Blood & Flesh: The Reel Life & Ghastly Death of Al Adamson (2019) - full transcript

(mellow melodic music)

(cicadas chirping)

(light melodic music)

- 20 years ago, this was a ranch,

there was a trailer for
the caretaker and the maid,

but for some reason,

nothing's been rebuilt
where the murder occurred.

- [Presenter] It was a real life horror,

it's a chilling story

proving life can be stranger than fiction.

- [Jack] His business
associate and his family



always heard from him at least
two or three times a week.

For five weeks, they
had not heard from him

and the last place that he
was seen was at his residence.

- This story reads like the
plot of a bad horror movie,

except this is real and the victim,

believe it or not was
a horror film director.

- [Presenter] You're looking
at the last interview

film director, Al Adamson ever gave.

During the '60s, Adamson gained
a cult following of fans,

who enjoyed his low budget horror films.

(screaming)

- [Newsreader] And now police
are looking for a motive

as they try to unravel a
real life horror story.

- Al really didn't deserve that ending.



- I was like shocked.

Such an odd death.

- Horror movie director ends
up in a horror movie scenario

and I just couldn't believe it.

- It just didn't even seem real,

I mean, how could someone murder Al?

- He was a good person,

you know, he didn't do nothing to nobody.

(light melodic music)

- [Sean] Al Adamson,
like who was this guy?

- My claim to fame as a
director and also our company,

Independent International Pictures,

I think we put more on the screen

for the amount of money
spent than anybody else did.

(dynamic melodic music)

- What other director
worked with Colonel Sanders,

- How do you do?

- [Michael] Charles Manson,

bikers

and porn people?

(thudding blow)
- Uh!

- [Gary] You could be sure
there were gonna be midgets,

(screaming)

a lot of breasts,

blood and gore.

- Who's that?

- All kinds of fun people
and strange things going on.

- He was the king of B movies.

- He'd do things on a nickel

that majors would do for $20,000.

- He exploited any and
everything he could.

- For the amount of money
that he had to make the films,

I've never seen anybody make
films better than Al Adamson.

- Anybody that says that,

oh, some of Al Adamson's movies were good,

no, they were not.

- You're right, I am a
rotten bastard, I admit it.

I wrote down six of the movies

that I thought were pretty
interesting, that Al made,

"Blood of Dracula's Castle,"

"Hell's Bloody Devils,"

"Horror of the Blood Monsters,"

"Five Bloody Graves,"

"Brain of Blood,"

"Blood of Ghastly Horror,"

but I mean, how are you gonna

take a guy like that seriously?

- [Woman] You don't even know him.

- He was an original and he
wasn't always the good guy.

- I didn't kill him, I
could've a few times.

- [Man] But Al certainly
carved a niche for himself

in Hollywood history.

(melodic upbeat music)

- [Announcer] The shocking
scenes you're about to see

are not suggested for
the weak or immature.

- Let's see, where'd he go?

Ah, get me outta here, let
me outta here, let me out.

Did you hear that?

Did you hear what was in that box?

Ah, let me outta here, I can't stand this.

I'm in here, I can't
breathe, let me outta here.

(sinister laughing)

This is the head of the
Frankenstein monster

from "Dracula vs. Frankenstein."

(ominous suspenseful music)

All kinds of things here, it's amazing,

you'd be amazed at what's here,

I would be amazed at what's here.

I went to my first
movie at the age of four

and that was called
"Knickerbocker Holiday,"

but I quickly became a fan
of horror and westerns,

starting collecting films
at the age of eight,

started in 1948, still collecting,

eventually decided I
would make my own films

and I attended the City College
of New York Film Institute.

In school I worked as a film editor.

Over here's my old Moviola from IP,

many films cut on that
including "Brain of Blood."

(metallic clattering)

Oh dear, there they all go.

Joe Franklin used to
have an office like this,

things all around it and he'd
say when something fell over,

"Leave it, it's fine,
leave it where it falls,

"leave it where it falls."

Joe was the first person I met

and befriended in the
entertainment industry,

he helped me to do everything.

(mellow melodic music)

- Well, in this world, Mr. Salle,

you've got your Alfred Hitchcock,

you've got your Roger Corman,

but there are fanatical, avid,
ardent fans of Al Adamson,

whose 32 movies play on TV
all over the world every night

and they include "The Murder Gang"

and "Dracula vs Frankenstein."

You know, in the old
days one lone cameraman

with a shoestring budget
could make a movie,

but since "Jurassic Park" and "Star Wars,"

I think the public is spoiled today,

you've got to give them
multi million dollar,

lavish effects, right, it's
not like the old days anymore

or am I wrong, I don't know?
- It's tougher today.

- Tougher?
- Yeah.

- You know, this man's father

was a pioneer film cowboy, right, Al?

His name was--
- Denver Dixon.

- [Joe] Denver Dixon, he was
like Art Acord, Jack Hoxie.

- He was on your show.
- That's right.

- I got started in the business,

because my father was
init, I grew up in it,

as long as I can remember back,

that's the only thing I wanted
to do was be around films.

I guess I was more of a fantasy world,

I didn't think I ever would be,

but I ended up being in ‘em,

it just kind of happened.

- Al was like the brother I never had,

he was just a great guy

and we had a lot of fun together.

We're partners, friends and compadres,

I consider him my best friend

and he said that he considers me his.

Al was born in 1929 in California

to a father, Denver
Dixon aka Victor Adamson

and his mother Dee Dixon,
she was a non-professional,

but Denver Dixon trained
her to be an actress.

Al might have been conceived

during the making of this film in Oregon.

- Denver Dixon had been
a cowboy in New Zealand

and he specialized in rope tricks.

- My Dad could rope, ride
a horse and drive wagons,

he also could use a bullwhip

and get a cigarette out
of my mother's mouth.

(whip cracking)

- Denver Dixon was the
original independent,

he was a working cowboy from Australia,

he made the first western
on Australia in 1910,

came to the the United States,
worked on the East Coast,

went to the West Coast, did westerns,

he was offered a big job with Universal,

turned it down.

- He went out and made his own films,

distributed his own films,

by doing that he took all the control

and he was able to make a
good living making films.

- A friend of mine, a
distributor in New York

was handling Denver's pictures

and his son wanted to get in the business.

- My father kept pushing him, you know,

because he knew all the tricks.

- I really wanted to be a dancer,

I really wanted to be in the musicals,

I wanted to sing and
dance, all those things,

unfortunately I didn't have any rhythm,

so I became an actor.

Hey, break it up, you
two, we're moving out.

- [Samuel] "Half Way to
Hell" was backed by Denver,

was directed by Denver,

the part of the Mexican bandit
was played by Lyle Felice.

- Here.

- Something happened with Lyle Felice

during the making of the picture
and he walked off the film.

Taking a cue from that,
Denver walked off the picture,

he had some dispute with Al.

- He's not gonna take
advice from his father,

Heaven forfend.

- Al finished the picture.

- I found out I was better
telling people what to do,

than being told what to do.

Right.

So I ended up being a director.

- That's the first time
he directed anything,

but the picture was not particularly good

and it was a failure.

- It was a mess.

- Sometimes they work
and sometimes they don't.

In 1958, met James Warren,

publisher of Famous Monsters
of Filmland magazine

and I worked closely with him,

it was Forrie Ackerman
for a number of years

and I learned advertising and
campaigns through Jim Warren

and I eventually became an editor

on Screen Thrills lllustrated,

Wildest Westerns and Spacemen.

- Sam was like a fanboy,

he knew about a lot of obscure people

and was a big fan of western stars,

so he knew who Al's Dad was.

- [Samuel] And in 1962,
through the help of my parents,

I took my first trip to Los Angeles.

- He went out for a month
and one of the people

he wanted to interview was Denver Dixon

and that's when he met Al.

- Click, the door opens, there's Al,

that's the first time I met him.

Denver tells him, "It's Mr. Sherman,

"he's in from New York,

"he's interviewing me
for a magazine article."

I became a fast friend of Denver Dixon's,

he asked me if I would
represent "Half Way to Hell."

I went back to New York, met Irwin Pizor,

President of Hemisphere Pictures

and his partner, Kane Lynn

and I ended up doing campaigns for them

and after the failure
of "Half Way to Hell,"

what was Al doing?

He was running a nightclub
in the San Fernando Valley,

what made him come back

was he was managing the
singer, Tacey Robbins.

♪ Even the boy from New York City ♪

♪ Found it hard to leave my LA ♪

- [Samuel] They felt
if she was in a movie,

she would mean more.

- A movie that at first
was called "Echo of Terror"

and then it became a
number of different things.

- [Samuel] So he's done this film,

Denver said "You can't
trust anybody here in LA,

"you've got to go to see
Sam Sherman in New York."

We took that 35 millimeter
print to preview theater

and ran it, just he and myself,

I said Al, you've really
got talent as a director,

this is a great movie,
dramatic, good action.

- [Man] Hold it!

- So I then set up a screening

of all the independent
distributors I knew in New York

including Hemisphere and
everybody turned it down,

they said it's a really good film,

but there's nothing to exploit.

- Bye bye.
- Bye.

- See you later, huh?

- [Samuel] At that point, go-go
dancing was really popular,

so Kane Lynn, who was at Hemisphere said,

"Why don't we try to
get go-go in the title?"

Al went back and shot these go-go scenes.

- [Announcer] A desire in
flame to madness and murder

by the wild, provocative young
bodies of the go-go girls.

Some live only for kicks

and they take their
love where they find it,

but sometimes it's the wrong kind,

a psycho, who gets his
kicks a different way.

See "Psycho A Go-Go."

- We couldn't give away "Psycho A Go-Go."

- They started thinking,

well, maybe we could make
this more marketable.

- They went back a third time,

made it more of a horror
movie, added a few name stars.

- What's this all about?

- Bringing John Carradine
in, giving us a name.

- Have I overlooked some parking tickets?

- Having him put the brain
in this killer's head,

that supposedly caused
all the other scenes

of him being a maniacal killer.

- Who asked you to put
this thing in my brain?

- No one, I decided it was best.

- Oh, you decided?

- Al said, "If the picture doesn't work,

"you'll figure out what
we do to change it."

