Return to Oldfield: Making from a Whisper to a Scream (2015) - full transcript

Just a minute, little lady.

You gotta have a
ticket to go in there.

It was kind of the
culmination of a dream

that I had ever since I was a kid,
which was making a feature film.

And he wanted the script to be a certain
way, we all wanted that to happen,

and he was able to make the movie
the way he wanted to make it.

Pick a taboo, any taboo,
it's in one of the segments.

Necrophilia, kids
killing people.

We were all so young,
and it's kind of like

none of us knew what we were
doing but we were doing it.

Just cobbling together whatever
connections we could find.



Jeff is going,
"Come on, we need more blood!"

And the guy's
going, "It's empty."

I always liked the
way Jeff directed.

I liked the energy he got.

Jeff always wanted
Vincent Price.

I kept saying, "Jeff, Vincent Price,
that's really shooting for the moon."

The next thing I hear is
Vincent Price's voice going,

"It's shit! It's shit!"

"I'm not doing it."

...because Clu Gulager murdered
his naked wife in a bathtub.

I think you can see the beginnings of
somebody trying to be a filmmaker.

We all made mistakes on it, but I'll tell
you this, I wouldn't change a thing.

The circus had come to town.

It was going to be
there all summer long.



Welcome to Oldfield.

I'd gone to film school at USC,
University of Southern California,

had made a film there
called "Divided We Fall"

with a guy named Kevin Meyer.

We'd partnered up, and we were going
to make this big, epic civil war drama.

We convinced John Agar to be in it who
was John Ford stock player for a while

and then later did very famous
'50s science fiction movies.

It took about a year to make.

We ended up dropping
out of school to finish it.

So it was really just...

It was our "Apocalypse Now"
in SO many ways.

I'd worked on it.

I'd done makeup
and various things.

His filmmaking skills really
advanced, I thought.

So that's kind of what I left
USC with, under my arm.

I had that to show to people, to
show that I was a filmmaker,

newly arrived, freshly minted,
ready to conquer Hollywood.

I remember when Mariette
Hartley came down to USC

and said that Jeff was
the hope of Hollywood.

Of course, I'm waiting for
Hollywood to fall down at my knees,

at my feet and go, "We anoint
you the new, whomever."

That didn't happen.
Big surprise.

At college, I met a guy
named Darin Scott,

he was a chemical engineer major
at USC, we were in the same dorm.

Jeff and I were good
friends at USC,

and I actually appeared in
some of his student films.

Also at USC, Mike Malone, who I'd grown
up with and made Super 8 films with,

he actually was in the film program
as well, a year behind me.

Jeff and I met initially in junior
high school in Dalton, Georgia.

He, sort of, mainly is responsible
for me getting involved in film.

We all kind of ganged
up and decided,

"Hey, let's really use our
talents to make a feature film."

Darin was very good in organization,
and he had a creative mind as well.

I was very interested in
movies. I love movies.

I love writing short stories.

I think Jeff was the
first one to say to me,

"Why don't you stop writing short
stories and start writing screenplays”

"because people actually
pay for those sometimes."

Mike was the wild-idea guy,

and his bent was much more
into comedy, which I love too.

The filmmaking process for me is
fun because it's creative and social.

So it was like, "Hey, let's go hang
out with friends and do fun stuff,"

"pretend to get shot with
guns and roll down hills,”

"do stunts and stuff like
that, and do silly stuff."

The two final pieces of the
puzzle was Courtney Joyner

who I had gone to school with.

He was at USC as well.

And my brother Bill who moved
out to California in 1984.

After graduation we were all looking
at trying to start our movie careers,

and I was focusing on writing, and
Jeff had already started to work

for Roger Corman a little bit, he
was working for Jim Wynorski.

I ended up rooming with Jeff.

When I did that, everybody who was
coming into the apartment was somebody

who wanted to be in the film business
as he did, and I caught the bug.

So Jeff, and Darin, and Mike
Malone, and Jeff's brother Bill,

and I, all lived together in
this house up in Tujunga.

It was fun, but it was also...

We all got to make the
rent, we all got to get jobs.

We all got to go out
and do something,

in the meanwhile we were
planning to make this movie.

I was starting to work
a little bit at Universal.

A director there named Virgil Vogel
had read some scripts of mine

when I was in college, and
so I was working with Virgil.

Jeff was great 'cause he'd come
over to Universal, and we'd go out

to the set of "Airwolf" together, and all
the things that we were working on.

I was actually working at Procter & Gamble
as an engineer while rooming with Jeff,

and I knew that I hated the corporate
lifestyle and working for a big company,

and I wanted to do
something independent.

I wanted to get into
a creative field.

Jeff came to me one day and said that I
should quit my job and throw in with them,

and we're going to go and
we're going to make this movie.

The original intent was, with
this company Conquest Films

which was the film company name
that I had from my Super 8 days,

the original intent was to
make a road movie called.

"Last Stand of the Shaffner Sisters"

that Mike and I had conceived
and done some work on,

and Courtney did the
D-draft of the script.

That really was a much too ambitious
movie and a very oddball movie,

but much too ambitious to
really try and do for a first film.

So we decided, instead of that, we
would make a horror film which...

I was a huge horror fan.

Of course, this was at the time
when independent movies...

This was the time of "Friday the 13th"
and "Halloween",

and, of course, VHS was
getting ready to explode.

So there was money to be had
particularly for independent horror

because independent
horror had done so well.

Of course, we loved horror
movies, and that was our focus.

We just really started talking that that's
really what we should try and do.

I had an idea of a haunted Southern town
that emanated evil, whatever, historically,

called "From a Whisper to a Scream"
but I hadn't written anything other than

just that little basic
idea and the title.

At that time there hadn't
been a lot of anthologies.

We all loved "Tales from the Crypt" and
"Asylum", and the Amicus movies,

but that format had gone
by the wayside a little bit.

We thought, and I think it was
an extremely smart strategy,

that if we do, basically,
a series of shorts,

we're raising the
money independently.

If we fall short of the money at
any point during the production,

we don't end up in that
position of having a movie

that's three quarters
of the way done.

So this was, in a way... We
wanted to do an anthology

but it was also a
very sound stopgap.

So that, if we ran into
trouble at any point,

we would have actually completed
segments of something.

We could then do it.

As I remember
it, I had this idea,

"Let's just pick a
bunch of taboos,"

"and then we'll write a
story around each taboo."

The stories were divided up.

Jeff wrote one, Courtney wrote
one, Mike and Courtney wrote one,

and Darin wrote one. Jeff
wrote the Civil War episode.

And then Mike wrote, actually, a
draft of the Clu Gulager episode,

and it was very funny but
it wasn't really the tone.

But it was so creative
and so interesting!

Everyone's a little squeamish about
funny episodes in horror anthologies

because sometimes they
work great and sometimes...

Mike had done such a terrific job
but he was very gracious and said,

"No, I can rewrite it to what
you feel it should be."

The episode I scripted
was about a gangster

who gets shot by
some of his associates

and is discovered in the woods by a
mysterious old man who, it turns out,

is several hundred years old and
has the secret to immortality.

Of course, the gangster wants
the secret to immortality,

and he gets it, but he doesn't
get it like he really wanted.

The carnival episode actually had
begun as an idea I had for a short

that I wanted to write for myself,
very much kind of old EC comics, 1930s.

A guy eats a bunch of glass,
and it comes blowing out of his body.

If you look at "From a Whisper
to a Scream", you'll notice

that there are some very twisted things
in it, and that came out of that process

of young guys trying to be
as shocking as possible.

We really didn't see each other's
work until we were kind of at the end,

and it was all put together, and we were
all kind of flipping through the pages.

It wasn't...

Everybody kind of wanted their
own voice which Jeff would...

Jeff was great, and he let that
happen, and Darin did too.

Then, the roundabout, the
bookends with Vincent Price.

There, really, the big struggle was
coming up with the appropriate vehicle

that connected the stories.

Basically, the town historian there
lives alone, there at his library,

and his daughter has just
been executed for murder,

and he doesn't even go to his
own daughter's execution.

He doesn't.

He's completely removed himself from that
experience because she was doomed,

because she was
born there, as he was.

We all kind of gave ideas to
each other's stories etc.,

and came out with a script that was
coherent and, we thought, ready to go.

So we figured, "Okay, well,
how do we get this made?”

That's where my brother came in.

Bill was a real sharp
salesman type of guy.

A real charmer.

He knew how to talk to people,
and we realized pretty early on

that he would be the guy to
try to sell the investment.

We were inspired by guys like
Sam Raimi and Tobe Hooper

who had either made limited partnerships,
formed limited partnerships to raise money.

The Coen Brothers did
this for "Blood Simple".

What happened was, I wrote up all
the paperwork and the perspectives

and the limited partnership agreements
and did all that on my computer.

We gave that all to Bill, and
Bill flew off to Dalton, Georgia

where he proceeded to have
meetings with all of these

wealthy people in town trying
to raise money for the film.

But in the mid-eighties, it
was an easier thing to do,

and movie making was a little
more exotic back then, I think.

Dalton, Georgia was a town where they
made 60% of the world's carpet at the time.

So you pretty much knew who
the rich guys in town were

because their names were
on all of the carpet mills,

and he made appointments
with these guys.

He had presentations.

And I supplied kind of the
enthusiasm for the project

and the artistic vision when
we were raising the money.

He just could never be deterred.

Everybody should have a producer
who's so absolutely focused

in his determination to
get something made.

He had it because he
wanted to make a movie.

He wanted to make a
movie with his brother.

And, lo and behold, we raised a very small
amount of money to make this movie.

We promoted the film as
Dalton's first feature film.

Here are two hometown boys
coming home to make a movie

and to take the landmarks of Dalton, and
to put them in front of the entire country.

I think people got pretty
enthusiastic about it.

So I went back to Los Angeles,

and we started casting the
movie and looking for the crew.

The casting of the movie
was unusual in one sense

because there was
no casting director.

It was just me. There
wasn't a middleman.

It was just... I had an idea of someone
I wanted and then tracked them down.

Terry Kiser we knew socially because
I knew the director Steve Carver.

We would go to his house, and
we would meet Terry there.

He was a great guy
and a terrific actor.

I was always very impressed
with him and just loved his work.

So I thought that
was a perfect fit.

What the goddamn
hell do you want?

And then Harry Caesar, Jeff and I met Harry
Caesar at a memorial for Robert Aldrich.

Actually, we were at the Directors
Guild and sitting right behind him.

That's how that happened.

It was, really, like the sixth
degrees of separation casting.

It was like, so-and-so knew
someone who knew someone

who then knew the person
that I wanted to get to.

Rosalind Cash, who
was just so terrific.

She was a good friend of ours, of a
director that we knew named Oscar Williams.

Oscar had written "Truck Turner”,
and he wrote and directed

a very cool movie called
"Five on the Black Hand Side".

He'd been around, and he had a
lot of really good advice for me.

And Angelo Rossitto also was in the
carnival episode, and that was just great.

Jeff and I really wanted him, of course,
because he had been in "Freaks".

Some of them had kind of fallen out
of favor, maybe, in the mainstream,

like Cameron Mitchell who
had done just tons of movies

but hadn't done a lot of studio stuff
in a while except on television.

