Intermission: Deadly Illusion (1987)
The same year that you made It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive and A Return to Salem’s Lot, you wrote and began directing a picture for Pound Ridge Films that was eventually produced and released as Deadly Illusion.
Yes. Deadly Illusion was originally called I Love You to Death, but then somebody else made a movie with that title so I couldn’t use it. [1] My script was a thriller about a private detective, who is approached by a man who wants to hire him to murder his wife in Long Island and make it look like somebody has invaded their home. The private detective takes an advance on the job and then goes out to the house in Southampton and warns the wife that her husband is trying to have her killed. He then makes love to the wife before leaving the house. The very next day the wife turns up dead and, of course, the private detective is the one accused of doing it. He goes to view the body at the morgue and discovers that the corpse is that of an entirely different woman. The woman that he approached and was intimate with was not really the man’s wife, but an impostor. So, people now think that he is the murderer and the private detective must find out who actually committed this crime and framed him for it. That was basically the story.
That sounds like a relatively simple story, but you have attacked the completed film, accusing it of being incoherent and patchy.
That’s because it made absolutely no sense at all. There were various aspects of it that weren’t entirely coherent. There were numerous loose ends that weren’t successfully tied up and so it was something of a mess. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the movie, but one example involves the private detective meeting the woman and making love to her. Pretty soon afterwards, he sees her again and doesn’t recognize her! The question is why? Why didn’t he know her? This guy should have realized exactly who she is. I mean, he was supposed to be a private detective after all, but his powers of observation certainly failed him on that occasion. He’d just slept with her and there is no way that he wouldn’t know who she was. So, there were things like that which needed to be better explained because they were coming across as preposterous. It made the guy look stupid; it made the entire movie stupid, too! And if the movie looks stupid, we all look stupid.
What was missing that would have made the narrative more logical?
Oh, I don’t know. I’m sure there are some other things that I didn’t think were right, but what can you do? Again, I haven’t seen the movie in a long time and I have no desire to reacquaint myself with it. But it was all there in my original screenplay — all the necessary elements that would have allowed the story to make perfect sense. They were just ignored, that’s all. I mean, all the stuff about the little green bottles and their significance to Morgan Fairchild’s character. Fairchild plays a top New York model, whose career is now well behind her. She is middle-aged and battling the ravages of age, and I thought that gave the film an interesting layer. In the script, she has endured a series of unsuccessful operations that have compromised her stunning looks, so by day she wears an artificial face that has been fabricated for her. The material in these little green bottles was supposed to be the lubricant that she smears on her face so that the artificial mask will attach to her own. That was the basic idea. That’s why Billy Dee Williams, who played the private detective, doesn’t recognize her later on. All of this was extracted from the picture by the producers. It didn’t matter that it was interesting and rich and necessary — it just had to go!
Deadly Illusion was a troubled production, and you were famously fired for the second time in your career during the course of shooting. What happened?
I was about halfway through shooting the picture when I got fired. I did receive co-directing credit, but it was a very poorly operated company. Once again, I wasn’t in charge of the entire operation and I don’t seem to do too well if I don’t have complete control of everything. I tried to do things my way, but certain people were coming up with stupid suggestions and stupid objections and got in the way of everything. These producers were extremely obstructive, but I just ignored them and did what I wanted to do. Finally, they lost patience with me and I was fired. I mean, they were really fools, as the picture went way over budget and the company went into bankruptcy.
Were you suddenly getting a sense of déjà vu here?
Well, it was the same situation that had happened several years earlier on I, the Jury, almost a repetition of that same scenario. Certain people didn’t know what they were doing and they were spending way too much money. I remember that at one point we were about to start shooting a scene when I said to them, “We don’t need a hundred people here. We can’t get more than twenty people into this location and you have seventy more people standing in the street. Can’t you send them over to another location and prepare for tomorrow? That way, we can have everything cabled in and ready to go. We won’t have to wait when we arrive at the set tomorrow. These people are clearly not doing anything. Send them over there!” They then replied, “Oh, but we don’t do things that way.” Obviously, they had their own way of doing everything, which was a good reason for why they eventually went over-budget. Again, I was trying to do things my way, and, of course, I couldn’t. What can you say?
What problems occurred during shooting?
