by Kim Newman
After sixty, seventy films inside four years, it gets so Roger can knock ’em off over a weekend. No kidding. The Little Shop of Horrors is made in three days because it’s raining and Roger can’t play tennis. He tackles every subject, within certain Jim-and-Sam-imposed limits. He shoots movies about juvenile delinquent girls, gunslinger girls, reincarnated witch girls, beatnik girls, escaped convict girls, cave girls, Viking girls, monster girls, Apache girls, rock and roll girls, girls eaten by plants, carnival girls, sorority girls, last girls on earth, pearl-diver girls and gangster girls. Somehow, he skips jungle girls, else maybe Boomba would land an AIP contract.
The thing is everybody – except Sam, who chortles over the ledgers without ever seeing the pictures – gets bored with the production line. Another week, and it’s Blood of Dracula plus High School Hellcats, ho hum. I don’t know when Roger gets time to dream, but dream he does – of bigger things. Jim thinks of bigger posters, or at least different-shaped posters. In the fifties, the enemy is television, but AIP product looks like television – small and square and black and white and blurry, with no one you’ve ever heard of wandering around Bronson Cavern. Drive-in screens are the shape of windshields. The typical AIP just lights up a middle slice. Even with Attack of the Crab Monsters, The Amazing Colossal Man and The She-Creature triple-billed, kids are restless. Where’s the breathtaking CinemaScope, glorious Technicolor and stereoscopic sound? 3-D has come and gone, and neither Odorama nor William Castle’s butt-buzzers are goosing the box office.
Jim or Roger get a notion to lump together the budgets and shooting schedules of two regular AIP pictures and throw their all into one eighty-five-minute super-production. Together, they browbeat Sam into opening the cobwebbed cheque book. This time, Mike Todd – well, not Mike Todd, since he’s dead, but some imaginary composite big-shot producer – will have to watch out come Oscar season. So, what to make?
In England, they start doing horror pictures in colour, with talented actors in starched collars and proper sets. Buckets of blood and girls in low-cut nightgowns are included, so it’s not like there’s art going on. Every other AIP quickie has a monster in it, so the company reckon they’re expert at fright fare. There’s your answer. Roger will make a classy – but not too classy – horror. Jim can get Vinnie Price to star. He’d been in that butt-buzzing William Castle film for Columbia and a 3-D House of Wax for Warners, and is therefore a horror ‘name’, but his career is stalled with TV guest spots on debatably rigged quiz programs or as fairly fruity actors touring Tombstone on Western shows. After Brando, well-spoken, dinner-jacketed eyebrow-archers like him are out of A pictures. What Jim and Roger don’t have is a clue as to what their full-colour, widescreen spooktacular should be about. They just know Revenge of the Crab Monsters or The Day After the World Ended won’t cut it.
Enter Walter Paisley, with a Signet paperback of Tales of Mystery and Imagination. No, it isn’t altruism – it’s all about the client.
Boomba’s out of work and eating his weight in bananas every single day. Bonzo and Cheetah have a lock on working with Dutch Reagan and Tarzan, so my star is unfairly shut out of the town’s few chimp-friendly franchises unless he’s willing to do dangerous vine-swinging, crocodile-dodging stunts those precious primates want to duck out of. Therefore, I’m obliged to scare up properties suitable as vehicles for a pot-bellied chimpanzee. I ponder a remake of King Kong, with a chimp instead of a gorilla, but RKO won’t listen. I pitch a biopic of Major Sam, America’s monkey astronaut, but that goddamn Russian dog gets all the column inches.
In desperation, I ask an intern who once had a few weeks of college about famous, out-of-copyright stories with monkeys in ’em, and get pointed at ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’. Okay, so, strictly, the killer in that yarn is an orangutan not a chimpanzee – but every film version casts a guy in a ratty gorilla suit, so Boomba is hardly wider of the author’s original intent. I know of AIP’s horror quandary, and a light bulb goes on over my head. I dress Boomba up in a fancy suit and cravat and beret for the Parisian look and teach him to wave a cardboard cutthroat razor. I march the chimp into Jim and Sam’s office just as Jim and Roger are looking glumly at a sketch artist holding up a blank board which ought to be covered with lurid artwork boosting their break-out film.