- [Erik] Okay, it's a crime
film, but we've got to have

one of the bank robbers be the zombie.

- [Samuel] We re-shot till
there was only 10 minutes

of "Psycho A Go-Go" left.

- I can't believe it.

- It's true.

- It was the biggest mish
mash ever seen on this planet

and now that was called
"Blood of Ghastly Horror."

- [Announcer] Human zombies,

(screaming)

living corpses in "Blood
of Ghastly Horror."

- So we took it to Hemisphere,

who distributed it for
a while as that version,

it did nothing, so Al was depressed.

(mellow guitar music)

- Well welcome to the Cochise RV resort.

It's not Hollywood, but a
few of us old Hollywood guys

still hanging around here above the grass,

my name is Bob Dix,

I was an actor for many, many years.

My friend, Al Adamson

takes a really near and
dear place in my heart,

we did it all together
at one time or another.

I had written an original screenplay

about a gunfighter named Ben Thompson,

I submitted the script to Lucky Brown

and he handed it off to Al.

- I knew everybody
there, they knew me well,

the studio in Hollywood
was just down the street

from Consolidated Film
Industries, which was convenient,

I'm two blocks away from
sending it to the lab.

- We all met at Hollywood Stage,

Hollywood Stage was on Santa
Monica Boulevard at the Stuart

and the only way to get a job

for someone who had no
idea about the movies

was to hang out where movies were made.

- I would lie and try and get the job,

I'm a production manager, I'm a stuntman,

I can do lighting.

- And Al came by the office and he says,

"You guys are doing pretty good then,

"because we shoot one in three days."

And I was supposed to
direct "Five Bloody Graves,"

but Al wanted to do it, so
he put up another 15,000

or whatever it might be,
I said hey, let him do it.

- He agreed to match me dollar for dollar

and we would co-produce,

so we created Dix International Pictures

and it consisted of Al, myself,

our attorney and Bud Cardos.

(light guitar music)

- I had a pretty good
reputation back in those days

and these independents coming
in and taking over the show,

got in trouble and stuff like that.

Ludi, come on!

I went in and met Al, I really
liked him right off the top,

he was a really nice guy and everything.

- Bud Cardos started out with me

as a production
manager/stuntman doing both,

he would jump in when
we needed stunts done,

he would choreograph the stunts,

he was able to do things on the set

and to help me with things,
we were a great team,

he was the best production
manager I've ever had.

- [Announcer] "Five Bloody Graves."

- Al cast Vicki Volante,
it was the beginning

of a really heavy love
affair in Al's mind.

- Vicki said she was being
called back for a film,

but that the director was hitting on her

and she was not interested in him,

so would I come down
and act as her boyfriend

and she would introduce me

and when I encountered Al
Adamson, I didn't have a career,

so I said to him can I
help you on the show?

He said, "Well, no, I don't have money,"

I said oh, you don't have to pay me.

Al always loved getting
somebody to work for free,

I didn't know it at the time,

but it kind of was his modus operandi.

- We got decent names for the film,

Scott Brady,

Jim Davis,

Carradine, the old man.

- John Carradine, one of the
nicest men I've ever met,

he did have a drinking problem,

when I first found him,
nobody was hiring him.

- Animals, animals.

- One time Al came to him
and he was stretched out

on a couch in the back of the stage there

and Al had about two pages
of dialogue that changed.

- You know, he read it, went back to bed.

- "Okay, Mr. Carradine,
on the set, please,"

and he went, "Huh?"

- Face your sins, then ask
forgiveness from the Almighty,

then and only then can
you find true happiness.

- Never blew a line.

- The man had a photographic mind.

- And when the director
said, "Cut," he went, "Uh!"

- So we were in Fluter,
Utah, we got one motel,

we got all the rooms, we
got all the equipment,

we got all the actors, we got the horses

and Al is supposedly gonna direct.

- Vicki and I had a intimate scene,

where she is giving me a cup of coffee

and I noticed Al's coverage,

he wanted to shoot the whole scene

with everybody behind the
camera and everything on Vicki.

- Are you asleep?

- [Ben] Yep.

- Cutting it is a different
story, than just shooting,

you've got to cover whatever you're doing

and I saw that he was
just not doing his job

the way he should do it.

- When you do work like we were doing

in the independent field, you know,

all of us wear more than one hat,

if you're not working
in front of the camera,

you're either playing assistant
director or crowd control,

one time I was sweeping
up the horse apples

and one of the people came
and asked, "What do you do?"

I said I'm a producer.

- I played two roles in that,

Santago, the Indian chief here.

- [Announcer] Yaqui Chief Santago

slaughters the white man and woman

in the name of justice for his people.

- And I played Firewater
Joe, he was a half-breed.

You're gonna find out that
death by ants is very slow.

- Everybody worked together
to put this on the screen

in the best way we can, but
after we shot the movie,

we had to do our narrative track

to cover some of the
coverage he didn't get to,

‘cause he was so involved
with Vicki Volante.

- [Announcer] These two
men, each of whom is certain

of the justice and honor
for which he does battle

meet in a final confrontation.

- I tried to train him,

how to direct,

how to act,

how to edit,

he wasn't good at any of 'em.

- [Announcer] Diabolical.

(ominous suspenseful music)

- Before long Al wanted to make a film

based on a script by Rex Carlton,

who had been around the business

since the '50s, "Feast of Vampires,"

I said Al, this is awful,
it's really terrible,

"Well, what would you do with it?"

So I ended up rewriting it

and changing it into "Blood
of Dracula's Castle."

- Hey.
- There it is!

- For "Blood of Dracula's Castle,"

I had to find a castle
and that wasn't easy,

but I found one up in Lancaster,

we rented the whole castle, we used it,

it was a wonderful location,

we really got some
great mileage out of it.

- John Carradine was in it
and people were just like,

well, John Carradine
can't be in every picture,

I'd say why not?

Paula Raymond was in it.

- [Lucky] Alex D'Arcy,

Bob Dix was in it as the crazy eye.

- I played Crazy Johnny and Vicki Volante.

(screaming)

- That Al had a stock
company is undeniable

and so did Ed Wood, so did Ted V Mikels,

I mean, so did Ray Steckler,

anybody who I think works
consistently, you know,

you go back to the people

that you have a comfort level
with, the people who get it.

- I did all the UPM work,
lined up the schedules,

doubled John Carradine when he
had the fall down the steps,

at the same time I went out
and found bats, live bats,

that we had to put in the cellar

and we shot in like five days,

but we shot most of Al's
pictures in a week to 10 days,

depending on the picture.

- [Announcer] A picture
that will delight anyone,

who finds a certain satisfaction
in horror and lunacy.

- Al came to New York with it
and I had Columbia Screen Gems

ready to buy it for television

for more than the cost of the picture.

-We had a TV deal on
"Blood of Dracula's Castle,"

which would have paid off the
lab and made things right.

- The film got sold out
from under Al and Sam.

- It must be some sort of a joke.

- Something went wrong with Rex Carlton,

I'm not sure that anybody really knows,

there's a lot of rumors about
what happened to Rex Carlton.

- I guess he promised
somebody the wrong thing

or he took the wrong money.

- He had a gambling problem,

a real bad gambling problem.

- We found out that the film
had been sold in an auction

to the man that originally
put up the money,

so he got the film
without having to pay off

the money that he owed.

- Everybody else was wiped out.

Rex had taken money from
some tough characters

and they were going to
take it out of his hide.

He left New York, went
back to Los Angeles,

he lived on the Sunset Strip,
sat down in his bathtub,

put a gun to his head
and blew his brains out.

- Really?

I didn't think he was the suicide type,

but that's what they put on
his death certificate, suicide.

I just wondered if he owed so much money

to the wrong people, hm.

- This is a perfect setting for a murder.

- Yes, isn't it?

- That was Al and my introduction

to what could happen in
the entertainment business.

- It was very exasperating at that time,

because I was in the
beginning of my career

and to know that people like this exist.

- Adamson was either really
smart or really lucky

finding amazing cinematographers,

some of the early movies were shot

by Laszlo Kovaks and Vilmos Zsigmond.

- Vilmos and Laszlo fled
Hungary during the Revolution,

came here to America, they
couldn't speak English that well

and just like everybody else
when you started in Hollywood,

this is where you
started was the B movies.

- So Laszlo went on to shoot "Easy Rider"

and work with Bogdanovich
and people like that.

Vilmos Zsigmond later
got the Academy Award

for "Close Encounters" and
he did three films for Al.

- Vilmos Zsigmond, Willy!

Yeah, it's funny, when he first came here,

he was Willy, he wanted everybody
to think he was American,

because he could get more jobs that way.

When he got to be famous,
then he became Vilmos again.

- He came to me and said,

"I started to make a movie
and I shot two weeks,

"nothing is in focus,
what do you suggest?"

I said well, I'll tell
you what I would do,

I would junk this, like forget it,

hire me and I have all the
equipment that you need

to shoot this movie and
I'll work for $100 a day.

- Every time I put together $100,

we'd go out and shoot some
more on "Psycho A Go-Go,"

that was the first film
that I used him on.

- So he hires me the first weekend

and on five o'clock he
comes to me and says,

"There's a couple more shots left,

"l have to go do something,

"would you direct these couple of scenes

"and I will come back with your money?"

- An hour later he came back

with a bunch of singles and change.

- I said when did you get this money?

He said, "Well, in my free time,

"I'm delivering newspapers."

- He went to his customers,
who had not I guess paid him

for the subscription to the newspaper,

got the money and paid Vilmos.

- After this I respected this guy.

- But then he became a prick,

he had all these people
that he hadn't paid,

because it was experience for them.

- It was always really about Al,

Al didn't know that I was
selling crap to make a living,

Al never thought, how is this guy living?

I don't pay him anything.

- He always had money for
himself, but never paid me.

- SO we were having a couple of drinks

and I said Adamson, in 15 minutes,

if you don't have the money,
we'll beat the shit out of you,

in summary we were half loaded.

He come over from 1500, that's
when I think it was 1500

and Bob and I said Jesus
Christ, we got lucky.

- He cheated me all the time.

- [Michael] Later on his
most used cinematographer

was Gary Graver and a very talented guy.

