The Wild Weird World of William Winckler

The Joe-Mammy.com interview

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Every now and then, something fun finds you.  I was asked to check out and review a recently released little independent film with the ultra-catchy title “Frankenstein vs the Creature from Blood Cove.”  It was a fun little movie (you can check out the review here) and I wondered what kind of mind could cook up such a fun little bit of retro movie fun.  So I asked, and I was put in contact with one Mr. William Winckler, the writer/producer/director and star of “Frankenstein vs the Creature from Blood Cove.” He was agreeable so we sat down and had a nice discussion about classic movies, nudists and why Vincent Price just doesn’t get the respect he deserves.

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Joe Mammy: When was the film done, from start to finish?

William Winckler: Well, I actually began the script about two years ago—or year and a half ago—closer to two years ago I think.  We went through various revisions in the script.  The original concept for it was a little bit more like a science fiction film and the finished product is more like a traditional horror film.  And then we were basically raising some money to produce the picture because it had such a high budget.  So it was basically about two years in development and we actually started principal photography in February of this year and I think we shot about twenty one days or so, I think, in February.  So it was basically the middle of winter where we shot here.

Joe: I remember hearing on the commentary that the models were having a hard time with the beach scenes just because it was so—

WW:  Oh yeah, it was very cold, very cold.  Especially the second model, the one who got killed, Carla Harvey—the actress that played that character, she was very cold at that time.  And the surfer guys too, it was like ice.  It’s very interesting because we were able to get a lot of interesting shadows and cloud formations in winter time here—are you based in Southern California?

Joe: I’m in North Dakota.

WW: Well in Southern California, sunny Southern California, if you do shoot in winter you do get very ominous clouds and spooky-looking colder weather and so we do get kinda chilly weather in the middle of winter and that’s what we had at that time.

Joe: Was that by design that you shot in that?  Because when I was watching it one thing that really struck me was the grey pervasive background—not just because it was in black and white—it really felt like one of those older horror films.

WW: Yeah, that’s exactly—we intentionally shot at that time for that reason because I knew the clouds would be dark and there’d be weird shadows and we could do more things with the lighting.  Also the actors were in these very hot monster suits and I also thought that in winter time it would more be comfortable and easier for them to operate and run around than in the middle of summer where they’d, you know, die of heatstroke or something.  But really it was twofold: it was mainly to try and get the shadows and the unique cloud formations, and to make it comfortable for the stuntmen in the creature suits.

Joe: So had you had the idea for this kind of film for a while, or how did the idea for this strike?

WW:  Well the short answer really is basically I was going to produce a sequel to my cult comedy success “The Double D Avenger”—we were going to make “Double D Avenger 2,” but for various creative and artistic reasons and distribution reasons we went on to plan B which was my horror film.  The way I gotthe idea for the horror film was that several years ago I actually had this kind of nightmare of the Frankenstein monster battling this half-man half-fish creature on a beach and the imagery I had in my mind was of waves crashing in the background and a lighting strike, the ocean with weird clouds and the monsters going at it.  I have a pad—a manila pad near my bed and so when I come up with interesting ideas for movies or such I’ll immediately write it down and that was one that stuck.  I said “I gotta turn this idea into a film.”  So actually that was the seed of the idea and then I built an entire script around the concept of these two monsters battling on the beach and the creature dragging Frankenstein in the ocean and then having a battle beneath the waves and struggling and all that.   That was kind of the whole concept and so it was interesting how it developed.

Joe: I haven’t seen “the Double D Avenger,” but in my reading there’s been a lot of carry-over.  Is that one of the perks as far as you look at it—being able to involve friends you’ve worked with in the past and your wife as well in the projects you do?

WW: Well you want to work with good people.  You want to work with very good actors and you want to work with people you trust and I had some very good working relationships with some of the actors in “The Double D Avenger.”  G. Larry Butler, or Larry Butler, is really one of the finest Hollywood character actors and he’s also a very good close personal friend of mine and my wife.  He carried half of the movie “The Double D Avenger” for Kitten Natividad, playing the villain Al Purplewood, sort of the Jackie Gleason-type strip club owner who was just insane.  He carried that movie, really, and when I came around to doing “Frankenstein vs the Creature from Blood Cove” I talked to Larry and I said, “You know, this part’s kinda like a Vincent Price type thing—and nobody can do Vincent Price—but you can kinda do your own Vincent Price-ish character.”  And that’s exactly what he did.  He did it as himself but if you look at the character of Al Purplewood and the character of Dr Monroe Lazaroff, it’s night and day.  They’re two totally, totally different characters.  So Larry Butler was a great one we had from “the Double D Avenger.”

Gary Canavello did the comedy relief character of Percy Featherstone, the makeup man.  I used to do a lot of acting in Hollywood at Universal and such and there was a famous makeup guy who used to do my makeup who was exactly—exactly—Percy Featherstone.  I’ve worked with some other makeup guys who were kinda similar but this one guy at Universal was exactly that; that was kinda the basis of the character.  Gary Canavello was in “The Double D Avenger” playing Kitten Natividad’s boyfriend and he’s also a very talented guy.  I said “you wanna play this kinda flamboyant makeup character?” and he said “Yeah, love to.” And so he also kinda had the best jokey lines in “Frankenstein.”

Mimma Mariucci from “The Double D Avenger” came back.  She played Pirate Juggs. one of the villainous strippers, and then I had her play Mimi the maid who was having an affair with Dr Lazaroff.  You know, part of the movie with “Frankenstein vs the Creature from Blood Cove” is sort of like the old Vincent Price films where Vincent Price would have a mansion and he’d have a maid and he’d have assistants and there’d be a monster and whatever.  That’s kinda what we did there.

