(Lever clanking)
(Electricity whooshing)
(Eerie, somber music)
(Pretorius laughing)
- [Katherine] Crawford, what did you see?
- Bit off his head.
- I just love you've what you've done with this room.
- You may be a scientist, but right now,
you're acting like a junkie.
- Just take him and leave.
- What the hell is that? - Dr. Edward pretorious.
- Well, we learned what we came for.
He ain't crazy and that... It... ate pretorious' head.
They're gonna think we're crazy.
- All right, come and get me, eunuch!
This time, I'm not running away.
(Creature shrieking)
- Yes, the greatest sensual pleasure there is
is to know the desires of another mind.
- I know your desires, you impotent pig.
(Katherine laughing) (Eerie music)
- When I met Stuart Gordon,
I was introduced by a friend of mine,
of ours, back in the day, named Bob Greenberg.
- Bring a friend to me.
- Bob Greenberg told me I should go meet Stuart Gordon,
who, for 10 years, had been the artistic director
of the organic theater in Chicago.
We got along real well and I really, I saw his plays,
and saw how he took questions from the audience,
and I thought, "wow, this guy, I have confidence here."
'Cause I didn't know what I was doing.
And I said, "well, let's make a movie,
and I wanna make a horror movie."
And he said he had a couple ideas,
and one of them was re-animator.
Now, I'd read some lovecraft
and I knew the name lovecraft,
but I was never a fan of the stories.
He doesn't write in images like
us modern people like to read images, he wrote words.
And it seemed like at the end,
when the real horror was coming,
the protagonist would like... pass out.
- Well, like tolkien, lovecraft created a mythos,
a backstory if you will, of this place.
Or maybe not so much a backstory,
that they're there, they're still there.
And I think it was kind of a manifestation, in a vague way,
of his own fear of germs.
- He was writing at a time when germs
were kind of a new concept.
You know, biotics and antibiotics
and all of this sort of stuff.
The fact that something we couldn't see could kill you.
- You know, he had this idea that there were things
in the air in a paralleled universe,
like germophobia,
kind of like... he didn't like fish.
He didn't like fish, fish were creepy to him.
So he made it kind of, you know,
these half fish, weird, gooey people.
Cthulhu, this whole idea of this subterranean,
ancient old ones that were still rumbling down there,
and there were certain places on earth
where they could come up and still get you.
You know, that's a mythos that's created
and everybody goes, "yeah."
And they've stolen from him right and left.
- But then Stuart mentioned re-animator,
and they already... he and Dennis, and William Norris,
had already written a script for a pilot for a TV show.
It was half the length
of a feature film script
and it was for broadcast television.
I read the story, the re-animator
was actually six stories,
and they're not really lovecraftian.
They are more like "monkey's paw" type stories,
people crawling out of the grave,
those sort of ec comics type of thing,
and that appealed to me.
- October of '85, re-animator comes out.
It makes a bit of a splash,
not the thing that everybody seems to remember.
- Pauline Kale had a very nice writeup about the movie
and she said some very nice things about me,
and I thought, "okay, I've arrived.
My career is finally gonna take off."
And then I was talking to my agent, saying,
"ooh, all these roles are gonna come my way."
And he said, "yeah, but it was a horror movie,
and it was really over the top,
and it was kind of really out there,
and really gory and silly."
- Everything was kind of a mixed bag, actually.
You loved it or you hated it.
Then I think it came out on vhs
and it was a full-fledged phenom there
in this vhs new world.
Charlie band made a three-picture deal,
I think with Stuart and Brian, to make some movies.
Charlie had started empire studios in Rome, outside of Rome.
So let's do a follow up, another lovecraft project
follow up, and using the same team.
I was always sorry that Bruce abbott
was never a part of any of that.
So Barbara and I, and Brian and Stuart, of course,
and of course, Mac ahlberg, who was the cinematographer
and a dear friend, and such a talent.
I honestly think Stuart was surprised
at the humor in re-animator
and he wanted to do his follow up and not have that flavor.
He wanted to do a straight-ahead, serious lovecraft piece.
I have to say that I think of any lovecraft movie
that has been made, that from beyond comes the closest
to the mythos, the vibe, the otherworldly
kind of parallel universe
that lovecraft tried to convey.
The color scheme that Mac ahlberg came up with,
the palette, it was fantastic.
Nothing like re-animator.
Re-animator had none of that lovecraft mythos in it.
It's not a story that lovecraft himself
even thought was worthy of him.
It was a gig that he did for money, whereas from beyond
was probably something much closer to...
His imagination.
(Glass shattering)
- They're at it again with the colored lights
and the weird sounds.
- From beyond, the pre-credit sequence
is almost the entire story,
almost the entirety of the lovecraft story.
After that, it's all of our work.
It's... Stuart gets story credit and he helped develop
the story itself, the story elements,
and then I did the screenplay.
In lovecraft, you are getting the dread of the unknown.
You see the terrible in the story you see
the terrible consequences of having built the resonator,
and having delved into the
unseen dimensions
of creatures that are around us all the time.
However, you see the consequences of it,
but you are left to dread the reality of it.
We, especially Stuart and Brian, were very dedicated
to putting as much of that reality onto screen as possible.
- It was said to us, "this movie is not funny,
so don't play it funny."
So yes, it was a conscious choice from Stuart
not to make it funny, but I also think, to Stuart's credit,
he didn't want to do something that he had done before.
He wanted to do something different.
He wanted to show that he could do different tones
and make different kinds of movies,
and a lot of his stuff is very different.
- We loved all kinds of stories.
We especially loved making people laugh.
It's the first stuff we did.
We had a satire comedy group in high school
and we actually played the coffee house circuit
in Chicago back in the day, back in the '60s.
- And we talked about doing other lovecraft movies,
and that's what I thought a sequel would be,
because I was basing my ideas
on the Roger corman Edgar Allen poe movies from the '60s,
where the sequel was a new story by Edgar Allen poe.
You went from "house of Usher" to "pit and the pendulum,"
to "premature burial," to "tales of terror,"
and that, to me, was what a sequel was.
But I didn't understand then what I do now,
which is that a sequel is really just
a celebration of the original movie,
and people want to see those characters.
They really don't want a new thing.
They want to elongate what they enjoyed before.
Back then, everybody's doing a three picture-deal
on a napkin at cannes, so we did a three-picture deal
on a napkin, three pictures that we would decide.
And so the first one was dolls,
which was a script that already existed
by ed naja.
We did that, we were gonna do that one first,
and then we were gonna do a lovecraft one.
And so I looked at all the lovecraft stuff
that was available to us and came up with two
that I thought would be good.
One was "dreams in the witch house,"
and the other was "from beyond."
And so we discussed it and we decided
that from beyond had that metal machine,
so it added a kind of a Sci-Fi element to it,
which seemed maybe safer in the marketplace.
And so then, the third one was gonna be robot jox,
and for dolls and from beyond,
we went to Rome, Italy, to shoot it.
So in September of 1985,
I moved my family to Rome
and we shot dolls up to the Christmas break,
and then after the break, we transformed the set.
We built one big house set,
we redid it to shoot from beyond,
and then we edited them both after.
So dolls was actually shot first,
although it was released second.
- It's running itself!
- I think for Stuart, I think what really attracted him
about from beyond... I mean, he liked to do
the crazy scenes and stuff, but I think there was...
I think he always liked this idea that you could
go into another dimension, like you're an adventurer,
and maybe you've gotta be careful
that you can't get out.
And I think that was what Stuart really,
what had appealed to him,
at least when we would talk about it.
He really liked that idea of the intrepid explorers.
- When Stuart was first talking to me and Dennis
about Katherine mcmichaels and playing her,
what I heard, maybe it was from Charlie band,
was that, "Barbara's not really old enough
to play a psychiatrist and somebody who has
gone to school and maybe had a phd.
She just played this college co-ed in re-animator,
who's gonna believe this?"
And Stuart was adamant that I play the part, and he said,
"no, however she plays it,
it's gonna become iconic, because she's playing it,"
and it would've been this true of anybody.
