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VICE Lord: An Interview with
Gary Sherman |
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PG: I think it’s one of the best cop/action movies of the ‘80s. GS: You’re in good company, because Martin Scorsese thinks it’s one of the best movies of the ‘80s. PG: I’m glad to hear that. I wish it was easier for people to see it—it’s been out of circulation for so long. GS: Well, Blue Underground is going to release it on DVD. They’ve had the rights for a while, but Canal Plus bought it just before they went into bankruptcy, so the rights are a little messy right now. But (BU co-owners) David Gregory and Bill Lustig are working their tails off to sort our the rights, because they’ve already done the master and we’ve done the commentary. They’re really going to make it look beautiful. You know, John Alcott shot it. The movie is so beautifully shot. PG: Yeah, you can tell, even on the twenty-some-odd-year-old videotape I had to buy off eBay. You’re credited with the co-writer with Kenneth Peters, Sandy Howard and Robert Vincent O’Neill. How much of the final script is theirs and how much is yours? GS: (laughs hesitantly) PG: Is that answerable? GS: Um…the original writer [Kenneth Peters] was the cop that it originally happened to. It’s under a pseudonym. PG: So the opening crawl about this being based on actual events is true? GS: It is true. What happened was that I got quite friendly with the guy, and he was very high up in the LAPD. So when I got hired to direct it, they wanted me to do a Page One rewrite. Because of all the contractual things, we had to break some Writer’s Guild rules—but I suppose we’re beyond the statute of limitations on this sort of thing (laughs), so it’s okay to talk about it. PG: We’re past the two-decade mark—I think you’re okay. GS: So I actually went through the police academy and became a reserve police officer in order to be able to ride as second man in a two-man car. I spent six weeks out on the streets riding with the vice unit so I could really feel the reality of what went on. And from this point, I probably rewrote 80% of the script. In fact, a lot of the original script, which Sandy wanted shot, ended up as pieces of what became the title sequence. You’ll notice pieces of scenes in the title sequence—they were whole scenes that I pulled out of the movie. PG: Yeah, I remember the bit with the leathermen, which shows up later too. GS: Yeah, and there’s an arrest outside of a movie theater. It was really just a stupid scene, so I just took pieces of it and cut it into the title sequence. There was some stuff with drag queens and stuff—it just stopped the movie. And when I was doing the rewrite, Sandy kept saying, “No, put this in and keep that—let’s shoot it.” So we shot it. But I had a lot of support on that movie. Bob Rehme kept saying to me, and John Daley, who had come back into my life, they said, “Just go along with everything, because it’s going to be your movie in the end.” PG: That must have been reassuring to hear after what you’d go through. GS: Sure, especially having the head of the studio putting his arm around my shoulder and saying, “Just keep doing what you’re doing.” VICE SQUAD was a very important picture to me. It was the first of its kind. No one had ever done a police drama like that before. PG: Not to that degree, no. GS: And the people that I heard from—you know, John Milius called me and said, “This is the best movie I’ve ever seen. I just watched the movie last night with Steve Spielberg and he loved it!” And Marty Scorsese, and Walter Hill and I became great friends after that movie, and Jim Bridges—he was really funny. You notice that I have a big gap in my life after VICE SQUAD. The movie made a lot of money. And I was in a very unhappy point in my life—my personal life was nowhere. And what happened with VICE SQUAD was that it was so controversial, a lot of people didn’t want to have anything to do with me. There was this attitude in Hollywood that I was a very angry person, and that I hated women. Neither of which were at all true. My feeling about VICE SQUAD was that I wanted the violence to be so ugly that it would put people off of violence. I wanted the violence against women to be so repulsive—I didn’t want it to be titillating or exciting. I wanted it to be gruesome and ugly. And I think I achieved that, but I think in a way it was misunderstood by a lot of people. There was actually a public argument [over the film] between Dawn Steel (former president of Paramount and Columbia Pictures) and Martin Scorsese at a Paramount dinner. They were talking about the Oscars that year and who should be nominated, and Marty said, “Well, the best film this year is a film that the Academy doesn’t have the guts to nominate for anything.” And Dawn Steel says, “What’s that?” And Marty says, “VICE SQUAD.” And Dawn starts screaming, “Are you kidding? That’s the most misogynistic—“ and they start screaming