And Cameron couldn't
have been greater.

We went down to Palm
Springs and met with him.

Jeff and I just drove down there,
and he said, "Well, come on by the condos."

We go, and we meet him, and he says,
"Sure, no, this sounds great."

"Let's go to a party.”
That was Cameron Mitchell.

It's always exciting, I think, for actors
to work with a first-time director

because they invariably will work
differently than a lot of people,

especially if you've done a
lot of television or something.

There's maybe a different way of
working with a first-time director

than some of the directors
they had worked with

throughout the years at
Universal or wherever.

Everybody wanted
to lend us a hand.

If they couldn't do it
personally, then they knew

somebody else who would,
or they had phone numbers, or...

Just the amount of generosity
that came around the movie

was pretty astounding, actually.

Clu Gulager, I'd had him
in mind for another part.

A smaller part in the movie.

I was doing a small
documentary on Don Siegel.

We did a tribute to Don at USC,
and Clu got involved with that.

Jeff and I went down
to his acting workshop.

He started acting with me because he
wanted to learn how to communicate

in that department,
the acting department.

I asked to be in that film. They
weren't going to hire me.

They wanted my wife.

I said, "Let me be..."

"Let me play this captain
in the Civil War."

They found one of the great film
actors of Hollywood to play it

who was on the down
spin and an alcoholic.

And when he read
the script, he goes,

"You know what?
I would love to play Stanley.”

I said, "Well, let me play it."

"Let me play this part
opposite Miriam."

She played my sister.

It was originally written as a totally
different, much younger character, etc.

And had nothing really to
do with what ended up on the screen.

I thought about
it for just a little bit.

I thought, and I really
mulled it over in my mind,

"You know what, that would
be a really interesting take,"

"and having Clu in that role
could bring something to it"

"that's not there right now."

I think, "Yeah, that's the idea.
Let's get Clu."

He did also...
By that time, he's done,

actually, "A Nightmare on Elm Street 2"
and "The Hidden".

So Clu's involvement with
horror was becoming

more and more prominent,
and that was terrific.

I remember Darin just initially
snap judgment-wise, going,

"Oh, that is a shitty idea.
I can't believe that."

"Him though? That's totally wrong."

Because it was wrong as written.

Of course, Miriam, his wife,
is so wonderful in the movie.

She was known primarily
though, as a comedian,

from "Barney Miller" and
movies like "The Big Bus".

The casting process was one of my
most enjoyable things in pre-production.

Just being able to meet and then get
these actors that I admired for so long.

It was just wonderful.

Most of the small roles were
cast out of Atlanta or Dalton

where the film was shot, and that
was just incredibly eye-opening,

because there were some
just hilarious auditions

that were just totally
unexpurgated emotion.

It was just amazing to see how different
the approaches to material could be.

We'd had then in our mind
that the "connecting device"

would probably be shot in California,

but we'd scheduled it
actually in our first schedule.

We had scheduled it to be shot in
Dalton where the movie was shot

but we kind of always had
it in the back of our mind,

"Well, we might need to
shoot that in California"

"because we're trying to
get a big name for it."

And the big name we were trying to get
from the very beginning, was Vincent Price.

I was actually a naysayer.

Jeff always wanted Vincent
Price, and I kept saying,

"Jeff, Vincent Price, that's
really shooting for the moon."

"Let's be a little
more realistic.”

But he was absolutely bound and
determined to get Vincent Price.

We're trying to figure out
how do we get him.

How do we get to Vincent Price?
We're young kids.

We don't have any
connections in Hollywood.

We don't know any agents.

But we did know one thing,
that back in the eighties

you could buy people's, and I'm
talking about celebrities', addresses.

There was a service that would sell
you anybody's address for $10.

I am sure they are
out of business now

because they'd be sued to death,
but at that time this was going on.

So we went, and we paid $10
for Vincent Price's address.

Fascinating. A little far-fetched.

Darin, and Jeff, and I, we go out
to his house on Swallow Drive,

and we're just sitting
there in the car.

We're just staring at his house,
and we're scared to death.

And I'm saying to Jeff,
"Well, you know, you're the director."

"You go up there and
knock on the door."

And Jeff's saying to me, "Uh-uh, you're
the producer. You're supposed to do that."

"You go up and
knock on the door."

Both of us were afraid to do it.

So we decided we'll both go.

We both went up with our little red-bound
copy of "From a Whisper to a Scream”,

fresh off the printer, went
up to his door, knocked.

Vincent Price opens the door.

He is in an apron, because
he had been baking bread.

We tell him who we are.

We tell him what we
want, and he lets us in.

So we go into his living room, and we sit
down, and he was incredibly gracious.

He was very, very nice.

I told him that I'd seen him on stage
at the Tivoli Theater in Chattanooga

doing "Diversions & Delights",
the Oscar Wilde play written by John Gay.

And I'd actually met
him, just shook his hand

as he came out of the
dressing room after the play.

We were there 20 minutes while he
talked about art, talked about film.

We drank iced tea.

It was a dream situation.

So we gave him the script, and then we
heard from him a couple of days later

saying, "You know, I read the
script. It's very interesting,"

"but I've tried to get away from
horror films, and I really don't know."

"I just really don't
know right now."

His main thing was, he had just hosted
the series "Mystery!" with Diana Rigg,

and that had done extremely
well, and it was very prestigious.

So he kind of didn't want to
continue with that format.

But we didn't really know
that Vincent would do it,

but we didn't know
he wouldn't do it.

So we were, kind of, as they say,
kind of hovering or, kind of, in limbo.

Darin and I drive cross-country
in my little Honda,

and we had to be there
in two and a half days.

So we just drove
pretty much nonstop.

I would sleep when he was driving.
He would sleep when I was driving,

but neither of us trusted
either of us, so nobody slept.

We finally made it to Dalton
in about two and a half days

and started the
preparation in earnest.

We're going to talk about the
movie industry coming to town.

Maybe not necessarily in Chattanooga
but it's in the Dalton area at least.

The movie is going to be entitled
"From a Whisper to a Scream" which is, why?

Each one of these is a period piece,
and you have to find, obviously,

period costumes, period props.

We've got a great
crew working on this.

The funny thing for me as the producer
of "From a Whisper to a Scream" is,

this was the first time I'd actually
ever been on a motion picture set.

My only previous experience had
been in acting in Jeff's student films.

So it was a completely
new experience for me,

and it seemed like a student film,
only bigger and more complicated.

My idea always was to have kind
of a pro-am approach to the crew,

to have people that had never
done certain things before

combined with people that
had done things before.

So you have that enthusiasm
and then that professionalism,

and that energy would combine
to make something unique.

We found a guy named Craig Greene
to be the director of photography.

He had his own equipment, so
that was incredibly advantageous.

It wasn't our modern camera.

It was an old Mitchell
camera from the early '60s.

A Mitchell camera... People today
would be amazed to see this thing.

This is the kind of camera
that Hitchcock shot on.

I mean, it was as big as a
trunk, a big heavy trunk.

It wasn't just camera equipment,
he had lighting equipment and everything.

It was like a... One-stop
rental house to hire him.

So that's one of the reasons,
perhaps the main reason, why we hired him.

Being a veteran, working with a bunch of
young kids who are pretty much green,

he was kind of harassable
and a little bit grumpy.

He was a talented guy. He
had not shot a lot of things.

He'd shot some commercials,
but he hadn't shot a lot of things.

But he had gaffed a lot of things, and
had been an electrician for a long time.

So he definitely knew
lighting inside and out.

And he had connections
with a lot of the crew

that we brought out to
Georgia to make the movie.

And our sound guy,
Jerry Wolfe, sound recordist,

also came from Los Angeles, and
he was a great guy to work with.

He had done many,
many independent films,

and he actually was a still photographer
on many independent films.

It was great hearing his stories
throughout the production.

I don't remember the
first reading of the script.

I read it so many times.

I don't remember my first
reading or reaction to it.

But what I do know is that
I looked at it and thought,

"Boy, if we get to do this, this is
the kind of thing that I want to do."

This is everything.

It's blood, gore,
guts. It's fantasy.

It's all these different effects-orientated
kind of things in here,

and they're going to let
me be in charge of it,

and we're going to go shoot for
a month in Georgia, and all that.

I'm like, "This is what I
got into this industry for."

My assistant director,
quite frankly, I don't know

if I could have survived the
movie in some level without him,

was a guy named Mark
Hannah who I'd grown up with

and made Super 8 films with,
along with Allen Posten.

There was a whole little group of us
from Dalton, Georgia, growing up,

making Super 8 movies in the
backyard and running around town.

The three of us growing up,
making Super 8 movies,

and this is a very proud moment that Jeff
is getting to make his first feature film,

and Mark and I are
there to help him.

Doing a feature like this
was all our dreams.

Of course, Allen and I did
our own several years later

but the idea to come here where
we had learned filmmaking,

loved filmmaking, gone to the
movies, it was really neat.

It was a dream come true.

And having Mike Malone there and
my brother, it made it seem like,

on some level, this was just an
extension of a Super 8 filmmaking.

I don't know that they really had a
place for me or a job for me to do.

So Mark Hannah basically told me,
"Okay, you're the transportation captain.”

And I'm like, "Great."

Had no idea. No idea whatsoever

what a transportation captain
did or anything like that.

Mike Malone on this movie, for me

it was great to have him
there as a sounding board,

it was great to have
him there as a friend,

and it was great to have
him there as a fellow artist.

I was working and
living in New York City.

I had gone to Syracuse.

I was working in the fashion industry,
and I really thought my career was over.

I had gone to school to major in set
design and wanted to do theater and film.

They showed up and said, "We want
you to come to Dalton, Georgia,"

"and do this film,"
and I was just blown away.

It was everybody's
first job, pretty much.

I'm credited with Allen
Posten on this project,

and it was great to have
someone like him to work with

because he was able to
build all these great sets

and really make a
lot of things happen.

She did basically the wardrobe
and all the costumes for the film,

and I was doing the sets.

There were times where
she did help out on the set.

She designed some of the sets.

That's such a big project, it was good to
have someone to do that, to work with.

I had to do a Civil War,
1930s carnival, 1950s scene and a 1970s.

My crew was a bunch of high
school kids that worked for free.

We were reading this, we knew
we were doing period stuff,

but suddenly it occurred to us that
we'd only prepared the budget

for art direction and set dressing
and wardrobe for about 200 bucks.

The beauty of low budget filmmaking,
if there's no release date or anything,

you have time in prep to gather certain
props together, art department things.

And my brother Bill would have more flights
of fancy, "Let's say, what about this?"

"This and this would be possible."

And make you think bigger.

He would make a deal with the
vendors, the hardware stores,

everybody in the town, and
he got everything for free.

Period props and set pieces were plentiful
and loaned to us by friendly farmers,

the local college, thrift stores,
the crew and their families.

When you do movies like this,
you have to have somebody

who's going to be in there to really try
and hustle all these things together.

And Bill not only did it,
he also loved doing it.

But it could have never been done without
Jeanne Burr and William Burr, the father.

Our whole production office...

