Can you identify some of the inspirations that led to the writing of the script?
My main inspiration was the consumerism and corporate greed found in our country and the damaging products that were being sold. I was constantly reading in the newspapers about various goods and materials being recalled because they were harming people. For example, you had foods being pulled off the market because they were hazardous to people’s health. I don’t know what the situation is elsewhere, but here in the U.S. we still have this problem. There are products always being recalled, whether its spinach, beats, or bananas, that are poisonous. There are other foods such as hamburger meat, cured meats, and sausages that are in some cases actually killing people and must be quickly withdrawn from sale. And of course, there are always the cigarettes, which, along with alcohol, have killed more people than anything else that can be bought legally. Back in the 1930s and ‘40s, there were a number of ad campaigns issued by cigarette companies which featured all the great radio stars like Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Edgar Bergen, Charlie McCarthy, and Abbott and Costello. All of these people were sponsored by cigarettes. In fact, I believe that cigarettes were the biggest sponsors on radio at that time. Of course, cigarette advertising isn’t even legal anymore, but back in those days all the big movie stars were lighting up onscreen. Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart all had cigarettes dangling from their mouths, and these images were being projected to people that smoking was a sexy thing. For kids, smoking was a sign of maturity, a rite of passage. These dangerous products were, and still are, deeply embedded into our way of life. I mean, look at the sheer volume of junk food we consume every day. We continue to eat these foods despite the fact some of them are killing us. That’s when I started thinking that The Stuff could be an imaginary product — in this case an ice cream dessert — that is being consumed by millions and is doing irreparable damage to humanity. Everybody is gobbling down this yummy food, so how can it possibly be wrong for us?
There’s this idea that is continually being reinforced in the western world that if you don’t drink Coca Cola or own a television, you do not conform and are incapable of living a rich and meaningful existence.
Oh, absolutely. That’s the projected image that is constantly being sold to us: happiness is a product that can be purchased and consumed and will make you part of something greater than yourself. It’s a way to make you whole and content. In the movie, you see the young kid’s family trying to cajole him and then force him to eat The Stuff, so that he can be exactly like them and have what they apparently have. That’s an extreme example, but there are different kinds of external pressures that we all face to conform. It’s something we see and experience every day in subtle and not so subtle ways, and it always looks very easy and fulfilling and obtainable. All of this was in my mind when I was making the picture. [1]
Some have speculated that the exploration of conformity in The Stuff was directly influenced by Invasion of the Body Snatchers and that the monster itself is a variation on The Blob. Were those films in any way influential on you?
Not really. The Stuff does have certain similarities with those movies, but they are mostly superficial. Once I decided that The Stuff was an ice cream dessert, and, of course, became an amorphous gooey substance, naturally some would assume that The Blob had something to do with it. The Blob was an alien organism from outer space that was crawling around dissolving people. In The Stuff, we were dealing with something that was a food that people actually ate and it lived inside them, taking possession of their mind, body and soul. It was an entirely different idea. Here, the victims were inviting, or at least contributing, to their own destruction, and, again, that can be a metaphor for whatever you like: alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, or junk food.
That has to be one of the most innovative concepts in the history of horror movies, that the victims eat the monster rather than the monster eating the victims.
Yeah, and that’s what the whole ad campaign really focused on: “Are you eating it or is it eating you?” That’s exactly how I originally sold the project to New World — as sort of a fresh twist or new take on the traditional monster movie.
What is your definition of a monster and by extension a monster movie?
