Pennywise: The Story of It (2021) - full transcript
A documentary surrounding It (1990), based upon the Stephen King novel of the same name, which featured a notorious villain known mostly as Pennywise.
[Cult Screenings UK LTD
theme music]
[Presenter]
There is, I think, in his works
an element of high tragedy,
and I am sure that tonight,
he will be willing
to share with us
the movements and gestures
of his dance macabre.
I present to you, Stephen King.
[crowd clapping]
[Stephen King]
Thank you.
You come to experiences in your
own life that are frightening,
and you try to make sense
of them in what you write.
And I can remember
living in Colorado
and we had an old
American Motors car
that just simply vomited
up it s transmission one day
in the middle of the road.
[crowd laughing]
[Stephen King]
And a tow truck came along
and took it away
to wherever they take
transmissionless Matadors,
and they called around after
it had started to get dark
and said, "Your car's ready
if you want to come and get it."
And my wife said,
"Are you going to take a cab?"
And I said, "No, I'll walk."
And I walked and it got
darker and darker,
and this was really on
the edge of town, you know.
There's nothing there and
you could see the dealership,
but it was a ways away.
And the path went across
this bridge, you know,
a little arched humpback wooden bridge.
And I'm walking across it,
and I can hear my heels
clacking on the bridge
and I flashed to this
story when I was a kid
about these goats that were
going across a bridge
and there's this troll
underneath and he said...
[crowd laughing]
-"Who's that
trip-trapping on my bridge?"
And I thought, "Wouldn't it be a scream
if something just reached
up now and grabbed me,
[crowd laughing]
-and pulled me down there,
and that was the last
anybody heard of
old Stevie King?"
So.
But the incident
stayed in my mind,
and over a period of five years,
I would come back to that
and come back to that,
and little by little,
I began to evolve a story
until now it's developed into
a novel that's about
1,300 pages long.
It's called IT,
and it all came from that
one little moment of fear.
And I think that a moment
of fear is worth having
if you can get something good
out of it.
[Tim Reid] This is Tim
Reid, Richard, in Virginia.
It's back.
I found a picture of Georgie.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
IT's enduring power
may come from the chords
it strikes among all of us.
We're all human beings
and we were all children once.
[Richard Thomas] It's amazing
to me all these years later
how people are still coming up
and talking about
that it has this lasting
effect and impact.
[Brent Baker] You never think
that something you've created
will, you know,
this will live on forever.
[Adam Faraizl]
As an actor,
I didn't really
pay much attention
to the impact that I was having.
I was just something
I was doing as a kid.
-This is battery acid,
you slime!
[Bart Mixon] I've done
shows in Mexico or in Europe
where the crew
that I've worked with there,
they're like,
"Oh, my god. You did IT!"
[Marlon Taylor] I
think the story itself
is kind of timeless...
People going through issues
and having to come together
to overcome them.
-We do it.
-Oh yeah. We.
-You know,
it's a coming-of-age story.
[Emily Perkins]
- It always surprises me when people say,
"Oh, my god, I always
wanted to be you in IT.
I always wished I was Bev."
And I think,
"Oh, you poor thing.
What was your childhood like?"
[Tommy Lee Wallace] It's
talking some pretty serious talk
about what it's like
for each of us to be a child.
The fun.
- [boy] Yeah! Yeah!
-And the scary parts.
[Brandon Crane] You know,
most TV movies
disappear into oblivion.
I think the fact that IT
is consistently played on cable
has opened it to.
A much wider audience.
[Chris Eastman] It
was one of the first
terrifying mini-series.
People were invested in it.
It became an event.
-Something is coming.
[Chris Eastman]
And because it was made for TV,
it allowed a younger audience
to view it as well.
[Dennis Christopher]
Little kids, who saw
IT on television,
it's still in their minds
as the scariest thing
they've ever seen.
[Pennywise] Ah!
-That movie scared
the beep out of me, like,
I couldn't sleep,
I hate clowns, I hate spiders.
Like, couldn't even go
near a drain.
[Norman Cabrera] People
tend to gravitate towards things
that struck them as a kid.
And I think probably
a lot of the people who saw IT
as teenagers or younger,
it just, it burned themselves.
So as an adult, it
becomes a fun memory,
then it takes on
this whole other cult level.
-It scared the hell
out of millions of people.
[ominous music]
-One of the comments is...
Is typically
"Tim Curry is the reason
why I'm terrified of clowns."
[Tony Dakota] The portrayal of
Pennywise probably went from
"Yeah, we're gonna
have some clowns over
for little Johnny's
birthday party" to,
"Uh, probably not."
[Seth Green] Well, a character
that manifests itself
in the shape of your fears
is terrifying
at any age, in any era.
And so, I think that's why
that concept is so indelible.
[Tim Curry] A lot of people tell me
that IT poisoned their childhood
when they saw it on television.
[Georgie screams]
-And I would always think,
"You shouldn't have been
watching it."
[theme music]
[typewriter keys clacking]
[Larry D. Cohen]
I had written Carrie,
and that had put Steve
King, Brian de Palma,
the actors and me on the map
in a way that I became a
go-to for horror adaptations.
I got a call one day.
[phone ringing]
.from my agent
in Los Angeles who said
he'd been approached
by a pair of producers
who'd set up a new
Stephen King project at ABC
as a novel for television
and was I interested in that?
The next day the doorbell rang,
Federal Express at the door,
and the guy is carrying
the most humongous
FedEx package I've ever seen.
I took this unwieldy,
bulky piece from him
and was about to close the door
and he said, "Hang on a minute."
And he went back to the elevator
and came back with
these two giant containers
containing the typed manuscript
of IT in its earliest stages.
I sat down and read the opening
with young Stuttering Bill.
-Well, we have to
seal it first with paraffin.
[Larry D. Cohen]
And baby brother Georgie,
and what turns out to be
a horrible demise
at the hands of Pennywise.
In the sewer.
I went, "I'll do it."
We went in for a first
meeting with the network
and the executive vice
president of movies for television
and she looked at me
and she said,
"So tell me, what is IT?"
And I said, "Well it's
an inter-terrestrial beast...
[Richie shrieks]
-"that has come down eons ago
and has the power to screw
with kids' minds.
-Beep-beep, Richie.
[Larry D. Cohen]
"And attack their worst fears."
And she looked at me
and she nodded, and she said,
"Yes, but what is IT?"
So, I went, "Okay."
And I answered another answer
and she asked me,
I don't know, five more times.
And I looked over
at the producers and went,
"I'm in hell."
I was coming back home
to New York,
and I'm sitting on the plane,
and I see a guy
with his back to me
reading what is clearly
the cover of my script.
It's Bob Iger,
who was the head of
all of the programming at ABC.
And he whipped
through night one,
went through his briefcase,
pulled out night two,
whipped through night two,
stood up, stretched,
sort of smiled,
and it said to me
IT had his support,
and I think he
decided in that reading,
"Yeah, let's do it."
[rumble of aircraft engine]
The producers had a brainstorm
and they picked up the phone
and they made an overture
toward George Romero.
He loved the book;
he was as nuts for it as I was.
He saw the possibilities
of what IT could be.
I pitched it to the network
as a long novel for television.
I said, "I think it should be
eight and ideally ten hours."
We exchanged maybe five times
in the course of the process.
I would do what was needed,
which was called a bible
in television terms,
which was just
a really detailed outline.
And I'd send it to George.
He'd look at the
outline, and a week later
I would get a 45-page
typed version of mine
interspersed with his thoughts,
his notes, and his suggestions.
There was never a
question that he thought
it was going to be a gross-out,
lots of blood,
kind of picture.
He understood what television offered
was the chance for
you to go right up to the line.
But his radar was out for
what would the network allow.
I think the dream
of what we had in mind
was absolutely amazing.
I think we were just about
20 years early in having it.
We would have been Game of Thrones.
That would have been the way
to do this piece of material
in its fullest possible way.
-The network started to get very
nervous.
Nobody had ever gone
where this piece had gone,
and they sort of went
from it being eight hours,
which became the official
running time bible,
to maybe it should be four,
at which point
George said, goodbye.
[Jim Green] We were
looking for a director.
We had an air date.
[screams]
[announcer] Stephen
King's IT starting tomorrow.
[Jim Green]
Tommy Lee Wallace came to mind.
Tommy was also a writer.
Part two needed the help and
I felt that a director-writer
would probably be
the person to do that.
-And action!
I cut my teeth on synopsizing
manuscripts for agents
and developed a knack
for condensing novels
into a couple of pages
of synopsis,
So I just made an attempt
to do that with the book.
Larry Cohen wrote
this wonderful script,
and I'm referring to
night number one
because that's what got me
truly excited.
[Larry D. Cohen]
The trick in IT was
in putting on the King hat
and going, "Okay,
I've now read this 400 times,
I breathe it with
every pore of my body,
and I'm gonna pretend
I'm Stephen King
for as long as it takes for me
to get this done."
I did three-by-five cards
on the wall,
and I went, "Okay, we're missing
how you get from here to here.
It's not in what he wrote."
I retained a part of Steve's
back-and-forth juggling...
[Mike] I brought this old
photo album from home.
[Larry D. Cohen]
- -of the two time periods.
I thought it had a lot
of emotional resonance.
[Tommy Lee Wallace] That's
the only time I've ever seen
the absurdity of
a seven-act TV movie structure
actually work because of the
seven characters involved.
[Larry D. Cohen]
So, for the first night,
the structural job
became really clear
and weirdly the limitation
became a tremendous asset.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
Each act focused on
one of the characters
and told the story
of what happened in childhood
and the alarm being
sounded for them.
- Hello?
- [Mike] Beverly,
it's Mike Hanlon.
-I was less enamored
with the second night
because it deviated so far away
from the novel itself.
I didn't know that
in the beginning
because I hadn't read the novel,
but I knew something was amiss.
It just didn't
deliver the goods.
The husband of Bevy...
-No, I'm not married.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]...
Re-entered the picture
and became kind of
the villain of the piece.
- [Beverly screams]
- being more or less
animated by Pennywise.
In dramatic terms,
it did what it needed to do
to bring the movie to an end,
but it had little to do
with the book
and I felt like it
kind of gypped the viewer.
It was a much more prosaic
TV-style climax.
-[Beverly gasps][
-I was candid with Larry
about that.
And by this point, the impetus
is moving to Vancouver
and Larry couldn't come
to Vancouver to work with me
to bring the second night
up to the first.
[Larry D. Cohen] By this time,
I'd been working on the project
for about two-and-a-half,
three years.
Not quite as long as
it took Steve to write it
but the runner-up prize.
We were about to start Carrie
with the Royal Shakespeare
Company over in England
and I was owing a draft
on something else, and I went,
"I think this is my cue to say,
'Go with God. I'm done.'"
[Tommy Lee Wallace] So,
the job fell to the best guy
I could find for free, me.
And so,
I did the rewrite myself.
And in this case,
we simply were up against
a production schedule
that was hurtling toward us
and was not going to be
pushed back.
So I just went back to
the book again and again
until I could find a way
to bring the adult story around
to something
resembling the book.
It really is a deep challenge
to condense a novel
that rich, that deep,
that dense,
into just a few hours
of television.
I used Mike
as a narrative device.
-I'm sure by now
you all remember
what was going on
in Derry 30 years ago.
There was a rash of killings,
maimings, disappearances.
[Tommy Lee Wallace] Because
you can save a lot of frames of film
if somebody's summing up
the story.
-Henry Bowers confessed to everything,
and the killing stopped.
[Tommy Lee Wallace] I thought
it was poignant for him
and helped his character
actually.
But it was going so fast
that at night in the hotel
I would just...
[imitates typing]
[typewriter pings]
as fast as I could go.
I don't think Night Two
is the masterpiece
that Night One is,
because I do respect
Larry Cohen's script
and didn't feel all that great
about changing
it so drastically.
-Tommy Lee
did what he needed to do
given what the circumstances
were.
[typewriter keys clacking]
[country music]
[interviewer] This reminds you
very much of your childhood,
this neighborhood?
[Stephen King] Yes, it does.
It does. Same dirt road.
Same old Grange Hall
at the end of the road.
[interviewer] That's you.
[Stephen King] That's me
when I sold my first story.
I look a little bit surprised
about the whole thing.
-Stephen King
is such great drama and mystery.
And for as much as his books are
about horrific things,
they are mostly about
deeply human
psychological thought processes,
so you get a lot of
deep character study.
[Tim Curry] Well, I'd
read most of the books
because he's a master of
narrative.
He tells a whacking good story.
-People would say you ought to
write about what you know.
I grew up in a small town.
We had no running water.
I went to a one-room school
with all the grades
together and.
Somebody had to go up
to a house and bring back water.
And to me, the whole existence
was not pastoral
or beautiful or anything.
It was just boring.
I wanted to be in outer space.
I wanted to fight monsters
in the swamps of the Amazon.
So those were the things
that I wrote about.
And later I found a way to.
Blend those two interests:
My interest in what was
strange and... and alien
and the places where I lived
and where I grew up.
[Gene Warren]
Most of his works are
difficult to turn into films.
Because if you try to.
Visually show an audience
what this.
Incredibly talented writer
that uses the English language
in order to have the reader
conjure up their worst fears,
it doesn't always work.
-The movie has to capture
some of the spirit of
the writer's heart and-and mind.
And if it doesn't,
generally speaking,
what the reader went to the book
and found and loved,
the movie audience won't.
-It's hard to capture
all the little nuances
that he puts in his books.
[Aaron Sims] His stuff
was such an influence
on so many filmmakers as well,
as far as storytelling.
[Larry D. Cohen] Steve's
got a very particular genius
in creating villains.
They become iconic
and come into a level
of the public's consciousness
and the viewer's conscious
that's forever.
-You were one
of the first people
to have the idea that a clown
could be a scary figure.
Did you find clowns scary
when you were a kid?
-Well, you know, as a kid
going to the circus,
there would be like,
12 full-grown people
that would all pile out
of a little tiny car.
Their faces were dead white.
Their mouths were red as
though they were full of blood.
They're all screaming.
Their eyes are huge.
What's not to like, you know?
- [Conan O'Brien laughing]
- [clowns laughing]
[announcer] The circus is
still the greatest show on earth,
and to have a circus,
you have to have clowns.
[horses trotting]
[Tim Curry] Well, there's
a long tradition of clowns.
When I was a kid and used to go
to pantomimes in England,
they used to have a guy
whose name I think
was Charlie Cairoli,
who wore the classic
kind of pointed hat
and was rather a gentleman.
He wasn't threatening at all.
[Mark Tillman] Growing up,
my brother was into clowns
and ran away
and joined the circus.
If you've ever been
backstage at a circus,
it changes your perceptions
of clowns.
-Often there's sort of mayhem
involved with being a clown.
-They're usually, both
silly and scary or playful,
which can all be frightening
to a kid.
-I went to the circus in 1974,
when I was a little kid,
and I have a photo of me
where the clown's putting
his arm around me,
and I'm only about this tall.
And I have this
paralyzed look like, you know,
I'm not happy.
[Jarred Blancard] I think
it's almost archetypal
in the sense that clowns,
like Pagliacci, the opera...
There's always something
behind that smile.
-I think prima facie,
clowns are fucking scary.
Even when you're enjoying them,
there's something in there
in the grotesquery of it all,
and it's really in
the eyes, I think.
You know, you can have
this very funny thing.
Even if the mouth
isn't overtly scary,
which sometimes
clown mouths are,
but the minute
the eyes get hard,
the minute the eyes aren't,
you know... [hums]
[♪♪♪]
You know, aren't that,
and they go.
Wow!
-I would go to McDonald's
when I was a little kid.
I would not go hang out with
the Ronald McDonald cutout.
-The fry guy!
-There's something
weird about it.
I didn't think he was going to
grow teeth and eat my face.
-Not every single clown you see
makes you want to
instantly turn around
and run away in horror.
[Larry D. Cohen] I think adults and kids
understand clowns
very differently.
[woman] I can't go to circuses.
I can't go somewhere
where there's clowns,
even a picture of it.
[interviewer] What's going
to happen if you look at it?
[woman gasps]
[clown 1] It is a phobia,
and it is called coulrophobia.
The majority of people that are
afraid of clowns are adults.
- [blowing a kazoo]
- [woman cries and yells]
[Larry D. Cohen]
I think for kids,
clowns are great fun.
There's just not any menace
or danger at all.
And Steve's particular spin
was to take something
that's much loved and familiar
and ratchet it up
as far as it could possibly go.
-Somebody who's got problems
and fears and phobias,
they go to a psychiatrist,
and it costs maybe
150 dollars an hour.
And they don't even get
a full hour,
they get 50 minutes.
I do what people pay me.
[John DeLamar]
There's lots of things
that feed into what
King was doing
with creating a clown
as the main antagonist.
At the time, John Wayne Gacy
had just happened,
so we're dealing with
people being afraid of clowns,
and the guy next door
is a threat.
-At one point,
I saw a painting of Pennywise
that Gacy had done.
[TV news anchor]
A dark landscape,
a portrait of Elvis,
and a scene with seven dwarfs.
But this is the work
of John Wayne Gacy,
an evil man who buried
more than 25 of his victims
in the crawl space
of his own house.
Arts Factory owner
showed us five pieces,
including this
Pennywise the Clown
from Stephen King's IT.
-I was like, should
I be flattered or offended?
I don't know
how I feel about this.
[Emily Perkins] The scary
clown is that realization
deep within the child that
they can't express, that no,
something's not quite
right in the world, you know.
Like, I've seen the homeless guy
in the street.
-Any spare change, mister?
-Or, you know, I've seen
really sick people,
or I myself have experienced
some kind of abuse
or discrimination, right?
But you're not supposed
to talk about it as a child.
You feel like you have to
smile and be happy.
[laughing]
[Emily Perkins] That's
what the evil clown is about.
It's about the fact
that there's something rotten.
[Pennywise growling]
-at the heart of society.
[Pennywise] This whole town
is IT in some way. All of them.
-And as a kid, you're
not allowed to express it.
[John DeLamar]
Pennywise is really important
because the '50s were
considered safe and sweet
and nostalgic and fun.
And at the heart of it,
they're not.
So, the clown works
on that metaphorical level
that it's saying this is
what the decade was like.
On the outside, it's one thing.
Inside, it's something
completely different.
[Seth Green] The mythology
of clowns being scary
has exponentially grown
over the last 20 years.
- Fuck you!
- [gunshot]
-I do feel as though this book
and this movie
had some influence on that.
-I was about five or six
and I was in
a video rental store,
and then all of a sudden,
there's this face
just staring back at me,
and I just froze.
Like, if you see a spider,
you freeze with fear,
and I just froze.
[Guilford Adams] People,
I think, perceptions change
because that's what
they're being sold.
They're being sold
that clowns are scary.
[TV news anchor 1]
Sightings of a mysterious clown
have been creeping out
some people in Staten Island.
-Media sites have been abuzz
with stories
of a mysterious
and creepy clown.
-And you know,
I'm sure that Pennywise
and John Wayne Gacy
didn't do the best job
in creating a positive image
of clowns.
And I'm sure it wasn't
Tim Curry's goal
to have people hate clowns
for the rest of their lives.
But I think it is
kind of a hallmark
of a good performance.
[Ben Heller]
He had a tremendous impact on
growing people's fears
about clowns.
[Tim Curry] I can't say
that I ever saw clowns
as being threatening,
although I loved
being threatening.
[Pennywise] That's it! Let go!
Be afraid!
-It was a lot of fun.
[Guilford Adams]
There's enough room
in our understanding of clowns
to have some of them
be not so scary,
to be sweet and nice,
and maybe some of them
just downright awesome.
[Pennywise]
Beep-beep. [exhales]
[typewriter keys clacking]
[man 1] [indistinct]
[man 2] Push this closer
to the monster, please.
[man 3] [indistinct]
[man 4] A little farther,
Tim. Find the light.
[woman] All right, here
we go. Yeah. Thank you.
And clear, please.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
And action!
I believe casting has been
as much a contributing factor
to the success
of my version of IT
as any other factor at all.
It was beautifully cast. Period.
-They brought me the script
and they said,
"You want to do it?"
And I'm like, "Well, yeah."
This is an amazing piece.
We knew what we had
when we were working on it.
Pennywise was
such a brilliant character.
-We were looking
for television leads
to promote the picture
in our marketing campaign.
Victoria turned her list in,
and we began going after
the network-approved actors.
We had approval
of Harvey Fierstein
to star as Pennywise.
And we were saying,
"We need to continue to
look on the list here.
We don't know whether
the network will approve him."
[Bart Mixon] I think they'd
mentioned it was going to be
either Roddy McDowell
or Malcolm McDowell.
-And they explored Alice Cooper
at one juncture.
-So, who else have we got?
- [elevator gate rattling]
- [chuckling]
-I do remember
that we had brought up
Rocky Horror Show
and said, "Look at that."
-I had to buy the Rocky Horror
Picture Show album,
I had to buy the books,
I had to buy the scripts.
You're a very expensive date.
-I know.
-Just the freedom
of the character,
the intensity
that he gave to it,
was so wonderful
and you could see
that this would
translate brilliantly
into a horror character.
-How 'bout that?!
-We were focused on Tim Curry.
-Me?
[Tim Reid] I think he's
one of the best actors
that's ever come out of England,
and I don't think
he gets his due.
[interviewer] Was
there any time in your life
when you said, "I
want to be an actor"?
[Tim Reid]
Yes, I did, actually.
[interviewer]
What is there in it
which appeals to you most?
-A sort of voluntary
schizophrenia, really.
It's a high-risk profession
and I enjoy risks.
[Aaron Sims] He's created
so many iconic characters
that we've known through time,
and they've been
so uniquely different.
[interviewer] You said that
being British in Hollywood means
that you're usually stuck
playing a butler or a villain,
but that's okay with you.
-I think that they probably feel
that we bring some kind of
style to the... the job
that... that we might not
necessarily have acquired
in the States.
[interviewer] Yeah, but you
know what I think it is about you?
I think it's that
you're very seductive
and, you know, I thought
if you were the devil,
I would pay to go to hell.
[maniacal laugh]
[Aaron Sims]
His Darkness character has
stood out from any other
devil I've ever seen.
[Ben Heller] Looking at
his body of work, I feel like,
there's nothing
that he can't do.
-[indistinct]
-And the challenge was:
Is he available?
-I will kill you all.
-Is he interested?
Can we make a deal?
-I'll kill you all.
-Will the network
be okay with it?
-You are priceless!
-Of course, everyone was.
[Tim Curry] I didn't audition
or even do a meeting.
They just asked me
if I wanted to do it,
and I said, yes, I did.
[Victoria Burrows] Tim Curry
just had all those elements
that he would be fearless
in the role.
-Kiss me, fat boy!
- [Ben groans]
- [laughs evilly]
-He brought
more to the character
than what was
written on the page.
[Jim Green] So, he was
approved at the network
and the rest is history.
-You all taste so much better
when you're afraid,
really afraid!
[Tommy Lee Wallace] Tim
brings his considerable intellect
when he does a part.
[Tim Curry] I sometimes
ask myself that question
after I've done a take.
One of the great advantages
is that you can whisper.
I mean, that you can do things
that are very small
which you couldn't do
on... on a stage
and then that's what
I'm discovering about that.
[Tommy Lee Wallace] We
didn't talk at great length
intellectually about it
because it was clear to me
that he had the correct
instincts.
-It's got to be true,
whatever you're doing,
and the camera picks that up
much more cruelly than
anything else.
[Chris Eastman] Tim Curry
managed to capture the humor
that a clown can bring.
[grunts]
-And then
just managed to switch it.
[growls]
[Chris Eastman] And be
this magnificent evil villain
that would kill you and eat you.
[snaps fingers] Like that.
-I'll kill you all!
-In a funny way,
it's a very simple performance.
-Take your pick,
B-B-B-Billy boy!
[Richard Thomas] Whenever you
see fearlessness in a colleague,
it's always an inspiration.
[Tommy Lee Wallace] Some
wise person in the movie business
said for directors the key is...
90 percent of it is
casting the right actor
and then
getting out of their way.
Tim was a director's dream.
A little further, Tim.
Find the light, uh,
somewhere in there.
[man]
There's not much there.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
Okay. There! There's some.
[laughter]
[Tim Curry] I liked
Tommy Lee a lot.
He was very direct,
which was nice.
-Tommy Lee Wallace was a
brilliantly minimalist director.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
Remember in-in the script,
where I talked about
[indistinct],
and I hope we still have it
standing by.
-He basically trusts his casting
and just gives the actors
their head and lets them do
what they do well.
[Tim Curry] He was very
clear about what he wanted.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
Now, his hands come up first,
and then pulls himself up.
There. That's it.
[Tim Curry] Which was
great. I really liked that.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
Okay, your chin's a little low.
Ah, that's perfect.
-Because then it
becomes a pleasure to deliver.
-[laughs] I'll drive you crazy
and I'll kill you all!
I'm every nightmare
you've ever had.
I am your worst dream come true.
I'm everything you
were ever afraid of.
-He did give me a lot of room.
[Larry D. Cohen] Pennywise
was a very dangerous invention.
And I use dangerous
in the best sense of the word.
[growls]
-What I mean by it is that
they're pitched at a level
that totally can go very wrong
very quickly,
with the wrong casting,
with the wrong direction,
with any number of
fill-in-the-blank
mistake possibilities.
Tim was the genius choice
that radiated perfection
everywhere every time
he appeared.
[typewriter keys clacking]
[Bill]
You guys don't have to do this.
My dad says you have to know
when to take a stand.
[boy 1] Let's get out of here!
[boy 2] Yeah, let's go.
[woman 1] We live in
dangerous times, boys and girls.
I want you to be careful.
[man 1] Not just any
car. It 's a bicycle.
[man 2] They always
made the best noise.
[Mrs. Winterbarger]
Come on, Laurie Anne.
It's gonna storm.
[Laurie Anne]
♪ The itsy-bitsy spider ♪
♪ Went up the waterspout ♪
♪ Down came the rain ♪
♪ And washed the spider out. ♪
[Jim Green]
No one even thought of
going to Vancouver
in those days.
[Eddie] I wish this
summer would never end.
It's the best summer
of my whole life.
[Beverly]
Your hair is winter fire,
January embers.
My heart burns there too.
[Richie]
This was poor town.
[Mike]
Yeah, still is.
It's all I need.
[Patrice Leung] The wave
of filmmaking in Vancouver
started in 1984.
I think the dollar dropped.
And so more shows started to go,
"Oh, you can get a bigger bang
for your buck in Vancouver,
and we're only
two hours away from LA."
[Bill] Hey!
I'm back!
[Jim Green] When the time
came for us to start producing,
I had Vancouver implanted in
my head as a place to go.
[Richie] You think
we're gonna let you have
all the fun there, Billy boy?
-Having such a big production
over such a long period of time
created a huge buzz.
-In '89,
it was really busy in town.
[woman] Okay, here
we go. And roll, please.
-The studio that we used
was called The Bridges
and it was an abandoned shipyard
building that was converted.