And then of course Russ Meyer’s star, Raven De La Croix came in and she had a cameo of this gypsy woman.  Of course she was the star of Russ Meyer's “Up” and “The Lost Empire” and just had a ton other of cult films that she did and she’s a good friend of ours.  I would say that of all the Russ Meyer’s actresses I’ve worked with that she’s the best: she’s totally loyal and dependable and talented, and personal friends with my wife and me as well.

It was interesting too, because at one point Raven was going to play Ula Foranti—Dr Lazaroff’s female assistant—but Raven’s husband had an emergency medical problem, a heart problem, and her first priority was nursing him back to health.  So she had to bow out of playing this major character but he began recovering so quickly that I was able to cast her anyway in this cameo role of the gypsy woman.  In fact I actually had the idea for this gypsy woman as sort of an homage to the Universal stuff but I didn’t write it in the final draft, and then when Raven said she’d be able to work I said “ok I’m going to write this scene for you.”  So that scene was specifically written for Raven De La Croix last minute.  We did this kind of emergency thing and I wrote the scene up and we scheduled it out and put it in and did it.

So to make a long story short, you work with people you trust and who are talented and who are kinda on your team there, too.  Larry especially I think is on his way to being another Vincent Price or Lon Chaney.  He’s done several other horror films that are out right now and he’s a very good character actor.

Joe: I think I heard it on the commentary where you spoke of your respect for Vincent Price. I always like to hear stuff like that because he’s one of the most overlooked guys.  Everyone seems to think of the schlocky old 60’s stuff and a lot of those are actually really good if you look at them.

WW: Yeah, I think Vincent Price was probably one of the best actors ever.  If you say

to me “Would you rather watch House of Wax with Vincent Price or the remake of House of Wax with Paris Hilton?” there’s no comparison, okay?  I absolutely love the classic monster movies/creature features.  I love the sci-fi/fantasy/horror genre films from the 40’s, 50’s, 60’s up to the mid-to-late 1970’s, the Universal monsters, the Hammer horror films from England—which also had some T&A nudity with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee—AIP’s films—the drive-in movies they did in the 50’s like “I Was a Teenage Werewolf” and stuff, all the Roger Corman stuff, the Edgar Allan Poe pictures.  I just love Vincent Price, “The Tingler” “The House on Haunted Hill” and all the Poe movies—they were great.  I love the old Japanese monster pictures of the 50’s and 60’s and Mario Bava’s Italian films of the time.

You know when you look at the “Famous Monsters of Filmland” magazine that covered the golden age—60 years of all these classic films, they were just entertaining entertainment, as crazy as that sounds.  It was truly entertaining.

The way I like to be entertained is I like to be taken to another place.  I want so see larger-than-life characters and larger-than-life situations.  I don’t want to see real life because I see real life everyday; I see real people in real dramatic situations—I turn on the news and see the horrors of reality.  So my whole concept of entertainment is escapism and that’s how traditionally this country used to entertain people.  That’s what it was, it was about entertaining people.  That’s why these movies are so great—“Creature from the Black Lagoon” and Vincent’s films and all—they were just fun, pure escapism.  Were they total reality?  No, but what did Shakespeare say, Shakespeare said “hold the mirror up to nature, don’t look out the window.”

Entertainment should be a reflection of reality, but not the reality itself.  I think the biggest problem today with a lot of genre films is that everybody takes themselves so damn seriously and they’re trying so hard to depict real people on the screen and what they don’t understand is that you wind up boring the audience.  I realize that as a filmmaker my main job is to entertain people.  Does something look incredibly realistic?  If it does or it doesn’t, the point is are you entertained or are you bored?  That’s my opinion.

I love the classic films.  Heaven on Earth for me is to have a million DVDs and watch stuff from the 60’s and 50’s.  Not all of it was great but it all had entertaining value.  You talk about Vincent Price; I could sit there forever and watch everything Vincent Price does.  We don’t have any actor like him today at all.  Nobody comes close.  Am I going to make a contemporary style horror?  Hell no I’m not, because I’m doing a completely different thing.  I’m doing this retro stuff.

So that kinda answers your question about Vincent.

Joe:  Talking about “holding the mirror up,” one thing that I particularly caught and appreciated was the bit of social commentary you had in there with “the biggest terror wins.”  A lot of those older films had the kind of subtle jab or commentary on the world.  You had on the one side something over the top but there’s a message that’s a lot more universal.  And I think that because the film was more fanciful it helped underscore that message even further.  Do you agree on that?

WW:  There’s also a message in there, really, about fanatical man-made religion.  It’s not an argument for atheism, but we have a very, very serious problem when people become too obsessed with extremist religion, regardless of what the religion is.  And it always ends up causing death and destruction and all sorts of problems and such.  There is an undercurrent in the movie about the dangers of fanatical man-made religion and pure insanity and here we are in 2005 and we have this insanity going on, you know?  There are several little messages woven into this thing.  You look at it as a fun B-movie and that’s pretty much what it is, but there are some subliminal things going on there, too.

Joe:  I always think of “B-movie” as a real endearing term.  I think part of it’s not supposed to be the “ultra-realistic” thing you were talking about, but it’s supposed to remind us of how things were in the past and how we were entertained—I want to say it was you I was reading who was talking about the difference between that classic horror response versus disgust.

