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Directors Retreat Explores the Dark Side
by Ted Elrick
From left: Robert Markowitz, Mick Garris, Tobe Hooper, Wes Craven,
George A. Romero, Larry Cohen and Alain Silver. (Photo: Mary Gallagher)
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This past September, the DGA Special Projects Committee held their annual Directors Retreat at the UCLA Conference Center at Lake Arrowhead.
Approximately 50 members and their guests gathered to hear from some of the top directors of the horror suspense genre under the banner "Thrillers, Chillers & Killers." Individual discussions featured luminaries, George A. Romero, Mick Garris, Tobe Hooper and Wes Craven.
Director Robert Markowitz moderated the first discussion with Pittsburgh-based George A. Romero, whose groundbreaking 1968 film
Night of the Living Dead inspired many of the speakers at the conference to find independent funding to make their own low-budget shockers.
In his discussion with Markowitz, Romero noted that his film work was probably influenced by the events and issues of the times - the Vietnam war, pollution and the counterculture of the '60s. He speculated that the horror genre is perhaps one of the more interesting ways of exploring fears about society at large.
"The reason to do horror is to upset the apple cart," Romero said. "Traditionally we kill the monster at the end to save mankind as it were."
Romero said that he uses violence in a film as a sort of sucker punch to
the audience, likening it to Robert Altman's use of graphic elements in the operating sequences of M*A*S*H.
"It brings you back to the reality of the situation," he said. Citing his 1978 film
Martin as an example, he detailed how it was influenced by the political and economic climate of Pittsburgh. It was a period when many of the steel mills had closed and there was general alienation among the people who found themselves out of work. It was that same alienation he brought to the main character of Martin.
In addition, Romero said that he can now look back at his zombie trilogy - Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead
(1978) and Day of the Dead (1985) - and see how each film reflects the decade in which it was made.
Romero confessed that he prefers to work with unknown actors and made reference to Hitchcock's shock for the audience in
Psycho. "In the early days, before the studio was standing over our shoulders, I always loved the idea of using what the industry calls 'unknowns,' because you don't know who the Janet Leigh is, what's going to happen to any of them," Romero explained.
"I just always liked working with actors who were either friends, or where there was an existing relationship," he added. "I was pretty much able to do that up until
Knightriders. Then for Creepshow they wanted cameo names for it. But everyone in that is pretty much an EC comics-type drawing, they're all such archetypal characters."
The conference attendees were treated to a screening of Romero's latest independent film,
Bruiser, [see Romero profile upcoming in DGA Magazine, January 2000] which was recently picked up by Lions Gate for distribution.
The next day began with a discussion between Markowitz and director Mick Garris who has had considerable success with the TV adaptations of Stephen King's The Stand
and The Shining.
Garris continued with the flow of Romero's comments. He grew up during the anti-war movement and was heavily influenced by it. He said that one of the things that attracted him to
The Stand was the plot catalyst of the accident at a government research facility unleashing a plague, and the military's attempts to cover up the fiasco. He felt that these very real fears were explored in the film.
He also spoke about the difficulties of shooting the six-hour miniseries,
The Shining, particularly when it came to maintaining his directing focus. "One of the key things is to stay focused on what comes before and what comes after the scene you're shooting," he said. "The first thing is to trust the script, to get it to where it's as close to perfect as it can be. Steve [King] is a great screenwriter and I think the script he did for
The Shining is one of the best scripts I've ever read.
"My shot lists are not just for the upcoming day's work. I also put in what the context is, emotionally and physically, for every scene that I shoot so that I can say, 'Wait a minute, this isn't standing alone. This is what preceded it and this is the arc it's following, where it's going.'"
George Romero then took over the moderating reigns for a discussion with Tobe Hooper, director of
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Poltergeist. Hooper started out doing commercials and political spots, even doing some work for George Bush, Sr.
Hooper said that a lot of the color for
Texas Chainsaw came from current events of the 1970s and specifically from the premise that nature had gone wrong. "Underneath all of that were these other elements. We had run out of gas in the country, there were lines to get gasoline so that's where [the characters] running out of gas comes from. And a lot of people had been put out of jobs so that's where [the unemployed slaughterhouse workers] comes from. People went back into their isolated little groups where they did some nasty stuff. The family physician also told me about when he was a pre-med student and a friend of his skinned a cadaver's face, cured it and wore it as a mask to a Halloween party. So that's where Leatherface came from."
Romero commented on Hooper's use of long shots of Texas landscape whereas today we might see Steadicam following the action. Hooper replied that those were "Andrew Wyeth influenced." Romero then praised Hooper's talent for capturing effective chase sequences.
"I love chase sequences," Hooper confessed. "I used to have bad dreams of slow-motion running and the bullies in school were coming to beat the hell out of me and I just couldn't run fast enough."
Next up was a discussion between Robert Markowitz and Wes Craven
(Last House on the Left, Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream) who is also a member of the
DGA's Task Force on Violence and Social
Responsibility. Craven left his job as a college literature professor to pursue what many considered to be an 'impractical' film career.