Like, if he didn't pick me, if it was somebody else,
that you buy into that, because that person
cements that role for you and then you can't imagine
anybody else playing it.
But there was a leap and I did think to myself,
"okay, I've gotta deepen my voice and be very serious,"
because I did play a college co-ed in re-animator.
But the thing that I liked about working
in the Stuart Gordon universe in my early career
is that both roles were smart women.
However I looked, young or old, or whatever,
I just infused my character with who
I thought she was as a woman.
And yes, of course, wearing a suit
and wearing Pearl earrings,
and putting my hair back and wearing glasses.
Part of the reason they wanted me to wear glasses
is they thought that would make me look smarter,
and maybe older, and then I would get to take them off
later on in the story when I put the leather on,
and it would be a little bit of a dichotomy.
- What the hell are you doing'?
- Stuart took me to trashy lingerie on la cienaga
and I tried on a few outfits for him.
I don't think you could get away with that today.
It would be the costume designer
that would be having me try a few on,
maybe take some pictures.
But we were just there at the store,
maybe for a couple of hours,
and I tried on different outfits and he would say,
"huh, I like that one.
Yeah, that one's all right.
No, I don't like that one, try this one."
So that's what we did, but you know,
it was all perfectly safe and normal and whatever.
I was completely fine with that, too.
And I think we came up with a great outfit.
- Honestly, it's not one of my favorite works of mine,
simply because I feel like I'm pathetic.
I'm just constantly, "what's happening?"
And, "wait," and "I can't."
And you know, even the scene with Barbara in her gear,
I'm like, "why am I comatose in this?
Why am I not participating in this?"
I don't even know this happened, apparently.
Barbara was the driving force in that movie.
If you wanna think about it, I was Dan Kane
and she was Herbert west, and pretorius was Dr. Hill.
- From beyond was shot in Italy,
so all the effects crews basically built all their effects
in Los Angeles, and then everything
had to be shipped over to Italy,
and then that's where we all finally got together.
We had a big warehouse set up for ourselves,
for the effects crew.
All the crates came in, all of Tony's physical effects
stuff came in, and we all worked out of it together.
So we kind of kept sharing and,
"oh, I forgot to bring this from the states,"
'cause this is back in the '80s
and not everything was readily available in Italy.
- [Mark] Once I read the screenplay
and saw what type of effects were involved,
I had a meeting with Stuart
to try and decide what I would be doing.
And it was either he or Brian that said,
"you know, we realize this is a very ambitious project,
so we're gonna have to divide the special effects
into two or three different teams."
I think it ended up being my team,
John buechler's team for makeup effects,
Tony doublin for all the resonator effects,
along with the prop guy, and Michael muscal
was the special effects coordinator.
He was the guy that hopped around
between all of our workshops.
Oh, and John naulin for the pineal gland-involved
ball cap on Jeffrey combs.
So you had three makeup effects groups,
mechanical effects group, and Michael muscal
was jumping around from shop to shop
to make sure everybody's on track.
You know, my team was responsible for doing
kind of the Mr. Bubbly pretorious makeup on Ted sorel,
and the pretorious monster, which was very nebulous
up until quite late into the pre-production,
where Stuart was about to leave for Rome,
and we hadn't nailed down the design he liked.
I'd done a lot of sketches and sculptures,
and finally, one night I had him and his wife
come out to my studio, it was very late,
and I had sculpted this little
kind of pretzel-like creature.
I did it very quickly as kind of a last ditch,
"maybe he'll like this, it's kinda cool."
And he came out, took one look at it and said,
"I love it, let's do it."
So finally, we nailed him down on something he liked
right before he took off.
I had Bob kurtzman as my lead artistic guy.
So Bob and I did most of the sculpting,
had Greg punchatz sculpting,
Aaron sims, sculpture and painting,
John Blake did all the beautiful hair work
for the bubbly Ted sorel, the wig and the chest hair.
And David kindlon was essential,
he did the mechanical stuff for it.
And Steve patino and Tom floutz did the fiberglass mold.
Steve was in charge, that was his baby.
- When they told me that we were going to shoot
from beyond in Italy, I said, "let me get my passport."
I didn't have one, I'd never been out of the country.
So I had to get one of those expediated passports
and fly overnight to Italy, by myself, and show up in Rome.
And it was like magic, getting off the plane
and coming to the old city.
And we stayed this really nice place off of viale parioli,
and it was just, you know, the coolest thing.
The keys had big balls attached to them
and you had to give it to the...
Like you never took your key with you.
They didn't want you to lose your key,
so you had to leave the key at the front desk.
"Okay, I hope they don't steal my stuff."
- Well, my memories... and this is true for a lot of movies,
my memories of from beyond
are much more on a personal basis in terms of being in Rome,
having days off in Rome, meals in Rome, walking the streets,
being there for a longer period of time
in order to kind of have it wash over you,
instead of a five-day tourist vacation, you know?
I was kind of living there, going to the
real Italian deli across the street,
or the people that knew me at the little local cafe
that I would eat at, or...
And my companion for all of that was perfect,
it was Mac ahlberg.
Mac ahlberg is Swedish
and spoke fluent Italian.
We would just go on walking tours on our days off,
have lunch at piazza navona, walk over here.
"This is that, the history of this statue is this,"
and they're just right there,
fading away, but in public.
You know, not behind glass or protected,
they're just decaying slowly,
right where they existed always.
But Mac was a fount of knowledge that way,
and a great companion.
So I do remember just enjoying...
Well, who wouldn't? Rome like that.
- Being in Rome, that's my first time overseas, too.
Being in Rome and on the set,
there were so many things going on
on and off the set, you know?
So there was a story a minute, really.
- I think we had really good chemistry, the three of us,
Ken and Jeffrey and myself in from beyond.
And I think that was due, in part, to the fact
that we were in Italy and we were so happy.
We were making a movie, making great money, feeling good.
And on the weekends, we always would have a brunch,
and I would host everybody
to come up to my little apartment.
I had a spiral staircase up to the roof
and I would make biscuits for everybody.
Remember, Ken foree made biscuits in the movie,
and it was some sort of like dumpling
beef stew or something?
Well, it was the same concoction, it was bisquick.
And I had brought over some bisquick, or bought bisquick,
I don't know if they sold it there.
But I would make biscuits every weekend,
and I would mash up butter and pistachios,
and we would have pistachio butter on it
and then put honey on it.
It was like this thing I invented.
- It was like a family environment because we...
It was Brian and his wife, I believe.
Yeah, his wife, and then Stuart and his,
she was in the film as well.
And then it was Barbara, Jeffrey, myself, Ted,
and I think we kind of hung out together.
- We were all crazy.
- Charlie band had made movies with his father, Albert band,
in Italy, and Charlie always loved Italy.
And so he bought some property there,
and continued to work there a little bit.
- When I was a teenager, the high school I was at
was offering a four-week trip to Europe
and it was really inexpensive, and my folks said,
"you know what? When is he ever gonna get the opportunity
to go to Europe or anything like that?"
So they did that and it was like,
you know, it was nice thinking.
And we went to Italy, France, Switzerland and england.
And I remember coming from Naples, on the tour bus
from Naples to Rome, and we were driving on the freeway
and I see this weird complex over to my side.
And I even took out my 110 instamatic camera at that point,
and snapped a picture, going, "what's that? What's that?"
Nobody knew what the hell it was.
Go up ahead 10 years later,
I get hired to go on from beyond
and we were staying at a hotel that was
down south of Rome, in pomezia, or in torvaianica,
and they had a bus and they picked up all the effects crew.
The first day, we're coming up the highway
and I'm sitting there in the bus, and I look out the window
and I see that same complex of buildings again.
And I started telling bill Butler,
"oh my god, I remember that from 10 years ago.
When I was a kid, I saw that
and I didn't know what the hell it was.
Does anybody know what that was?"
Well, before I knew it, the bus turned in
and it was the dino de laurentiis studios,
and I ended up working there next three years of my life.
- Charlie had bought the de laurentis studio
and it was just out... it was kind of in between Rome
and where we were staying, which was this small town,
I'm not sure I pronounce it right,
porta vionica or something like that.