My definition of a monster and a monster movie is something that involves a person or creature that is abnormal. It’s Alive is clearly a monster movie. The monster is a human being but qualifies as an aberration — a threatening perversion of a normal child. Monsters can take on many forms, but they are always something outside of the normalcy of human experience. Sometimes they are recognizable; sometimes they are not. The Monster in Frankenstein is made up of human body parts stitched together and is a monster, but then a character like Dracula looks more recognizably human but is endowed with certain supernatural abilities that distinguish him from us. Then, you have monsters like the Alien in Alien, which is a creature from another planet, and the shark in Jaws, which is, of course, a real animal. I mean, it’s a super-shark, but it’s still a shark. Jaws is considered a horror movie, but I’ve always thought of it as an adventure film. The music is certainly the music of an adventure film. Of the great monster movies in the modern genre, I would say that Alien is the very best because it follows my theory of not revealing the monster in any great detail. That film only shows you suggestions of the monster without dwelling too much on the Alien’s physical layout. That way, the audience always wants to see the monster and never gets tired of it. To me, that’s what a good monster movie does: it makes you almost struggle to make sense of the monster allowing the mystery and threat to be sustained.
Do you believe that this patient, elusive quality has been lost in modern horror and science fiction cinema?
Yes, I do, and there are several reasons for that. Let me put it this way, the problem I have with CGI, and the great digital special effects we are capable of today, is that we can now create anything we want onscreen. At first you say, “Wow, look how well that’s done! Isn’t that a beautifully designed and rendered creature?” Well, it may look fantastic, but after a few minutes you get tired of it. You certainly aren’t afraid of it anymore, not when it’s been revealed so explicitly. Your fear and fascination diminishes as you become more familiar with the monster’s appearance. So, I think that advancements in technology have really damaged the audience’s ability to be afraid. They are no longer scared of what they are going to see, because the seemingly limitless ability of CGI is doing all their imagining for them. The audience are robbed of any opportunity to conceive what this thing could possibly be.
But surely the temptation to use CGI on The Stuff would have been strong, if it had been available and affordable at the time you were shooting the movie?
I would have still used it sparingly, if at all. CGI would have certainly given The Stuff a smoother, more fluid action, but I think it would have looked too slick and cartoony. I instead used miniatures, mattes, and stop-motion animation to realize the monster as I had done on Q. I thought stop-motion would give The Stuff a more tactile, realistic quality in its movements, and that’s why I hired Dave Allen again. Dave went from realizing a giant bird flying around New York to making an ice cream crawl around, but the work was no less challenging in its own way. The serious problem with stop-motion was that it was such a painfully slow and time-consuming process. I’d check in with Dave every once in a while to see how the work was going, and discover he’d only executed about five or six seconds of completed animation at a time. It was frustrating, but I had to be patient because that’s simply what you got with stop-motion techniques. We also had another accomplished artist working on The Stuff in Jim Danforth who is one of the masters of stop-motion and miniatures. [2] Jim worked on the sequence where the factory blows up at the end and he did some great work.
What materials did you use to realize The Stuff itself in the various sequences?
There were a number of things we used. For the scenes where The Stuff was moving around rooms, we occasion
ally utilized the same fire-fighting foam that the fire department uses to put out fires. That material was mainly made out of ground-up fish bones, so it smelled terrible! I remember we used the foam during one scene, and, immediately after I yelled cut, several of the cast who had gotten the foam on their costumes ran off to the nearby Hudson River and jumped in the water. They couldn’t endure that awful smell a moment longer. For the scenes where the actors had to actually eat The Stuff on camera, we used something a little more palatable — ice cream and whipped cream, which certainly smelled better than the foam. For the miniature shots, I believe we used some kind of liquid plastic, and in some cases the sets — the miniature rooms — were tilted so that the material could flow about. This gave the impression that The Stuff was moving independently, pouring through doors and windows, and climbing up walls. In reality, we were actually using gravity to manoeuvre it around, but it worked out great.
Tell me about staging one of the most impressive scenes in the film: The Stuff attacking Michael Moriarty and Andrea Marcovicci in their motel room.