Tragically, Boomba compromises his employment prospects by crapping his velvet britches and grabbing for Sam’s foot-long cigar, but my Poe paperback falls onto the desk and Roger snatches it up. He once read some of the stories, and thinks he particularly liked ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’. Sam objects. The kids who go to AIP pictures have to study Poe in school and will therefore naturally hate him. But Jim remembers Universal squeezed out a couple of Poe pictures and racked up fair returns back in the Boris and Béla days. Then, Sam – who gives every appearance of actually having read ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ – says you can’t make a horror movie without a monster and there’s no monster in the story. ‘The house,’ says Roger, eyes shining, ‘the house is the monster!’ Jim and Sam look at each other, thinking this over. Boomba is forgotten, chewing the cigar. Then, management buys Roger’s line. The house is the monster.
Important issues get settled. Is there a part for Price? Yes, there’s someone in the falling house called Roderick Usher. Is there a girl? Roderick has a sister called Madeline. Paging through the paperback, they discover Poe doesn’t say Madeline isn’t a teenager in a tight sweater. I suggest the thin plot of the eighteen-page story would be improved if a killer chimp escaped from the Rue Morgue and broke into the House of Usher to terrorise the family. No one listens.
Jim and Roger run with ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’. They happily read out paragraphs in Vinnie Price accents. The sketch artist covers his board with a falling house, Vinnie lifting a terrified eyebrow, a buried-alive babe in a tight shroud, coffins, crypts, skeletons, an atomic explosion (which gets rubbed out quickly) and slogans ripped from Poe prose. ‘He buried her alive… to save his soul!’ ‘I heard her first feeble movements in the coffin… we had put her living in the tomb!’ ‘Edgar Allan Poe’s overwhelming tale of EVIL and TORMENT!’
I see my slice of the deal vanishing along with Sam’s cigar. Eddy is dead and long out of copyright, so there’s no end for him. This cheers Sam up, since he’d been all-a-tremble at the prospect of having to buy rights to some horror book from some unwashed writer.
So, just when it would take a steam train to stop AIP making House of Usher, I mention I am the agent for the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore and can easily secure permission – for a nominal fee – for the use of the author’s name, which they have registered as a trademark. For a few moments, the room is quiet and no one believes me. Sam is sceptical, but I tell him the reason Poe’s middle name is so often misspelled is to evade dues payable to the EAPSoB. He mulls it over. He swallows it, because it makes sense to him. He’s ready to argue for going with Edgar Allen Poe’s House of Asher as a title before Jim and Roger shout him down. Sam doesn’t care about critics, but little slivers of Jim and Roger do, so they’re ready to strike a deal on the spot. I have a pre-prepared contract, which needs crossings-out as it’s for a monkey as actor rather than an august body as trademark-leaser, but will still do.
As soon as I’m out of the office, I found the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore and start paperwork on trademark registration. It turns out I’m not even the first in the racket. Edgar Rice Burroughs and Mark Twain, or their heirs, have beaten me to it. The deal may not be 100% kosher, but AIP’s cheque clears. Probably, they just want to shut me up, since I’m theoretically responsible for bringing them the property. Hey, it’s my drugstore paperback. They offer me an ‘associate producer’ credit, but forget to include it on the film. Maybe it’s lost in the five minutes of swirling multi-coloured liquids tacked on after the house has burned down and tumbled into the tarn. But, from then on, I’m part of the Poe package.
The Fall of the House of Usher – or House of Usher, as it is called
on the posters to save on lettering – is made in a comparatively leisurely fifteen days. Vinnie shaves his moustache, under protest as if he were Cesar Romero, and wears a white wig, which he likes enough to model in his off-hours along Sunset Strip. There are only three other people in the speaking cast, so the star gets first bite of all the scenery available for chewing. On set, Vinnie objects to the line ‘The house lives, the house breathes!’ Roger tells him, ‘The house is the monster,’ and Vinnie sells it with eyeball-rolling, velvet-tongued ham. In my capacity as ‘ass. prod.’, I have Boomba pose for a portrait as a degenerate Usher ancestor. Floyd, the camera genius, doesn’t get a good shot of it so you can’t see the chimp’s cameo in the picture.