And they had us staying
at a hotel there on the beach, which was the off season,
so it was just film crew in there, which was nice.
And then the studio was, I don't know,
maybe half an hour away, and it was a real studio.
I mean, they had sound stages and offices,
and everything set up there for production.
Plus, they had a cappuccino bar,
so we were downing cappuccinos like crazy.
- The back lot had red Sonja sets still standing there,
the spaceship from barbarella still standing there.
Film history was just sitting there in junk heaps
and I tried to save as much of it as I could, you know.
It was amazing, because
you think about all the stuff that was done at this studio.
- They're trying to sell off things within the studio
and one of the things they sold off was the heating element.
So we got there in April of whatever year it was,
and there was a snowstorm and it was freezing,
and there was no heat in the entire building,
because they'd sold off the components or something.
So they got these big, big, huge size portable heaters
for all of the rooms and they were very loud,
and it was always very cold, because we couldn't
have them on during filming and the room was really big.
So I just remember it being...
I was scantily clad in my leather
and I remember just being freezing all the time.
- Oh, the coolest part was that they had
an old-style plaster shop where these old, you know,
classically-trained technicians were making molding
and things for the sets that were made out of molds,
plaster molds and silicone molds and everything like that.
But they were doing it like an old style
of how they did it, you know, and approached it.
And they were all kinda old-timers, and it was cool.
We'd just go over there to watch
what they were doing in the plaster shop.
- I think when a film is prepped in one place,
let's say Los Angeles, and especially if it's an overseas,
there's always... I mean, it's tricky,
any kind of big shipping, and you have a specialty item
that needs to be handled carefully,
you also have all the time that is taken away
from your prep time, because there's crating, the shipping,
usually production doesn't wanna do it too fast.
So it's slow, that cuts into your prep time.
So there's a lot of considerations that are a little tricky.
You just keep that in the back of your mind
when you're building it, you kind of build it
more bulletproof than even it has to be for shooting.
You're actually building it to withstand the shipping.
Where on shooting, you know it's gonna be six frames of film
and you're gonna be shooting it
one of 60 shots being done that day.
So it's strange to consider stuff that way,
but it's kinda the way it is.
- One of the funniest things that happened,
the shipping for this project was insane.
We had to measure each monster
and then we had to have a crate made for each monster.
And the biggest monster in the project
was what we all called the giant shrimp chicken,
which comes boinging in.
So we had this crate made for this giant shrimp chicken.
It was as big as this room,
it was a huge crate full of packing peanuts,
and the shrimp chicken was in there.
And it must have been... The monster was probably
10 and a half feet long.
So things would arrive to us on a daily basis.
It wasn't just like, one day all the puppets were there.
Because Italy has so much red tape
for anything like that, and you know,
I'm sure that they would want to see what the hell
was inside of a giant shrimp chicken, if anything.
So one day, we see Manuelo, our assistant, our driver,
pacing around and rubbing his forehead,
and speaking on the phone, and he's nervous.
And I was like, "what's wrong, Manuelo?"
And he's like, "oh, there's a very big problem
with the shrimp chicken."
I'm like, "what's wrong with him?"
He's like, "oh, he fell, he fell off the airplane
onto the runway and there's millions of packing peanuts
blowing all over DaVinci airport,
and the shrimp chicken is laying on the runway."
So they had to have our guys go with a truck
and get clearance to go to the DaVinci airport runway,
and load this giant shrimp chicken in the back of a truck
and drive it, it must have been the funniest thing ever.
I can't imagine. I can't imagine what the Italians
were thinking as that thing
went careening down the highway, headed back.
- Due to some of my less favorite memories,
my wife and my child, Daniel,
who's now a two-time academy award winner on his own,
got to come over there for a lot longer than we had planned.
And Daniel was embraced by both cast and crew,
both American and Italian.
And I don't don't know if you've ever,
if the people here have ever seen
a European hare, a European rabbit.
You know, I mean, they're completely different
than the bunnies we have out here and they're bigger.
And we had water tanks at the studio,
and we came in one Monday morning,
and a hare had been jumping along and obviously
fell into a water tank, drowned, and bloated.
So there's basically, I mean, this looked
almost like a little person in a suit.
This thing is this big, floating in the water tank, face up,
and this about three weeks before easter.
And Daniel's like, "what is that?"
And one of the Italian guys, thinking it was a joke, said,
"oh, that's the easter bunny, I guess no easter this year."
And Daniel freaks out, starts crying, runs away,
and the crew is like... his name was bony.
And they're all like, "what did you do?" You know?
And I will have to tell you that the Monday morning
we came in after easter, we had a 5,000-square foot
shop over there to be able to do
all the stuff we were still building.
And that Monday morning, it looked like easter
had regurgitated into that room.
They had these... the eggs that they have over in Europe,
they have toys and stuff in them this big.
I mean, over here, that's a hundred bucks.
I have no idea what they... I mean, they must have spent,
even in the '80s, they had to have spent
hundreds of dollars to maybe a thousand dollars
on doing this room like a department store easter display.
And, "look, look, the bunny's okay,
bunny's fine," you know?
And it was just so sweet.
- I really thought that I could control it.
- One of our biggest problems on from beyond,
the biggest, biggest problem, was sound.
Sound, because the Italians, at least at that time,
had a long, long history of not worrying about sound.
Not just because of silence, but because they were
so used to having movies come in and dub them.
They even dubbed their own fricking movies.
I remember going to the theater to see an Italian movie,
in a movie theater, and their mouths are not doing
what they're saying in Italian,
and these are Italian actors.
So that was... they just don't have... at the time, anyway,
they didn't have a tradition of it.
So we would be doing a quiet scene
and all of a sudden, we'd hear...
(Mimics crew speaking in Italian)
Or a construction guy would start banging a hammer,
and you'd go, "what's going on? Cut, cut, cut."
And then you'd go to these guys
and they would have an attitude of like,
"what's your problem? Americans, whoo."
- I remember that drove Stuart crazy,
like, "why can't they be quiet?"
And the first ad was like, "I can't do anything about it.
That's just the way it is."
- Well, the other thing that the Italians would do
is that they kinda went on strike, because the first day
when we were shooting, they had box lunches
and the box lunches did not have
little bottles of wine in them.
And this was revolt time, where,
"we're not continuing until we get what we're used to
and that is wine with our lunch."
- Lunch was very important and having a glass of wine
at lunch was very important.
- And then at about 4:00, they either go have a whiskey
or a lemon vodka, and the American team,
we took to this tradition wholeheartedly.
And then we would get drunk, and then we would wrap
and we would get in the rental cars,
and we would figure-8 race around the back lot
through the red Sonja set, until Mike deak
drove the rental car off the bridge
and into the red Sonja moat.
But Charlie doesn't know that,
because we all climbed in the moat
and we pushed the car out. Sorry, Charlie.
- But they were incredible artists
and the crew was just great.
It was just, they're just different, just different.
They're more chill, more relaxed.
- There is a working class feel to it, and you know,
specifically speaking to the Italian culture, it's like,
"yeah, oh there's big shot, great.
Well, it's 5:00. See ya. We'll see ya tomorrow."
Like, it's not that romanticized.
It's taken very seriously, but I think maybe
there's a different understanding
that there's a life after 5:00, and there are wine breaks.
You know, wine is on the table at lunch,
and make sure that bread is crunchy,
and life is okay and a film will get done.
A little different, sometimes, to the intensity
and the passion you see in la,
and depending on the day,
I can make an argument for either one. (Chuckling)
- The cool thing was, the long shots
of the outside of the house was all forced perspective.
In other words, it was a very small miniature,
and then with lines coming away,
so that when we're at the gate and looking at it,
it looks like it's way far away.
But really, it's just a forced perspective.
That house didn't really exist. (Chuckling)
It didn't exist.
Everything was done on that sound stage, or on the grounds
of the production company of the studio, empire studio.
For instance, us coming out in the hospital
and getting in the ambulance and driving,
that was all just out in front of the studio
using those buildings.
It wasn't anything... I don't recall us
going anywhere for a location.
Movies are illusion. If the eye believes it,
it doesn't matter if it's true or not.
