get away from horror films, and I really don't know."
"I just really don't know right now."
His main thing was, he had just hosted the series "Mystery!" with Diana Rigg,
and that had done extremely well, and it was very prestigious.
So he kind of didn't want to continue with that format.
But we didn't really know that Vincent would do it,
but we didn't know he wouldn't do it.
So we were, kind of, as they say, kind of hovering or, kind of, in limbo.
Darin and I drive cross-country in my little Honda,
and we had to be there in two and a half days.
So we just drove pretty much nonstop.
I would sleep when he was driving. He would sleep when I was driving,
but neither of us trusted either of us, so nobody slept.
We finally made it to Dalton in about two and a half days
and started the preparation in earnest.
We're going to talk about the movie industry coming to town.
Maybe not necessarily in Chattanooga but it's in the Dalton area at least.
The movie is going to be entitled "From a Whisper to a Scream" which is, why?
Each one of these is a period piece, and you have to find, obviously,
period costumes, period props.
We've got a great crew working on this.
The funny thing for me as the producer of "From a Whisper to a Scream" is,
this was the first time I'd actually ever been on a motion picture set.
My only previous experience had been in acting in Jeff's student films.
So it was a completely new experience for me,
and it seemed like a student film, only bigger and more complicated.
My idea always was to have kind of a pro-am approach to the crew,
to have people that had never done certain things before
combined with people that had done things before.
So you have that enthusiasm and then that professionalism,
and that energy would combine to make something unique.
We found a guy named Craig Greene to be the director of photography.
He had his own equipment, so that was incredibly advantageous.
It wasn't our modern camera.
It was an old Mitchell camera from the early '60s.
A Mitchell camera... People today would be amazed to see this thing.
This is the kind of camera that Hitchcock shot on.
I mean, it was as big as a trunk, a big heavy trunk.
It wasn't just camera equipment, he had lighting equipment and everything.
It was like a... One-stop rental house to hire him.
So that's one of the reasons, perhaps the main reason, why we hired him.
Being a veteran, working with a bunch of young kids who are pretty much green,
he was kind of harassable and a little bit grumpy.
He was a talented guy. He had not shot a lot of things.
He'd shot some commercials, but he hadn't shot a lot of things.
But he had gaffed a lot of things, and had been an electrician for a long time.
So he definitely knew lighting inside and out.
And he had connections with a lot of the crew
that we brought out to Georgia to make the movie.
And our sound guy, Jerry Wolfe, sound recordist,
also came from Los Angeles, and he was a great guy to work with.
He had done many, many independent films,
and he actually was a still photographer on many independent films.
It was great hearing his stories throughout the production.
I don't remember the first reading of the script.
I read it so many times.
I don't remember my first reading or reaction to it.
But what I do know is that I looked at it and thought,
"Boy, if we get to do this, this is the kind of thing that I want to do."
This is everything.
It's blood, gore, guts. It's fantasy.
It's all these different effects-orientated kind of things in here,
and they're going to let me be in charge of it,
and we're going to go shoot for a month in Georgia, and all that.
I'm like, "This is what I got into this industry for."
My assistant director, quite frankly, I don't know
if I could have survived the movie in some level without him,
was a guy named Mark Hannah who I'd grown up with
and made Super 8 films with, along with Allen Posten.
There was a whole little group of us from Dalton, Georgia, growing up,
making Super 8 movies in the backyard and running around town.
The three of us growing up, making Super 8 movies,
and this is a very proud moment that Jeff is getting to make his first feature film,
and Mark and I are there to help him.
Doing a feature like this was all our dreams.
Of course, Allen and I did our own several years later
but the idea to come here where we had learned filmmaking,
loved filmmaking, gone to the movies, it was really neat.
It was a dream come true.
And having Mike Malone there and my brother, it made it seem like,
on some level, this was just an extension of a Super 8 filmmaking.
I don't know that they really had a place for me or a job for me to do.
So Mark Hannah basically told me, "Okay, you're the transportation captain.”
And I'm like, "Great."
Had no idea. No idea whatsoever
what a transportation captain did or anything like that.
Mike Malone on this movie, for me
it was great to have him there as a sounding board,
it was great to have him there as a friend,
and it was great to have him there as a fellow artist.
I was working and living in New York City.
I had gone to Syracuse.
I was working in the fashion industry, and I really thought my career was over.
I had gone to school to major in set design and wanted to do theater and film.
They showed up and said, "We want you to come to Dalton, Georgia,"
"and do this film," and I was just blown away.
It was everybody's first job, pretty much.
I'm credited with Allen Posten on this project,
and it was great to have someone like him to work with
because he was able to build all these great sets
and really make a lot of things happen.
She did basically the wardrobe and all the costumes for the film,
and I was doing the sets.
There were times where she did help out on the set.
She designed some of the sets.
That's such a big project, it was good to have someone to do that, to work with.
I had to do a Civil War, 1930s carnival, 1950s scene and a 1970s.
My crew was a bunch of high school kids that worked for free.
We were reading this, we knew we were doing period stuff,
but suddenly it occurred to us that we'd only prepared the budget
for art direction and set dressing and wardrobe for about 200 bucks.
The beauty of low budget filmmaking, if there's no release date or anything,
you have time in prep to gather certain props together, art department things.
And my brother Bill would have more flights of fancy, "Let's say, what about this?"
"This and this would be possible."
And make you think bigger.
He would make a deal with the vendors, the hardware stores,
everybody in the town, and he got everything for free.
Period props and set pieces were plentiful and loaned to us by friendly farmers,
the local college, thrift stores, the crew and their families.
When you do movies like this, you have to have somebody
who's going to be in there to really try and hustle all these things together.
And Bill not only did it, he also loved doing it.
But it could have never been done without Jeanne Burr and William Burr, the father.
Our whole production office...
There was Jeff's house, and behind Jeff's house
they had a little pool house, but without the pool.
The little other house was like the production office.
So Jeff had people coming left and right from L.A., Tennessee, Atlanta.
I really didn't realize having all those people in my house
was going to be that difficult.
It was so low-budget, it'd be like "Yours, Mine and Ours".
He'd hand them a pillow and say,
"Go find a room in the house, and you can sleep there."
So the whole house was taken over by everybody making this movie.
They were totally involved with the film.
Totally supportive, so supportive of Jeff and Bill,
really wanted to see that they were able to make their dream come true.
I remember telling Mom and Dad, both,
"It's going to be something that you will love, you will hate,"
"but you will talk about it for the rest of your life on some level."
And that's exactly what happened.
We were all involved in doing something we really believed in.
There was no completion bond.
There was no guarantee that the film would be finished,
much less released, much less, so...
So all of that was an incredible pressure on our shoulders
that we willingly and joyfully took on.
- To me, I mean, I grew up in Dalton. - Yeah.
And Mike pretty much grew up in Dalton, and my brother, as well.
It is, to me, it's easier to do a film of this type here,
in this area, because of the cooperation.
Perhaps a slightly unbilled character in the whole film
is Dalton and the surroundings.
Beautiful countryside, lakes, swamps.
It was just a perfect place to shoot a horror movie.
And that was one of the main things that we did discuss.
We all discussed that every story kind of had its own visual personality.
And he was able to do that.
The town of Dalton was amazingly cooperative.
So a lot of stuff was open to us that...
You certainly couldn't have gotten that kind of cooperation in Los Angeles
or in New York City, some of the more traditional filmmaking centers.
With a regular film, you're going to go in,
and you kind of schedule all your exterior days,
and then your exterior nights, and then your interiors.
And if it rains early on, you can move to an interior set.
You got coverage.
Your actors are kind of there for the run of the show, and all that.
But with an anthology film, we were basically shooting four short films,
one each week, for four weeks in a row, using the same crew.
That's the best way to describe it.
It wasn't really designed as a smart logistic location,
"Oh, we base here, and then we'll shoot around,”
"as much stuff as we can around there."
There was a lot of company moves and a lot of one-day locations in the movie.
Almost everyone had interiors and exteriors day and night within that week,
but then you have to be able to turn around with your crew time.
So, if you're finishing one week on nights,
you can't start the next week shoot, which is a different story, on the mornings.
So it'd become this real puzzle of trying to put everything together.
The swamp episode was always going to be the first episode shot
because it was probably the logistically simplest episode.
So we did do ourselves a favor by starting small.
The first thing we shot should've been the last thing, and the last thing
probably should've been, schedule-wise, the first thing.
The first thing we shot was indoor set which should have been rain cover set.
So we started shooting the swamp episode in the warehouse of World Carpets,
and we shot for two days on the set.
It was built inside a carpet warehouse.
Two, three floors up, you kind of had to drive up this concrete ramp,
if you wanted to get a vehicle up there or something,
or bring a pickup truck to bring stuff.