WW:  Yeah, you see in the 1980’s the slasher genre hijacked the horror genre and it hasn’t

been the same since.  Now I do like some slasher pictures.  I love the original “Halloween,” I thought that was great.  I think the original “Friday the Thirteenth” and “Nightmare on Elm Street” were fun, but after that it began to be the same thing a million times over and over again—teenagers in the woods and whatever.  The sad thing is that the horror genre was a whole wide world of types of things—of monsters and mummies and mad scientists and all that, it wasn’t always about some nut with a knife running around killing teens.

We’re kind of doing something totally different from the rest.  I’m kind of in a world of my own.  I’m not paying attention to what the trends are; I’m just doing my own thing.  If the whole rage is teen slashers, well, that’s nice.  I’m doing my own thing and I hope other people would be interested in seeing this as well.

It’s the feeling of being frightened and excited and on the edge of your seat—the human emotion of fear is somewhat different—really is different—from the emotion of disgust or “I’m gonna throw up” and again that’s something that kinda came in to the 70’s and 80’s when they were trying to go for more shock value.  But, again, the emotion of “I’m gonna throw up” is completely different than the emotion of fear or excitement or anticipation of something happening.  I think horror movies should entertain and frighten and keep you on the edge of your seat and build tension.  You do need to have some gore and some stuff that could be deemed disgusting but if you go overboard with it and the audience gets sick to their stomach then you’re no longer frightening them—two totally different emotions.

Joe: You’re referring to the older ones that have more of an intellectual quality to it instead of just the raw—

WW: Well, these types of films have heart and soul, too.  They’re character-driven.  I’m not spending $100 million on CGI effects; my movie is not a video game.  It is a character-driven piece; it’s about people.  But it’s an exciting, fun, escapist—like I say, an old-fashioned monster movie creature feature.

I used to love watching Saturday afternoons here in L.A., Seymour’s Monster Rally.  There was this character named Seymour that used to host; he was a horror movie host.  Then years later Elvira started here in LA.  Boy, I loved Elvira.  I was one of the charter members of her fan club when I was in high school; you know I really loved her.

That’s exactly what we’ve done.  Speaking of horror hosts, we recently had a screening, a theatrical screening in San Francisco and The Ghoul hosted them.  He was kind of a well-known horror host back east.

Joe: Have you been following the Japanese horror films that have been coming out more

recently?

WW:  Don’t like the new Godzillas, I did like the new Gamera ones.  I think the first three were pretty good.  When they brought Gamera back, the director really knew what he was doing.  It was just like a good ol’ Japanese monster picture.  The newer Godzillas, I don’t know what’s going over there, but they don’t seem to—

I have great connections in Japan.  “Double D Avenger” is sold in Japan on DVD—it’s called “MegaPie Oba Ranger” is the name of it, which loosely translated means “Giant-Breasted Old Bag Power Ranger.”  “MegaPie Oba Ranger.”

I love the classic Toho movies.  I love the old Godzillas from the 60’s—they also had a different feel and look—again pure escapism.  Were they reality?  No, but I’m not interested in watching reality.  I live in reality all day long.  My whole philosophy is escapist entertainment.

My father, Robert “Bobby” Winckler was a famous child actor—a well-known successful child actor here in Hollywood here in the 30’s and 40’s.  He did 80 movies and 200 radio shows with all the stars of the golden age of Hollywood.  All the stuff that he did was escapist entertainment—all the westerns and the cowboys and all the films he did were fun escapist stuff.  In fact he did a very famous movie called “Sullivan’s Travels” with Joel McCrea, it was a Preston Sturges film, and the whole moral to that film—and it’s considered one of the top 100 movies of all time—the whole moral to that film was that people want entertaining entertainment and escapism because the real world is a disaster.  And I agree with that philosophy so that’s what I do with the films I’m doing.

Part of the reason, too, why I did “Frankenstein,” crazy as it might seem, is that I just wanted to see this kind of movie and nobody was making it.  “Lost Skeleton of Cadavera” was done but that was more of a comedy, really, and we have comedic parts in our film, but our film is more like a monster movie.  It seemed like in “Lost Skeleton” they were kind of making of fun of the old stuff whereas what we’re doing we’re not making fun of it, or teasing it, we’re trying to replicate it.

Joe: You mentioned your father.  One thing I ran across when I was digging in the Internet Movie Database, IMDB, I thought it was really kind of interesting, to me on a personal level, that you wrote your father’s biography on there.

WW: I thought it was very interesting.  I saw on IMDB that all his credits had been up there and there was something on the internet about dad but it was not correct so I went ahead and wrote a biography.  It was really an amazing thing, the career that he had because Charlie Chaplin’s wife, Mildred Harris Chaplin got him into show business.  He worked in Hal Roach studios and worked in the “Our Gang” comedies—the “Little Rascals” with Spanky and Alfalfa and Buckwheat, he did about a dozen of those and then worked with Patsy Kelly and then he went on to do other things.  He played W.C. Fields’ son.  He worked with Laurel and Hardy, Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland—if you name a star from that time period, he worked with them: Edward G. Robinson, he played Pat O’Brien as a boy, Bob Hope, Jack Benny, did tons of radio shows with all the stars of the time.  Really in the 30’s and 40’s it was a magical time.

His parents had this bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard where the stars would come in and the studios would do research and such.  He was very good friends with Edward G. Robinson.  They were doing a show called “Big Town” at CBS and they would do two broadcasts, one for the east coast and one for the west coast and in between they’d go to dinner, so Edward G. Robinson would buy the cast, the regulars that is, dinner.  My dad was auditioning for a movie part, playing Pat O’Brien as a boy; Edward G. Robinson would coach him.  So my dad was the probably the only one in the world to see Edward G. Robinson do a perfect Pat O’Brien.  Shirley Temple and all these different celebrities and such and Jack Benny, you know, he worked with everybody.