- My father's career started off

in the late '50s, early '60s,

when he moved from
Portland to Los Angeles,

he wanted to be an actor,
actually his real deep desire

was he wanted to make movies
like Orson Welles made.

- I was in the Navy in
the Combat Camera Unit

and I got started literally with Al,

I went on as an assistant cameraman

on a picture called "The Fakers."

Everyone was doing James
Bond movies, you know,

so this was a kind of a James Bond movie.

♪ When you play the
game, you always deal ♪

♪ And never show anyone how you feel ♪

♪ Act the part, make it
look like it's real ♪

♪ Fakers ♪

- It's a good film,

fact is we had Nelson
Riddle do the title song.

♪ And never tell the
truth when you can lie ♪

♪ In the scheme of chance,
to lose is to die ♪

- Which was quite a coup

for a little low budget picture like that.

- He cast Broderick Crawford,
former Academy Award winner

as a head of a detective squad

that was investigating counterfeit plates

that were stolen from the Nazis.

- Von Delberg's gonna pass around

a few million quality counterfeit,

he's gonna refinance the
Nazi party in Germany.

- I used Broderick Crawford for one day

and he's in the whole film,
I shot him out in one day.

- One thing that Sam Sherman
always wanted in his movies

was old names from the past.

- He would get guys

who were really almost
out of the business,

people like Kent Taylor,
who goes back to the '30s.

- We used to laugh about it, you know,

who's he going to get and
he always surprised us

and he never disappointed

and these guys were on the way out,

Carradine was really
crippled with arthritis,

Taylor was pretty much out of film,

none of them were insulted
by it or belittled by it,

they were pampered and treated
like the stars they were.

- Alot of people, they
didn't wanna retire,

they didn't choose to retire,

the business retires you
and the phone stops ringing.

- Hollywood chews 'em up and spits 'em out

and on the way out, Al grabbed 'em

and made one more run with 'em.

- Ah, get lost.

- When we would be on
location, it was always KFC.

- Every meal we had, lunch and
dinner was Colonel Sanders.

- Free Kentucky Fried Chicken,

because we agreed to put
Colonel Sanders in the movie.

- How do you do?

How do, ma'am?

- So I said we want you
to come out and you say,

ain't that chicken finger-lickin' good?

He said, "Listen, we first started

"doing television commercials."

- We got hundreds and
hundreds of phone calls

saying get that dirty old
man off the television

talking about licking his fingers,

so he said, "I ain't gonna do it."

- Isn't that the most
wonderful chicken you ever ate?

- He refused to say his line

and they had to do several takes of it,

which is a big no no
on an Al Adamson film.

I don't think I've eaten
Colonel Sanders since then.

- He finally revolted and said,

"Look Al, you've got to do something,"

so he made a deal with Pioneer Chicken.

- They decided to do re-shoots

and Al asked me if I'd like to shoot,

there had been two other
cameramen on the picture,

but he trusted me, at the same
time I started out with Al,

I'd also met Orson Welles,

so I was working a lot with
Orson Welles and with Al.

- And the lessons that he learned

from working with Al Adamson carried over

and helped to make many

of those Orson Welles
film projects possible.

- Talk about an interesting career,

to work with Al Adamson and Orson Welles

and shoot second unit on
"Raiders of the Lost Ark,"

how many cameramen can say that?

- You know, there wasn't much money,

but there was always a
good, positive attitude

with Al on the sets.

- And when they were filming
some of the biker scenes,

the police suddenly showed up

and that footage is in the movie.

- Gary Graver was a gorilla
style DP and he was fast,

you could run in somewhere
where you weren't supposed to be

and shoot a scene and get out,

he wasn't gonna put his foot down

and say oh, I can't work
under these conditions,

that's why he was so
popular with Al Adamson.

- "The Fakers" was a
Television Movie of the Week

and you could sell anything
to television in those days,

when we started the picture,
but when we finished it,

the whole market went down.

Motorcycle pictures were
happening at that time.

changed over it with "Easy Rider,"

so we got some of the footage out,

that we were using originally

and we made the motorcycle
gang part Nazis,

because there was a big Nazi element

in the original picture.

- It was an action picture, we
put the motorcycle element in

and we converted "The Fakers"
into "Hell's Bloody Devils."

- [Announcer] They're
rougher, tougher and meaner

than all the others as
they zoom their motorcycles

towards the most violent
and sadistic acts,

"Hell's Bloody Devils" ride
hard, live hard and love hard.

- Sam and I are good
picture fixers, (laughing)

we've taken a lot of bad pictures

and shot additional footage
to 'em and made 'em work.

- Do you think there may
be animal life out there?

- It's possible.

- Sam Sherman would have Al Adamson

shoot more footage for
these foreign films,

that hadn't played in America
at all or maybe not much.

Sometimes it would just be a few scenes,

sometimes it would be
like 20 to 40 minutes

of brand new footage.

- You're right, doctor,

there is an intelligent form of life.

- And you'd go to see this movie

and you'd think something's
not right about this movie,

it doesn't really fit together right,

well, that's ‘cause it was made

in different decades
and different countries.

- We had a film called
"Creatures of the Red Planet,"

it was a Philippine
movie, black and white,

that Al was re-shooting as a
space flight to this planet,

where these prehistoric
things were going on

and this prehistoric
footage, black and white

was gonna be tinted red,

but it gave you tremendous
headaches and eyestrain,

so I said let me follow what
a silent movie would've done,

daytime, amber, water scenes, green,

(shrieking)

nighttime, blue and
when the vampires came,

(roaring)

that's when I used the red tint.

(eerie orchestral music)

- They called it Spectrum-X,

that was just to disguise the
fact that you were bringing

a black and white and
a color film together.

- So I said Al, we've
got to add more footage

to explain why the colors were changing.

- About whom the Spectrum
gun will show you

what is happening with the
chromatic radiation belt.

Choose a color.

- Green.

(electronic beeping)

- How about red?

(electronic beeping)

And blue.

(electronic beeping)

Right now I'd like some
relaxation in any color.

I hadn't seen a script

and still we're able to play the scene

and was cut in their own movie,

I never saw him till years later.

- They had an opening
sequence where these vampires

were attacking people in the alleyway.

- As the vampire approached,

I did what any brave young boy would do,

I let go of my mother's
hand and ran down the street

and left her to be attacked
and devoured by the vampire.

- [Fred] They do this pan
across all the vampires

and it's Al and it's Gary Graver,

I don't know who was running the camera

and so when they could do the trailer,

they were able to say all color.

- [Announcer] In weird color!

- And they kept showing you the shots

from that opening three-minute sequence

that they had shot in color.

- Well, this thing eventually
was all cut together,

it looked good, I had
to make a better title

and I wrote down horror,
blood and monsters.

- "Horror of the Blood Monsters"

and you like horror
pictures, what a great title.

- You didn't need to see the
ad, the title was the ad.

- What does it have to do with the movie?

Not a damn thing, who cares?

Claw men and John Carradine
in this jackass spaceship,

you want more than that?

- [Announcer] You'll see human beings

hideously transformed into
the most grotesque creations

we ever dared to show you on screen.

- He then had a screening
with me at Movielab,

but he said, "This is
awful, just shelve it."

(dramatic melodic music)

- A guy came in the office,

who said that he could put
together a Italian western,

if Al could come up with an American star.

We got Robert Taylor and
everything fell in place,

the financing from the United States,

the financing from Europe,
off he goes to Spain,

this would have been a big picture for Al.

- The people in Spain
rejected the cast we had,

so the whole thing fell apart.

- And he spent his last
buck flying back and forth

talking to these people.

- Al had invested every penny he had,

$50,000 is a lot of money,

all his money went down the drain.

- So I came back to New
York and I was broke,

I was really broke, didn't have a dime.

- Very depressed as you can imagine.

- I'd met Dan Kennis through Sam Sherman,

we talked about making films together

and he said, "Well, if you can
write a story that we like,

"we'll give you the money

"to go back to California
to make this film."

So I went back to a sleazy,
$10 a night hotel room,

stayed up all night,
wrote the whole story.

- He called me the next
morning, seven o'clock,

"Come down here immediately,

"I've got the answer to our problems."

- A motorcycle gang has to chase

a young girl and a young guy

all compressed in a day or two time wise

and Danny said, "I like
it, I'm gonna back it."

- They gave me the money to go home

to start pre-production on the film.

- He didn't have a script

and I said, well, I'll write it for you,

I used the magic word, I
said I'll do it for free.

Al's favorite movies were
not motorcycle movies

or horror movies, Al's
favorite movies were musicals,

he loved "Seven Brides
For Seven Brothers,"

he loved "West Side
Story" with Russ Tamblyn.

- I actually abandoned the movie industry

and the entertainment industry.

(mellow melodic music)

Only an artist would do this,

I threw my Academy Award
nomination plaque up on the wall

and forgot about it and
a couple of years later,

I went up to fix the aerial

and I saw it up there, it was all peeling,

so I brought it back down to my studio,

painted a little bit on
it, stuck a dice on it,

I thought hey, it looks pretty cool now.

I got rid of my agent, my manager

and put all of my
concentration and focus on art.

Unfortunately I ran out of
money and needed to work,

Al Adamson sent me the script
and I remember reading it

and thinking, oh God,
how am I gonna do this?

- Russ Tamblyn was at
pretty much semi-retired,

when I first met him,

I don't know whether it was his choice

or the film industry's choice,

because he had a tendency
to wanna do things his way.

- I told him and I said, well, you know,

I'm in this really
creative stage right now

and so I need to kind of
have my own way with it

and he said, "That's great,
whatever you wanna do."

So that sort of turned me on

and then the second thing was
the money, I needed the money.

- His own mother didn't
want him to play that part,

thought it would ruin his career.

- And then the third thing

and probably one of the
most important things

was that I had been a huge fan

of Marlon Brando's movie, "The Wild One,"

so I said yes, yes and did it.

- We go down to Indio two weeks
and I had written a script

and I used my father's middle name

and my middle name, Dennis Wayne.

- The script was pretty bad and I thought,

well, I'll just say what I
wanna say most of the time.

- If you could just see your face.