That scene was quite a difficult and complex operation. It begins with The Stuff starting to seep out of the mattress and pillow as Michael and Andrea are lying in bed. As they attempt to fend it off, the scene continues with The Stuff literally picking up a guy before climbing up the wall with him and leaping onto the ceiling as it is set on fire. To successfully pull off that gag, we had to employ a series of special effects, mechanical effects, and practical effects. We constructed a full-size rotating room, much in the same way it had been done in the old Fred Astaire picture, Royal Wedding. In that movie, the room turned upside down as Astaire started dancing and singing on the walls and ceiling. That was great, but the main difference between that scene and ours was that our room would be turned upside down while it was on fire! Nobody had ever attempted that before. Anytime you are working with fire it can be extremely dangerous, so I did have some reservations about doing the scene.
Where did you shoot the revolving motel room?
We shot it over at the former Mary Pickford Studios in Hollywood. I remember that the cameraman had to be strapped securely in a seat, so that he wouldn’t fall out as the room went topsy-turvy. The special effects people who worked with me on that sequence had devised some of the gags in A Nightmare on Elm Street. There was one sequence where a kid is suddenly sucked into his own bed by Freddy Krueger and a torrent of blood explodes out and hits the ceiling. These guys had built that set for Wes Craven and claimed that they still had the original materials and could use them again. I guess they did have the mechanical portion of it but they didn’t have the room itself, so that had to be built all over again. Interestingly, the room did not turn over with the aid of a motor, as you might think, but was actually operated manually. This meant they had three guys on each side of the room jumping up and down as hard as they could until they got the set spinning. Finally, the room turned over, but it was all done with manpower. In fact, showing that sequence being shot would have been more fascinating than watching the sequence itself. Seeing these six guys bouncing up and down in an effort to get this room upside down was quite a feat of physical labour. It really scared the hell out of me because you had this thing turning upside down and there were flames and people were locked inside it. I was lucky that nobody got hurt, but the scene looks great and is one of the film’s highlights.
The character of Mo Rutherford, the industrial saboteur who is investigating the manufacturers of The Stuff, is beautifully played by Moriarty.
Yeah, it’s another great performance. I think New World were reluctant to have me cast Moriarty in the part at first because he was not your typical, traditional hero. They were looking for somebody who was a more conventional, handsome leading man, but I wanted Moriarty. I may have gone around making one or two offers to various actors, but Moriarty was always my first and only choice. He played that character so well with his rambling Southern charm. Rutherford plays the fool, and at one point even says, “No one is as stupid as I appear to be.” That’s the act he puts on — pretending to be dumb when he’s really the smartest guy in the room. When we started shooting, Moriarty’s character was not called Mo Rutherford. He had a different name, a different personality, and attitude, and was much straighter. Then Moriarty said, “I have to get a handle on this guy. Give me something musical. I like to think in terms of music.” He was looking for a sound or feeling, something he could hang his hat on. I said, “Why don’t we make him a Southern boy? We’ve never done that before.” So, I changed the character’s name to Mo Rutherford, and Moriarty immediately liked the sound of that name. We both thought it was funny, so we stuck with it. Then, bit-by-bit, this character emerged. I mean, he was always an ex-FBI agent who’d been kicked out of the Bureau and was now working as an independent industrial spy. That never changed. I can remember thinking if a movie about an industrial saboteur had been made before as I was aware that such people existed. Over the course of an afternoon, Moriarty and I came up with the idea that this man was a Southern wise-guy with a different agenda. On the surface, he is apparently one thing, but underneath there is a lot more going on with this man. Once we got those details in place, we really had something for Moriarty to have fun with.
Moriarty is supported in the film by one of your most interesting and eclectic casts. How did you go about assembling the major players?