- I remember towards the end of the film
when the house goes crazy, Stewart asked us could he...
There was a banister or something on a stairway, and said,
"I want it to come to live and be a three-fingered
tentacle thing," and stuff like that.
And he says, "can you guys do that?"
'Cause it wasn't anything that was budgeted for.
And we were like, "yeah, we'll try."
And I literally think it was like a day or two later,
criswell had an old mechanism of a tentacle.
We sculpted this thing out of Clay,
we made a quick mold on it, did it in simple red latex.
Anything that... it was done so fast,
and we had on the set like within the next day or two
for Stuart, and he was just like blown away.
And it's like anything he wanted we wanted to try and do,
because we were caught up in this film.
Stuart, everything, this was like one of the first ones,
or this was the first one I was involved with
that was a multi crew effects picture,
where you're trying to do ridiculous, over-the-top stuff
that was not anything that was ever really done before.
And it took five makeup effects crews to do it,
and you had to work together and try to do
every trick in the book to pull this off,
'cause it was way before cgi.
If it didn't happen on camera, it didn't happen.
- One of the projects I was working on
was history of the world: Part I,
with a person by the name of Bob Greenberg,
who became a good friend of mine, and he's how
I connected with Brian yuzna and Stewart Gordon.
Robert was from Chicago
and Stuart was from Chicago as well.
He brought the two of them together
and then when they were looking for special effects,
he brought me into the picture.
So that was on re-animator and I brought John naulin in
to help me with the makeup effects.
And we also brought in John buechler
to help with the makeup effects.
I'd known John before then, buechler,
and then so we did re-animator,
and they were happy with our work.
So when they were starting from beyond,
there was a lot of creature effects and visual effects,
and special effects that needed to be done.
So they brought John naulin back in,
John buechler back in, myself in.
They also brought in Mark shostrum
to help with the pretorious monsters.
We had quite a bit of makeup
and creature effects, so we all had quite a full plate.
- There were four teams that broke up,
honestly, I believe it must have been a hundred gags,
with buechler, I think, doing
the majority of the puppet-y ones.
And it was just nonstop from the minute you got there.
- Going through it, you know,
we had a couple of production meetings,
we read the script, made notes, and then we had
a couple of meetings beforehand, and with all of us,
the people I just mentioned, we sat around a table,
went through it all, solved their questions,
answered questions, solving some of the problems
and that kinda thing.
And then Brian kinda looks at us, "what's the next step?"
We looked at him and all of us
in union went, "writing checks." (Laughing)
- Oftentimes, the most difficult effects to do
are the ones that have three or four drops of blood,
not blood shooting all over the place.
And in re-animator,
we'd gone through over 30 some gallons of blood,
and in from beyond, not so much blood. A lot more slime.
So much slime that we, by the way, made it in Italy.
We brought it over dry, because it was gonna cost
thousands of dollars to ship two drums,
'cause we went through over a hundred gallons of slime.
- I was just so excited.
I didn't really know much about the script,
but I did know there was like 150 makeup effects gags.
And part of my job, aside from helping ship
all of these puppets overseas, was to stand on set
with the bucket, with the paintbrush,
and paint slime on all the monsters in between every shot.
That was really one of my main jobs.
- It was a very slimy show, lots of slime.
And I remember there was times when we were under the set...
There was a lot of effects that we basically
had to pull out of our ass, 'cause, you know,
all the money went into certain things,
and it wasn't a huge budget show.
You know, it was relatively small budget,
but there was times that...
The end sequence where they're dueling each other
in a mass of flesh and goo.
The attic set was on a raised floor for various reasons.
One was the Ken foree thing where they eat his body
and he's just a skeleton, so Ken had to be through
a slant board thing in the floor,
but also just to operate certain things through the floor.
And so we're under there and there's gallons of slime
just leaking through the holes
that we had cut in the floor, and we were covered with it.
And I remember, because I was down under the floor
with bill and Mike, puppeteering,
and we were so covered with it.
And then I remember the slime covering us,
and then a few hours later, that slime kinda is like starch.
So when it dries, it's suddenly hard,
and you could hear your blue jeans cracking as you walk.
- By the end of the film, that stuff
started getting very rotten, and there was the big finale
in the scene where Jeffrey combs and Ted sorel's head
are coming out of a slime pile on the floor,
and Jeffrey's getting pulled outta this thing.
And then the skulls of each other are fighting.
And this stuff stunk so bad,
and bill and I were underneath the stage,
and we were under this stuff, and it's dripping on us,
and it really smelled awful,
and the entire stage smelled awful.
And we did days of that stuff.
- And apparently, someone told me at the time,
they put this in McDonald's shakes
to give it a nice... mm-mm.
- At the time, the slime was made out of a food thickener
called methyl cellulose,
which was a thickener for McDonald's milkshakes.
So when we went to the studio, we were told
that we were gonna go through 12
50 gallon barrels of this slime.
So we'd never worked on a project
where there was that much slime before,
so we foolishly said, "well, once we start working,
we are not gonna have time."
It took like a half a day to make a barrel.
You have to heat it up, literally heat the water up,
put the powder in there, stir it,
color it, tint it, store it.
So we made all 12 gallons at the same time.
What we didn't take into consideration is that it gets sour.
So these barrels of slime, I cannot even begin to tell you
or describe the smell of this slime.
Every day that would pass,
it would get more and more rancid.
So a lot of times, you have to understand,
in particular, the scene where Jeffrey's skull
and pretorious' skull are biting back.
That's us underneath a platform
with this sort of poly foam webbing,
you know, melted body, and they're biting,
we're puppeteering each other,
and they were pouring five gallon barrels of this slime.
Well, unfortunately for us,
those puppet platforms are not airtight.
So spoiled slime was just pouring down,
the worst smell that you could ever imagine,
just pouring and covering all over us.
But I wouldn't change it for the world.
It was actually quite fun, but it didn't smell too good.
- It's one of the things that they do to bend wood,
you know, to make elaborate shapes outta wood and stuff,
is they soak it in methyl cellulose, which is a wood fiber,
and it gets in there and it makes wood flexible.
And so they got these big paddles that they use
over in Italy for pasta.
And they got these big, giant containers,
and they'd have these guys over there.
And after a while, the handles are starting to do this,
and they're like, "ah!" You know?
- To this day, as anyone will tell you,
when I direct something that has slime,
I say, "slime it up," and then they run in
with a paintbrush and I can just see Stuart Gordon,
"no, pour it with a bucket."
So I'm carrying on Stuart's tradition
of making sure that everything is slimy.
Even if it's a family drama, I slime all the actors up.
- I do find you distracting.
- Stuart is one of a fairly... he was one
of a fairly short list of directors, for me,
that I've worked with, that knew what he wanted,
but that vision always came into final focus
once you were on set.
And so I had learned on re-animator
that if it was storyboarded to be this big,
what Stuart really wanted was this big.
And by the time he explained it all to Mac ahlberg,
and it had to be lit and it had to be done,
'cause you know, Stuart came out of theater.
He came out of live, out of theater,
and it really needed to be this big.
- My first memory of some solid talk about it
was a lunch I had with Brian and Stuart,
bringing forth this idea of from beyond, Rome,
and, "by the way, would you be willing to shave your head?"
As it turned out, that was premature,
because they didn't have the idea that I had
this thing coming outta my head and wiggling around,
that required a whole apparatus that, you know,
me shaving my head ain't gonna help.
That's not gonna help with that.
So they quickly realized that I didn't
necessarily have to do that.
I mean, they did put, for one scene, a bald cap on me
for when the monster drops me. That big worm thing.
But then, pretty much after that, it was the bigger
head apparatus with the hidden headband
that allowed the dog dick to move around.
- I knew that like in re-animator,
it wasn't gonna all happen on one gag.
It's going to be moments here,
moments there, put them together.
I made the stalk that it sat on.
I wanted it to be as thin as possible.
As a matter of fact, when I tasked the machinists
to make the ball and socket armature that it worked off of,
I said to them, I said, "I want it to be literally,
when this piece fits over it,
I want it to be smaller than a number two pencil."