He caught the tail end of World War II, and then when he came back his parents wanted him to go to college—he worked between the ages of 8 and 18—and he became interested in law in college and ended up becoming an entertainment attorney, representing people in the business.  It was like he had two careers, he had this incredible acting career and then he had this legal career representing people.  He died in 1989 and it was kind of interesting because he never really boasted or bragged or talked too much about his career or anything like that and it was kinda my overactive imagination that I kinda went into the business on my own and kinda did my own thing.  He had a fascinating career and that was when people look back at Hollywood with rosy colored glasses or whatever, and the reality was it was a wonderful time for the most part; he was there at the time where all the classics were being done.  He worked in Ronald Reagan’s biggest picture, the life of Knute Rockne and my dad was in that one.  It was interesting because my dad in the 80’s, I forget, he was somewhere he met Reagan, and Reagan knew him and said “I remember you, you were in the movie, blah blah.” And “oh yeah, I knew you too.”

Joe: When I saw that you had written that, it gave me a sense of your affection and loyalty to that era.  I just thought it was a nice tribute if nothing else.

WW:  Thanks. I love classic movies, and again they were not all gems, but having been in mainstream Hollywood and knowing a lot of people working in the business today, I think it’s so vastly different.  I think the product or the films are so vastly different.  There are some great films made today, once in a while, but I’m really entertained by the classic stuff.  That’s what I’m interested in.

Joe: In the process for you, if you had to break it down into the writing it, and then the directing and the putting it together, is there a part of that that appeals more to you, that you struggle more with, can you even break it down that way?

WW: Yeah, when I have the idea for the script I’m able to—I think that for good or bad I have this kind of overactive imagination and I’ve always been able to write a script and not have any problem.  So there was never a struggle in writing a script or a screenplay.  You do the screenplay, you get everything going, casting—the biggest amount of work is once you have a script done and you’ve got the green light to go and make the film.  As an independent filmmaker I wear a lot of hats, it’s organizing everything.  Making sure we’ve secured the props and wardrobe and the casting and the locations and the permits and insurance, getting that all together at the beginning is a monumental chore.  I make this comparison: it’s like planning a wedding.  Imagine you’re going to get married and you’re planning a wedding and you’ve gotta have the caterer and gotta have the venue and gotta get the costumes and the dresses and whatever, but it’s a wedding you have to plan that happens 21 days in a row.  That’s exactly what it is.  So that’s the toughest part.

I always spend a lot of time in pre-production because pre-production doesn’t cost any money and you can plan everything out meticulously and you can know what’s going to happen each and every day and you can have backups and everything else.  So once you’re on the set and you’re directing it’s not that difficult a thing to do.  Switching back and forth between acting and directing is not bad.  I was able to turn the character on and off like flipping on and off a switch.  I basically saw that with Michael Landon when I worked with one of his early television movies called “Sam’s Son,” I met him and saw him and he had me working and gave me direction and he complimented me on what I did.  Then I watched him work, he would write, produce, direct and act and wear all the hats and he would do it perfectly and I thought “wow, it can be done.”  That’s what I’ve been doing.

I had a very, very good teacher.  I do think you have to have talent.  Nobody can teach you how to be an actor, no one can teach you to write a script like “Frankenstein vs the Creature from Blood Cove,” it’s gotta come from your wacky head.  But I had a really great teacher at UCLA, a man named Don Richardson who was an Emmy award winning television director and he was the teacher for Anne Bancroft and Grace Kelly and Zero Mostel and John Cassavetes and Elizabeth Montgomery and tons and tons of other people, and he taught an alternative to method acting.  He knew the people who brought the method over from Russia to America and he didn’t quite agree with it and thought they got it wrong, and he came up with a more simplified way of working.  He also taught me a great deal about directing.

I’m more of an actor’s director than a “camera pusher.”  There’s a lot of guys who direct who are more or less camera pushers who are looking at the shots, but having done some theater and come from theater and acting workshops I’m more of an actor’s director and that’s kind of the direction I go in.  Don really taught me a great deal about acting.  I’m able to be director and actor and actually go on the set and, bang, I’m Bill Grant, glamour photographer.  I’m the guy struggling, trying to make it and trying to get out of this predicament and as soon as I get the signal that the shot is done, okay, cut, and then I’m Bill Winckler the director.  It’s two totally separate things.  Like I said it’s like flipping a switch on and off.  But Michael Landon was one of the nicest guys I ever encountered in the mainstream and what a talented guy he was.  He did the same thing, just flip it on and off.  He’d get behind the camera on “Highway to Heaven” or whatever and do his thing and then go in front of it, be that angel character and then cut, and go back and, you know.  It can work.

Joe: How has the response been to the film?  I know you guys have been going around doing promotion and all that.

WW: It’s been fantastic, it really has.  The DVD just launched.  The sales are just incredible.  All the fan reaction that we’ve been getting has been A+.  The horror movie fans, the monster movie fans, the creature feature fans, any sort of cult genre film fans, they all love this thing and they think “hey, this is a lot of fun.”  And 98 or 99% of the critics find it fun and entertaining, and that’s amazing because I get nervous when they all kind of agree—I guess opinions are like assholes, everyone has one.