We found wood somewhere in a field from a shack that did burn down.
We loaded it up on a truck, took it to this carpet mill,
put it in an elevator, put it on the eighth floor and built the shack.
And we're building these sets like a house.
Back then we didn't know how to build a wall that could fly very easily.
We built it with two-by-fours and plywood, so they were pretty sturdy.
We had a lot of tattered pieces in the cabin, in the swamp.
That set in particular was really beautiful, and I loved it.
I know he was very hands-on and really created that beautiful set.
When I first walked on the set, I'm like,
"They've got a movie set in a carpet factory?"
I thought, "What kind of movie I'm on here?"
At first I thought, "Is this a porn movie?"
Watching the tractors and stuff going up and down, and everything.
Hauling all these big things and stuff,
and having to be careful not to get skewered or stabbed
by one of those things that they carried the carpet rolls on.
Coming to and from set, it was interesting.
I think Jeff's little...
I guess, he had a little Toyota at the time.
Actually got hit by a...
They call them pole hysters because it got a big pole
that goes in the middle of the carpet.
And it hit his car and just peeled it open like a tuna fish can or something.
It was sad and funny at the same time, but mainly funny.
Working with Terry Kiser and Harry Caesar, the two of them,
it was just joyful. It really was.
They were both total professionals and just really got into the material,
and deepened it, quite frankly.
I think they deepened the material.
Do you realize what you got, old man?
You got the key to life!
Eternal life!
Terry Kiser at that time, and I've seen him since,
a very warm, outgoing guy, but at that time he was kind of intense.
It was a little... I didn't try and pal it up with him or buddy-buddy.
He really seemed to be concentrating on the part
and wanting to do something really good.
And just as a filmmaker, I can't thank them enough
for taking a chance being in this movie with a first-time director
and making that first-time director feel very at home.
So, about midway through that first day I really did feel at home, directing.
It was long hours.
Jeff was trying to make his day and all that.
Next day we'd come back.
Picked up a little easier.
We thought, "Oh, good, we'll go in and get out of here at a normal time."
And then, when we finished with all the main actors and everything, Jeff as...
I guess, to this day, he wants to shoot every single shot.
He wants to direct everything that goes in the movie.
So we spent another two, maybe three hours
shooting close-ups and cutaways of the set, for the reaction shots and all that.
That's something that could've been shot some other time
by some other people somewhere.
Well, here we are.
This is the swamp, and this was our first day on location.
Which really wasn't a swamp.
It was more like a large pond that had decaying trees in it.
Really a big flooded place.
There's a spring there, very deep spring, deep enough to scuba dive in.
The Indians used to camp out there and stuff.
It looked really cool.
We have all the the rotting, dying, kind of Southern Gothic trees.
Being the transportation captain, I was responsible
for finding a spot to put all the trucks.
And not having any experience in that I didn't know where to put the trucks.
So we start driving trucks in, and I'm waving people over,
and then, all of a sudden, the grip truck pulls onto a piece of land,
and then, all of a sudden, it just starts leaning.
So all day, we're worried about the truck falling over, and, of course,
I'm worried about safety, insurance, can we actually get the gear off and stuff?
Actually, my first official act as a motion picture producer
was calling the wreckers to get the grip trucks out of the mud.
We had to get two tow trucks.
One to come over on the side of the top of the thing and pull it straight,
and then another to pull it out, back onto solid ground.
That was my major F-up on the film.
From that time on, maybe, I figured out, "Hey, you know what?"
"There'll be problems on this movie but we'll get through them."
Because in a different, parallel universe maybe that grip truck
would have gone into the swamp and rendered a lot of the equipment useless,
and that gave us a whole new set of problems.
So we were lucky that that didn't happen,
and on some level that luck continued through the making of the movie.
Some of the best stuff from the movie was shot here.
Really spooky stuff with the dream sequence with Terry Kiser,
and also a duel to the death between Harry Caesar and Terry Kiser's character
that takes place on a boat, where Harry Caesar got the worst of it
at that moment, but he came back.
Well, the night before we were to shoot the swamp demons dream sequence,
where Terry Kiser's boat gets all busted up,
TW and I took the newly crafted break-away boat
out onto the swamp for its maiden voyage.
It was beautiful.
Above us, a sky full of stars.
Around us, the chorus of unseen swamp life.
The midnight-black water beneath.
And there was nobody around for miles.
Under the influence of some powerfully locally grown herb.
Transcendentally beautiful night.
Just the best.
We did a poor man's water housing.
We just got an aquarium and stuck the camera in there,
and just kind of dipped it right below the water level.
So you're getting that cool underwater kind of look without spending,
whatever it is, $235 a day on a water housing.
We went to the department store and bought a $30 aquarium.
So I ended up walking...
Swimming, walking, whatever, out in the swamp to shoot the aquarium shots,
and when I got out of there, there was...
I wasn't really worried about snakes so much,
but when I got out of there, man, I was covered, covered in leeches.
There was... Tons of leaches.
We were wading around in the swamps.
Gee, were poisonous snakes an issue? Yes.
We didn't see or kill any, but they were there the whole time.
A lot of people that did come from Los Angeles
were not so prepared to deal with the humidity.
There was a lot of grumbling about how hot it was etc.,
which you can't do anything about.
The DP was an older guy, and this guy has been argumentative with Jeff every shot.
Jeff's like, "I want to do this, I want to do this."
The guy's like, "I don't think we can do that."
I was standing, like, right...
Closer than I am to the camera.
Jeff tells the guy he wants a certain setup,
he wants a certain shot, a certain lens.
The guy's like, "Well, why do you want to do that?"
Jeff just stops and goes, "Come here."
They went for a walk about 15 feet away.
I heard Jeff say, "Look, you're director of photography on this film."
"I'm the director."
"So do what the fuck I say, okay?"
That was it.
We never had a problem after that.
The next segment we shot was at Terry Kiser's hideout,
his little mobile home where his sweetie pie had double-crossed him.
I think Allen Posten had found the trailer,
and then he and Cindy Charette had gone out and dressed it out and whatever.
We'd found a hot rod, 1950s hot rod that fit the period, but was a real hot rod.
They're not that hard to find around here.
For the swamp scene for Terry Kiser and his funky trailer,
and all that, he's in this old vintage shirt.
I found this beautiful vintage shirt in a thrift store, and we had one of those.
One of those, which is unheard of.
You just... It's like, you never only have one shirt of...
One for an actor, or one dress of something.
So things like that were so funny.
That whole summer I was running to get birthday gifts
because every week somebody had a birthday.
So we devised a plan that everybody would get about the same thing.
A beach towel.
Usually it said, "Dalton, Georgia" on it, if we could get that put on.
And we did birthday cakes.
I can remember, with Terry Kiser, his was, I think, among the first,
and I brought out the cake, and we all sang to Terry, and he was overwhelmed.
He just couldn't believe that we would do such a nice thing.
So we wrapped up the swamp episode shooting an exterior night with the voodoo ceremony.
Ever since shooting that night, the way Harry said it,
and just the terminology in general, the "Sharoom zik lik naheem"
has been embedded in my head since the summer of 1985.
We finished on a night.
It was a hot night. It was a buggy night.
It was a night we were glad to be done with, and everybody got a day off.
But that was a small hill to climb, and there was a much bigger hill to climb
in the next episode, because it was the carnival episode
which was set in the 1930s and had a lot of extras.
In my inexperienced mindset, a huge logistics.
On the day off, to introduce the new cast members to the crew
and the people helping out in the movie,
somebody that worked there within the Little Theater would throw a party.
We'd have a "Welcome to Dalton" party,
and then a "Welcome to the night before the first shoot" party.
They were like banquets.
This is the Prater's Mill, which predates the Civil War.
It's antebellum, and it's still here, historical site.
I think they actually had a cavalry skirmish around here.
This was the site for the glass-eater segment for the carnival sequence.
They have fairs there a couple of times a year.
They've some performance spaces, so there was many stuff already there.
We didn't have to build a lot of the structure.
So it was mainly getting in and dressing them, and...
We found a guy in Chattanooga who used to run a carnival.
I forget how we found him, but... A guy named Bud Hammontree.
He brought down, pretty much for free because he was retired
and just thought it'd be a fun thing to do,
so he brought down a ride that we put on the far end here,
and then we built the carnival around that.
So we didn't have to build very much stuff.
Much of it was just brought.
Cindy Charette was our art director.
I walked onto that carnival set.
She really built a midway. It was fantastic.
I hand-painted all the banners, all the carnival banners myself.
And remember, it's a summer. So it's humid and there's lots of bugs,
and I was attacked by mosquitoes, and it was just miserable.
I worked on "Rat in the hole"
which I didn't know was going to be shown right up front.