at each other. And (producer) John Fiedler has to jump in there and calm them down, because everyone’s looking at them. Fiedler called me the next day and said, “Boy, you wouldn’t believe what happened last night!” PG: When you heard that, you must have been blown away. Here’s Martin Scorsese defending you and Dawn Steel tearing you down. Did you feel to a certain extent like “Mission accomplished?” GS: In a way, except that John Milius was producing a film at Paramount that he wanted me to direct, and after that evening, Dawn Steel said, “Not only can he not direct it, I won’t even take a meeting with him.” And I lost a picture, which was UNCOMMON VALOR. And that would have taken me out of the horror genre, which I must admit I was looking to get out of. But anyway, I got really upset, and I went away for a year and nobody heard from me. I went off into the ether and disappeared. I traveled for a year and did all forty-eight states. I had a lot of money, so it wasn’t a question at the time. And I wrote while I was away, and one of the things I wrote I brought back and showed to some people, and they said, “Oh, that’s a television series.” So what happened was that I ended up under contract to Lorimar. And I started developing pilots for them. So from VICE SQUAD to WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE, I was doing television, and having a pretty good time doing it. I was supervising a lot of shows, and I got called in as a consultant on a lot of cop shows because of VICE SQUAD. You know what? I’ve always enjoyed my life, and living my life and gaining real life experiences has always been so much more important to me than building my career. I’ve never taken my career seriously. I love making films because I love having a voice. I’m a very political person, and I would have liked to have had a bigger voice to make the kind of political statements I’d like to make, but in the meantime, I’ve done that on my own. That part of my life overshadowed what was destined to be my career. PG: Well, ultimately, at the end of the day, what you’ve done with your life is the most important thing, so if you’re happy with it, then no one can say otherwise about you. GS: So there I am, doing what I’m doing—and I was going to tell you about Jim Bridges. Right in the middle of this period when I’m doing television, I’m at this big party that this photographer was having, and I was talking to Alan Parker. And Jim Bridges comes up to say something to Alan, and Alan says, “Oh, this is Gary Sherman.” And Jim says, “Gary Sherman! I’m so angry at you, I can’t tell you!” I said, “What are you talking about?” And he says, “VICE SQUAD was one of the best movies I’ve ever seen, and now you’re doing fucking television? Quit this fucking television stuff and go make another movie!” PG: What do you say to that? GS: It was really quite funny. We ended up becoming good friends—as a matter of fact, we didn’t know this, but we were neighbors. Anyhow, I was quite happy doing my television stuff—I did a number of pilots and things, and one day I get a telephone call from Bob Rehme: “Okay, it’s time for you to return the favor.” I said, “What’s that?” “I have a script that is unshootable. We’ve already sold the picture. We’ve got theater dates on the picture. It’s a great title, but we don’t have a script or a movie or anything, so you’ve got to come and write me a script and direct this thing for me.” And it was WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE. So he gives me the script, and I read it, and then I called him in the morning and told him, “Boy, are you right.” There was nothing shootable in the script. I said, “If it’s WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE, why doesn’t it have anything to do with the TV series?” And he said, “I don’t know.” So I asked him, “Do I have carte blanche here?” And he said, “Absolutely.” So Denise DiNovi, who was working for Bob at the time—actually, Denise and I were dating—it was short and sweet, but we ended up as friends—Denise says, “I have this friend Brian Taggart, who would be wonderful for you to work with.” I basically had three weeks to rework the script, so I met with Brian, and I thought he and I could work well together. I knew some of his work (Taggert’s credits include VISITING HOURS, OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN and V: THE FINAL BATTLE and the subsequent series; he reteamed with Gary for the ill-fated POLTERGEIST III), so we sat down one night, worked straight through and came in the next morning with a storyline for Bob. He said, “Great, go ahead and write the script.” So in 17 days—and I’m talking 17 20-hour days, Brian and I pounded out the first draft. We were stuck in an office, we had an assistant who had a computer—and it was the first time I’d ever worked with a computer—and was entering everything as we wrote it. I mean, literally, Brian would lie down on the couch and sleep while I wrote, and we’d tag team. And Arthur Sarkissian came into the picture as producer (his later films include the RUSH HOUR franchise), and he would come in and bring us food— PG: And keep you alive.  GS:
So we finally got a script that was shootable, and we went into
production. WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE is a much better movie than the script.PG: There seems to be this recurring theme in the criticism about the movie that says that the film did wrong by the series. Frankly, the series was never sacred ground, but how do you feel about people who have that sort of knee-jerk nostalgia? GS: I don’t think we were besmirching the original DEAD OR ALIVE. I think the character that [star] Rutger Hauer was playing—first of all, Rutger was not my first choice for the film. We had gotten it to Mel Gibson, who had not done any American films. It was before he’d done LETHAL WEAPON. So anyway, he loved the script, but everyone was saying that he was going to be a big star, so he wanted a lot of money. A lot of money at the time was around a million dollars, and the million-dollar mark was a high water mark. And New World didn’t want to pay that kind of money. We went back and forth on that with them, and then Rutger Hauer came up, and you’re looking at SOLDIER OF ORANGE and BLADE RUNNER, and you think, “Oh well…okay…” and Rutger was half as much money. And the studio said to me, “Let’s put the money into the production instead of the star,” and I said, “I think we should put it into the star, because it’ll make a lot of difference.” PG: Today, that’s more conventional Hollywood wisdom. GS: There’s no question today that if WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE had been the exact same movie, but with Mel Gibson instead of Rutger Hauer— PG: It would have been night and day. GS: Everything would have been different. You know, Roger Ebert said it the best. At the end of his review, he put in a paragraph that said, “Gary, you’re a good film director. Why don’t you pick better material?” PG: Yeah, I just read that the other day. It’s so rare to read a mainstream critic who looks beyond the film in question and sees the talent behind it. I know he said good things about DEAD AND BURIED and VICE SQUAD. GS: He always said good things about my pictures, but then he gave them one and a half stars. But he’d talk about how well-made they were. I still have a dialogue with Roger. I was actually at a dinner for him not long ago, and we sat and talked. He made a joke at the dinner—it was all directors who started in Chicago—you know, Andrew Davis and Harold Ramis and myself and some other people. And Roger made a joke in his speech. He said, “I guess I have to apologize to Harold. I only gave two stars to GROUNDHOG DAY and now everyone tells me it’s a groundbreaking movie.” So afterwards, I walked up to Roger and said, “You apologized to Harold for only two stars—how about apologizing to me for never giving me more than one and a half? Especially with DEATH LINE, which you panned, and was just named one of the ten most important horror films of the 20th century by the British Film Institute?” PG: I didn’t know that. GS: The BFI had set up a board for a series of books that were published by the Cambridge Press, and the BFI helped pick the ten most important films in each genre, and DEATH LINE was one of the ten chosen for horror. So I said, “You know, there’s a two-DVD set for DEAD AND BURIED, which has become this total cult film.” And Roger says, “Well, I guess I’m going to have to rethink this.” And of course, Mike Wilmington jumped in there and did a four-hour interview with me, because he’s going to a retrospective on all of my movies. He thinks I’ve been underrated. PG: How did Gene Simmons get involved with DEAD OR ALIVE? GS: He called me. We were looking for a lot of people for that picture. We had just locked on to Rutger, and I had a lot of budgetary restrictions on that film. So my assistant came in and said, “Uh, Gary, Gene Simmons is on the phone for you.” I said, “What?” I didn’t know Gene at the time—I knew who he was, but I didn’t know him personally. I said, “What does he want?” And he said, “He wants to talk to you about being in the movie.” And at the time, I was having nothing but production problems on this film—I was trying to get it made for this budget in the time that we had to make it, and I said, “God, that’s all I need is some drugged-out rock and roller running around the set. Just get a number and I call him back.” So later, he came in again and said, “Gene’s on the phone again.” And Arthur Sarkissian was sitting in the room with me and asked, “What does he want?” I said, “He wants to be in the movie.” And Arthur says, “Well, talk to him, because if nothing else, maybe we can get him to do the soundtrack.” So I pick up the phone and the voice on the other line says: “Mr. Sherman? This Mr. Gene Simmons. I have read this script that you wrote, and I think it’s just amazing. And I