With “Double D Avenger” it was very interesting because I deliberately made an Ed Wood type camp comedy and it was high satire like Monty Python.  But the problem is some people don’t get comedy, and with “The Double D Avenger” I got some mixed reviews.  The people who got the high camp loved it; the people who didn’t get the high camp hated it.  So you had kind of a mixed deal there because the thing was made as a joke, the whole thing was a put-on, and we tried to make this Ed Wood thing with this over-aged superwoman and these Russ Meyer women from the 70’s who were no longer in their twenties.  But with “Frankenstein vs the Creature from Blood Cove” our reviews have all been fantastic, 99% of them.  What’s interesting too is that we’ve been getting a lot of interest from the international markets and such.  So far so good, everything is going great.

By the way, it’s very easy, we have multiple retailers carrying the product and in the process of going to carry the product, but Amazon.com is the easiest way to buy the DVD.  If they just log on to Amazon.com, it’s there for $24.98. The DVD’s loaded with extra stuff as you saw.  It’s interesting that Amazon has become the #1 online retailer for DVD’s, especially for collectors.  I guess it’s so easy to buy and they ship it off right away, I think they’ve beat out a lot of brick and mortars.

Joe:  I know being from Boondock, Nowhere it’s easier to go on Amazon because they actually have what I’m looking for.

WW: Well it’s also very hard for a brick and mortar to have that much inventory in stock and Amazon carries practically everything.  Plus I think it’s actually cheaper to buy on Amazon; there are certain ramifications with state taxes and such so it’s easier for fans to get what they want when they want.

Joe: I’m glad the response has been so great for you guys.  I do writing and stuff like that and it’s always a really mixed thing because you put together something you’re really happy with, but in the back of your mind you know your bread and butter relies on other people liking it too.

WW: You know, I’m not all that surprised because people want to be able to see the fun old fashioned monster movies and creature features again.  We did bring it up to speed.  There is some violence and such and some T&A, similar to the Hammer horror films and some of the 80’s films that had a little violence in them; we brought it up to speed per se.  So it’s sort of an homage to that whole genre in general, it wasn’t an exact duplication of, say, a Universal movie.  What surprised me was some of the slasher genre fans enjoying the picture and really liking it because I kinda thought well, maybe because I don’t have a madman running around with a knife they wouldn’t get into it.  Lo and behold they enjoy it too.  I think many different horror fans and cult movie fans and such enjoy this.

I mentioned something about Don Richardson.  I’ll tell you; of course my father Robert “Bobby” Winckler was a great influence on me as far as just being a great dad and helping manage the career at the very early stages.  He was just the nicest guy in the world, just fantastic.  But another person who influenced me, who was sort of a mentor of mine through the 90’s was Jonathan Harris who played Dr. Smith in the “Lost in Space” television series.  Jonathan was a neighbor of mine and we’d have luncheons every week and Jonathon really taught me a lot about the business of show business and a lot of things about acting and such.  It was absolutely amazing how he shared all this knowledge with me about the entertainment industry that I use today.  Jonathan was a great influence and mentor, you could say.  It’s kinda funny, thinking Dr Smith from “Lost in Space,” but he was a very, very wise, intelligent guy who really knew the business in and out.

Joe:  Some of my impressions of that “Golden Age” was a lot of those guys were really diverse people that had knowledge of all sorts of stuff and just ended up doing the acting thing.  Maybe I’m over-romanticizing it, but it seems like when you get a Paris Hilton-type who is always around just because they’re around, it strikes me that we’re not better off getting our entertainment from someone like that.

WW: One of the things I love about Larry Butler and the people I cast in my film was that I really tried to have Larry do a sort of Lon Chaney Jr. or Vincent Price sort of character and he’s got an interesting face.  He’s a very, very different lead actor from most horror films today.  Larry really has more in touch with the old classics which is why I wanted him to play this part.  We also cast a lot of British actors in the movie to give it a sort of Hammer horror feel. Whenever you have a British sounding voice in a horror film it’s a little bit different.  Casting-wise I was trying to go for interesting faces and interesting characters.  We really don’t have anybody like Vincent Price today or John Wayne or Jimmy Stewart, I mean, where is Jimmy Stewart?  That’s deliberately what we tried to do.

One actor I’ve always loved is Darren McGavin who was in the “Night Stalker” movies and the series that was just released on DVD, I thought he was fantastic.  That old school of interesting character faces, interesting personalities.  You know, say what you will about William Shatner, I think of all the Star Trek stuff, he had a hell of a personality and charisma—something that was a larger-than-life attitude there that was along the lines of the classic movie stars.  That’s what we tried to do with “Frankenstein vs the Creature from Blood Cove” with Larry and the rest of the cast.

Joe: I know you guys are in the middle of the promotion and stuff, but have you thought of what’s next, what you’d like to do next?

WW: Well, we’ve got plans for other horror films coming up, I’m in development on another one and right now I’m just working with Jeff Berkwits, our publicist with Perplex PR and he’s got a lot of exciting stuff coming up and a lot more interviews.  I think we’ve got, like, 17,000 websites talking about the movie.  If you do a Google or Yahoo search it comes up with about 16 or 17,000 sites come up mentioning the title or talking about the title.

Joe: It’s a great title.  It’s one of those as soon as you see it you’re just interested because it just sounds like something that would be fun to watch.

WW: Yeah, we went to great lengths to make sure the monsters were totally

different from any other studios’ creations.  The Frankenstein monster was actually based on Mary Shelley’s novel description and you very rarely see the long haired Frankenstein but that’s really what the description was.  The Frankenstein monster in our movie is very, very close to Mary Shelley’s original book description.  In the early drafts of the movie, Frankenstein talked a lot but we wound up cutting a lot of the dialogue from the script because we just felt the movie would go better if the monster didn’t have too much talking.  The kind of “oh poor pitiful me” character, whenever you had movies where Frankenstein talked a lot, those tended to fail and I felt that it could hurt the film if he talked too much.  So we ended up cutting the dialogue for him and I think it was a wise decision.