[Tony Lazarowich] I was
working at Thomas Special Effects,
which is a local special effects
house here in Vancouver,
owned by John Thomas.
He had a great
stable of crew people.
He had all these
people that he nurtured
and had what we call
"real-world" abilities...
Welders, woodworkers, people
that work with fiberglass.
They are all the veterans
of the film industry
that Vancouver has created.
It put a lot of people to work.
It used a lot of locations
and it also put Vancouver
on the map.
- [man] Cut!
- [woman] Cut! Very nice.
[typewriter keys clacking]
[Mike]
What are you guys anyway?
-We're sort of a club.
[Stephen King] I can
remember going to the movies
and they used to have
Saturday matinees.
We'd all line up,
usually with our money
tied in a handkerchief
or something
so we wouldn't lose it,
and then we'd
get in the theater,
and everybody would turn
their popcorn boxes into bugles
and then the giant grasshoppers
would come on
and destroy Chicago and London.
I wrote about some of this stuff
in a book called IT.
It's funny, I think a lot of us
have only the haziest memories
of our childhood.
-I don't remember much of it
at all, what we did.
[Stephen King] We can access
some of the good memories,
and maybe we can access
some of the really bad memories
if a bully beat us up
on the school yard.
-You're dead!
-But what I discovered
in writing IT was that
the more I thought
about my childhood,
the more
those memories came back.
[Dennis Christopher]
There's symbolism everywhere
in the writing
that Stephen King created
to express the fears
of all children
that go through feeling
like a loser.
[children's mocking laughter]
[Dennis Christopher]
Feeling like an outsider.
[boy]
You're only here because
Mom says it's
our Christian duty.
-That's what
the Losers Club was about
and that's the bond that kept
these people together,
because they didn't find
sanity, peace,
or even really a loving family
except with each other.
Their chosen family.
[Ben]We're seven now.
Lucky seven.
[Larry D. Cohen] The gold
of the book were the kids.
That's where I responded;
I think it's where the
audience responded.
That horror was
the icing on the cake,
and very particular icing
in this case.
[Pennywise laughs]
[Victoria Burrows] We had
a casting director in Canada
by the name of Sid Kozak,
and Mark and I
did the U.S. casting.
[Mark Tillman]
We were looking for three
major things with the kids.
One was a sense of humor.
-Richie Tozier's my name.
[joybuzzer buzzes]
One was they always
had to do a scene
that was painful and heartfelt.
-You killed
my brother George, you bastard.
-And then
they also had to be scared.
[doorknob rattles]
A lot of times,
when you see them right off,
you go, "They're not prepared
emotionally to handle this yet."
You're looking for an old soul.
You're looking for people
that have a pain
and kids that could
truly, truly feel depth,
truly feel the fear.
- [growling]
[Mark Tillman] without projecting it,
truly feel the camaraderie
of the humor of the group.
[Mark Tillman] And when
you're coming in alone,
that's hard for those kids.
[Seth Green]
All these different characters
that seem to come
from different backgrounds
all had the same thing
in common...
They're misfits,
they're outcasts,
they have an undesirable
home life.
-What you got there?
[Seth Green] They don't feel
like they're worth anything.
-It's the Losers Club.
[all laugh]
-And yet,
when they all work together,
they are literally unstoppable.
-I think the six of us
could put you in the hospital.
-Seven.
-We went to the producers
to do a mix and match.
We wanted to have three
in each roll for the first one
and see how the
kids worked together.
-It was
challenging having kids...
-Eddie, which way is Derry?
-and adults...
-That way.
-and you had to cast
both in the like.
[Larry D. Cohen]
Like Stand by Me,
the challenge was
in finding adults
that would both physically
match up with them.
This was a case
where I think the network
was completely
right in its choices.
-You really needed to believe
Seth Green grows up to be Harry.
I feel like
every one of those parts,
there's a poignancy involved,
because those kids,
I believed that they grew up
to be those people.
[Victoria Burrows] At that
time, what was really popular
was to find the iconic TV actors
that would be ensemble players.
-The ideas kept coming.
Richard Thomas for Bill.
Those were quick decisions
in an office.
[Victoria Burrows]
John Ritter, Harry Anderson,
Annette O'Toole, Richard Masur,
Dennis Christopher, Tim Reid..
[TV Commercial]
Stephen King's IT.
[Victoria Burrows] I
mean, those were like
a gold mine of actors.
-We were getting TV's best
and then piled
Tim Curry on top of that.
Well, we knew we had something.
-They all
came together wonderfully.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
That's lightning in a bottle.
You just don't always get that.
[Mark Bacino]
The adult actors wanted to
spend time with the kids,
wanted to get to know them.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
We had a Lucky Seven camp
for the express purpose
of having the children
and the adults interact
and work out business.
Bill Denbrough goes like this.
It's no accident.
We brought the group that
wasn't being shot right then
in for three days
simply to have them develop
little tricks of that sort
so that it really would feel
a veracity to the whole thing.
[Mark Bacino]
When you see that first part
and those kids who then later
become those adults,
the end result was, I
think, very successful
because the characters
were more in synch.
-I think
that paid just untold dividends.
[Emily Perkins] It
was really important
for Tommy Lee Wallace
that all the kids
were bonded in reality
so that that would come across
on screen.
-I mean,
are we men or are we mice?
[all] We're mice!
-You feel this trust
that he has for you.
And as much as he knows
about all the characters
and how all the puzzle pieces
fit together,
he knew how much
our characters meant to us.
-To the Losers Club!
- All right.
- [all] To the Losers Club!
[glasses clink]
[Mark Tillman]
The first kid that was cast
was Jonathan Brandis,
because he just was rich.
And when you look at it,
oh, my god.
He can reach points of pain
and depth, very simply,
deeply, very quickly.
-It's some kind of monster.
And it's right here in Derry.
[Emily Perkins] I had a crush
on Jonathan Brandis for sure.
I thought he was pretty cute.
[Beverly] [voice-over]
My heart burns there too.
-I remember he was on the cover
of every, like,
Teen Beat magazine.
-Brought an awful lot
of gravity to that role...
-George.
-that somehow was a good
emotional match
for his adult counterpart,
Richard Thomas.
-George.
[Richard Thomas] I remember
Jonathan because we met,
we talked, you know, to get
a feeling of the same person,
but that felt like it was
an essential meeting to have.
I don't know if he had to
put a mole on his cheek. He did!
They made him put a mole
on his cheek.
[laughs] Oh, the poor kid.
That's terrible.
That's right,
he had to wear a mole.
Oh god.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
They both had something
in their personalities
that's serious,
that takes the cruel world
and the hurts and the
angers and the angst of it all
and takes it personally and
wants to do something about it.
[Bill] [voice-over]
I'm going back in.
This time I'm gonna kill It.
-There's a sense of nobleness
about both of those people
and Jonathan had that
as a child.
[Bill] Now, listen.
You guys don't have to do this.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
And he was the natural
leader of the kid actors, too.
He didn't do it
by making a lot of noise.
He just did it
by being who he was.
[Richard Thomas] I felt
very close to that character
when I read it.
When a script comes to you
or a play text and you read it,
you can feel the proximity
of the character,
the affinity that you have,
and you can feel the distance.
But with Bill, I just thought,
"Oh, no, I know how this feels.
I know who this guy is."
[Larry D. Cohen] It was the
Bill-Georgie-Pennywise sequence
with the observation
of what siblings were,
but emotionally I believed in
the truth of those brothers
loud and clear,
and I thought the scene
was one of Steve's best.
-You made it for me?
Can I go sail it?
-I remember
the scene assembling the boat
with Jonathan Brandis,
and giving him the kiss
and how awkward that was.
-Yuck!
-But he was a great guy.
[Brandon Crane]
I was completely stunned.
I had no idea
that he had been suffering
any kind of depression
or any other issues.
All I knew is he was working.
I think he had just finished
a movie with Bruce Willis,
Hart's War.
He had an incredible
run on Sea Quest.
[crowd screaming]
-Hello.
[crowd screaming]
-He'd learned
the craft of directing..
-What you do is sit at it
and watch '70s television...
- [Jonathan Brandis] Yeah.
- On a channel and...
Just to find out all the ways
you shouldn't direct
a television show.
-Um, it's just
they're shot kind of cheesy
and I just kind of want to learn
how to do something different
with television.
[Brandon Crane] He
was doing everything
a resourceful actor could do.
I think he had everything
in front of him
and I was excited
to see him moving forward.
I was blown away
because he's my age.
That was probably
one of the first times
I ever even considered
my own mortality.
[Bill] Swear to me.
Swear to me that
if It isn't dead,
we'll all come back.
-The kids moved me enormously,
and I think about
the scene at the end
when they come together
having won the battle
but not the war and hold hands
and swear that they'll return.
[boy] Swear.
-When you have a project
that is such a good story
and has such a good lead actor,
it's really hard to
screw it up. musically.
[piano notes playing]
Finding a focus
was the first thing.
What's the music going to do?
It could have been the most
horrific alien ever
to visit our planet
in the form of a clown.
[laughing]
-.but to me, it was
kids in jeopardy.
-Hands squeeze.
[Richard Bellis]
I focused on the kids.
To a large extent that's
because Stephen King and I
are about the same age,
so when he writes about kids,
that's my childhood.
In the '50s when we would play
outside and build dams
and all of that stuff, we would
score our activities ourselves.
If it was an action scene,
we would do:
"Nah nah nah nah nah."
When they jump on Silver
to get away...
- Go!
- Hi-ho Silver, away!
[Richard Bellis] The
reference of hi-ho Silver means
that through their minds
was going:
badump badump badump
badump badump badump.
Now I couldn't do
the William Tell
and get away with it
with a straight face,
but that was the focus.
[Mark Tillman] We would
put the pictures of the adults
up first and as they were cast,
we put the kids that were
possible matches for them.
And very early on Sid sent us
a tape and photos of Emily,
who was the young
Annette O'Toole...
-Daddy, breakfast is ready.
[Mark Tillman]
- -and she set a very high bar.
We kept looking for that role,
but she was really an old soul
that just matched
what we were looking for.
-The character of Bev
was like my mom's childhood.
She grew up in the '50s,
her name was Bev, she was poor.
I just felt like
I was playing her.
She said, "Those are the exact
clothes that I used to wear,"
so it was this
really unique opportunity
to express my mother's story.
-Emily was a singularly
professional young actress.
She was very mature
for her years.
She understood
that the relationship
between her film
father and herself
was not the relationship
between her and me
and that makes life
a whole lot easier.
-For me, Beverly Marsh
was the 1950s female child
who was oppressed
based on her gender.
-Bev wants to help.
I hope it's okay.
I mean, she's a girl.
-.and very stringent ideals
of how women should behave.
-Let me see that.
-Bev's father is
extremely critical
of her developing sexuality.
-Poetry from some boy?
-That's a big theme
in the novel.
The domestic and sexual violence
against Bev is a major theme.
It's not as much I don't think
in the mini-series,
but it's there a little bit.
[Frank C. Turner] My agent
suggested me for Al Marsh
and the casting
director said, "Oh, no.
Frank's too much of a nice guy
to play that character. No."
They did three rounds
of auditions.
Finally, on the fourth round,
the casting director
let me go in and audition.
[Victoria Burrows]
Casting against type when
you're in that kind of project,
that's part of our
being creative
and the agents and managers
submitting them and saying,
"Hey, what about this?"
-In the room, the director says,
"Would you shave your beard?"
I said, "You hire me,
my beard's gone."
-Daddy, please!
[slap thrown]
-He felt so guilty
having to smack me
and be this intimidating,
domineering, abusive father.
-Let me alone,
you just let me alone!
-Come here!
-And sometimes
you went a little over
the limits
in terms of discipline.
-He always apologized
at the end of the day
but while he was in the moment...
-You get right the
hell back here, Bevvy!
He was just really scary,
so I didn't have to do
a lot of acting.
The blood coming out
of the sink...
[screams]
[Emily Perkins] ... stayed
with me because for a while
I was like afraid to take
showers, [laughs]
and there's that sewage,
subterranean element to IT.
-Good afternoon, gentlemen.
I'm Beverly Marsh.
[Richard Thomas]
Annette O'Toole I had worked
with several times,
and I loved Annette
and the person that she was
and the actress that she was.
[Emily Perkins] There
wasn't a lot that I needed to do
to become the young Annette.
They said that our mannerisms
were similar.
[Ben]Well, I was thinking,
being Saturday now,
you could come down
with me to the Barrens.
-My grandfather was an actor.
He was in Gone with the Wind.
I think they were having
a 40th anniversary party
and there was a lady there
who thought I was kind of
precocious and cute,
and put me to work
almost right away.
I was four.
[Mark Tillman]
The Jonathan Ritter match,
little guy, Brandon,
unbelievable from the moment
he came in.
-Ten out of ten.
[Brandon Crane] I
remember getting a callback
and it being an audition
that I really wanted to get.
And there were probably
20 kids in the room.
-There was a lot
of competition in that role.
[Brandon Crane] I looked
around and I remember noticing
there weren't any other Bens.
So, I asked the AD,
"Where are the other Bens?"
They said,
"It's pretty much just you.
We're looking at
a kid in Vancouver
and I think one in Texas,
but I think it's gonna be you."
Nobody does that, right?
Nobody tells you
during the casting process
that it's probably gonna be you.
I had never been asked to read
anything like this before.
[Ben] [voice-over] They
wouldn't treat us like this
if Daddy were still alive.
[Brandon Crane]
Being a fat kid,
you literally don't have
a whole lot of roles that,
I don't want to say
have any meaning,
but... but certainly don't have
a lot of depth.
A lot of times, they're just
about food jokes or fat jokes.
[Henry] What a porker.
[Brandon Crane] They're
crazy of f-the-cuff one-liners.
They're the crazy characters.
[Chris Eastman] Obviously,
body image is a real key issue
that a lot of kids
are dealing with,
probably more than
you even imagine.
-I'd never been given anything
to read that wasn't that.
There was a lot of gravitas
with this.
I remember, "Wow, I'm gonna have
to be a real actor now."
There's a moment where
I pull some Sugar Daddies
out of my pocket and eat them
because I'm nervous.
It was explained to me
that there was some importance
behind that because
I protested a little bit.
I was like, "Ah, really?
Do we have to do this right now?
And... and the way
Tommy articulated it,
it made perfect sense,
so I went along with the ride.
I was willing to do those things
because there was so much
more meat with the character
and so many situations
that I'd never been
able to portray before.
I did those things willingly,
knowing that there would be
a huge payoff in the end.
[Adam Faraizl] Knowing
that you were going to be
in the same movie with
John Ritter and Harry Anderson
and all these other
actors who I'd already
seen on TV at this young age
was a phenomenal experience.
[Seth Green] I was a
huge fan of John Ritter.
He was a massive
influence of mine.
Not just as the kind of
actor that he was
but the kind of comedian
that he was.
The type of physical comedian
that he was and
how deeply sincere he was
in all of his performances
regardless of the character
that he was playing.
-How important is being a star?
-Uh, it's not important.
Being thought of as a...
As a good actor is.
[Richard Thomas] You have
one of the most gifted comedians
of his generation too,
so obviously it's going
to be crazy, right?
-He was always full of mischief.
Always up to something.
[John Ritter] Here, boy!
[whistling] That's it.
Oh, I can't stand it.
I can't stand it.
[Tim Reid] I had my two
kids come up and visit.
They were big fans
of John Ritter
because they watched
Three's Company,
so when I told them I
was working with him,
my stature went way up.
They have never forgotten it.
[loud roar]
[woman] Cut!
-We were all stirring up
our own fear.
That's what we did at work
all day internally,
to be ready to jump
into these scenes,
which were kind of hard
and kind of dark.
John would always lift us
up with humor.
He's always got humor
in his back pocket and
I know it served us really well.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
Here's a comic actor asked
to play the dramatic role,
and I never doubted
for a minute that he could.
-Mike?
[Mike] Yeah, buddy.
Listen, It. It's come back.
[Ben breathing heavily]
-He walked in and made
everyone around him better,
like a good team player
in a sport,
just by his professionalism,
his sense of preparedness,
and his ability to
get down to business
while still cracking wise
and having fun.
-John had a presence
about himself
that interestingly related
more to young people.
-Hang tough, champ.
You're gonna make it.
-He was adored by young people.
[Emily Perkins]
He really appreciated
that we were just kids and
sets should be
an enjoyable place to be.
Maybe he was a
little bit responsible
for all the boys' antics.
I wouldn't be surprised.
[Brandon Crane]
He was, you know,
really interested in meeting me.
I was him. He was... he was
one of my idols.
But there was always a running
joke that of all the kids,
I looked the least like my
counterpart,
and he was quick to sort of
notice that as well.
So he pulled me aside and said,
"Hey, let's spend
some time together
and think of some things
that we can do
that will sort of
bridge that gap."
There's that reveal
where I'm standing there
in the classroom
and then we cut to him
and he's biting
his nail as well.
That was what we came up with.
[Ben Heller] We tossed the
football around on set with him
because he was open to coming in
and playing with the kids.
[Chris Eastman] And I still
remember him saying, you know,
when he was,
"Okay, okay, I've had enough,"
and we're like "Oh come on,
just a couple more,"
he was like,
"When I had no hair on my balls,
I could throw the ball
for hours." [laughs]
[Brandon Crane]
Everybody had a Game Boy,
so I was playing my Game Boy.
I was playing Tetris,
and he walked up to me
and he said,
"What is this?"
I said, "It's Tetris."
"Tetris?"
I said, "Yeah, Tetris.
It's a game. Everybody knows Tetris.
You live under a rock?"
He grabs it out of my hand
and he starts playing.
And... and from then on
I realized,
"Okay, well, he's cool.
He's not just John Ritter
the actor.
He's John Ritter, my peer.
And maybe if I'm lucky,
my buddy."
[Tim Reid] I got
a call to come in
and speak with the
directors for this mini-series.
I had not read the book,
so of course I rushed out and
spent all night
and part of the day,
because Stephen King writes
so many long books.
I took on the role
for two reasons.
One, it was a nice gig,
and it was going to be
for a long time up in Vancouver.
The other reason was working
with some of these actors
that I had admired,
worked with one or two of them,
so that was really
the... the two main reasons.
[Mike] I brought this whole
photo album from home.
-Marlon was really wonderful
and he did this little monologue
at the beginning of the audition
that was simple, deep, and
had a lot of thought in it.
-There was an
Easter egg hunt here,
but the ironworks exploded
and all these people got killed.
[Marlon Taylor] The lines
that they had me reading
were pretty much the lines from
the actual classroom scene.
[Mark Tillman] That role
was so hard to audition for.
It has very little material
in the group scenes
and takes a lot of
negative language.
When you're casting
and you're being a bully
to all these kids. wow,
it takes a lot out of the day.
[Tim Reid] Thank god,
he looked physically
a lot like what I looked like
at his age.
You know, you always wonder,
"Oh my god,
he'll get somebody here
who looks nothing like me."
You know, like they bring
a white guy to play me.
No, it didn't happen! [laughs]
Mike represents to
me a few souls that I have met
in my journey in life,
and they're people who,
for whatever reason,
something happened in their
childhood or young adulthood
that has affected them
for the rest of their life.
- [balloon pops]
- [monster shrieks]
[Tim Reid] I knew of
a few people like him,
and some ended
in very tragic situations,
some fate just never seemed
to bless them
with a good hand, you know?
It's like always
throwing snake eyes.
And I think Mike
was that kind of guy.
I think that all of them
had a sense of that,
that they were on their way,
they were young people
full of life, full of wonder,
and all of a sudden, this
horrible thing happened to them
for the rest of their life.
They have been hiding
in psychological fear of life.
And to me, Mike
is the center spoke
that brought it
all back together.
-Lucky seven.
-That's how in the series
when they got a phone call
from him,
didn't take a whole lot
of explanation.
[phone ringing]
- Yeah?
- This is Mike Hanlon, Bill.
-Immediately
they know what this is about.
-Bill, It's back.
-Now they have to decide,
do they want to participate.
[Stanley] [whispering] On
my honor I will do my best
to do my duty to God
and my country [indistinct].
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
Stephen King's big secret
is about the wonders and
horrors of childhood...
[Pennywise] Stanley boy.
[growls]
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
- -and how you get through it
and how important friends are
and bonding with special
people, like-minded youngsters.
Those bonds can be
as strong as steel
and his story is a demonstration
of just how strong,
when they made a promise
to each other
to return if It came back.
-I swear it.
[Tommy Lee Wallace] They
were very solemn about it
and they meant it.
And you see what happens when
they have to keep that promise,
especially in the case of Stan,
who couldn't face
keeping the promise.
It was that horrible for
him, and so he didn't bother
to go back. but he did
something else instead.
-I think I'll take a bath.
[Ben Heller] Stan was
most affected by Pennywise
and I suspect that
even as an adult,
that memory never was
very far from his mind.
-Stan saw It face to face.
Not the clown,
but he saw
what was behind the clown.
-When he got the call
from Mike Hanlon...
-Who did you say?
[Mike] Mike Hanlon.
[Ben Heller]... to
come back to Derry,
it brought back
so much trauma to him
that he just couldn't
go on anymore.
He couldn't even fathom the idea
of possibly facing It again.
-Goodbye.
Bye, Stan.
-And he chose an easy way out.
-For somebody like me who
grew up in the '70s,
It's a Who's Who.
Richard Masur, who I'd literally
grown up watching.
He was the classic
character actor.
So him coming in, even though
it was just for a day
and he had a small part in IT,
I was like, "Wow."
I got a call from Jim Green
and he told me they were doing
this miniseries.
-We talked about what we could
do to tie the character together
between the adult and the child.
He asked what I thought
we should do.
And for whatever reason,
I immediately thought
of this thing where I was gonna
grab my ear, and he liked it.
I remember just thinking,
"I have no idea what I'm doing
and this well-respected actor
just said he likes my idea."
I was like, you know,
over the moon about it.
My favorite
part of the time I was there
was when we set
up that beauty shot
of all of us on the staircase.
I thought that was
a wonderful shot.
It was a lot of people
who were really well known
at that time
all standing up there.
[Ben Heller] To me,
Stan Uris was an outsider
like the rest
of the Losers Club.
He was very by the book
in that he didn't deviate
from his school lessons
or what his parents
may have told him,
but he was able to connect
with these kids...
[Eddie] Lucky seven, Stanny.
-I said I was in.
-and then explore
a different part of himself.
[Mark Tillman]
One of the last casts
was a little kid named Adam.
-Some guy killed George.
Pulled one of his arms
right off,
just like a wing off a fly.
-He was smaller
than most of the other kids
and they were worried about the
size match-up and everything.
-My character Eddie Kaspbrak,
I would say that he was kind of
the runt of the bunch...
-How you doin', Eddie Spaghetti?
[Eddie groans]
-which was
already a fairly runty bunch.
He was the quiet, shy kid
who was also the youngest
of the bunch,
which I believe was true
in reality.
I think I was the only one
who wasn't a teenager yet.
I was still 12 and I think
everyone else was 13 or above.
[Dennis Christopher] I went
in and met with the producers
and we talked with Tommy Lee
and I guess they
got the feeling from
the work of mine
that they had seen
that I was right to play Eddie.
And of course, after that,
I devoured the book
and was wondering
how in the hell
they were going to fit
all of this beautiful writing
and all of these amazing
background stories
of these characters into
two nights of television.
[Mark Tillman]
On the last mix and match,
Seth Green wasn't going
to be able to make it.
And Victoria was like,
"Oh, my god,
we have to get him here."
Everybody was confirmed
except Seth,
and we were a little nervous
about that.
So I actually drove to his house
and picked him up.
[Seth Green] It was exciting to know
that I was getting close to it.
When you audition,
you mostly don't get jobs.
You... you don't get 90 percent
of the things you audition for,
so to even get a callback
and be in the chemistry
part of it, I was very excited.
[Tommy Lee Wallace] Seth
was full of piss and vinegar.
A great kid, clever and
cracking jokes all the time.
[Seth Green]
I was a very curious kid,
and then I was also interested
in filmmaking very young.
[Patrice Leung]
Seth was the most precocious,
but he had this intelligence
about him and he would say,
"I'm going to be a filmmaker
one day."
[Seth Green] Part of
what they liked about me
was me doing voices.
-Your voices
all sound the same, Richie.
-Thanks a bunch, professor.
-or impressions.
-By George, Martha,
it's the river Nile.
-.or being
fast-witted or funny.
-Well, hey.
Larry, Curly, and Mo.
-Beep-beep, Richie.
-That was the thing
that got me that part.
Richie, to me,
always seemed both fearless
and also terrified.
- [cutlery thudding]
- Tozier!
-He was willing
to keep going forward
even though he was scared.
[kid]Richie!
- but he was the first guy
to make a joke about it.
♪ You've gotten so ugly ♪
Oh, come on.
And then Harry Anderson,
whom I didn't know,
we had an instant rapport.
[kisses]
[laughs]
[Seth Green]
Harry and I chatted a lot.
And I'd watched him
on Cheers and Night Court.
I'd seen him do stand-up
and magic.
[Harry Anderson]
This is one you probably know.
[crowd laughter]
-So, I was into that guy and
excited to get to play him.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
Directing kids,
in general, is challenging.
And he takes a powder and jumps.
Boom!
Jumps right over you and
suddenly you guys see him go,
and that'll be the end
of this first piece.
And directing seven,
sometimes ten,
12 kids all in one scene...
[indistinct].
Don't go way over there.
Is hugely challenging
because they have
so much energy.
-Whoa!
-I think Seth was more or
less the ringleader.
[Seth Green]
We got in a lot of trouble.
-Let's get out of here!
-We were kids.
Both on set and off.
[laughs]
[Marlon Taylor] But I think
us getting in trouble together
also made us a lot closer.
-Yeah.
-We also had our little spats,
like we got tired of each other.
Jonathan Brandis and I
often took out our stresses
by bagging on each other
pretty intensely, actually.
But at the end of the day,
we were all pretty close.
-If it were filmed now with
that same group of kids,
there would be a lot of them
who had diagnoses.
Maybe ADHD,
oppositional defiance.
Some of them just
would not shut up.
[Brandon Crane] We were
dropping water balloons off
of our balcony onto
people's convertibles.
I think one time we managed
to do it with Kool-aid
and the person was fairly upset.
The police came and told us it
wasn't a good idea to do that,
especially since
we weren't citizens.
We thought we were
going to get deported.
-I honestly did
not get a lot of their jokes.
All the other boys had read
the book, and in the book,
the kids all have sex with Bev.
The boys knew this,
but I didn't know,
and so they kept making
references to this fact
and they were just going
above my head.
So finally, my mom said,
"Why don't you
just read the book?"
And so I read it
and I was kind of horrified
but in a way it was
kind of liberating too.
Because when I was 13, you know,
you're going through puberty
and your things
are changing and stuff.
So it was just this
very sort of odd entry
into adolescence for me.
[Larry D. Cohen] There were scenes that I
never thought twice about,
meaning the orgy scene
with the kids with Bev.
