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VICE Lord: An Interview with
Gary Sherman |
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Ultimately, the real reason VICE SQUAD
delivers such a sucker punch to viewers' expectations is due to the
direction of the vastly unheralded Gary Sherman. One of the most cerebral
filmmakers to work in the exploitation trenches, he’s also no stranger to
tackling thorny issues within an exploitation context; his first feature,
DEATH LINE (shown in the States as RAW MEAT) kicked against
class prejudice and racism in a story about the ultimate societal reject, a cannibal living in the London railway system. He also opened up a can of worms concerning the sanctity of death and our burial customs in his second horror feature, 1981's DEAD AND BURIED, which went through extensive birthing spasms before emerging as a considerably less dark and humorous film than during its conception. The reaming he took during the post-production on DEAD AND BURIED earned him his pick of follow-up projects from its distributor, Avco/Embassy chief Robert Rehme, which is how he came to discover VICE SQUAD. We wanted to know how Gary turned what could have been a cheapo grinder into a double-barreled crime pic, but he was kind enough to give us the dirt on so much more, from getting double-crossed by American International Pictures to his secret rock and roll past and the joys of owning Gene Simmons’ head. __________________________________________________________________________ Paul Gaita: There’ s a gap of almost a decade between DEATH LINE and DEAD AND BURIED. What was going on during that period? Gary Sherman: I was doing commercials. What happened was right after I did DEATH LINE, which was rather successful, but never really saw the light of day because of the AIP (American International Pictures, who distributed the film in the U.S., retitled it RAW MEAT and released it on a double bill with Ivan Reitman’s CANNIBAL GIRLS) fiasco— PG: What was the AIP fiasco? GS: I don’t know legally how much I can talk about it. There was something done that was illegal in the distribution of the picture (laughs). It’s a long, long story. The picture was hardly released in the United States—it was released under a different title. When the picture was released, we didn’t even know that it was our movie. There was some stuff done between the people who financed the film and AIP that was done behind our backs. It went into litigation, and then it couldn’t be in litigation because some of the people were officers of public corporations, so the litigation had to be dropped. Eventually, AIP pulled out of their claims and pulled the pictures, because there were all kinds of tax write-offs at the time for them. I don’t really want to [elaborate]. I don’t really understand exactly what happened—it’s not my area of expertise. I’d just as well as stay politically correct. PG: Sure, that’s fine. So you were doing commercials? GS: Yeah. I stayed in England until around 1980, and then I came to the United States and I started writing. I wrote a couple of scripts—Jay Kanter (agent for Marilyn Monroe and Marlon Brando, among others, and executive in Universal’s London office and MGM and Fox in the States; he later co-formed The Ladd Company with Gareth Wigan and Allan Ladd Jr) had come over and was at First Artists. Jay had produced DEATH LINE. And Allan Ladd Jr. (co-producer on DEATH LINE) had come back to the States and he was president of Fox. So I did several different things for them--none of which got produced, because as you know, lots of things in Hollywood never get produced. Then I got into television in a big way. I wrote two pilots that were done as two-hour movies for Alan Landsburg Productions (Landsburg’s TV credits range from “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau” to PORKY’S II, “That’s Incredible!” and “In Search Of…”). They both had “mysterious” in the title—one was called MYSTERIOUS ISLAND (a.k.a. MYSTERIOUS ISLAND OF BEAUTIFUL WOMEN; according to Gary, the project began at NBC but moved to CBS and was recast as a Movie of the Week. Gary was not involved in the final version of the film) which I did not direct (Joseph Pevney did), and the other one was called THE MYSTERIOUS TWO, which was a “Big Event” I directed for NBC. PG: This is around ’79 or so? GS: 79-80. Basically, I was doing a lot of television. I was writing a lot of television and writing pilots and directing a little bit. And then I did DEAD AND BURIED.  PG: How did DEAD AND BURIED come your way?GS: Ron Shusett called me around 1979 or 1980. He was looking for scripts to produce. This was before ALIEN—it might have been ’78, because I met him before ALIEN was produced. Anyway, Ron called me, and I had a script that I’d written in London with Bob Shearer, a friend of mine. Bob and I used to turn out script after script after script—really bad horror movies. We used to put pseudonyms on them (laughs). PG: Were they exploitation? GS: Yeah. PG: And you were just writing them to sell them? GS: Oh, we sold them. I don’t know how many of them were made, and I don’t even know what titles [they were made under], because we just stayed absolutely clear of them. We had somebody representing us and selling them (laughs). We would turn out these terrible scripts about spiders—you know, because Hammer was popular…what were some of the other companies? PG: Oh, Tigon—there were others. GS: There were all kinds…there was one that was