If I had known that, I would probably put more detail to it.
And there was a hot dog banner.
I remember working on that one.
Freak show paintings, facades of old carnival attractions,
like The Palace of a Thousand Pleasures, House of Pain.
We had a phrenology booth.
Oh, on one of the banners, I had a portrait of Jeff himself, as a baby,
and it was called Freddie, The Frog Baby,
and I used his face in that, and I still have that.
But everything else, if you really look, it wasn't carnival stuff.
It was more... We came up with game booths,
and we came up with a couple of fire acts,
whatever. Anything we could do cheaply.
So set in the 1930s, we've got new actors,
we've got new sets, we've got new locations.
We jumped in it with a crew that had finished
a tough swampy week the week before.
Gentlemen.
Is this an open game?
It isn't.
We started with some of the carnival stuff,
some of the stuff in the tent and the thing in the morning.
Some things were just some of the leads,
so we could really focus on the actors.
Angelo was just a joy to work with, to have around.
He was just a fascinating guy and had been through so much in his life.
The thing with Angie as a small person is...
A little person on set, you've got to help him.
Sometimes you got to lift him onto the set or the chair or something.
So you just got to help him some, and that's okay.
But that gives you a chance to interact with him
and just get to spend some good time around him.
He was way up there in years, and I think we exhausted him.
We exhausted ourselves, but Angelo was a trooper, he was great.
No, you couldn't be more wrong.
Everything that happens in this carnival is my business.
And Rosalind Cash was just a wonder to work with too.
She was... The racehorse analogy.
She was definitely a high-strung racehorse
that, if with the right jockeying, could just...
Could be a winner every time.
I had never worked with a kind of a method actor before,
and Rosalind Cash was a method actor.
She kind of built her character, and she'd work into it.
She'd talk, and then she'd work some more.
And Jeff would have private conversations on set.
Would pull them away, would take a moment.
Actors want attention, that's all they want.
They want to hear, who am [?
What's my part?
What do you want from me?
The actors need a lot, and Jeff would give that to them.
That's where you beat your wife to death.
I told you how that happened.
The judge doesn't care what you look like, No Face!
We had a great makeup effects crew, Rob Burman
and his younger brother Barney Burman who actually...
Barney plays No Face in the carnival episode.
There was a picture in Famous Monsters of Filmland
from a science fiction TV series, I believe, called "Way Out".
And Dick Smith had done a makeup of a guy who's literally...
Half of his face was completely blank.
Not even the indentation of a skull, and I always...
I'd see that picture, and it always freaked me out.
So that was my homage, inspiration, rip off, whatever.
We did the little mechanical eye on the guy's chest
that moves around and looks around, and things like that.
Really tough to do.
I think we ended up trimming his chest hair off
and reapplying it over the top of the prosthetic.
He swore at us for having a bald spot after that,
but hey, it's suffering for your art, right?
After that, we did the big midway scene.
This was our biggest scene as far as extras.
We're having an open casting call for every resident.
We want everybody to come down and audition
for the other extra parts, for a carnival scene.
We need a lot of extras for that, and these are featured extras
because in the carnival midway they're going to be seen a great deal.
We put out a call on the radio station for extras to come in period costume,
and we had hundreds of people show up in period costume.
The antique car club came and brought probably 30 antique cars,
knowing their cars were going to be featured.
Everybody thought they were going to get a close up, and everybody was excited
to meet Vincent Price who of course had not been signed yet.
Every person who was there as a barker or running one of the stands
on the midway or something, it was a friend of the Burrs,
and Bill orchestrated that so completely.
When a movie's being made, in the beginning there's all that enthusiasm in the world,
but you always hear people later saying,
"I didn't realize it was going to take this much time."
"I didn't realize we were going to have to come back again and again,"
"till they got that scene right."
Marker.
- And background action! - Action!
Well, me and Melinda was walking down.
We did that I don't know how many times.
Walking back and forth, walking back and forth.
Then the other thing to save money, we're shooting short ends,
which means... Some other movie that has a big budget
or a decent budget is shooting, and when they get close to the end,
they don't want to roll out on a take, so they take that short end.
So it may be 100 feet, it may be 300 feet.
So every couple of minutes you have to reload the camera.
Instead of getting 10 minutes, you're getting a minute and a half or something.
So it's very frustrating like that, just production-wise,
that's eating into your setups.
And many times they were loading in the camera equipment
as we were hanging the last curtain,
but then we had to go right away to the next location.
There was so much stuff, and there's a lot of stuff that was dropped,
that we couldn't shoot because of time.
It was two o'clock in the morning, and we had to have a second meal.
Now, you're in North Georgia.
Where are you going to get food for a crew of 50?
So we had to drive almost to Chattanooga to Krystal Burgers.
It's a Southern chain, it's like White Castle.
Two o'clock in the morning, we drive up to the drive-thru, and...
"Yes, can we help you? Welcome to Krystal's."
"What you think, Darin? How many do you think we need?”
"I don't know. We got a crew of 50. And actors and stuff."
"Okay, yeah. We want 300 cheeseburgers.”
"Are you serious?"
"I am serious."
When we were filming the actual glass-eater act,
that was set up at the mill also, at the Prater's Mill,
and we'd boxed in and made this little set out of an existing building there.
I remember hating it at that point.
That was a low point because a lot of people that helped were volunteers,
and if they didn't show up, you still had to get the work done.
So it came down to a handful of people that had to do it.
4:00 AM you start losing people. They just start wandering away.
So the crowd got smaller and smaller,
so they had to get tighter and tighter on the shots.
I'm in the carnival sequence
giving an astoundingly bad performance as an audience member.
When we shot the scene, I had a close-up,
but what was so strange is you had to remember what you was looking at.
Because all you was looking at was the camera
but you had to remember that what he was doing,
and you had to get this expression on your face.
So that was strange.
On the glass-eating scene, what was he actually eating? What was he...
Actually, it was some of the... For the razor blade, the inserts,
the closeups, that we shot here, it was our stunt man.
He actually ate... He knew how to do it.
He actually ate a razor.
And some of the glass? I remember he ate... The light bulb glass?
No, the razor blade, razor blade. The glass was just candy glass.
This is the actual box, which he used to... Crushed glass, and he had some razorblades.
Speaking of which, this is an actual razor blade that was used in the movie.
I've never done this before.
Is it supposed to hurt?
We shot the glass-eater sequence two times.
Did this beautiful makeup with the glass sticking out of his fingers,
and that bolts, and things like that, and walked out on the set,
and showed Jeff and said, "Jeff, what do you think?"
And he goes, "Well, that looks really great."
"Isn't it the other hand?"
I just went nuts.
Thank God, they can flip the negative, so it's just an insert.
It just had to look like the other hand, but... Oh.
There were two days in a row, I think, that the crew worked very long hours.
That's what's to be expected with this kind of movie.
I maybe didn't say it like that, but that's kind of the impression,
I think, that they got from me.
We finished up shooting the carnival sequence in the old Hotel Dalton.
It had been a hotel for years and years
and would have been a nice hotel back, I guess, in the '30s or '40s.
I'm not even exactly sure when they built it.
Didi Lanier did a heroic...
She was the Fay Wray award for screaming the most loudest and most prolonged,
and Jeff just kept dragging it out of her until her voice is gone,
I guess, and the screaming and stuff.
We were off camera with, embarrassingly enough, just, basically, a Hudson sprayer.
A garden sprayer pumped up with thin blood that we sprayed up against the walls.
You can kind of tell in some of them where you see
a trail of blood go across the wall or whatever.
He probably used the first take but he kept on
for endless takes of her screaming and the blood spattering and all that.
All of a sudden the lights kind of went off, and I'm told the generator went down.
I was like, "Well, that's weird. It was going fine a minute ago."
So I run downstairs, and I go to the genny operator who was Keith Crofford,
famous for... One of the head muckety-mucks at Adult Swim
on Cartoon Network now, but at that time he was a lowly generator operator
out of the truck, making sure that electricity was flowing.
I go, "Keith, what's going on?"
And he goes, "Eh, the genny broke."
I go, "What do you mean it's broke? Do we need to order parts and stuff?”
"No, no. It'll be okay in the morning."
I go, "Well, can we fix it now?" And he goes, "No, it's broken for now."
If you want to call it a crew mutiny, you can call it a crew mutiny.
If you want to call it dissatisfaction,
maybe I'd prefer that, they were dissatisfied.
They made it known they were dissatisfied, and they were absolutely
frigging right to make it known they were dissatisfied.
I was pissed off at the time, but any idiot would know that,
of course, they're going to be dissatisfied.
The crew was tired, and this was their way of telling the madman, Jeff Burr,
four stories up, getting some chick to scream that you could hear
three blocks away, to stop already, will ya?