[John DeLamar] Pennywise
and It are the things
that drive the
losers to, in the novel,
have this very,
very obscure and weird orgy
in the middle of the narrative
where they're all
having sex with Beverly.
It's to ward off It,
to keep It at bay,
because childhood
is what It loves.
-[whispering] I am an eater
of worlds and of children.
-And if you want to push away
from the thing
that's scary to you,
you push into the thing
that it can't feed on,
and you do that through sex.
[Larry D. Cohen]
I just thought it was one of
Steve's digressions
down a lane that didn't work.
[Brandon Crane]
I remember the guy
who played Officer Nell.
He completely lost
his shit one day.
[Adam Faraizl] There's
a scene where we're all
in the Barrens,
building the dam.
The policeman comes along
and says,
"Hey, what are you kids
doing down there?"
and one of the kids
said, "Masturbating."
We all started laughing
and then also it carried on.
We couldn't get the next
[laughs] like three or four
takes.
[Brandon Crane]
We weren't focusing
and I remember getting the "this
isn't professional" lecture.
[Tommy Lee Wallace] There were
times that Jim pulled them aside
and gave them the lecture.
And I sometimes would sort of
lose it a little bit on set
and say,
"Look, you're actors here.
I know you're having fun.
I love you're having fun.
You have to do your job."
[Jim Green] Our director
came to me and he said,
"Jim, I'm losing it
with these kids."
So I said, "I need a meeting
with the kids
before we break for lunch
and I don't want
their parents there."
They rallied around and I said,
"You are making a picture.
If you came here because
you want to be an actor,
then I can tell you right now
whatever you're doing on the set
will reflect on whether
you work again.
I do recommend that you pay
attention to your director.
Shape up, guys."
And walked away.
[Patrice Leung]
The adults were... [laughs]
When they got the...
All the adults together,
'cause some of them
knew each other
and they were all buddies,
they were actually more noisy
than the kids.
-We used to try
to make each other throw up,
okay, by being as gross
as we possibly could, right,
to make the other person gag.
We're adults, you know, sort of.
It just got louder
and louder and louder
until the assistant director
finally came in and said,
"You guys have to leave.
You have to go outside
on the street.
You can't be in here because
we can't get any work done."
[laughs]
[typewriter keys clacking]
-I want to make sure
you remember my name.
-Oh god, Henry Bowers.
[Jarred Blancard]
My agent called and said,
"Guess what?
We've got an audition for you,"
and I said,
"Oh really, for what?"
She said, "Stephen King's IT."
She said,
"It's a big production,
it's a miniseries,
it's incredible."
She said, "Please work your ass
off for this audition."
'Cause, she said,
"It's once in a lifetime."
I knew.
Hundreds of kids
had probably gone in there.
Big guys were gonna go in
there and be the traditional bully...
Which I don't find
very threatening,
to be honest with you.
And so I thought, okay, who can I channel?
I always refer to Dennis Hopper
because he's a very small man,
but he conveys an
intensity that's menacing.
[Brandon Crane] Jarred
was an exceptional actor.
-[archive] You're dead, fat boy.
[Brandon Crane]
For someone who was his age.
The level of commitment
that he had was frightening.
[Jarred Blancard]
I went in for the audition
and the casting director
grabbed me and he said,
"I've got to get you
to the producers right away."
He said, "You're exactly
what they're looking for.'"
And I said "Me?"
And again, here I was,
this scrawny kid,
and I was being
plucked out of that group.
[Gabe Khouth] He just had...
Something about that guy,
he had some sort of
menacing appeal about him.
-[archive] Ta-ta, girls.
-I could be wrong, but I believe
I auditioned for it three times,
and the first one
was for Henry Bowers
and I wanted that part
very badly.
-I want you to think
about that before you die.
[Gabe Khouth] As we know,
Jarred Blancard
got Henry Bowers.
And what character
I played on IT
is actually
a little contentious,
because in the script
I was Patrick,
and I notice that IMDb,
and depending where you
look online I played Victor,
which always confused me
when the fans were like,
"Hey, we loved you playing
Victor in Stephen King's IT,"
and I was like,
"You mean Patrick,"
and they'd be like,
"No, Victor,"
and I'm like,
"No, it was Patrick."
[Chris Eastman] The
very first thing that I did
was another iconic film called
NeverEnding Story
where, ironically,
I played a bully.
I managed to get typecast
in kind of that bully role...
Not because I was big,
just because I was intense
and could beat people up.
Let me show you.
And I could really
burp on command.
-Without throwing up,
as well, I might add.
[Jarred Blancard] In
the book, it's-it's obvious
that Henry is badly...
I mean, abuse doesn't
begin to cover
what he suffers
at the hands of his father
and he has this true fear
of his father.
I'm not a method actor
but I did keep that
a bit in mind
when I was attempting to
torture and ultimately kill
these poor children, right?
He needed to transfer
those feelings of helplessness.
He wanted to impose
that same fear on other people
that he suffered
when he went home at night.
There's one scene in the film,
it's the only scene
where my character is vulnerable
and that's in the classroom
and that's when
he's being threatened
to be kicked out
after a disturbance.
There's a crack in my voice
when he says,
"But my father
will tan my hide."
and that sort of
typifies the fear
that he has of-of his father.
I actually get emotional
about this because
my dad's passed.
He, uh, wasn't
supportive at all.
He never went to
any of my plays,
he sort of scoffed at all of
my dreams and aspirations.
But I remember
that he came home from work
and I said, "Dad, I got it!"
and his shock and the pride
and the sadness
that he hadn't embraced
this dream earlier.
And from that point on, though,
it was nothing but-but pride
and-and-and
it was a wonderful thing.
I apologize
for getting emotional.
I wanted to be as
sensitive off camera
as I possibly could.
Yelling these racial slurs and
these obscenities, you know,
calling him, you know, fat boy
and all of that kind of thing,
I wanted to make sure
after the take that
he knew that
that's not the way I felt.
-[archive]
Or what, boy? Or what?
[Marlon Taylor]
You know, he always told me
how uncomfortable he was
with having to say
some of the things
he had to say to me,
which was great. [laughs]
'Cause it was
some harsh words, man!
It was some harsh words said.
[Jarred Blancard] I'd
always apologize afterwards.
And the Americans were quite
astounded by that; they thought,
"Well, you're playing a part."
[Brandon Crane] There's a
scene where I get confronted
by Henry Bowers,
where he's supposed to carve
the "H" in my belly.
-[archive]
Hey look, it's the fat boy.
-[archive]
Top of the day, fat boy!
-And it was probably the scene
that I feared the most.
[rock music]
-[archive]
[Ben grunting]
[Brandon Crane]
I thought for a moment
that he could very well lose it
and go ahead and just, you know,
start the artwork on my stomach
right then and there.
-[archive] Come on.
Don't really cut him.
-[archive] Cut him? Huh?
Cut him?
[Brandon Crane] He made
it very easy to be afraid.
But I remember
that being probably
the most difficult scene
for me to film.
[Jarred Blancard] The only
source of disappointment for me
was the fact
that we couldn't go as raw
and as bold
as they did in the book.
The violence
is something that I just...
I wanted to go further with it.
I just felt it would have been
more effective
if we were able to do that,
knowing fully well
that we weren't able to.
-[archive] Henry Bowers.
[Mark Tillman] There were
two adults that were cast later
and Green/Epstein
were very sweet
about allowing us to look at
so me people that were friends.
-Henry. Hen.
This is scaring me already!
[laughs]
[Tommy Lee Wallace] It
needed a special quality person.
And in this case,
he was being cast after the boy
who played Henry Bowers, who
was also a very special person
and had a strangeness about him.
-I tell you, people will
always remember Henry Bowers.
[Mark Tillman] Michael
Cole, he was from a show
called Mod Squad
that I grew up on.
[Victoria Burrows] He
wasn't traditionally a badass
but he just showed that side
and so he was just kind of
one of these little gem finds,
somebody that had some gravitas.
-After all those years,
Michael had attained
a patina of strangeness,
which some of us do.
And so when he came in
to talk about it,
I felt very positive
right there and then
that he could pull
that roll off as.
[laughs], okay,
that strange little boy
grew up to be this strange man.
-[archive] I'll pay you back,
I'll pay you all back!
-Not many casting
directors will do this.
I got down on the
floor crawling around,
and I was so shook up and sweat
was starting to run down,
and Victoria got down
on the floor with me,
sliding sheets of paper
in front of me
so I could get the cue.
Boy, what a champion.
[Jarred Blancard]
I met Michael Cole
and he was perfectly polite
but not very effusive
or -or friendly,
and I-I actually backed out
of his trailer and I thought,
"I'm just gonna leave you alone
to your business." [laughs]
So, he did a great job
obviously.
[Michael laughs]
[typewriter keys clacking]
[Guilford Adams] Pennywise is wonderful.
I mean, he's charming and scary
and both elusive
and enthralling, you know.
He's like any good drug.
Like you just want to go to it,
but then you regret it
immediately.
[Larry Cohen] Pennywise
is much more overtly comic...
-[archive] Won't do
any good to run, girly boy.
- [Larry Cohen]...
- As a lure for the kids
And as a sort of perverse
set of jokes for the audience.
But when he scares,
he scares the crap out of you.
He found the way
to really lure you in
like Georgie in the sewer.
-[archive] My boat!
-[archive] Exactly!
[Mark Bacino] When Georgie
is first taken by Pennywise,
which is a great scene
when he follows the boat
down the street in the rain.
-[archive] S.S. Georgie.
[imitates honking]
[Patrice Leung]
The effects guys had done this
brilliant job to figure out
how to get the boat to flow
all in one take.
-[archive] No, please no.
[Tony Dakota] Tommy Lee
Wallace opened the sewer grate,
which was just a manhole cover
which was about four feet away
from the sewer,
and had Tim crouch down
and speak...
-[archive] Hiya, Georgie!
[Tony Dakota]
- -into the sewer.
[Tommy Lee Wallace] We
had a strange day to shoot it.
You can almost always count on
overcast in Vancouver,
but this day
was sunny and bright,
but "We better go ahead
and do it because
here we are
and the set is built."
[Tony Dakota] You can
see the rays of sunshine
coming through the scaffolding
that they built to
create the rain.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
I had trepidation about that
but the effect
was kind of wonderful.
The light was doing weird things
and of course you could see
the rain really well because
it was backlit by the sun.
Then you get
to the actual sewer.
That was a set.
It was done outdoors.
The set was up high
and Tim was just standing
with his face
up against the opening,
so we were on a riser,
looking down as if
we were on the street.
[Tim Curry] Little Georgie
at the beginning of the film
when he's chasing his
paper boat and I grab him,
he stopped and said...
-"Tim, you're scaring me,
you're scaring me."
-"It'll save you
a little acting, won't it?"
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
That wonderful little boy.
-[archive] Do they float?
[Tommy Lee Wallace] and
Tim Curry's performance.
-[archive] They float, Georgie.
-to me,
that's what that scene is.
Not much in the way
of special effects.
-[archive] You'll float too!
-[archive] [screams]
-One of the scenes
that was left out
of the final showing of IT
was that scene where
Sharon comes to the door
and is presented with
a fireman holding
the body of her son.
[Tony Dakota] Holding me
with my arm in my sleeve
and the blood dripping
out of the sleeve.
[Sheelah Megill]
It's pouring rain
and she opens the
door and there he is,
and I spent all day screaming
as we did take after take.
[Tony Dakota] I guess
since it was made for TV
that that was pushing
the envelope a little bit.
[Bark Mixon] We were certainly
aware that we were doing
a horror movie for television.
-[archive]
[man] George, [indistinct].
[Bart Mixon] And back
then, we were very limited
to what you could show.
[Mark Bacino]
We were breaking new ground,
because I don't remember
before any kind of material
like this
that I saw on television.
Sci-fi, horror.
-[archive] Float.
-.blood, and there was
a lot of that.
[balloons popping]
-[archive]
[Eddie's terrified scream]
-And we had to work with
the program practice department
at all times.
There was a scene where
the kids become
blood brothers and sisters
and they cut their hand
and they place
their palms on palms.
We had to change that
because it was in the early '90s
and it was during
the time of AIDS.
So, we wrote the scene
to spit in their hand.
-The advertisers
were very nervous.
This was a children
in jeopardy story
and we had to focus it on
the fact that it was
a Stephen King novel,
that it was very popular.
[Mark Bacino] Executives,
creatives knew it,
but program practices still
had to follow their guidelines
and we were constantly
up against them,
pushing it, and fighting
for the creative integrity
of the piece.
[Jim Green] Broadcast
Standards rejected the picture,
and the head of Broadcast
Standards at the time
happened to be someone I knew,
so it was easy for me
to get on the phone to New York
and ask for help.
The gentleman that was
in charge of
censorship at ABC
agreed to come out and
look at the picture with me.
His staff had rejected
the picture on so many levels
that every note that they had
meant re-cutting the picture
and I just simply said,
"We're not cutting
a piece of it."
[Mark Bacino]
"This is what you bought.
You bought
a Stephen King horror.
We'll be able to show it
in a very respectable,
responsible way...
-[archive] [announcer] IT
is based on subject material
that may be unsuitable for,
and unsettling to
younger and
impressionable viewers.
-"but we can't deny the audience
what they come to expect."
[Jim Green]
I had made my argument
that these were recollections of adults.
-[archive] The blood.
I cleaned the whole thing up
that very same night.
[Jim Green] And so therefore,
we could get away with
children in jeopardy.
-[archive] [laughing]
[blood gurgles]
[Jim Green]
The next day we were told,
"No changes. Move forward."
[woman 1] Cue background!
[woman 2] Background!
[horse hooves clopping]
-[archive] [man] Eric, go.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
The idea of the carnival scene
is straight out of the book...
The hand that reaches
right out of the photo album
and grabs at them.
-Come on, it's just a drawing!
[Tony Lazarowich] The photo
book was built by two people,
Mike Steffy, and Bob Comer.
Both of them had this
amazing mechanical ability
to build what we call
tabletop gags,
really intricate things.
-That was my favorite thing,
that you see a photograph
and I come alive.
Such a great idea.
[laughs]
-[archive] [hisses]
-I have never seen so many
cables attached to something
that operated those pages
to turn.
It was a complex
push me-pull me cable system.
They had to hit their marks,
so they had to have individual
cables for individual pages.
It took them weeks to build it.
When they operated it,
it was one of those "How do you
hide all that stuff?"
Visual effects
just didn't have the money.
-[archive] [woman]
All right, here we go. Yeah.
Thank you and clear, please.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
What I really, really
wanted to emphasize was
that "I think I see Pennywise
back there in the background
somewhere
but he's just not
bothering anybody."
[Marlon Taylor] And
I picked up the book
and the first thing we saw
was just a big hole in it.
And he's like, "All right,
I want you guys to act
like you guys
are reading this book,
like Pennywise is
dancing down the street.
He jumps on the pole."
-[archive] [Tommy Lee Wallace]
Uh, remember the uh,
remember the pull-up.
-[archive] [woman] Don't watch
the clown, background.
Keep doing your own stuff.
-[archive] [Tommy Lee Wallace]
Remember that, uh,
little lower, and.yeah.
- "And then, here it comes..."
-[archive] Aah!
-Oh, shit,
he's right in your face,
just like that.
-"and I need you
guys to react."
[Ben Heller] It was
Tommy's hand that kind of
came up through there.
I remember later
seeing the completed scene
and being blown away.
-I thought that was
a good powerful moment.
[Norman Cabrera] Makeup
effects were booming at that time.
Garage shops
were popping up everywhere,
and Fantasy II was
like an all-encompassing
movie effects house.
[Gene Warren Jr.]
We had a makeup effects wing
and Bart Mixon
was the lead person in it.
Tommy Lee Wallace
knew him from Fright Night 2
[Bart Mixon] I had set
up their creature shop
for Fright Night 2,
so it was just natural
for Gene to bring me back in.
I had a crew of about a half
a dozen artists on the show,
but I... probably selfishly,
I wanted to do Pennywise myself.
-That was Bart's baby.
Bart sculpted it and did
the whole application.
-[archive] Fozzie Bear
does the twist?
[Bart Mixon] Early on, I
was doing a fair amount of
clown research and sketching.
-The idea, first of all,
was to do a lot of research
on representation of clowns
over time
to have a historical
perspective.
We have to think of
the size of the actor
and how big we want him to be,
how nimble we want him to be.
What we're doing
with the costume is
we're serving his face;
everything has to serve
the expression.
-The first time
I did prosthetics
I was doing Legend
for Ridley Scott,
where I played the devil.
-He had mentioned
that Rob Botin had literally
casted every inch of his body,
so I think he wasn't anxious
to have his life cast
done again.
[Tim Curry] That's
all right, I can bear it.
[Tommy Lee Wallace] He was absolutely
weighted down
with special effects makeup
to the point at which he was...
To most people was no longer
recognizable as Tim Curry.
[Tim Curry] I was
prosthetic down to my waist
and it was all glued on,
and to get it off
they used to sit me in a bath,
tear a hole in my head
and pour in solvent.
And the two guys
who were doing it were insane,
probably because they were
around solvents so much.
You do get horribly
claustrophobic,
particularly
if your whole face is covered.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
So, his only reservation
was too much makeup.
He wanted to be
able to use his face.
We pushed and pulled about
how much makeup to do.
[Bart Mixon] I met with him
and we had a few conversations
about what he did
or didn't want to wear.
He did want to go as light
as possible with the prosthetic.
So there was some evolution.
-[archive] I'll kill you all.
I'll kill you all.
[Bart Mixon] I saw it
as a fantasy character.
It was an illusion that It's
presenting to these children.
I wanted it to almost
be like a living cartoon,
just as harmless and as pleasant looking
as it could be,
and that's why the colors
are pure white and red and blue
and very primary and very clean.
I didn't want
there to be cracks.
And at least when he's
presenting himself to the kids,
he's casting this illusion,
so why would he
have flaws in it?
[Tommy Lee Wallace] The usual
accoutrement of clownmanship,
it was definitely
going to be whiteface.
It was really the classic
Bozo the Clown approach,
to begin with.
-He came over to the shop,
we took a life cast,
and then we produced
copies of busts of his head.
I believe I had three of those
that I did clay sketches on
where we did
three different concepts.
There was a hobo clown
with jowls and droopy face,
and then there was
one in between
that had more prosthetics
on his face
but made him a little more
angular and meaner.
Once we-we produced the makeup,
then we went up
to Canada to test it.
And we did two makeup tests.
[Mark Bacino]
When we got to Vancouver,
and were doing our test
makeup, I was so looking forward
to that day and that moment
when we would be able to sit
with Tim with the makeup on
and see this clown with
bloodshot eyes and fangs
and a scary face.
The first test
was just the head and the nose
with a paint scheme
that was what Tim had wanted.
He dictated the patterns
on the face.
The second test, we added
the cheeks and the chin
and then I painted something
closer to what I had
on my original design,
where he's got like a bigger
red mouth and the blue eyes.
They photographed both of those.
The decision was made
that he didn't really
need the cheeks and chin,
which at the time
I was kind of like,
"Hey, wait a minute!"
But I think he looks great
like he is.
The paint scheme evolved
a little bit further.
We did at least one more test
where we just painted
Tim's face white
and then refined the patterns.
-It's always kind of tough
having that stuff stuck on you.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
There was a certain line
that I was going past,
and Bart Mixon was in
on that conversation,
as was Doug Higgins,
the art director.
We were all having discussions
about Pennywise's look.
I was excited about adding
certain appliance makeup
like a bulbous forehead,
perhaps exaggerated cheekbones,
big extended chin,
things to cartoonize his face.
Tim took a stand about that
and said he really didn't want
to wear these things.
He agreed to try them on.
-And he said, "If you want me
to wear this scary makeup,
then I think you have
the wrong actor."
And I thought, "What?"
[Richard Thomas] He had great
patience and great forbearance,
because I think that job
was a purgatory for him,
I really do.
-[archive] [man] One more, Tim.
[Richard Thomas]
And God love him,
he created a character
that has scared
the pants off of generations.
[Mark Bacino] He said,
"Look, just make me
as a straight clown
and I will scare the audience."
I thought, "Of course.
That's why we have Tim Curry."
-[archive] Go!
Now.
[Mark Bacino] "He will scare
us. We don't need all of that."
-In the end,
we removed all of them
except the bulbous head,
and I'm glad we stuck with that,
but he was totally right that
his face is so expressive...
-[archive]
Give us a profile, Tim.
[chuckles]
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
- -that it was good
to not see it too done up
with rubber.
[Richard Thomas] But Tim
could act through a manhole cover
if he wanted to,
because he has that kind of
charisma and presence.
[Bart Mixon] The look
that we ended up with
was based in a large part
on the Lon Chaney Phantom
of the Opera.
That's why it's got
the upturned nose
and the bulbous head.
[Chelan Simmons]
♪ The itsy-bitsy spider ♪
♪ Climbed up the water spout ♪
♪ Down came the rain
and washed the spider out ♪
I didn't film
any of my scenes with Tim Curry
'cause they didn't
want to scare me.
I was walking back to go
to my trailer to go change
and Tim Curry is in full gear,
his clown makeup, everything,
and he walks by me
and he goes, "Hi!"
And it scared me so much.
To be honest that's the
reason why I... [laughs]
I still haven't seen the movie,
because I'm terrified of clowns.
-[archive] [screaming]
-There was quite a good
photograph in a magazine of me
heading for the makeup trailer
in a bathrobe with a Marlboro
dangling from my face.
[Emily Perkins] Tim kept
himself quite aloof from us.
He would basically just
hang out in his cast chair,
chain-smoking in full makeup
and whenever he saw
us, he would just go
"Grrrrr!" [chuckles]
[Adam Faraizl]
Those kind of people
always make your job easier.
[Tim Curry] The kids were
actually quite scared of me.
-I'd been playing it really cool
and then we wound up in a van
going back to the hotel together
and I was wearing
a Rocky Horror shirt
and I was like trying
to cover it up,
and he saw it and he was like,
"Oh, you like the movie?"
And I go, "Yeah, I'm...
I'm into you, dude!" [laughs]
I have a picture of him
in half a clown costume
with me standing next to
him looking slightly scared
that was taken off the set
after shooting this shower scene
and I was too scared to
ask him for that picture.
My mom, however, was not.
[Tommy Lee Wallace] I
encouraged him to be really big,
because it's almost like
a character
who's satirizing himself
constantly.
He's being self-referential
when he tells these
awful, stupid jokes.
-[archive] Do you have
Prince Albert in a can?
-Then, urrah, urrah, urrah.
-[archive] Urrah, urrah, urrah,
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
urrah, urrah,
you know, it's like, "Wait,
he's just demented;
that's all there is to that.
But wait, he's not even a clown,
he's some other kind of monster,
so, oh, I'm uneasy."
[John DeLamar] Pennywise
is this really strange, queer...
Not in LGBTQ sense,
but like queer as in strange,
as in aberrant.
I think that the novel,
more so than the miniseries,
is very much grounded
in the fact
that Pennywise
is on three different levels:
It is in disguise
as Pennywise; Pennywise then
disguises himself as, say,
the Creature
from the Black Lagoon,
the mummy, the leper.
-[archive] Get out of Derry
while you still can!
[John DeLamar]
Beverly's dad in a dress,
so it's drag on drag
on drag on drag.
It's all about these
very queer elements,
which is what horror
fiction is always about.
It's always about the
thing on the outside.
So, King is really preying on those fears,
those fears of the outsider.
[frightful music]
-[archive] Stan?
[Ben Heller] My first day of
shooting on the set
was with Jonathan Brandis,
where Stan goes to do some
bird watching and ends up in
a house...
-[archive] Hello?
-[archive] Stanley.
-[archive] Yeah?
[Ben Heller]
- - and of course,
It manifests itself
as that mummy.
[ominous music]
[Bart Mixon] Jim McLaughlin
sculpted the mummy for me,
which was basically a makeup
that Jim had done
a year or so earlier
and I was like,
"That looks cool, you mind
if we use that in the movie?"
So he just, you know,
made me a copy of that.
[Aaron Sims] There's a
werewolf which was really cool
that was done by Norman Cabrera.
-[archive] This.
This isn't happening.
-[archive] [werewolf growls]
-[archive] [Richie screams]
[Norman Cabrera] He's
like, "We're doing an homage
to I Was a Teenage Werewolf,
the Michael Landon creature,"
and I was like,
"Uh, yeah.
This is a no-brainer, man.
I want to do this."
[Seth Green] When I saw the stunt guy
in the suit the first time,
all I wanted to do was touch it.
[Norman Cabrera] Werewolves
was always my favorite monster
in every movie, and I loved
I Was a Teenage Werewolf
'cause he had these
really cool streaks
and he wore like
the school jacket
and he was... kind of
was like a greaser.
I basically got
my old monster magazines out
so I had the references
all there.
I knew exactly
what they were going for,
and I liked giving it
a slightly updated twist.
[owl hoots]
-I look at night two
and I think it suffers
in part from the problems
of being only a night two.
Steve's narrative
as it accelerates
benefits from more time
rather than less.
That said,
the fortune cookie scene
in the restaurant
and the scene
when Bev goes to her old house
and another
woman is living there
who is by no means
what she appears...
-[archive] If you're wise,
you'll run dear, run,
because to stay will mean
worse than your death.
[Larry Cohen]... were as good
as anything in night one.
[ominous music]
-[archive] [Beverly screams]
-[archive]
I worry about you, Bevvy.
I worry a lot.
[Bart Mixon] Norman Cabrera
did the Al Marsh corpse
when Beverly goes back
to her home
and the old woman turns into
the corpse of her father.
[Frank Turner] I had to do
the whole upper-body cast,
which is one of the
most grueling things
that an actor can do.
They tried to Krazy Glue
mealy worms to my face,
actually live worms
jiggling on my face.
[Bark Mixon] But we
couldn't get them to stick.
[Frank clicks tongue]
So, we had to lose
the mealy worms.
[Adam Faraizl]
When you get on some sets,
you can tell that
it's done in a way
that's going to make it
look good on camera
but it doesn't really look
that great up close...
Not the case with this set.
-[archive] Standby for picture.
[Adam Faraizl] Inside
that set, you really felt like
you were underground and
in some sort of sewer system.
-[archive] [Tommy Lee
Wallace]Okay. We're there.
-The set was awesome.
It just kind of transformed you
and took you to another place.
-[archive] [Bill]
Who's missing?
- [archive] Stan!
- [archive] Oh no!
[Ben Heller] There was a scene
where Stan got pulled aside
from the group
with Henry and Belch.
-[archive] [Belch burps loudly]
-[archive] Hi, kid.
I uh, guess you're the first.
[Jarred Blancard]
I got a chance to confront
Ben Heller and you felt like,
"Oh, this is it now.
He's a dead man."
I felt that little segment
came closest to encapsulating
what Henry Bowers
was capable of.
-[archive] I want you to think
about that before you die.