just wanted you to know that I am the perfect person to play the Arab terrorist. I speak several dialects of Arabic, I speak perfect Hebrew and several other languages. You know I can be terrifying. The least I would like is to have a meeting with you. Are you free for lunch tomorrow?” And I said, “Yes.” He says, “I’m in Indianapolis right now—we have a concert tonight”—he had to be in Detroit or some place the next night, but he says, “But I have my own plane, so I’ll fly in tomorrow. Just tell me exactly what time and we’ll meet wherever you like.” I said, “That’s fine, but I’m not promising you anything.” “That’s okay,” he says. “I would just like the opportunity to meet you.” So the next day, I meet probably one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met in my life. He’s absolutely amazing—he’s incredibly literate, and nothing like I expect the tongue of KISS to be. I mean, he’s mind-boggling. He’s never done drugs, has never had alcohol except when he was studying to be a rabbi—yet sexually addicted. That part of his reputation is true. PG: And well documented. GS: But an unbelievable guy. And he was really into everything—how to be a terrorist. We hired people to train him, and even brought in a choreographer to teach him how to move the way that a trained guerilla would move. He worked so hard, and we worked under some of the worst conditions, but Gene was unbelievable. I couldn’t have asked for anyone to work harder and be more professional. There was not an ounce of star stuff that went on from him. He wasn’t fussy about his trailer or anything else. We’d be working, and he’d be freezing cold or soaking wet, and I’d ask him if he’d want to change or take a break, and he’d say, “Let’s get this over with.” He said it was helping him to be under these terrible conditions. And that fight sequence with Rutger. And we blew his head off. When Brian and I were working on the script, we were trying to figure out an ending, and we were exhausted. And suddenly I came up with the idea to have him with a hand grenade in his mouth, which I thought was a great visual, and Rutger would tie his headdress around his head like he had a toothache, and I thought, let’s bring him out through the crowd by the ring of the grenade with his hands cuffed behind him—I mean, nobody’s going to find you over this. So I had Rutger saying, “Send the reward to Danny’s widow, and I’ll pick up the bonus myself.” And I came up with that line—“Fuck the bonus.” I screamed it out—everybody in the place turned around and looked at us. I turned to Brian and yelled, “He says ‘Fuck the bonus’ and pulls the ring on the hand grenade!” And Brian starts jumping up and down, and just at that point, Arthur came walking into the office and asked what we were yelling about. And I said, “Rutger stuffed the hand grenade in Gene’s mouth and says, ‘Fuck the bonus’ and pulls the ring!” And Arthur yells, “That’s great!” And boom, we had the end of the movie. PG: The creation of an inspired moment. GS: Gene loved it. PG: It’s a great send-off, which is what every good villain wants. GS: Everybody fought over who was going to get Gene’s head. PG: Who has it? GS: I had it, but it just disintegrated. It was latex, and it wasn’t very cured. It should have been preserved better. PG: When you had it, did you tell people, “Hey, I’ve got the head of Gene Simmons in my office--wanna check it out?” GS: Bring Me the Head of Gene Simmons—I think it’s a movie. PG: I think you’ve got something there. I wanna double back a bit on VICE SQUAD. GS: I’ll talk as much as you want on VICE SQUAD. PG: Cool. First off, I want it to be known to the general population that you used the phrase “Make My Day” a year before SUDDEN IMPACT. GS: I don’t know if people have noted that (laughs). PG: When I heard that, I thought to myself, “It’s too bad that Reagan didn’t give a shout-out to Gary Sherman.” GS: Listen, I’m such a dyed-in-the-wool Don Siegel fan (legendary director of DIRTY HARRY, ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ, CHARLEY VARRICK, the original INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS; Siegel didn’t direct SUDDEN IMPACT, but his influence on Clint Eastwood has been widely noted) that if someone was going to rip me off, let it be Don. I think one of the most influential pictures for me as a kid was INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS. I love that movie and what Don did in the movie. And CHARLEY VARRICK is… PG: A great movie that too few people know about. GS: I actually became quite friendly with Andy Robinson for a while (Robinson played Scorpio in DIRTY HARRY)—we had some mutual friends. I loved getting to hear Don Siegel stories. And just when I was going to get to meet Don Siegel was when he died. I went to the memorial service with Andy Robinson. PG: Speaking of Don, we talked about your going through the police academy, which contributed to the procedural feel of the film. But there’s also a strong noir