There was Jeff's house,
and behind Jeff's house

they had a little pool house,
but without the pool.

The little other house was
like the production office.

So Jeff had people coming left and
right from L.A., Tennessee, Atlanta.

I really didn't realize having
all those people in my house

was going to be that difficult.

It was so low-budget, it'd be
like "Yours, Mine and Ours".

He'd hand them a pillow and say,

"Go find a room in the house,
and you can sleep there."

So the whole house was taken over
by everybody making this movie.

They were totally
involved with the film.

Totally supportive, so
supportive of Jeff and Bill,

really wanted to see that they were
able to make their dream come true.

I remember telling
Mom and Dad, both,

"It's going to be something that
you will love, you will hate,"

"but you will talk about it for the
rest of your life on some level."

And that's exactly
what happened.

We were all involved in doing
something we really believed in.

There was no completion bond.

There was no guarantee that
the film would be finished,

much less released,
much less, so...

So all of that was an incredible
pressure on our shoulders

that we willingly
and joyfully took on.

- To me, I mean, I grew up in Dalton.
- Yeah.

And Mike pretty much grew up in
Dalton, and my brother, as well.

It is, to me, it's easier to
do a film of this type here,

in this area, because
of the cooperation.

Perhaps a slightly unbilled
character in the whole film

is Dalton and the surroundings.

Beautiful countryside, lakes, swamps.

It was just a perfect place
to shoot a horror movie.

And that was one of the main
things that we did discuss.

We all discussed that every story
kind of had its own visual personality.

And he was able to do that.

The town of Dalton was
amazingly cooperative.

So a lot of stuff was
open to us that...

You certainly couldn't have gotten that
kind of cooperation in Los Angeles

or in New York City, some of the
more traditional filmmaking centers.

With a regular film,
you're going to go in,

and you kind of schedule
all your exterior days,

and then your exterior nights,
and then your interiors.

And if it rains early on,
you can move to an interior set.

You got coverage.

Your actors are kind of there for
the run of the show, and all that.

But with an anthology film, we were
basically shooting four short films,

one each week, for four weeks
in a row, using the same crew.

That's the best
way to describe it.

It wasn't really designed as
a smart logistic location,

"Oh, we base here,
and then we'll shoot around,”

"as much stuff as we
can around there."

There was a lot of company moves and
a lot of one-day locations in the movie.

Almost everyone had interiors and
exteriors day and night within that week,

but then you have to be able to
turn around with your crew time.

So, if you're finishing
one week on nights,

you can't start the next week shoot, which
is a different story, on the mornings.

So it'd become this real puzzle of
trying to put everything together.

The swamp episode was always
going to be the first episode shot

because it was probably the
logistically simplest episode.

So we did do ourselves
a favor by starting small.

The first thing we shot should've
been the last thing, and the last thing

probably should've been,
schedule-wise, the first thing.

The first thing we shot was indoor set
which should have been rain cover set.

So we started shooting the swamp episode
in the warehouse of World Carpets,

and we shot for two
days on the set.

It was built inside
a carpet warehouse.

Two, three floors up, you kind of
had to drive up this concrete ramp,

if you wanted to get a vehicle
up there or something,

or bring a pickup
truck to bring stuff.

We found wood somewhere in a field
from a shack that did burn down.

We loaded it up on a truck,
took it to this carpet mill,

put it in an elevator, put it on the
eighth floor and built the shack.

And we're building
these sets like a house.

Back then we didn't know how to
build a wall that could fly very easily.

We built it with two-by-fours and
plywood, so they were pretty sturdy.

We had a lot of tattered pieces
in the cabin, in the swamp.

That set in particular was
really beautiful, and I loved it.

I know he was very hands-on and
really created that beautiful set.

When I first walked
on the set, I'm like,

"They've got a movie
set in a carpet factory?"

I thought, "What kind
of movie I'm on here?"

At first I thought,
"Is this a porn movie?"

Watching the tractors and stuff
going up and down, and everything.

Hauling all these
big things and stuff,

and having to be careful not
to get skewered or stabbed

by one of those things that
they carried the carpet rolls on.

Coming to and from set,
it was interesting.

I think Jeff's little...

I guess, he had a little
Toyota at the time.

Actually got hit by a...

They call them pole hysters
because it got a big pole

that goes in the
middle of the carpet.

And it hit his car and just peeled it
open like a tuna fish can or something.

It was sad and funny at the
same time, but mainly funny.

Working with Terry Kiser and
Harry Caesar, the two of them,

it was just joyful.
It really was.

They were both total professionals
and just really got into the material,

and deepened it, quite frankly.

I think they deepened
the material.

Do you realize what
you got, old man?

You got the key to life!

Eternal life!

Terry Kiser at that time,
and I've seen him since,

a very warm, outgoing guy, but at
that time he was kind of intense.

It was a little... I didn't try and pal
it up with him or buddy-buddy.

He really seemed to be
concentrating on the part

and wanting to do
something really good.

And just as a filmmaker,
I can't thank them enough

for taking a chance being in this
movie with a first-time director

and making that first-time
director feel very at home.

So, about midway through that first
day I really did feel at home, directing.

It was long hours.

Jeff was trying to make
his day and all that.

Next day we'd come back.

Picked up a little easier.

We thought, "Oh, good, we'll go in
and get out of here at a normal time."

And then, when we finished with all the
main actors and everything, Jeff as...

I guess, to this day, he wants
to shoot every single shot.

He wants to direct everything
that goes in the movie.

So we spent another two,
maybe three hours

shooting close-ups and cutaways of the
set, for the reaction shots and all that.

That's something that could've
been shot some other time

by some other people somewhere.

Well, here we are.

This is the swamp, and this
was our first day on location.

Which really wasn't a swamp.

It was more like a large pond
that had decaying trees in it.

Really a big flooded place.

There's a spring there, very deep
spring, deep enough to scuba dive in.

The Indians used to
camp out there and stuff.

It looked really cool.

We have all the the rotting, dying,
kind of Southern Gothic trees.

Being the transportation
captain, I was responsible

for finding a spot to
put all the trucks.

And not having any experience in that
I didn't know where to put the trucks.

So we start driving trucks in,
and I'm waving people over,

and then, all of a sudden, the grip
truck pulls onto a piece of land,

and then, all of a sudden,
it just starts leaning.

So all day, we're worried about the
truck falling over, and, of course,

I'm worried about safety, insurance, can
we actually get the gear off and stuff?

Actually, my first official act
as a motion picture producer

was calling the wreckers to get
the grip trucks out of the mud.

We had to get two tow trucks.

One to come over on the side of the
top of the thing and pull it straight,

and then another to pull it
out, back onto solid ground.

That was my major
F-up on the film.

From that time on, maybe,
I figured out, "Hey, you know what?"

"There'll be problems on this
movie but we'll get through them."

Because in a different, parallel
universe maybe that grip truck

would have gone into the swamp and
rendered a lot of the equipment useless,

and that gave us a whole
new set of problems.

So we were lucky that
that didn't happen,

and on some level that luck continued
through the making of the movie.

Some of the best stuff from
the movie was shot here.

Really spooky stuff with the
dream sequence with Terry Kiser,

and also a duel to the death between
Harry Caesar and Terry Kiser's character

that takes place on a boat, where
Harry Caesar got the worst of it

at that moment,
but he came back.

Well, the night before we were to shoot
the swamp demons dream sequence,

where Terry Kiser's
boat gets all busted up,

TW and I took the newly
crafted break-away boat

out onto the swamp
for its maiden voyage.

It was beautiful.

Above us, a sky full of stars.

Around us, the chorus
of unseen swamp life.

The midnight-black
water beneath.

And there was nobody
around for miles.

Under the influence of some
powerfully locally grown herb.

Transcendentally
beautiful night.

Just the best.

We did a poor man's
water housing.

We just got an aquarium and
stuck the camera in there,

and just kind of dipped it
right below the water level.

So you're getting that cool underwater
kind of look without spending,

whatever it is,
$235 a day on a water housing.

We went to the department store
and bought a $30 aquarium.

So I ended up walking...

Swimming, walking, whatever, out in
the swamp to shoot the aquarium shots,

and when I got out
of there, there was...

I wasn't really worried
about snakes so much,

but when I got out of there, man, I
was covered, covered in leeches.

There was... Tons of leaches.

We were wading
around in the swamps.

Gee, were poisonous
snakes an issue? Yes.

We didn't see or kill any,
but they were there the whole time.

A lot of people that did
come from Los Angeles

were not so prepared to
deal with the humidity.

There was a lot of grumbling
about how hot it was etc.,

which you can't do
anything about.

The DP was an older guy, and this guy has
been argumentative with Jeff every shot.

Jeff's like, "I want to do this,
I want to do this."

The guy's like, "I don't
think we can do that."

I was standing, like, right...

Closer than I am to the camera.

Jeff tells the guy he
wants a certain setup,

he wants a certain
shot, a certain lens.

The guy's like, "Well, why
do you want to do that?"

Jeff just stops and
goes, "Come here."

They went for a walk
about 15 feet away.

I heard Jeff say, "Look, you're
director of photography on this film."

"I'm the director."

"So do what the
fuck I say, okay?"

That was it.

We never had a
problem after that.

The next segment we shot
was at Terry Kiser's hideout,

his little mobile home where his
sweetie pie had double-crossed him.

I think Allen Posten
had found the trailer,

and then he and Cindy Charette had gone
out and dressed it out and whatever.

We'd found a hot rod, 1950s hot rod that
fit the period, but was a real hot rod.

They're not that hard
to find around here.

For the swamp scene for
Terry Kiser and his funky trailer,

and all that, he's in
this old vintage shirt.

I found this beautiful vintage shirt in a
thrift store, and we had one of those.

One of those, which is unheard of.

You just... It's like, you never
only have one shirt of...

One for an actor, or one
dress of something.

So things like that
were so funny.

That whole summer I was
running to get birthday gifts

because every week
somebody had a birthday.

So we devised a plan that everybody
would get about the same thing.

A beach towel.

Usually it said, "Dalton, Georgia" on it,
if we could get that put on.

And we did birthday cakes.

I can remember, with Terry Kiser,
his was, I think, among the first,

and I brought out the cake, and we all
sang to Terry, and he was overwhelmed.

He just couldn't believe that
we would do such a nice thing.

So we wrapped up the swamp episode shooting
an exterior night with the voodoo ceremony.

Ever since shooting that
night, the way Harry said it,

and just the terminology in general,
the "Sharoom zik lik naheem"

has been embedded in my
head since the summer of 1985.

We finished on a night.

It was a hot night.
It was a buggy night.

It was a night we were glad to be done
with, and everybody got a day off.

But that was a small hill to climb, and
there was a much bigger hill to climb

in the next episode, because
it was the carnival episode

which was set in the 1930s
and had a lot of extras.

In my inexperienced mindset,
a huge logistics.

On the day off, to introduce the
new cast members to the crew

and the people helping
out in the movie,

somebody that worked there within
the Little Theater would throw a party.

We'd have a
"Welcome to Dalton" party,

and then a "Welcome to the
night before the first shoot" party.

They were like banquets.

This is the Prater's Mill,
which predates the Civil War.