So these were tiny little pieces and we made it
so that they didn't snap together
or anything like that, they fit front to back
and were held on by pressure, and by the actual sleeve.
And they were operated using swage surgical cable,
and John criswell made the controller.
And so we had a version of that
that was literally a pistol grip,
with the controller for the shots of it
just kinda doing that sort of thing.
And we had a head of Jeffrey with the little opening in it
that we could put that through and make it,
you know, do those closeups.
We could also poke it through at different levels.
We could also put... I could put eight of those pieces
together and make it so it was only that long.
I could put all 50 of those pieces together
and make it that long.
And when it was that long, it was actually so flexible
it would cross back over itself.
I wanted it to be elegant, partially because when Barbara
takes it in her mouth and bites it off,
I wanted it to look like, you know,
her taking a Rose, the stem of a Rose
in her mouth, and biting it off.
I didn't want it to look like she's, you know,
she's trying to chomp through a banana or something.
You know I wanted it to be kind of
elegant and gross at the same time.
- Later, in other projects, I've had apparatuses
and they've had a joystick,
and they're maneuverable, but they're radio operated.
You know, there's a signal that goes to a bug.
Well, not in those days, man.
It was practical, hardwired clamps, and...
So yeah, you had a joystick,
but it was connected to literal wires.
So everywhere I went, when I had that shit on,
someone's following me with their joystick. (Groaning)
It's fun to do it for a period of time.
It becomes less and less fun the more and more you do it.
That's what I can say.
It was kind of novel at first,
"this is gonna be really cool,"
and then you're tired of the really cool,
and you just want this crap to be off.
- Some of the effects that stand out in my memory
are for sure the makeup that Bob kurtzman did on Ted sorel,
where half of his body is fused.
And that took... you know, you hear these stories
about makeups taking like five hours to put on,
and a lot of times, it's exaggerated.
But that really did take forever.
I think they showed up at like 3:00 in the morning.
It was beautifully sculpted and applied makeup,
where Ted had to lay on a slant board
and Bob just carefully glued it on him.
And I just remember thinking, "oh my gosh."
The guy had to kinda keep his arm in this position
and he was so patient.
The actor was so, so patient with the makeup.
And I remember having to go there
and just slop that slime on him,
and paint that slime in every shot.
- Everything had to be shot by a certain day,
'cause all these extra people,
all this extra cost was going away.
They were getting in airplanes, coming back to the states.
So we shot and we shot all of this stuff, and you know,
David kindlon had made this really, really nice head.
So we've got this pretorious head
and that's a major sequence with a major speech
that is given by that character in closeup.
And they shot it, and then they sent the crew home
before they looked at the dailies.
And what they ended up with is they ended up
with a great looking head kinda doing,
you know, this sort of thing all over it, and it's moving,
but they can't get it to line up with the dialogue.
And they got the actor trying to do adr work on it,
and trying to... additional dialogue recording,
and trying to get it all to sync up,
and it's just not working.
And that was the second time, when John and I
both got called in, and we said,
"well, ithinkthey're about landing in New York
if you wanna get on the phone."
You know, it's like, "what?"
And they said, "well, what can you do with what's left?"
And I said, "well, have they picked up the trash?"
Because everything was thrown into a dumpster in Italy.
And we went out and we dug it all out.
They had taken the animatronic head and just cut it off.
It was not there. But we had a lot
of the other elements of it
and we had the rest of the creature,
but the neck was truncated, it was shortened.
So in order to make it fit around the back of his head,
I was gonna have to truncate it even more
by cutting a notch into it.
And that led us to what I affectionately have called
for the rest of my career, hell day.
- It's the greatest sensual pleasure there is.
- And we started doing the prosthetics,
and attaching the actual actor's head
with a dark, black piece down here,
so we could do a black, you know, a contrast matte,
kinda like what some of the stuff we did in re-animator.
And so we've got the actor forward like that,
with the black down here and the pieces up here,
and you raise the camera a little bit
and you don't see the neck.
So that's what the gag was.
And we did that whole speech,
and all of that was re-shot, so that was a major day.
It was also a day when we had Jeffrey in the full prosthetic
with the... everything's going,
and you know, it was the day that bubba dies,
and that was all done in the same day,
and I've never done that much makeup in one day in my life.
John criswell got a whole lot of experience
putting prosthetics on with me that day,
kinda literally being the extra hands.
It was a great day.
- I do remember the pretorious transformations
was one of the things that deak was out there for that.
And we did the derma wax, when Jeffrey comes up
and he sees pretorious for the first time
coming back from the dead, and he puts his hand
on the shoulder, and the fingers sink into his skin.
That was all built up with medical derma wax,
so that it literally was just wax,
his fingers could sink into him.
And then buechler had this gag where...
He supposedly ripped off his face,
and it was like the musculature underneath...
And he had this gag where it was
simply like bakery twine, like in the appliance.
And he said, "it's gonna make the muscles
start popping out."
And I was thinking, "that'll never work."
And we did it, and that's when I gave buechler
a lot of benefit of the doubt for stuff,
because he did this thing and it worked perfectly,
and I never thought it would work.
- [Mark] I think shortly before we left for Rome,
Stewart said, "oh, I've got another idea."
I'm like, "oh, jeez, we've got enough work already,
what is it?"
And he said he wanted to have Ted as the bubbly creature
holding Barbara crampton, you know, tearing at her dress.
He wanted his fingers to grow really long
and kind of caress her breasts.
I'm like, "oh god, Stuart, we don't, you know,
we don't have enough time or money
to create more effects, and..."
- Your boss had some scruples.
- He was a genius.
It's just that the five senses
weren't enough for him and he wanted more.
- We didn't have time to bring back Ted sorel
and do more iifecasting and make his arm and all that.
And I had a finger extension arm from Mark patton,
who was much younger than Ted sorel,
but he was from elm street 2...
But I had this wonderful full arm mold
of him with fingers extended.
And I thought, you know, I can take that
and use that mold and make a hand,
and make the fingers grow.
(Bubba screaming)
- The way we did that was we took styrofoam pellets
and we soaked them in gray dye, and then we let them dry,
and then we scraped them all up
and we put them in these barrels.
And then when we would film,
we would put the styrofoam pellets in front of leaf blowers
and blow them all around the room,
and then sweep them up off the floor,
put them back in and do it.
Well, poor Ken foree, who I'm still
to this day friends with, got one of the pellets
in his ear canal, all the way inside.
And you'd never seen somebody
so patient in all of your life.
He just kind of raised his hand and was like,
"excuse me, but one of these pellets is in my ear."
So I think it was about 45 minutes of digging around
with one of those long medical o-tips.
I wanna say they put maple syrup,
or something really sticky on the end of it,
and they finally got it out.
But my gosh, he was such a team player.
He didn't say a word.
- They put me in a wetsuit, okay? Underneath it,
'cause they had to pour karo syrup
all over my head and my body, you know,
so that those little bugs, little bees, would stick.
They were little styrofoam,
you know, that was what they were.
And so, they start pouring the syrup,
and I'm gonna be stuck there for quite a few hours,
and the syrup started going down under the suit.
Cold karo syrup just dripping down your chest,
and then your back, you know, almost to your butt.
(Laughing) I won't go any further,
but you get that idea.
- It's just exhausting is what it can be.
- One of the scenes when I jump on Jeffrey's back
and we fall down into the basement,
if you are careful and you look on the wall, you'll see,
it's a white wall, you see a brown streak.
They had to get a Italian man to play me
and they had to paint him.
So they painted him brown (Laughing) And he streaked
as his arm or something hit the wall.
So there's a streak coming right behind him. (Laughing)
- I know this behavior, I've seen it in the streets.
- We had this shot where we had to have this cutoff head
lifted off this torso, and Mike deak and I thought,
"oh, this is gonna be so good, let's pull a trick."
So we took a styrofoam head
and we just painted it the worst way possible.
We put acetone on it and made it all melt-y,
and then we put two crazy cockeyed ping pong balls for eyes,
and we put long packing hemp for hair,
and put lipstick on it and it just, it looked like
the stupidest thing you'd ever seen in your life.