Quite frankly, the long hours were partly due to my,
not all, but partly, due to my inexperience.
The crew was very supportive of me in many, many ways.
I cannot underestimate their contribution at all, and as I said,
they taught me a lot on that particular episode,
on how to really comport myself on a professional set.
I think the crew, they got some rest between the second and third episodes.
The third episode, the one with Clu Gulager,
was not as logistically complicated, certainly, as the carnival sequence.
I think they had not lost their desire to do a good job,
but there was a certain amount of just being tired,
"What do you want? Okay, let's do it."
So we went into that third episode limping a little bit,
but we were still able to play the game.
Clu and Miriam, when they showed up, they were very enthusiastic about the project,
and I think that's one of the reasons I like Clu so much.
I mean, he just jumped in with both feet, and he had ideas.
Clu was really conscientious about how he wanted this character to live and breathe.
The job Clu Gulager did on "From a Whisper to a Scream" was amazing.
He was playing an extremely quirky, strange, twisted and freakish character.
Somebody who's involved in incest, someone who's involved in necrophilia,
someone who's involved in murder.
And yet he brings a humanity to it, and you're actually sympathetic to him.
To me, that episode was always... It was a Tennessee Williams drama
with a little comedy, just pulling the curtain back on this very strange person.
You know there are people out there that, certainly,
in any Southern city of any size and not just Southern city,
that have unusual lives that you go, "My God!"
To me, that's what the episode was about.
The other star of that segment was Megan McFarland from Atlanta.
Even at that time she was very much an Atlanta theater acting star.
Primarily it took place in one main location,
and then a few little sequences out of that...
But the locations for that episode were very close together.
The shots at the loading dock, that was actually World Carpets which...
One of the people there was an investor, and also that's where the cabin set,
the interior set had been built for the swamp sequence.
So we had gone back there to shoot this exterior set on the outside.
Craig Greene, the director of photography, had fallen off the loading dock in a scene.
Went down, caught his ribs on the top of the loading dock,
which was a concrete loading dock.
I think Scott Kaye filled in for him to shoot there the rest of that day.
Well, you would think that would make things tougher for us,
but it actually made things easier because they put him on heavy codeine,
and after that he was in a great mood for the rest of the shoot.
Aren't you gonna wash my back?
And this is the actual trick icepick which Clu Gulager used
to stab Miriam in the back with, and there's kind of a strange story on that.
He refused to go on the set until this icepick was fixed
because he was worried about it pricking his wife's back.
So what I did is, I took a strip of tape, rolled it up in a little ball
and then took another little piece of tape around it.
We had some colored hairspray.
Luckily we had that, and it just so happened to be silver, like the blade here.
I took it, sprayed it silver, let it dry a little quick,
took it out there and demonstrated it for them.
Then Clu took it and experimented with it. And he said, "Okay."
When we were making the movie,
there was a certain part of me being shocked by the material.
There was a lot of talk about how frightening would this movie be,
because word was beginning to get out that Jeff liked to make horror movies.
Everybody was wondering what this movie was going to be rated.
We were shooting the scene in the restaurant
which is one of the fantasy sequences.
A lot of the people at the restaurant thought it was just
a restaurant scene, and at certain point Megan starts,
having blood running all out of her mouth and they're like,
"What? What kind of movie is this?"
It's one of those things where we had about two hours, and they said,
"Well, we want to do something in this double wake-up scene. What can we do?"
I said, "Well, I know I can do a zombie in that amount of time."
They said, "Great, sounds wonderful. Let's do it."
So about, I don't know, 20 minutes before they were set to roll camera
I was standing around with her dressed as a zombie.
To me it looks like a woman who's made of pizza,
and you picked all the pepperonis off of it.
Stanley.
You wanted me, Stanley.
I had to sing in it, and I'm not a singer.
I murdered a woman in the car.
Strangled her to death.
Then I turned to the camera, in the car,
out the window and sang a little song about it.
Well, we didn't have a song.
Miriam wrote it the night.
She's a musician as well as an actor.
She wrote the song.
I learned it very quickly, and we did it the next night.
It had no place in the film.
I don't know why we did it, but Jeff left it in.
He thought it was quirky enough to leave in this quirky film.
We had the episode where Clu Gulager commits an act of necrophilia.
He's murdered a woman who he was in love with and obsessed with,
and her body is lying in state, in the funeral home,
and we shot it in a real funeral home.
Then again, you're in a small town, you know everybody.
You don't have any money for sets.
So you need a meat locker, you cough up meat locker place, you get a meat locker.
You need a funeral home, you cough up the funeral home place.
But we had to be very careful and tell everybody to be quiet
because we didn't want the owners of the place to know
that we were shooting a corpse getting penetrated in their funeral home.
And then, of course, the topper to the whole working at the funeral home at night
on a monster movie thing is, it came a huge summer storm here.
Frankenstein laboratory kind of thunder, and lightning, and stuff. So that was neat.
Okay, here we are. We're in front of the house...
We're in back of.
Where Clu Gulager and Miriam resided.
Now it's a lawyer's office, but before it was a private residence of Emily Davies.
They asked Emily, and she, being the theater person, she agreed.
And I thought, "Well, there it goes, the end of a friendship."
That was one of the episodes that had a lot of makeup effects towards the end
with the baby born of necrophilia.
In the movie she's supposed to have a baby while she's buried,
and the baby is supposed to come up from the grave and terrorize everybody.
I wanted it to look fresh and kind of babylike on one side,
and then mutant and demon on the other.
It ended up being a little more mutant and demon than fresh baby, but...
It was a foam latex puppet with fiberglass understructure and a lot of brass parts,
cable operated, so that, when it would move in the waist,
its arms would move and all of that.
We used very fine cable wires.
In the beginning, the baby was very animated.
It could move its head, it could do... Move its hands, it was like...
Moving its face, kind like a Chucky baby.
And then the more they used it, the more it kind of stopped working.
You got a special effect, prop like that,
you want to shoot the closeup first, not the wide shot.
We shot the wide shot first, and when they forced it up through the dirt and stuff,
I guess, it damaged the cables a little bit.
So by the time the baby... They did the shot of the baby coming up from the grave.
All they could really get was the hand popping up and one finger moving.
Like, one finger that still worked, so... Anyway.
If I do that for Allen, to this day he'll know exactly what we're talking about.
It was awful.
None of the cables held the way they were supposed to, and everything.
So what you see in the film is sort of a jiggling, wobbling thing.
- Daddy! Daddy! - Oh, no!
I was always happy with the baby at the top of the stairs.
You could definitely see a little shlong and the light hitting it.
It just killed me.
The offspring sliding down the stairwell was kind of a poor man's rig
with just, basically, a board, and Craig Greene and somebody else sliding down
with some sandbags and a camera to get that final little push-in.
A lot of folks have asked me what happened to the baby.
You know we had a fight at the bottom of the stairs.
What happened to that baby?
I ate it.
So we didn't really shoot the effects as effectively as we could,
because the actual baby that Burman designed was pretty cool.
There was a really cool stuff that they had done with it.
The house, although it was a private residence,
was treated as a set that had been built.
There were no holds barred on what they did to the house.
I guess part of it was Jeff's vision,
thinking that things could always be put right afterwards.
They cleaned it up afterwards and took care of all the mess.
I don't know of anybody else that would have allowed
their kitchen to be just littered with garbage.
But Clu and Miriam brought so much energy and so much commitment to the roles,
that I think the crew... It elevated the crew.
It elevated everyone's game.
So we finished that episode, and then a force of nature arrives in Dalton, Georgia.
Cameron Mitchell.
And for whatever reason, Cameron was the actor, of all the actors that came,
he was the one that was recognized totally in Dalton.
People would come up to him and talk to him and...
We're walking along.
All of a sudden Cameron looks over to this guy,
and he goes, "Jesus Christ, you're fat."
And the guy was. The guy was easily 300 pounds.
The guy loved it because Cameron Mitchell, a movie star, had noticed him.
I mainly knew him from his TV work.
"High Chaparral”.
Although he'd been in a lot of movies...
I didn't think he was one of those guys that...
He's got an open week or two, and they got a few thousand dollars to fly him to Italy.
He's gone, so...
Wonderful casting to have him in there.
The right guy for the right part, but also just a great...
I loved the way he worked.
He was one of those classic
"always take the work seriously, but never himself seriously."
The first night he showed up on the set, we were at the house that we filmed
which is an actual, historical real site.
The Confederates used it as their headquarters for a while.
There was a battle right there in the area, literally, in the front yard of that house.
And then the Yankees came through.
I think Sherman even used it for his headquarters for a day or two.
We talked about the horror of General Sherman's march through Georgia,
because he... Before Hitler, he killed every man, woman, child,
burned every blade of grass and corn, and the things that you saw in that sequence,
in that particular story, that happened to be true.