It's antebellum,
and it's still here, historical site.

I think they actually had a
cavalry skirmish around here.

This was the site for the glass-eater
segment for the carnival sequence.

They have fairs there a
couple of times a year.

They've some performance spaces,
so there was many stuff already there.

We didn't have to build
a lot of the structure.

So it was mainly getting in
and dressing them, and...

We found a guy in Chattanooga
who used to run a carnival.

I forget how we found him, but...
A guy named Bud Hammontree.

He brought down, pretty much
for free because he was retired

and just thought it'd
be a fun thing to do,

so he brought down a ride that
we put on the far end here,

and then we built the
carnival around that.

So we didn't have to
build very much stuff.

Much of it was just brought.

Cindy Charette was
our art director.

I walked onto that carnival set.

She really built a midway.
It was fantastic.

I hand-painted all the banners,
all the carnival banners myself.

And remember, it's a summer.
So it's humid and there's lots of bugs,

and I was attacked by mosquitoes,
and it was just miserable.

I worked on "Rat in the hole"

which I didn't know was going
to be shown right up front.

If I had known that, I would
probably put more detail to it.

And there was a hot dog banner.

I remember working on that one.

Freak show paintings, facades
of old carnival attractions,

like The Palace of a Thousand
Pleasures, House of Pain.

We had a phrenology booth.

Oh, on one of the banners, I had a
portrait of Jeff himself, as a baby,

and it was called Freddie,
The Frog Baby,

and I used his face in that,
and I still have that.

But everything else, if you really look,
it wasn't carnival stuff.

It was more... We came
up with game booths,

and we came up with
a couple of fire acts,

whatever. Anything we could do cheaply.

So set in the 1930s,
we've got new actors,

we've got new sets,
we've got new locations.

We jumped in it with a
crew that had finished

a tough swampy week
the week before.

Gentlemen.

Is this an open game?

It isn't.

We started with some
of the carnival stuff,

some of the stuff in the tent
and the thing in the morning.

Some things were
just some of the leads,

so we could really
focus on the actors.

Angelo was just a joy to
work with, to have around.

He was just a fascinating guy and
had been through so much in his life.

The thing with Angie
as a small person is...

A little person on set,
you've got to help him.

Sometimes you got to lift him onto
the set or the chair or something.

So you just got to help him
some, and that's okay.

But that gives you a
chance to interact with him

and just get to spend some
good time around him.

He was way up there in years,
and I think we exhausted him.

We exhausted ourselves,
but Angelo was a trooper, he was great.

No, you couldn't be more wrong.

Everything that happens in
this carnival is my business.

And Rosalind Cash was just
a wonder to work with too.

She was... The racehorse analogy.

She was definitely a
high-strung racehorse

that, if with the right
jockeying, could just...

Could be a winner every time.

I had never worked with a
kind of a method actor before,

and Rosalind Cash
was a method actor.

She kind of built her character,
and she'd work into it.

She'd talk, and then
she'd work some more.

And Jeff would have private
conversations on set.

Would pull them away,
would take a moment.

Actors want attention,
that's all they want.

They want to hear, who am [?

What's my part?

What do you want from me?

The actors need a lot,
and Jeff would give that to them.

That's where you beat
your wife to death.

I told you how that happened.

The judge doesn't care
what you look like, No Face!

We had a great makeup
effects crew, Rob Burman

and his younger brother
Barney Burman who actually...

Barney plays No Face
in the carnival episode.

There was a picture in
Famous Monsters of Filmland

from a science fiction TV series,
I believe, called "Way Out".

And Dick Smith had done a
makeup of a guy who's literally...

Half of his face was
completely blank.

Not even the indentation
of a skull, and I always...

I'd see that picture,
and it always freaked me out.

So that was my homage,
inspiration, rip off, whatever.

We did the little mechanical
eye on the guy's chest

that moves around and looks
around, and things like that.

Really tough to do.

I think we ended up
trimming his chest hair off

and reapplying it over
the top of the prosthetic.

He swore at us for having
a bald spot after that,

but hey, it's suffering
for your art, right?

After that, we did the
big midway scene.

This was our biggest
scene as far as extras.

We're having an open casting
call for every resident.

We want everybody to
come down and audition

for the other extra parts,
for a carnival scene.

We need a lot of extras for that,
and these are featured extras

because in the carnival midway
they're going to be seen a great deal.

We put out a call on the radio station
for extras to come in period costume,

and we had hundreds of people
show up in period costume.

The antique car club came and
brought probably 30 antique cars,

knowing their cars were
going to be featured.

Everybody thought they were going to get
a close up, and everybody was excited

to meet Vincent Price who of
course had not been signed yet.

Every person who was there as a
barker or running one of the stands

on the midway or something,
it was a friend of the Burrs,

and Bill orchestrated
that so completely.

When a movie's being made, in the beginning
there's all that enthusiasm in the world,

but you always hear
people later saying,

"I didn't realize it was going
to take this much time."

"I didn't realize we were going to
have to come back again and again,"

"till they got that scene right."

Marker.

- And background action!
- Action!

Well, me and Melinda
was walking down.

We did that I don't
know how many times.

Walking back and forth,
walking back and forth.

Then the other thing to save
money, we're shooting short ends,

which means... Some other
movie that has a big budget

or a decent budget is shooting, and
when they get close to the end,

they don't want to roll out on a take,
so they take that short end.

So it may be 100 feet,
it may be 300 feet.

So every couple of minutes
you have to reload the camera.

Instead of getting 10 minutes, you're
getting a minute and a half or something.

So it's very frustrating like that,
just production-wise,

that's eating into your setups.

And many times they were
loading in the camera equipment

as we were hanging
the last curtain,

but then we had to go right
away to the next location.

There was so much stuff, and there's
a lot of stuff that was dropped,

that we couldn't shoot because of time.

It was two o'clock in the morning,
and we had to have a second meal.

Now, you're in North Georgia.

Where are you going to
get food for a crew of 50?

So we had to drive almost to
Chattanooga to Krystal Burgers.

It's a Southern chain,
it's like White Castle.

Two o'clock in the morning, we
drive up to the drive-thru, and...

"Yes, can we help you?
Welcome to Krystal's."

"What you think, Darin? How
many do you think we need?”

"I don't know. We got a crew of 50.
And actors and stuff."

"Okay, yeah. We want
300 cheeseburgers.”

"Are you serious?"

"I am serious."

When we were filming the
actual glass-eater act,

that was set up at the mill also,
at the Prater's Mill,

and we'd boxed in and made this little
set out of an existing building there.

I remember hating
it at that point.

That was a low point because a lot of
people that helped were volunteers,

and if they didn't show up, you
still had to get the work done.

So it came down to a handful
of people that had to do it.

4:00 AM you start losing people.
They just start wandering away.

So the crowd got
smaller and smaller,

so they had to get tighter
and tighter on the shots.

I'm in the carnival sequence

giving an astoundingly bad
performance as an audience member.

When we shot the scene,
I had a close-up,

but what was so strange is you had to
remember what you was looking at.

Because all you was
looking at was the camera

but you had to remember
that what he was doing,

and you had to get this
expression on your face.

So that was strange.

On the glass-eating scene, what was
he actually eating? What was he...

Actually, it was some of the...
For the razor blade, the inserts,

the closeups, that we shot
here, it was our stunt man.

He actually ate...
He knew how to do it.

He actually ate a razor.

And some of the glass? I remember
he ate... The light bulb glass?

No, the razor blade, razor blade.
The glass was just candy glass.

This is the actual box, which he used to...
Crushed glass, and he had some razorblades.

Speaking of which, this is an actual
razor blade that was used in the movie.

I've never done this before.

Is it supposed to hurt?

We shot the glass-eater
sequence two times.

Did this beautiful makeup with the
glass sticking out of his fingers,

and that bolts, and things like that,
and walked out on the set,

and showed Jeff and said,
"Jeff, what do you think?"

And he goes,
"Well, that looks really great."

"Isn't it the other hand?"

I just went nuts.

Thank God, they can flip the
negative, so it's just an insert.

It just had to look like the
other hand, but... Oh.

There were two days in a row, I think,
that the crew worked very long hours.

That's what's to be expected
with this kind of movie.

I maybe didn't say it like that,
but that's kind of the impression,

I think, that they got from me.

We finished up shooting the carnival
sequence in the old Hotel Dalton.

It had been a hotel
for years and years

and would have been a nice hotel
back, I guess, in the '30s or '40s.

I'm not even exactly
sure when they built it.

Didi Lanier did a heroic...

She was the Fay Wray award for screaming
the most loudest and most prolonged,

and Jeff just kept dragging it out
of her until her voice is gone,

I guess, and the
screaming and stuff.

We were off camera with, embarrassingly
enough, just, basically, a Hudson sprayer.

A garden sprayer pumped up with thin
blood that we sprayed up against the walls.

You can kind of tell in some
of them where you see

a trail of blood go across
the wall or whatever.

He probably used the
first take but he kept on

for endless takes of her screaming
and the blood spattering and all that.

All of a sudden the lights kind of went
off, and I'm told the generator went down.

I was like, "Well, that's weird.
It was going fine a minute ago."

So I run downstairs, and I go to the
genny operator who was Keith Crofford,

famous for... One of the head
muckety-mucks at Adult Swim

on Cartoon Network now, but at that
time he was a lowly generator operator

out of the truck, making sure
that electricity was flowing.

I go, "Keith, what's going on?"

And he goes, "Eh,
the genny broke."

I go, "What do you mean it's broke?
Do we need to order parts and stuff?”

"No, no. It'll be okay
in the morning."

I go, "Well, can we fix it now?"
And he goes, "No, it's broken for now."

If you want to call it a crew mutiny,
you can call it a crew mutiny.

If you want to call
it dissatisfaction,

maybe I'd prefer that,
they were dissatisfied.

They made it known they were
dissatisfied, and they were absolutely

frigging right to make it
known they were dissatisfied.

I was pissed off at the time,
but any idiot would know that,

of course, they're going
to be dissatisfied.

The crew was tired, and this was their
way of telling the madman, Jeff Burr,

four stories up, getting some chick
to scream that you could hear

three blocks away, to
stop already, will ya?

Quite frankly, the long hours
were partly due to my,

not all, but partly, due
to my inexperience.

The crew was very supportive
of me in many, many ways.

I cannot underestimate their
contribution at all, and as I said,

they taught me a lot on
that particular episode,

on how to really comport
myself on a professional set.

I think the crew, they got some rest
between the second and third episodes.

The third episode, the
one with Clu Gulager,

was not as logistically complicated,
certainly, as the carnival sequence.

I think they had not lost their
desire to do a good job,

but there was a certain
amount of just being tired,

"What do you want?
Okay, let's do it."

So we went into that third
episode limping a little bit,

but we were still able
to play the game.

Clu and Miriam, when they showed up, they
were very enthusiastic about the project,

and I think that's one of the
reasons I like Clu so much.

I mean, he just jumped in with
both feet, and he had ideas.

Clu was really conscientious about how he
wanted this character to live and breathe.

The job Clu Gulager did on
"From a Whisper to a Scream" was amazing.