When Markowitz asked about the horror genre in relation to concerns currently raised around violence in movies, Craven said, "Quite often we think about [horror] movies in much too narrow a way." He sees his films in a larger, even archetypal context.
"When I think of a film like
Nightmare on Elm Street, the way I designed the character of Nancy is that she's sort of an
uber character," he explained. "I think there is an uber character who is everybody in the film. Nancy is winnowed out of a series of alternatives which are represented by the friends she has. They're all part of the same overall character. In all stories about heroes and heroines, they represent the best of us. They represent the core that will risk everything to slay the dragon.
"The point is that [most of the] characters are not paying attention to the critical question: 'What is going on here, right now, as unpleasant as it may be?' And that's what the hero and heroine have their attention focused on. It's what Nancy does in the
Nightmare series. She knows something is going on. Everybody else is saying, 'Let's go out and party.' But she knows. It's like right now with the environment and global warming. Nobody wants to know. They say, 'Let's party.' But there's always a few people who say, 'No, this is what you have to pay attention to if you want to make it to the next generation.'
"That is what is right at the core, the DNA of the genre: how do you get your own fragile piece of ectoplasm into the next generation when everything around you is tooth and claw, programmed to get you?" he said. "That's why these films are kind of boot camps for the psyche."
DGA Special Projects Committee member Alain Silver moderated a Sunday-morning panel about the horror genre and the financing of independent horror films with Romero, Garris, Craven and Larry Cohen, director of
It's Alive, The Stuff and The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover.
"Historically a lot of the great horror pictures were low-budget pictures," Cohen said. "I really liked those Universal horror films with Karloff and Lugosi. People always dismiss them as B-movies. Thirty years later if you stopped and asked some of the young people who the major stars were - Robert Taylor, Greer Garson - they wouldn't know anything about them. But if you stopped the same people and asked them who Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi or even Abbott and Costello were, they know them. So those stars of B-movies have a longer lifetime than some of the stars of A-movies. I think some of the B-movies have held up better. So, who knows, it may turn out we were making A-movies after all."
On the subject of raising finances, Romero said that he started raising the funding for
Night of the Living Dead by having ten people contribute $600 each which got them some film stock and the ability to rent the farmhouse they planned to shoot the film in.
Tobe Hooper (right) talking with Directors Retreat attendees.
(Photo: Mary Gallagher)
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"Once we were able to show some dailies, people started to come around," he said. "You could say to somebody, particularly in Pittsburgh and at that time, 'I'm going to make a movie.' They'd say, 'Right. Good luck, kid.' When we were able to show little sequences and they were in synch with the dialogue people started to kick in two grand, five grand, until we had the $70,000. People were pretty impressed with the footage we were able to get up on screen.
"At the time, Pittsburgh, after Los Angeles, was the number two drive-in movie center. We got every little B-movie that came down. I think there was this understanding that we weren't going out to make a Greer Garson picture. We were going to make something for drive-ins and the investors would say, 'Oh, yeah, I see those all over the place.'"
Many found encouragement when Craven spoke about a "phenomenal situation" on
Last House on the Left and the tenacity of its producer. "I'd worked with Sean Cunningham [the producer] as an assistant editor on a movie prior to that. He offered me a complete 50/50 partnership on Last House. After we did
Last House, we thought we'd be making incredible amounts of money on every other picture. We were picked up by American International, Sam Arkoff's company. I remember getting a check for $50,000, the first payment, and after having been a college professor making what I thought was a lot of money, $11,000, this was phenomenal.
"So, we thought, 'OK. We've done our horror picture.' And we wrote scripts about divorced fathers and Vietnam. For
two and a half years we struggled on other properties and nobody wanted to hear about it. So we both were kind of broke and I went off to Los Angeles to make
The Hills Have Eyes.
"Sean, on the very tail end of his savings, thought up the idea that it would be terrific to have a film called
Friday the 13th. Steve Miner, who later became a director and who had been my assistant editor, knew somebody in Westport, Connecticut, who was a machinist. He had the letters for
Friday the 13th cut out in steel. Sean put it on a piece of black cardboard with broken glass and shot it and made it up into a one-sheet that said
"Friday the 13th." Sean had maxed out all of his credit cards, and on the last of his American Express card he bought full-page ads in
Variety and Hollywood Reporter saying he was selling worldwide rights to
Friday the 13th. There wasn't even a story, yet.
"From that he got enough phone calls from little countries and raised $10,000. With that he found a writer who wrote novelizations of
Kojak, and he got a script set in a camp. Sean went back to the people who financed
Last House on the Left, and they put up $250,000, he made the film and became a multi-millionaire. So, I think if there's any purpose to this story it is to say, 'There's a million ways to skin this cat.' Today, with digital cameras, it seems to me that you could make something to show, so cheaply, so I think that's an enormous advantage for young filmmakers."
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