Belch, the guy that
gets pulled in the pipe,
the lower half of him
is a dummy so that
they can fold, because it's kind
of hard to fold yourself over
like he does.
-When they told me
how I was going to die
and the dimensions of the pipe,
I started stretching,
so I'm just in there
trying to get my head
to my knees
so that I could fit in there,
and one of the stunt
coordinators said,
"You're not going to be
able to do it. I can't do it."
I wanted to do my own stunts
but they were like,
"No, no, it's an explosion...
- [loud explosion]
- [archive] [Belch screams]
[Chris Eastman]
- - "and you can't do that."
[growls] You know, I was
17 years old and being like,
"Yeah, yeah,
I did my own stunts!"
[Tony Lazarowich]
As a young effects person,
I got a lot of the crappy jobs.
We're down in the sewer,
and there's that pipe
that light goes through,
and there's a bazillion holes
in that pipe.
Well, my job was, first,
drill all the holes.
You got to make them
look perfect
and then you had to go
inside it,
because with the
camera sliding in there
and also we had the
actor that got sucked into it,
all the holes had to have
all the little sharp edges
taken off.
I just spent 12 hours a day
doing that.
-[archive] Hey, Henry?
-I was lifted off the ground.
I was told to just have,
they described it as
dead eyes, right,
so there's no real
reaction to the fact
that you're being pulled in
by some mysterious force.
-[archive] Belch!
[Chris Eastman]
I love dying on film.
There's a finality to it.
Just the ability to. let go.
-[archive] This is
battery acid, you slime!
[Adam Faraizl]
My character, Eddie Kaspbrak.
I don't know, I like to
think in kind of a way
he was the one who did
the most damage to It.
Like, the most protective with,
you know,
the battery acid scene.
-[archive] [growls in pain]
-He was a warrior on the inside.
[Bart Mixon]
When the kids saw him,
I wanted him to be like this cartoon clown,
and when the adults saw him,
I wanted him to be
this like a horrific caricature
of that previous clown.
The adults know
that this isn't really a clown.
They know that it's a monster,
and so there's no reason for It
to necessarily
maintain this illusion
other than
just to screw with them.
And my original concept art
for it had blue eye sockets
which would become
eye sockets of the skull;
just the way
the mouth was painted
would suggest
more of a skullish mouth.
And for various reasons,
we didn't go that route.
But when we ended up
doing the battery acid look,
the disfigured part is what
that makeup would have been,
only on his entire head.
When we shot that
sequence in Canada
with the battery acid,
we didn't have time
to switch him over
so we just shot the whole thing
with the regular clown face.
At that point,
the intention was to not use
the disfigured prosthetics
and I went back to LA
kind of a little heartbroken.
And we were building
the miniature Pennywise
for when he goes down the drain
and I had it sculpted
with the normal face,
and literally
the day I got the front half
of the mold done,
Gene Warren comes back and goes,
"Hey, we're doing some reshoots
and we're going to use
the disfigured Pennywise."
Now I had to take a life cast
of his quarter-scale head
and do like a tiny prosthetic
to make it look like
the disfigured Pennywise.
To Tim's credit, the only
reason that that makeup,
even though it's
a heavier makeup,
is in the movie is because
he had seen the prosthetics
and he volunteered to wear it
for the day that we shot it.
-I loved the fact
that we really got to work
with Tim in that scene.
-[archive] Stan, no!
-[archive] Bev, the stones!
-[archive] Hurry, Bev. Kill It!
-[archive] Kill me?
[laughs] Oh, brat!
You are priceless!
-When Pennywise gets hit
in the head with
the silver stone and knocks
the chunk out of his head.
-[archive] Bam! He nails him!
[Bart Mixon] Initially,
we shot that in Vancouver
with just the regular
Pennywise makeup.
-[archive]
Kill it, Bev! Kill it!
-[archive] [Tommy Lee Wallace]
Make that happen fast.
As soon as this... as soon as
he gets hit. Okay?
So, bam!
He gets hit in the head.
-I think it was
an interesting choice
by Stephen King
to have Bev, the only girl,
be the one who actually
has mastered this weapon
and can use the weapon
against It.
-[archive] [Richie] It's like
it's supposed to be Bev.
[Bret Mixon] In the movie,
it's a little silver earring
about so big,
but for the shot of it
flying out of the
slingshot and hitting him,
Bart sculpted at least twice
a duplicate of the earring.
It's flat on the back with...
With a little hole
so they could mount it
on a... on a rig
and I think it probably rotated.
[Emily Perkins]
I remember practicing
with a slingshot at
home. Once I fired it
right into the camera
and it ricocheted
around the map box. [laughs]
Took me a while to live
that one down with the boys.
They were like, "I'll do it!
I'll do it!
She's incompetent!"
I was just like, "Oh, men."
-[archive] Kill It, Bev!
-[archive] [growling]
[Ben Heller]
Filming those scenes
in the sewer
and working with Pennywise.
-[archive] [Tommy Lee
Wallace][indistinct].
-[archive] And you. are next.
- Definitely some of
the more memorable times.
-[archive] Action!
-[archive] [groaning]
[Adam Faraizl] It really
put you in the mood
and it really
gave you the feeling
that you were actually
doing these things.
Similar to the shower scene.
-[archive] It's okay, Eddie.
Hi. I just wanted to say hello.
-The entire thing
is built on a sound stage
so you have a bathroom
that is seven-eighths complete.
-[archive] This is a little
inconvenient, Eddie.
Just hold on while I make
a few adjustments.
-It was a combination
of stop-motion
replacement animation.
We sculpted the stretching
of the drain in the tiles
and it's sculpted
frame by frame and then cast
and then replacement,
one frame at a time.
[Adam Fariazl] You have all this noise.
The poles blowing
the compressed air,
which are loud bursts from
12 to 14 different poles.
The director yelling cues at me.
Have Tim Curry
reciting his lines for me
in Tim Curry Pennywise voice
over a loudspeaker system.
So, when you add
all those factors together,
me having an asthma attack
at the very end of the scene...
-[archive]
[breathing with difficulty]
[Adam Faraizl]... it's not really
too much acting going on there
because there was
a lot of adrenaline,
there was a lot of pressure.
-[archive] [Richie]
Well, sports fans,
this has been a real hoot.
[Tim Reid]
The Chinese restaurant scene
was sort of our scene
out of Alien in that
the director did not let us see
what was going to happen.
[fortune cookie breaks]
-[archive] [screams]
[baby bird squawks]
[Richard Thomas] First of
all, you have to remember
you have all these actors
sitting around who have known
each other for years.
Ritter and I were very naughty.
Poor Tommy, the director,
I think wanted to
really kill both of us.
[Tim Reid]
We were back in that time
so we were always relating
to each other in character
as childhood friends.
[Richard Thomas] And
Annette, who is so sweet
and such a dear heart
and such a "nice girl,"
has got such a raucous
sense of humor.
I mean, we were just outrageous.
You put a bunch of actors
around a table for hours,
it's crowd control at
a whole other level.
I think it was very hard
and I want to apologize
right now to the director
and everybody.
[Tim Reid] And then after
that, staying in character
knowing what this meant,
that this was again an omen.
This thing is never
going to leave us.
[Richard Thomas]
The little thing with the eye,
the fortune cookie,
that was my favorite.
[Tony Lazarowich] Back then, you had to do
everything practically.
And if they had to fix it,
it was a lot of work and money.
So, the challenges
that IT brought
to the effects department
as a mechanical,
practical thing,
was amazing.
[Richard Thomas]
I loved that scene
and that's...
In my fading memory,
making that scene is one
that's always stood out for me.
That and where
I'm telling them all
we have to be strong
and we have to stay together
and we're going to do this.
And the reason
I remember that scene
is that I just wonder
how terrible
my performance was
at that moment. [laughs]
I've been afraid to revisit it
because I don't want to know.
-[archive] [Bill] For years,
I've been getting paid
to scare people,
but I'm the one
who's been scared.
[Richard Thomas] I was
just always afraid, oh god,
was I as hokey
as I thought I was?
There was so much love
and fun at the table
in the Chinese restaurant.
As difficult as it may have
been for them to get it quiet
and do the work, that chemistry
and that craziness
is one of the things
that makes the picture work.
[Bart Mixon] I was responsible
for Stan's head in the fridge.
-[archive] Sorry I'm late!
[Bart Mixon] We were
building the stuff in Burbank
and then flying up to Vancouver.
And so I had a big trunk
that I would carry
the Pennywise wigs
and the various prosthetics.
You'd go through customs
and typically
they would open it up
and uh, you know,
"What's all this stuff?"
So, I'm going through this time
with the severed head in it,
so I'm like, you know, "Oh, well
this ought to be funny!"
-From here to here
he built a kind of a false neck,
so it looked like my head
was sitting flat on the rack.
[Bart Mixon] Stan's head in
the fridge was a combination
of a prosthetic on the actor
to simulate the cut neck.
[Richard Masur] I'd already
slid into this refrigerator,
and you have to picture
it's a rack,
and the rack goes into
a little notch
on either side of it.
So you have to
get it just right,
and it has to go in
at just the right angle,
and I'm part of the rack.
[Bart Mixon] They had
a shelf with a cutout in it
that slid up against his neck
and then, all that
was rodoed out
by my brother Brett.
So it was just a neck prosthetic
and then a death makeup
on Richard.
-I slide into this thing...
I just hate everybody
and I just want this over with.
So I'm lying there like this.
Then they start putting
these little cans and stuff
around my head
and I'm just going,
"Can we just shoot this?
Can we please just shoot this?"
"Yeah, well,
we've gotta just."
I said, "Come on,
let's shoot the fucking thing.
I need to get this off,"
and then it's like,
"Hi, kids! How you doing?
Yeah, we all float down here."
You know, and I just...
I just wanted to kill somebody.
[typewriter keys clacking]
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
When I read the novel,
all thousand pages of it,
I remember going,
"Wha...? All this,
and it's a fuckin' spider?"
-[archive] Damn me to hell.
-Oh man, come on. You can do
better than that rubber spider.
-Aww.
I was a little let down,
to be frank,
and you're talking to someone
who really loves that novel.
[Larry Cohen] If I'd had one
scene that I would have put in
that I think is one of
Steve's great sequences,
it was where they build
the underground clubhouse
and use it as a smoke hole
and hallucinate IT
as this extraterrestrial
arrival eons ago,
and I think it would have
added to the narrative
and just straight-out
storytelling,
and maybe directed the spider.
[Larry Cohen]
into the junk pile.
-The one thing I loathed
was what they did with him
at the end.
They made him into
this awful plastic spider.
-[archive]
I believe in the Tooth Fairy.
But I don't believe in you!
-Which wasn't scary at all.
[Tommy Lee Wallace] Then
I got over that and thought,
"Okay, it's a spider.
Why not?"
[archive]
All right, here we go.
Because it's so much more
than that in the end.
And there's this cosmic struggle
in space or space-time,
or Bill's mind or somebody's
mind, you know? [chuckles]
[archive] Come on. Can we have
the deadlights out on a cue?
- [archive] [man 1] Yep.
- [archive] [man 2] Yes.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
It gets into territory
that to me it was unfilmable.
[archive]
Okay, and the entire creature
is going to breathe
a little for me, right?
Here we go.
I think it has to breathe
a little heavier than that.
John Thomas, sharper moves!
[Richard Thomas] So, I
think we were all a little bit like,
"Okay, now we're
in a monster movie.
Now we're going to be
fighting this big toy."
-[archive] [Tommy Lee Wallace]
Somebody rear back
with their fist.
John! That's it!
More of that!
It culminates in a struggle.
[Tommy Lee Wallace] between
humans and a giant spider.
All right, fine.
Our challenge of course
was to come up with a creature
that looks incredible.
Only we had champagne ideas
and a beer budget.
-[archive] [Joey]
Look at this masterful piece.
-[archive] [man]
Yeah. Look at it, look at it.
-[archive] [Joey] Look at this.
Aaron Sims. Aaron Sims.
-[archive] [man] Joey.
-[archive] That's a bad
sculpture, very bad.
-[archive] [man]
Oh, no it's not.
-[archive] [Aaron]
It's a very cool sculpture.
-[archive] [man]
Aaron's doing his magic.
-It was me
and a colleague and friend,
Joey Orosco,
which was creating the spider
that would be in the climax
of the show.
-[archive] [Joey]
Look what he's doing.
-[archive] [Aaron] It sucks.
I'm fucking it up. Look at it.
-[archive] [Joey] Hey, this is
for family television.
-[archive] [Aaron] Hey!
No, we got the edit coming now.
-Going into it,
I guess subconsciously,
I didn't want people to just go,
"Oh, it's just a spider."
-This is like...
I know, but.
[Bart Mixon] I didn't want it
to be just a big black widow
or a tarantula.
-[archive] [inaudible]
-[archive] Yeah, well I got...
-It's spider-like,
but it was never intended to be a spider.
[Aaron Sims]
The design evolved,
so there was a lot of different
designs that were created.
Some were more spider-like
that felt they
were very grounded
to an earthbound spider.
What we ended up going with is
something that felt
otherworldly.
If you actually delivered
a giant spider...
-[archive] The two effects guys
on the picture,
John and Gene.
[Gene Warren]
- -living in a cave.
It took the film
from this frightening,
heady picture,
to a Ray Harryhausen
action adventure.
But that's what the script
called for,
so we did whatever
we thought we could do
for the time and money,
and we built
a stop-motion spider.
[Tommy Lee Wallace] It was
Bart who created the model.
Did a masterful job
and it was beautiful.
And I'd signed off on that.
-Well, I don't want to
point too many fingers.
For some reason,
I think the spider
gets a lot of grief
that I don't think it deserves.
[Tommy Lee Wallace] When the
crew came up from Los Angeles
and they got it out to
assemble the spider,
there was this kind
of, "Oh, by the way,
the spider, as planned,
was unwieldy.
The physics of it
were just such that
we couldn't make that happen.
It was just too heavy.
It was collapsing
under its own weight."
You're assembling something
that doesn't look anything
like we agreed upon.
-[archive] [Joey]
[indistinct].
[Tommy Lee Wallace] And
now I'm just supposed to shoot it?
Well, the answer was:
"Yeah, that's show business.
You don't have any more time.
You've got to do this."
[archive] Hold them up there,
hold them up. right arm in.
So make it look
the best you can.
[archive] Drop!
God!
Cut. Aces.
-So I tell people,
"Hey, it could have been
fighting a turtle
in outer space.
Would you have liked
that better?"
-I thought the spider
was fantastic,
to tell you the truth.
The way it looked in
the shop was really cool.
[Bart Mixon]
We had 12 weeks to build it.
Unfortunately,
the shooting of the spider
was literally
the last two days of filming.
-[archive] [Tommy Lee Wallace]
All right, take it up to,
uh, a hundred.
Okay!
[Norman Cabrera]
I think a lot of times,
for time constraints on set,
or for whatever reason...
-[archive] [Tommy Lee Wallace]
Put the hands out slowly!
Cut!
-The director
can't get the shots
or doesn't shoot it
to its full potential.
-What we built and delivered
was capable of
a lot more than what's seen in the film.
-[archive] [woman] And
positions, please [indistinct].
There we go.
- [laughter]
[Norman Cabrera] The big
problem with a lot of these movies
is that you get the set
and they're like,
"Okay, put it
in front of the camera.
Okay, make it move."
And then they wiggle it:
wiggle, wiggle, wiggle. "Okay."
- [archive] Cut.
- [archive] [woman] Cut.
-[archive] [Tommy Lee Wallace]
Nicely done.
[Norman Cabrera] And
you're like, "Hold on a second,
this could do much more..."
"No, no. We got it. We got it.
We're moving on."
[Bart Mixon] The head had
a full range of movement.
The fangs could move,
the mouth, the mandibles.
-[archive] Get the hands around
and then just pinch around.
[indistinct].
[Bart Mixon]
The fangs dripped poison.
[laughter]
The eyes moved.
- [archive] Who's got the eyes?
- [archive] Mike.
-[archive] [man 4]
There you go.
Go to town, Brent.
[Bart Mixon] Brent Baker
was my main mold maker
and then he also performed
inside the spider.
-[archive] [man 5]
Move the butt, Brent.
Yeah.
- [archive] [indistinct].
-[archive] [man 5] Move it
like a bug would move it, Brent.
He is! That's it!
It's a frightening bug.
[Brent Baker] It's always
a challenge when you're
playing inside a creature suit.
-[archive] [Tommy Lee Wallace]
How is it in there, Brent?
-[archive] [man]
You gotta speak up, Tommy.
You okay, Brent?
They would insert me through
the rear of the spider
and pull off the abdomen,
and slide me up into it.
[Bart Mixon]
He was also inside the spider
when they flipped it over,
but it had these metal ribs
around it
and those we hadn't
thought to pad.
-[archive] [Tommy Lee Wallace]
When I say, "Action,"
IT will overlap, that is to say,
a few steps back,
you'll come in,
Rambo on the creature,
it will do its roll and go down.
[Brent Baker]
It's all fun and games
until they go to push
the spider over on its side
and like a fool I was like,
"I'll do it.
Yeah, I'll be in it, you know.
How bad could it be?"
-[archive] [Tommy Lee Wallace]
And, action!
[Bark Mixon] So, yeah,
he goes like 90 degrees
and then just slams
into these aluminum.
[laughs] square stocks.
- [archive] Cut!
- [archive] [woman] Cut!
-[archive]
Brent, you all right?
-He had some nice bruises,
but he was a trouper.
-[archive] Show your bruises.
-[archive]
Let's see the bruises.
-[archive]
You're going to be a star.
-[archive] [Brent Baker]
They're starting to turn
kind of greenish now.
There's the other one.
It's turning all kinds of
interesting colors.
I was effectively
blind inside of there.
[chuckles] Not to complain,
because it's still great fun,
you know, playing a monster.
It's like, "Hey, I'm almost
like part of the cast."
-It was his idea.
He wanted to be an
actor, so there you go.
There's a couple
of close-ups of the spider
that for some reason
they shot it at like 50,
60 frames a second,
maybe even slower,
to where it's barely perceived
that it's moving.
I think if we delivered a spider
that did as little
as what you see in the show,
I think they would have been
pissed off.
-[archive] [laughter]
-Unfortunately, the timing
session after the fact...
After all the photography
is done
and you've got your movie
and now you're in a session
where you're looking at a scene
and you're making it
lighter or darker;
at that point, I was in Tahiti
on this other picture.
And so, the timing session
went on without us,
with another member
of the organization who...
He and I had not
communicated successfully.
So, it was lit up
pretty brightly.
You saw everything,
and I was dismayed.
And it was out there
before I could correct it.
I would go back and
correct it now if I could.
-[archive] Okay and roll.
-[archive] [indistinct]
Five fifty-five,
George [indistinct].
Five fifty-five,
Baker [indistinct].
[Dennis Christopher]
I kept saying there has to be
a weakness based in fear,
not in physical strength,
that's inside Eddie.
What is the secret that he has
not been able to tell anyone,
including these people?
We're now crawling
through the tunnel
towards what will be the spider,
and that day
I'm saying to Tommy,
"What are we going to do
about Eddie,
and Eddie's fatal flaw,
his big fear?
He hasn't confessed.
We know what's
going to happen to him
moments after this."
-[archive] Push Dennis closer
to the monster, please.
Ready? Uh, Dennis' face
is blocked.
-[archive] Yeah,
go back up into that.
-[archive] [Tommy Lee
Wallace]And then.
Action!
-[archive] [Eddie screaming]
[continues screaming]
-[archive] [Tommy Lee
Wallace]Cut!
[Dennis Christopher] Eddie
deserves to be completed.
So, I said to him at lunch
before we shot the scene,
"What if he's just a virgin?
That's it. Finished."
-[archive] [Richard]Well,
I can't help you with that, pal,
but thanks for sharing.
-[archive] [Beverly]
Richie! Let him talk.
-We all saw how
uncomfortable, awkward
and really strange it is to...
It's not really strange,
it's not really strange at all,
it's a choice.
But how society reacts to people
that aren't sexual,
and Eddie was not.
-[archive] [Eddie] I could
never sleep with somebody
that I didn't love.
And I've never
really loved anyone.
Except you guys.
-[archive] [Tommy Lee
Wallace]And.
One, two, three, go!
[Larry Cohen] There are
things I wouldn't have done,
had I had the ability
to see in retrospect,
was the revelation of IT
as the spider.
Had I been around, I would have
come up with something
involving Pennywise.
-Some things you can't
know until after the fact.
Who knew that Tim Curry was just
going to be such a home run?
It was like, okay, the book says
he disappears at this point
and never to return.
But like probably
most of the audience
when I watch it, I go,
"Oh! There goes Tim."
-[archive] [laughing evilly]
-Oh, I wish we could have
one more scene with him.
Some kind of goodbye scene,
some way of.
Well, maybe we should kill him,
you know?
Or maybe his face should be
the spider's face.
Or... I don't know.
That's a problem
we never solved.
[bell ringing]
-[archive] [Tommy Lee
Wallace]You're ducking way down.
You got to look for the rock
standing straight up.
- [archive] [Annette] Okay.
- It may look...
It may feel a little goofy, but.
- I... I didn't realize.
[Bart Mixon] I guess after
Beverly wounds the spider
with the slingshot and the rock
and it walks away,
when they came upon him
in that last bit,
had that been Tim Curry again,
mortally wounded,
I think that might have been
a more satisfying ending,
because you were just
so invested in Tim
as that villain at that point.
-It would have been nice
had we been able to solve it,
because I agree
that the story drops Pennywise,
and he's such
an endearing character,
he deserved a better exit.
[archive] All right,
bring it to a climax now.
Everybody all at once.
-[archive] [all grunting
and straining]
-[archive] [Tommy Lee
Wallace]And, cut!
[bell ringing]
[Richard Thomas] I suppose
people will revisit this
and know that it's a puppet,
but it doesn't matter.
The story returns
to the world of the psyche
and goes back into
very good territory, I think.
It goes back to the
heart of what the deep
thematic structure
of the piece is.
The hardest part about that
for me really
was the fucking bicycle.
Forget the horror and the drama,
it was the bicycle
that was the problem, okay?
That's where the fear
and the terror was.
I loved Olivia.
Great sense of humor,
but a fragility
which I thought was wonderful.
And she was terrified
that I was going to kill her.
I know she was.
I think she said she was.
I just said, "Please god,
let me not kill
this actress and myself."
-[archive] [Bill] Hold on.
[Richard Thomas] You
can see the terror on my face
if you look very carefully.
Behind the veneer
of performance,
it's there.
I will forever associate Olivia
with going downhill
at speed on a bike.
[typewriter keys clacking]
Alan and I
went down to the agency
to meet with Stephen
and show him the picture.
They had a screening room
all set up.
And I remember he came up to us
and I put my hand out to shake
Stephen's hand
and he had a rat in it,
a rubber rat. [laughs]
It was kind of like
a shocking thing, you know,
and it was, I don't know,
maybe to break the ice.
We had a few exchanged words
and then he saw it privately.
He didn't want us to be
there, but, um, we later heard
that he liked it
and he was happy.
[Tommy Lee Wallace] I was
certain when we got a final cut
that we had a good movie.
[Ben Heller] At the premiere,
I was really just thinking
that I can't believe I'm
actually a part of this film.
[Larry Cohen]
The results were,
that we got a viewership
of 30 million people.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
It was huge in the ratings.
It was viewed as a big success.
And the press on it
was very positive.
[Patrice Leung] I think
the legacy of the original IT
was this brilliant performance
on TV, which you would
usually see in film,
in your living rooms.
-It was just
an extraordinary event to.
Have this King first piece for
TV as a mini-series
come out and stake
that kind of territory
and resonate so strongly
with people.
It became the proverbial
water cooler mini-series.
And I think it then
went on to have
the most unexpected afterlife.
[Emily Perkins]
I think the reason
that IT was so successful
at scaring people
is because these characters
don't have the ability
to name what scares them
or the forces that oppress them.
[Richard Bellis]
The high point was going up
and receiving the Emmy.
I'm told that when they
announced my name.
Bam! I was gone.
You know, as if I thought
they were going to take it back
if I didn't get up to
the podium quickly enough.
-He just made magic
with that score.
Align: left position:45% line:5% size:45%
[♪♪♪]
-[archive] [Georgie] Meep, meep.
S.S. Georgie underway.
-[archive] [boy]
Rocks! Rocks?
Rocks!
[Richard Bellis] It 's
a very lonely Emmy
sitting in my house,
but that's all right.
I credit Tim and Stephen King
for my Emmy.
It's very difficult
to write music
when the story is flawed
or when the acting is poor.
When the story is.
I mean, that great,
and the performances
are that good,
that all adds up
to any department's Emmy.
You're elevated by those
performances in that story.
-One of the reasons that I think
it's a cult favorite
is because
of Tim Curry and the clown.
[John DeLamar] He 's everything.
He is the poster,
he's on T-shirts.
[Seth Green]
Pop culture has taken
ownership of this miniseries.
-Without the benefit of any CGI,
just balls to the walls talent,
Tim nailed it in a way that.
You say "IT"
and people say "Tim Curry."
-[archive] [laughs] Me?
-I think it's really
interesting how
the Pennywise character
continues to gain that fan base.
As the internet grew,
I started to really realize
how much of an impact he had,
and the film had
on a lot of people.
[crowd cheering]
[Seth Green]
Now we're in an age where
nostalgic things
are being passed down.
We generationally are choosing
what icons to perpetuate
to future generations.
Pennywise
as an ultimate horror icon,
a demonic infinite that has
access to your deepest fears,
I don't think that's gonna
dull anytime soon.
[Dennis Christopher]
I'm just so happy to be part
of what Stephen King created
and part of what Tommy Lee
gave to America.
[Aaron Sims] Being familiar
with Stephen King's work
and actually being able to
help realize this
on any capacity
was a thrill for me.
-[archive] [Joey and Aaron]
We did it! Yeah!
-I enjoyed the tension.
I mean, not as a person
but as an actor.
Throughout the whole
process of shooting IT,
I was learning at
such an exponential rate.
I was discovering
that there was more to acting
than standing on your mark.
-[archive] [Tommy Lee
Wallace]Take the outside
instead of the inside, Brandon.
There's a lot of room
right there.
Not too far out,
squeeze in behind Bill.
-I was loving it.
[Seth Green]
I think it fits well
amongst some of the great
icons of the genre.
There's even a comedic aspect
to it that was never intended.
-[archive] Beep-beep! [exhales]
[Marlon Taylor] I never
would have known or thought
that it would have
become a cult classic.
I always thought
that it was a great story.
But I never realized
that it would go
as far as it's gotten.
[Tim Curry]
I'm very proud of it
and I'm used to the
idea of cult movies,
so I'm glad that
it's having a life.
It's a cracking story.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
The popularity of IT
down through the years
is multi-layered.
I think first it speaks
to really fine performances.
That's first and foremost.
A good story as the foundation.
A great script,
at least in Night One.
Competent directing.
That's a formula for something
that will be viewed
more than once among those
who consider it a favorite.