He was playing an extremely quirky,
strange, twisted and freakish character.

Somebody who's involved in incest,
someone who's involved in necrophilia,

someone who's involved in murder.

And yet he brings a humanity to it, and
you're actually sympathetic to him.

To me, that episode was always...
It was a Tennessee Williams drama

with a little comedy, just pulling the
curtain back on this very strange person.

You know there are people
out there that, certainly,

in any Southern city of any
size and not just Southern city,

that have unusual lives
that you go, "My God!"

To me, that's what the
episode was about.

The other star of that segment was
Megan McFarland from Atlanta.

Even at that time she was very
much an Atlanta theater acting star.

Primarily it took place
in one main location,

and then a few little
sequences out of that...

But the locations for that episode
were very close together.

The shots at the loading dock,
that was actually World Carpets which...

One of the people there was an investor,
and also that's where the cabin set,

the interior set had been built
for the swamp sequence.

So we had gone back there to shoot
this exterior set on the outside.

Craig Greene, the director of photography,
had fallen off the loading dock in a scene.

Went down, caught his ribs
on the top of the loading dock,

which was a concrete
loading dock.

I think Scott Kaye filled in for him
to shoot there the rest of that day.

Well, you would think that would
make things tougher for us,

but it actually made things easier
because they put him on heavy codeine,

and after that he was in a great
mood for the rest of the shoot.

Aren't you gonna wash my back?

And this is the actual trick
icepick which Clu Gulager used

to stab Miriam in the back with, and
there's kind of a strange story on that.

He refused to go on the set
until this icepick was fixed

because he was worried about
it pricking his wife's back.

So what I did is, I took a strip of
tape, rolled it up in a little ball

and then took another little
piece of tape around it.

We had some colored hairspray.

Luckily we had that, and it just so
happened to be silver, like the blade here.

I took it, sprayed it silver,
let it dry a little quick,

took it out there and
demonstrated it for them.

Then Clu took it and experimented
with it. And he said, "Okay."

When we were making the movie,

there was a certain part of me
being shocked by the material.

There was a lot of talk about how
frightening would this movie be,

because word was beginning to get out
that Jeff liked to make horror movies.

Everybody was wondering what
this movie was going to be rated.

We were shooting the
scene in the restaurant

which is one of the
fantasy sequences.

A lot of the people at the
restaurant thought it was just

a restaurant scene, and at
certain point Megan starts,

having blood running all out
of her mouth and they're like,

"What? What kind
of movie is this?"

It's one of those things where we
had about two hours, and they said,

"Well, we want to do something in this
double wake-up scene. What can we do?"

I said, "Well, I know I can do a
zombie in that amount of time."

They said, "Great, sounds
wonderful. Let's do it."

So about, I don't know, 20 minutes
before they were set to roll camera

I was standing around with
her dressed as a zombie.

To me it looks like a woman
who's made of pizza,

and you picked all the
pepperonis off of it.

Stanley.

You wanted me, Stanley.

I had to sing in it,
and I'm not a singer.

I murdered a woman in the car.

Strangled her to death.

Then I turned to the
camera, in the car,

out the window and sang
a little song about it.

Well, we didn't have a song.

Miriam wrote it the night.

She's a musician
as well as an actor.

She wrote the song.

I learned it very quickly,
and we did it the next night.

It had no place in the film.

I don't know why we
did it, but Jeff left it in.

He thought it was quirky enough
to leave in this quirky film.

We had the episode where
Clu Gulager commits an act of necrophilia.

He's murdered a woman who he
was in love with and obsessed with,

and her body is lying in
state, in the funeral home,

and we shot it in a
real funeral home.

Then again, you're in a small
town, you know everybody.

You don't have any
money for sets.

So you need a meat locker, you cough up
meat locker place, you get a meat locker.

You need a funeral home, you
cough up the funeral home place.

But we had to be very careful
and tell everybody to be quiet

because we didn't want the
owners of the place to know

that we were shooting a corpse getting
penetrated in their funeral home.

And then, of course, the topper to the
whole working at the funeral home at night

on a monster movie thing is, it
came a huge summer storm here.

Frankenstein laboratory kind of thunder,
and lightning, and stuff. So that was neat.

Okay, here we are. We're
in front of the house...

We're in back of.

Where Clu Gulager
and Miriam resided.

Now it's a lawyer's office, but before it
was a private residence of Emily Davies.

They asked Emily, and she, being
the theater person, she agreed.

And I thought, "Well, there it
goes, the end of a friendship."

That was one of the episodes that had
a lot of makeup effects towards the end

with the baby born
of necrophilia.

In the movie she's supposed to
have a baby while she's buried,

and the baby is supposed to come up
from the grave and terrorize everybody.

I wanted it to look fresh and
kind of babylike on one side,

and then mutant and
demon on the other.

It ended up being a little more mutant
and demon than fresh baby, but...

It was a foam latex puppet with fiberglass
understructure and a lot of brass parts,

cable operated, so that, when
it would move in the waist,

its arms would
move and all of that.

We used very fine cable wires.

In the beginning, the
baby was very animated.

It could move its head, it could
do... Move its hands, it was like...

Moving its face, kind
like a Chucky baby.

And then the more they used it, the
more it kind of stopped working.

You got a special
effect, prop like that,

you want to shoot the closeup
first, not the wide shot.

We shot the wide shot first, and when they
forced it up through the dirt and stuff,

I guess, it damaged
the cables a little bit.

So by the time the baby... They did the
shot of the baby coming up from the grave.

All they could really get was the hand
popping up and one finger moving.

Like, one finger that still
worked, so... Anyway.

If I do that for Allen, to this day he'll
know exactly what we're talking about.

It was awful.

None of the cables held the way they
were supposed to, and everything.

So what you see in the film is
sort of a jiggling, wobbling thing.

- Daddy! Daddy!
- Oh, no!

I was always happy with the
baby at the top of the stairs.

You could definitely see a little
shlong and the light hitting it.

It just killed me.

The offspring sliding down the
stairwell was kind of a poor man's rig

with just, basically, a board, and Craig
Greene and somebody else sliding down

with some sandbags and a camera
to get that final little push-in.

A lot of folks have asked me
what happened to the baby.

You know we had a fight
at the bottom of the stairs.

What happened to that baby?

I ate it.

So we didn't really shoot the
effects as effectively as we could,

because the actual baby that
Burman designed was pretty cool.

There was a really cool stuff
that they had done with it.

The house, although it
was a private residence,

was treated as a set
that had been built.

There were no holds barred
on what they did to the house.

I guess part of it
was Jeff's vision,

thinking that things could
always be put right afterwards.

They cleaned it up afterwards
and took care of all the mess.

I don't know of anybody else
that would have allowed

their kitchen to be just
littered with garbage.

But Clu and Miriam brought so much energy
and so much commitment to the roles,

that I think the crew...
It elevated the crew.

It elevated everyone's game.

So we finished that episode, and then a
force of nature arrives in Dalton, Georgia.

Cameron Mitchell.

And for whatever reason, Cameron was
the actor, of all the actors that came,

he was the one that was
recognized totally in Dalton.

People would come up to
him and talk to him and...

We're walking along.

All of a sudden Cameron
looks over to this guy,

and he goes,
"Jesus Christ, you're fat."

And the guy was.
The guy was easily 300 pounds.

The guy loved it because Cameron
Mitchell, a movie star, had noticed him.

I mainly knew him
from his TV work.

"High Chaparral”.

Although he'd been
in a lot of movies...

I didn't think he was
one of those guys that...

He's got an open week or two, and they got
a few thousand dollars to fly him to Italy.

He's gone, so...

Wonderful casting
to have him in there.

The right guy for the right
part, but also just a great...

I loved the way he worked.

He was one of those classic

"always take the work seriously,
but never himself seriously."

The first night he showed up on the set,
we were at the house that we filmed

which is an actual,
historical real site.

The Confederates used it as
their headquarters for a while.

There was a battle right there in the area,
literally, in the front yard of that house.

And then the Yankees
came through.

I think Sherman even used it for
his headquarters for a day or two.

We talked about the horror of General
Sherman's march through Georgia,

because he... Before Hitler,
he killed every man, woman, child,

burned every blade of grass and corn, and
the things that you saw in that sequence,

in that particular story,
that happened to be true.

And his little
bunch of soldiers.

There was C.. Cox, who was a student
in Clu's acting class where I'd studied,

and Tim Wingard was in Clu's class
as well, and then Bill Edwards,

who I'd gone to school with at USC, and
I thought he always had a great look.

He is one of these guys that... He
acts, but he also does other things,

and he doesn't really pursue
the acting as much as he could.

- We couldn't afford 60,000 troops.
- No.

So I played a Sergeant, the head of a
platoon, and I was the mean son of a bitch.

Yeah.

I was really representing the
image of General Sherman.

One of the things that stood
out on the Civil War segment,

that I thought was really cool, I guess,
you see all these Hollywood movies,

and they just don't do it, but...
The aging on the uniforms.

I'd never really seen
stuff taken to that limit.

I first walk in, and they're
just rags, and they're filthy,

and I'm like, "Wait, this
is... These are soldiers."

"They're supposed to be..."

And then it was like,
"No, it's the end of the war."

"These are guys in the
Western theater of the war."

"They've been bombers for
Sherman or whatever."

The ladies who made the Civil War outfits
were all the "little old lady" town ladies

who were in their sixties and seventies,
and they hand-sewed the Civil War outfits

which I'll never
forget in my life.

So, out here, and it
was all like this high,

and it was that late
sunset-y kind of stuff.

Yeah, really pretty stuff.

But we got ready to do my stunt.

I'm sprinting across
as hard as I can.

Jeff yells, "Pow!"

And I take this incredible fall
where I made it look like I got shot

in the shoulder,
and I flip, and I tumble.

There's no stunt
pads or anything.

I mean, I crashed hard.

I kind of hurt my
shoulder and stuff.

Turns out they had the cameras set
at the wrong speed or something.

It was set 12 frames a second
or something like that.

So it's like, "Ah, we
got to do that again."

Your second stunt fall is never
as good as your first one.

Jeff wanted a sign that
said "Welcome to Oldfield",

and he wanted it like a sign they
would have made back then.

So we got a couple of logs or
branches, and we got a piece of wood,

and we painted "Oldfield" on it.

"Oldfield, 25 miles",
and did the arrow thing.

I remember one day they
were filming in a field.

We came up, and we said,
"Jeff, where do you want the sign?"

"Where do you want us to put it?"

And he is in the middle of something,
and he's like, "Oh, I don't know."

"I really don't
know. Just put it..."

"Lean it up against that wagon for
now, and when we get ready to film,"

"we'll put it wherever
we want to put it."

If you look at the movie, that's
exactly where it ended up.

They never moved it. It just
stayed there, and I guess...

I don't know whether
they forgot about it or...

But it worked, I guess.

Cameron Mitchell came
to me, and he said,

"I've got to leave,
go back to L.A."

Because he was good
friends with Spelling.

Spelling used him all the time, and he...
So he had to go back for an audition.

And we thought he was
going to make it big again.

The second coming of...

Whatever. But that...

But anyway, we let him leave, and I
look back on it now because even...