And his little bunch of soldiers.
There was C.. Cox, who was a student in Clu's acting class where I'd studied,
and Tim Wingard was in Clu's class as well, and then Bill Edwards,
who I'd gone to school with at USC, and I thought he always had a great look.
He is one of these guys that... He acts, but he also does other things,
and he doesn't really pursue the acting as much as he could.
- We couldn't afford 60,000 troops. - No.
So I played a Sergeant, the head of a platoon, and I was the mean son of a bitch.
Yeah.
I was really representing the image of General Sherman.
One of the things that stood out on the Civil War segment,
that I thought was really cool, I guess, you see all these Hollywood movies,
and they just don't do it, but... The aging on the uniforms.
I'd never really seen stuff taken to that limit.
I first walk in, and they're just rags, and they're filthy,
and I'm like, "Wait, this is... These are soldiers."
"They're supposed to be..."
And then it was like, "No, it's the end of the war."
"These are guys in the Western theater of the war."
"They've been bombers for Sherman or whatever."
The ladies who made the Civil War outfits were all the "little old lady" town ladies
who were in their sixties and seventies, and they hand-sewed the Civil War outfits
which I'll never forget in my life.
So, out here, and it was all like this high,
and it was that late sunset-y kind of stuff.
Yeah, really pretty stuff.
But we got ready to do my stunt.
I'm sprinting across as hard as I can.
Jeff yells, "Pow!"
And I take this incredible fall where I made it look like I got shot
in the shoulder, and I flip, and I tumble.
There's no stunt pads or anything.
I mean, I crashed hard.
I kind of hurt my shoulder and stuff.
Turns out they had the cameras set at the wrong speed or something.
It was set 12 frames a second or something like that.
So it's like, "Ah, we got to do that again."
Your second stunt fall is never as good as your first one.
Jeff wanted a sign that said "Welcome to Oldfield",
and he wanted it like a sign they would have made back then.
So we got a couple of logs or branches, and we got a piece of wood,
and we painted "Oldfield" on it.
"Oldfield, 25 miles", and did the arrow thing.
I remember one day they were filming in a field.
We came up, and we said, "Jeff, where do you want the sign?"
"Where do you want us to put it?"
And he is in the middle of something, and he's like, "Oh, I don't know."
"I really don't know. Just put it..."
"Lean it up against that wagon for now, and when we get ready to film,"
"we'll put it wherever we want to put it."
If you look at the movie, that's exactly where it ended up.
They never moved it. It just stayed there, and I guess...
I don't know whether they forgot about it or...
But it worked, I guess.
Cameron Mitchell came to me, and he said,
"I've got to leave, go back to L.A."
Because he was good friends with Spelling.
Spelling used him all the time, and he... So he had to go back for an audition.
And we thought he was going to make it big again.
The second coming of...
Whatever. But that...
But anyway, we let him leave, and I look back on it now because even...
I mean, the idea that he could have just stayed there and never come back.
So we let him go with the promise that he would come back
in 24 hours, and he did come back.
He didn't abandon us, and everything was fine but it could have been a disaster.
The other thing that was very much on our minds was,
this had a large cast of kids in it,
and this was shortly after the "Twilight Zone" tragedy.
It happened with Vic Morrow and the kids killed on that set.
So all that was kind of resting on my shoulders as far as,
"What are the laws with working with the kids?"
"What are the hours we can use them?"
Working with the kids was very interesting
because they all had different degrees of experience.
Tommy Nowell was very experienced for his age and had been in several TV movies.
He was just a great guy, a very commanding presence, really, for his age.
Tommy Nowell played Andrew, our leader, and I do remember him.
He was a great guy, and he was not only the leader in the movie,
but he was also the leader of the group of actors
that played the children in the movie.
Don't try anything with her, Mr. Gallen.
I warn you.
A kid whose sister was an actor, David Stynchcombe,
who just was wonderful to work with.
My audition was for the part of Ambrose which, actually,
I found out later, had already been cast to a guy named Sergio,
but I think Jeff and Bill were looking for who would be good for lesser roles.
And Ashli Bare who played Amanda.
I don't know her level of experience, but she was a total pro at a young age.
Just untie me, please?
Well, what about my leg?
I don't get around so easy.
I don't think she stuck with acting.
I don't think she pursued it when she got older,
but she was absolutely terrific to work with as a kid.
I have a prosthetic right leg, and, of course,
we couldn't show a 20th century prosthesis in the movie.
So they're like, "Have you ever walked on crutches?"
Well, I hadn't, but I told them, "Oh yeah."
"I've walked on crutches many times."
I thought they were going to bring me some crutches,
and they actually brought me two tree limbs.
Their parents were wonderful too.
They were just very supportive, because it was kind of a tough...
That part of it... It was kind of a tough movie thematically.
I hope I was very good too, explaining what was going on and the context of everything.
You watch the film and it's a horrific sequence,
but you got to remember, when you're shooting a movie,
you're not in a room by yourself with body parts.
You're in a room with some phony looking, rubber body parts,
with 20 or 30 other people, all cottoned up and stuff.
I think most of the kids had a lot of fun on that.
There were some children that had a hard time
differentiating between reality and make-believe.
Fortunately, I wasn't one of them, I knew we were making a movie.
I knew it was all make-believe.
We were just having fun, creating entertainment,
but there was one boy that could not stand
Cameron Mitchell's screams of torment being set on fire,
and Jeff had to get somebody to put cotton balls in his ears.
We were very, very protective of those children.
We were very protective of those children.
They knew they were play-acting, they knew they were in something.
The kids were happy to be there, they were having fun just like any other kids,
so that was a very positive thing.
It wasn't exploitation at all on our side,
and, as far as the kids were concerned, it was great.
I mean, they were getting to do what all the other kids got to do,
so that was terrific.
Yes, we had fun playing "pin the arm and the leg on the corpse”.
Some kids play "pin the tail on the donkey",
but I played "pin the arm and the leg on the corpse”.
We had bones hanging in the tree, it was a great macabre setting.
But it was hard work, and Jeff did a hell of a good job.
So we wrapped that episode up,
and we have one half-day of pickups and other scenes to shoot.
We shot at the Fairgrounds, that was the last location we had.
It was at the North Georgia Fairgrounds, and we shot outside a little bit,
in the swamp episode, the discovery of Jesse's body in a bag.
We shot that there, and we shot the body blowing up in the carnival episode there.
He's in the hotel room, and the voodoo priestess is making
all of the metal and glass and things that he's eaten over the years
erupt out of his body.
So we made a false torso of him that we could run a sharp edge up underneath,
so that it looked like a razor blade tracing across his chest and up his leg,
and all of that, for a quick little insert of that.
And then, all of a sudden, you see parts of his body,
and almost two-inch holes start just blowing big chunks out of him.
So we had another insert that was made out of fiberglass and PVC fittings,
that we put blasting caps inside of and then put a quarter inch layer of
flesh- and blood-tone gelatin skin over the top, so it looked like his torso,
beautifully, but it was made out of gelatin.
As soon as we blew off those caps, it would blow these big holes through his body
that blew more chunks of blood and foam.
When the squibs went off and blew this stuff, and I looked up,
you saw holes in the insulation on the inside of the ceiling.
It didn't blow all the way through the roof so that it would leak,
but it did damage to the building, and I just...
I knew they were going to come after me for that or, whatever.
That was actually a really fun night.
It's always fun when you get to start playing with explosives.
Talk about Sherman marching through Georgia.
There were people's houses that got messed up, there were yards that got messed up.
I definitely had some concerns about,
"Would people in Dalton put up with another feature film coming into town?"
We trooped back to California to start post-production.
I hired this editor, Okuwah Garrett, and we started editing.
We had a few test screenings.
I stupidly invited Forrest. Ackerman to that screening,
and Forrest. Ackerman was a legendary figure.
He had a magazine at the time called Famous Monsters of Filmland.
So the rough-cut screening goes okay,
the film doesn't break, all four episodes are shown.
Forrest Ackerman and his wife just leave.
So we finished the four episodes, got them down to where we wanted them to be.
So, now it's March of '86.
Now we were addressing the "connecting device".
Vincent hasn't called us,
"You know what, hey, I think I've got to do your movie now."
None of that's happened.
The idea was to get a name in it that would bring some weight to it.
Bring some box office attraction to it, maybe, but put some weight to it.
To have this...
We had some good names in the episodes.
We figured, "Okay, we want a real good name"
"for the 'connecting device' because it's only going to be,”
"probably, a two- or three-day shoot."
Something like that.
"Okay, Vince is not going to do it."
"What about Max von Sydow?"
Why him? Why he would be the perfect historian/librarian
in a small Southern town?