They'll watch it again.
-Down here we all float!
-[archive] [growls]
[laughs evilly]
theme music]
[Presenter]
There is, I think, in his works
an element of high tragedy,
and I am sure that tonight,
he will be willing
to share with us
the movements and gestures
of his dance macabre.
I present to you, Stephen King.
[crowd clapping]
[Stephen King]
Thank you.
You come to experiences in your
own life that are frightening,
and you try to make sense
of them in what you write.
And I can remember
living in Colorado
and we had an old
American Motors car
that just simply vomited
up it s transmission one day
in the middle of the road.
[crowd laughing]
[Stephen King]
And a tow truck came along
and took it away
to wherever they take
transmissionless Matadors,
and they called around after
it had started to get dark
and said, "Your car's ready
if you want to come and get it."
And my wife said,
"Are you going to take a cab?"
And I said, "No, I'll walk."
And I walked and it got
darker and darker,
and this was really on
the edge of town, you know.
There's nothing there and
you could see the dealership,
but it was a ways away.
And the path went across
this bridge, you know,
a little arched humpback wooden bridge.
And I'm walking across it,
and I can hear my heels
clacking on the bridge
and I flashed to this
story when I was a kid
about these goats that were
going across a bridge
and there's this troll
underneath and he said...
[crowd laughing]
-"Who's that
trip-trapping on my bridge?"
And I thought, "Wouldn't it be a scream
if something just reached
up now and grabbed me,
[crowd laughing]
-and pulled me down there,
and that was the last
anybody heard of
old Stevie King?"
So.
But the incident
stayed in my mind,
and over a period of five years,
I would come back to that
and come back to that,
and little by little,
I began to evolve a story
until now it's developed into
a novel that's about
1,300 pages long.
It's called IT,
and it all came from that
one little moment of fear.
And I think that a moment
of fear is worth having
if you can get something good
out of it.
[Tim Reid] This is Tim
Reid, Richard, in Virginia.
It's back.
I found a picture of Georgie.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
IT's enduring power
may come from the chords
it strikes among all of us.
We're all human beings
and we were all children once.
[Richard Thomas] It's amazing
to me all these years later
how people are still coming up
and talking about
that it has this lasting
effect and impact.
[Brent Baker] You never think
that something you've created
will, you know,
this will live on forever.
[Adam Faraizl]
As an actor,
I didn't really
pay much attention
to the impact that I was having.
I was just something
I was doing as a kid.
-This is battery acid,
you slime!
[Bart Mixon] I've done
shows in Mexico or in Europe
where the crew
that I've worked with there,
they're like,
"Oh, my god. You did IT!"
[Marlon Taylor] I
think the story itself
is kind of timeless...
People going through issues
and having to come together
to overcome them.
-We do it.
-Oh yeah. We.
-You know,
it's a coming-of-age story.
[Emily Perkins]
- It always surprises me when people say,
"Oh, my god, I always
wanted to be you in IT.
I always wished I was Bev."
And I think,
"Oh, you poor thing.
What was your childhood like?"
[Tommy Lee Wallace] It's
talking some pretty serious talk
about what it's like
for each of us to be a child.
The fun.
- [boy] Yeah! Yeah!
-And the scary parts.
[Brandon Crane] You know,
most TV movies
disappear into oblivion.
I think the fact that IT
is consistently played on cable
has opened it to.
A much wider audience.
[Chris Eastman] It
was one of the first
terrifying mini-series.
People were invested in it.
It became an event.
-Something is coming.
[Chris Eastman]
And because it was made for TV,
it allowed a younger audience
to view it as well.
[Dennis Christopher]
Little kids, who saw
IT on television,
it's still in their minds
as the scariest thing
they've ever seen.
[Pennywise] Ah!
-That movie scared
the beep out of me, like,
I couldn't sleep,
I hate clowns, I hate spiders.
Like, couldn't even go
near a drain.
[Norman Cabrera] People
tend to gravitate towards things
that struck them as a kid.
And I think probably
a lot of the people who saw IT
as teenagers or younger,
it just, it burned themselves.
So as an adult, it
becomes a fun memory,
then it takes on
this whole other cult level.
-It scared the hell
out of millions of people.
[ominous music]
-One of the comments is...
Is typically
"Tim Curry is the reason
why I'm terrified of clowns."
[Tony Dakota] The portrayal of
Pennywise probably went from
"Yeah, we're gonna
have some clowns over
for little Johnny's
birthday party" to,
"Uh, probably not."
[Seth Green] Well, a character
that manifests itself
in the shape of your fears
is terrifying
at any age, in any era.
And so, I think that's why
that concept is so indelible.
[Tim Curry] A lot of people tell me
that IT poisoned their childhood
when they saw it on television.
[Georgie screams]
-And I would always think,
"You shouldn't have been
watching it."
[theme music]
[typewriter keys clacking]
[Larry D. Cohen]
I had written Carrie,
and that had put Steve
King, Brian de Palma,
the actors and me on the map
in a way that I became a
go-to for horror adaptations.
I got a call one day.
[phone ringing]
.from my agent
in Los Angeles who said
he'd been approached
by a pair of producers
who'd set up a new
Stephen King project at ABC
as a novel for television
and was I interested in that?
The next day the doorbell rang,
Federal Express at the door,
and the guy is carrying
the most humongous
FedEx package I've ever seen.
I took this unwieldy,
bulky piece from him
and was about to close the door
and he said, "Hang on a minute."
And he went back to the elevator
and came back with
these two giant containers
containing the typed manuscript
of IT in its earliest stages.
I sat down and read the opening
with young Stuttering Bill.
-Well, we have to
seal it first with paraffin.
[Larry D. Cohen]
And baby brother Georgie,
and what turns out to be
a horrible demise
at the hands of Pennywise.
In the sewer.
I went, "I'll do it."
We went in for a first
meeting with the network
and the executive vice
president of movies for television
and she looked at me
and she said,
"So tell me, what is IT?"
And I said, "Well it's
an inter-terrestrial beast...
[Richie shrieks]
-"that has come down eons ago
and has the power to screw
with kids' minds.
-Beep-beep, Richie.
[Larry D. Cohen]
"And attack their worst fears."
And she looked at me
and she nodded, and she said,
"Yes, but what is IT?"
So, I went, "Okay."
And I answered another answer
and she asked me,
I don't know, five more times.
And I looked over
at the producers and went,
"I'm in hell."
I was coming back home
to New York,
and I'm sitting on the plane,
and I see a guy
with his back to me
reading what is clearly
the cover of my script.
It's Bob Iger,
who was the head of
all of the programming at ABC.
And he whipped
through night one,
went through his briefcase,
pulled out night two,
whipped through night two,
stood up, stretched,
sort of smiled,
and it said to me
IT had his support,
and I think he
decided in that reading,
"Yeah, let's do it."
[rumble of aircraft engine]
The producers had a brainstorm
and they picked up the phone
and they made an overture
toward George Romero.
He loved the book;
he was as nuts for it as I was.
He saw the possibilities
of what IT could be.
I pitched it to the network
as a long novel for television.
I said, "I think it should be
eight and ideally ten hours."
We exchanged maybe five times
in the course of the process.
I would do what was needed,
which was called a bible
in television terms,
which was just
a really detailed outline.
And I'd send it to George.
He'd look at the
outline, and a week later
I would get a 45-page
typed version of mine
interspersed with his thoughts,
his notes, and his suggestions.
There was never a
question that he thought
it was going to be a gross-out,
lots of blood,
kind of picture.
He understood what television offered
was the chance for
you to go right up to the line.
But his radar was out for
what would the network allow.
I think the dream
of what we had in mind
was absolutely amazing.
I think we were just about
20 years early in having it.
We would have been Game of Thrones.
That would have been the way
to do this piece of material
in its fullest possible way.
-The network started to get very
nervous.
Nobody had ever gone
where this piece had gone,
and they sort of went
from it being eight hours,
which became the official
running time bible,
to maybe it should be four,
at which point
George said, goodbye.
[Jim Green] We were
looking for a director.
We had an air date.
[screams]
[announcer] Stephen
King's IT starting tomorrow.
[Jim Green]
Tommy Lee Wallace came to mind.
Tommy was also a writer.
Part two needed the help and
I felt that a director-writer
would probably be
the person to do that.
-And action!
I cut my teeth on synopsizing
manuscripts for agents
and developed a knack
for condensing novels
into a couple of pages
of synopsis,
So I just made an attempt
to do that with the book.
Larry Cohen wrote
this wonderful script,
and I'm referring to
night number one
because that's what got me
truly excited.
[Larry D. Cohen]
The trick in IT was
in putting on the King hat
and going, "Okay,
I've now read this 400 times,
I breathe it with
every pore of my body,
and I'm gonna pretend
I'm Stephen King
for as long as it takes for me
to get this done."
I did three-by-five cards
on the wall,
and I went, "Okay, we're missing
how you get from here to here.
It's not in what he wrote."
I retained a part of Steve's
back-and-forth juggling...
[Mike] I brought this old
photo album from home.
[Larry D. Cohen]
- -of the two time periods.
I thought it had a lot
of emotional resonance.
[Tommy Lee Wallace] That's
the only time I've ever seen
the absurdity of
a seven-act TV movie structure
actually work because of the
seven characters involved.
[Larry D. Cohen]
So, for the first night,
the structural job
became really clear
and weirdly the limitation
became a tremendous asset.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
Each act focused on
one of the characters
and told the story
of what happened in childhood
and the alarm being
sounded for them.
- Hello?
- [Mike] Beverly,
it's Mike Hanlon.
-I was less enamored
with the second night
because it deviated so far away
from the novel itself.
I didn't know that
in the beginning
because I hadn't read the novel,
but I knew something was amiss.
It just didn't
deliver the goods.
The husband of Bevy...
-No, I'm not married.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]...
Re-entered the picture
and became kind of
the villain of the piece.
- [Beverly screams]
- being more or less
animated by Pennywise.
In dramatic terms,
it did what it needed to do
to bring the movie to an end,
but it had little to do
with the book
and I felt like it
kind of gypped the viewer.
It was a much more prosaic
TV-style climax.
-[Beverly gasps][
-I was candid with Larry
about that.
And by this point, the impetus
is moving to Vancouver
and Larry couldn't come
to Vancouver to work with me
to bring the second night
up to the first.
[Larry D. Cohen] By this time,
I'd been working on the project
for about two-and-a-half,
three years.
Not quite as long as
it took Steve to write it
but the runner-up prize.
We were about to start Carrie
with the Royal Shakespeare
Company over in England
and I was owing a draft
on something else, and I went,
"I think this is my cue to say,
'Go with God. I'm done.'"
[Tommy Lee Wallace] So,
the job fell to the best guy
I could find for free, me.
And so,
I did the rewrite myself.
And in this case,
we simply were up against
a production schedule
that was hurtling toward us
and was not going to be
pushed back.
So I just went back to
the book again and again
until I could find a way
to bring the adult story around
to something
resembling the book.
It really is a deep challenge
to condense a novel
that rich, that deep,
that dense,
into just a few hours
of television.
I used Mike
as a narrative device.
-I'm sure by now
you all remember
what was going on
in Derry 30 years ago.
There was a rash of killings,
maimings, disappearances.
[Tommy Lee Wallace] Because
you can save a lot of frames of film
if somebody's summing up
the story.
-Henry Bowers confessed to everything,
and the killing stopped.
[Tommy Lee Wallace] I thought
it was poignant for him
and helped his character
actually.
But it was going so fast
that at night in the hotel
I would just...
[imitates typing]
[typewriter pings]
as fast as I could go.
I don't think Night Two
is the masterpiece
that Night One is,
because I do respect
Larry Cohen's script
and didn't feel all that great
about changing
it so drastically.
-Tommy Lee
did what he needed to do
given what the circumstances
were.
[typewriter keys clacking]
[country music]
[interviewer] This reminds you
very much of your childhood,
this neighborhood?
[Stephen King] Yes, it does.
It does. Same dirt road.
Same old Grange Hall
at the end of the road.
[interviewer] That's you.
[Stephen King] That's me
when I sold my first story.
I look a little bit surprised
about the whole thing.
-Stephen King
is such great drama and mystery.
And for as much as his books are
about horrific things,
they are mostly about
deeply human
psychological thought processes,
so you get a lot of
deep character study.
[Tim Curry] Well, I'd
read most of the books
because he's a master of
narrative.
He tells a whacking good story.
-People would say you ought to
write about what you know.
I grew up in a small town.
We had no running water.
I went to a one-room school
with all the grades
together and.
Somebody had to go up
to a house and bring back water.
And to me, the whole existence
was not pastoral
or beautiful or anything.
It was just boring.
I wanted to be in outer space.
I wanted to fight monsters
in the swamps of the Amazon.
So those were the things
that I wrote about.
And later I found a way to.
Blend those two interests:
My interest in what was
strange and... and alien
and the places where I lived
and where I grew up.
[Gene Warren]
Most of his works are
difficult to turn into films.
Because if you try to.
Visually show an audience
what this.
Incredibly talented writer
that uses the English language
in order to have the reader
conjure up their worst fears,
it doesn't always work.
-The movie has to capture
some of the spirit of
the writer's heart and-and mind.
And if it doesn't,
generally speaking,
what the reader went to the book
and found and loved,
the movie audience won't.
-It's hard to capture
all the little nuances
that he puts in his books.
[Aaron Sims] His stuff
was such an influence
on so many filmmakers as well,
as far as storytelling.
[Larry D. Cohen] Steve's
got a very particular genius
in creating villains.
They become iconic
and come into a level
of the public's consciousness
and the viewer's conscious
that's forever.
-You were one
of the first people
to have the idea that a clown
could be a scary figure.
Did you find clowns scary
when you were a kid?
-Well, you know, as a kid
going to the circus,
there would be like,
12 full-grown people
that would all pile out
of a little tiny car.
Their faces were dead white.
Their mouths were red as
though they were full of blood.
They're all screaming.
Their eyes are huge.
What's not to like, you know?
- [Conan O'Brien laughing]
- [clowns laughing]
[announcer] The circus is
still the greatest show on earth,
and to have a circus,
you have to have clowns.
[horses trotting]
[Tim Curry] Well, there's
a long tradition of clowns.
When I was a kid and used to go
to pantomimes in England,
they used to have a guy
whose name I think
was Charlie Cairoli,
who wore the classic
kind of pointed hat
and was rather a gentleman.
He wasn't threatening at all.
[Mark Tillman] Growing up,
my brother was into clowns
and ran away
and joined the circus.
If you've ever been
backstage at a circus,
it changes your perceptions
of clowns.
-Often there's sort of mayhem
involved with being a clown.
-They're usually, both
silly and scary or playful,
which can all be frightening
to a kid.
-I went to the circus in 1974,
when I was a little kid,
and I have a photo of me
where the clown's putting
his arm around me,
and I'm only about this tall.
And I have this
paralyzed look like, you know,
I'm not happy.
[Jarred Blancard] I think
it's almost archetypal
in the sense that clowns,
like Pagliacci, the opera...
There's always something
behind that smile.
-I think prima facie,
clowns are fucking scary.
Even when you're enjoying them,
there's something in there
in the grotesquery of it all,
and it's really in
the eyes, I think.
You know, you can have
this very funny thing.
Even if the mouth
isn't overtly scary,
which sometimes
clown mouths are,
but the minute
the eyes get hard,
the minute the eyes aren't,
you know... [hums]
[♪♪♪]
You know, aren't that,
and they go.
Wow!
-I would go to McDonald's
when I was a little kid.
I would not go hang out with
the Ronald McDonald cutout.
-The fry guy!
-There's something
weird about it.
I didn't think he was going to
grow teeth and eat my face.
-Not every single clown you see
makes you want to
instantly turn around
and run away in horror.
[Larry D. Cohen] I think adults and kids
understand clowns
very differently.
[woman] I can't go to circuses.
I can't go somewhere
where there's clowns,
even a picture of it.
[interviewer] What's going
to happen if you look at it?
[woman gasps]
[clown 1] It is a phobia,
and it is called coulrophobia.
The majority of people that are
afraid of clowns are adults.
- [blowing a kazoo]
- [woman cries and yells]
[Larry D. Cohen]
I think for kids,
clowns are great fun.
There's just not any menace
or danger at all.
And Steve's particular spin
was to take something
that's much loved and familiar
and ratchet it up
as far as it could possibly go.
-Somebody who's got problems
and fears and phobias,
they go to a psychiatrist,
and it costs maybe
150 dollars an hour.
And they don't even get
a full hour,
they get 50 minutes.
I do what people pay me.
[John DeLamar]
There's lots of things
that feed into what
King was doing
with creating a clown
as the main antagonist.
At the time, John Wayne Gacy
had just happened,
so we're dealing with
people being afraid of clowns,
and the guy next door
is a threat.
-At one point,
I saw a painting of Pennywise
that Gacy had done.
[TV news anchor]
A dark landscape,
a portrait of Elvis,
and a scene with seven dwarfs.
But this is the work
of John Wayne Gacy,
an evil man who buried
more than 25 of his victims
in the crawl space
of his own house.
Arts Factory owner
showed us five pieces,
including this
Pennywise the Clown
from Stephen King's IT.
-I was like, should
I be flattered or offended?
I don't know
how I feel about this.
[Emily Perkins] The scary
clown is that realization
deep within the child that
they can't express, that no,
something's not quite
right in the world, you know.
Like, I've seen the homeless guy
in the street.
-Any spare change, mister?
-Or, you know, I've seen
really sick people,
or I myself have experienced
some kind of abuse
or discrimination, right?
But you're not supposed
to talk about it as a child.
You feel like you have to
smile and be happy.
[laughing]
[Emily Perkins] That's
what the evil clown is about.
It's about the fact
that there's something rotten.
[Pennywise growling]
-at the heart of society.
[Pennywise] This whole town
is IT in some way. All of them.
-And as a kid, you're
not allowed to express it.
[John DeLamar]
Pennywise is really important
because the '50s were
considered safe and sweet
and nostalgic and fun.
And at the heart of it,
they're not.
So, the clown works
on that metaphorical level
that it's saying this is
what the decade was like.
On the outside, it's one thing.
Inside, it's something
completely different.
[Seth Green] The mythology
of clowns being scary
has exponentially grown
over the last 20 years.
- Fuck you!
- [gunshot]
-I do feel as though this book
and this movie
had some influence on that.
-I was about five or six
and I was in
a video rental store,
and then all of a sudden,
there's this face
just staring back at me,
and I just froze.
Like, if you see a spider,
you freeze with fear,
and I just froze.
[Guilford Adams] People,
I think, perceptions change
because that's what
they're being sold.
They're being sold
that clowns are scary.
[TV news anchor 1]
Sightings of a mysterious clown
have been creeping out
some people in Staten Island.
-Media sites have been abuzz
with stories
of a mysterious
and creepy clown.
-And you know,
I'm sure that Pennywise
and John Wayne Gacy
didn't do the best job
in creating a positive image
of clowns.
And I'm sure it wasn't
Tim Curry's goal
to have people hate clowns
for the rest of their lives.
But I think it is
kind of a hallmark
of a good performance.
[Ben Heller]
He had a tremendous impact on
growing people's fears
about clowns.
[Tim Curry] I can't say
that I ever saw clowns
as being threatening,
although I loved
being threatening.
[Pennywise] That's it! Let go!
Be afraid!
-It was a lot of fun.
[Guilford Adams]
There's enough room
in our understanding of clowns
to have some of them
be not so scary,
to be sweet and nice,
and maybe some of them
just downright awesome.
[Pennywise]
Beep-beep. [exhales]
[typewriter keys clacking]
[man 1] [indistinct]
[man 2] Push this closer
to the monster, please.
[man 3] [indistinct]
[man 4] A little farther,
Tim. Find the light.
[woman] All right, here
we go. Yeah. Thank you.
And clear, please.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
And action!
I believe casting has been
as much a contributing factor
to the success
of my version of IT
as any other factor at all.
It was beautifully cast. Period.
-They brought me the script
and they said,
"You want to do it?"
And I'm like, "Well, yeah."
This is an amazing piece.
We knew what we had
when we were working on it.
Pennywise was
such a brilliant character.
-We were looking
for television leads
to promote the picture
in our marketing campaign.
Victoria turned her list in,
and we began going after
the network-approved actors.
We had approval
of Harvey Fierstein
to star as Pennywise.
And we were saying,
"We need to continue to
look on the list here.
We don't know whether
the network will approve him."
[Bart Mixon] I think they'd
mentioned it was going to be
either Roddy McDowell
or Malcolm McDowell.
-And they explored Alice Cooper
at one juncture.
-So, who else have we got?
- [elevator gate rattling]
- [chuckling]
-I do remember
that we had brought up
Rocky Horror Show
and said, "Look at that."
-I had to buy the Rocky Horror
Picture Show album,
I had to buy the books,
I had to buy the scripts.
You're a very expensive date.
-I know.
-Just the freedom
of the character,
the intensity
that he gave to it,
was so wonderful
and you could see
that this would
translate brilliantly
into a horror character.
-How 'bout that?!
-We were focused on Tim Curry.
-Me?
[Tim Reid] I think he's
one of the best actors
that's ever come out of England,
and I don't think
he gets his due.
[interviewer] Was
there any time in your life
when you said, "I
want to be an actor"?
[Tim Reid]
Yes, I did, actually.
[interviewer]
What is there in it
which appeals to you most?
-A sort of voluntary
schizophrenia, really.
It's a high-risk profession
and I enjoy risks.
[Aaron Sims] He's created
so many iconic characters
that we've known through time,
and they've been
so uniquely different.
[interviewer] You said that
being British in Hollywood means
that you're usually stuck
playing a butler or a villain,
but that's okay with you.
-I think that they probably feel
that we bring some kind of
style to the... the job
that... that we might not
necessarily have acquired
in the States.
[interviewer] Yeah, but you
know what I think it is about you?
I think it's that
you're very seductive
and, you know, I thought
if you were the devil,
I would pay to go to hell.
[maniacal laugh]
[Aaron Sims]
His Darkness character has
stood out from any other
devil I've ever seen.
[Ben Heller] Looking at
his body of work, I feel like,
there's nothing
that he can't do.
-[indistinct]
-And the challenge was:
Is he available?
-I will kill you all.
-Is he interested?
Can we make a deal?
-I'll kill you all.
-Will the network
be okay with it?
-You are priceless!
-Of course, everyone was.
[Tim Curry] I didn't audition
or even do a meeting.
They just asked me
if I wanted to do it,
and I said, yes, I did.
[Victoria Burrows] Tim Curry
just had all those elements
that he would be fearless
in the role.
-Kiss me, fat boy!
- [Ben groans]
- [laughs evilly]
-He brought
more to the character
than what was
written on the page.
[Jim Green] So, he was
approved at the network
and the rest is history.
-You all taste so much better
when you're afraid,
really afraid!
[Tommy Lee Wallace] Tim
brings his considerable intellect
when he does a part.
[Tim Curry] I sometimes
ask myself that question
after I've done a take.
One of the great advantages
is that you can whisper.
I mean, that you can do things
that are very small
which you couldn't do
on... on a stage
and then that's what
I'm discovering about that.
[Tommy Lee Wallace] We
didn't talk at great length
intellectually about it
because it was clear to me
that he had the correct
instincts.
-It's got to be true,
whatever you're doing,
and the camera picks that up
much more cruelly than
anything else.
[Chris Eastman] Tim Curry
managed to capture the humor
that a clown can bring.
[grunts]
-And then
just managed to switch it.
[growls]
[Chris Eastman] And be
this magnificent evil villain
that would kill you and eat you.
[snaps fingers] Like that.
-I'll kill you all!
-In a funny way,
it's a very simple performance.
-Take your pick,
B-B-B-Billy boy!
[Richard Thomas] Whenever you
see fearlessness in a colleague,
it's always an inspiration.
[Tommy Lee Wallace] Some
wise person in the movie business
said for directors the key is...
90 percent of it is
casting the right actor
and then
getting out of their way.
Tim was a director's dream.
A little further, Tim.
Find the light, uh,
somewhere in there.
[man]
There's not much there.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
Okay. There! There's some.
[laughter]
[Tim Curry] I liked
Tommy Lee a lot.
He was very direct,
which was nice.
-Tommy Lee Wallace was a
brilliantly minimalist director.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
Remember in-in the script,
where I talked about
[indistinct],
and I hope we still have it
standing by.
-He basically trusts his casting
and just gives the actors
their head and lets them do
what they do well.
[Tim Curry] He was very
clear about what he wanted.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
Now, his hands come up first,
and then pulls himself up.
There. That's it.
[Tim Curry] Which was
great. I really liked that.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
Okay, your chin's a little low.
Ah, that's perfect.
-Because then it
becomes a pleasure to deliver.
-[laughs] I'll drive you crazy
and I'll kill you all!
I'm every nightmare
you've ever had.
I am your worst dream come true.
I'm everything you
were ever afraid of.
-He did give me a lot of room.
[Larry D. Cohen] Pennywise
was a very dangerous invention.
And I use dangerous
in the best sense of the word.
[growls]
-What I mean by it is that
they're pitched at a level
that totally can go very wrong
very quickly,
with the wrong casting,
with the wrong direction,
with any number of
fill-in-the-blank
mistake possibilities.
Tim was the genius choice
that radiated perfection
everywhere every time
he appeared.
[typewriter keys clacking]
[Bill]
You guys don't have to do this.
My dad says you have to know
when to take a stand.
[boy 1] Let's get out of here!
[boy 2] Yeah, let's go.
[woman 1] We live in
dangerous times, boys and girls.
I want you to be careful.
[man 1] Not just any
car. It 's a bicycle.
[man 2] They always
made the best noise.
[Mrs. Winterbarger]
Come on, Laurie Anne.
It's gonna storm.
[Laurie Anne]
♪ The itsy-bitsy spider ♪
♪ Went up the waterspout ♪
♪ Down came the rain ♪
♪ And washed the spider out. ♪
[Jim Green]
No one even thought of
going to Vancouver
in those days.
[Eddie] I wish this
summer would never end.
It's the best summer
of my whole life.
[Beverly]
Your hair is winter fire,
January embers.
My heart burns there too.
[Richie]
This was poor town.
[Mike]
Yeah, still is.
It's all I need.
[Patrice Leung] The wave
of filmmaking in Vancouver
started in 1984.
I think the dollar dropped.
And so more shows started to go,
"Oh, you can get a bigger bang
for your buck in Vancouver,
and we're only
two hours away from LA."
[Bill] Hey!
I'm back!
[Jim Green] When the time
came for us to start producing,
I had Vancouver implanted in
my head as a place to go.
[Richie] You think
we're gonna let you have
all the fun there, Billy boy?
-Having such a big production
over such a long period of time
created a huge buzz.
-In '89,
it was really busy in town.
[woman] Okay, here
we go. And roll, please.
-The studio that we used
was called The Bridges
and it was an abandoned shipyard
building that was converted.
[Tony Lazarowich] I was
working at Thomas Special Effects,
which is a local special effects
house here in Vancouver,
owned by John Thomas.