I mean, the idea that he could have just
stayed there and never come back.

So we let him go with the
promise that he would come back

in 24 hours, and
he did come back.

He didn't abandon us, and everything was
fine but it could have been a disaster.

The other thing that was very
much on our minds was,

this had a large
cast of kids in it,

and this was shortly after
the "Twilight Zone" tragedy.

It happened with Vic Morrow
and the kids killed on that set.

So all that was kind of resting
on my shoulders as far as,

"What are the laws with
working with the kids?"

"What are the hours
we can use them?"

Working with the kids
was very interesting

because they all had different
degrees of experience.

Tommy Nowell was very experienced for
his age and had been in several TV movies.

He was just a great guy, a very
commanding presence, really, for his age.

Tommy Nowell played Andrew, our
leader, and I do remember him.

He was a great guy, and he was
not only the leader in the movie,

but he was also the leader
of the group of actors

that played the
children in the movie.

Don't try anything
with her, Mr. Gallen.

I warn you.

A kid whose sister was an
actor, David Stynchcombe,

who just was
wonderful to work with.

My audition was for the part
of Ambrose which, actually,

I found out later, had already
been cast to a guy named Sergio,

but I think Jeff and Bill were looking for
who would be good for lesser roles.

And Ashli Bare who
played Amanda.

I don't know her level of experience,
but she was a total pro at a young age.

Just untie me, please?

Well, what about my leg?

I don't get around so easy.

I don't think she
stuck with acting.

I don't think she pursued
it when she got older,

but she was absolutely
terrific to work with as a kid.

I have a prosthetic right
leg, and, of course,

we couldn't show a 20th
century prosthesis in the movie.

So they're like, "Have you
ever walked on crutches?"

Well, I hadn't, but I
told them, "Oh yeah."

"I've walked on
crutches many times."

I thought they were going
to bring me some crutches,

and they actually brought
me two tree limbs.

Their parents were
wonderful too.

They were just very supportive,
because it was kind of a tough...

That part of it... It was kind of
a tough movie thematically.

I hope I was very good too, explaining what
was going on and the context of everything.

You watch the film and
it's a horrific sequence,

but you got to remember,
when you're shooting a movie,

you're not in a room by
yourself with body parts.

You're in a room with some
phony looking, rubber body parts,

with 20 or 30 other people,
all cottoned up and stuff.

I think most of the kids
had a lot of fun on that.

There were some children
that had a hard time

differentiating between
reality and make-believe.

Fortunately, I wasn't one of them,
I knew we were making a movie.

I knew it was all make-believe.

We were just having fun,
creating entertainment,

but there was one boy
that could not stand

Cameron Mitchell's screams
of torment being set on fire,

and Jeff had to get somebody
to put cotton balls in his ears.

We were very, very
protective of those children.

We were very protective
of those children.

They knew they were play-acting,
they knew they were in something.

The kids were happy to be there, they
were having fun just like any other kids,

so that was a very
positive thing.

It wasn't exploitation
at all on our side,

and, as far as the kids were
concerned, it was great.

I mean, they were getting to do
what all the other kids got to do,

so that was terrific.

Yes, we had fun playing "pin the
arm and the leg on the corpse”.

Some kids play
"pin the tail on the donkey",

but I played "pin the arm
and the leg on the corpse”.

We had bones hanging in the tree,
it was a great macabre setting.

But it was hard work, and
Jeff did a hell of a good job.

So we wrapped that episode up,

and we have one half-day of
pickups and other scenes to shoot.

We shot at the Fairgrounds, that
was the last location we had.

It was at the North Georgia Fairgrounds,
and we shot outside a little bit,

in the swamp episode, the
discovery of Jesse's body in a bag.

We shot that there, and we shot the body
blowing up in the carnival episode there.

He's in the hotel room, and the
voodoo priestess is making

all of the metal and glass and things
that he's eaten over the years

erupt out of his body.

So we made a false torso of him that we
could run a sharp edge up underneath,

so that it looked like a razor blade
tracing across his chest and up his leg,

and all of that, for a
quick little insert of that.

And then, all of a sudden,
you see parts of his body,

and almost two-inch holes start
just blowing big chunks out of him.

So we had another insert that was
made out of fiberglass and PVC fittings,

that we put blasting caps inside of
and then put a quarter inch layer of

flesh- and blood-tone gelatin skin over
the top, so it looked like his torso,

beautifully, but it was
made out of gelatin.

As soon as we blew off those caps, it would
blow these big holes through his body

that blew more chunks
of blood and foam.

When the squibs went off and
blew this stuff, and I looked up,

you saw holes in the insulation
on the inside of the ceiling.

It didn't blow all the way through
the roof so that it would leak,

but it did damage to the
building, and I just...

I knew they were going to come
after me for that or, whatever.

That was actually
a really fun night.

It's always fun when you get to
start playing with explosives.

Talk about Sherman
marching through Georgia.

There were people's houses that got messed
up, there were yards that got messed up.

I definitely had some
concerns about,

"Would people in Dalton put up with
another feature film coming into town?"

We trooped back to California
to start post-production.

I hired this editor, Okuwah
Garrett, and we started editing.

We had a few test screenings.

I stupidly invited Forrest.
Ackerman to that screening,

and Forrest. Ackerman
was a legendary figure.

He had a magazine at the time
called Famous Monsters of Filmland.

So the rough-cut
screening goes okay,

the film doesn't break,
all four episodes are shown.

Forrest Ackerman and
his wife just leave.

So we finished the four episodes, got them
down to where we wanted them to be.

So, now it's March of '86.

Now we were addressing
the "connecting device".

Vincent hasn't called us,

"You know what, hey, I think
I've got to do your movie now."

None of that's happened.

The idea was to get a name in it
that would bring some weight to it.

Bring some box office attraction to
it, maybe, but put some weight to it.

To have this...

We had some good
names in the episodes.

We figured, "Okay, we
want a real good name"

"for the 'connecting device'
because it's only going to be,”

"probably, a two- or
three-day shoot."

Something like that.

"Okay, Vince is not going to do it."

"What about Max von Sydow?"

Why him? Why he would be
the perfect historian/librarian

in a small Southern town?

I have no idea, but I had it
in my head. Okay, Max...

I even wrote it down in a
diary "Max von Sydow"

above the title
"From a Whisper to a Scream”.

I call SAG or whatever, "Find out
who Max von Sydow's agent is."”

His agent is a little Austrian
man named Walter Kohner.

Walter Kohner takes my call
and says, "Send me the script."

So, I send him the script.

I get a phone call very,
very soon afterwards,

maybe a day or two later,
which is unusual in Hollywood.

I get a phone call saying, "Come
into my office. I must talk to you."

Great. I wonder what's this.
It's got to be good news.

Walter sits me down in
his office, and, right away,

it's the first thing out of his mouth,
"Max will not do your movie."

I'm like, "You dragged me all the way
here, to your office, to tell me that?"

"You couldn't have told
me that over the phone?"

He goes, "But! I have the
perfect client for you."

I'm all ears, "Who, who?"

"Vincent Price."

"Vincent Price! He would be good!"

Total serendipity or whatever
you want to call it, fate, perhaps.

That's why this whole thing started again,
and Vincent Price was back on the table.

I did not mention to Walter that we
had contacted him much earlier,

and I think, maybe Vincent had
even forgotten it, who knows?

Walter talked to Vincent and said,

"Okay, Vincent wants to see part of
the movie, to see what you shot."

That's a part of it.
We decided, "Okay, great."

He said he didn't have to see the whole
movie but just wanted to see part of it.

The only way to
see it was on film.

We decided, hey, you know what?

We'll show him the swamp
episode in its entirety,

because, for many
reasons, we felt at that time

that was the most, obviously, pretty
looking episode lighting-wise, etc.

It was probably the least objectionable
in terms of gore and thematic material.

So we showed that episode.

Now we're negotiating on money, and we
called Walter to see what was going on,

and Walter said, "I don't
think it's going to work out."

But he kind of left,
again, it was like this...

He left a little bit like, "I don't
think it's going to work out."

So my brother goes, "You
know what, here's an idea."

So my brother had
a great idea which...

It was the same offer, basically, but
it's kind of stated in a different way.

And he said, "Okay."

That's what did it.

Really, it was a combination of just
tenacity on our part and just luck.

I remember Jeff going,
"Oh, I got Vincent Price in."

And we're all, "Vincent Price!"

You couldn't get any
better than Vincent Price

for this movie. So we're
all excited, "Okay, great!"

He had booked a cruise, a month-long
cruise to Aruba and the Lower Caribbean.

One of those combination
"vacation/working vacation"

because he would give lectures
on arts and also soak up the sun.

How did you get in here?

The entire "connecting device" sequence
with Vincent Price and Susan Tyrrell,

and Martine Beswick, and Larry Tierney, was
all shot in the old Hammond lumber yard.

The Hammond lumber yard
was the Roger Corman studio.

We're building these sets, and Cindy
Charette is the production designer

on this part of it, and Allen Posten is
involved with the props and the wardrobe.

I built some sets, and it was very
layered, all this beautiful texture,

and had great painters painting the
wall, so it was like crumbling decay.

And then the set decoration
was full of beautiful antiques

from the Paramount prop house.

Jeff was going, "You know what,
as long as we have Vincent Price,”

"we should go all out. We should
do like an Edgar Allan Poe store."

"The library should be all
boarded up or all bricked up,"

"and the wallpaper
should be peeling off."

"We're gonna put Vincent in a wheelchair,
and we're gonna give him a hook,"

"and we'll put a
patch over his eye."

Courtney and I decided,
"Okay, we're going to amp up his part."

"We're going to make
it something that..."

"Make it more robot-fused,
than how it was on the page."

The set had open windows with
curtains, but we took the curtains down.

We got these fake bricks, and
we bricked up all the windows.

We got the blowtorches
on the wallpaper,

and we burnt off wallpaper,
and dust was everywhere.

In the meantime, Jeff sent the new
version of the script to Vincent Price,

and Jeff's like, "Oh, I know he's
going to like it. He's going to love it."

We would give the pages
to Walter who then, in turn,

would fax them or telex them, at
the time, probably, to the ship.

I would periodically check
in with Walter and say,

"Hey, how is Vincent
responding to the script?"

"Oh, he loves it. He loves it.
Oh, Vincent loves it. Don't worry."

In the meantime we're
prepping the shoot.

Go on.

I get a phone call from Walter,
very panicked phone call saying,

"Vincent will not do your movie now."

"Why? We've already
agreed on everything!"

I don't know if contracts were signed
at that time, I think they were.

Anyway, all of a sudden Walter is
saying, "Vincent will not do your movie."

- What the hell?
- He hates the script.

"What do you mean
he hates the script?"

"You've been telling me
he loves the script."

"I never told you that.
I never told you that.”

I learned many lessons
in that five-minute span,

and 98% of the lessons
are "Don't trust an agent”.

Walter and I finally
negotiated, if you will,

"Okay, Vincent will call you
from the ship and talk to you."

It really boiled down
to Walter saying,

"I'm going to set up a ship-to-shore phone
conversation with Vincent and you,"

"and whatever happens, happens.”