streak in the film as well. Were there any particular films or books from that genre that were in mind when you wrote the script or while you were directing the film? GS: CASABLANCA. PG: How so? GS: The attitude and the flow to CASABLANCA, which is so lyrical and musical. I think of CASABLANCA as a song, and I had to write a rock and roll song based on a piece of classical material—that was my framework. Not in terms of shape, but in terms of feeling. I like to deal with emotion, and I think that if there’s any strong point to my films, I think that I’m able to elicit emotions with them. The emotional outline of the picture is one of the most important things to me in the making of the film. When I sit down to write a script, I think more about how I want to move the audience emotionally than almost anything else other than the characters. The characters are what give us the emotion. But there’s an attitude in CASABLANCA, which is why people are attracted to the picture. There’s a loneliness about Rick that I tried to instill in Walsh. PG: I think it’s there, like in the end, or in the scene where he’s talking about his daughter after Ramrod gets arrested. There’s these little snapshots of him. GS: One of my favorite lines that I’ve ever written is, “I haven’t been married, but I’ve been divorced a few times.” PG: And she says back to him, “Who hasn’t?” in an almost off-the-cuff way. That’s great. GS: I don’t mean to be pretentious by mentioning CASABLANCA—VICE SQUAD is by no stretch of the imagination CASABLANCA. PG: I know what you’re saying—you were trying to evoke the same kind of emotional flow as that film. GS: I don’t know—I love Humphrey Bogart films—THE MALTESE FALCON or any of the Sam Spade movies. I’ve always loved that ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s kind of film noir detective. PG: Well, that comes across in VICE SQUAD—there’s a good mix of noir and procedural that you don’t see in other crime or cop pictures during the period. GS: And DOA—the original. I hated the remake. I actually wanted to do the remake. I was out trying to do it as an idea when I heard that it was being done, so I had no choice but to back off. PG: Did you ever see VICE SQUAD with an audience? GS: About a hundred times. PG: What did you notice that people were reacting to? GS: I’ll tell you a funny story about seeing it for the first time with an audience. We had a preview to see how people would react to it. I was very happy with it—I did a few nips and tucks to increase reaction—but at the end, when Ramrod is pinned against the wall by the car, and he’s pulling the gun out as Walsh is aiming his gun at him, and finally Walsh shoots. Somebody in the audience yelled, “Shoot him again!” And the whole audience went berserk. So I immediately went back into the cutting room and put the second shot in! And it worked—he pulls the trigger, you get Ramrod jerking back, and then you go back to Walsh again. The censors hated it—they tried to get me to take it out. PG: Did they think that it was gratuitous? GS: Yeah, and they felt that a policeman wouldn’t do that. PG: Yeah, but Ramrod, he did deserve it. While I was watching VICE SQUAD, I started thinking about how popular the word and the image of a pimp has become in recent years in the music industry and popular culture. There’s even an animated movie called LI’L PIMP coming out, and there’s a drink called Pimp Juice. Considering your portrayal of a pimp in this movie is pretty horrendous—and also more realistic—what’s your reaction to this popularity? GS: The exploitation of women for sexual purposes is something that I find to be repulsive. When I’d ride with the vice squad and get involved in their cases, I’d come home and take a shower for an hour and a half. It can get to anybody. You spent enough time in that sex for money world and no matter your bent is, you’ll find it titillating after a while. We’re all sexual creatures—there’s no denying it. Freud was right. But that world of one human being exploiting another human being—whether it’s for sex or anything else—I find it abhorrent. It’s a kind of slavery, it’s removing people’s freedom. Most of these girls who end up as hookers, especially street hookers, most of them are very wounded human beings. In almost every case, they were abused as children. Their self-confidence and self-esteem was destroyed when they were a child, and then some pimp comes along and introduces them to drugs and that is the slave ring that is put around their neck. These are evil people. And it gets glorified by people like Heidi Fleiss. And maybe the concept of a madam is something different than a pimp, but I still think it’s exploitation of a human being, and that’s bad. So in none of my films, and sometimes I make my villains a little arch, I have never and will never glorify an exploiter of human beings as a hero. I’d rather not make the film than do that. At one time in my life, Jonathan Demme and I had a company