He had a great
stable of crew people.
He had all these
people that he nurtured
and had what we call
"real-world" abilities...
Welders, woodworkers, people
that work with fiberglass.
They are all the veterans
of the film industry
that Vancouver has created.
It put a lot of people to work.
It used a lot of locations
and it also put Vancouver
on the map.
- [man] Cut!
- [woman] Cut! Very nice.
[typewriter keys clacking]
[Mike]
What are you guys anyway?
-We're sort of a club.
[Stephen King] I can
remember going to the movies
and they used to have
Saturday matinees.
We'd all line up,
usually with our money
tied in a handkerchief
or something
so we wouldn't lose it,
and then we'd
get in the theater,
and everybody would turn
their popcorn boxes into bugles
and then the giant grasshoppers
would come on
and destroy Chicago and London.
I wrote about some of this stuff
in a book called IT.
It's funny, I think a lot of us
have only the haziest memories
of our childhood.
-I don't remember much of it
at all, what we did.
[Stephen King] We can access
some of the good memories,
and maybe we can access
some of the really bad memories
if a bully beat us up
on the school yard.
-You're dead!
-But what I discovered
in writing IT was that
the more I thought
about my childhood,
the more
those memories came back.
[Dennis Christopher]
There's symbolism everywhere
in the writing
that Stephen King created
to express the fears
of all children
that go through feeling
like a loser.
[children's mocking laughter]
[Dennis Christopher]
Feeling like an outsider.
[boy]
You're only here because
Mom says it's
our Christian duty.
-That's what
the Losers Club was about
and that's the bond that kept
these people together,
because they didn't find
sanity, peace,
or even really a loving family
except with each other.
Their chosen family.
[Ben]We're seven now.
Lucky seven.
[Larry D. Cohen] The gold
of the book were the kids.
That's where I responded;
I think it's where the
audience responded.
That horror was
the icing on the cake,
and very particular icing
in this case.
[Pennywise laughs]
[Victoria Burrows] We had
a casting director in Canada
by the name of Sid Kozak,
and Mark and I
did the U.S. casting.
[Mark Tillman]
We were looking for three
major things with the kids.
One was a sense of humor.
-Richie Tozier's my name.
[joybuzzer buzzes]
One was they always
had to do a scene
that was painful and heartfelt.
-You killed
my brother George, you bastard.
-And then
they also had to be scared.
[doorknob rattles]
A lot of times,
when you see them right off,
you go, "They're not prepared
emotionally to handle this yet."
You're looking for an old soul.
You're looking for people
that have a pain
and kids that could
truly, truly feel depth,
truly feel the fear.
- [growling]
[Mark Tillman] without projecting it,
truly feel the camaraderie
of the humor of the group.
[Mark Tillman] And when
you're coming in alone,
that's hard for those kids.
[Seth Green]
All these different characters
that seem to come
from different backgrounds
all had the same thing
in common...
They're misfits,
they're outcasts,
they have an undesirable
home life.
-What you got there?
[Seth Green] They don't feel
like they're worth anything.
-It's the Losers Club.
[all laugh]
-And yet,
when they all work together,
they are literally unstoppable.
-I think the six of us
could put you in the hospital.
-Seven.
-We went to the producers
to do a mix and match.
We wanted to have three
in each roll for the first one
and see how the
kids worked together.
-It was
challenging having kids...
-Eddie, which way is Derry?
-and adults...
-That way.
-and you had to cast
both in the like.
[Larry D. Cohen]
Like Stand by Me,
the challenge was
in finding adults
that would both physically
match up with them.
This was a case
where I think the network
was completely
right in its choices.
-You really needed to believe
Seth Green grows up to be Harry.
I feel like
every one of those parts,
there's a poignancy involved,
because those kids,
I believed that they grew up
to be those people.
[Victoria Burrows] At that
time, what was really popular
was to find the iconic TV actors
that would be ensemble players.
-The ideas kept coming.
Richard Thomas for Bill.
Those were quick decisions
in an office.
[Victoria Burrows]
John Ritter, Harry Anderson,
Annette O'Toole, Richard Masur,
Dennis Christopher, Tim Reid..
[TV Commercial]
Stephen King's IT.
[Victoria Burrows] I
mean, those were like
a gold mine of actors.
-We were getting TV's best
and then piled
Tim Curry on top of that.
Well, we knew we had something.
-They all
came together wonderfully.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
That's lightning in a bottle.
You just don't always get that.
[Mark Bacino]
The adult actors wanted to
spend time with the kids,
wanted to get to know them.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
We had a Lucky Seven camp
for the express purpose
of having the children
and the adults interact
and work out business.
Bill Denbrough goes like this.
It's no accident.
We brought the group that
wasn't being shot right then
in for three days
simply to have them develop
little tricks of that sort
so that it really would feel
a veracity to the whole thing.
[Mark Bacino]
When you see that first part
and those kids who then later
become those adults,
the end result was, I
think, very successful
because the characters
were more in synch.
-I think
that paid just untold dividends.
[Emily Perkins] It
was really important
for Tommy Lee Wallace
that all the kids
were bonded in reality
so that that would come across
on screen.
-I mean,
are we men or are we mice?
[all] We're mice!
-You feel this trust
that he has for you.
And as much as he knows
about all the characters
and how all the puzzle pieces
fit together,
he knew how much
our characters meant to us.
-To the Losers Club!
- All right.
- [all] To the Losers Club!
[glasses clink]
[Mark Tillman]
The first kid that was cast
was Jonathan Brandis,
because he just was rich.
And when you look at it,
oh, my god.
He can reach points of pain
and depth, very simply,
deeply, very quickly.
-It's some kind of monster.
And it's right here in Derry.
[Emily Perkins] I had a crush
on Jonathan Brandis for sure.
I thought he was pretty cute.
[Beverly] [voice-over]
My heart burns there too.
-I remember he was on the cover
of every, like,
Teen Beat magazine.
-Brought an awful lot
of gravity to that role...
-George.
-that somehow was a good
emotional match
for his adult counterpart,
Richard Thomas.
-George.
[Richard Thomas] I remember
Jonathan because we met,
we talked, you know, to get
a feeling of the same person,
but that felt like it was
an essential meeting to have.
I don't know if he had to
put a mole on his cheek. He did!
They made him put a mole
on his cheek.
[laughs] Oh, the poor kid.
That's terrible.
That's right,
he had to wear a mole.
Oh god.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
They both had something
in their personalities
that's serious,
that takes the cruel world
and the hurts and the
angers and the angst of it all
and takes it personally and
wants to do something about it.
[Bill] [voice-over]
I'm going back in.
This time I'm gonna kill It.
-There's a sense of nobleness
about both of those people
and Jonathan had that
as a child.
[Bill] Now, listen.
You guys don't have to do this.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
And he was the natural
leader of the kid actors, too.
He didn't do it
by making a lot of noise.
He just did it
by being who he was.
[Richard Thomas] I felt
very close to that character
when I read it.
When a script comes to you
or a play text and you read it,
you can feel the proximity
of the character,
the affinity that you have,
and you can feel the distance.
But with Bill, I just thought,
"Oh, no, I know how this feels.
I know who this guy is."
[Larry D. Cohen] It was the
Bill-Georgie-Pennywise sequence
with the observation
of what siblings were,
but emotionally I believed in
the truth of those brothers
loud and clear,
and I thought the scene
was one of Steve's best.
-You made it for me?
Can I go sail it?
-I remember
the scene assembling the boat
with Jonathan Brandis,
and giving him the kiss
and how awkward that was.
-Yuck!
-But he was a great guy.
[Brandon Crane]
I was completely stunned.
I had no idea
that he had been suffering
any kind of depression
or any other issues.
All I knew is he was working.
I think he had just finished
a movie with Bruce Willis,
Hart's War.
He had an incredible
run on Sea Quest.
[crowd screaming]
-Hello.
[crowd screaming]
-He'd learned
the craft of directing..
-What you do is sit at it
and watch '70s television...
- [Jonathan Brandis] Yeah.
- On a channel and...
Just to find out all the ways
you shouldn't direct
a television show.
-Um, it's just
they're shot kind of cheesy
and I just kind of want to learn
how to do something different
with television.
[Brandon Crane] He
was doing everything
a resourceful actor could do.
I think he had everything
in front of him
and I was excited
to see him moving forward.
I was blown away
because he's my age.
That was probably
one of the first times
I ever even considered
my own mortality.
[Bill] Swear to me.
Swear to me that
if It isn't dead,
we'll all come back.
-The kids moved me enormously,
and I think about
the scene at the end
when they come together
having won the battle
but not the war and hold hands
and swear that they'll return.
[boy] Swear.
-When you have a project
that is such a good story
and has such a good lead actor,
it's really hard to
screw it up. musically.
[piano notes playing]
Finding a focus
was the first thing.
What's the music going to do?
It could have been the most
horrific alien ever
to visit our planet
in the form of a clown.
[laughing]
-.but to me, it was
kids in jeopardy.
-Hands squeeze.
[Richard Bellis]
I focused on the kids.
To a large extent that's
because Stephen King and I
are about the same age,
so when he writes about kids,
that's my childhood.
In the '50s when we would play
outside and build dams
and all of that stuff, we would
score our activities ourselves.
If it was an action scene,
we would do:
"Nah nah nah nah nah."
When they jump on Silver
to get away...
- Go!
- Hi-ho Silver, away!
[Richard Bellis] The
reference of hi-ho Silver means
that through their minds
was going:
badump badump badump
badump badump badump.
Now I couldn't do
the William Tell
and get away with it
with a straight face,
but that was the focus.
[Mark Tillman] We would
put the pictures of the adults
up first and as they were cast,
we put the kids that were
possible matches for them.
And very early on Sid sent us
a tape and photos of Emily,
who was the young
Annette O'Toole...
-Daddy, breakfast is ready.
[Mark Tillman]
- -and she set a very high bar.
We kept looking for that role,
but she was really an old soul
that just matched
what we were looking for.
-The character of Bev
was like my mom's childhood.
She grew up in the '50s,
her name was Bev, she was poor.
I just felt like
I was playing her.
She said, "Those are the exact
clothes that I used to wear,"
so it was this
really unique opportunity
to express my mother's story.
-Emily was a singularly
professional young actress.
She was very mature
for her years.
She understood
that the relationship
between her film
father and herself
was not the relationship
between her and me
and that makes life
a whole lot easier.
-For me, Beverly Marsh
was the 1950s female child
who was oppressed
based on her gender.
-Bev wants to help.
I hope it's okay.
I mean, she's a girl.
-.and very stringent ideals
of how women should behave.
-Let me see that.
-Bev's father is
extremely critical
of her developing sexuality.
-Poetry from some boy?
-That's a big theme
in the novel.
The domestic and sexual violence
against Bev is a major theme.
It's not as much I don't think
in the mini-series,
but it's there a little bit.
[Frank C. Turner] My agent
suggested me for Al Marsh
and the casting
director said, "Oh, no.
Frank's too much of a nice guy
to play that character. No."
They did three rounds
of auditions.
Finally, on the fourth round,
the casting director
let me go in and audition.
[Victoria Burrows]
Casting against type when
you're in that kind of project,
that's part of our
being creative
and the agents and managers
submitting them and saying,
"Hey, what about this?"
-In the room, the director says,
"Would you shave your beard?"
I said, "You hire me,
my beard's gone."
-Daddy, please!
[slap thrown]
-He felt so guilty
having to smack me
and be this intimidating,
domineering, abusive father.
-Let me alone,
you just let me alone!
-Come here!
-And sometimes
you went a little over
the limits
in terms of discipline.
-He always apologized
at the end of the day
but while he was in the moment...
-You get right the
hell back here, Bevvy!
He was just really scary,
so I didn't have to do
a lot of acting.
The blood coming out
of the sink...
[screams]
[Emily Perkins] ... stayed
with me because for a while
I was like afraid to take
showers, [laughs]
and there's that sewage,
subterranean element to IT.
-Good afternoon, gentlemen.
I'm Beverly Marsh.
[Richard Thomas]
Annette O'Toole I had worked
with several times,
and I loved Annette
and the person that she was
and the actress that she was.
[Emily Perkins] There
wasn't a lot that I needed to do
to become the young Annette.
They said that our mannerisms
were similar.
[Ben]Well, I was thinking,
being Saturday now,
you could come down
with me to the Barrens.
-My grandfather was an actor.
He was in Gone with the Wind.
I think they were having
a 40th anniversary party
and there was a lady there
who thought I was kind of
precocious and cute,
and put me to work
almost right away.
I was four.
[Mark Tillman]
The Jonathan Ritter match,
little guy, Brandon,
unbelievable from the moment
he came in.
-Ten out of ten.
[Brandon Crane] I
remember getting a callback
and it being an audition
that I really wanted to get.
And there were probably
20 kids in the room.
-There was a lot
of competition in that role.
[Brandon Crane] I looked
around and I remember noticing
there weren't any other Bens.
So, I asked the AD,
"Where are the other Bens?"
They said,
"It's pretty much just you.
We're looking at
a kid in Vancouver
and I think one in Texas,
but I think it's gonna be you."
Nobody does that, right?
Nobody tells you
during the casting process
that it's probably gonna be you.
I had never been asked to read
anything like this before.
[Ben] [voice-over] They
wouldn't treat us like this
if Daddy were still alive.
[Brandon Crane]
Being a fat kid,
you literally don't have
a whole lot of roles that,
I don't want to say
have any meaning,
but... but certainly don't have
a lot of depth.
A lot of times, they're just
about food jokes or fat jokes.
[Henry] What a porker.
[Brandon Crane] They're
crazy of f-the-cuff one-liners.
They're the crazy characters.
[Chris Eastman] Obviously,
body image is a real key issue
that a lot of kids
are dealing with,
probably more than
you even imagine.
-I'd never been given anything
to read that wasn't that.
There was a lot of gravitas
with this.
I remember, "Wow, I'm gonna have
to be a real actor now."
There's a moment where
I pull some Sugar Daddies
out of my pocket and eat them
because I'm nervous.
It was explained to me
that there was some importance
behind that because
I protested a little bit.
I was like, "Ah, really?
Do we have to do this right now?
And... and the way
Tommy articulated it,
it made perfect sense,
so I went along with the ride.
I was willing to do those things
because there was so much
more meat with the character
and so many situations
that I'd never been
able to portray before.
I did those things willingly,
knowing that there would be
a huge payoff in the end.
[Adam Faraizl] Knowing
that you were going to be
in the same movie with
John Ritter and Harry Anderson
and all these other
actors who I'd already
seen on TV at this young age
was a phenomenal experience.
[Seth Green] I was a
huge fan of John Ritter.
He was a massive
influence of mine.
Not just as the kind of
actor that he was
but the kind of comedian
that he was.
The type of physical comedian
that he was and
how deeply sincere he was
in all of his performances
regardless of the character
that he was playing.
-How important is being a star?
-Uh, it's not important.
Being thought of as a...
As a good actor is.
[Richard Thomas] You have
one of the most gifted comedians
of his generation too,
so obviously it's going
to be crazy, right?
-He was always full of mischief.
Always up to something.
[John Ritter] Here, boy!
[whistling] That's it.
Oh, I can't stand it.
I can't stand it.
[Tim Reid] I had my two
kids come up and visit.
They were big fans
of John Ritter
because they watched
Three's Company,
so when I told them I
was working with him,
my stature went way up.
They have never forgotten it.
[loud roar]
[woman] Cut!
-We were all stirring up
our own fear.
That's what we did at work
all day internally,
to be ready to jump
into these scenes,
which were kind of hard
and kind of dark.
John would always lift us
up with humor.
He's always got humor
in his back pocket and
I know it served us really well.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
Here's a comic actor asked
to play the dramatic role,
and I never doubted
for a minute that he could.
-Mike?
[Mike] Yeah, buddy.
Listen, It. It's come back.
[Ben breathing heavily]
-He walked in and made
everyone around him better,
like a good team player
in a sport,
just by his professionalism,
his sense of preparedness,
and his ability to
get down to business
while still cracking wise
and having fun.
-John had a presence
about himself
that interestingly related
more to young people.
-Hang tough, champ.
You're gonna make it.
-He was adored by young people.
[Emily Perkins]
He really appreciated
that we were just kids and
sets should be
an enjoyable place to be.
Maybe he was a
little bit responsible
for all the boys' antics.
I wouldn't be surprised.
[Brandon Crane]
He was, you know,
really interested in meeting me.
I was him. He was... he was
one of my idols.
But there was always a running
joke that of all the kids,
I looked the least like my
counterpart,
and he was quick to sort of
notice that as well.
So he pulled me aside and said,
"Hey, let's spend
some time together
and think of some things
that we can do
that will sort of
bridge that gap."
There's that reveal
where I'm standing there
in the classroom
and then we cut to him
and he's biting
his nail as well.
That was what we came up with.
[Ben Heller] We tossed the
football around on set with him
because he was open to coming in
and playing with the kids.
[Chris Eastman] And I still
remember him saying, you know,
when he was,
"Okay, okay, I've had enough,"
and we're like "Oh come on,
just a couple more,"
he was like,
"When I had no hair on my balls,
I could throw the ball
for hours." [laughs]
[Brandon Crane]
Everybody had a Game Boy,
so I was playing my Game Boy.
I was playing Tetris,
and he walked up to me
and he said,
"What is this?"
I said, "It's Tetris."
"Tetris?"
I said, "Yeah, Tetris.
It's a game. Everybody knows Tetris.
You live under a rock?"
He grabs it out of my hand
and he starts playing.
And... and from then on
I realized,
"Okay, well, he's cool.
He's not just John Ritter
the actor.
He's John Ritter, my peer.
And maybe if I'm lucky,
my buddy."
[Tim Reid] I got
a call to come in
and speak with the
directors for this mini-series.
I had not read the book,
so of course I rushed out and
spent all night
and part of the day,
because Stephen King writes
so many long books.
I took on the role
for two reasons.
One, it was a nice gig,
and it was going to be
for a long time up in Vancouver.
The other reason was working
with some of these actors
that I had admired,
worked with one or two of them,
so that was really
the... the two main reasons.
[Mike] I brought this whole
photo album from home.
-Marlon was really wonderful
and he did this little monologue
at the beginning of the audition
that was simple, deep, and
had a lot of thought in it.
-There was an
Easter egg hunt here,
but the ironworks exploded
and all these people got killed.
[Marlon Taylor] The lines
that they had me reading
were pretty much the lines from
the actual classroom scene.
[Mark Tillman] That role
was so hard to audition for.
It has very little material
in the group scenes
and takes a lot of
negative language.
When you're casting
and you're being a bully
to all these kids. wow,
it takes a lot out of the day.
[Tim Reid] Thank god,
he looked physically
a lot like what I looked like
at his age.
You know, you always wonder,
"Oh my god,
he'll get somebody here
who looks nothing like me."
You know, like they bring
a white guy to play me.
No, it didn't happen! [laughs]
Mike represents to
me a few souls that I have met
in my journey in life,
and they're people who,
for whatever reason,
something happened in their
childhood or young adulthood
that has affected them
for the rest of their life.
- [balloon pops]
- [monster shrieks]
[Tim Reid] I knew of
a few people like him,
and some ended
in very tragic situations,
some fate just never seemed
to bless them
with a good hand, you know?
It's like always
throwing snake eyes.
And I think Mike
was that kind of guy.
I think that all of them
had a sense of that,
that they were on their way,
they were young people
full of life, full of wonder,
and all of a sudden, this
horrible thing happened to them
for the rest of their life.
They have been hiding
in psychological fear of life.
And to me, Mike
is the center spoke
that brought it
all back together.
-Lucky seven.
-That's how in the series
when they got a phone call
from him,
didn't take a whole lot
of explanation.
[phone ringing]
- Yeah?
- This is Mike Hanlon, Bill.
-Immediately
they know what this is about.
-Bill, It's back.
-Now they have to decide,
do they want to participate.
[Stanley] [whispering] On
my honor I will do my best
to do my duty to God
and my country [indistinct].
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
Stephen King's big secret
is about the wonders and
horrors of childhood...
[Pennywise] Stanley boy.
[growls]
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
- -and how you get through it
and how important friends are
and bonding with special
people, like-minded youngsters.
Those bonds can be
as strong as steel
and his story is a demonstration
of just how strong,
when they made a promise
to each other
to return if It came back.
-I swear it.
[Tommy Lee Wallace] They
were very solemn about it
and they meant it.
And you see what happens when
they have to keep that promise,
especially in the case of Stan,
who couldn't face
keeping the promise.
It was that horrible for
him, and so he didn't bother
to go back. but he did
something else instead.
-I think I'll take a bath.
[Ben Heller] Stan was
most affected by Pennywise
and I suspect that
even as an adult,
that memory never was
very far from his mind.
-Stan saw It face to face.
Not the clown,
but he saw
what was behind the clown.
-When he got the call
from Mike Hanlon...
-Who did you say?
[Mike] Mike Hanlon.
[Ben Heller]... to
come back to Derry,
it brought back
so much trauma to him
that he just couldn't
go on anymore.
He couldn't even fathom the idea
of possibly facing It again.
-Goodbye.
Bye, Stan.
-And he chose an easy way out.
-For somebody like me who
grew up in the '70s,
It's a Who's Who.
Richard Masur, who I'd literally
grown up watching.
He was the classic
character actor.
So him coming in, even though
it was just for a day
and he had a small part in IT,
I was like, "Wow."
I got a call from Jim Green
and he told me they were doing
this miniseries.
-We talked about what we could
do to tie the character together
between the adult and the child.
He asked what I thought
we should do.
And for whatever reason,
I immediately thought
of this thing where I was gonna
grab my ear, and he liked it.
I remember just thinking,
"I have no idea what I'm doing
and this well-respected actor
just said he likes my idea."
I was like, you know,
over the moon about it.
My favorite
part of the time I was there
was when we set
up that beauty shot
of all of us on the staircase.
I thought that was
a wonderful shot.
It was a lot of people
who were really well known
at that time
all standing up there.
[Ben Heller] To me,
Stan Uris was an outsider
like the rest
of the Losers Club.
He was very by the book
in that he didn't deviate
from his school lessons
or what his parents
may have told him,
but he was able to connect
with these kids...
[Eddie] Lucky seven, Stanny.
-I said I was in.
-and then explore
a different part of himself.
[Mark Tillman]
One of the last casts
was a little kid named Adam.
-Some guy killed George.
Pulled one of his arms
right off,
just like a wing off a fly.
-He was smaller
than most of the other kids
and they were worried about the
size match-up and everything.
-My character Eddie Kaspbrak,
I would say that he was kind of
the runt of the bunch...
-How you doin', Eddie Spaghetti?
[Eddie groans]
-which was
already a fairly runty bunch.
He was the quiet, shy kid
who was also the youngest
of the bunch,
which I believe was true
in reality.
I think I was the only one
who wasn't a teenager yet.
I was still 12 and I think
everyone else was 13 or above.
[Dennis Christopher] I went
in and met with the producers
and we talked with Tommy Lee
and I guess they
got the feeling from
the work of mine
that they had seen
that I was right to play Eddie.
And of course, after that,
I devoured the book
and was wondering
how in the hell
they were going to fit
all of this beautiful writing
and all of these amazing
background stories
of these characters into
two nights of television.
[Mark Tillman]
On the last mix and match,
Seth Green wasn't going
to be able to make it.
And Victoria was like,
"Oh, my god,
we have to get him here."
Everybody was confirmed
except Seth,
and we were a little nervous
about that.
So I actually drove to his house
and picked him up.
[Seth Green] It was exciting to know
that I was getting close to it.
When you audition,
you mostly don't get jobs.
You... you don't get 90 percent
of the things you audition for,
so to even get a callback
and be in the chemistry
part of it, I was very excited.
[Tommy Lee Wallace] Seth
was full of piss and vinegar.
A great kid, clever and
cracking jokes all the time.
[Seth Green]
I was a very curious kid,
and then I was also interested
in filmmaking very young.
[Patrice Leung]
Seth was the most precocious,
but he had this intelligence
about him and he would say,
"I'm going to be a filmmaker
one day."
[Seth Green] Part of
what they liked about me
was me doing voices.
-Your voices
all sound the same, Richie.
-Thanks a bunch, professor.
-or impressions.
-By George, Martha,
it's the river Nile.
-.or being
fast-witted or funny.
-Well, hey.
Larry, Curly, and Mo.
-Beep-beep, Richie.
-That was the thing
that got me that part.
Richie, to me,
always seemed both fearless
and also terrified.
- [cutlery thudding]
- Tozier!
-He was willing
to keep going forward
even though he was scared.
[kid]Richie!
- but he was the first guy
to make a joke about it.
♪ You've gotten so ugly ♪
Oh, come on.
And then Harry Anderson,
whom I didn't know,
we had an instant rapport.
[kisses]
[laughs]
[Seth Green]
Harry and I chatted a lot.
And I'd watched him
on Cheers and Night Court.
I'd seen him do stand-up
and magic.
[Harry Anderson]
This is one you probably know.
[crowd laughter]
-So, I was into that guy and
excited to get to play him.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
Directing kids,
in general, is challenging.
And he takes a powder and jumps.
Boom!
Jumps right over you and
suddenly you guys see him go,
and that'll be the end
of this first piece.
And directing seven,
sometimes ten,
12 kids all in one scene...
[indistinct].
Don't go way over there.
Is hugely challenging
because they have
so much energy.
-Whoa!
-I think Seth was more or
less the ringleader.
[Seth Green]
We got in a lot of trouble.
-Let's get out of here!
-We were kids.
Both on set and off.
[laughs]
[Marlon Taylor] But I think
us getting in trouble together
also made us a lot closer.
-Yeah.
-We also had our little spats,
like we got tired of each other.
Jonathan Brandis and I
often took out our stresses
by bagging on each other
pretty intensely, actually.
But at the end of the day,
we were all pretty close.
-If it were filmed now with
that same group of kids,
there would be a lot of them
who had diagnoses.
Maybe ADHD,
oppositional defiance.
Some of them just
would not shut up.
[Brandon Crane] We were
dropping water balloons off
of our balcony onto
people's convertibles.
I think one time we managed
to do it with Kool-aid
and the person was fairly upset.
The police came and told us it
wasn't a good idea to do that,
especially since
we weren't citizens.
We thought we were
going to get deported.
-I honestly did
not get a lot of their jokes.
All the other boys had read
the book, and in the book,
the kids all have sex with Bev.
The boys knew this,
but I didn't know,
and so they kept making
references to this fact
and they were just going
above my head.
So finally, my mom said,
"Why don't you
just read the book?"
And so I read it
and I was kind of horrified
but in a way it was
kind of liberating too.
Because when I was 13, you know,
you're going through puberty
and your things
are changing and stuff.
So it was just this
very sort of odd entry
into adolescence for me.
[Larry D. Cohen] There were scenes that I
never thought twice about,
meaning the orgy scene
with the kids with Bev.