But we had a lot of funny things happen on the set when we were shooting.  When Frankenstein was battling the creature underwater—we actually had underwater photography which is actually very complicated.  We had to have the cameraman, Matthias Schubert—my cinematographer Matthias Schubert is incredible, what he was able to do—actually had a diving tank on and went underwater and the monsters would go beneath the water and then fight for a little bit and come up for air.  At one point Frankenstein’s wig came off, which was hilarious seeing a bald Frankenstein wrestling the creature.  Then the upper part of his forehead latex appliance started un-gluing in the water so he had kind of like a visor there.  It was crazy.

We shot at a beach which was sort of a deserted beach except it was frequented in

summertime by nudists.  I thought, we’re shooting in wintertime there’s not going to be anyone there, really.  What nudist would go out in the middle of winter?  Well, lo and behold there were nudists all over the place and it was funny they kind of ignored the monsters fighting and everything.  We were always trying to shoot around these nudists.  I think in one of the DVD bonuses we have a picture of one of the nudists off in the background.  We blurred out his face, but . . . It was really crazy.

We had this freak hail storm happen in the last day of the shoot, it was wild.  We all had to evacuate this graveyard set and Sam Hamer, our sound guy, got some great recordings of the lightning and all that stuff.

You know it’s funny, prior to the shoot I did a check on the graveyard set.  I jumped into this open grave and was doing a little bit of—there were some leaves, I was digging some stuff out.  And these joggers came by and thought I was digging a real grave to bury a wife or something.  The guy came by and asked, “what are ya doin’?”  I said “I’m just diggin’.”  He goes “It looks like you’re diggin’ a grave.”  And I said “I am.”  And he said “What are you doing it for?”  And I said “Oh, you know, just one of those things,” because I didn’t have time to go into detail.

We had a lot of funny bloopers and funny things go on and we have some of that stuff on our DVD bonuses.

Joe: The part with Frankenstein and the pizza guy—

WW: Yeah, when they delivered the pizza.  Also when the creature’s teeth came out—it was very interesting.  The creature costume had dentures.  Corey Marshall who played the creature had to fit into this rubber suit with the claws and the hands and everything else and then had to have makeup put under his eyes and such.  The mouth part was open and he had to wear these big dentures with all these fangs.  It was very difficult for him to wear those dentures and in one scene the top denture came out.  He actually had to have his teeth molded like you were going to the dentist to get false teeth made.  They were very elaborate pieces.  It was very hard for him to struggle with the teeth.

It’s funny with the makeup because the monsters look great on camera and in black and white photography they look fantastic.  I described what the characters were going to look like in the script and then our special effects team would do some designs and such and then I would go back and forth and make changes on the design and everything else.  I wanted, for example, our fishman character to not look like the Creature from the Black Lagoon or some of the others.  I wanted to have a different face structure, I didn’t want webbed hands, I didn’t want fins on the sides of the arms, I wanted more human eyes, I wanted horns on the character because it was more of a scaly thing.  It took a long time to get the actors into makeup once the appliances and costumes were made and all the foam appliances were done.  That was the one little thing I was worried about throughout the picture was getting the actors into those monster costumes on time and on set everyday so we wouldn’t fall behind schedule, and I’m well aware of the fact latex appliances take two hours or so to apply.  That was something I was always, always, always worried about.  We gotta stay on time; we gotta shoot these ten pages today or whatever.  It was rough out on that beach with the sand and the cold weather and being in a costume that you have trouble moving in and you’ve got dentures in your mouth and you can’t see

all the time.  And then when they went into the water, that was incredibly tough, but they did it.  Lawrence Furbish did a great job as the Frankenstein monster.

One thing that’s sort of interesting, I was originally going to have a British cult film star/tv star, Michael Billington play the Frankenstein monster.  He was all ready to do it.  He had starred in Gerry Anderson’s series “UFO” and James Bond’s “The Spy Who Loved Me” and “The Prisoner” and a bunch of other British things and he had the script, loved the script, wanted to do it.  There was a problem with his work visa and so I said “okay Mike, we’ll skip this one but I’m gonna do another one and I’ll have you work in the next picture.”  And he died.  He was in his early 60’s and he just passed away and it was kind of a shock, you know?  It was really bizarre and the other star of “UFO”, Ed Bishop, also died in the same week.  It was very strange; it was the two major stars of that series.  So Lawrence Furbish was kind of a last-minute replacement for Michael Billington.

We did have one interesting character there—we have many celebrity cameos but

Butch Patrick from "the Munsters" came in and did that quick scene that was hilarious where he yells out to Yvonne De Carlo.  Butch is a great guy and a friend of mine.  He’s credited as Patrick Lilly in the movie.  He’s really a great guy—and "the Munsters" of course will live forever.  That’s another larger-than-life piece of entertainment.

Joe: You mentioned Corey Marshall and Lawrence Furbish before.  If I recall neither of those guys had a lot of film experience before.