- I gave him the opportunity
in "Satan's Sadists"

to do a lot, I let him improvise.

- And there's a lot of one liners.

- You know what, what if they don't come.

Plus the speech on top of the
car that I completely wrote,

what was originally written
there was really crap.

- You're right, I am a
rotten bastard, I admit it,

but I tell you something,

even though I got a lot of hate inside,

I got some friends who
ain't got hate inside,

they're filled with nothing but love,

their only crime is
growing their hair long,

smoking a little grass and getting high,

looking at the stars at night.

Quentin Tarantino, he said,

"You know, I'm such a fan of
yours from "Satan's Sadists.""

I said okay, come on,
you're putting me on, right?

And he said, "No," and he
started quoting my speech,

he quoted it like line for line

and he just thought it was brilliant.

I told him, I said I wrote that, you know.

- Let's just cool it for a minute.

- Let's all get stoned.

- When I wrote it,

I was hoping that I would be the good guy,

but Al said to me,

"You don't have enough
experience, so I hired Gary Kent."

- Those rocks will give
us some protection,

they won't be able to
get their bikes up there.

- Here is "Satan's Sadists"

and I think this is from either
Russia or Czechoslovakia.

Al was very loyal

and that was one of the
great things about him,

if he got a crew of people together,

then when he did a film, he
usually hired the same people,

you'd show up to work and
there'd be all your old friends.

- And I wrote a part about a guy

who was stoned all the time,

I thought that would be
a good character to play,

so I played the part of Acid.

- I was a half crazy motorcycle guy,

who got killed by a rattlesnake.

I've got this snake wrapped around my neck

and I'm dying, you know. (laughing)

- I had like a third or
fourth lead in the picture

at that time, I played Firewater.

- You just slay this bastard.

♪ Come on and work it out now ♪

- Al needed a Mama for the motorcycle gang

and just down the street from his office

was a little coffee shop.
- Barney's.

- Well, Al went in and there
was this pretty, blonde girl,

Regina Carrol was waiting on tables,

she spilled coffee on him.

- Al always thought she did it on purpose,

so she could get in the movies.

- I read her for the part.

- I don't care what happens to me anymore,

but I'd die if something happened to you.

- And she got it and the
rest as they say is history.

- That was when Al got
his attention off of Vicki

and on to Regina.

- [Samuel] He'd not been
successful with women prior to her.

- She was sweet, she was
kind, Regina was a dreamer.

- She walked down the street,

wolf whistles all over the
place, everybody looked at Gina.

- Gina and Al were together all the time.

- Oh, he was crazy about
her, he really was.

- It was love at first sight,

when she spilled that coffee on him,

this was the man for her, they
were just beautiful together

and eventually they got married.

- I guess you think
that's kind of crazy, huh?

- This former Vegas
showgirl became his muse

and she was in all of his films.

♪ Hey, work it on out now ♪

♪ You got that motion ♪

♪ Got an emotion ♪

- It was fun to make the movie,

I liked working with all of the guys

and I liked working with Al.

- Well, the atmosphere on
the set was always fun.

(melodic upbeat music)

- Every night we'd all
go to Bud Cardos' room

and Bud would have this big
pate he made out of rattlesnake,

we'd have beers and out
would come the guitar

and Bud would start singing,

then Russ Tamblyn would
show up and he would sing

and then Bob Dix and pretty
soon we'd all be crowded

in this rotten, little, tiny motel room

singing, drinking and eating rattlesnake.

Bud Cardos always had his plane,

because he would write
it off to the production.

- And every time we
needed traveling shots,

I would fly the cameraman and hang out,

I used the plane to chase people with

and I came down and bounced
my wheels off a car,

you know, ‘cause he liked
all that shit, you know,

it didn't cost him any
money for the plane,

if Al could get something
for free, man, he'd get it

and then I would just land on the highway.

- Right on Interstate 10, Bud
Cardos is landing his plane.

Highway Patrol came out

and they gave us a little bit of a static.

- "Where's your permits for this?"

and "We have to block the highways,"

and blah blah blah and here
I am in my motorcycle outfit.

Boy, I've had a lot of nothing.

- Somehow he kept from going to jail.

- "Satan's Sadists" is a little rougher

than those earlier biker movies.

- A lot of the handheld stuff
really kind of puts you there

and the violence is pretty jarring.

- In the script all it
says is they have a fight,

then you've got to choreograph it.

- I would watch, but he
never staged the stunts,

he'd say what he wanted, then
Bud and I would work it out.

Russ Tamblyn was also very handy,

he'd been a dancer and an acrobat,

so Russ could do all of his own work.

- You know, I seriously got into it.

- With that picture completed,
we did a great campaign.

- [Announcer] This is "West
Side Story" star, Russ Tamblyn

at his dramatic best in the
shocking new motion picture,

"Satan's Sadists," torn
out of today's headlines,

a shocking, realistic story
of the wave of revolution

and anarchy sweeping our country
today, "Satan's Sadists."

- I took that picture all
around the country screening it

and all the exhibitors took
dates out of other things

and booked it then.

- [Announcer] And it's wild beyond belief.

- The picture cost 50 grand to make.

- It did like $20 million.

- It made over $10 million
on the world market.

- The picture did
probably six or $700,000.

- The picture did a lot of money.

- A ticket was a dollar and a half,

so if you multiply that for
the amount tickets cost today,

six, seven, $8, the picture
would have grossed $100 million.

- I don't know if "Satan's Sadists"

made as much money as they claim it did,

I mean, a lot of these B
movie people as we all know

are well prone to hyperbole, shall we say.

- Then Independent International Pictures,

that had never existed all
of a sudden became a company.

- And I had four or five pictures

that we hadn't been able
to get distribution on yet.

- "Five Bloody Graves"
or "The Blood Monsters,"

"Blood of Ghastly Horror,"
"Hell's Bloody Devils,"

we took them out one by one
like they were brand new,

like they hadn't been sitting around

for five or six years getting moldy.

From the company that gave
you "Satan's Sadists,"

"Hell's Bloody Devils,"
there's a new thing coming out.

- [Announcer] You can't afford to miss

"Hell's Bloody Devils,"

everybody's talking about it.

- They made money and we
made some more pictures,

we put those out, one after
the other after the other.

- We have our own laws here.

- [Announcer] They enforce them

with their own savage justice.

- In walks this guy, Raphael
Nussbaum, who has some money,

he wants to make a picture

about a girl gang in a western setting.

- [Announcer] "The Female Bunch."

- We had about 10 of these girls,

they forgot to find out
if they could ride horses.

- And they said, "Can you ride a horse?"

And I said yes and that was my mistake.

We were terrified every day.

- When I got on location,

the producer kept keeping
the script from me

and finally when he hands it to me,

he hands me about three or four pages

of what was basically a porno

with a lot of girls in this sex ranch,

I had Russ Tamblyn, I was trying
to make a movie out of it.

- "The Female Bunch,"
yeah, that was kind of fun.

- We're gonna have to
teach you a lesson, boy.

- He was just the crazy man on the set,

he would say, "Put the camera
here, put the camera here,"

and like trying to co-direct.

- Argh!

- They ran out of money
and I called my Daddy,

I said they're gonna shut the film down,

unless they have $3,000, he says,

"Well, I'll give it to you,
but this is a bad deal."

I went no, it's not, Dad,
no, no, no, it's not,

well, of course it was a
bad deal, I never saw it.

My scene comes on where
I get my heroin overdose

from my lesbian lover,
all of a sudden I'm nude,

they did some pick up
shots at the Manson ranch.

- [Russ] We had shot several times

out at the Spahn's Movie Ranch.

- [Greydon] It was a popular
setting to make movies,

but around that time the
Manson clan was there.

- Charlie Manson, okay,
how could I forget?

He took a liking to me,

that was one thing I'll never forget,

Charlie would take me
around, "Do you want a girl?"

do you want a girl, I said
no, no, no, no, no, it's fine.

- These skeevy girls come walking up,

they were pushy and obnoxious

and tried to get us to go
out to the desert with them.

As it turned out, it was Linda
Kasabian and Sadie Glutz.

- Charles Manson came on the set,

he was ogling the girls.

- Go ride a horse.

- And I told Bud, I
says get him off my set

and Cardos took him physically
and moved him off the set.

- I was a little cocky back in those days.

- A week later it was big news

that this Charles Manson
group were all picked up

in the desert and arrested

for the horrors on the streets of LA.

(ominous suspenseful music)

(screaming)

- Horror movies were really,
really big worldwide,

I think there was a record number

of horror movies made in the early '70s.

- So I wrote this script
about a mad scientist,

who lived in an amusement park

and he would send his
goon out to grab girls

and they would do blood
experiments on them.

- "Blood Freaks," that was the title.

- [Greydon] Al liked the script,

Sam Sherman liked the script.

- I said Al, you know, we
have a dwarf in this picture,

I'd like to have Angelo Rossitto,

he was in several Lugosi
pictures, he's terrific.

"How do you get him?"

I said, well, I heard he ran a newsstand

on Hollywood Boulevard,

Al walked up and down, he calls me back,

he says, "You know, I can't find your man,

"I'm gonna have to go with
agent Jerry Rosen's dwarf."

Who's Jerry Rosen's dwarf?

Angelo Rossitto.

- We wanna buy a ticket,
we wanna buy a ticket.

- It was not normal as a
nine or 10-year old boy

to be looking downward
towards a 60-year old man,

but he took it in his stride.

(dramatic melodic music)

- And then Al gets a great deal,

two actors for the price of one,

♪ Carrol Naish as the mad scientist

and Lon Chaney Jr. as his goon.

- If it was Lon Chaney, I would say,

well, why don't you
make him be a werewolf,

why don't you have him be something

that the fans would really be into,

but when you see the film,
you understand the situation.

- What I remember about Lon
Chaney Jr. was he was quiet,

very large, he seemed huge to me

and he had a lot of health issues.

- Lon Chaney Jr. was very ill.

- We didn't know that at the time.

- He developed cancer of the larynx.

- They tried to give him dialogue,

you couldn't understand
what he was saying.

- And Al says, "What the
hell are we gonna do?"