run by a married couple. [The company title] was their name or something…anyway, there scads of these companies turning out genre stuff in the ‘70s. And all really bad. And Bob and I thought we’d cash in on these. Both of these worked in commercials, and made a really good living with them. So we’d sit in coffee shops—way before Starbucks—and meet in the mornings before we’d go to our offices and sketch something out. It was just a joke—what we did while had our tea in the morning. But one idea which hadn’t sold, and we really liked, was called PHOBIA (made in 1980 by John Huston). The Huston movie is half the script. When Bob and I wrote the original script, it was pretty good—I think the movie is awful. PG: It’s hard to find these days. GS: (not too ruefully) Yeah, well…it was like a dream and a nightmare at the same time. John Huston was going to direct one of my scripts—and it was the worst movie he’d ever made! (laughs) But he was in bad shape at the time. I don’t think he knew he was even on the set half the time. They had started to shoot the film and basically, they ran out of money very quickly. There were two stories conjoined throughout the entire script, and you never knew why there were two stories. And at the very end of the script, the two stories came together—bang!—and you’re watching one story. That was the original premise of the film. The fact that it was [about] phobias, the movie was really about psychoses. It was a pretty good script, and Ron read it and loved it and made a deal with us. And then he never got it made himself, and ended up in this situation with Larry Spiegel and his partner, who had this Canadian deal. And when it went to Canada, they had to have Canadian writer’s credits on it. PG: So those are the two credited writers (Lew Lehman, who also directed the surreal THE PIT, 1981, and Peter Bellwood, later co-scripter on HIGHLANDER and its first sequel; Hammer scribe Jimmy Sangster also took a pass at it). GS: The two writers basically got credit for writing the script but they were the ones who destroyed the script. They took it and threw one story out of it. Anyway…at the time that the script was sold to Ron, I think it was a pretty good script. PG: Until those guys got their hands on it. GS: Well, the producers too. It’s funny, because Larry and I subsequently met and became friends (laughs), though I never could forgive him for what he did to my script. You can’t judge by your friends by their resumes (laughs). I have a lot of good friends whose movies I don’t like and they don’t like mine but that has nothing to do with our friendship. So anyway, PHOBIA was done during that period as well. Let’s see…I shot DEAD AND BURIED in ’80 and it was released in ’81, and I did VICE SQUAD in ’81. PG: And that comes out in ’82. GS: And it was while I was doing VICE SQUAD that PHOBIA came out. I remember that I was doing VICE SQUAD and I was invited to a screening. And I walked out about ten minutes into it. I was so upset. I’d been invited up to the set, but I didn’t go, because I was actually shooting VICE SQUAD at the time. PG: When DEAD AND BURIED came your way, were you concerned that after doing DEATH LINE, you’d be pegged as a horror director? GS: I was offered one horror film after another after DEATH LINE, because in Europe, it was unbelievably successful, and immediately became this cult horror film in Europe. There was a special screening at L’Ecran Fantastique, which at the time was a very prestigious horror film festival. But I didn’t want to do another one. I’ll tell you how I came to do my first horror film. I was a very young and successful commercial director—I had an incredible career going, and I was in my early twenties. And everyone kept saying to me, “Make a movie.” And I said, “How do you make a movie?” And they’d say, “Write something.” So an art director friend of mine named David Chasten (sp?) who also dabbled in writing, he had an idea, and basically I wrote the script. It was a pretty fun script, but it was very much a film student script. PG: Introspective, that sort of thing. GS: Yeah. So Ray Davies of the Kinks, who was a good friend of David’s and a good friend of mine, wanted to do a movie, and we gave him the script to read, and Ray loved it. So we went out with the script to sell it, and the other Kinks said to Ray, “If you do a movie, forget it. We have a career here, and if you go off and make movies for six months, what do we do?” So Ray said, “I guess I can’t.” And without Ray, we had this script that was just a student film (laughs). So I took it around to a few people, and one of the people who read it was David Hemmings’ partner at Hemdale, John Daley. I knew John—London was a weird and wonderful place at that time, and you just knew everybody. Nobody cared who anybody was—everybody just hung out. So I gave him the script to read, and he called me back and said, “That’s a really well-written script, but there’s no way I’m going to make it. Who would want to go see it?” So I said, “Well, okay…” And he said, “Why don’t you write a horror film? That should be able to sell, especially in today’s market.” So I thought, okay. And then I’m off doing a very, very expensive Procter and Gamble commercial (laughs) for a new deodorant spray—it was the launch of the first spray anti-perspirant in Europe. They were spending lots and lots of money on it. So the creative director of the agency, Cerie Jones had just written a novel—hadn’t been published yet, and we