WW: Lawrence did a lot of theatre and I believe he did do some acting in a couple

independent films before my film.  He was also looking into being a WWF wrestler and he actually got so far as doing the training and then had a back injury and didn’t move forward with it.  Corey Marshall had done a ton of stuff, lots of theatre.  He was basically a trained dancer and martial artist and he did a lot of voice-overs in some Japanese anime movies, television and some video games, one of them was very popular among a lot of fans—this one particular video game.  He was the Cookie Monster in Sesame Street Live which toured and I thought that was so funny to go from the Cookie Monster to the Creature from Blood Cove.  He basically does a lot of legitimate theatre and I think he just landed a role in an opera here in Los Angeles.  He’s very much a theatre person.  Alison Taylor who played Ula Foranti is very much a theatre actress—the British lady who played Ula Foranti is always doing plays and loving every minute of it.

But Corey really went above and beyond the call of duty on this picture because he played the werewolf, he played the ghost of Victor Frankenstein, he played the man at the bar that gets his arm ripped out, he played the Creature from Blood Cove.  When he came to audition he did different movements for me and it was interesting because all of them were totally different.  He played totally different characters: the ghost moved different from the werewolf and the werewolf moved different from the creature.  He totally got it.  Very artistic guy, very creative guy and really helped out the crew.  He was the first guy there and the last guy to leave and was an independent producer’s dream, or any producer’s dream, just really totally dedicated to what he does and very good at it.

Joe: That was one of things that really made an impression on me.  Some guys when they’re in that much makeup just seem to be walking around, but you really got a sense of character from those two guys.

WW: Yeah, Lawrence really got into the character and so did Corey for everything he did.  The werewolf just was totally different and the emotions were there, and same thing when it was without makeup with the ghost of Victor Frankenstein.  The ghost of Victor Frankenstein was actually a mask that was very difficult for Corey to wear.  It was tough for him to breathe in the thing.

Lawrence actually slowly but surely was getting the Frankenstein monster to be more emotional.  By the end of the movie the facial expressions were totally moving around as if he was finally getting up to speed as far as being alert.  The Frankenstein monster being resurrected at the beginning of the film was kinda zombie-like; by the end he was totally up to par with what he was doing.

Joe: I have to ask, being a red-blooded American male type, how tough is it to show up to work and know you’ve got the likes of Tera Cooley and Selena Silver just going to be around scantily clad all day.

WW: (laughs) Well, you know it’s funny.  It’s all very professional, it’s all very carefully done and you just treat it like it’s just another day of shooting, really.  We’re all from Hollywood and we’re all kind of jaded, I guess.  We’ve seen everything there is to see.  It’s a part.  The story was basically about a young guy who works for this men’s cheesecake magazine, kind of a rag, and you needed—story-wise, it would have been ridiculous for the girls to be clothed.  What men’s magazine doesn’t have nudity?  So what we did was we had very tasteful nudity, no frontal we just had T&A, by the way in the British Hammer horror films with Christopher Lee in some of the vampire pictures especially there was a lot of T&A in some of those British movies back in the 60’s and 70’s.  And of course in Italy they had a ton of them, Mario Bava had it, Paul Naschy in Spain had tons of that stuff, but story-wise if you’re going to have a guy who works for a men’s magazine, you’ve got to have a little bit of T&A because it looks ridiculous.  Even FHM has some topless and whatever.  So that’s what made sense.

So also with the club at the end—by the way that was the same club we used in “Double D Avenger” as Al Purplewood’s gentleman’s club.  How many times have you seen a cop show where they go into a strip club and there’s a girl dancing in a bikini?  Every club I’ve ever gone into, the women are nude.  It’s kind of ridiculous and basically we’re a direct to DVD market.  The major studios pretty much control theatrical distribution, television, cable; so for independent companies and a movie like this, we’re primarily a DVD business and so most of our audience is over eighteen.  It’s essentially like an R rated or a soft R film or like a PG-13 film is what it would get if it were getting a rating.  So we had some tasteful T&A in the picture and Tera Cooley is a professional model.  She has a book

that’s unbelievable with every conceivable print ad you could imagine and very tasteful nude images she’s done.  Carla Harvey was a Playboy model and she had also appeared on Playboy television, and she was just great to work with.  And Selena Silver was a nude model who got into the adult industry and she did a great job as well.  Sometimes for nude roles you’re better off casting, depending on the part, you’re better off casting a woman has worked for Playboy magazine or has done stripping or has done nude modeling professionally because if you get some little actress from Kansas out there and you say “ok, now we’re going to do the topless scene” and she freezes up and says “I don’t wanna do it,” you’re in big trouble, you know?  You want to have people who don’t have hang ups about their bodies or have strange ideas or whatever, and these girls were fantastic.  It was a lot of fun working with them; I hope I can work with them again.  They support the movie a lot, it was great.

Speaking of that industry, Ron Jeremy actually has a cameo in the picture as a drunk.  When I was thinking about the casting for this character I thought, who could I hire to play a slimy sleazy guy in the bar and I thought, well, Ron Jeremy would be good.  Actually Ron Jeremy is a friend of a friend of mine.  In “Double D Avenger” I hired an actress named Elizabeth Starr who was an actress with these gigantic breasts and she knew Ron very well.  So I talked to Ron and we had a meeting and he wanted to do it.  It’s funny, at the time we shot Ron was hotter than heck in mainstream television.  He’d done "The Surreal Life" and he’d done all these commercials and he’d done these other movies and “Detroit Rock City” and all these things.  He was known more for a lot of mainstream stuff at that time.  He came and he was great.  He did that fun scene along with Lloyd Kaufman.  Lloyd Kaufman from Troma came in to town and did a hilarious cameo and a lot of that stuff is ad-libbed stuff that he did.  It was interesting because that footage was shot at a different location weeks earlier and the way we were able to shoot it, the eye lines were aligned perfectly.  So when Lloyd would comment on how beautiful Selena Silver looked and “she’s got nice titties, and they’re real,” and then he turns left to look at Ron and then Ron Jeremy turns right and looks at Lloyd, the eye lines are perfectly matched and again, the two men were in totally different rooms and locations weeks apart and it worked beautifully.