with Michael Mann while the three of us were in London. I won’t even go to see Michael’s films, because every one of Michael’s films glorifies criminals. Even the thing he’s doing with Tom Cruise now (COLLATERAL, about a hit man), and THIEF. I don’t believe in the glorification of criminals. Maybe I’m a moralist or something… PG: Everybody has a set of beliefs, and that’s what you stand by. GS: Especially if it’s drug-associated. I’ve had my own problems with drugs, and successfully overcame them. I think that to promote drugs is one of the most evil things that we can do to young people. The answer to your question is that I have very strong feelings about these things, and the fuel of prostitution is drugs. The sale of sex for money—I have no moral issue with that per se, but the exploitation of human beings in that trade, and the fact that drugs are used makes me crazy. PG: When you sat down with Wings, were you able to talk about your feelings on these subjects with him. Did it go into your shaping the character? GS: Wings had never played anything but a good guy before. He was the nicest guy in the world on a soap opera. But I knew the real Wings Hauser, because Nancy Locke, who was in DEAD AND BURIED, was Wings’ wife, and I’d met Wings through Nancy when she was in Mendocino (the location for DEAD AND BURIED). Nancy’s the mother of the little boy in the haunted house sequence. And so Wings was in Mendocino with Nancy, and we got to be pretty good friends. I saw an underside to Wings—there was an anger that existed in him from a long time ago. So we talked a lot and discussed the things in his life that he was ashamed of and the things that he was proud of—I knew him and did the evil thing of using this information when I cast him in the part. And even before Wings was cast, we would talk deeply about Ramrod. And when I brought it up at the studio that I wanted to cast Wings, everyone said, “Wings Hauser? He plays this nice guy in a soap opera. He can’t be Ramrod.” And I asked if they could just meet with him, and we had this whole panel of people from the studio in there. Wings and I had rehearsed a scene before hand, and he came into the room and terrified them. He and I had talked deeply about how evil Ramrod was—he wasn’t psychotic. He was evil. And we had given him a whole background as to who he was and why he was the way he was. And Wings came into this room, and he was Ramrod. There was no question about it—he was Ramrod. He terrified everyone in the room—Bob Rehme, Frank Capra Jr.. Everyone said, “Get him out of here!” So finally I shut him down (laughs), and he walked out of the room, and everyone said, “You’re right, he’s got it. If he can terrify an audience the way he terrified everyone in this room, you were right.” And Wings and I really did talk about who Ramrod was. I did the same thing with Season to move her into being Princess. PG: He and Season and Nina Blackwood have some really brutal scenes. How did you work them into the mindset for those scenes? I’m thinking specifically of Ramrod breaking into Ginger’s hotel room, and the end with Princess chained to the bed. GS: Well, Nina was great to work with. She really wanted to do the part. She’d just gotten the MTV job, and was really excited about that. I’d seen her in some workshops, and we just talked about her emotions in the scene. She was in love with this guy because her self-esteem was so low, and she just felt that she needed him, even though he beat and tortured her. The scenes with Season were so long and so intense, and they needed to go beyond acting. Season was going through some personal problems in her life with Kurt (Russell), who was in the process of leaving her for Goldie (Hawn), and there was stuff going on with her little boy, who wasn’t well. And I must admit that evilly, I used that. I was the only one that Season trusted enough to tie her down to the bed. I would put the handcuffs on her, and I would sit with her and get her going. I would talk to her about all the bad things that were going on her life—we were very close. And I would just get her going, and she would say, “Talk to me about it more.” And she’d get into that thing—the idea of possibly losing her child, which was going on at the time, because Kurt was fighting her for custody. So the emotion that was coming out of Season in those scenes had to do with her son. I had to hold her afterwards. With Wings, I would get him worked up, and I would have to go out with him afterwards every night. We shot that whole picture at night. PG: Yeah, isn’t there just one daylight scene at the end? GS: There’s one dawn scene, and it actually was dawn. We had a 9 o’clock call every night—even when we were on a soundstage, because we didn’t want to change the feeling. So we’d wrap on the picture at 5 in the morning, and I would have to take Wings out, because he wouldn’t go home to Nancy and the kids as Ramrod. I would take him out every morning and decompress him—we’d