So we're thinking we're gonna be funny,
because Stuart's loving us, everyone's loving us.
And like they, you know,
some of these effects, there's so many of them,
the first time that Stuart and the dp, Mac ahlberg,
would get to set would be the first time they'd see them.
So Mike and I take this hemp-covered styrofoam head
with lipstick and crossed eyes,
and we put a garbage bag over it and we go on set.
And then Mac ahlberg is this Swedish, very proper man
who literally looked through a monocle, was like,
"okay, can we please bring in the cutoff head?"
And we go, "all right, we're coming in,"
and we have have this...
We come in and we have this head in a bag.
And then we're looking at each other, nudging each other,
and we pull the bag off this cutoff head.
And Mac ahlberg blew his stack and was like,
"what is this shit storm? I can't fucking shoot this.
What are you... what is going through your fucking..."
Just having a fucking tantrum.
We didn't know what to say.
We're like, "(Babbling) We're kidding, we're kidding,
we're kidding, here's the real head,"
you know, which really looked a million times better.
But I still think our head
looked really good, but anyway.
- There's a scene where I'm eating the brain
and Carolyn purdy-Gordon, Stuart's wife,
plays a doctor who comes in and catches me
before I suck her eyeball out, you know?
I'm eating a brain and I say it's delicious.
And so they gave me a brain, it was a rubber brain,
and it had some like corn syrup blood on it,
and it had been molded with a bite taken out of it. Smart.
And so, you know, I'm eating the brain,
so I use this little hole, but I'm biting it.
And she, "what are you doing?"
And I say, "it's delicious."
And Stuart goes, "cut, cut, cut, cut.
What are you, what are you eating?"
I said, "I'm not eating anything, Stuart.
There's nothing to eat, this is rubber,
and see that, so I'm pretending."
And he said, "well, there should be something in there,
that we should really see you eat something."
And I went... and he said, "anybody got anything
pink around here that we could put in there?"
You know, not many foods,
that would match brain, apparently.
And someone said, "well, I got some polygrip,
I got some dentures adhesive."
And he said, "yeah, put that in there."
It was pink, so they filled this hole with the thing.
"Action," (mimics chewing)
"Crawford, what are you doing?"
And I say my line. (Mimics talking with mouth full).
I can't open my mouth,
it's so dry in there,
because that's what that stuff does,
takes all the moisture outta your mouth.
And he, "cut, cut, what are you doing?"
(Mimics talking with mouth full)
And I said, "it takes all the moisture away."
And I said, "you try it."
And he goes, "you know what?
I never have an actor do anything that I won't do myself.
So yeah, fill that up, I'll show you what I mean."
They filled it up, he took a bite and like
tried to spit it out, but it had already
cemented in and took every bit of moisture
that it would take to propel something outta your mouth.
(Babbling) Took it and he goes,
"okay, fine. Just mime it."
So we wasted about half an hour on that.
- Delicious.
- So we were shooting and everything was going great.
We were all very, very busy.
And like I said, these stages were...
I don't know how high the ceilings were,
I wanna say 35 feet up in the air, they were massive.
And on each stage, there was like a 25 foot door
that was about, oh, I have to say two or three feet thick,
that was concrete and steel.
And on each door, at the end of the night
when you close the door, there was a ring
that was like this, and a ring that was like this,
that would come together like that.
And they would put a big pin in it and put a lock on it,
so nobody could get in the sound stage.
- We were getting ready to do the lamprey eel sequence
and I needed to go in and ask a couple questions of Stuart,
and I walked in a side entrance to the stage over there.
And when I reached back, I thought I was grabbing
a real, honest-to-god handle.
- So he probably pulled, you know,
three or four tons of concrete.
- And my finger went down through one of those bolts,
and then the bolts crossed over each other.
And iwent (shouting), 'cause that's what you do
when when you feel a shot of pain, and you hear
what sounds like a box of pencils crunching
and it's your hand.
And I went like that, and when I ran out into one
and I put my fingers... I'm an ex EMT.
I put my finger right here
and went right into my pressure point,
and I went out to one of the work lights,
which over in Italy was just a great, big light bulb
with a cage around it.
And I held up and I could not see...
I could see this finger, I could see this finger,
but I couldn't see these two at all,
'cause they were hanging down here.
And the hospital the first night cut pieces off,
threw them away, and we never got those back.
And then they just kinda set things back,
and bound it up with a bunch of gauze,
and then two days later, I went back
to quote/unquote check on it,
and when they took the gauze off, it stuck a little,
and one of my fingers fell back off.
And the doctor's going, you know, like, "chop chop."
And I'm like, "no chop chop, no."
And Tony doublin's wife at the time,
she had driven me, and I said to the nurse...
That's the only one there that spoke English.
I said, "give me that file."
And we grabbed the file and we went out the fire escape,
and down the fire escape, and that's when
I went back to Albert band, held that in front of his face
and said, "find me a real doctor in this country."
And he did.
- I have the same feeling on every last day
of every single movie.
And that is, "let's start again,
because now I know how to play the character."
There's always a little bit of remorse at the end of a film,
because you think, "oh, did I do it? Did I nail it?
Could I have done something different?
Oh, maybe I should have played
that scene a little bit differently,
and could I have done something more or less?"
Or, "was I good enough?"
I mean, you always hope that you're gonna
fulfill the job required, and I always feel
a sense of loss, loneliness, and sadness at the very end.
And I remember the last day of from beyond,
having those same feelings, just hoping and wishing
that it was going to turn out okay.
(Explosion booming) (Katherine groaning)
- It's a little bit slight of hand.
So you know, again, this was before
computer generated effects,
so there was no visual effects shot,
there were only special effect shots,
and those were largely created on the set.
Occasionally, some things would go into the optical camera
for optical effects, but especially with Stuart,
almost everything was practical.
They all were pretty much effects on the set.
And again, that's from his theater background.
It goes back to the plays like "warp,"
where the effects were on stage, live at the time,
and that's how Stuart worked.
I can't remember exactly the scene,
but there was a moment when something
was supposed to be an effect and we didn't have the effect.
And the actor kind of did something
that made it look like it had happened.
And Stuart grinned and said,
"see, acting is the best special effect."
There's a great deal of latitude in what happens in editing.
And every director is different,
but certainly by from beyond, I had a very, very strong
and trusting relationship with Stuart, and in his mind,
was completely given the permission and the charge
to edit the film as I saw fit.
Once he was done shooting in Italy, he came back.
In the case of from beyond,
he was able to be in la through most of the production,
post production process.
So he and Brian both came back
and we were all working together, I think along somewhat
with Albert band, who was Charlie band's father,
and kind of the godfather
of empire films at that point.
So the three of us were there, and you know,
it wasn't like we were working together every day.
I would take the film and work things out
and put scenes together, and Stuart would come in
and we'd look at things and change things,
and maybe find a way to make something work better,
or find a way to make it more exciting.
On a daily basis, we were reworking the scenes.
It takes months to edit a movie and in those days,
we were editing on film, not computers.
So you're actually cutting and taping
pieces of film together.
And then from time to time, Brian would come in,
and he would... not quite dad coming in the room,
but he would be another viewpoint that maybe
was a little bit more... a little less of an enthusiast
than Stuart and a little bit more of a realist.
So it was a nice balance getting the input
from the two of them, and I think I brought
very much an actor's perspective,
a sense of drama, a sense of performance,
a sense of storytelling that I had picked up
in all my years of acting.
So I think it was really a nice combination of personalities
and skills and intellects that came together
in the editing room making from beyond.
- I had been a foley artist, let me see,
for six years by then, 'cause I started in 1980
working on the shows Dallas and knots landing,
and from beyond was some of the feature work
I'd been doing, 'cause I'd transitioned
pretty much into features completely by then.
And this was one of the independent films I worked on.
It was during a time when I was doing both big features
and then independent features, and this was an independent
that I did where I was the only foley artist on it,
which is unusual, because normally, two foley artists
work on a film, but on some of the smaller
independent films, they will often have just one.
And this was one of those times when it was just me.