Joe: That’s one thing that struck me, more as a general comment, that you’ve got guys like Ron Jeremy and some of the actresses from old Russ Meyer movies, it strikes me as odd.  I remember growing up and the local porn shop had a big sign on it saying “Russ Meyer movies available,” and now not only are they considered inoffensive, but now they’re considered actual films, not just some cheap thrill.

WW: What was funny about Russ Meyer was that Russ Meyer, I think, was a genius in coming up with the idea of making movies with women with gigantic breasts and he’d get the camera down low to the ground and he’d tilt it up, up at the woman, and the woman would look like the Empire State Building with these two giant knockers hanging out.  And that was hilarious and they were comedies.  Whether Russ knew it or not he was making comedies.  Most of these films are riots and they’re just so funny.  They’re not really erotic films; they’re not really sexy films or porno films.  They’re this goofy, campy, almost Austin Powers-type comedies, and when I did “The Double D Avenger,” which was years and years and years after Russ had basically retired, I wanted to do an homage to that because I thought it would be funny.  Nobody had done it in a million years and it was so politically incorrect to do it, but again, I’m doing kinda doing my own thing here so I wasn’t paying attention to that.

So that’s how I did “the Double D Avenger,” as sort of a Russ Meyer movie-star reunion picture.  We had Kitten Natividad, Haji, Raven De La Croix.  Raven again was from Russ Meyer’s “Up,” Kitten Natividad was from “Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens” and “Up,” and Haji was in the most famous movie Russ ever did called “Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!,” which actually had no nudity in it whatsoever.  Yeah, they were strictly comedies in my opinion.

Joe: It all ties in—with the range of the fantastic ideas and how you’ve drawn them all together.

WW: I think “Frankenstein vs the Creature from Blood Cove” is kind of an homage to the Universal classics, the Hammer horror films and the AIP Sam Arkoff, James Nicholson drive-in movies.  It’s sort of an amalgamation of them.  The AIP films were kind of influenced by Universal and Hammer.  That’s really what we did.  It would be impossible, really, for me to do a film that’s exactly like the Universal pictures or like the old classics.  For example if you look at Bela Lugosi’s “Dracula, ” I could never shoot a movie that had that slow pacing, that would have no music track, that would have really no action, no violence, no sex appeal.  Now I love the Bela Lugosi “Dracula” movie.  Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy it.  It would have been very difficult for me to market and sell a movie like that.  What I needed to do was have an homage to many of the classics and that’s what we did, so that’s why there’s sort of that mixture that you’re talking about.

Joe: That kind of wraps up the questions I had, did you want to give a little shout out to anybody we haven’t mentioned?

WW: David Gerrold was fantastic from Star Trek.  He created the Tribbles—“The Trouble with Tribbles”—and was a bit player in some of the Star Trek shows.  He came in and did the hilarious cameo and improvised the line about giant ants in the desert.  He came up with a funnier line than what I had originally written.  I said, “Well David, you’re the great sci-fi writer so you go ahead and rewrite the piece you want to do.”  So he went ahead and did that.  He has an incredible following, David Gerrold, it’s amazing.  He was just great.

I’m just happy with all the actors we cast in the picture.  I think everything turned out great with the movie, the casting, the props, the locations, the wardrobe.  The script was very strong, I think, one of the best ones I’ve written.  I think it did what it’s supposed to do and that is be kind of a classic old-fashioned monster movie creature feature that our core audience who are over 18, who are collectors and fans, and non-fans too, can enjoy.  And it’s certainly different.  There’s no way mainstream Hollywood today would make a movie like this.  You’re never going to see these kinds of pictures again.  The only way you’ll see these pictures is independent sources like me.  I think it’s unique because I grew up in a time where I was able to see all these things and watch all these things.  I was at the right place and the right time and I had all these influences on my life, like I say, Jonathan Harris and my father and Don Richardson and all these funny experiences.  I have a way of replicating that style of writing, and I have a knack for duplicating that type of filmmaking that I don’t think a lot of young guys or independent directors can do today, because I think you have to have a love for it and you have to have a real knowledge of it and you have to have that little wacky brain to come up with bizarre twists.  I think we made a classic, really, that’s going to live forever.  Just go out on Amazon.com and get it and that’s the quickest and easiest way for you to get it and enjoy it.   I think it’s also a film you can watch again and again, you can always see something different in it each time.  Those DVD bonuses that we’ve loaded the DVD up with I think are really interesting too, the documentaries and the bloopers and all that stuff.

Joe: You have any parting words of wisdom for the kids at home?

WW:  I would say just live your life to the fullest and use your talent to the fullest and enjoy life.  If you want to get into the entertainment industry there’s a zillion different ways to do it, but it’s very, very tough and you have to really have a game plan and know what you’re doing.  We live in a time where the major studios kind of monopolize a lot of distribution outlets, so it’s not enough to just make a picture—it’s out there distributing it and selling it that’s the key.  If you want to be an independent filmmaker, make a great film, but then work like heck to get it out there and sold.

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For additional news, information and bios, check out the official “Frankenstein vs the Creature from Blood Cove” website and home of William Winckler Productions.  You can also drop by the Joe-Mammy.com Shop and pick up a copy of either “Frankenstein vs the Creature from Blood Cove” or “the Double D Avenger”.  Be the first kid on your block to own them both!