I said well, he doesn't
have that many lines,

yet he's supposed to be a mad goon,

so he mumbles or scratchy
voice, whatever it is.

First day I knocked on the
door, he opens the door

and it's Lon Chaney
Jr., wow, that's great,

you know, Wolf Man.

When we're ready to
walk out there, he says,

"Oh, I forgot my tea, I forgot my tea."

So he goes back, he
opens a bottle of vodka,

pours it straight into a thermos

with no tea, just the vodka,

screws it up, says, "Okay, let's go."

- I thought it would be interesting
to work with Lon Chaney,

that was my scene and I shot
with him under the pier,

but he was drunk the whole time,

so we kind of had to stand him
up to get through the scene,

I actually kind of pitied him.

- I always look at the
other side of the coin,

I was glad somebody was giving him a job

and putting him on the screen.

You know, I would watch
anything with Lon Chaney.

- So then J Carrol Naish comes in

and he's being pushed in a wheelchair

and we had no idea, Al
turns to me, he says,

"Oh, my God, what are we gonna do?"

I said wait a minute,

♪ Carrol Naish is only
in the amusement park.

- Look here.

(screaming)

- And then he's down in his basement

with the scientific bullshit,

I said he doesn't have to walk,
leave him in a wheelchair.

We do a rehearsal, he
couldn't remember a line,

so I said well, why don't
we write cue cards for him?

- Alright.

- And so I'd print them out really large

and he had Coke bottle
lenses, he couldn't read,

he'd look off camera at his cue cards

and he'd read his lines and
then look back at the actor.

- The circulatory system must
experience a traumatic shock,

one that is inconceivable
to the human mind.

- We didn't know he had
one eye and one glass eye,

so when you look at the movie,

you see one eye going
across reading the cue cards

and the other eye just
kind of hanging there.

- She could walk away from us now

as though nothing had happened
on that fateful night.

- The sound man kept hearing a clatter,

da da da da, da da da
da, da da da da da da.

- We go what is that?

No one could figure out what it was

and it was J Carrol's teeth.

- He had loose dentures

that were clicking every time he talked.

- She has survived decapitation,

Is manufacturing the right
type of vital fluid for us.

- We told Al and Al said, "Screw it."

- ♪ Carrol Naish says, "Oh, young man,

"someday you're gonna work on a feature."

I don't know what he
thought he was making.

(ominous suspenseful music)

- Al sent the 16-day work
print for Danny and his backers

to see and they hated
it, "We're shelving it."

- We just had problems with story,

some of the stuff we
shot just didn't work,

it was one of those
pictures, it didn't work.

- So I said Danny, listen, would
you let me try to fix this?

And he said, "Okay, see what you can do."

So I start looking at this.

- What in the world is
a creature emporium?

- A leftover from the
sidewalk carnival days

run by a Dr. Duray, at least
that's the name he uses.

- At least that's what he calls himself,

maybe he could be something else.

- They decided to change this
whole concept of the script.

- What is the answer?

- How about if he's the
last of the Frankensteins,

the last Dr. Frankenstein.

(electricity crackling)

(dramatic melodic music)

- At the time I was
working a graveyard shift

and shooting the movie at the same time

and going through the makeup process,

where Frankenstein was getting energized

and all these things were zapping sparks,

the original set stuff
from "Frankenstein,"

you know, the electronics
and all the ch, ch, ch,

you know, they all went out
and got all the original stuff.

I kind of just went is this
really happening to me?

- And we put this thing
together and I said,

how about if we also
throw in Count Dracula?

We got him in there too.

- I had nothing to do with that,

I didn't write it, I
wasn't working with Al,

I didn't even know about it at the time.

- Al was very specific, he said,

"I wanna get our friend,
Roger to play Dracula."

- They picked their
stockbroker to play him.

- Dr. Duray, I presume.

I hope your busy schedule

will allow me a brief visit with you.

- Sam and Al were sitting across from me

and Al was different,
he was like real pensive

and I said what's going on?

And he said, "You have acting
background, don't you?"

I said a little, yeah, he said,

"You look the part, I mean Dracula."

I said guys, come on and Sam's
trying to discourage him,

"What do you mean he's gonna do it?

"He's raising money, we
need him to raise money."

"No, no, I have a feeling about this."

- I'm known as the Count of Darkness,

the Lord of the Manor of Carpathia.

Turn here.

- Forrie Ackerman and his wife, Wendy

were having dinner with me,

I said, how can we say
Roger Engel as Dracula?

He says, "We'll come
up with a better name."

- Szandor Vorkov, hm,

so he said, "Do you know what that is?"

And I said I don't.

- [Samuel] Szandor LaVey, the
satanist from San Francisco

and Vorkov, kind of an
acronym for Karloff.

- [Roger] So I became Szandor Vorkowv.

- [Samuel] Roger was quirky and odd

and gave it a different spin.

- I'm afraid your quest for
knowledge must end tonight.

- He's considered by many

to be like the worst
Dracula in cinema history.

- They had a great idea
to put a light under me

to make me look more evil
and I started blinking,

I said guys, I'm blinking.

Well, that is unimportant, doctor.

"Don't worry about it, we'll take it out."

So when I actually saw
the finished product,

there I am in one scene blinking,
they hadn't taken it out.

I don't know who wrote it, but
the lines all ran together,

there weren't any real breaks,

so I'd have to really
gulp words or gulp air.

And get your revenge on Doctors Beaumont,

Steadman and Marky, who ruined your career

and caused the accidental fire,

which crippled you as you are now.

It felt very wooden sometimes

and I would mention this to Al,

"Don't worry, we'll cut it,
we'll edit it, it'll work."

- So we got the whole thing ready,

I felt we had to do more with it

to build up the fight between Dracula

and the Frankenstein monster
and we shot that in New York.

- The two monsters facing one another,

never been done in a film before.

- We were all walking up to this church,

when the first guy opened
the door to go in there

and we all saw a bat fly
out, oh well, that's an omen,

you know, they're looking
at me and they said,

"You have anything to do with that?"

And I'm wearing clown white,

I had a makeup person in Hollywood,

but here I'm wearing clown white

and store bought plastic
Halloween fangs that hurt.

At some point, Frankenstein
gives me a look

and there begins our struggle.

(ominous suspenseful music)

Looks like we're dancing
and Al's directing,

"A little more, a little less."

Stop or I'll destroy you piece by piece.

And that's when I start
tearing him limb from limb

and finally the head.

(ominous suspenseful music)

- "Dracula vs. Frankenstein," you know,

they are such famous names,

it automatically was a marketing tool.

- [Announcer] Together in one film,

they meet in a fight of fright,

the kings of horror battle to the death.

"Dracula vs. Frankenstein."

- The Riverlea Theater marquee

had "Dracula vs. Frankenstein" on it

and I was like a magnet, you know,

you're dealing with a young teenager,

who is reading Famous Monsters

and he sees "Dracula vs.
Frankenstein" on the cover,

I knew I had to see it.

- [Announcer] A doctor who serves the dead

and the living creature horribly created

from the mangled corpses of their victims.

- And when I finally did see it,

I don't even know how to describe it,

you're glad that it was as good as it was

and not as good as it was.

- They had a nice run there
making movies and selling them

mostly to drive-ins and
grindhouses for a while,

Sam Sherman and Al Adamson
movies are all over the place.

- They were like the dream
team of tits and terror movies.

(screaming)

(melodic upbeat music)

- [Announcer] How many ways
can you distort the human mind?

(explosive booming)

- There really were homes
for these pictures back then,

they would play on 42nd Street

and then play in the inner cities.

Theater owners weren't watching the films,

they were looking at the campaigns.

- [Samuel] They would just take it

based on a title and an ad sheet.

- The press books, the posters,

sometimes I wonder of they
spent more money on those

than they did on the movies themselves.

- All of our films were made

with the title and the campaign in front.

- The films were definitely,
I think set up ahead of time

and booked ahead of time

and then maybe finished
just in the nick of time.

- Almost every title and campaign

came out of Sam Sherman's
head, that's his department.

We had great artwork and great campaigns,

I just tried to make
the best possible film

with what we had to work with,

which they would say, "This
is how much money we have,"

and I'd go out and make the film,

whatever the budget was.

- You can't wait to see them,

even though you kind of know
it's not going to be very good.

- Most of my reviews have been bad.

- [Samuel] They think Al and myself

were a bunch of incompetents,

who made all these patch jobs,

we didn't know what we were doing.

- [Al] We never ever went
out to make a bad film,

I don't think anybody goes
out to make a bad film.

- What happened to me?

- If you look at some
of your great directors,

they have never made 32 films.

- Obviously he wasn't a great director,

you know a lot of directors
start off making B movies,

but they usually graduate.

- They're taking a film

and comparing it with a $10 million movie

and these films didn't
cost that kind of money.

(gasping)

So we didn't have a great script.

- A friend of my father's just called me

and Lieutenant Cross told me to call him,

if any of my father's
friends did contact me.

- I'm sure that Lieutenant Cross

will be interested in
what you have to say.

- Okay, thank you.

- So we didn't have a great actor.

- The good Lord does not
approve of such carryings on.

- My films were made
for the average person,

not for reviewers.

- Take a look at this.

- What's interesting with Al is he can see

a lot of the trends and
exploitations that were going on.

- For a brief period in the early '70s,

black cast movies were a big deal.

- And I said how can we
make just white movies?

- You jive turkey, you're just
trying to get in my pants.

- Al was nice to every one of his actors,

any of you actors say anything
bad about him, you're lying.

- They had purchased the
rights to one of the books

in the paperback series, "Black Samurai."

- [Michael] Kind of spy, kung fu thing.

- "Black Samurai," that was Jim Kelly.

- [Announcer] Codename, "Black Samurai."

- I was like oh, my goodness.

It would've been smarter of
you to have been nicer to me.

- So Jim Kelly and I were
going after the bad guy

and he was up there with his vulture,

(vulture squawking)

and his henchmen were dwarves.

- Argh!

- Fighting with the
dwarves, that was a riot,

they were good guys and then that vulture.

- Fulton, kill!

(vulture squawking)

- Right through the "70s,

there was a distinct line
between union and non-union,

on the union side was nothing but rules,

Al couldn't make a movie that way,

but on Al's side, the non-union side.

