Oh, I knew Joe when I made Weasels Rip My Flesh. Many people contacted me, because I was in the newspaper. I even met Andy Milligan’s producer from Guru the Mad Monk, Monty Isaacs. He came over—and that was a whole story unto itself. I didn’t know who Andy Milligan was at the time, and he had all these pressbooks for Guru and Torture Dungeon. Anyway, on Marzano—he was making these movies for the (now-defunct) Uniondale Mini Cinema in Uniondale, New York. It was very popular in the late ‘70s—they showed The Rocky Horror Picture Show on a regular basis and a lot of exploitation and cult movies.

He did some great movies in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, which I think is his best stuff. The way I met him was that he asked someone to get into touch with me after he saw the write-up, and I went and met him. He was much older, but everyone surrounding him was kids my age. He was like the leader of all these people making shorts for the Mini Cinema—they were comic shorts like “Saturday Night Live” type skits or gross-out comedy skits. I brought Weasels, because they wanted to see it, and I remember feeling so belittled, because he had a superior camera that could do all these in-camera effects. I thought he was so advanced—I thought, “My God, his stuff blows mine away,” but actually, that wasn’t the case. It was my misconception, because he had better equipment. And I’m not taking anything away from his films.

He was the middleman for these big guys who had the money and would produce these movies for like $7,000. So for Cool It, Baby, it was the cinematographer, Lew Waldeck, and Marzano who directed it. No one wanted to take credit, so Lou Campa put his name on it. And then Marzano directed Venus in Furs, but he and Campa didn’t get along, so he never directed another sexploitation film. He did work on a couple of them, like To Turn a Trick.

Right, he was the soundman on that, and also appears in it briefly. But his early stuff is his greatest, I think. I love When They Sleep and Erostratus and You Or I and of course, his feature, Man Outside. He made that before The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and all the other lonely anarchist movies. He was ahead of his time, but he never promoted his stuff, and these other movies would come out and bury him.

Mine. He was good at doing imitations of actors with distinct accents—he was good with British actors. For instance, he did an incredible George Sanders, and it was a choice between Bela Lugosi and George Sanders (for the role), and I went for the Lugosi, because those lines—do you know where those lines are cribbed from?

No, no. Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932). That movie is incredible.

It’s very perverse. And some of the lines are priceless—when the woman dies [in Rue Morgue, Lugosi] goes, “Dead…you’re dead!” So I had him do that. And at the end of Rue Morgue, the camera is pulling back and he’s just standing there after the body is dumped—and it’s a great scene, with him just standing there and saying, “Will my search…ever…end?” (laughs) So I said to Marzano, “The last shot [of the scene} is going to be this super-pullback, and you’ve got to say, ‘Will human suffering…never…end?’” I had to change the dialogue.

Now imagine if there had been more of them searching after the two maniacs.

Yes, and as you know, Fred Borges was supposed to have been Jacob, but because of the time constraints and Fred’s lateness, there was just no ways. He was all ready to do it—I had the fake teeth, he was going to have a hunchback and be constantly drooling and saying insane lines. But I said, “Fred, you’re either there on time when we need you, or forget it.” And he finally admitted, “I’m not taking the chance. I know I’ll never be on time.”

The reason why I put the mask on him, which was supposed to be his face—and people freak out when I tell them that it’s supposed to be his face—is because he didn’t have time to do anything else, and this guy without the mask looked like Robert Plant. He had long, thick blonde hair. We had to tie his hair up like a girl and put it under that mask. He was a great guy, but he wasn’t an actor.

Well, it’s not that he couldn’t remember his lines, but I couldn’t have him saying them through the mask, and I couldn’t have him without the mask, because he looked like a little boy. So I just made him a mute. Oh, and I don’t know where I got it, but that was my sequined vest (that Jacob wears).

Yeah, it’s insane. Someone gave that to me.

That’s the ticket. He’s just off the wall enough to convince you that he’s Billy Buck’s sidekick. Besides, John carries the whole thing anyway.

You know why? Because I was trying to have linear storylines, and the Cinema of Transgression wasn’t about that—they were trying to recreate the Andy Warhol thing, where basically anything you put through the camera was art.

Of course. By the time I made TDCTGA, I had seen John Waters and Herschell Gordon Lewis and Texas Chainsaw—I had finally caught up with all that stuff by 1985. But John Waters was never on my mind—a lot of people say that my movies are a cross between Herschell Gordon Lewis and John Waters, and if anything, okay, I can understand the Herschell Gordon Lewis analogy, but it was never on my mind to do something like John Waters. It just came out that way.

I think that’s fascinating that certain things that you see remind you of another filmmaker’s style.

I think there’s a truth to that. When you’re doing something on the same level (as another filmmaker), there’s bound to be some overlap or connection in some oddball way.