This is how it plays. In some earlier century (no one’s sure which), a brooding youth with a Brando sneer and a Fabian haircut travels through burned-out wasteland to a painted-on-glass mansion where Vinnie twitches at the slightest sound and rolls his eyeballs as if they were marbles. He has extra-sensitive senses, which are a perpetual torment to him and looks severely pained whenever anyone drops a fork or lights a lamp. Our hero is searching for his missing girlfriend, Vinnie’s sister. She flits about, showing cleavage, then faints and is buried alive in the basement. Girl claws her way out of crypt, irritated, and scratches out Vinnie’s eyes as if he were making a play for her date at the record hop. A candle falls over and the House of Usher catches light like Atlanta in Gone With the Wind – indeed, some of the burning building stock footage might be offcuts from David O. Selznick’s day. Vinnie and girl get crushed and/or burned. Our hero makes it out unscorched, and broods some more – presumably his agent has just told him how much he’s getting paid and he’s resolved to quit acting and become a producer so he can wave the foot-long cigars some day. A caption runs: ‘“and the deep and dark tarn closed silently over the fragments of the House of Usher” – Poe’. Just to make sure you know, Eddy’s name pops up several more times during the swirly credits.
Against expectations, Usher is a monumental hit, boffo boxo, molto ducats in the coffers. Roger makes money. Vinnie makes money. Sam and Jim make more money than they can imagine, and Jim at least has a great imagination. Edgar Allan Poe, or the Baltimore Society in his name, makes money. Even Boomba gets residuals for the use of his unseen likeness. There actually are residuals and Sam has to find out how to pay them. The matter never came up with Voodoo Woman or The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues. Naturally, being Hollywood, this means only one thing – sequels.
The first pass runs to pitches like Return to the House of Usher… only there’s a stinking tarn where the old homestead used to be, so few dramatic possibilities not involving expensive underwater photography present themselves. I spin a story out of my head in which Roderick Usher’s ghost crawls out of the tarn as a green monkey with flippers. Jim sees straight off that I’m angling a star role for Boomba and nixes the approach. It would be easy to take offence – after all, the chimp is a better actor than the duck-tailed hoodlums AIP put ruffs, doublets and floppy-tasselled hats on in subsequent movies.
Skipping through my now dog-eared and broken-spined Tales of Mystery and Imagination, Roger gets excited about ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’. The slavering sketch artist, about whom I’m starting to worry, draws a teenybopper in a tight sweater strapped down in a pit while Vinnie swings a blade over her bazooms. Jim and Sam love this, and are disappointed when Roger looks up the story and finds it’s a guy in the dungeons of the Spanish Inquisition. Never mind, he says, the pendulum is the monster. By this, he means the torture angle is grabby enough without the added distraction of bazooms. The artist rubs out the bosomage, and puts in a manly chest – revealed through pendulum-slashes in a frilly shirt.
So, Pit and the Pendulum gets a green light. Even Sam sees one picture for the price of two is a better deal if it hauls in ten times the gross of the average four old-style AIP creature features. He quietly squelches Bert I. Gordon’s Puppet People vs. the Colossal Beast project and Alex Gordon’s long-cherished The She-Creature Meets the Old-Time Singing Cowboy script, and pours added shekels into Pit. It’s AIP’s big hope for 1961.
Only problem is, ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ isn’t a story – just a scene. Guy in pit. Nearly sliced by pendulum. Escapes. Even Roger can’t spin that out to feature length with long shots of dripping walls, gnawing rats and Vinnie licking his lips. The problem is solved, unusually, by the writer. Dick Matheson takes his Usher script, changes the names, and drops the climactic house fire in favour of Pit/Pendulum business. This time, brooding youth – not the same one, though you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference – is looking for his missing sister, and she’s married to Vinnie. But she’s still buried alive – twice, as it happens. The Usher sets are back, with new painted flats and torture equipment to bump the house up to a castle. The establishing shot is a bigger glass painting, with crashing waves included. Vinnie keeps his moustache, which saves behind-the-scenes drama – and wears tights, always a big favourite with him.