- Okay, let's roll it!

- We all did everything.

- We'd all end up acting,

we were all in a shot someplace.

- My head ended up being sent in a box

to the police station.

- Gary Graver's worked for me as an actor.

- Man, it's a real bummer!

- And we've used that, "It's a bummer,”

every time we see Graver.

- It was like a young family
going let's go make a movie!

- We'd go out and rent
cars and do car chases,

when you take 'em back
to the rental place,

they're all clunkety clunkety clunk.

- Son of a bitch!

- This is the way these
kind of movies were made.

- Cheap and fast.

- Al was a one-shot guy, you know,

as far as he was concerned,

if you did it in two takes,
you've wasted half of your time.

- If you miss the line,
too bad, it's a take!

- One time Al had to do
five takes of a scene,

he was infuriated, Gary opened the camera,

there was no film in the camera

and it's like on any other movie

you would've been fired for that

and he had to tell Al, "I
don't know what to tell you,

"there was no film in the camera."

"There wasn't?

"Oh, thank God, we would've
wasted all that film."

- Al allowed people to come
and make mistakes on his movie.

- We represented something
he needed, youth, energy

and he was providing something

we all needed a lot, opportunity.

- I wouldn't give those days up,

I wouldn't wanna do it now,

but I wouldn't give 'em up for anything.

- You could complain about certain people,

who you knew were exploiting it,

but Al didn't make you feel
that way, they liked that.

- In my mind's eye I can see Al

standing there holding his dog.

- Sh!
(dog barking)

- No.

- Everywhere he went, hm,
"Cut, print," he had this dog.

- If I didn't see him put the
dog down a couple of times,

I'd think he might've been
sewn to his arm or something.

- [Anie] And then if he didn't have it,

he'd hand it off to Regina.

- She was not able to bear children,

so as Al said, "We have dogs."

- A lot of B movie people
are definitely left of center

and very odd, you know,

Ted Mikels living with
10 women in a castle,

Ed Wood wearing women's clothes

and the way I understood about Al

was he was just like a normal
like everyday kind of guy,

people said to me he probably
would've been a mailman,

but he happened to make

these really bizarre, sleazy B movies.

- There was a European
movie that came out in 3D

called "The Stewardesses"
and it made a lot of money,

Sam and Al decided to capitalize on that

and they made two stewardesses movies.

- First one was "The Naughty
Stewardesses," Sam wrote it.

- The one dispute I ever had with him,

he said, "This looks like
an 8th Avenue nudey to me,

"I don't want any part of it."

I said let me tell you something,

this picture's gonna be
in the can and finished

whether you do it or not.

"Forget what I said,
we'll do the picture.”

Al's funny.

- Let me guess, you had a wild weekend?

- Always.

- I was about 13 at the time

and my role was to turn around

and notice that something
was going on behind us.

- Come here.

- [Sean] That was a bit inappropriate,

the captain and the flight attendant

doing some rather adult activities.

- The woman from the airline saw this,

shut the whole thing down.

- [Announcer] Fly first class

with "The Naughty Stewardesses,"

your hostesses on the wildest
flights you'll ever take.

- [Samuel] The picture came out.

- [Announcer] All new for adults.

- And what did we do?

We created a phony organization

called Stewardesses For a Better Image

protesting the movie, "The
Naughty Stewardesses,"

a couple of people felt it was a phony,

they called and for a week
Regina answered the phone,

"Stewardesses For a Better Image."

- [Announcer] They're
sweet, but know the score.

- Biggest hit for IP,
just went through the roof.

"The Naughty Stewardesses"
led to one sequel,

"Blazing Stewardesses" and Al
didn't wanna do that either,

but I wanted to do an old western.

- [Chris] So they made a stewardess movie

that was really about cowboys
and old Republic westerns.

- I had The Three Stooges
planning to be in a film.

- Well, The Two Stooges, what was left,

one of them got very ill,
so we replaced the Stooges

with the two remaining Ritz brothers.

- I don't know who would
remember The Ritz Brothers,

you'd have to have been
involved in vaudeville, I think.

(cheerful melodic music)

- It's a throwback film being
sold as a stewardess movie

and also trying to cash
in on "Blazing Saddles,"

there's a subplot about
trucks that are being hijacked

and a couple of years later
Sam was able to re-release it

as "The Great Truck Robbery" to cash in

on the whole "Convoy,"
"Smokey and the Bandit" craze

and when "Best little
Whorehouse in Texas" came out,

Sam re-released "Blazing Stewardesses”

as "Cathouse Cowgirls."

- Sometimes there'd be five
titles for the same movie

and three different campaigns,

"Black Heat" and "Girls' Hotel"

are the same movie as "The Murder Gang,"

- Suddenly the clouds parted,
this is the same movie.

- Didn't I see this before?

- People would get tricked
into seeing the same movie

again and maybe again, it's conman stuff.

- I looked at this video box that says,

"I Spit on Your Corpse,"

I said, my God, who made this thing?

I turned around, there's some stills,

I said I shot this, it
was "Girls For Rent"

and Sam had retitled it and repackaged it.

- [Announcer] Looking for salvation,

the organization's gals have
got it in "Girls For Rent."

- Irwin Pizor, one of my partners,

former head of Hemisphere
Pictures wanted a porno star,

we got 'em, Georgina Spelvin.

- [Announcer] Now you
can see Georgina Spelvin,

star of "The Devil in Miss Jones"

at a theater near you in "Girls For Rent."

- [Samuel] We made it in the least time

we ever made anything, 60
days from script to screen,

Georgina Spelvin looked
at me and she said,

"This is too much like hard work,

"I'm going back to fuck films."

- Roll over, cowboy.

- [Al] We put sex in
almost every film we did.

- This is going to fun.

- The hottest one we probably
shot was "Cinderella 2000,"

we were trying to do a musical, comedy,

science-fiction, sex film.

- Here I lie getting hornier and hornier.

- [All] We know what you need, Snow White.

- Angelo Rossitto was, "Oh, my
God, like a bunch of dwarves

"having an orgy with Snow
White, this is too much,”

he wouldn't be in the scene.

- Our musical numbers were handicapped

because of the fact we
didn't have a lot of money,

but the score is excellent.

♪ And we are doing without ♪

♪ Yes, we are doing without ♪

- And we were making
money with these pictures.

The major studios started seeing
the success of our company,

of AIP, of Roger Corman,

they were ignoring the
drive-ins in those days,

they were just strictly
for second features

and they finally started saying,

hey, there's a market out there.

(glass shattering)

- [Announcer] "National
Lampoon's Animal House."

- The majors started taking
over the drive-in screens.

- Especially right after "Jaws,"

a lot of the independent companies

were really getting
shut out by the studios.

- [Al] We were very successful
all through the '70s,

until the drive-in market went to nothing.

- I think we found that his
unique talent and abilities

just didn't transfer
as well to other films.

- He tried different things.

- A children's film of all things.

- [Announcer] "Carnival
Magic," the excitement,

the thrill, the adventure of the carnival.

- They just hired him,

because it was a guy that
could get the job done.

- [Announcer] See Alexander
the Great drive everyone crazy.

- One day we heard this screaming
and we all turned around

and Trudi the Chimp had Shorty the Dwarf

holding on to him, climbing the tree,

his little legs were just kicking,

he's going, "Help me, help!"

- The woman's always scratching the monkey

and it looks like she's
giving him a hand job.

- Now don't be too nice to him,

he's on six months' probation
for driving without a license.

- Wait a minute, a woman's
giving a monkey a hand job

in a children's film?

- This chimp was beyond the age

that you would use it in
a circus, very dangerous,

did send a few people to the hospital.

She knocked out the script supervisor,

grabs her by the head and goes pow!

And knocked her out cold,

she was in the hospital with a concussion.

- [Announcer] The most
amazing thing you'll ever see,

a talking chimpanzee.

- Yeah.

- What's funny is in the
movie that the chimp talks.

- Some coconuts, hm.

- That wasn't part of the story, yeah.

- We shot nothing like that.

- I heard that later,
like the chimp talks?

- That's one of his last movies,

I mean, it's crazy and it's really cheap,

but it could be his best directed film.

- It's been a long day,

but it's good to be together.

- Hm-mm.

- It's important to have
someone to share things with.

Life alone can be very sad.

(melodic melancholic music)

- Poor Gina, she happened
to get this cancer business.

- Al was always after her to stop smoking,

he could never get anywhere with that.

- I know there was a big
problem between the two of them,

he wanted her to quit
smoking and she couldn't.

- He gave her the best care,

he took her to all the best
doctors and places and he said,

"My thinking is I'll
keep her alive for a year

"and then medical science will advance."

- Really sad to see a young lady like that

with all that talent pass away.

- [Samuel] Gina died in November of '92,

it was a great tragedy.

- Regina was a wonderful
person, she was always kind,

she was always helping other people.

She was one of the
bright things in my life.

- That was really sad and I
think that's what took Al away.

- He was so totally broken as a person.

- He was so involved with her,

that everything else was nothing.

- Because Regina had passed away,

he really didn't have time

to continue with the movie making.

(mellow melodic music)

He just decided to concentrate

solely on his business ventures.

- [Samuel] Al tended to
be a Will-o'-the-wisp,

one day he's in north Hollywood,
the next day he's in Utah,

he'd buy a house, he'd live in it,

he'd sell it and he'd
be off somewhere else.

Eventually he had a house in
Indio south of Palm Springs,

which he used to like to stay at.

(speaking in foreign language)

- I remember going up
and seeing him there,

Al was so proud of his
Jacuzzi he had over there.

- [Ken] That Jacuzzi, I guess

it was more than just pleasure,
but it was also therapy.

(gentle piano music)

- I would visit with Sam
and we'd do things and so,

then he got involved with UFOs.

- There were a lot of
sightings around that time,

I was thinking of doing
a docudrama feature.

- We're sitting at lunch
and he was brainstorming,

ba ba ba bub bub bub,
and before you know it,

he had gotten financing
through some friends

to produce a UFO documentary
with Al Adamson directing.