were talking. I’d already come up with the idea for DEATH LINE, and I mentioned it to him, and while we were off on this location, the two of us wrote the script. We did it in about three weeks. So I gave the script to my commercial company producer, who was also one of my best friends—a guy named Jonathan Demme, who (laughs) did okay for himself. Jonathan was my producer then, and at that time, he had no intention of directing. He was really into producing. I gave him the script, and he said (excited voice), “This is really great! When this friend of mine gets in town, let me give it to him.” And that was Paul Maslansky. Paul was working for Jay Kanter and Alan Ladd at the time. Paul reads the script, loves it, gives it to Alan and Jay, they read it and call me and say, “What do you want to do with this script? It’s great.” And I said, “I want to make it—as cheaply as possible.”  PG: Which is interesting, because that’s not how the movie looks on
screen.GS: Well, I had the tricks down. I’d been doing all these incredibly expensive commercials where I had four or five days to shoot a 30-second commercial with all these camera moves. So I really had all those tricks down pat, and I came up with the idea that if you treated films with the same care as a 30 second spot, in essence, and really filled with production value, you could make up for the lack of time and money. You know, like the tracking shot— PG: Oh, that circular tracking shot (which slowly reveals the Man’s existence and the fates of the fellow workers that were trapped with him in the abandoned tunnel in one long, slow tracking shot)? GS: We lit and rehearsed that shot for almost a whole day, and did three takes, and we were out of it. But it was an entire day’s shooting, and it’s eight and a half minutes. PG: It’s interesting, because if you think of any other horror film from the period, no one else was stopping the film like that to create some atmosphere. GS: Well, DEATH LINE to me was more than a horror film. I’d come to England after running away from the Chicago convention (the Democratic convention of 1968), which I’d been involved in. I was a real political animal at the time, and that first script that David Chasten and I wrote was very political, which is why we couldn’t get it made. So when I came up with the idea for DEATH LINE, I said, “I can write a political treatise, wrap it up like a horror movie, and no one will ever know.” PG: That comes across. There’s an agenda to DEATH LINE, but it doesn’t overwhelm the story. GS: Yeah, it talks about classism in a big way. It’s racism—that’s exactly what DEATH LINE is all about. It was a very important thing to me—it still is. I haven’t changed (laughs). I’m still a bit of a left-winger. PG: That’s okay. So are we. So let’s flash forward to DEAD AND BURIED. How did this come about? GS: I’d met Ron Shusett because he was a fan of DEATH LINE, and he came to me with PHOBIA and we worked on that together. And then he did ALIEN, and that was a sizable hit. So he came back to me and said, “Now we can make a movie.” Actually, I was spoken to about being the director of ALIEN, but I was involved in all sorts of other things at the time, and there was another picture at Fox that was in trouble—DAMNATION ALLEY. Paul Maslansky was producing it for Jay and Laddie (Alan Ladd) and had been brought in to take over the picture, and Paul wanted me to come in and take that picture over. But Jay felt that the picture was in so much trouble that he didn’t want me to take it over. Meanwhile, the decision was made—well, I guess Walter Hill was originally supposed to direct ALIEN, but then THE DRIVER was such a failure for Fox, so they moved on. It was all over the place. Gordon Carroll was pretty much in charge of who was going to be who on the picture. So when the decision was made to move me off DAMNATION ALLEY, I went back to doing my television stuff—quite happily. In the meantime, I started to work with Ron on TOTAL RECALL, which I was basically lending ideas to. And then ALIEN was a big hit, and everybody wanted to make DEAD AND BURIED, and I was Ron’s first choice to direct it. Unfortunately, I think the deal was made with the wrong people. PG: From listening to the commentary on the Blue Underground disc, the original intention for the film was to make a black comedy, and then I guess the parties that were involved production-wise pulled out all the comedy elements. When a studio does that at the last minute, what do you do as a director? It seems like this was the second time this had happened to you as a director. GS: It was…at the time, I took DEAD AND BURIED to heart a lot more than I do now. I look at the picture now, and there’s a couple of blemishes that I hate—the scene with the acid up the nose, and the fisherman getting all slashed up—they weren’t part of the original film. And to facilitate those changes and get rid of all the comedy, the picture was Cuisinarted a little bit—it was cut up and things were put in a different order than they were initially intended to be. They changed the pacing of the picture. But in looking back at it, my feeling about DEAD AND BURIED is that even though we went through all these problems, I’m pretty proud of what we did on the movie. You’ve seen the Blue Underground DVD? PG: Yes. GS: So you’ve heard all the commentary (laughs)? If you listen to Steve Poster’s commentary (Poster was the film’s DP) and mine, and then you listen to Ron’s, you’d think we were talking about