Aspects of Special Effects seem to have definite echoes of Vertigo.
Yes, of course. Anytime you are dealing with a character who is obsessed with re-creating the personality and image of a dead person you are getting back to Vertigo. Brian de Palma certainly did that with his film, Obsession. Actually, de Palma is another example of a director who was extremely hot at one time. In fact, he couldn’t have been hotter when he did pictures like Carrie and Scarface, but now you don’t hear about him at all. Then there’s Bob Rafelson who directed Five Easy Pieces. He hasn’t done anything in twenty years or more! So, these are contemporaries of mine, who reached incredible heights that I never achieved, but then kind of evaporated. It’s very tough to remain part of the A List, or the A-Plus List, and then fall out of that elite group. Usually, these directors don’t go back and do low-budget pictures like I do. They just don’t do anything. They seem unable to cope with the reality that they could continue making movies if they only made them cheaply. If they would make low-budget pictures, they could still make movies for the simple pleasure of making movies. They are not going to be making $80 million or $100 million movies anymore; they just have to make films for $1 million. Unfortunately, I don’t think certain directors can quite wrap their minds around that thought. They just resist it and withdraw. The next thing you know they are doing nothing. Inevitably, what follows is their agents then dump them and they become undesirables. It’s a sad case of people who have great talent and a great potential to keep working, but they won’t deal with the cold hard fact that they can’t make big-budget pictures anymore. That period has now passed them by. But there are plenty of pictures they could be making if they could just accept their situation and deal with it. Fortunately, I never rose out of the ranks of low-budget cinema, so I didn’t have very far to fall! [Laughs] I could always get back on my feet and make another picture, no matter what happened.
The characters in Special Effects are very film savvy. Detective Delroy seems to harbour ambitions to become involved in movies and at one point informs Keefe [Brad Rijn] that Neville “made a bomb with about $30 million worth of special effects.” Even taxi drivers seem aware of the current health of Neville’s career.
Well, audiences are now more film savvy than they’ve ever been. Ever since television shows like Entertainment Tonight, and all the other daily programmes which deal with show business news, have come on the air, people now know every detail of a movie’s production history, personnel, and performance. There are also things like the Internet and the special features on DVDs that inform people about how a movie was made and by whom, and also gives them a platform to criticize films. It used to be that when a movie came out and it played in theaters and was reviewed, people would go see the picture whether it was good or bad. Today, they not only put the reviews of the movie out, they also tell you how much the picture made at the box office. They inform you exactly what the grosses are so that by Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and the beginning of the following week, you immediately know whether the picture is a hit or a flop. If the movie is a box office bomb, nobody wants to see it because nobody wants to spend their money watching a movie that’s a flop. So, they basically destroy the film before it has a chance to get back on its feet again. Very few movies can survive that kind of publicity and they are merciless in releasing this data. The availability of — and concentration on — this information has effectively changed the entire landscape of cinema. This stuff was never revealed in the old days of Hollywood, when the studios not only made the movies but also owned the theaters. They controlled everything, and audiences never really knew whether a picture was profitable or not. Nowadays, they advertise the grosses almost as loudly as they advertise anything else about the movie. When you go to a film festival and kids stand up to ask you a question, the first two things they want to know is how much did the movie cost and how much did it gross. They rarely ask you about the specifics of making the film, or its artistic intent, or the collaboration with the actors. No, it’s an entirely different mind-fix on movies these days.
Keefe seems to be the only character in Special Effects who is not film-literate. He is even unable to operate a standard projector.
Sure, and that was intentional. He was just a kid from the Midwest, who came to New York and had no background in the movies at all. He didn’t know who Chris Neville was, or who anybody else in the business was. Keefe simply wanted to retrieve his wife and take her back to the hometown with him. In the end, he gets his wish, but of course it’s not his wife he’s reclaiming, it’s her double. He’s going to bring this crazed woman back home with him to live the life of his dead wife and be a mother to his child. Her mind has more or less snapped, so she goes along with this illusion. It’s actually a very bizarre ending. Then, to finish it all, Detective Delroy, who really didn’t have any involvement in movies before he got assigned to this case, has more or less become stage-struck and is now sitting in on casting sessions and script conferences, making changes and offering suggestions. Suddenly, Delroy is taking over the movie after Neville dies and even gets the credit at the end instead of me! [Laughs] It reads “A Philip Delroy Movie.” He receives the credit that I should have gotten, but I gave it to him. That’s a further blurring of the boundaries between truth and illusion. Fantasy and reality has been bridged even within the movie itself. The part of Detective Delroy is a comedic take on Sonny Grosso, a New York detective who was the technical advisor on The French Connection and later became a movie and television producer himself. Grosso was hired by William Friedkin to advise on the film, but then he learned the business and enjoyed quite a long career.
Detective Delroy is essayed by Kevin O’Connor, whose work I’ve enjoyed in films such as Let’s Scare Jessica to Death and The Brink’s Job.