I have no idea, but I had it in my head. Okay, Max...
I even wrote it down in a diary "Max von Sydow"
above the title "From a Whisper to a Scream”.
I call SAG or whatever, "Find out who Max von Sydow's agent is."”
His agent is a little Austrian man named Walter Kohner.
Walter Kohner takes my call and says, "Send me the script."
So, I send him the script.
I get a phone call very, very soon afterwards,
maybe a day or two later, which is unusual in Hollywood.
I get a phone call saying, "Come into my office. I must talk to you."
Great. I wonder what's this. It's got to be good news.
Walter sits me down in his office, and, right away,
it's the first thing out of his mouth, "Max will not do your movie."
I'm like, "You dragged me all the way here, to your office, to tell me that?"
"You couldn't have told me that over the phone?"
He goes, "But! I have the perfect client for you."
I'm all ears, "Who, who?"
"Vincent Price."
"Vincent Price! He would be good!"
Total serendipity or whatever you want to call it, fate, perhaps.
That's why this whole thing started again, and Vincent Price was back on the table.
I did not mention to Walter that we had contacted him much earlier,
and I think, maybe Vincent had even forgotten it, who knows?
Walter talked to Vincent and said,
"Okay, Vincent wants to see part of the movie, to see what you shot."
That's a part of it. We decided, "Okay, great."
He said he didn't have to see the whole movie but just wanted to see part of it.
The only way to see it was on film.
We decided, hey, you know what?
We'll show him the swamp episode in its entirety,
because, for many reasons, we felt at that time
that was the most, obviously, pretty looking episode lighting-wise, etc.
It was probably the least objectionable in terms of gore and thematic material.
So we showed that episode.
Now we're negotiating on money, and we called Walter to see what was going on,
and Walter said, "I don't think it's going to work out."
But he kind of left, again, it was like this...
He left a little bit like, "I don't think it's going to work out."
So my brother goes, "You know what, here's an idea."
So my brother had a great idea which...
It was the same offer, basically, but it's kind of stated in a different way.
And he said, "Okay."
That's what did it.
Really, it was a combination of just tenacity on our part and just luck.
I remember Jeff going, "Oh, I got Vincent Price in."
And we're all, "Vincent Price!"
You couldn't get any better than Vincent Price
for this movie. So we're all excited, "Okay, great!"
He had booked a cruise, a month-long cruise to Aruba and the Lower Caribbean.
One of those combination "vacation/working vacation"
because he would give lectures on arts and also soak up the sun.
How did you get in here?
The entire "connecting device" sequence with Vincent Price and Susan Tyrrell,
and Martine Beswick, and Larry Tierney, was all shot in the old Hammond lumber yard.
The Hammond lumber yard was the Roger Corman studio.
We're building these sets, and Cindy Charette is the production designer
on this part of it, and Allen Posten is involved with the props and the wardrobe.
I built some sets, and it was very layered, all this beautiful texture,
and had great painters painting the wall, so it was like crumbling decay.
And then the set decoration was full of beautiful antiques
from the Paramount prop house.
Jeff was going, "You know what, as long as we have Vincent Price,”
"we should go all out. We should do like an Edgar Allan Poe store."
"The library should be all boarded up or all bricked up,"
"and the wallpaper should be peeling off."
"We're gonna put Vincent in a wheelchair, and we're gonna give him a hook,"
"and we'll put a patch over his eye."
Courtney and I decided, "Okay, we're going to amp up his part."
"We're going to make it something that..."
"Make it more robot-fused, than how it was on the page."
The set had open windows with curtains, but we took the curtains down.
We got these fake bricks, and we bricked up all the windows.
We got the blowtorches on the wallpaper,
and we burnt off wallpaper, and dust was everywhere.
In the meantime, Jeff sent the new version of the script to Vincent Price,
and Jeff's like, "Oh, I know he's going to like it. He's going to love it."
We would give the pages to Walter who then, in turn,
would fax them or telex them, at the time, probably, to the ship.
I would periodically check in with Walter and say,
"Hey, how is Vincent responding to the script?"
"Oh, he loves it. He loves it. Oh, Vincent loves it. Don't worry."
In the meantime we're prepping the shoot.
Go on.
I get a phone call from Walter, very panicked phone call saying,
"Vincent will not do your movie now."
"Why? We've already agreed on everything!"
I don't know if contracts were signed at that time, I think they were.
Anyway, all of a sudden Walter is saying, "Vincent will not do your movie."
- What the hell? - He hates the script.
"What do you mean he hates the script?"
"You've been telling me he loves the script."
"I never told you that. I never told you that.”
I learned many lessons in that five-minute span,
and 98% of the lessons are "Don't trust an agent”.
Walter and I finally negotiated, if you will,
"Okay, Vincent will call you from the ship and talk to you."
It really boiled down to Walter saying,
"I'm going to set up a ship-to-shore phone conversation with Vincent and you,"
"and whatever happens, happens.”
I don't believe you.
I'm in a cubicle at Roger Corman's studio in Venice.
It's just me and a phone.
I'm just literally waiting for the ship-to-shore phone call.
I'm just staring at this phone, sweating. Just staring.
Half of me is going, "Please don't ring. Please don't ring."
And half of me is going, "Oh, it's going to ring and I've got to be..."
"I've got to say something brilliant."
The phone rings.
I can't pick it up at the first... I just can't pick it up at the first ring.
And it just... My heart is pounding.
So it rings maybe three times, I pick it up.
I'm listening, and I just hear this very, very scratchy,
"Go ahead, please. Go ahead with your call."
It's Vincent Price.
The next thing I hear it's Vincent Price's voice going, "It's shit."
"It's shit. I'm not doing it. It's shit. It's shit."
I was like... Hey, I thought his vocabulary was a lot better than that.
I mean... But me, I'm going all, "Motherfucker, I'm doomed."
I hear him out. I don't interrupt him. I don't do any...
I just listen to him, and it's listening to him go,
how shitty the script is, "How dare you rewrite the script?”
"I agreed to do this movie based on this particular script."
"Why would you even think I would do that particular script?"
He finally tires himself out by screaming and cursing,
and I finally am able to say my piece, which is, "We'll do whatever you want.”
That's the upshot.
You have a lot to learn, my dear.
They agreed that it wasn't going to change
and it was going to be the same way, the first script.
So Vincent Price agreed to do it.
But then he comes back to us, and he goes, "Guys, they're going to be here tomorrow."”
"We've got to put it back to the way it was."
There wasn't really time.
So what we did, we just hung curtains over the brick windows,
and we tried to fix some of the wallpaper.
We cleaned up the dust.
If you looked at the movie, you could...
If you looked really closely, you could see
how it was deteriorating, and we tried to make it more livable and more new.
He said, "I want a teleprompter.”
"I'm going to show up at rehearsal,”
"and if I don't like what I see, don't expect me to do the movie."
Vincent, when he showed up, I remember him being very impressed
at the sets because it was a real thing.
It wasn't like a mumble jungle, "Oh, go out to Home Depot and get me a desk.”
It looked beautiful, and he felt like, we were the real things.
I think that was another thing of what made him come in and do it.
It was a beautiful moment.
He came in and looked, and saw the teleprompter.
He said, "What is that doing here?"
I go, "Well, Walter said, and you said that you'd want to..."
"I never use those things."
Then he launched into a speech
from the material that he had memorized and just said it brilliantly.
And all, kind of...
Some of the pressure was off.
You know, you do that for an actor,
you have to create this world for an actor, and then they're at ease.
And when they're at ease, then they can do their job, and the director can do his job.
From that moment on, in all seriousness, from that moment on,
it was a joy and an honor and everything to work with Vincent Price.
He's really old, kind of hunched over and moving when he talked and all that.
The neat thing about that was, when the camera rolled,
that first time that they clicked the slate, stepped back,
and he did his first on-camera performance, after the rehearsals and stuff.
He just straightened up, and 20 years fell off of him,
and he just became Vincent Price that you'd seen my whole life, growing up.
David Del Valle knew some people, and he was involved as a publicist.
So he knew some people like Hazel Court who just came in
and just came to say hello, to make him feel good.
It was just the one... It was like a parade of a lot of people he worked with.
Roger Corman came down and had a great reunion with him,
that was just a great moment.
The other part of that two day of shooting was Susan Tyrrell,
SuSu, as she's known by a lot of her friends.
Clu Gulager had worked with her on a movie called "Tapeheads"
and said, "Well, she might be a really good fit."
I think we tamped her down a little bit,
I did, sort of, directing a little bit, maybe too much.
That was the idea of it, to tamp her down and have that explosion...
That boiling, boiling thing that you know is going to erupt at some point at the end.
That's nothing.
Those are bad dreams, the ravings of a madman.
You don't see, do you?