[John DeLamar] Pennywise
and It are the things
that drive the
losers to, in the novel,
have this very,
very obscure and weird orgy
in the middle of the narrative
where they're all
having sex with Beverly.
It's to ward off It,
to keep It at bay,
because childhood
is what It loves.
-[whispering] I am an eater
of worlds and of children.
-And if you want to push away
from the thing
that's scary to you,
you push into the thing
that it can't feed on,
and you do that through sex.
[Larry D. Cohen]
I just thought it was one of
Steve's digressions
down a lane that didn't work.
[Brandon Crane]
I remember the guy
who played Officer Nell.
He completely lost
his shit one day.
[Adam Faraizl] There's
a scene where we're all
in the Barrens,
building the dam.
The policeman comes along
and says,
"Hey, what are you kids
doing down there?"
and one of the kids
said, "Masturbating."
We all started laughing
and then also it carried on.
We couldn't get the next
[laughs] like three or four
takes.
[Brandon Crane]
We weren't focusing
and I remember getting the "this
isn't professional" lecture.
[Tommy Lee Wallace] There were
times that Jim pulled them aside
and gave them the lecture.
And I sometimes would sort of
lose it a little bit on set
and say,
"Look, you're actors here.
I know you're having fun.
I love you're having fun.
You have to do your job."
[Jim Green] Our director
came to me and he said,
"Jim, I'm losing it
with these kids."
So I said, "I need a meeting
with the kids
before we break for lunch
and I don't want
their parents there."
They rallied around and I said,
"You are making a picture.
If you came here because
you want to be an actor,
then I can tell you right now
whatever you're doing on the set
will reflect on whether
you work again.
I do recommend that you pay
attention to your director.
Shape up, guys."
And walked away.
[Patrice Leung]
The adults were... [laughs]
When they got the...
All the adults together,
'cause some of them
knew each other
and they were all buddies,
they were actually more noisy
than the kids.
-We used to try
to make each other throw up,
okay, by being as gross
as we possibly could, right,
to make the other person gag.
We're adults, you know, sort of.
It just got louder
and louder and louder
until the assistant director
finally came in and said,
"You guys have to leave.
You have to go outside
on the street.
You can't be in here because
we can't get any work done."
[laughs]
[typewriter keys clacking]
-I want to make sure
you remember my name.
-Oh god, Henry Bowers.
[Jarred Blancard]
My agent called and said,
"Guess what?
We've got an audition for you,"
and I said,
"Oh really, for what?"
She said, "Stephen King's IT."
She said,
"It's a big production,
it's a miniseries,
it's incredible."
She said, "Please work your ass
off for this audition."
'Cause, she said,
"It's once in a lifetime."
I knew.
Hundreds of kids
had probably gone in there.
Big guys were gonna go in
there and be the traditional bully...
Which I don't find
very threatening,
to be honest with you.
And so I thought, okay, who can I channel?
I always refer to Dennis Hopper
because he's a very small man,
but he conveys an
intensity that's menacing.
[Brandon Crane] Jarred
was an exceptional actor.
-[archive] You're dead, fat boy.
[Brandon Crane]
For someone who was his age.
The level of commitment
that he had was frightening.
[Jarred Blancard]
I went in for the audition
and the casting director
grabbed me and he said,
"I've got to get you
to the producers right away."
He said, "You're exactly
what they're looking for.'"
And I said "Me?"
And again, here I was,
this scrawny kid,
and I was being
plucked out of that group.
[Gabe Khouth] He just had...
Something about that guy,
he had some sort of
menacing appeal about him.
-[archive] Ta-ta, girls.
-I could be wrong, but I believe
I auditioned for it three times,
and the first one
was for Henry Bowers
and I wanted that part
very badly.
-I want you to think
about that before you die.
[Gabe Khouth] As we know,
Jarred Blancard
got Henry Bowers.
And what character
I played on IT
is actually
a little contentious,
because in the script
I was Patrick,
and I notice that IMDb,
and depending where you
look online I played Victor,
which always confused me
when the fans were like,
"Hey, we loved you playing
Victor in Stephen King's IT,"
and I was like,
"You mean Patrick,"
and they'd be like,
"No, Victor,"
and I'm like,
"No, it was Patrick."
[Chris Eastman] The
very first thing that I did
was another iconic film called
NeverEnding Story
where, ironically,
I played a bully.
I managed to get typecast
in kind of that bully role...
Not because I was big,
just because I was intense
and could beat people up.
Let me show you.
And I could really
burp on command.
-Without throwing up,
as well, I might add.
[Jarred Blancard] In
the book, it's-it's obvious
that Henry is badly...
I mean, abuse doesn't
begin to cover
what he suffers
at the hands of his father
and he has this true fear
of his father.
I'm not a method actor
but I did keep that
a bit in mind
when I was attempting to
torture and ultimately kill
these poor children, right?
He needed to transfer
those feelings of helplessness.
He wanted to impose
that same fear on other people
that he suffered
when he went home at night.
There's one scene in the film,
it's the only scene
where my character is vulnerable
and that's in the classroom
and that's when
he's being threatened
to be kicked out
after a disturbance.
There's a crack in my voice
when he says,
"But my father
will tan my hide."
and that sort of
typifies the fear
that he has of-of his father.
I actually get emotional
about this because
my dad's passed.
He, uh, wasn't
supportive at all.
He never went to
any of my plays,
he sort of scoffed at all of
my dreams and aspirations.
But I remember
that he came home from work
and I said, "Dad, I got it!"
and his shock and the pride
and the sadness
that he hadn't embraced
this dream earlier.
And from that point on, though,
it was nothing but-but pride
and-and-and
it was a wonderful thing.
I apologize
for getting emotional.
I wanted to be as
sensitive off camera
as I possibly could.
Yelling these racial slurs and
these obscenities, you know,
calling him, you know, fat boy
and all of that kind of thing,
I wanted to make sure
after the take that
he knew that
that's not the way I felt.
-[archive]
Or what, boy? Or what?
[Marlon Taylor]
You know, he always told me
how uncomfortable he was
with having to say
some of the things
he had to say to me,
which was great. [laughs]
'Cause it was
some harsh words, man!
It was some harsh words said.
[Jarred Blancard] I'd
always apologize afterwards.
And the Americans were quite
astounded by that; they thought,
"Well, you're playing a part."
[Brandon Crane] There's a
scene where I get confronted
by Henry Bowers,
where he's supposed to carve
the "H" in my belly.
-[archive]
Hey look, it's the fat boy.
-[archive]
Top of the day, fat boy!
-And it was probably the scene
that I feared the most.
[rock music]
-[archive]
[Ben grunting]
[Brandon Crane]
I thought for a moment
that he could very well lose it
and go ahead and just, you know,
start the artwork on my stomach
right then and there.
-[archive] Come on.
Don't really cut him.
-[archive] Cut him? Huh?
Cut him?
[Brandon Crane] He made
it very easy to be afraid.
But I remember
that being probably
the most difficult scene
for me to film.
[Jarred Blancard] The only
source of disappointment for me
was the fact
that we couldn't go as raw
and as bold
as they did in the book.
The violence
is something that I just...
I wanted to go further with it.
I just felt it would have been
more effective
if we were able to do that,
knowing fully well
that we weren't able to.
-[archive] Henry Bowers.
[Mark Tillman] There were
two adults that were cast later
and Green/Epstein
were very sweet
about allowing us to look at
so me people that were friends.
-Henry. Hen.
This is scaring me already!
[laughs]
[Tommy Lee Wallace] It
needed a special quality person.
And in this case,
he was being cast after the boy
who played Henry Bowers, who
was also a very special person
and had a strangeness about him.
-I tell you, people will
always remember Henry Bowers.
[Mark Tillman] Michael
Cole, he was from a show
called Mod Squad
that I grew up on.
[Victoria Burrows] He
wasn't traditionally a badass
but he just showed that side
and so he was just kind of
one of these little gem finds,
somebody that had some gravitas.
-After all those years,
Michael had attained
a patina of strangeness,
which some of us do.
And so when he came in
to talk about it,
I felt very positive
right there and then
that he could pull
that roll off as.
[laughs], okay,
that strange little boy
grew up to be this strange man.
-[archive] I'll pay you back,
I'll pay you all back!
-Not many casting
directors will do this.
I got down on the
floor crawling around,
and I was so shook up and sweat
was starting to run down,
and Victoria got down
on the floor with me,
sliding sheets of paper
in front of me
so I could get the cue.
Boy, what a champion.
[Jarred Blancard]
I met Michael Cole
and he was perfectly polite
but not very effusive
or -or friendly,
and I-I actually backed out
of his trailer and I thought,
"I'm just gonna leave you alone
to your business." [laughs]
So, he did a great job
obviously.
[Michael laughs]
[typewriter keys clacking]
[Guilford Adams] Pennywise is wonderful.
I mean, he's charming and scary
and both elusive
and enthralling, you know.
He's like any good drug.
Like you just want to go to it,
but then you regret it
immediately.
[Larry Cohen] Pennywise
is much more overtly comic...
-[archive] Won't do
any good to run, girly boy.
- [Larry Cohen]...
- As a lure for the kids
And as a sort of perverse
set of jokes for the audience.
But when he scares,
he scares the crap out of you.
He found the way
to really lure you in
like Georgie in the sewer.
-[archive] My boat!
-[archive] Exactly!
[Mark Bacino] When Georgie
is first taken by Pennywise,
which is a great scene
when he follows the boat
down the street in the rain.
-[archive] S.S. Georgie.
[imitates honking]
[Patrice Leung]
The effects guys had done this
brilliant job to figure out
how to get the boat to flow
all in one take.
-[archive] No, please no.
[Tony Dakota] Tommy Lee
Wallace opened the sewer grate,
which was just a manhole cover
which was about four feet away
from the sewer,
and had Tim crouch down
and speak...
-[archive] Hiya, Georgie!
[Tony Dakota]
- -into the sewer.
[Tommy Lee Wallace] We
had a strange day to shoot it.
You can almost always count on
overcast in Vancouver,
but this day
was sunny and bright,
but "We better go ahead
and do it because
here we are
and the set is built."
[Tony Dakota] You can
see the rays of sunshine
coming through the scaffolding
that they built to
create the rain.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
I had trepidation about that
but the effect
was kind of wonderful.
The light was doing weird things
and of course you could see
the rain really well because
it was backlit by the sun.
Then you get
to the actual sewer.
That was a set.
It was done outdoors.
The set was up high
and Tim was just standing
with his face
up against the opening,
so we were on a riser,
looking down as if
we were on the street.
[Tim Curry] Little Georgie
at the beginning of the film
when he's chasing his
paper boat and I grab him,
he stopped and said...
-"Tim, you're scaring me,
you're scaring me."
-"It'll save you
a little acting, won't it?"
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
That wonderful little boy.
-[archive] Do they float?
[Tommy Lee Wallace] and
Tim Curry's performance.
-[archive] They float, Georgie.
-to me,
that's what that scene is.
Not much in the way
of special effects.
-[archive] You'll float too!
-[archive] [screams]
-One of the scenes
that was left out
of the final showing of IT
was that scene where
Sharon comes to the door
and is presented with
a fireman holding
the body of her son.
[Tony Dakota] Holding me
with my arm in my sleeve
and the blood dripping
out of the sleeve.
[Sheelah Megill]
It's pouring rain
and she opens the
door and there he is,
and I spent all day screaming
as we did take after take.
[Tony Dakota] I guess
since it was made for TV
that that was pushing
the envelope a little bit.
[Bark Mixon] We were certainly
aware that we were doing
a horror movie for television.
-[archive]
[man] George, [indistinct].
[Bart Mixon] And back
then, we were very limited
to what you could show.
[Mark Bacino]
We were breaking new ground,
because I don't remember
before any kind of material
like this
that I saw on television.
Sci-fi, horror.
-[archive] Float.
-.blood, and there was
a lot of that.
[balloons popping]
-[archive]
[Eddie's terrified scream]
-And we had to work with
the program practice department
at all times.
There was a scene where
the kids become
blood brothers and sisters
and they cut their hand
and they place
their palms on palms.
We had to change that
because it was in the early '90s
and it was during
the time of AIDS.
So, we wrote the scene
to spit in their hand.
-The advertisers
were very nervous.
This was a children
in jeopardy story
and we had to focus it on
the fact that it was
a Stephen King novel,
that it was very popular.
[Mark Bacino] Executives,
creatives knew it,
but program practices still
had to follow their guidelines
and we were constantly
up against them,
pushing it, and fighting
for the creative integrity
of the piece.
[Jim Green] Broadcast
Standards rejected the picture,
and the head of Broadcast
Standards at the time
happened to be someone I knew,
so it was easy for me
to get on the phone to New York
and ask for help.
The gentleman that was
in charge of
censorship at ABC
agreed to come out and
look at the picture with me.
His staff had rejected
the picture on so many levels
that every note that they had
meant re-cutting the picture
and I just simply said,
"We're not cutting
a piece of it."
[Mark Bacino]
"This is what you bought.
You bought
a Stephen King horror.
We'll be able to show it
in a very respectable,
responsible way...
-[archive] [announcer] IT
is based on subject material
that may be unsuitable for,
and unsettling to
younger and
impressionable viewers.
-"but we can't deny the audience
what they come to expect."
[Jim Green]
I had made my argument
that these were recollections of adults.
-[archive] The blood.
I cleaned the whole thing up
that very same night.
[Jim Green] And so therefore,
we could get away with
children in jeopardy.
-[archive] [laughing]
[blood gurgles]
[Jim Green]
The next day we were told,
"No changes. Move forward."
[woman 1] Cue background!
[woman 2] Background!
[horse hooves clopping]
-[archive] [man] Eric, go.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
The idea of the carnival scene
is straight out of the book...
The hand that reaches
right out of the photo album
and grabs at them.
-Come on, it's just a drawing!
[Tony Lazarowich] The photo
book was built by two people,
Mike Steffy, and Bob Comer.
Both of them had this
amazing mechanical ability
to build what we call
tabletop gags,
really intricate things.
-That was my favorite thing,
that you see a photograph
and I come alive.
Such a great idea.
[laughs]
-[archive] [hisses]
-I have never seen so many
cables attached to something
that operated those pages
to turn.
It was a complex
push me-pull me cable system.
They had to hit their marks,
so they had to have individual
cables for individual pages.
It took them weeks to build it.
When they operated it,
it was one of those "How do you
hide all that stuff?"
Visual effects
just didn't have the money.
-[archive] [woman]
All right, here we go. Yeah.
Thank you and clear, please.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
What I really, really
wanted to emphasize was
that "I think I see Pennywise
back there in the background
somewhere
but he's just not
bothering anybody."
[Marlon Taylor] And
I picked up the book
and the first thing we saw
was just a big hole in it.
And he's like, "All right,
I want you guys to act
like you guys
are reading this book,
like Pennywise is
dancing down the street.
He jumps on the pole."
-[archive] [Tommy Lee Wallace]
Uh, remember the uh,
remember the pull-up.
-[archive] [woman] Don't watch
the clown, background.
Keep doing your own stuff.
-[archive] [Tommy Lee Wallace]
Remember that, uh,
little lower, and.yeah.
- "And then, here it comes..."
-[archive] Aah!
-Oh, shit,
he's right in your face,
just like that.
-"and I need you
guys to react."
[Ben Heller] It was
Tommy's hand that kind of
came up through there.
I remember later
seeing the completed scene
and being blown away.
-I thought that was
a good powerful moment.
[Norman Cabrera] Makeup
effects were booming at that time.
Garage shops
were popping up everywhere,
and Fantasy II was
like an all-encompassing
movie effects house.
[Gene Warren Jr.]
We had a makeup effects wing
and Bart Mixon
was the lead person in it.
Tommy Lee Wallace
knew him from Fright Night 2
[Bart Mixon] I had set
up their creature shop
for Fright Night 2,
so it was just natural
for Gene to bring me back in.
I had a crew of about a half
a dozen artists on the show,
but I... probably selfishly,
I wanted to do Pennywise myself.
-That was Bart's baby.
Bart sculpted it and did
the whole application.
-[archive] Fozzie Bear
does the twist?
[Bart Mixon] Early on, I
was doing a fair amount of
clown research and sketching.
-The idea, first of all,
was to do a lot of research
on representation of clowns
over time
to have a historical
perspective.
We have to think of
the size of the actor
and how big we want him to be,
how nimble we want him to be.
What we're doing
with the costume is
we're serving his face;
everything has to serve
the expression.
-The first time
I did prosthetics
I was doing Legend
for Ridley Scott,
where I played the devil.
-He had mentioned
that Rob Botin had literally
casted every inch of his body,
so I think he wasn't anxious
to have his life cast
done again.
[Tim Curry] That's
all right, I can bear it.
[Tommy Lee Wallace] He was absolutely
weighted down
with special effects makeup
to the point at which he was...
To most people was no longer
recognizable as Tim Curry.
[Tim Curry] I was
prosthetic down to my waist
and it was all glued on,
and to get it off
they used to sit me in a bath,
tear a hole in my head
and pour in solvent.
And the two guys
who were doing it were insane,
probably because they were
around solvents so much.
You do get horribly
claustrophobic,
particularly
if your whole face is covered.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
So, his only reservation
was too much makeup.
He wanted to be
able to use his face.
We pushed and pulled about
how much makeup to do.
[Bart Mixon] I met with him
and we had a few conversations
about what he did
or didn't want to wear.
He did want to go as light
as possible with the prosthetic.
So there was some evolution.
-[archive] I'll kill you all.
I'll kill you all.
[Bart Mixon] I saw it
as a fantasy character.
It was an illusion that It's
presenting to these children.
I wanted it to almost
be like a living cartoon,
just as harmless and as pleasant looking
as it could be,
and that's why the colors
are pure white and red and blue
and very primary and very clean.
I didn't want
there to be cracks.
And at least when he's
presenting himself to the kids,
he's casting this illusion,
so why would he
have flaws in it?
[Tommy Lee Wallace] The usual
accoutrement of clownmanship,
it was definitely
going to be whiteface.
It was really the classic
Bozo the Clown approach,
to begin with.
-He came over to the shop,
we took a life cast,
and then we produced
copies of busts of his head.
I believe I had three of those
that I did clay sketches on
where we did
three different concepts.
There was a hobo clown
with jowls and droopy face,
and then there was
one in between
that had more prosthetics
on his face
but made him a little more
angular and meaner.
Once we-we produced the makeup,
then we went up
to Canada to test it.
And we did two makeup tests.
[Mark Bacino]
When we got to Vancouver,
and were doing our test
makeup, I was so looking forward
to that day and that moment
when we would be able to sit
with Tim with the makeup on
and see this clown with
bloodshot eyes and fangs
and a scary face.
The first test
was just the head and the nose
with a paint scheme
that was what Tim had wanted.
He dictated the patterns
on the face.
The second test, we added
the cheeks and the chin
and then I painted something
closer to what I had
on my original design,
where he's got like a bigger
red mouth and the blue eyes.
They photographed both of those.
The decision was made
that he didn't really
need the cheeks and chin,
which at the time
I was kind of like,
"Hey, wait a minute!"
But I think he looks great
like he is.
The paint scheme evolved
a little bit further.
We did at least one more test
where we just painted
Tim's face white
and then refined the patterns.
-It's always kind of tough
having that stuff stuck on you.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
There was a certain line
that I was going past,
and Bart Mixon was in
on that conversation,
as was Doug Higgins,
the art director.
We were all having discussions
about Pennywise's look.
I was excited about adding
certain appliance makeup
like a bulbous forehead,
perhaps exaggerated cheekbones,
big extended chin,
things to cartoonize his face.
Tim took a stand about that
and said he really didn't want
to wear these things.
He agreed to try them on.
-And he said, "If you want me
to wear this scary makeup,
then I think you have
the wrong actor."
And I thought, "What?"
[Richard Thomas] He had great
patience and great forbearance,
because I think that job
was a purgatory for him,
I really do.
-[archive] [man] One more, Tim.
[Richard Thomas]
And God love him,
he created a character
that has scared
the pants off of generations.
[Mark Bacino] He said,
"Look, just make me
as a straight clown
and I will scare the audience."
I thought, "Of course.
That's why we have Tim Curry."
-[archive] Go!
Now.
[Mark Bacino] "He will scare
us. We don't need all of that."
-In the end,
we removed all of them
except the bulbous head,
and I'm glad we stuck with that,
but he was totally right that
his face is so expressive...
-[archive]
Give us a profile, Tim.
[chuckles]
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
- -that it was good
to not see it too done up
with rubber.
[Richard Thomas] But Tim
could act through a manhole cover
if he wanted to,
because he has that kind of
charisma and presence.
[Bart Mixon] The look
that we ended up with
was based in a large part
on the Lon Chaney Phantom
of the Opera.
That's why it's got
the upturned nose
and the bulbous head.
[Chelan Simmons]
♪ The itsy-bitsy spider ♪
♪ Climbed up the water spout ♪
♪ Down came the rain
and washed the spider out ♪
I didn't film
any of my scenes with Tim Curry
'cause they didn't
want to scare me.
I was walking back to go
to my trailer to go change
and Tim Curry is in full gear,
his clown makeup, everything,
and he walks by me
and he goes, "Hi!"
And it scared me so much.
To be honest that's the
reason why I... [laughs]
I still haven't seen the movie,
because I'm terrified of clowns.
-[archive] [screaming]
-There was quite a good
photograph in a magazine of me
heading for the makeup trailer
in a bathrobe with a Marlboro
dangling from my face.
[Emily Perkins] Tim kept
himself quite aloof from us.
He would basically just
hang out in his cast chair,
chain-smoking in full makeup
and whenever he saw
us, he would just go
"Grrrrr!" [chuckles]
[Adam Faraizl]
Those kind of people
always make your job easier.
[Tim Curry] The kids were
actually quite scared of me.
-I'd been playing it really cool
and then we wound up in a van
going back to the hotel together
and I was wearing
a Rocky Horror shirt
and I was like trying
to cover it up,
and he saw it and he was like,
"Oh, you like the movie?"
And I go, "Yeah, I'm...
I'm into you, dude!" [laughs]
I have a picture of him
in half a clown costume
with me standing next to
him looking slightly scared
that was taken off the set
after shooting this shower scene
and I was too scared to
ask him for that picture.
My mom, however, was not.
[Tommy Lee Wallace] I
encouraged him to be really big,
because it's almost like
a character
who's satirizing himself
constantly.
He's being self-referential
when he tells these
awful, stupid jokes.
-[archive] Do you have
Prince Albert in a can?
-Then, urrah, urrah, urrah.
-[archive] Urrah, urrah, urrah,
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
urrah, urrah,
you know, it's like, "Wait,
he's just demented;
that's all there is to that.
But wait, he's not even a clown,
he's some other kind of monster,
so, oh, I'm uneasy."
[John DeLamar] Pennywise
is this really strange, queer...
Not in LGBTQ sense,
but like queer as in strange,
as in aberrant.
I think that the novel,
more so than the miniseries,
is very much grounded
in the fact
that Pennywise
is on three different levels:
It is in disguise
as Pennywise; Pennywise then
disguises himself as, say,
the Creature
from the Black Lagoon,
the mummy, the leper.
-[archive] Get out of Derry
while you still can!
[John DeLamar]
Beverly's dad in a dress,
so it's drag on drag
on drag on drag.
It's all about these
very queer elements,
which is what horror
fiction is always about.
It's always about the
thing on the outside.
So, King is really preying on those fears,
those fears of the outsider.
[frightful music]
-[archive] Stan?
[Ben Heller] My first day of
shooting on the set
was with Jonathan Brandis,
where Stan goes to do some
bird watching and ends up in
a house...
-[archive] Hello?
-[archive] Stanley.
-[archive] Yeah?
[Ben Heller]
- - and of course,
It manifests itself
as that mummy.
[ominous music]
[Bart Mixon] Jim McLaughlin
sculpted the mummy for me,
which was basically a makeup
that Jim had done
a year or so earlier
and I was like,
"That looks cool, you mind
if we use that in the movie?"
So he just, you know,
made me a copy of that.
[Aaron Sims] There's a
werewolf which was really cool
that was done by Norman Cabrera.
-[archive] This.
This isn't happening.
-[archive] [werewolf growls]
-[archive] [Richie screams]
[Norman Cabrera] He's
like, "We're doing an homage
to I Was a Teenage Werewolf,
the Michael Landon creature,"
and I was like,
"Uh, yeah.
This is a no-brainer, man.
I want to do this."
[Seth Green] When I saw the stunt guy
in the suit the first time,
all I wanted to do was touch it.
[Norman Cabrera] Werewolves
was always my favorite monster
in every movie, and I loved
I Was a Teenage Werewolf
'cause he had these
really cool streaks
and he wore like
the school jacket
and he was... kind of
was like a greaser.
I basically got
my old monster magazines out
so I had the references
all there.
I knew exactly
what they were going for,
and I liked giving it
a slightly updated twist.
[owl hoots]
-I look at night two
and I think it suffers
in part from the problems
of being only a night two.
Steve's narrative
as it accelerates
benefits from more time
rather than less.
That said,
the fortune cookie scene
in the restaurant
and the scene
when Bev goes to her old house
and another
woman is living there
who is by no means
what she appears...
-[archive] If you're wise,
you'll run dear, run,
because to stay will mean
worse than your death.
[Larry Cohen]... were as good
as anything in night one.
[ominous music]
-[archive] [Beverly screams]
-[archive]
I worry about you, Bevvy.
I worry a lot.
[Bart Mixon] Norman Cabrera
did the Al Marsh corpse
when Beverly goes back
to her home
and the old woman turns into
the corpse of her father.
[Frank Turner] I had to do
the whole upper-body cast,
which is one of the
most grueling things
that an actor can do.
They tried to Krazy Glue
mealy worms to my face,
actually live worms
jiggling on my face.
[Bark Mixon] But we
couldn't get them to stick.
[Frank clicks tongue]
So, we had to lose
the mealy worms.
[Adam Faraizl]
When you get on some sets,
you can tell that
it's done in a way
that's going to make it
look good on camera
but it doesn't really look
that great up close...
Not the case with this set.
-[archive] Standby for picture.
[Adam Faraizl] Inside
that set, you really felt like
you were underground and
in some sort of sewer system.
-[archive] [Tommy Lee
Wallace]Okay. We're there.
-The set was awesome.
It just kind of transformed you
and took you to another place.
-[archive] [Bill]
Who's missing?
- [archive] Stan!
- [archive] Oh no!
[Ben Heller] There was a scene
where Stan got pulled aside
from the group
with Henry and Belch.
-[archive] [Belch burps loudly]
-[archive] Hi, kid.
I uh, guess you're the first.
[Jarred Blancard]
I got a chance to confront
Ben Heller and you felt like,
"Oh, this is it now.
He's a dead man."
I felt that little segment
came closest to encapsulating
what Henry Bowers
was capable of.
-[archive] I want you to think
about that before you die.
Belch, the guy that
gets pulled in the pipe,
the lower half of him
is a dummy so that
they can fold, because it's kind
of hard to fold yourself over
like he does.