One morning, I wake and find I’ve grown a moustache too. Plus I’m thinner, paler and more watery-eyed. And my wardrobe – which was once full of snazzy striped threads – runs to basic black. I don’t think much of it, because the times they are a-changing. Pit is, if anything, bigger boffier boxo than Usher, and the walls start closing in.
Tales of Terror gets through its remake of House of Usher in the first reel, and calls it ‘Morella’. Then, it runs through ‘The Black Cat’ and ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ (Peter Lorre and Vinnie compete in a face-pulling contest) for a second act, finishing up with ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ (bad-tempered Basil Rathbone turns Vinnie into a ‘nearly liquid mass of loathsome – of detestable putrescence’). Since most of the pages are now torn out of my book, I venture the opinion we’re using up doable Poe at an alarming rate, especially since AIP are cranking out more than one of these pictures a year. I try to get ‘Rue Morgue’ back on the table, determined Boomba will have his comeback before the well runs dry. After only one and a half remakes of House of Usher, everyone is bored again – the curse of success in this business, if you ask me – and trying to break out.
First, Roger sneaks off to do The Premature Burial at another outfit, with Ray Milland playing Vincent Price, but Sam and Jim buy into the deal, so Roger is sucked back in. Premature isn’t quite as much of a remake of Usher as Pit and ‘Morella’, but it is a remake of the scheme-to-drive-the-husband-crazy sub-plot Matheson padded out Pit with. Roger wants to hop-frog off and make, I don’t know, socially significant movies about segregation. He winds up buried alive in Venice, California, in those standing Danny Haller sets. Decaying mansions with stock furniture. Tiny soundstage exteriors with false perspective stunted trees. Dry ice mist pooling over bare floor.
Piqued that Milland is daring to usurp his shtick, Vinnie hares all over the library, doing Master of the World, Confessions of an Opium Eater, Twice-Told Tales, Diary of a Madman and Tower of London. In Vinnie’s mouth, Verne, De Quincey, Hawthorne, de Maupassant and Shakespeare somehow turn into Poe. Brooding youths. Velvet jackets. Buried alive girls. Vinnie a-flutter. Crypt in the basement. House burns down. Swirly credits. The Shakespeare (Tower of London is Richard III translated into English) is directed by Roger, who swears he can’t remember being on the set. He admits it’s possible the film got shot during a blackout he had during a screening of a Russian science fiction film he was cutting the special effects out of to fit around rubber monster scenes shot by some kid to see release as Rocket Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women of Blood. Meanwhile, Vinnie is muy fortunato lording it over the castles of AIP, hawking Sears Roebuck art selections and cookbooks on the side.
Even the critics start noticing they get the same picture every time. Recalling that this happened before, I propose an ingenious solution. When Universal got in a rut with Frankenstein, Dracula and Mummy pictures, they had the monsters meet Abbott and Costello. Comedy killed off the cycle. Once you’ve laughed at a horror,
it’s never frightening again. Since Lou has passed away, we can’t get the team back but I suggest it would at least triple the hilarity if Bud’s new comedy partner is a rotund, talented chimpanzee… and AIP can launch a new series with Abbott and Boomba Meet the Black Cat. It’ll slay ’em in the stalls when Boomba starts tossing loathsome, detestable putrescence at Vinnie Price’s moustache. We can bill Boomba as ‘The Chimp of the Perverse’.
Before I sell Jim, Sam and Roger – not to mention Bud Abbott – on this, Matheson dashes off a funny remake of House of Usher, purportedly based on ‘The Raven’. It breaks my heart to tell Boomba he’s been benched again, but the ‘ass. prod.’ gig is still live and EAPSoB dues are pouring in. The Raven, for comedy value, casts Vinnie as the brooding youth in tights, makes the buried-alive chick a faithless slut and has Boris Karloff play Vincent Price. The castle still burns down in by-now scratchy stock footage, which almost counts as a joke. Lorre is in it too, driving Karloff nuts making up his own dialogue. The juve is some piranha-toothed nobody who lands the job by spreading a false rumor he’s Jim Nicholson’s illegitimate son. When it comes out that he isn’t, Sam swears the grinning kid will never work in this town again, though it’s too late to cut him out of The Terror, yet another remake of House of Usher that Roger shoots in three days because he still has Karloff under contract. The twist here is that the house is washed away rather than burned down.