- I said, Al, I wanna
come over the project

of what I called, "Mysterious Reality,"

something weird that might be true,

we'll do dramatic scenes,
we'll do documentary scenes.

He said to me, he said, "I
don't believe in any of this,

"I'm just gonna film some of these things

"and treat it like fiction,
I've no problem with it."

Boy, did he change.

- So what are your conclusions
if any, Mr. Adamson,

your guess is as good as anybody,

‘cause nobody ever came back and said,

you know, what they found out really?

- Yeah, there's no real proof anywhere,

but there's an awful lot of believers

and an awful lot of intelligent people,

that believe that there
are UFOs out there.

- What do you think, Stevee?

- I believe there's a lot of
things that we don't know,

a lot of things that are unexplained

and that's where I'm leaving it.

- Is this your leading lady?
- Yes, Stevee Ashlock.

- I first met Al as I
came to audition for him,

he was looking for an American
actress to take to Australia

to play a part of a woman
who was abducted by aliens.

UFOs have always been something
that has intrigued me.

- That's important, right, Al?
- Right.

- Al had decided that he could
sit in his house and grieve

or he can get back into life and move on,

‘cause no matter what he was gonna do,

it wasn't gonna bring her back.

- Has she got the part, Al?
- Well, you know, why not?

- And I resemble Regina quite a bit,

Al decided that it was
the perfect combination

and everything just
kind of fell into place.

Over the past few years I've
had flashbacks of that night.

- It was a pretty good shoot,

it was pretty fast, it
was only a few days,

but I was the only person
who knew who Adamson was,

a lot of the crew thought he was a hack,

I don't know if they did
some research on him,

no one was getting paid really,

so they thought he was a bit of cheapskate

and he came out with Stevee,

she was on set most of the time,

they were professional, but
when the camera stopped,

you could see the affection
between the two of them.

It was in and out straightaway,

but you know, for me to be
working alongside him was great.

- And the scenes he
directed were very good.

- There seems to be a
large aircraft below 5,000.

- [Tim] He shot some really nice stuff.

- Delta Sierra Juliet, this is Melbourne,

what type of aircraft is it?

- [Pilot] It's hovering on top
of me, it's not an aircraft.

- I end up spending a bloody fortune,

sending Al all over the world.

- When we were in Turin, Italy,

do you know that Turin, Italy

is the world headquarters for the UFOs

and they said, "Would you
like to go into the vault?"

And I go, what vault?

They let you in with a
key, they lock you in there

and it's like these file cabinets

go from the ceiling to the floor

and there's these files
all the way around.

- So it's all the case for just one year,

it's about 50 boxes collected.

You know, we have a secret part,

where we keep the bodies
of the enemies too.

(laughing)

- He did his own investigations

and he was getting very deeply into this,

I was worried about him.

- [Interviewer] What do you mean by,

"He was getting so deeply into it?"

- People he was in touch with

and things that were happening,
which I'm not gonna repeat.

- Al was completely a non-believer

before this day that he met this person,

after this particular meeting,

he came back a believer in aliens.

- [Interviewer] So what
happened in this meeting?

- I don't know if I'm
at liberty to really say

exactly what happened in the meeting,

but I can tell you that he met a being,

let's just call it a being,

that was half alien and half human

and it had documentation and everything,

that it,

was not from Earth

it was very strange.

You know, and Al saw it
and saw the documentation

and again, Al was the kind of person,

that if he didn't see
it, he didn't believe it

and he saw it with his own
eyes, spoke to this being

and came back a believer.

- I said I think we should
get off some of this.

- Why does the government protect people

from knowing more about this though?

- I think they're afraid
that the people will panic.

- Oh, is that the reason?
- I think so.

- We made like a pact that
we would keep it to ourselves

and we wouldn't tell anybody else.

- It was I thought dangerous.

- I felt like the woman that knew too much

and I was afraid now I have information

that could get me killed.

(light haunting music)

I just don't think it's safe.

We already knew that the
government was trying to,

well, we knew, ‘cause
they will look normal,

but if you look at their
eyes and you look like,

are we filming?

- [Interviewer] We are filming, yes.

So where does the film stand now?

- Not finished,

there's enough footage for three films,

but what can I say?

You're running, you got all that?

- [Interviewer] Yep.

- The production just
slowed down and stopped,

it got a bit too hairy to
be around quite frankly,

because I think there are
people or forces or whatever,

who, you've gone far enough, that's it,

we're not gonna let you go
any further and that's it.

- On the other hand
perhaps I don't wanna know.

(mellow melodic music)

- [Samuel] Stevee was his
lady friend at the time,

they had a house together up in Vegas.

- One day when the doorbell rang,

I thought it was the gardener,

but instead this scary man
was standing at the door

and he was real shifty
and he looked homeless

and he wouldn't look me in the eye

and I was so taken back
when I opened the door,

I slammed the door and I locked the door

and Al was coming down the
steps at the time when I did it

and he said, "Stevee, why
are you being so rude?"

And then he goes over and opens the door

and he starts to invite this person in,

come to find out that was Fred

and so Fred's talking to him

and trying to get a job from Al,

he says, "Oh, is there anything
you need done on the house,

"you know, I'll help you
and I'll work cheap,"

and this and that, Al's going, "Cheap?

"Stevee has all these honeydew lists,

"that she wants me to do
and I could make a deal,"

and Al was all about deals, you know,

so Al makes a deal and
Fred starts working for us.

(melodic haunting music)

- Fred was building stuff
for my brother, you know,

things around his new house.

- Adamson was a little bit
on the, how should I say?

On the side of always saving money

and not spending a whole lot of money,

so Fred came at a cheap price.

- I noticed that Fred
started behaving strangely,

Al wore his hair in a very unique way,

he kind of combed it straight back,

so Fred started wearing his hair that way.

Well, then he had those
Pierre Cardin type shirts,

that he would wear, well,
Fred started wearing those.

There was one day when Brit
and I came home from the store,

we had a bunch of stuff in the truck

and it was kind of dusk out and
we pulled up in the driveway

and I thought it was Al standing
at the top by the garage

and I said, Brit, get out and ask Al

to come help us unload the truck

and so Brit gets out and goes, "Al, Al!"

And the person turns around, it was Fred

and we were going, oh, God, it was creepy.

- [Interviewer] Did you
discuss this with Al?

- Yes and Al, he goes,

"Oh, Stevee, you're just
doing your woman thing,"

everything was like my woman thing.

- I couldn't believe some of
the things that he'd done,

but I guess he knew what he was doing,

I told my brother, I said you know,

does Fred know what he's doing here?

And he's, "Oh yeah, he knows
all that stuff, he's okay."

- I got out the bank statements
one day and the checkbooks

and I started looking at things

and things weren't adding up

and so I laid out all the paperwork

and then when Al came
back, I showed it to Al

and I said, does this make sense to you?

And I saw Al get really kind of angry,

now he's not a person that gets angry.

- Fred Fulford had apparently obtained

one of Mr. Adamson's credit
cards in his own name

and had been using it.

- And I said, well, we need to fire him

and Al was like, "Oh, no, no, no,

"we're gonna make him work it off."

I said he's a thief, I said give him $200,

take him into the driveway,
say thank you very much,

"Oh, you just don't like him."

Well yeah, I don't like him,

there's a reason I don't like
him, you shouldn't like him,

but you know, he was
like, "He's only Fred."

(mellow melodic music)

- [Samuel] So it led
to a fight and Al left,

he went to stay in his house in Indio.

- [Stevee] Al came up
with this plan, he says,

"Well, if I put him in
the middle of nowhere,

"he can't do anything wrong,

"he can't steal from us,
he can't do anything."

Oh yeah, he can.

- [Interviewer] Well,
do you wanna go get it?

You wanna stop for a second?

- I thought Fred would get it.

(speaking in foreign language)

- He had asked her more than
just to do housekeeping,

but help him decorate, help
him make some decisions,

because she lived in a mobile
home adjacent to his estate.

(speaking in foreign language)

- It was during that time that Fred

started to enjoy a lot of
Al Adamson's daily life

and not getting the work done,
that he was contracted to do.

(speaking in foreign language)

- One day I got a phone call
from this guy named Robert,

one of the workers at the house,

Robert goes, "Stevee, do
you know what Fred's doing?"

Good Lord, I don't know what,

as soon as Al would
drive out the driveway,

he would load up all the
supplies that Al just bought,

take 'em back to Maynard's
and he had the receipt,

he would go back and get the cash back.

- I talked to Gary Graver
and Gary Graver said,

"Hey, Al would love to talk
to you, he's in Palm Springs."

I called Al and it was 10, 11 years

and it was just wonderful talking to him

and he said, "Il have only one problem,

"a guy that's been working for
me has been stealing from me

"and I'm gonna confront him
and if he doesn't pay me,

"I'm gonna throw the
son of a bitch in jail."

- On the phone he said Fred
had been stealing from him,

he'd got to get rid of Fred.

I said yeah, wait, don't do
nothing, Al, till I get there,

we'll try and take care of this together

and get Fred to move out.

(melodic haunting music)

(speaking in foreign language)

- I get there about 11 o'clock, 11:30

and I said where's my brother?

He says, "Oh, he's out looking at a car.”

I said Fred, looking at
a car, what the hell for?

He had four cars then, he said,

"You know your brother, he
said he'd be back in a while."

So I left and went home

and then I got halfway home, I call back,

'cause I lived two hours from Al's house.

I called back and I said, is he there yet?

And he said, "No, he's not here yet,

"he's still out looking at the cars."

(speaking in foreign language)

- The next day, I came,

where is he?

"We don't know, nobody
knows where he's at."

(speaking in foreign language)

(melodic haunting music)

- And I call him again and he said, "No,"

he said, "He's in Texas
looking at his property."

(speaking in foreign language)

- So another couple of weeks
go by and still nothing

and my brother never did that to me.

- I wasn't even thinking of him

I was just thinking if
he didn't call me back,

maybe he was sick or he went
out of town or something.

(speaking in foreign language)

- He had had a Post Office
drop box welded with a lock

and he actually placed it on the property,

because there was money checks
coming in, credit cards,

he didn't want anybody
to access any of that.