two different movies. Steve’s commentary and mine are very close. But Ron—I love Ron, but he lives in a different world than the rest of the world than us. His reality is far away from everybody else’s reality. PG: Which works to his advantage, I guess. GS: Oh yeah. When he wrote TOTAL RECALL, he went to Mars and he never came back (laughs). And that’s great, and he’s a joy because of it, but living in the real world with Ron is difficult. He and Linda would go off into stuff [on the commentary] that didn’t happen, couldn’t have happened…it’s funny. I don’t care—it doesn’t bother me. And like I say, I think the world of Ron, it’s just…(laughs). PG: You’re relatively fond of the end product. GS: I wasn’t for a long time. When we screened my director’s cut of the film and the lights came up, the audience just sat there. We screened it at the big theater at the old Goldwyn Studios, which is now Warner Hollywood (down the street from my house—PG), and it was packed. I had invited a lot of people, and the audience just sat there—they laughed through it, but the way the ending came, after a picture that was filled with black comedy—the audience was stunned. The end credits came up, and there was about 30 seconds of silence, and then just a rousing cheer from the audience. And people came up to me—(executive producer) Bob Rehme came up to me and said, “I’m so proud to be part of the film,” and James Farentino said, “It’s the best thing I’ve ever been involved in.” People were just blown away by it—including Jay [Kanter] and Laddie. Everybody just went “Wow.” And then Mark Damon (former actor turned executive and chief of Producers Sales Organization, which oversaw TRUE ROMANCE, 9 1/2 WEEKS, etc.) who was the third entity involved in the film, takes me over into a corner and says, “Very interesting movie, but if I’d wanted Bergman for a horror film, I would have hired Bergman. Now let’s make it into a horror movie.” And then he turns to (composer) Joe Renzetti and says, “Big band music? Who wants to hear big band music?” Well, Mark being Mark—and Mark and I have plastered over the problems too. I just ran into him recently too and we were very cordial to one another—it got pretty bad. PG: What was PSO’s role in DEAD AND BURIED? GS: They were the third production entity. They didn’t come until post-production. The original entity was run by Richard St. John. He had left Four Star, and it was being financed by Guinness. And then Guinness pulled out, and John Hyde put together a group. John was either working for or with—I don’t know how this should be politically placed—Richard St. John, and then Richard left completely. John Hyde put a group of people together to finance the project, and they became in charge of the picture. This was in the middle of shooting. And that changed things a little bit, but not as much as it got changed later. And then Mark Damon bought out John Hyde’s company for PSO. So now Mark was completely in charge of the whole thing. And Ronnie—as I said, Ronnie was somewhere on Mars during the whole thing—he just went along with the flow. But I was not involved with the final cut or the finishing of the picture at all. We had finished the picture—we had done a dub and everything. So Ron calls me up to screen the final cut of the picture with the new dub and everything. And just in the title sequence alone, the music was so badly mixed compared to our mix—the mix is a really important thing to me in my films. I remember that there was a saxophone solo that came out over that piano solo that Joe had written and was just incredible. And it was gone—it just wasn’t there. I got really upset and didn’t even stay for the whole movie. You know, you get very close to a movie—it becomes your baby. Bob Rehme hated the changes that Mark was making in the picture. Bob was running Avco Embassy at the time, and they were going to be the distributors. And so Bob called me and said, “I want to go back to your original cut.” So I got caught in the middle of a legal dispute between the two of them, and I was informed that if I made one change in the film, I would be sued by PSO. And Jay Kanter, who at the time was, I think, the president of Fox—Laddie had just been moved up to chairman—Jay has always been my mentor, and he said to me, “Gary, walk away from it.” PG: Sure. What else can you do at that point? GS: He said, “Get over it. Walk away and make another movie. You got another movie you want to make.” And I said, “Not really. I’m a little disturbed by all of this at the moment, and I don’t know if I want to make another movie.” He said, “Go make another movie.” And subsequent to that, I went back to Bob Rehme. I don’t know if Jay called Bob Rehme or if I talked to Bob, but Bob called me into his office and handed me a stack of scripts and said, “I loved your movie. Your movie is not going to exist, but I want another Gary Sherman movie.” And amongst those scripts was VICE SQUAD. And I said, “You know what? I want to make this movie.” The script was not very good, but we knew we could fix it. But Bob Rehme was 100% me on VICE SQUAD. And I think it’s my best movie. Gary Sherman interview, Part 2: Vice Squad CLICK HERE, COCHISE. _____________________________________________________________________________________ VICE SQUAD PART 1: We're All in the Same Toilet Bowl CLICK HERE, FUCKER. ___________________________________________________________________________________ |
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