-When they told me
how I was going to die
and the dimensions of the pipe,
I started stretching,
so I'm just in there
trying to get my head
to my knees
so that I could fit in there,
and one of the stunt
coordinators said,
"You're not going to be
able to do it. I can't do it."
I wanted to do my own stunts
but they were like,
"No, no, it's an explosion...
- [loud explosion]
- [archive] [Belch screams]
[Chris Eastman]
- - "and you can't do that."
[growls] You know, I was
17 years old and being like,
"Yeah, yeah,
I did my own stunts!"
[Tony Lazarowich]
As a young effects person,
I got a lot of the crappy jobs.
We're down in the sewer,
and there's that pipe
that light goes through,
and there's a bazillion holes
in that pipe.
Well, my job was, first,
drill all the holes.
You got to make them
look perfect
and then you had to go
inside it,
because with the
camera sliding in there
and also we had the
actor that got sucked into it,
all the holes had to have
all the little sharp edges
taken off.
I just spent 12 hours a day
doing that.
-[archive] Hey, Henry?
-I was lifted off the ground.
I was told to just have,
they described it as
dead eyes, right,
so there's no real
reaction to the fact
that you're being pulled in
by some mysterious force.
-[archive] Belch!
[Chris Eastman]
I love dying on film.
There's a finality to it.
Just the ability to. let go.
-[archive] This is
battery acid, you slime!
[Adam Faraizl]
My character, Eddie Kaspbrak.
I don't know, I like to
think in kind of a way
he was the one who did
the most damage to It.
Like, the most protective with,
you know,
the battery acid scene.
-[archive] [growls in pain]
-He was a warrior on the inside.
[Bart Mixon]
When the kids saw him,
I wanted him to be like this cartoon clown,
and when the adults saw him,
I wanted him to be
this like a horrific caricature
of that previous clown.
The adults know
that this isn't really a clown.
They know that it's a monster,
and so there's no reason for It
to necessarily
maintain this illusion
other than
just to screw with them.
And my original concept art
for it had blue eye sockets
which would become
eye sockets of the skull;
just the way
the mouth was painted
would suggest
more of a skullish mouth.
And for various reasons,
we didn't go that route.
But when we ended up
doing the battery acid look,
the disfigured part is what
that makeup would have been,
only on his entire head.
When we shot that
sequence in Canada
with the battery acid,
we didn't have time
to switch him over
so we just shot the whole thing
with the regular clown face.
At that point,
the intention was to not use
the disfigured prosthetics
and I went back to LA
kind of a little heartbroken.
And we were building
the miniature Pennywise
for when he goes down the drain
and I had it sculpted
with the normal face,
and literally
the day I got the front half
of the mold done,
Gene Warren comes back and goes,
"Hey, we're doing some reshoots
and we're going to use
the disfigured Pennywise."
Now I had to take a life cast
of his quarter-scale head
and do like a tiny prosthetic
to make it look like
the disfigured Pennywise.
To Tim's credit, the only
reason that that makeup,
even though it's
a heavier makeup,
is in the movie is because
he had seen the prosthetics
and he volunteered to wear it
for the day that we shot it.
-I loved the fact
that we really got to work
with Tim in that scene.
-[archive] Stan, no!
-[archive] Bev, the stones!
-[archive] Hurry, Bev. Kill It!
-[archive] Kill me?
[laughs] Oh, brat!
You are priceless!
-When Pennywise gets hit
in the head with
the silver stone and knocks
the chunk out of his head.
-[archive] Bam! He nails him!
[Bart Mixon] Initially,
we shot that in Vancouver
with just the regular
Pennywise makeup.
-[archive]
Kill it, Bev! Kill it!
-[archive] [Tommy Lee Wallace]
Make that happen fast.
As soon as this... as soon as
he gets hit. Okay?
So, bam!
He gets hit in the head.
-I think it was
an interesting choice
by Stephen King
to have Bev, the only girl,
be the one who actually
has mastered this weapon
and can use the weapon
against It.
-[archive] [Richie] It's like
it's supposed to be Bev.
[Bret Mixon] In the movie,
it's a little silver earring
about so big,
but for the shot of it
flying out of the
slingshot and hitting him,
Bart sculpted at least twice
a duplicate of the earring.
It's flat on the back with...
With a little hole
so they could mount it
on a... on a rig
and I think it probably rotated.
[Emily Perkins]
I remember practicing
with a slingshot at
home. Once I fired it
right into the camera
and it ricocheted
around the map box. [laughs]
Took me a while to live
that one down with the boys.
They were like, "I'll do it!
I'll do it!
She's incompetent!"
I was just like, "Oh, men."
-[archive] Kill It, Bev!
-[archive] [growling]
[Ben Heller]
Filming those scenes
in the sewer
and working with Pennywise.
-[archive] [Tommy Lee
Wallace][indistinct].
-[archive] And you. are next.
- Definitely some of
the more memorable times.
-[archive] Action!
-[archive] [groaning]
[Adam Faraizl] It really
put you in the mood
and it really
gave you the feeling
that you were actually
doing these things.
Similar to the shower scene.
-[archive] It's okay, Eddie.
Hi. I just wanted to say hello.
-The entire thing
is built on a sound stage
so you have a bathroom
that is seven-eighths complete.
-[archive] This is a little
inconvenient, Eddie.
Just hold on while I make
a few adjustments.
-It was a combination
of stop-motion
replacement animation.
We sculpted the stretching
of the drain in the tiles
and it's sculpted
frame by frame and then cast
and then replacement,
one frame at a time.
[Adam Fariazl] You have all this noise.
The poles blowing
the compressed air,
which are loud bursts from
12 to 14 different poles.
The director yelling cues at me.
Have Tim Curry
reciting his lines for me
in Tim Curry Pennywise voice
over a loudspeaker system.
So, when you add
all those factors together,
me having an asthma attack
at the very end of the scene...
-[archive]
[breathing with difficulty]
[Adam Faraizl]... it's not really
too much acting going on there
because there was
a lot of adrenaline,
there was a lot of pressure.
-[archive] [Richie]
Well, sports fans,
this has been a real hoot.
[Tim Reid]
The Chinese restaurant scene
was sort of our scene
out of Alien in that
the director did not let us see
what was going to happen.
[fortune cookie breaks]
-[archive] [screams]
[baby bird squawks]
[Richard Thomas] First of
all, you have to remember
you have all these actors
sitting around who have known
each other for years.
Ritter and I were very naughty.
Poor Tommy, the director,
I think wanted to
really kill both of us.
[Tim Reid]
We were back in that time
so we were always relating
to each other in character
as childhood friends.
[Richard Thomas] And
Annette, who is so sweet
and such a dear heart
and such a "nice girl,"
has got such a raucous
sense of humor.
I mean, we were just outrageous.
You put a bunch of actors
around a table for hours,
it's crowd control at
a whole other level.
I think it was very hard
and I want to apologize
right now to the director
and everybody.
[Tim Reid] And then after
that, staying in character
knowing what this meant,
that this was again an omen.
This thing is never
going to leave us.
[Richard Thomas]
The little thing with the eye,
the fortune cookie,
that was my favorite.
[Tony Lazarowich] Back then, you had to do
everything practically.
And if they had to fix it,
it was a lot of work and money.
So, the challenges
that IT brought
to the effects department
as a mechanical,
practical thing,
was amazing.
[Richard Thomas]
I loved that scene
and that's...
In my fading memory,
making that scene is one
that's always stood out for me.
That and where
I'm telling them all
we have to be strong
and we have to stay together
and we're going to do this.
And the reason
I remember that scene
is that I just wonder
how terrible
my performance was
at that moment. [laughs]
I've been afraid to revisit it
because I don't want to know.
-[archive] [Bill] For years,
I've been getting paid
to scare people,
but I'm the one
who's been scared.
[Richard Thomas] I was
just always afraid, oh god,
was I as hokey
as I thought I was?
There was so much love
and fun at the table
in the Chinese restaurant.
As difficult as it may have
been for them to get it quiet
and do the work, that chemistry
and that craziness
is one of the things
that makes the picture work.
[Bart Mixon] I was responsible
for Stan's head in the fridge.
-[archive] Sorry I'm late!
[Bart Mixon] We were
building the stuff in Burbank
and then flying up to Vancouver.
And so I had a big trunk
that I would carry
the Pennywise wigs
and the various prosthetics.
You'd go through customs
and typically
they would open it up
and uh, you know,
"What's all this stuff?"
So, I'm going through this time
with the severed head in it,
so I'm like, you know, "Oh, well
this ought to be funny!"
-From here to here
he built a kind of a false neck,
so it looked like my head
was sitting flat on the rack.
[Bart Mixon] Stan's head in
the fridge was a combination
of a prosthetic on the actor
to simulate the cut neck.
[Richard Masur] I'd already
slid into this refrigerator,
and you have to picture
it's a rack,
and the rack goes into
a little notch
on either side of it.
So you have to
get it just right,
and it has to go in
at just the right angle,
and I'm part of the rack.
[Bart Mixon] They had
a shelf with a cutout in it
that slid up against his neck
and then, all that
was rodoed out
by my brother Brett.
So it was just a neck prosthetic
and then a death makeup
on Richard.
-I slide into this thing...
I just hate everybody
and I just want this over with.
So I'm lying there like this.
Then they start putting
these little cans and stuff
around my head
and I'm just going,
"Can we just shoot this?
Can we please just shoot this?"
"Yeah, well,
we've gotta just."
I said, "Come on,
let's shoot the fucking thing.
I need to get this off,"
and then it's like,
"Hi, kids! How you doing?
Yeah, we all float down here."
You know, and I just...
I just wanted to kill somebody.
[typewriter keys clacking]
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
When I read the novel,
all thousand pages of it,
I remember going,
"Wha...? All this,
and it's a fuckin' spider?"
-[archive] Damn me to hell.
-Oh man, come on. You can do
better than that rubber spider.
-Aww.
I was a little let down,
to be frank,
and you're talking to someone
who really loves that novel.
[Larry Cohen] If I'd had one
scene that I would have put in
that I think is one of
Steve's great sequences,
it was where they build
the underground clubhouse
and use it as a smoke hole
and hallucinate IT
as this extraterrestrial
arrival eons ago,
and I think it would have
added to the narrative
and just straight-out
storytelling,
and maybe directed the spider.
[Larry Cohen]
into the junk pile.
-The one thing I loathed
was what they did with him
at the end.
They made him into
this awful plastic spider.
-[archive]
I believe in the Tooth Fairy.
But I don't believe in you!
-Which wasn't scary at all.
[Tommy Lee Wallace] Then
I got over that and thought,
"Okay, it's a spider.
Why not?"
[archive]
All right, here we go.
Because it's so much more
than that in the end.
And there's this cosmic struggle
in space or space-time,
or Bill's mind or somebody's
mind, you know? [chuckles]
[archive] Come on. Can we have
the deadlights out on a cue?
- [archive] [man 1] Yep.
- [archive] [man 2] Yes.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
It gets into territory
that to me it was unfilmable.
[archive]
Okay, and the entire creature
is going to breathe
a little for me, right?
Here we go.
I think it has to breathe
a little heavier than that.
John Thomas, sharper moves!
[Richard Thomas] So, I
think we were all a little bit like,
"Okay, now we're
in a monster movie.
Now we're going to be
fighting this big toy."
-[archive] [Tommy Lee Wallace]
Somebody rear back
with their fist.
John! That's it!
More of that!
It culminates in a struggle.
[Tommy Lee Wallace] between
humans and a giant spider.
All right, fine.
Our challenge of course
was to come up with a creature
that looks incredible.
Only we had champagne ideas
and a beer budget.
-[archive] [Joey]
Look at this masterful piece.
-[archive] [man]
Yeah. Look at it, look at it.
-[archive] [Joey] Look at this.
Aaron Sims. Aaron Sims.
-[archive] [man] Joey.
-[archive] That's a bad
sculpture, very bad.
-[archive] [man]
Oh, no it's not.
-[archive] [Aaron]
It's a very cool sculpture.
-[archive] [man]
Aaron's doing his magic.
-It was me
and a colleague and friend,
Joey Orosco,
which was creating the spider
that would be in the climax
of the show.
-[archive] [Joey]
Look what he's doing.
-[archive] [Aaron] It sucks.
I'm fucking it up. Look at it.
-[archive] [Joey] Hey, this is
for family television.
-[archive] [Aaron] Hey!
No, we got the edit coming now.
-Going into it,
I guess subconsciously,
I didn't want people to just go,
"Oh, it's just a spider."
-This is like...
I know, but.
[Bart Mixon] I didn't want it
to be just a big black widow
or a tarantula.
-[archive] [inaudible]
-[archive] Yeah, well I got...
-It's spider-like,
but it was never intended to be a spider.
[Aaron Sims]
The design evolved,
so there was a lot of different
designs that were created.
Some were more spider-like
that felt they
were very grounded
to an earthbound spider.
What we ended up going with is
something that felt
otherworldly.
If you actually delivered
a giant spider...
-[archive] The two effects guys
on the picture,
John and Gene.
[Gene Warren]
- -living in a cave.
It took the film
from this frightening,
heady picture,
to a Ray Harryhausen
action adventure.
But that's what the script
called for,
so we did whatever
we thought we could do
for the time and money,
and we built
a stop-motion spider.
[Tommy Lee Wallace] It was
Bart who created the model.
Did a masterful job
and it was beautiful.
And I'd signed off on that.
-Well, I don't want to
point too many fingers.
For some reason,
I think the spider
gets a lot of grief
that I don't think it deserves.
[Tommy Lee Wallace] When the
crew came up from Los Angeles
and they got it out to
assemble the spider,
there was this kind
of, "Oh, by the way,
the spider, as planned,
was unwieldy.
The physics of it
were just such that
we couldn't make that happen.
It was just too heavy.
It was collapsing
under its own weight."
You're assembling something
that doesn't look anything
like we agreed upon.
-[archive] [Joey]
[indistinct].
[Tommy Lee Wallace] And
now I'm just supposed to shoot it?
Well, the answer was:
"Yeah, that's show business.
You don't have any more time.
You've got to do this."
[archive] Hold them up there,
hold them up. right arm in.
So make it look
the best you can.
[archive] Drop!
God!
Cut. Aces.
-So I tell people,
"Hey, it could have been
fighting a turtle
in outer space.
Would you have liked
that better?"
-I thought the spider
was fantastic,
to tell you the truth.
The way it looked in
the shop was really cool.
[Bart Mixon]
We had 12 weeks to build it.
Unfortunately,
the shooting of the spider
was literally
the last two days of filming.
-[archive] [Tommy Lee Wallace]
All right, take it up to,
uh, a hundred.
Okay!
[Norman Cabrera]
I think a lot of times,
for time constraints on set,
or for whatever reason...
-[archive] [Tommy Lee Wallace]
Put the hands out slowly!
Cut!
-The director
can't get the shots
or doesn't shoot it
to its full potential.
-What we built and delivered
was capable of
a lot more than what's seen in the film.
-[archive] [woman] And
positions, please [indistinct].
There we go.
- [laughter]
[Norman Cabrera] The big
problem with a lot of these movies
is that you get the set
and they're like,
"Okay, put it
in front of the camera.
Okay, make it move."
And then they wiggle it:
wiggle, wiggle, wiggle. "Okay."
- [archive] Cut.
- [archive] [woman] Cut.
-[archive] [Tommy Lee Wallace]
Nicely done.
[Norman Cabrera] And
you're like, "Hold on a second,
this could do much more..."
"No, no. We got it. We got it.
We're moving on."
[Bart Mixon] The head had
a full range of movement.
The fangs could move,
the mouth, the mandibles.
-[archive] Get the hands around
and then just pinch around.
[indistinct].
[Bart Mixon]
The fangs dripped poison.
[laughter]
The eyes moved.
- [archive] Who's got the eyes?
- [archive] Mike.
-[archive] [man 4]
There you go.
Go to town, Brent.
[Bart Mixon] Brent Baker
was my main mold maker
and then he also performed
inside the spider.
-[archive] [man 5]
Move the butt, Brent.
Yeah.
- [archive] [indistinct].
-[archive] [man 5] Move it
like a bug would move it, Brent.
He is! That's it!
It's a frightening bug.
[Brent Baker] It's always
a challenge when you're
playing inside a creature suit.
-[archive] [Tommy Lee Wallace]
How is it in there, Brent?
-[archive] [man]
You gotta speak up, Tommy.
You okay, Brent?
They would insert me through
the rear of the spider
and pull off the abdomen,
and slide me up into it.
[Bart Mixon]
He was also inside the spider
when they flipped it over,
but it had these metal ribs
around it
and those we hadn't
thought to pad.
-[archive] [Tommy Lee Wallace]
When I say, "Action,"
IT will overlap, that is to say,
a few steps back,
you'll come in,
Rambo on the creature,
it will do its roll and go down.
[Brent Baker]
It's all fun and games
until they go to push
the spider over on its side
and like a fool I was like,
"I'll do it.
Yeah, I'll be in it, you know.
How bad could it be?"
-[archive] [Tommy Lee Wallace]
And, action!
[Bark Mixon] So, yeah,
he goes like 90 degrees
and then just slams
into these aluminum.
[laughs] square stocks.
- [archive] Cut!
- [archive] [woman] Cut!
-[archive]
Brent, you all right?
-He had some nice bruises,
but he was a trouper.
-[archive] Show your bruises.
-[archive]
Let's see the bruises.
-[archive]
You're going to be a star.
-[archive] [Brent Baker]
They're starting to turn
kind of greenish now.
There's the other one.
It's turning all kinds of
interesting colors.
I was effectively
blind inside of there.
[chuckles] Not to complain,
because it's still great fun,
you know, playing a monster.
It's like, "Hey, I'm almost
like part of the cast."
-It was his idea.
He wanted to be an
actor, so there you go.
There's a couple
of close-ups of the spider
that for some reason
they shot it at like 50,
60 frames a second,
maybe even slower,
to where it's barely perceived
that it's moving.
I think if we delivered a spider
that did as little
as what you see in the show,
I think they would have been
pissed off.
-[archive] [laughter]
-Unfortunately, the timing
session after the fact...
After all the photography
is done
and you've got your movie
and now you're in a session
where you're looking at a scene
and you're making it
lighter or darker;
at that point, I was in Tahiti
on this other picture.
And so, the timing session
went on without us,
with another member
of the organization who...
He and I had not
communicated successfully.
So, it was lit up
pretty brightly.
You saw everything,
and I was dismayed.
And it was out there
before I could correct it.
I would go back and
correct it now if I could.
-[archive] Okay and roll.
-[archive] [indistinct]
Five fifty-five,
George [indistinct].
Five fifty-five,
Baker [indistinct].
[Dennis Christopher]
I kept saying there has to be
a weakness based in fear,
not in physical strength,
that's inside Eddie.
What is the secret that he has
not been able to tell anyone,
including these people?
We're now crawling
through the tunnel
towards what will be the spider,
and that day
I'm saying to Tommy,
"What are we going to do
about Eddie,
and Eddie's fatal flaw,
his big fear?
He hasn't confessed.
We know what's
going to happen to him
moments after this."
-[archive] Push Dennis closer
to the monster, please.
Ready? Uh, Dennis' face
is blocked.
-[archive] Yeah,
go back up into that.
-[archive] [Tommy Lee
Wallace]And then.
Action!
-[archive] [Eddie screaming]
[continues screaming]
-[archive] [Tommy Lee
Wallace]Cut!
[Dennis Christopher] Eddie
deserves to be completed.
So, I said to him at lunch
before we shot the scene,
"What if he's just a virgin?
That's it. Finished."
-[archive] [Richard]Well,
I can't help you with that, pal,
but thanks for sharing.
-[archive] [Beverly]
Richie! Let him talk.
-We all saw how
uncomfortable, awkward
and really strange it is to...
It's not really strange,
it's not really strange at all,
it's a choice.
But how society reacts to people
that aren't sexual,
and Eddie was not.
-[archive] [Eddie] I could
never sleep with somebody
that I didn't love.
And I've never
really loved anyone.
Except you guys.
-[archive] [Tommy Lee
Wallace]And.
One, two, three, go!
[Larry Cohen] There are
things I wouldn't have done,
had I had the ability
to see in retrospect,
was the revelation of IT
as the spider.
Had I been around, I would have
come up with something
involving Pennywise.
-Some things you can't
know until after the fact.
Who knew that Tim Curry was just
going to be such a home run?
It was like, okay, the book says
he disappears at this point
and never to return.
But like probably
most of the audience
when I watch it, I go,
"Oh! There goes Tim."
-[archive] [laughing evilly]
-Oh, I wish we could have
one more scene with him.
Some kind of goodbye scene,
some way of.
Well, maybe we should kill him,
you know?
Or maybe his face should be
the spider's face.
Or... I don't know.
That's a problem
we never solved.
[bell ringing]
-[archive] [Tommy Lee
Wallace]You're ducking way down.
You got to look for the rock
standing straight up.
- [archive] [Annette] Okay.
- It may look...
It may feel a little goofy, but.
- I... I didn't realize.
[Bart Mixon] I guess after
Beverly wounds the spider
with the slingshot and the rock
and it walks away,
when they came upon him
in that last bit,
had that been Tim Curry again,
mortally wounded,
I think that might have been
a more satisfying ending,
because you were just
so invested in Tim
as that villain at that point.
-It would have been nice
had we been able to solve it,
because I agree
that the story drops Pennywise,
and he's such
an endearing character,
he deserved a better exit.
[archive] All right,
bring it to a climax now.
Everybody all at once.
-[archive] [all grunting
and straining]
-[archive] [Tommy Lee
Wallace]And, cut!
[bell ringing]
[Richard Thomas] I suppose
people will revisit this
and know that it's a puppet,
but it doesn't matter.
The story returns
to the world of the psyche
and goes back into
very good territory, I think.
It goes back to the
heart of what the deep
thematic structure
of the piece is.
The hardest part about that
for me really
was the fucking bicycle.
Forget the horror and the drama,
it was the bicycle
that was the problem, okay?
That's where the fear
and the terror was.
I loved Olivia.
Great sense of humor,
but a fragility
which I thought was wonderful.
And she was terrified
that I was going to kill her.
I know she was.
I think she said she was.
I just said, "Please god,
let me not kill
this actress and myself."
-[archive] [Bill] Hold on.
[Richard Thomas] You
can see the terror on my face
if you look very carefully.
Behind the veneer
of performance,
it's there.
I will forever associate Olivia
with going downhill
at speed on a bike.
[typewriter keys clacking]
Alan and I
went down to the agency
to meet with Stephen
and show him the picture.
They had a screening room
all set up.
And I remember he came up to us
and I put my hand out to shake
Stephen's hand
and he had a rat in it,
a rubber rat. [laughs]
It was kind of like
a shocking thing, you know,
and it was, I don't know,
maybe to break the ice.
We had a few exchanged words
and then he saw it privately.
He didn't want us to be
there, but, um, we later heard
that he liked it
and he was happy.
[Tommy Lee Wallace] I was
certain when we got a final cut
that we had a good movie.
[Ben Heller] At the premiere,
I was really just thinking
that I can't believe I'm
actually a part of this film.
[Larry Cohen]
The results were,
that we got a viewership
of 30 million people.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
It was huge in the ratings.
It was viewed as a big success.
And the press on it
was very positive.
[Patrice Leung] I think
the legacy of the original IT
was this brilliant performance
on TV, which you would
usually see in film,
in your living rooms.
-It was just
an extraordinary event to.
Have this King first piece for
TV as a mini-series
come out and stake
that kind of territory
and resonate so strongly
with people.
It became the proverbial
water cooler mini-series.
And I think it then
went on to have
the most unexpected afterlife.
[Emily Perkins]
I think the reason
that IT was so successful
at scaring people
is because these characters
don't have the ability
to name what scares them
or the forces that oppress them.
[Richard Bellis]
The high point was going up
and receiving the Emmy.
I'm told that when they
announced my name.
Bam! I was gone.
You know, as if I thought
they were going to take it back
if I didn't get up to
the podium quickly enough.
-He just made magic
with that score.
Align: left position:45% line:5% size:45%
[♪♪♪]
-[archive] [Georgie] Meep, meep.
S.S. Georgie underway.
-[archive] [boy]
Rocks! Rocks?
Rocks!
[Richard Bellis] It 's
a very lonely Emmy
sitting in my house,
but that's all right.
I credit Tim and Stephen King
for my Emmy.
It's very difficult
to write music
when the story is flawed
or when the acting is poor.
When the story is.
I mean, that great,
and the performances
are that good,
that all adds up
to any department's Emmy.
You're elevated by those
performances in that story.
-One of the reasons that I think
it's a cult favorite
is because
of Tim Curry and the clown.
[John DeLamar] He 's everything.
He is the poster,
he's on T-shirts.
[Seth Green]
Pop culture has taken
ownership of this miniseries.
-Without the benefit of any CGI,
just balls to the walls talent,
Tim nailed it in a way that.
You say "IT"
and people say "Tim Curry."
-[archive] [laughs] Me?
-I think it's really
interesting how
the Pennywise character
continues to gain that fan base.
As the internet grew,
I started to really realize
how much of an impact he had,
and the film had
on a lot of people.
[crowd cheering]
[Seth Green]
Now we're in an age where
nostalgic things
are being passed down.
We generationally are choosing
what icons to perpetuate
to future generations.
Pennywise
as an ultimate horror icon,
a demonic infinite that has
access to your deepest fears,
I don't think that's gonna
dull anytime soon.
[Dennis Christopher]
I'm just so happy to be part
of what Stephen King created
and part of what Tommy Lee
gave to America.
[Aaron Sims] Being familiar
with Stephen King's work
and actually being able to
help realize this
on any capacity
was a thrill for me.
-[archive] [Joey and Aaron]
We did it! Yeah!
-I enjoyed the tension.
I mean, not as a person
but as an actor.
Throughout the whole
process of shooting IT,
I was learning at
such an exponential rate.
I was discovering
that there was more to acting
than standing on your mark.
-[archive] [Tommy Lee
Wallace]Take the outside
instead of the inside, Brandon.
There's a lot of room
right there.
Not too far out,
squeeze in behind Bill.
-I was loving it.
[Seth Green]
I think it fits well
amongst some of the great
icons of the genre.
There's even a comedic aspect
to it that was never intended.
-[archive] Beep-beep! [exhales]
[Marlon Taylor] I never
would have known or thought
that it would have
become a cult classic.
I always thought
that it was a great story.
But I never realized
that it would go
as far as it's gotten.
[Tim Curry]
I'm very proud of it
and I'm used to the
idea of cult movies,
so I'm glad that
it's having a life.
It's a cracking story.
[Tommy Lee Wallace]
The popularity of IT
down through the years
is multi-layered.
I think first it speaks
to really fine performances.
That's first and foremost.
A good story as the foundation.
A great script,
at least in Night One.
Competent directing.
That's a formula for something
that will be viewed
more than once among those
who consider it a favorite.
They'll watch it again.
-Down here we all float!
-[archive] [growls]
[laughs evilly]