I don't believe you.

I'm in a cubicle at Roger
Corman's studio in Venice.

It's just me and a phone.

I'm just literally waiting for
the ship-to-shore phone call.

I'm just staring at this phone,
sweating. Just staring.

Half of me is going, "Please
don't ring. Please don't ring."

And half of me is going, "Oh, it's
going to ring and I've got to be..."

"I've got to say
something brilliant."

The phone rings.

I can't pick it up at the first...
I just can't pick it up at the first ring.

And it just... My
heart is pounding.

So it rings maybe
three times, I pick it up.

I'm listening, and I just hear
this very, very scratchy,

"Go ahead, please. Go
ahead with your call."

It's Vincent Price.

The next thing I hear it's Vincent
Price's voice going, "It's shit."

"It's shit. I'm not doing
it. It's shit. It's shit."

I was like... Hey, I thought his
vocabulary was a lot better than that.

I mean... But me, I'm going all,
"Motherfucker, I'm doomed."

I hear him out. I don't
interrupt him. I don't do any...

I just listen to him, and
it's listening to him go,

how shitty the script is, "How
dare you rewrite the script?”

"I agreed to do this movie
based on this particular script."

"Why would you even think I
would do that particular script?"

He finally tires himself out
by screaming and cursing,

and I finally am able to say my piece,
which is, "We'll do whatever you want.”

That's the upshot.

You have a lot to
learn, my dear.

They agreed that it
wasn't going to change

and it was going to be the
same way, the first script.

So Vincent Price
agreed to do it.

But then he comes back to us, and he goes,
"Guys, they're going to be here tomorrow."”

"We've got to put it back
to the way it was."

There wasn't really time.

So what we did, we just hung
curtains over the brick windows,

and we tried to fix
some of the wallpaper.

We cleaned up the dust.

If you looked at the
movie, you could...

If you looked really
closely, you could see

how it was deteriorating, and we tried
to make it more livable and more new.

He said, "I want a teleprompter.”

"I'm going to show
up at rehearsal,”

"and if I don't like what I see,
don't expect me to do the movie."

Vincent, when he showed up,
I remember him being very impressed

at the sets because
it was a real thing.

It wasn't like a mumble jungle, "Oh, go
out to Home Depot and get me a desk.”

It looked beautiful, and he felt
like, we were the real things.

I think that was another thing of
what made him come in and do it.

It was a beautiful moment.

He came in and looked,
and saw the teleprompter.

He said, "What is
that doing here?"

I go, "Well, Walter said, and
you said that you'd want to..."

"I never use those things."

Then he launched into a speech

from the material that he had
memorized and just said it brilliantly.

And all, kind of...

Some of the pressure was off.

You know, you do
that for an actor,

you have to create this world for
an actor, and then they're at ease.

And when they're at ease, then they can do
their job, and the director can do his job.

From that moment on, in all
seriousness, from that moment on,

it was a joy and an honor and
everything to work with Vincent Price.

He's really old, kind of hunched over
and moving when he talked and all that.

The neat thing about that
was, when the camera rolled,

that first time that they clicked
the slate, stepped back,

and he did his first on-camera performance,
after the rehearsals and stuff.

He just straightened up,
and 20 years fell off of him,

and he just became Vincent Price that
you'd seen my whole life, growing up.

David Del Valle knew some people,
and he was involved as a publicist.

So he knew some people like
Hazel Court who just came in

and just came to say hello,
to make him feel good.

It was just the one... It was like a parade
of a lot of people he worked with.

Roger Corman came down and
had a great reunion with him,

that was just a great moment.

The other part of that two day
of shooting was Susan Tyrrell,

SuSu, as she's known
by a lot of her friends.

Clu Gulager had worked with her
on a movie called "Tapeheads"

and said, "Well, she
might be a really good fit."

I think we tamped
her down a little bit,

I did, sort of, directing a
little bit, maybe too much.

That was the idea of it, to tamp her
down and have that explosion...

That boiling, boiling thing that you know
is going to erupt at some point at the end.

That's nothing.

Those are bad dreams,
the ravings of a madman.

You don't see, do you?

In the beginning they wanted to outfit
Vincent Price with his librarian outfit,

and he goes, "No, no.
I'm going to wear my own clothes."

"I have a shirt, and I have a nice
tweed jacket I'll wear, nice patches.”

So it was like,
"Okay, that works."

But he had clothes that were
beautifully tailored and old,

that he'd had forever, and this was a
jacket he'd gotten from Savile Row.

When it came time to shoot
Vincent's death scene,

Vincent came to me and
said, "You know what?"

It was originally written to
be... He gets poisoned.

She had slipped a poison to him,

and there was some dialogue
stuff between them as he's dying.

So he came to me, and
he said, "You know what?"

"Instead of doing all that, why doesn't
she have some weapon in her purse,”

"and then she can just
kill me that way?"

So we came up with,
"Okay, switchblade."

"That's great.”

"She'll flick it into my neck."

"Wonderful."

And he will expire.

We weren't prepared to do this,

so we only had a few hours,
three hours, and we called...

It was just literally a guy at
Corman studio that we just...

"Okay, you're going to kill
Vincent Price right now."

So they have a fake neck, and
then they had, after she throws it,

then they have... There's a rubber neck
with a rubber knife sticking out of it.

What they did, they
had a tube of blood

that ran up under his shirt,
under his coat and to the neck.

So they wanted the blood gushing out
of where the knife was sticking out of.

We assured him, because
we were being assured,

that the blood would spurt,
and it would not get on his jacket.

It would just be on his shirt.

And it wouldn't be that
much, et cetera, et cetera.

So they do the shot.

They film the knife going in.

And then I remember Jeff going,
"Okay, let's start pumping the blood."

There's a technician, behind
Vincent Price, with the pump.

They had a gallon of
blood, pumping the blood.

And all you could see was
a little trickle coming out.

Very, very little trickle, and Jeff's
going, "Come on, come on."

"We need more blood.
We need more blood."

So the guy back there is
pumping, pumping, pumping.

Still a little trickle.
A little trickle.

And Jeff's doing, "Come
on. We need more blood."

And the guy's going,
"It's empty. I'm out."

"I don't have any more blood."

And they're going,
"Well, what happened?”

What happened was, it
dribbled all down his shirt,

but then it dribbled onto his jacket, and
the jacket was compressed with the shirt.

So the jacket was full of blood.

The tube came
undone in his shirt.

So when he opened up
his coat, he had blood

everywhere here, on his
shirt and on his coat.

Boy, was he mad.

He was so...

He was so mad.

I just remember him
just looking like...

Looking like, "You motherfucker!”

"You told me it
wouldn't, and it did."

Luckily that was the
last shot he had to do.

He was so mad.

So we took the clothes.

We sent them to
the dry cleaners.

The dry cleaners delivered
them up to his house.

Jeff was like, "Oh my God, we didn't
get one shot. The overhead shot."

"We have to get an overhead shot
of Vincent falling down on the desk.”

"We don't have his clothes.
We need his clothes."

"Allen, can you run up to his house
and borrow the jacket again?"

"We'll call him and tell
him you're coming."”

I was like, "Okay."

I drove to his house,
knocked on the door.

And his wife...

All that she did was,
door cracked open,

wide enough for her to hand
out the jacket and the shirt,

and she just said,
"Here." And I took it.

The door closed.

There will be no more delays.

The sentence must
be carried out.

The execution scene that we
also shot there on that set,

looking back, that kind
of looks like a set.

That might actually be the
weakest set of the whole movie.

One of the big thrills of the shoot
was getting the opportunity to work

with Martine Beswick who
is one of only two women,

along with Maud Adams,
to be in multiple Bond films.

I'd be a liar to say, that at my
age at that time and stuff,

I didn't get a little bit
of a crush on her

because she was a
beautiful lady and just the...

Neat, some of the movies she'd
worked in that I had been a fan of also.

Larry Tierney was an
emergency casting.

We originally wanted Forry
Ackerman to do a cameo.

That didn't work out.

Larry was a great dear friend to me,
and he liked Jeff a great deal,

so I just called him up
and said, "Larry, this is..."

"I should get whatever
you're doing."

"I'll be there in 10 minutes."

David Del Valle was there, that
was the first time I got to meet him.

I kind of knew him through his
hard journalistic writings and stuff.

The challenging thing about shooting
the lethal injection sequence was,

particularly at that period in time, none
of us had ever seen a real lethal injection

and how it's done, but, of course,
neither had the audience.

So we were able to just make it
up any way we wanted it to be.

Camarillo, California, where
we shot the library exterior

and some driving shots in
the "Welcome to Oldfield" bit.

That was basically the
last thing that we shot.

They had negotiated the deal
only for an exterior of the house.

We show up, it's nighttime.

We need to put some lights on the
inside so the light will be illuminated

from the outside in, and the
guy's going, "No, no, no, no, no."

"It's $2,000 for exterior."

"You want to get inside
the house, it's five grand.”

Bill gets into this
whole thing with him

where Bill's like, "Sir, we don't have
$5,000. We only have $2,000."

"We're not going in there. We're
just putting the lights in it."

He goes, "No, it's five.
This is it, for everybody."

I'm sitting there
talking with him too.

At some point I stopped being
a participant in the discussion

and just became a spectator
watching Bill refuse to give up.

No matter what the guy
said, he didn't take a no.

25, 30 minutes later, nobody
moved, the guy gave in.

Bill, as producer, got what he wanted,
and for me that is, to this day,

the ultimate piece of movie
producing I've ever seen in my life.

Bill was the kind of guy who, once he put
his mind to something, he could do it.

Then, about a week later,
not even a week later,

there was an article, very small article,
in the Sunday Calendar section

in the Los Angeles Times, saying that
Vincent Price was about to film a movie

called "From a Whisper to a Scream”,
and he said

that it would be his
last horror film ever.

Apparently, Forrest.
Ackerman read that little note,

connected the title with
something he'd seen,

maybe, three or four
months previously.

"From a Whisper to a Scream...
Wait a minute! That's the..."

And he wrote Vincent one of the
most amazing letters I've ever read.

And the letter said, "Under
no circumstances, Vincent,"

"should you become
associated with Jeff Burr's film"

"because Clu Gulager murdered
his naked wife in a bathtub.”

"Stabbed her in the back, strangled
her, killed her deader than a... What?"

"And it's nasty,
and it's immoral."

"You shouldn't be associated
with these people."

I think that is what colored
Vincent's perception of the movie,

thoughts of the movie
from that point on.

He... To my knowledge, we tried to screen
the finished movie for him many times.

Invited him to any screening
we had but also to...

"We'll set up a private
screening for you."

He sent me a letter saying, "Well,
my health is not very good right now,"

"blah, blah, blah, but
I do want to see it."

But I don't think it would have
been his cup of tea, but then...

Actually working with him, being
able to direct him, it was wonderful.

And he was incredibly generous,
incredibly animated, incredibly...

He was joyful on the set.

I mean, I think he had a great time
doing it, the actual shooting of it.

The post-production is where the money
runs out and things tend to suffer.

We got lucky, we found a
sound house that was...

A good, solid reputation
and a great library.