have breakfast and talk for a while and get him back into the real world. It was a very emotional movie. PG: It comes across. Anyone who looks at that movie as just another crime/vice movie—and there were a lot of them in the ‘80s, like ANGEL—it’s not like that. There’s not a lot of daylight in that movie, metaphorically speaking. GS: Well, Sandy brought me HOLLYWOOD VICE SQUAD and wanted me to do that as well. I said no way—it was the worst script I’d ever read. He said, “Don’t be like that—just do it.” And I said no. There was all that stuff—MS. 45 and all these movies. And VICE SQUAD started that trend, and that upset me. The only thing that made me happy was that Walter Hill told me that 48 HOURS wouldn’t have been what it was if it wasn’t for VICE SQUAD. I think VICE SQUAD spawned some good movies, but it also spawned some bad ones too. PG: How did Wings end up doing the title song? GS: (laughs) That was another funny thing. You notice how at the end of the picture, there are music credits that go on for days? None of that music is in the movie? PG: What happened to it? GS: Sandy had made a financing deal with somebody to put their music in the movie—it was some kind of cross-collateralization thing. I get this music delivered to me while I’m cutting, so I put it in, and it was horrible. I didn’t want it in the movie. So Bob Rehme and John Daley said to me, “What do you want to do?” I said, “Joe Renzetti is one of my closest friends, and he just won an Oscar (for THE BUDDY HOLLY STORY). He doesn’t need the money, and he’ll do anything I want.” So I called him and asked, “Joe, this weekend—do you want to score a movie?” And that’s what we did. He had a little studio at his house, so we did all of it there so it wouldn’t cost anymore. I think it took four days. He brought in Simon Stokes to write “Neon Slime.” And then Artie Butler, who owned Evergreen Studios, was a friend of Joe’s, so we went in there and cut a score. And I sat down in the cutting room and laid the music in, and said, “Wow.” And Sandy was overruled. But he had this contractual obligation to put these people’s names on the movie. At the beginning, it says “Music by Joe Renzetti,” and that’s what it is. Every piece of music was written and performed by Joe—Joe is one of the great guitar players. A lot of it is synthesized, and we had a few musicians—I think we put the whole score together for less than $25,000. PG: That’s like an episodic budget. GS: Well, Joe’s a brilliant musician. PG: So how did Wings end up singing “Neon Slime?” GS: We needed someone to sing it. Wings sang, and I’m doing the backup harmonies. I began part of my life as a backup musician. PG: You did some music films early on, right? GS: Yeah, I did a lot of music films—THE LEGEND OF BO DIDDLEY, things with Ramsey Lewis. I did a bunch of stuff with up-and-coming groups that we would just put on film—Ginger Baker, The Seekers, Chuck Berry—I did a bunch of stuff for Chess Records, because that’s where I was working as a studio musician. I knew everybody there. I was doing a session with Bo Diddley when I asked if I could shoot some footage of him. That was around ’65. PG: Last couple of questions—I heard that there’s a softer version of the film—is that correct? GS: There’s a TV version. Actually, we used to joke that if there was a TV version of VICE SQUAD, it would be 20 minutes long (laughs). But there is a TV version. Where you could get your hands on it, no one knows. PG: Were you involved in the TV version? GS: I took a look at it, because by Director’s Guild rules, they have to offer it to me. It was like cutting my heart out. Actually, I just wrote a letter to somebody because one of the scripts that I’d written for Fox is now being done at Lifetime, and I have to “Lifetime” the script. So I wrote to the producer, and I said, “This is almost as bad as the time I had to do the TV version of VICE SQUAD!” So there is a TV version out there someplace, and did its round of network television and syndication. You don’t see it anymore because of the rights problem with Canal Plus. There’s no way to get it from them. PG: Well, in a way, it’ll make the DVD all the more valuable. GS: Well, when they get the rights sorted out. David Gregory keeps updating me, because I’m really anxious. It’s now been a year and a half since I did the commentary. PG: When you look back at the period we’re covering, which is roughly 1980-1995, what does it mean to you? For Sleaze and I, it was a period of our discovering films like VICE SQUAD and DEAD AND BURIED for the first time—more mature stuff than the Creature Features movies we were used to. Part of the reason we’re writing this book is to find out what it was like for the filmmakers to be active during this time. GS: What it was like for me—it gave me an opportunity to do groundbreaking, which is much harder to do today. Although the problem with groundbreaking is that until it’s ten years later, no one realizes that you broke