And so the way the process was,
was we had what we would call reels,
and the reels are only 10 minutes of film at a time.
And they were on black and white vegetable dupes,
they're all black and white,
they're kind of fuzzy, muddy-looking things.
So I didn't see any of the special effects
and I didn't get to hear any of the music.
I'm basically working with a black and white dupe
that's kind of muddy looking, where I'm seeing
the performances and I'm getting a basic idea
of what it looks like, and that's all I have to work with.
I don't have a digital color print like anybody has now.
So if there are any film students watching this,
it wasn't like that back then.
What we were basically doing is looking
at a very dirty black and white film,
and we're only looking at 10 minutes at a time.
So you have to really kind of imagine,
I'm working on 10 minutes of film,
and I'm not looking at the whole film.
I don't know what's happening next,
because back then, it's low budget,
I don't get to see the whole film first.
So I'm only seeing 10 minutes at a time
and I've got to assume I know what's gonna be happening next
and I have to keep track of what shoes was I wearing
for her before, and what shoes is she wearing now
when she changes clothes and she gets
into the sexy night thing, and they do this s&m stuff.
And sometimes, when you have a lotta time,
you can write down what you're using,
but when you're working this fast, you can't,
so you have to remember.
One of the things that's important to understand...
And in my book, the foley grail, idiscuss this
a little bit... about mixing what I call hybrid sounds,
where some of the editorial sound effects
are mixed with what we do in foley.
That was what happened with some of the creature sounds.
The creature sounds are a combination of designed effects
by editorial, so the sound editors
are putting in some designed and library effects,
and then what I was doing in foley was supplementing
or enhancing what they're also doing.
So some of the goopier sounds
and some of the strange things like that,
anything that sounded really mechanical,
or the (mimics electricity crackling)
And the stuff like that,
was completely sound effect designed.
I had nothing to do with any of that,
there would've been no way to do that in foley.
But the goopier things and the weird stuff like that,
I would've done on the foley stage,
using things like dippity-do and hand lotion.
And I do mouth noises, too, you know,
like (makes squishing sound) Stuff like that.
A year later, when I worked on predator,
I also did stuff like that for the monster for predator.
So I did some similar things like that.
When you're working on a really big feature,
you have time and you can think about what you're gonna do.
But what's really fun about working on an independent film,
where you don't have as much money or time,
is you have to think fast.
So this one was only, I think, a two or three day thing.
This wasn't two, to three, to four weeks like you have
for a big feature, where there's a lot of money.
Well, the nice thing about having limited funds
is you have to think fast and be creative,
so you grab or think really fast whatever is there,
and you have to be really inventive.
And I think that's really kind of a challenge and more fun.
- The first time I met Stuart,
it was kind of, in a way, assumed that I would do the score,
but nothing was really set in stone at that point.
And I remember I went over to his house,
we were gonna have dinner, and so we're having dinner,
everything's going well,
and we're discussing music and film, and theater,
and all these things.
And then it somehow came up
in the conversation that I was a big fan
of frank zappa and the mothers of invention,
and Stuart's eyes lit up, and that was the point
that I knew something was really connecting.
And we spent the better part of the rest of the evening
singing frank zappa songs from the album freak out,
to lumpy gravy, to all these albums
from the early mothers of invention.
And we hit it off, our sense of humor
and the sort of
snarkiness of zappa,
and the brilliance and all this.
So like I said, we sang a bunch of songs from the albums,
and we just connected in a major, major way.
What was obvious from the outset with from beyond
is that it did not have the sort of humorous aspect
that re-animator did.
It had a lot of the lovecraft quirkiness
and weirdness to it, which is great,
but it was in no way that sort of comedic horror
type of feel that I had created for re-animator.
Now, what definitely came out
that was extremely important in from beyond,
was the element of sexuality and/or sensuality,
which was the entire domain of the film.
The whole idea that this other dimension
was related to this pineal gland,
a sexual thing that got people's juices flowing,
or however you want to interpret it.
What I had to think of from a musical standpoint is,
how do I make the music feel both
sensual and sexy,
and at the same time, scary and horrific?
So, how do you marry all those things
was the first question that came to my mind,
and that was my jumping-off point.
When you're in that dimension and the resonator is on,
there had to be this... you had to feel
like you were in this other dimension.
And that's where I brought in a few electronics
or synthesizer, let's say.
Mostly bell-type things and all that,
which helped create that atmosphere.
Behind that, those few bell-like synthesizer things,
I had strings, real strings in this case.
And rather than use like a typical whole orchestra,
it was really mostly strings and some percussion,
and along with the synthesizers,
to help create that dimension.
So really, those were the ingredients that that I used.
So you had the atmosphere when you were in the dimension.
That atmosphere could be somewhat easily blended
into being in that from beyond dimension,
so sonically, it was more of an atmospheric thing.
But what was equally important was,
how do you get the sexuality
and sensuality aspect of it?
And that was the secondary part.
I think the sequence in the film that most demonstrates that
is when Barbara crampton is, you know,
she's in this like dominatrix,
you know, outfit and all this, she's feeling her sexuality
and all this stuff is going on with her.
Yeah, that was... it had to have both that atmosphere,
but it had to have this lovecraftian
sexuality, sensuality aspect to it.
So in that case, I played down the atmospherics,
even though there was some in there,
but played this really sort of undulating sexuality
and sensuality in the music.
So those were the devices I used, as opposed to
where it eventually went, when...
The part of the film where
it's this all hell breaks loose type thing
towards the end, right?
That's when, again, the use of the strings, real strings,
are so important, 'cause there's a lot of movement in those,
and that's not meant for atmosphere,
that's meant for action and the the intensity
of what's happening, and the resonator,
and when things are going haywire, so to speak.
So those are some of the elements
and how I dealt with them.
- And then the next thing you know,
in true Charles band tradition,
I think it came out about four months later,
and now that one did show in the theaters.
I remember, 'cause I saw it at the theater,
and it had a full-page ad in the la times,
with the guy, you know, Ted sorel and his bubblegum,
Mr. Bubblegum makeup.
And it was just so incredible seeing all of our hard work
and all the beautiful art direction, the color palette.
- From beyond didn't do great
in theatrical release, either,
and it was almost absolutely known that, I mean,
Charlie was ready to put it out on vhs immediately
after it was... it didn't go straight to video,
but in Charlie's mind, it was straight...
It was in video before it was in it.
- We thought from beyond was gonna be a smash hit.
But then again, I've always thought that.
Almost every... on a lot of movies I've done,
I've always thought, "this is gonna be it."
Because re-animator was such a surprise hit,
I think if we had... I mean, certainly empire
was not able to release it theatrically.
If I had taken it to Paramount or somebody,
and had them put it out for real,
it probably would've done it still did tremendous,
not theatrically, but it did tremendous video business.
I mean, fantastic.
If my deals had been honored, I would've been
a multimillionaire out of the gate, you know?
As it was, I wasn't.
But I did get to make more movies
and that was sort of the point.
- They knew that if they took what they liked,
what they had cut together, they knew that if
they took it to the ratings board like that,
the movie that you know,
that it wouldn't be that movie anymore.
They would say... once you... here's the thing.
You can put out any movie you want unrated,
you can do that, but you just have limitations.
And those limitations are usually from private entities,
like movie theaters, say, "we don't put out unrated movies
in our movie theaters, we just don't."
Some newspapers will say,
"we allow ads for movie releases,
but there can't be any graphics."
So here in la, the la times,
the ad for re-animator was black and white, words only.
And at the time, the other competitive newspaper
was the herald examiner. Remember that thing?
And they didn't care, so whatever the artwork was,
they printed it.
So you could do it, you just kinda were forced
to put one hand behind your back, I guess.
But it didn't matter with re-animator, just didn't matter.
People went, word of mouth, boom, bang, zoom.
- You know, I'd just be quite frank,
I had a tragic, tragic, tragic thing happen
in my personal life at this time,
just the day before the skivvies.
There had been crazy things going on in this film already.
I mean, Ted had his prosthetics
and that kinda thing, and he was butt-naked
in front of us for half a day for no reason.