Billy Dee Williams was giving a very slow performance without much energy. I then found out that he was drinking, and was actually drunk for most of the time. He didn’t have the look of an alcoholic, but he was drinking from morning till night. When I went into his trailer one day, the bottles came rolling out from under the couch and I realized exactly what was going on. Another unfortunate incident concerned the leading girl in the film, who was played by Vanity, a beautiful Black actress. She had done some movies before and later appeared in Action Jackson. [2] From what I understand, she has now quit the business and become a minister. Anyway, Vanity was lovely in her part, but then one day I turned up and she suddenly wasn’t there anymore. I asked the producers, “Hey, where’s Vanity?” They said, “Oh, we sent her back to Los Angeles. Her job was over.” I said, “Wait a minute, she has two or three more scenes to shoot! What am I supposed to do here? You sent her home without telling me?” I called Vanity and she agreed to work for scale and complete the scenes we needed to do. That was very good of her, but the producers weren’t interested. They felt her work was done and we had everything we needed. The truth was they didn’t want to give Vanity any more money, even if it was just scale. At that point — this was a couple of weeks into shooting — I simply decided that I was going to make these producers as miserable as possible. I did this so they would have no other alternative but to fire me. Please understand, you can’t just quit a movie otherwise they can sue you. You simply have to make things so miserable and difficult for them that they want — they have — to fire you. So, I began directly disobeying any requests and instructions they gave me. I just continued to do what I wanted to do until the end eventually came. As a matter of fact, I kind of forced them to fire me.
That must have been a deeply unpleasant situation to find yourself in?
It didn’t bother me at all, to tell you the truth. Believe me, I was just delighted to get the hell out of there. I’d sold them the script and had received most of the money for it, as well as half of the directing salary. I was alright, not that the money made any difference. I just let them do what they wanted to do with the film. I didn’t care anymore. If I’m not doing the things that I want to do, and I’m not fulfilling my needs and desires as a filmmaker, there’s no sense in going to work everyday. You can’t blindly do what people tell you to do, not when you know that what they are saying is wrong. All these individuals involved in the picture didn’t know anything about making a movie. As if to confirm that fact, they have all just drifted into oblivion now.
William Tannen [3] replaced you as director. Did you ever meet him?
No, I never met him.
During my research, I was amused to discover that t
he Staten Island Ferry got caught on a sandbar during the filming of one sequence, the first time in the passenger service’s history that this had ever happened.
Yeah, but it wasn’t too amusing being stuck in the middle of that situation. That was quite a thing that happened and it could have very easily turned disastrous — even fatal — for all those involved.
Can you explain exactly what went down?
It occurred around Christmas when the temperatures in New York were freezing. I don’t know if you have ever spent a winter in New York, but you can really feel that kind of cold deep in your bones. We were shooting a chase sequence on the Staten Island Ferry. This sequence was intended to be my original climax, not the one you now see in the picture. We ran aground of a sandbar in the middle of New York Harbour. As soon as the impact occurred, I knew we were in trouble. I just knew it. We had so many vehicles and equipment trucks and trailers on the ferry I think it was inevitable that we would encounter some difficulties. I actually complained that I didn’t have enough room to shoot the chase on the boat, but there was nothing I could do about it. When the ferry got stuck, we were marooned for something like fourteen or fifteen hours, and there were helicopters, tugboats and the Coast Guard all out there. It suddenly became this huge media event with all the news stations covering the story. They had choppers flying above us and we were on every news show on TV and all the front pages of the newspapers. Somebody onboard had a video camera and he filmed the entire disaster as it was unfolding. Thankfully, it had a happy ending and we all reached the pier, cold and shivering, but safe and sound. I actually shiver sometimes just thinking about that day.
You did succeed in generating some free publicity for Deadly Illusion.
Well, it was really only a fleeting moment as far as making the news was concerned. By the time the movie came out, it didn’t really matter anymore. Of course, it was a big deal for me because we could have all been dead. Seriously, if that ferry had capsized and we had all tumbled into the icy waters of the New York Harbour, we would have all been dead. We would not have lasted three minutes in those temperatures, there’s no question about it. You do hear of boats capsizing all the time and people being drowned. There was a cruise ship that recently capsized and sank in Europe, wasn’t there? [4] You may have read about it. A lot of people were killed. So, these tragedies do occur, and it makes you stop and think about what could have happened that day if things had turned sour. On top of everything, I didn’t even get my chase sequence out of it. That was gone, too.
The climactic chase sequence was eventually relocated to Shea Stadium.
Yeah, but I didn’t shoot that. I’m not responsible for any of that. That was entirely the work of the other guy and I take no credit for it. It’s a pretty awful climax, very flat and uninspired. My original chase on the Staten Island Ferry would have been much better and a lot more exciting. Unfortunately, the producers were more interested in cheaping out. Oh well, who cares about that now? I certainly don’t.
Did you draw any positives from the experience of making Deadly Illusion?
No, not really, but in this particular instance, I liked getting fired. Again, who cares? I must repeat it, if you are not doing what you want to do, what’s the point? You are getting up early every morning and working for fourteen hours a day, and doing something that you don’t want to do. Honestly, I would rather go home. We had a fairly decent cast on Deadly Illusion, but, as I say, the finished film was rather disjointed by the time they got through with it. They didn’t shoot all the scenes that were in the script, so it quickly became something of a mess. The only positive I can think of is that Deadly Illusion actually opened here at Grauman’s Chinese Theater, which is the biggest theater in town. For some incredible reason it actually got booked in there. Naturally, nobody went to see it, but Deadly Illusion was the only movie of mine ever to open at Grauman’s Chinese. It certainly holds that distinction. Frankly, I was amazed. I actually went down there and took some photographs in front of the theater. [Laughs] It just amused me to no end that this awful movie would be the one that opened at Grauman’s Chinese!