In the beginning they wanted to outfit Vincent Price with his librarian outfit,
and he goes, "No, no. I'm going to wear my own clothes."
"I have a shirt, and I have a nice tweed jacket I'll wear, nice patches.”
So it was like, "Okay, that works."
But he had clothes that were beautifully tailored and old,
that he'd had forever, and this was a jacket he'd gotten from Savile Row.
When it came time to shoot Vincent's death scene,
Vincent came to me and said, "You know what?"
It was originally written to be... He gets poisoned.
She had slipped a poison to him,
and there was some dialogue stuff between them as he's dying.
So he came to me, and he said, "You know what?"
"Instead of doing all that, why doesn't she have some weapon in her purse,”
"and then she can just kill me that way?"
So we came up with, "Okay, switchblade."
"That's great.”
"She'll flick it into my neck."
"Wonderful."
And he will expire.
We weren't prepared to do this,
so we only had a few hours, three hours, and we called...
It was just literally a guy at Corman studio that we just...
"Okay, you're going to kill Vincent Price right now."
So they have a fake neck, and then they had, after she throws it,
then they have... There's a rubber neck with a rubber knife sticking out of it.
What they did, they had a tube of blood
that ran up under his shirt, under his coat and to the neck.
So they wanted the blood gushing out of where the knife was sticking out of.
We assured him, because we were being assured,
that the blood would spurt, and it would not get on his jacket.
It would just be on his shirt.
And it wouldn't be that much, et cetera, et cetera.
So they do the shot.
They film the knife going in.
And then I remember Jeff going, "Okay, let's start pumping the blood."
There's a technician, behind Vincent Price, with the pump.
They had a gallon of blood, pumping the blood.
And all you could see was a little trickle coming out.
Very, very little trickle, and Jeff's going, "Come on, come on."
"We need more blood. We need more blood."
So the guy back there is pumping, pumping, pumping.
Still a little trickle. A little trickle.
And Jeff's doing, "Come on. We need more blood."
And the guy's going, "It's empty. I'm out."
"I don't have any more blood."
And they're going, "Well, what happened?”
What happened was, it dribbled all down his shirt,
but then it dribbled onto his jacket, and the jacket was compressed with the shirt.
So the jacket was full of blood.
The tube came undone in his shirt.
So when he opened up his coat, he had blood
everywhere here, on his shirt and on his coat.
Boy, was he mad.
He was so...
He was so mad.
I just remember him just looking like...
Looking like, "You motherfucker!”
"You told me it wouldn't, and it did."
Luckily that was the last shot he had to do.
He was so mad.
So we took the clothes.
We sent them to the dry cleaners.
The dry cleaners delivered them up to his house.
Jeff was like, "Oh my God, we didn't get one shot. The overhead shot."
"We have to get an overhead shot of Vincent falling down on the desk.”
"We don't have his clothes. We need his clothes."
"Allen, can you run up to his house and borrow the jacket again?"
"We'll call him and tell him you're coming."”
I was like, "Okay."
I drove to his house, knocked on the door.
And his wife...
All that she did was, door cracked open,
wide enough for her to hand out the jacket and the shirt,
and she just said, "Here." And I took it.
The door closed.
There will be no more delays.
The sentence must be carried out.
The execution scene that we also shot there on that set,
looking back, that kind of looks like a set.
That might actually be the weakest set of the whole movie.
One of the big thrills of the shoot was getting the opportunity to work
with Martine Beswick who is one of only two women,
along with Maud Adams, to be in multiple Bond films.
I'd be a liar to say, that at my age at that time and stuff,
I didn't get a little bit of a crush on her
because she was a beautiful lady and just the...
Neat, some of the movies she'd worked in that I had been a fan of also.
Larry Tierney was an emergency casting.
We originally wanted Forry Ackerman to do a cameo.
That didn't work out.
Larry was a great dear friend to me, and he liked Jeff a great deal,
so I just called him up and said, "Larry, this is..."
"I should get whatever you're doing."
"I'll be there in 10 minutes."
David Del Valle was there, that was the first time I got to meet him.
I kind of knew him through his hard journalistic writings and stuff.
The challenging thing about shooting the lethal injection sequence was,
particularly at that period in time, none of us had ever seen a real lethal injection
and how it's done, but, of course, neither had the audience.
So we were able to just make it up any way we wanted it to be.
Camarillo, California, where we shot the library exterior
and some driving shots in the "Welcome to Oldfield" bit.
That was basically the last thing that we shot.
They had negotiated the deal only for an exterior of the house.
We show up, it's nighttime.
We need to put some lights on the inside so the light will be illuminated
from the outside in, and the guy's going, "No, no, no, no, no."
"It's $2,000 for exterior."
"You want to get inside the house, it's five grand.”
Bill gets into this whole thing with him
where Bill's like, "Sir, we don't have $5,000. We only have $2,000."
"We're not going in there. We're just putting the lights in it."
He goes, "No, it's five. This is it, for everybody."
I'm sitting there talking with him too.
At some point I stopped being a participant in the discussion
and just became a spectator watching Bill refuse to give up.
No matter what the guy said, he didn't take a no.
25, 30 minutes later, nobody moved, the guy gave in.
Bill, as producer, got what he wanted, and for me that is, to this day,
the ultimate piece of movie producing I've ever seen in my life.
Bill was the kind of guy who, once he put his mind to something, he could do it.
Then, about a week later, not even a week later,
there was an article, very small article, in the Sunday Calendar section
in the Los Angeles Times, saying that Vincent Price was about to film a movie
called "From a Whisper to a Scream”, and he said
that it would be his last horror film ever.
Apparently, Forrest. Ackerman read that little note,
connected the title with something he'd seen,
maybe, three or four months previously.
"From a Whisper to a Scream... Wait a minute! That's the..."
And he wrote Vincent one of the most amazing letters I've ever read.
And the letter said, "Under no circumstances, Vincent,"
"should you become associated with Jeff Burr's film"
"because Clu Gulager murdered his naked wife in a bathtub.”
"Stabbed her in the back, strangled her, killed her deader than a... What?"
"And it's nasty, and it's immoral."
"You shouldn't be associated with these people."
I think that is what colored Vincent's perception of the movie,
thoughts of the movie from that point on.
He... To my knowledge, we tried to screen the finished movie for him many times.
Invited him to any screening we had but also to...
"We'll set up a private screening for you."
He sent me a letter saying, "Well, my health is not very good right now,"
"blah, blah, blah, but I do want to see it."
But I don't think it would have been his cup of tea, but then...
Actually working with him, being able to direct him, it was wonderful.
And he was incredibly generous, incredibly animated, incredibly...
He was joyful on the set.
I mean, I think he had a great time doing it, the actual shooting of it.
The post-production is where the money runs out and things tend to suffer.
We got lucky, we found a sound house that was...
A good, solid reputation and a great library.
We worked with two guys, Hari Ryatt and Bob Fitzgerald. And Bruce Stubblefield.
They were the three main guys we worked with.
Concurrently, we were looking for a composer.
We had virtually no money for the composer, so that immediately limits your choices.
How we found a composer was, we had a scene of the movie,
and we had various composers that were willing to do it.
Do a little sample score, a two-minute thing for the scene.
And the scene was the cemetery scene in the carnival episode.
So it was, kind of, a romantic that becomes a little horrific piece.
It kind of showed a range and a variety.
Then I met Jim Manzie, and he did that demo, and it was beautiful.
It was kind of Bernard Herrmannesque, but its own thing.
And I was really impressed, "So that's the guy."
I mean, Jeff gives me a lot of latitude.
I guess he trusts my judgment but he...
What's good about him, is that he always points you kind of in the right direction.
If I go in the wrong direction, he'll just very politely say,
"Jim, you know, less here, more there."
We ended up working with him.
Bill, I and Darin worked with him on "Stepfather II",
and then I ended up working with him on several movies after that,
like "Leatherface" and "Night of the Scarecrow", et cetera.
Yeah, Jeff is very knowledgeable at music.
He's always talking about strange bands from Florida.
And another regret is, we didn't have money to orchestrate the score
versus electronically do the score.
So I wish to God we could have orchestrally created the score,
because it would've elevated the movie that much more.
It would've been dynamic.
So we have an answer print.
That answer print is what we now start trundling around town,
looking for a distribution deal, and, finally, ended up with several offers.
We decided we...
There was a foreign distributor and then a US distributor.
The foreign distributor was Manson International,
which at the time was a very well known foreign agent.
Then there was The Movie Store or TMS Pictures which they became,
and they were the domestic distributors.
The American distributor decided to change the title of the movie.
The movie was not touched at all except for the title.
So I felt, "Well, you've won the game.”
"You made the movie that you wanted to make,"
"and you've cut it the way you want to cut it, no interference at all."