And I wanted to, you know, just have a little laugh
for the day to get things outta my head,
'cause I was really suffering at that point.
Something I don't like to talk about,
just some of those things that happen in your life
that you just don't wanna deal with,
or discuss with anybody.
So I just grabbed it, somebody showed it to me
and I grabbed it.
I said, "this will be this will get a laugh
and it'll give me a laugh,
and I need a laugh real bad right now."
And so that's why I put it on.
I was supposed to be shot,
or edited, from the stomach up,
and that didn't happen.
I saw the film for the first time on television
and I said, "oh, looks great."
Saw it again on ktla, they played it again.
Saw it, "oh, yeah, great."
I didn't see the cut until 15 years later,
something like that, almost 20 years later.
When I saw it, when I first saw it,
I said, "my god, what happened?"
It was a great time except for that. I mean, for me.
I mean, it was a wonderful time in Rome on the set.
We were doing great stuff.
I felt good about my performance,
I felt good about working with the other actors.
I thought they were marvelous
and really did a wonderful job, you know?
As I watched it on ktla, you know,
I said, "wow," you know?
I thought it would get a lot more playing time,
and certainly acknowledgement,
but I don't know, I don't know.
Maybe they should have cut something. (Laughing)
We might have gotten a lot more playing time, I don't know.
- You know, years later, Charlie band said
he wanted to do a spinoff TV series
that was inspired by from beyond.
So I was lucky enough to write
eight episodes of something
that he calls "miskatonic u,"
and we used the same color palette,
and paid tribute to Mac ahlberg,
who's a wonderful guy, and to Stuart.
It's certainly not a remake, it's certainly, it's just a...
You know, we loved Stuart so much.
I was so close to him and he was a very kind, funny mentor.
Both he and his wife, Carolyn, who I just loved.
And so, when Charlie mentioned,
"would you like to do this 'miskatonic' program?"
I said yes, knowing that there was a chance
that it might bite me in the ass from the fans,
but luckily, they all responded really well to it, yeah.
And I loved that we were able to include that color palette,
and the resonator, we built a new and improved resonator.
It's just such a good feeling.
And the first day that we filmed on set,
I actually asked Mike deak to come and help us do,
you know, to slime up our monsters.
And there me and Mike deak are, 35 years later,
with paint brushes,
painting slime on the puppets.
And I remember Mike said to me,
"you know, I feel like Stuart is in the room with us,"
and I absolutely know that to be true.
- It was really funny, because a lot of these movies
that I worked on, especially in the early days,
I never thought of them as being...
Well, definitely at the time, not anything like cult movies.
But I guess now, looking back, from beyond
has been on Turner classic movies on the underground.
And I'm sitting there watching this, going like,
"well, I guess I made it."
I mean, then a couple months ago,
dawn of the dead was on, or day of the dead
was on, rather, and I go, "oh, I'm actually on camera,
I'm actually being shown on Turner classic movies.
Me, on Turner classic movies."
This is like, this doesn't belong.
I mean, but yeah, two of the first films I worked on
are basically considered cult films at this point,
and we didn't know it at the time.
I mean, the thing, too, is...
This is another story that I'll throw out there.
Bill Butler and I, like I said,
were basically the heckle and jeckle, abbott and costello,
and we were just relentless in our comedy and saying things,
and we had no right to be,
'cause we were so new to the project.
But there was the thing of, we'd go to see dailies,
and to make sure that there's continuity for the creatures,
the makeups and things like that,
so they allowed us to go see dailies.
And we're sitting there with Albert,
and Stuart and Brian yuzna, and we're watching dailies,
and bill Butler and I
turned into mystery science theater 3000.
We're throwing out all these comments,
we're making all these smart-ass things.
We're making fun of the actors,
we're making fun of our effects,
we're making fun of everything.
And years later, I thought about it and I ran into Stuart,
and I asked him this twice.
I go, "Stuart, if I was on any other production
and there were a couple of jackasses
making fun of your dailies the entire time,
how the hell did you let it...
Why did you let us stay there?"
And he said to me one thing I'll never forget,
he says, "because you guys were funny."
And I was like, "you can't be serious.
I mean, you're doing... your life, your career's on the line
and we're sitting there being assholes."
"Yeah, because you're funny."
And it was like, that's the kind of guy Stuart was.
And I asked him that on two occasions,
and I got the same response, which is why Stuart has always,
through the years, been just so endearing.
I remember kmb, I was working there as a shop supervisor,
and Stuart came in and was doing dreams in a witch house,
or something like that.
And he said to me, he's like, "oh, Mike, you know,
I really wanna actually work with you as a monster
in this thing, but they won't allow me
to take anybody up to Canada and stuff."
You know, it's like from the time we worked
on from beyond, it was always the same thing.
I mean, bill in his book writes about it, this is true,
is that we came... we were goofing around with Stuart
so much on set, writing this pretend script, called...
Something that bill Butler came up with,
"queen of crisco mountain," about
these women on a prison spaceship are making TV dinners,
and there's this giant mountain of crisco
that they had to climb up to escape.
And Stuart... and we all thought it was funny as shit,
and we'd just keep coming up with scenes
in between shooting on from beyond.
I mean, it was like, what director would allow
that kind of stuff on set?
But that's what I mean. Maybe I was spoiled,
because that's not the way it works.
I couldn't pull any of that shit on a Michael bay set,
that's for sure.
But back then... because back then,
when he asked for something and like I said,
with that tentacle hand, we tried to deliver.
It was one of those things where it wasn't like
we were just being jackasses
and not holding up our end of it.
We were being jackasses, but we are also trying to give him
everything he absolutely wanted to film.
So I guess that's why he maybe
tolerated us a little more.
- You know, it's really...
What makes from beyond magical
is it's imbued with Stuart's sense of wonder
and his inner child, and his enthusiasm.
- So I remember when I directed my first film,
I did madhouse for lakeshore and lionsgate,
and he was the first person I wanted to show my film to.
And I didn't much really know what I was doing.
I knew what I liked to see and I knew as a fan,
and certainly from being directed, you know,
by him in regards to how to even put together a film.
I just remember him coming to the screening room
and the first thing that he said when he watched it,
I was terrified, was, "well, you're in the right business,
you know what you're doing."
I was like, "oh my god."
To hear Stuart Gordon say that, it meant everything.
And you know, the last time that I saw Stuart
was years later, when, of course, John buechler passed away.
We had buechler's funeral at my house in the backyard
and I saw Stuart there, and I could kinda tell
that he was probably not feeling his best,
and I didn't know that that was gonna be
the last time that I saw him.
So I had heard about a year later that he had sadly passed.
And I don't think anyone could miss him more,
other than his own family.
I just really... I just was really, really...
It was such a huge loss for me and all of his friends,
certainly his family.
But he left an indelible Mark on storytelling,
it is gonna take some big... He's got big shoes to fill.
You know, he just was such a unique artist,
that the world is really lucky
to have experienced all of his work.
- I think from beyond, as with re-animator,
and even something like chopping mall (chuckling)
Which is not a Stuart Gordon film.
But over time, these films have developed more fans,
and people share them with their children and their friends,
and they have become cult classics of '80s horror.
And for me, still working in the horror genre
all these many years later, I look back on the legacy
that I have in these beginning films,
and I appreciate them so much and I'm so happy
that I said yes to these movies,
not knowing if they were going to be good,
who were these directors, who was HP lovecraft,
what did I know?
And I didn't think that I was going to have
a career in the horror genre going forward.
I just wanted to act and people offered me a role
and I said yes, and I just happened to be lucky enough
to work for Stuart, and to have him continually hire me.
And I can't thank him enough,
and all the wonderful people I've worked with,
I'm getting choked up talking about it.
But it's just, it's true.
They mean so much to me, these films,
and the fact that people still watch them
and they still love them and that, you know,
I'm able to have a career really built
on the legacy of those early films,
because I really wouldn't be here today and making new films
if it hadn't been for those.
(Upbeat synth music)
- See, this is where I'm supposed to say something
disparaging against the editor on camera
and pretend that, "oh, he didn't know it,"
you know, and then I get cut out of the thing.
That was a joke. (Chuckling)