Kevin was a great actor, who had won several awards for his theater work. He was also an acting teacher in New York and had played Humphrey Bogart in the well-received TV movie, Bogie, so I knew he was a formidable talent. For some reason, Kevin was not in the Screen Actors Guild, or maybe he decided that he just didn’t care and would do a non-union picture. Either way, I was extremely lucky to have him in Special Effects. We built up the part of Detective Delroy in the movie because Kevin was playing the role. I added new lines and other pieces of business for him and a lot of his stuff was made up on the set as we were shooting. I actually had to tell Kevin to bring his performance down because he was slightly over-playing it at first. I kept signalling to him, waving my hand for him to bring it down. He got the message and played the scenes a little less theatrically. That character needed to be a little more understated. Kevin took direction well and I liked him very much. He also appeared in a couple of my subsequent movies. He played the taxi driver at the beginning of Island of the Alive, who discovers that a woman is giving birth to a monster baby in his cab. He also had a small part in The Ambulance playing a panhandler on the street. Unfortunately, most of Kevin’s part was later cut out of the picture. But he was in three of my movies and I wish I’d had him in more of them. He was a wonderful, affable guy who always delivered as an actor. Sadly, Kevin has also passed away. [7]
Special Effects plays like a cautionary tale of the pitfalls of pursuing fame and the manner in which show-business “chews beautiful girls up.” You illustrate the sheer number of hopeful starlets and their indifferent treatment with the high-shot of Neville walking over the photographs of all the young actresses.
Yeah, that image really sums it up: the cynicism and indifference of the business. We obtained the 8x10 headshots of every girl we could find in New York City and just covered the entire floor of the soundstage with all their photographs. You don’t really know what that image is until Neville suddenly steps into the frame and you realize that it’s an overhead shot and he is walking all over their faces. It’s not a particularly subtle visual metaphor, but it does convey the amount of respect some movie people have for aspiring young actresses.
An unexpected
moment is when the headshot of Dustin Hoffman as Dorothy Michaels in Tootsie is seen amongst the photographs Delroy is inspecting.
I didn’t know if anybody would notice that. I just did it as a gag. Like I said, they have photographs of every available actress in New York and there she — or he — is!
Neville’s soliloquy about the culture of stardom is savage: “This is the age of the non-entity. The glorification of the nobody, as long as they are victims. Look at the virtually non-existent careers of Dorothy Stratten or Frances Farmer. What makes them worthy of a $10 million eulogy on film? Murder, madness, suicide — that’s what stars are made of today.” Do you really believe that?
Absolutely. I don’t believe that any director wants to make a movie about the life story of a movie star unless that person has suffered some kind of a tragic ending. Jessica Lange played Frances Farmer in a movie, but the question remains was Farmer really deserving of having a movie made about her? [8] The cold, hard reality is hardly anyone knew who she was. Farmer’s enduring celebrity arose not from her modest achievements as an actress, but from the fact she went insane and was committed to a mental institution. It’s the same thing with other actresses and models who have met with tragic endings: their very public misfortunes and deaths were sensationalized and then formed their lasting claims to fame. I mean, what’s the point of making a picture about somebody’s continued success? Where does that go? It’s really not much of a story. Movies are only interesting if characters go through a terrible crisis. By that rationale, showing somebody who just becomes a star and rises to the top and nothing ever happens to them is just a linear story of success. So what? Who gives a shit? Of course, if somebody comes along and then murders you, or you murder somebody else; or if some other violent act or catastrophe occurs like you perish in a plane crash or you get paralysed in car accident and have to learn to walk again; or somebody kidnaps you; or you become an alcoholic or a drug addict; or you contract some terrible disease, then, and only then, is the movie worth making.
Considering our overloaded diet of reality television, Internet websites, and twenty-four-hour news channels that are dedicated to covering celebrity culture, do we now live in the true age of “the glorification of the nobody”?
Oh, yeah. You can’t deny it. I mean, how many non-entities are now celebrities with their own TV shows? What makes these wannabes so special? Certainly not the fact that we get to see their boring domestic routines. It’s not reality; it’s a carefully manipulated representation of somebody’s reality. Also, we constantly see celebrities and personalities getting arrested for drug addiction, for shoplifting, for getting into a fight in a nightclub, or for some other indiscretion. They get thrown in jail, then they get out, then they are eventually thrown back in jail again. The tabloid magazines, TV shows, and websites just eat all of this up and glorify them. The personal miseries of celebrities are then reduced to some quick newsflash or sound-bite, and they cease to become real people in some bizarre way. Various media outlets will pay thousands of dollars for video footage and photographs of celebrities. The paparazzi follow them everywhere around town, haunting them, climbing trees next to their homes so they can document their every move. There is no privacy or decency. It’s just a predatory stalking to feed people’s unceasing fascination with them. If somebody has done something quite naughty it makes them interesting. Nobody is interesting if they live a normal, peaceful, ordinary life. They have to be all fucked-up.
As I mentioned, you name-drop Dorothy Stratten in the film. Were you tapping into the then recent tragedy of her murder as Bob Fosse had done with Star 80?