Andrea Marcovicci had played opposite Woody Allen in The Front, and I liked that film and Andrea’s performance in it. I was happy about getting her onboard for the female lead as I thought she would play well alongside Moriarty. Paul Sorvino was cast as The Colonel after I ran into him at a restaurant in New York called Columbus, which was on Columbus Avenue over on the West Side. That place used to be a big hangout for actors and people in the film business, like Robert De Niro and Kevin Spacey. It was a wonderful watering hole where everybody could just mingle. You could go there and actually recruit people to work on your movies without having to go through their agents and have these long and occasionally painful negotiations. You’d just walk into Columbus for a drink or some dinner, and meet people who did your movies simply because they wanted to do them. I don’t think there’s any place left in New York, or even out here in Los Angeles, that quite has the same charm that Columbus had back in those days. You could literally put your whole movie together in there, and that’s how I got Sorvino involved. He was actually one of my favorite actors and I was very pleased to get him. Sorvino brought a strong comedic aspect to The Stuff, which I always liked, as The Colonel was this larger than life character. Off-camera, Paul loved to sing opera. Every day at lunchtime, he would entertain the cast and crew by performing a few arias whilst we were all eating. Moriarty finally couldn’t stand him anymore because Sorvino was hogging the spotlight. Moriarty didn’t like it because he didn’t have a piano to play, so he couldn’t compete. That allowed Sorvino to stroll around bellowing his songs, unchallenged.
Another recognizable face is Garret Morris, who plays Chocolate Chip Charlie. Prior to appearing in The Stuff, Morris was of course a regular on Saturday Night Live alongside John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd.
That’s right. Saturday Night Live was a hugely popular and influential TV show and Garrett was sharing the limelight each week with not only Belushi and Aykroyd, but Bill Murray and Chevy Chase — the cream of American comedy. Garret was the Black comedian in that group and he was a fairly big name at the time. I wrote Chocolate Chip Charlie as a deliberate take-off on a product in America called Famous Amos Cookies. Famous Amos was a Black gentleman, who had started this brand of cookies that had made a fortune and become nationally famous. I thought I’d take Famous Amos, call him Chocolate Chip Charlie, and make him a character in the movie. I had interviewed several Black comedians for that part including Arsenio Hall. New World didn’t know who Arsenio was at the time, but shortly after the release of The Stuff, he had a successful self-titled TV talk show and co-starred with Eddie Murphy in Comin
g to America. Anyway, we went with Garret and he was a good actor who fitted the role nicely. Garret was also a lot of fun to work with. I very kindly gave him a nice death scene where The Stuff devours him from the inside out and his face begins to swell and stretch horribly. In fact, for many years I had Garret’s replica head from his death scene at home. Each time I looked at it, I would think of the good time I had with him doing The Stuff. [Pause] Who else do we have in there?
Patrick O’Neal, Alexander Scourby, Danny Aiello…
Patrick O’Neal had played the villainous commandant in El Condor, so I’d had some previous experience with him. Patrick was always very good at playing bad guys. I thought he would be great as this smooth, unfeeling corporate villain alongside Alexander Scourby. Actually, Scourby was an idol of mine. He had a wonderful speaking voice and was famous for providing voiceovers. Scourby had narrated Richard Rodgers’ acclaimed documentary about World War II in the Pacific, Victory at Sea, and he was a consummate actor. I always loved him. When his name came up, I jumped at the chance of working with him. They say that it can be dangerous to meet your heroes, but it was personally very thrilling for me. Scourby could not have been nicer, and I love his performance in the film. Danny Aiello was another guy from the Columbus restaurant that I was friendly with. I remember Danny came to the set after learning the scene he had with Moriarty overnight. We rehearsed it for the first time and Danny knew all of his dialogue perfectly. Then, Danny suddenly asked if he could use cue-cards, and it was at this point that he started messing up his lines on the next couple of takes. He kept referring to the cue-cards constantly, but we eventually got through the scene. Of course, that sequence culminates with Danny’s character getting attacked and eaten by his dog after it gets possessed by The Stuff. I don’t think Danny was particularly happy to be working with that dog, which was a big, intimidating animal. The dog had to get physically close to him, and I think Danny found that very unnerving. In fact, every time I see Danny he kids me about his death scene. He always says, “Hey, this is the guy who once fed me to a dog! It was the most humiliating moment in my whole career!” [Laughs] Yeah, there was a distinguished actor that I reduced to the level of dog food!
Larry Cohen Page 39