We worked with two guys, Hari Ryatt and
Bob Fitzgerald. And Bruce Stubblefield.

They were the three main
guys we worked with.

Concurrently, we were
looking for a composer.

We had virtually no money for the composer,
so that immediately limits your choices.

How we found a composer was,
we had a scene of the movie,

and we had various composers
that were willing to do it.

Do a little sample score, a
two-minute thing for the scene.

And the scene was the cemetery
scene in the carnival episode.

So it was, kind of, a romantic that
becomes a little horrific piece.

It kind of showed a
range and a variety.

Then I met Jim Manzie, and he did
that demo, and it was beautiful.

It was kind of Bernard
Herrmannesque, but its own thing.

And I was really impressed,
"So that's the guy."

I mean, Jeff gives
me a lot of latitude.

I guess he trusts my
judgment but he...

What's good about him, is that he always
points you kind of in the right direction.

If I go in the wrong direction,
he'll just very politely say,

"Jim, you know, less
here, more there."

We ended up working with him.

Bill, I and Darin worked
with him on "Stepfather II",

and then I ended up working with
him on several movies after that,

like "Leatherface" and
"Night of the Scarecrow", et cetera.

Yeah, Jeff is very
knowledgeable at music.

He's always talking about
strange bands from Florida.

And another regret is, we didn't
have money to orchestrate the score

versus electronically
do the score.

So I wish to God we could have
orchestrally created the score,

because it would've elevated
the movie that much more.

It would've been dynamic.

So we have an answer print.

That answer print is what we
now start trundling around town,

looking for a distribution deal, and,
finally, ended up with several offers.

We decided we...

There was a foreign distributor
and then a US distributor.

The foreign distributor
was Manson International,

which at the time was a very
well known foreign agent.

Then there was The Movie Store or
TMS Pictures which they became,

and they were the
domestic distributors.

The American distributor decided
to change the title of the movie.

The movie was not touched
at all except for the title.

So I felt, "Well, you've
won the game.”

"You made the movie that
you wanted to make,"

"and you've cut it the way you want
to cut it, no interference at all."

"And if the only issue is they want to
change the title, I can live with that."

"The Offspring" was something
The Movie Store came up with.

We always thought it referred to the
baby in the Clu Gulager episode

because the poster is kind of this
creature crawling out of the paper.

But they felt that the
shorter title was better,

and a one-word title, in particular,
was better for horror film.

Well, at the time there
were various movies like.

"The Burning", whatever,
"The Funhouse", "The This"...

So they felt that one-word
title was punchy.

Where I did fold, and I really
argued, and I know Darin did,

and my brother did, was when...
All this trouble to get Vincent Price,

and he was by far the biggest, the
most well known name in the movie.

Why the heck would you not
put his name on the poster?

In big bold letters, put his
image on the poster, whatever.

They felt, just
stupidly, they felt that

Vincent was more of a TV
name than a theatrical name.

The Movie Store bought our film with
another movie they called "The Outing",

and they kind of
put them together.

Sometimes we played in solitary,
sometimes they did it as a double feature.

Something strange
is taking over.

It's the birth of an endless
evil, and it's a real Killer.

"The Offspring”.

Rated R.

We were fortunate enough
to get a theatrical release

that went all the way
across the country.

At the time it was bicycle,
what they would call bicycling,

which would be, you would open
in a certain region in the country

in a certain amount of prints, and then
go region to region, to region, to region.

Then when the movie actually
opened here in Los Angeles,

it opened at the Egyptian
Theater, on its own.

This is the theater that
I had seen "Aliens",

I had seen "Empire Strikes Back",
and here it is, premiering there.

So that was wonderful.

We got a very nice
review in the L.A. Times.

As I recall, from that first
screening at the Egyptian Theater,

that both people who went
to see it really liked it.

No, just kidding.

And I remember people screaming and
laughing, and we were all so proud,

and we were just jolly, just
like kids in a candy store.

Just so happy at
what we had done.

But that was...

Again, things were just so different
because the exploitation market

had a home in movie houses.

The first time I saw it
with a paying audience

was in Memphis, Tennessee,
in September of '87.

I stayed the night there, and then the
next morning the review came out.

It was like New York,
as a Broadway show.

And it was like... It was
not a really good review,

but the one thing it
said was, "The acting..."

"Clu Gulager is great
in it. Blah, blah, blah."

"And Cameron Mitchell
is amazing in it."

"Why isn't he in more movies?
Why isn't he in bigger movies?"

I felt very gratified for that.

The first time I saw the film finished,
projected, completely done,

on the big screen, I think there were
three things going through my head.

First of all, was just the excitement of
seeing that stuff up on the big screen

and going, "Oh, I remember that! Oh, I
remember that! Oh, I remember that!"

The second thing was, "Wow,
this is a feature film. This is cool."

"This is going to help with the
career and the experience."

Kind of the
professional end of it.

And then the third thing
was, "Oh my gosh,"

"what are people in Dalton
going to think when they see it?"

"What are my parents going to
think when they see Clu Gulager?"

I was getting my hair
cut, and the barber said,

"Yeah, I saw your movie the
other day, 'The Offspring'."

And I'm like, "No, no. I was in
'From a Whisper to a Scream'."

And he's like, "No, I've seen
your movie, you're in the movie."

So my mom and I, we grabbed the paper
and got the showtimes and the location,

and we jetted over into the
theater, and we watched it.

And it was a great thing to see
myself on the silver screen.

As a director, you remember,
at least I do anyway,

you remember the bad reviews more than
you remember the good reviews, the quotes.

I just remember there were a couple of
quotes that just always stuck in my mind.

The one quote was... It was
from Box Office Magazine,

which was a magazine specifically designed
for movie... Motion picture exhibitors.

So this would be sent to you.

If you owned a theater or owned a theater
chain, you subscribed to this magazine.

What Box Office Magazine
said, was something like,

"This film will burn a
path to video stores.”

"Don't let your theater
stand in its way."

The trade reviews, they always kind of
look at genre movies slightly askance.

But again, they
always saw this as,

"Wow, this is kind of different
because this is darker. This is..."

And they also usually made note
of the fact that this was done

by a bunch of young guys, and
this is an interesting effort.

The one, like, in New Orleans it
said, literally the first paragraph,

something like, "This film
is the cinematic equivalent"

"of putting a razor blade in a
child's apple on Halloween."

I go, "Man, put that on the
poster. That's a great quote."

In some respects, it
may be a polarizing film

because we tried to
make a polarizing film.

We were looking to do the most
twisted ideas that we could do.

That's what young guys do.
You want to shock people,

you want to bring them out of their chairs,
you want people either love it or hate it.

That was probably a pretty
accurate representation

of the reaction
that we got to it.

We got a lot of coverage
on the movie though,

because, primarily,
because of Vincent Price,

but Cinefantastique and
Fango and all of them...

Of course, Fangoria wrote
articles and interviews,

and all of that stuff all
came with the movie.

We did get a fair
amount of attention.

So, the movie ended up.

It came out theatrically
a few places foreign,

and then mostly on video
in foreign territories,

but it played in Italy
theatrically, and Germany,

and Japan, and it played several
big festivals. Horror festivals.

Played the Paris
International Film Festival,

played Fantafestival in Rome, played
several other European festivals.

That was kind of the thing where we
didn't know even though it was entered,

because the distributor would enter
it in these festivals for publicity.

Now you just look at the movie,
and people like the movie.

I mean, that means a lot to me because at
that time you were just kind of scrambling,

you were trying to figure out
what's the best way to do,

because you don't even know
how it's going to turn out.

And it turned out to be something
that people have responded to

over and over and over again,

and that it has an actual life,
and I'm proud of that.

That was my first
feature film experience.

I think it was more than
a horror movie too.

It's not like a horror movie today
where it's all blood and guts.

There was a thought behind it,
there was a story line.

I think there's an elegance
to the film, that moodiness

and a feel to it that elevates
it above most horror films.

It's Southern literature.
It's kind of Southern Gothic stuff.

There are certain things in
that film, both in the script

and just in the productions, that
you can't get anywhere else.

There's a certain vibe with the actors
that they're picking up from the location.

There are the locations
themselves. There's the extras.

They're all this stuff that just
screams, saying, "Hollywood."

Even though it was still
exhausting, I think Bill and I felt

that what we were doing
was helping to start a career

for both our sons, and
we were happy to do it.

Darin and Jeff and Bill
continued, of course.

They went right
to "Stepfather II".

I ended up working with Irwin
Yablans and Bruce Cohn Curtis,

and that led to me doing a
movie with Renny Harlin.

And Mark Hannah, of
course, I've said about him,

he's an absolutely integral part of
this movie, just keeping me calm,

I think. That was another thing
that he did that was just a gift.

Allen went on. He and
I produced and directed a movie,

a feature film a few years
later called "Island Girl".

He went on and did a
lot of art department

on a lot of music videos,
like the "Oh Sherrie" video.

Mike Malone ended up with this
incredible relationship and career

as a set decorator
and everything else,

working with Steven
Soderbergh and David Lynch.

"From a Whisper to a Scream”,
definitely, for me,

opened my eyes to the
world of filmmaking,

and it made me sure that that's
something I wanted to pursue.

And again, the movie would not be
the same if Mike wasn't involved.

He was a key... One of
the key players, and he...

I don't know if he got enough credit
that he deserved, but he certainly...

We've worked together on a few things
since and hope to work together again.

Basically, the essence is brotherly
love, both literally and figuratively,

in that Bill Burr was
Jeff's older brother,

and figuratively there
was a core group of us

who had gone to school together and
had known each other five, six years.

We were all young guys, and
we all wanted to make a movie,

and we wanted to
do it passionately.

I started out my career as a producer
working with Jeff's brother, Bill Burr.

Bill was a great guy.

A guy with a big personality,
a natural born salesman

and a person who loved the filmmaking
process and was so supportive of Jeff.

His enthusiasm during
the making of this film...

What both Burr brothers brought
to the table, was a love of cinema.

You couldn't ask for a
better producing team.

And then combine the fact that my
brother raised the money for the movie

and really gave
me a career that...

At least started me on
a career at that time

that I know I would not
have had without him.

William Burr was
so important to me.

He ended up being
a boyfriend of mine.

We were together for
almost seven years.

We've lost him in the years since,
and all of us miss him a great deal.

I know that Bill would get
such a kick out of the fact

that we are playing in the New Beverly
25 years after we first got released.

So I wanted to bring
a little of him here

and put him where he'll
always have a front row seat.

He did send some ashes of Bill,
and I did put them in the seat,

it has my plaque on it
here, at the front row.

He's going to watch
the film with us.

I put some in the popcorn.

My goal is to be the filmmaker
that he always thought I was.

I haven't reached that
goal yet, but I know I will.

I'm sure he's looking down
and seeing this process,

wishing he could
do an interview too.

We remember you well, Bill.

We love you, Bill, and
we hope you're at peace.

I personally can't thank you
enough for what you did.

As a tribute, you're going to forever be
merged with the swamp and our first effort.

I think in this business,
more than anything else,

working with great technicians,
great artists, in different facets,

as a producer you really discover the
joy of what filmmaking really should be.