(speaking in foreign language)

- I had a friend looking
for him in Mexico,

we were looking all over the country,

maybe he's sick in a hospital somewhere,

maybe he was kidnapped,

maybe someone's holding him somewhere.

(speaking in foreign language)

- I went back down there
and talked to Fred again

and wanting to know where the hell he was,

he should know where he was
at, he was working for him.

- Fred wouldn't allow
him to go into the home

and used the excuse that
he had just resealed

the entire floor of the
residence with this lacquer seal.

- I called the police.

- Once Al was reported missing,
they began an investigation,

it needed a follow up to make
sure he wasn't just somewhere,

you know, he had a yacht in
Hawaii, they had property,

Al had property all
over the United States,

so it needed a follow up to make sure

he wasn't just somewhere
enjoying a vacation or whatever,

just wanted to get away.

- They were getting nowhere, just nowhere,

I said to Linda, I'm gonna
concentrate in my mind

as much as I could concentrate

and try to reach him, wherever he is.

- I said how can you do that?

I mean, that's farfetched,
he said, "I've got to."

- And I'm lying in bed and I'm saying,

Al, I don't know where you are,

if you're sick, if you're
dead, if you're whatever,

you've got to give me a sign

and one word comes through
into my mind, cement.

(mellow melodic music)

(speaking in foreign language)

- And I called back the
police department again

and I said you know, something's wrong.

- At the time I took the report,

I walked over all the information

and the detectives went out there

and Fred was nowhere to be seen.

- [Daniel] Then Detective Jack Anderson

went to the home with a couple of officers

with the search warrant in his possession.

They went there with the housekeeper,

who used to live on the
property, Guadalupe.

- Tapes.

One of his pamphlets
from one of his movies.

So we started doing our search

looking through invoices,
records, credit card receipts,

so we could get the credit card numbers

and try and track him down.

Lupe was walking us through the house.

(speaking in foreign language)

- At one point we were walking
through the lower level

of the house and she pointed out a room,

where there used to be
an in-ground Jacuzzi.

She explained how Al really loved that,

because it was indoors.

(speaking in foreign language)

- [Jack] A big piece
right here, the Jacuzzi?

(speaking in foreign language)

- And it had all been tiled over.

Ceramic tiles,

shovel, sledgehammer.

She suddenly broke down into tears.

(speaking in foreign language)

(mellow upbeat music)

- We were using picks,
we were using shovels,

we were breaking up the cement,

we went at it all night and
it was in the midsummer too,

SO we were very hot,

I would say all that night
was close to the hundreds.

(mellow melodic music)

- It took five or six hours

and then we started pulling
out the cinder blocks.

- The investigators and the officers

worked throughout the night.

- And finally we got
down to a level of dirt.

There's a strong odor of decomposition

coming from the area in question.

- Oh, that smell.

- [Benjamin] And it was extremely hot,

So yes, there is a very
strong smell or odor

that comes out and develops.

- And it's kind of like okay,
we're on the right track,

that's when everything got slower,

because they had to be a lot more careful

and it was piece by piece,

they started using brushes.

- As we continued on down,

we found what appeared to
be a body wrapped in cloth.

(speaking in foreign language)

- [Jack] The coroner's
autopsy was able to determine

the body had what appeared to
be several blows to the head.

- On the death certificate,
it said blunt force trauma.

- From a circular type
object similar to a hammer.

Once we had determined that
there had been a murder,

now we are looking for a suspect.

- Fred Fulford was a construction person,

very well acquainted with a hammer.

He got help to chip out
the in-ground Jacuzzi

by a couple of laborers, he
also had those same laborers

help him remove a
mattress from the bedroom.

We talked to the laborers,

who said they didn't go
looking at the mattress,

it was just trash ready to be hauled off.

- We found where Mr. Fulford
had been cashing checks

by forging Al Adamson's name.

As part of our search of the residence,

we did find a couple of envelopes

that had Fred Fulford's name on them

and the return address was in Florida,

we traced Al Adamson's credit card

and we found that it had
actually been used in Florida

within the last day or two

and he had shipped a few of the
cars belonging to the victim

to an area in Florida.

- I get called into the chief's
office and the chief says,

"Pack your bags, you're going to Florida."

- When Mr. Fulford went to Florida,

he took a girlfriend with him,

who happened to be related to Lupe.

(speaking in foreign language)

- The sister had a child
from a previous relationship

with her, so we wanna know are they okay,

‘cause we figured if
someone does something wrong

and takes someone's life,

what will they do if
something else happens?

- If he finds out that
we're looking for him

or that he's a suspect,
what is he gonna do

with his girlfriend and the child?

- We're trying to tell the
family everything will be okay,

but we don't really know.

- We did a search of Fred
Fulford's mother's home

there in Florida and found
a lot of his clothing

and a lot of his
girlfriend's clothing there.

- Let's check the airport

to see if maybe he'll get
his girlfriend and the baby

on a flight back to California,

lo and behold, he ends
up getting her a flight.

We cut her off before
she boarded the plane

and we took her into a room

and that's where we
started interviewing her.

At first she couldn't believe it,

she's just, "He's so nice."

In going through her property,

there was a book of matches,

a hotel on the beach and
it was one of those things,

we said, hey, why would she have this,

unless they're staying there,
so we figured we had to move.

We started SWAT rolling to that hotel

and we rolling that way also,

we get there and I personally
got a little antsy,

I said you know what,

I wanna have an eye on
what's going on inside.

I made my way inside
waiting for SWAT to show up,

I was probably there five, 10 minutes,

who walks in through the doors?

And I took my gun out, drew
down on him, identified myself,

I told him to get down,
to keep his hands up,

get down on the ground, luckily he did.

- [Presenter] Police believe the man

who murdered and buried Adamson

was this man, Fred Fulford,
a part-time builder,

who was remodeling Al's home.

- [Fred] I met Al in Las Vegas,

he wanted a builder to
do some custom work,

I worked there for a year

or something like that, close to it.

He was my good friend anyway,
I never had no problems,

we never argued about nothing

and then he hired me to
of to Indio, California

to do a job over there,

I didn't wanna go, but
he made a deal with me.

- [Presenter] Police now say

money may have been the
motive for the murder.

- [Fred] His agreement was I stay in Indio

and work there, I used
my skill and my labor

and when we finish it, we sell
it and we split the profits.

The house was like mine and
his, place was a real mess,

I spent a lot of time, a lot of work on it

and a lot of money, I worked
for 10 months for nothing,

I didn't get nothing, I got
everything taken from me.

- Mr. Adamson was someone
who was successful,

someone that was famous,
someone that had a lot of money

and I think my client kind of wanted

a little bit of that lifestyle.

Part of the theory of the prosecution

was that he wanted to embezzle
and once he had been caught,

Mr. Adamson supposedly indicated

that he was gonna turn
him over to the police

and he didn't want that,

So supposedly that's why
he committed the murder.

- We believe that Al had confronted Fred

and then Fred had bludgeoned him to death.

- But he denied any
involvement in the murder.

- [Fred] The prosecutor made it sound

like I snuck off to
Florida, didn't tell nobody,

everybody knew where I was going,

I was going to visit my mother.

I have my own clothes, but
Al gave me a lot of things,

I didn't steal 'em, they
were mine, he gave ‘em to me.

That Jacuzzi was old and did not work

and as far as vehicles, I've
worked for those vehicles,

I remodeled the whole house

and whatever materials I'd buy,

I would use his check account,
he let me sign checks,

it made me look guilty,
sure I looked guilty.

I got blamed for everything
and the point is this,

I did not kill Al,

everything they said was not true,

I was just railroaded completely.

- [Daniel] And the result was

they found Fred guilty of murder.

- The jury only deliberated
for a matter of hours.

- Two hours, that's wow, I
mean, there was just zero, zero,

I mean, you talk about reasonable doubt,

there was zero doubt.

- He was sentenced to 25 to life,

I believe there's appeal processes,

he's made his appeal and they
were upheld, so you know.

- [Presenter] Why Fulford
would murder Adamson,

bury his body and think
that no one would ever know

is still a major question the police--

- By burying him in the house,

where he is the construction guy,

all it's doing is drawing an arrow to him,

if he killed him, why
didn't he just take the body

out into the middle of the desert,

where it won't be found for 10,000 years?

- I don't really think he
really thought this out.

- If people that commit crimes were smart,

we'd have a hard time catching them.

- There was an article
in an LA paper that said,

Sam Sherman says aliens killed Al Adamson,

what bullshit, I never
said anything like that,

but people can draw their own conclusions.

- Macabre death.
- Cement grave.

- And they do.
- It's a chilling story.

- UFO docudrama.
- The mystery.

- [Presenter] Buried inside his own house.

- But I've had to accept the verdict,

because the key thing was Al was gone,

no matter what I would look
at as some irregularity,

it's not gonna bring him back.

- Oh, I don't really know

what else I could tell you about Al.

(gentle piano music)

Believe me, he was good,
my brother was good.

- I was very, very happy to
be his friend and co-worker.

- I miss Al, Al was a great guy.

- I'd have worked for Al,

if I became the biggest
movie star in the world,

I would still work for Al.

- Even though he was difficult,

even though he was a
strange kind of a character,

I have to give him thanks,

maybe even thanks for not paying me,

‘cause not paying me made me
go out and make my own movies.

- He said, "You laugh
about the conditions,

"you laugh about my movie
scripts, you this and that,

"but when you make it big, Mike Ferris,"

and he used to look, "and you will,

"then you'll look back
and you'll thank old Al."

And I have many times.

- In our last conversation,

Al had been to several
conventions like Chiller Theater

and he was shocked that
he had all of these fans,

so he was telling me, "Gary, I was there

"and they showed my
film and they loved it,

"you'd be surprised, I
have fans in England.”

He was so pleased.

- They were pieces of
shit when we shot 'em,

but then later on they've become relics.

- Were they my favorite?

They were fun.

- Let's face it, he made
a lot of little pictures

and 90% of them made some money.

- And when Al was asked
at a screening in LA,

"What was the purpose of
you doing all these films?"

And Al answered.

- We're not shooting for Academy Awards,

when we make pictures,

we're shooting to entertain the audiences

and I think we did that.

(screaming)

(melodic upbeat music)