In the case of Dorothy Stratten, she was murdered by her own husband, who then killed himself. She was a Playboy Playmate, who perhaps had some potential as an actress, but I don’t think Stratten would have been remembered by anybody if she hadn’t have been murdered. Her true claim to fame was being a victim, it’s very sad to say, and I feel the fact they’ve made movies about her supports that. [9] I don’t think Stratten would have made it as a true movie star, but she certainly made it as a victim. I wrote my script many years before her murder, so it wasn’t influenced by that unfortunate event. Actually, The Cutting Room was conceived long before Stratten was ever a model or a starlet, but they do say that life sometimes imitates art.
An interesting touch is when the movie pauses for a moment to illustrate the forthcoming scenes from script-to-screen using white titles on black.
I thought that since we were talking about a script and the making of a movie, it would be interesting to use some of the movie terminology and artefacts as chapters to move the film along, giving it a look and style that had not been done before. I don’t think anybody had previously illustrated a screenplay onscreen using those kinds of titles during a movie as a means of advancing the story. There are a lot of interesting touches in Special Effects that I’m proud of, like the idea of Neville wearing editor’s gloves to strangle the guy who is blackmailing him. I thought that was another methodical thing he would do in order to not leave any fingerprints. And what kind of gloves would be available to him? Editor’s gloves, obviously!
Watching Special Effects again recently, I thought it was one of your most visually accomplished films.
I agree. I think Special Effects is very underrated. It’s one of my best movies and should be more widely seen. Again, we were fortunate that we had Lowell Nesbitt’s house, which gave us a beautiful locale to shoot in and made the film look very rich and elegant. We elected to do the movie in very bright vibrant colours and make it look decorous like a real Hollywood movie. I thought Paul Glickman did a very good job of shooting the picture. It looked really great and Special Effects is certainly one of the best-looking movies that I’ve done. Perfect Strangers, which Paul also shot for me, has this deliberate fuzziness to the image as we put filters on the lens to give the picture a certain kind of look. Did you like that look?
Yes, I did, but Perfect Strangers has that distinctive ‘80s haze to it, whereas Special Effects looks very sharp, clean, and controlled.
Yeah, it is a little more regimented than some of my pictures. Special Effects looks like it cost far more than it did. We got a lot up on screen for the money we spent. Having that access to Nesbitt’s house added so much production value to the movie. We didn’t have to build anything, because it was all there for us. Wherever we pointed the camera there was always something interesting to shoot. That enabled us to make the film look really good. For example, the sequence at the end where Neville is electrocuted in the swimming pool — all that came about because there was an indoor pool in the house. You don’t find that in New York City very much. Frankly, it was a miracle that we did. I then did what I always do — I simply wrote the pool into the script and revised the sequences so we could make use of it. It was too good to waste.
Neville remarks, “I’m a maniac when I do a picture.” Having listened to some of your crazy exploits and daring risks, it’s safe to assume that you, too, are also a maniac when you do a picture.
[Laughs] Look, anybody who would do the crazy things I’ve done throughout my career would have to be a maniac! I’ve done so many wild things I can’t count them all. One example: when I was doing The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover, I once sneaked into the office of the Attorney General — the chief legal officer of the United States of America — to shoot a scene without his knowledge! Who else would try getting away with that kind of insanity? So, yeah, when I was making movies, I did stuff that I would never dream of doing in real life. You get into a rhythm when you are directing, or at least I do, where it seems like nothing can go wrong. Everything you say is going to happen and nobody is going to say no. Everything occurs just as you want it to and it’s supposed to, and you will it that way. I must also say that during that time, as far as girls go, I never struck out. I was in this mind-fix where I couldn’t lose and every woman I saw and approached would hop right into bed immediately. It was magic time! I can’t expla
in why it would happen, but this aura suddenly surrounds you and everybody does everything you tell them to do. That’s exactly the way it was for me. It was crazy and went way beyond normal behaviour. You start taking bigger and bigger chances because you feel invincible and totally in control. I’m sure that is what Neville thought, only he committed murder instead of shooting without permits. But yeah, I’ll admit it. I was crazy when I was making some of these movies, but I was always in control.
I guess a director must at least maintain the illusion of being in control.
Oh, when you are directing you must first convince yourself that you are in control. Once you succeed in doing that then ninety percent of the battle is already won. When you begin to believe that you can’t do anything wrong, other people believe it, too, and just fall in line. It’s incredible how that happens, but it very often does.
The Stuff (1985)
The Stuff marked your swift return — quite literally — to biting satirical horror. How did the project get started?
Oh, I just wrote the script in the usual way: I sit down and write these scripts out of the clear blue sky. I get an idea then just go ahead and concoct the damn thing. That’s what happened with The Stuff. There were no meetings or development deals. It was completely done as an independent project of mine. I simply came up with the idea of this white substance that is discovered coming out of the ground one day, which turns out to taste wonderful. It’s then quickly packaged, marketed, and sold to the masses as an ice-cream dessert called The Stuff, but its soon apparent that this hugely popular food is actually a monstrous, living thing that does great harm to humans. After dreaming up this wacky concept, I took the project around various places in town. Eventually, I found a home for it at the new version of New World, which had formerly been Roger Corman’s company but was no longer involved with him. New World had been bought by other people at this time, and they put The Stuff out. They provided the entire budget for the picture and more or less just let me go off and make my movie.
Larry Cohen Page 38