ground. I’m deviating from your question a little bit, but it’s really strange for me after having been not readily accepted for my films when they were made, and even getting a lot of bad reviews, to suddenly have so many of my films called classics ten years, twenty years and in the case of DEATH LINE, thirty years later. I think that the opportunities were there to break new ground, to get out of the box—whichever cliché one wishes to use. And I jumped on them—maybe to my own detriment in some ways. Maybe if I’d confirmed more to the norm, my films would have been more accepted at the time. But it’s fun now that they’re being recognized. As far as the period goes, I was a child of the ‘60s, and that was a time in which we all wore costumes—bellbottom trousers and platform shoes and hair down our backs. It was all really wearing costumes. We carried a big political flag and we changed the world. The children of the ‘60s truly changed the world. Since then, there hasn’t been a movement like that, and I think that the art and the music that were created in the ‘60s—where contemporary art went in terms of Andy Warhol and the people that came out of that school, and the music that came out of the ‘60s—we haven’t even started to get close to it again, although there’s some. We sit around and talk about that all the time—there’s interesting stuff, but there’s not a lot. And I think that the ‘70s and ‘80s, especially, did not move the art form along in a great way. There were a few people in the art world who came to the fore in the late ‘80s who I think were really incredible, like Christian Boldonsky and a few Europeans, but I don’t think there was much in American art. And I’m trying to think of filmmakers who emerged from that period and hadn’t emerged early—I suppose there are some. PG: It was a weird period for American culture in general. GS: It was a stagnant period—it was almost like the ‘50s. PG: That’s exactly what I’ve been saying. Very conservative and afraid. GS: You had a generation of kids coming out of college and all they wanted to do is secure their financial futures. They weren’t interested in securing culture or real change. And again, you look at advertising from that period, design—it just didn’t move forward the way it did in the ‘60s. The Beatles broke up and that was the end of it (laughs). And I don’t want to seem like some old guy, because most people think I’m twenty years younger than I am anyway— PG: No, I don’t think you’re flying the “my decade was the best decade” flag—I grew up during the ‘80s. Those was my formative years, and when I see people getting misty-eyed or excited over things from that period, I say to myself, “What are you nostalgic for? This is such a dreadful period.” The only thing that made that time fun for me was punk rock and these really intense, crazy movies that were coming out. That’s what we’re trying to talk about—there were things that were dismissed but were fun in their own berserk way, and that’s what we think should be celebrated. GS: I look at most of the films that were done during the period, and most of the films were done by people who had been doing films for a while. I can’t think of anything really innovative from new people. Maybe I’m missing something, and if I sat down with reference materials, I could find something. One of my favorite films from that period was ALL THAT JAZZ, but Bob Fosse had been around forever. It’s at the top of the list of films that I wish my name was on (laughs). PG: Aside from people who were working in the Super-8 underground, there weren’t a lot of innovative people in the ‘80s. GS: There were very few great films during that period. APOCALYPSE NOW had already been made. GODFATHER had already been made. There were no CASABLANCAs during that period, that’s for sure. All I can say is that a few of my films that were made during that are considered to be classics—that were hated at the time (laughs). PG: Well, that’s the thing about classics. Sometimes it takes a while for people to figure that out about them. Gary, thank you for taking the time for taking the time to talk to us. When my partner and I started on the project, we said that of the two movies we’ve got to do first for the proposal, one of them has to be VICE SQUAD. He was in a band that used to cover “Neon Slime.” GS: Oh, really? PG: Yeah, he said that somewhere out there there’s a version of it. GS: You’ve got to send me a CD! PG: I don’t think Sleaze will allow that, but—it’s been a pleasure. -Paul Gaita __________________________________________________________________________ Gary Sherman Interview, Part 1: Deathline, Dead and Buried, Etc. CLICK HERE! _____________________________________________________________________________________ VICE SQUAD PART 1: We're All in the Same Toilet Bowl CLICK HERE, FUCKER. ___________________________________________________________________________________ |
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