Only by other people telling me about them. I didn’t see any of their stuff until later—people who collected a lot of movies would say, “Oh, Nathan, you’ve gotta see this movie by Donald Farmer.” And I said, “Why?” As I told you, the only way I heard about Donald Farmer was because that video company wanted to retitle one of my movies as a sequel to one of his movies. So they lent me this stuff and I caught up with it. I couldn’t get through the one Donald Farmer movie I saw—I had to shut it off. It was terrible. The guy is prolific, and he’s getting celebrities to be in them, for Christ’s sake, but what the hell is he doing? Again, I think it’s not what you know but who you know, because I don’t think the guy has a trace of talent.

(laughs) Well, it’s the hustlers that get places, and I guess I’m not a hustler on the same level as someone like Fred Olen Ray. I’m not much of a fan of his stuff either. He’s someone who I think has admitted that he makes his stuff strictly for the money. He’s like us, in that he grew up with the same things we watched, and whenever he writes about old movies, he’s great. He loves it and has all this information, but when he does his own stuff, that love doesn’t translate. For his own stuff, it’s like he has total contempt. Although he did a movie under a pseudonym that I thought was an incredible achievement—Spiders. I read, and I don’t know if it’s true, that it was done by Fred Olen Ray. It’s certainly the best thing I’ve ever seen him done.

And then on the East Coast, you’ve got Troma, which again, they have contempt for exploitation. And the way this hurts the genre, you rear a generation of kids and fans that only know that kind of stuff.

Right. They think that a Troma movie is great exploitation cinema. Look how many people rave over The Toxic Avenger. I could never understand that. The people who make that sort of thing have total contempt for the material and for their audiences too, but the audiences eat it up, especially in Japan.

Yes, they have a lot of issues. The only thing I like from Japan is Godzilla—and of course, the great directors—Kurosawa, Mizoguichi, Ozu and those guys.

No, no. We’re getting a little too highbrow. We’ve gotta keep this low, man (laughs).

Oh, no, I can explain it.

You’re probably asking why did I stop making movies after ’91? I actually started Vermillion Eyes 2. I actually shot one roll of film. I explained all of this on the never-to-be-seen documentary for the [Image] DVD, but what happened was—this was around ’94—John and I said, “Let’s do another quickie.” It was going to be a TDCTGA kind of thing—we were going to shoot very fast but do as good a job as possible. And we were going to hire real actors—and we did. We got them.

We had our lives to get ahead with. John was studying for his doctorate. People had jobs, people were married—it wasn’t easy anymore to get people. So, we went through hell for four movies, and John and I—but mainly John—had had enough of this guerilla filmmaking. It was taking a year to make a movie that should have taken a few days. So I kept assuring John, “Don’t worry, I’ve got it under control. I’ve got the people, and we’re going to be able to shoot this really fast. I’ve got a real actress coming over.” And John liked the dialogue—it was a great scene that I’d written. So we were actually going to put together this sequel to Vermillion Eyes. It was called Vermillion Eyes 2: The Odyssey of the Damned.

So…(sigh) I give the girl the script to study, and then she would come over to do the scene. She told me that she was going to bring over four different outfits [for costume], and I would choose. I said great, swell. I told John, “Oh, this is going to be a real movie now. We actually have a girl that can act, and an actual wardrobe to choose from.” This would be an amazing phenomenon. So we’re at John’s place, and the girl comes over in jeans and a regular shirt, and no bag. And automatically, I sensed the curse—the Schiffian Guerilla Filmmaking Curse was rearing its ugly head. She walks in, and says, “Ah…” I said, “What happened? I don’t see your outfit.”

“Yeah…um, I’m going to have to back out of this. I was thinking a lot about the script, and I really think that it’s negative, and in this time of New Age awakening and positive thinking, I really don’t believe in doing something negative.” She was on a cosmic trip about positives and negatives.

Was I going to change her mind? I knew she was insane. You should have seen John’s face—he wanted to kill me. “You’ve done it again. You have done it again! You’ve dragged me into another freaking thing…” So the girl finally left after talking about nonsense for a half-hour, and then John slammed this book he had with him on the table and said, “Nate, forget it! That’s it! No more movies! It’s over!” We had a big fight over that, because I felt that he was turning against me and was being ungrateful. But it was one of those little friendly fallings-out—we’d had so many battles, after all we’d been through together.

But he was right. I could understand his anger, because he was ready to roll, and instead of Fred being late, here was this strange girl screwing things up. And after I’d assured him that we had an actress…and I’d just bought all this film. I had to return it all. We shot one roll of John, which was easy.