It’s Alive III — Island of the Alive (1987)
It was only a matter of time before you concluded the saga of the mutant babies with It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive. Why did the movie happen at this juncture of your career, nearly a decade after the release of It Lives Again?
Well, I had initially approached Warner Bros. about the possibility of doing a remake of House of Wax. [1] I was still friendly with Andre de Toth, the director of the original House of Wax, and talked to him about us doing it together with Andre as producer. I actually took Andre over to Warner Bros. and together we pitched them the idea. Our story was about this great sculptor, who creates these astonishing wax dummies of Hollywood stars like Marilyn Monroe and Humphrey Bogart. They are wonderful works of art, but, one day, these street kids break into the wax museum and destroy all of the sculptor’s magnificent creations — also destroying his hands in the process. The police do nothing about this terrible crime, even though these thugs have basically ruined this man’s life. In his despair, the sculptor soon loses his sanity and murders all of the kids responsible for his misfortune. He then has to restock his wax museum with models of famous people and — since he can no longer sculpt — he kills lookalikes, who resemble famous Hollywood celebrities, and puts them in his museum as replacements. It would have been a good, scary picture and a nice tribute to the original, but Warner Bros. was reluctant to do it. Then, subsequently, I learned that the studio was interested in me doing a movie for their video division. At the time, they were going to try and make pictures directly for home video, so I suggested that we do another It’s Alive movie. They liked that idea, but I couldn’t do it for the prices they wanted to pay unless they offered me a two-picture deal. That way, just as I had done with Perfect Strangers and Special Effects, I could make two pictures back-to-back and utilize the same crew and a lot of the same actors to save costs. I again suggested to Warner Bros. that the second movie could be a remake of House of Wax, but they still weren’t going for it. They said, “No, we can’t give you House of Wax, but you can have one of our other horror titles like Salem’s Lot. We bought that property and have the sequel rights to it. Would you be interested in working on that instead?” I said, “Okay, but I can do whatever I like with it, right?” They said, “Yes, do anything you please.” So, we made the two-picture deal and agreed that the two movies would be Island of the Alive and a sequel to Salem’s Lot.
In an interview with Fangoria in 1987, you mentioned pitching Warner Bros. the idea of doing another direct-to-video sequel in the form of The Exorcist III.
I don’t remember that. It’s certainly possible that it may have come up in conversation as something we could have done, but I don’t recall my ideas for it exactly.
I believe your story would have involved the child of a now grown-up Linda Blair becoming possessed by the Devil.
Really? That’s interesting, because I don’t have any recollection of that plot-line. I really don’t. I do remember that at one time I was thinking of doing a picture set in Harlem with an all-Black cast that was about a Black exorcist. I had some very definite ideas about how I was going to do that movie. It would have had a lot to do with voodoo and black magic, all that stuff, but this was way back.
William Girdler [2] then beat you to the punch with his own blaxploitation Exorcist rip-off, Abby. [3]
He did, but I never saw Girdler’s movie. You know, so many times you come up with various projects and when they don’t come to fruition you just put them out of your mind. Then another idea pops up, then another one, and you just go with them. That’s what must have happened with Exorcist III because that idea escapes me right now.
The business of creating low-budget direct-to-video sequels to theatrical films has proved to be popular with studios, hasn’t it?
Yes, and of course, both Island of the Alive and A Return to Sal
em’s Lot had a pre-sold value and were sequels to recognized titles that audiences and video store owners were familiar with. That’s usually a very important consideration for the studios. It’s Alive, It Lives Again, and Salem’s Lot had all been popular rentals and it made sense to make the sequels. Today, there are people making direct-to-video pictures that are sequels to successful movies, particularly successful animated movies. Sometimes they’ll have a hit cartoon film and they’ll make a cheap version of it as a sequel in order to cash in. Disney has done that with a number of their titles. They managed to make some money on the basis that they were basically making these low-budget animated movies for kids — and parents do buy them for their children. I don’t know if any of these pictures have become break-out hits, but they do the same thing with horror movies, too. They’ll make a quick direct-to-video sequel to a film that has played theatrically, but most of these titles you don’t even hear much about. Sometimes they’ll turn up on HBO and Showtime, and you see them on cable. You often ask, “Hey, where have these pictures come from?” Some of these movies have pretty distinguished casts, too, but they have never received any theatrical release.
Larry Cohen Page 44