"And if the only issue is they want to change the title, I can live with that."
"The Offspring" was something The Movie Store came up with.
We always thought it referred to the baby in the Clu Gulager episode
because the poster is kind of this creature crawling out of the paper.
But they felt that the shorter title was better,
and a one-word title, in particular, was better for horror film.
Well, at the time there were various movies like.
"The Burning", whatever, "The Funhouse", "The This"...
So they felt that one-word title was punchy.
Where I did fold, and I really argued, and I know Darin did,
and my brother did, was when... All this trouble to get Vincent Price,
and he was by far the biggest, the most well known name in the movie.
Why the heck would you not put his name on the poster?
In big bold letters, put his image on the poster, whatever.
They felt, just stupidly, they felt that
Vincent was more of a TV name than a theatrical name.
The Movie Store bought our film with another movie they called "The Outing",
and they kind of put them together.
Sometimes we played in solitary, sometimes they did it as a double feature.
Something strange is taking over.
It's the birth of an endless evil, and it's a real Killer.
"The Offspring”.
Rated R.
We were fortunate enough to get a theatrical release
that went all the way across the country.
At the time it was bicycle, what they would call bicycling,
which would be, you would open in a certain region in the country
in a certain amount of prints, and then go region to region, to region, to region.
Then when the movie actually opened here in Los Angeles,
it opened at the Egyptian Theater, on its own.
This is the theater that I had seen "Aliens",
I had seen "Empire Strikes Back", and here it is, premiering there.
So that was wonderful.
We got a very nice review in the L.A. Times.
As I recall, from that first screening at the Egyptian Theater,
that both people who went to see it really liked it.
No, just kidding.
And I remember people screaming and laughing, and we were all so proud,
and we were just jolly, just like kids in a candy store.
Just so happy at what we had done.
But that was...
Again, things were just so different because the exploitation market
had a home in movie houses.
The first time I saw it with a paying audience
was in Memphis, Tennessee, in September of '87.
I stayed the night there, and then the next morning the review came out.
It was like New York, as a Broadway show.
And it was like... It was not a really good review,
but the one thing it said was, "The acting..."
"Clu Gulager is great in it. Blah, blah, blah."
"And Cameron Mitchell is amazing in it."
"Why isn't he in more movies? Why isn't he in bigger movies?"
I felt very gratified for that.
The first time I saw the film finished, projected, completely done,
on the big screen, I think there were three things going through my head.
First of all, was just the excitement of seeing that stuff up on the big screen
and going, "Oh, I remember that! Oh, I remember that! Oh, I remember that!"
The second thing was, "Wow, this is a feature film. This is cool."
"This is going to help with the career and the experience."
Kind of the professional end of it.
And then the third thing was, "Oh my gosh,"
"what are people in Dalton going to think when they see it?"
"What are my parents going to think when they see Clu Gulager?"
I was getting my hair cut, and the barber said,
"Yeah, I saw your movie the other day, 'The Offspring'."
And I'm like, "No, no. I was in 'From a Whisper to a Scream'."
And he's like, "No, I've seen your movie, you're in the movie."
So my mom and I, we grabbed the paper and got the showtimes and the location,
and we jetted over into the theater, and we watched it.
And it was a great thing to see myself on the silver screen.
As a director, you remember, at least I do anyway,
you remember the bad reviews more than you remember the good reviews, the quotes.
I just remember there were a couple of quotes that just always stuck in my mind.
The one quote was... It was from Box Office Magazine,
which was a magazine specifically designed for movie... Motion picture exhibitors.
So this would be sent to you.
If you owned a theater or owned a theater chain, you subscribed to this magazine.
What Box Office Magazine said, was something like,
"This film will burn a path to video stores.”
"Don't let your theater stand in its way."
The trade reviews, they always kind of look at genre movies slightly askance.
But again, they always saw this as,
"Wow, this is kind of different because this is darker. This is..."
And they also usually made note of the fact that this was done
by a bunch of young guys, and this is an interesting effort.
The one, like, in New Orleans it said, literally the first paragraph,
something like, "This film is the cinematic equivalent"
"of putting a razor blade in a child's apple on Halloween."
I go, "Man, put that on the poster. That's a great quote."
In some respects, it may be a polarizing film
because we tried to make a polarizing film.
We were looking to do the most twisted ideas that we could do.
That's what young guys do. You want to shock people,
you want to bring them out of their chairs, you want people either love it or hate it.
That was probably a pretty accurate representation
of the reaction that we got to it.
We got a lot of coverage on the movie though,
because, primarily, because of Vincent Price,
but Cinefantastique and Fango and all of them...
Of course, Fangoria wrote articles and interviews,
and all of that stuff all came with the movie.
We did get a fair amount of attention.
So, the movie ended up.
It came out theatrically a few places foreign,
and then mostly on video in foreign territories,
but it played in Italy theatrically, and Germany,
and Japan, and it played several big festivals. Horror festivals.
Played the Paris International Film Festival,
played Fantafestival in Rome, played several other European festivals.
That was kind of the thing where we didn't know even though it was entered,
because the distributor would enter it in these festivals for publicity.
Now you just look at the movie, and people like the movie.
I mean, that means a lot to me because at that time you were just kind of scrambling,
you were trying to figure out what's the best way to do,
because you don't even know how it's going to turn out.
And it turned out to be something that people have responded to
over and over and over again,
and that it has an actual life, and I'm proud of that.
That was my first feature film experience.
I think it was more than a horror movie too.
It's not like a horror movie today where it's all blood and guts.
There was a thought behind it, there was a story line.
I think there's an elegance to the film, that moodiness
and a feel to it that elevates it above most horror films.
It's Southern literature. It's kind of Southern Gothic stuff.
There are certain things in that film, both in the script
and just in the productions, that you can't get anywhere else.
There's a certain vibe with the actors that they're picking up from the location.
There are the locations themselves. There's the extras.
They're all this stuff that just screams, saying, "Hollywood."
Even though it was still exhausting, I think Bill and I felt
that what we were doing was helping to start a career
for both our sons, and we were happy to do it.
Darin and Jeff and Bill continued, of course.
They went right to "Stepfather II".
I ended up working with Irwin Yablans and Bruce Cohn Curtis,
and that led to me doing a movie with Renny Harlin.
And Mark Hannah, of course, I've said about him,
he's an absolutely integral part of this movie, just keeping me calm,
I think. That was another thing that he did that was just a gift.
Allen went on. He and I produced and directed a movie,
a feature film a few years later called "Island Girl".
He went on and did a lot of art department
on a lot of music videos, like the "Oh Sherrie" video.
Mike Malone ended up with this incredible relationship and career
as a set decorator and everything else,
working with Steven Soderbergh and David Lynch.
"From a Whisper to a Scream”, definitely, for me,
opened my eyes to the world of filmmaking,
and it made me sure that that's something I wanted to pursue.
And again, the movie would not be the same if Mike wasn't involved.
He was a key... One of the key players, and he...
I don't know if he got enough credit that he deserved, but he certainly...
We've worked together on a few things since and hope to work together again.
Basically, the essence is brotherly love, both literally and figuratively,
in that Bill Burr was Jeff's older brother,
and figuratively there was a core group of us
who had gone to school together and had known each other five, six years.
We were all young guys, and we all wanted to make a movie,
and we wanted to do it passionately.
I started out my career as a producer working with Jeff's brother, Bill Burr.
Bill was a great guy.
A guy with a big personality, a natural born salesman
and a person who loved the filmmaking process and was so supportive of Jeff.
His enthusiasm during the making of this film...
What both Burr brothers brought to the table, was a love of cinema.
You couldn't ask for a better producing team.
And then combine the fact that my brother raised the money for the movie
and really gave me a career that...
At least started me on a career at that time
that I know I would not have had without him.
William Burr was so important to me.
He ended up being a boyfriend of mine.
We were together for almost seven years.
We've lost him in the years since, and all of us miss him a great deal.
I know that Bill would get such a kick out of the fact
that we are playing in the New Beverly 25 years after we first got released.
So I wanted to bring a little of him here
and put him where he'll always have a front row seat.
He did send some ashes of Bill, and I did put them in the seat,
it has my plaque on it here, at the front row.
He's going to watch the film with us.
I put some in the popcorn.
My goal is to be the filmmaker that he always thought I was.
I haven't reached that goal yet, but I know I will.
I'm sure he's looking down and seeing this process,
wishing he could do an interview too.
We remember you well, Bill.
We love you, Bill, and we hope you're at peace.
I personally can't thank you enough for what you did.
As a tribute, you're going to forever be merged with the swamp and our first effort.
I think in this business, more than anything else,
working with great technicians, great artists, in different facets,
as a producer you really discover the joy of what filmmaking really should be.