So I realized at that point that the time had passed for that kind of filmmaking. We were older, we’d already made four films on that level. The only way to continue making films was on a professional level, with paid actors and actresses, and not on Super-8, but 16 or 35mm and some kind of budget. And I didn’t have that, so the filmmaking had to come to an end. I had many other opportunities to make another feature with other people after that, but I said no.

Yeah. I could have made ten movies on that level, but four was enough. And if you look at their progression, there was the homage to monsters, and then there was the serious, hardline movie with LICM. And then there was the parody movie with a little social commentary, and there was the serious, experimental movie with Vermillion Eyes. I basically did everything.

The thing was that after Vermillion Eyes, the only place to go was professional. It was either that or start making porno movies, and I had no interest in doing porn. So I ended up doing regular jobs—all kinds of regular, nonsense, junky jobs.

Different jobs, but for a long period, I was working for a digital imaging company, which I couldn’t stand. It was interesting—it was digitizing images onto photo CDs for major companies. I worked there for nearly ten years, but I realized that my life was just wasting away. I was doing something that I couldn’t stand doing. It wasn’t creative, but it was also my fault. I hadn’t been out hustling and trying to find a way to make a big budget film.

But the weird thing about it is that I didn’t realize how much time had passed. When you get older, it flies by, so I couldn’t believe how much time has passed since Vermillion Eyes. When people asked me, “How come you stopped making movies?” I’d say, “Eh, it’s no big deal, I’ll make another one eventually.” And they’d say, “What are you talking about? It’s been since 1991.” And I thought, “My God…they’re right. Has it been that long?”

Yes, I’m very excited, because I love the idea, but I really do believe in bad luck. In the past, I used to tell people about things that could have happened, but it fell through—there have been a lot of those. Because people with money, they’re so idle. They like to talk big, but when you get down to it, they lose interest so fast. It starts with, “Yeah, it’s great—let’s do it!” And then it comes to, “Well…I don’t know…” You don’t know how many times I’ve heard that—actually, come to think of it, I have been hustling for quite some time! It’s just been unsuccessful.

Well, I’ve given scripts to so many potential backers, and got nothing but nonsense. Look, you know what it is? The bottom line is, it’s not what you know, but who you know. I keep saying that, but it’s so true. Look how many untalented people are working in the industry. It’s because everyone knows someone. Everyone I know that’s succeeded either had someone back or knew somebody that gave them an opportunity. I’ve never had that.

Of course! What did you think—I’d start making Broadway musicals?

(laughs) Yeah.

I can’t believe it—don’t scare me. It’s only been two years, and you know it.

Exactly. I’m glad you reminded me. I am in the asylum, and the doctors are holding the phone to my ear because I’m in a strait-jacket.

I always find that to be a strange question, because things just happen. I guess the only thing I would have done differently is I would have pushed harder and hustled more to get these films shown or get backing for a real feature. I never did that until later. I’m completely happy with my career, though. I enjoyed making the movies, and I’m so happy that they’re on DVD and that everyone can see them, even though I’m not sure what the reaction will be. I try not to read too many reviews, but people send me reviews, and some have been positive and some negative, but the negative ones are from people who are so close-minded. One person said, “Why don’t you get a budget?” That’s a review? You know where the guy is coming from right away—“Get a budget.”

I have to thank my friend Robert Marcucci (filmmaker and production designer, best known as the PD on Street Trash). I think his name should be mentioned, because if it wasn’t for him, they wouldn’t be on DVD. He knew the guys at Image and he asked me if I’d be interested in having my films on DVD. And he went to the guys at Image and apparently, they approved it, which I found shocking, because I didn’t have any hopes for them accepting it—I mean, Image Entertainment? They’re the Walt Disney of horror. So I was totally taken aback. And it was Robert’s love for not only the features, but the shorts as well—he loved them so much that he said that they had to include those.

That depressed me so much, because when the DVDs were done, I saw my whole life flash before me. It was too much to swallow in one sitting. I’ve never had it so close together. Anyway, Alan Bazin, who was the reconstruction editor, did an amazing job in repairing splices and imperfections in the transfer, so he’s another key figure. The reason I have to mention Alan and Robert is because they weren’t just doing a job—they really love the movies.

Well, you know, it was a bit of a horror show, because I never wanted to go back and play with the movies again, so having to clean them up was like, “Oh, no…” I went through hell editing and putting them together so long ago, and now I have to go and clean them up. But I am very, very happy that they’re out. It’s a miracle that they’re receiving the distribution they have now and people are getting to see the films.

Even John and I talked about it. He’s in Nevada, and he said that to walk into a store and see them on the shelf is a surreal experience. Who would ever have thought? We always thought that they’d only play in backyards, and there they are on the shelf at Tower Records, right next to something that we consider a legitimate release.

Very true.

Post Script: Nathan informed us that Fred Borges recently passed away. Our condolences go out to his family.