Family Home Theater

On October 20, 1985, I had the good fortune to interview Vincent Price for a non-profit journal of the arts that I edited at the time, an award-winning magazine called Clockwatch Review. The interview took place on a Sunday morning at Price’s suite at the Pfister Hotel in Milwaukee, where he was in town to film a commercial. We had breakfast together while we talked, with Price, always the gentleman, pouring tea for me. He had just written a book about American art, and since he received a BA in art history from Yale in 1933, it seemed a good place to start before talking about his films. The following is an excerpt from an interview that was published in Clockwatch Review Vol. III Number 1 (1985).

How would you characterize American art? You said we’ve just begun to find an identity?

You know, in my profession, when they removed the censorship from the movies, the movies just went completely overboard in language, plot, sex, and violence . . . which is unfortunate. Because while some of the movies technically are wonderful, they are boringly realistic. And there is a kind of thing in the greatest drama—Ibsen and the realists—where there is a form which is brilliant, artistic, and yet somehow beyond life, larger than life.

It seems to me that one of our problems as American artists was that we were playing to the lowest common denominator. Television is the prime example of it, and I lump television and motion pictures and theater and everything else all in one thing. To me, art is everything. Everything that man does, as discriminated from the works of nature. The ultimate expression of man is art, and since I believe that everything man does is art, I believe in that ultimate expression of man’s doing.

Great art is communication to the few, unfortunately. It is not communication to the many. Your magazine will never have the circulation of the Enquirer [laughs]. The Enquirer is probably a perfect example, or Laverne & Shirley on television or Rambo in movies. I watched one of the Rambo-type movies last night, and it was the most puerile piece of writing I’ve ever seen in my life. It was just rounds of ammunition, but no rounds of dialogue.

There had to have been times when director Gore Verbinski was tempted to give himself a little poke with a cutlass . . . or at least pinch himself to make sure it all hasn’t been just a six-year dream. After all, in 1997, if you’d have told the director of Mousehunt that he would go on to revive the Hollywood pirate movie and produce a blockbuster trilogy for Walt Disney that would spawn legions of fans and a cottage industry of movie-related merchandise, he probably would have laughed. Verbinski’s budget for Mousehunt was reportedly $38 million. The budget for Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) was estimated at $140 million, and that was just the beginning. Dead Man’s Chest (2006) had a budget of $225 million, and At World’s End (2007) took a whopping $300 million to produce. These were blockbusters in every sense of the word.

But Verbinski was clearly the right man for the job. He took a Disney theme-park attraction and turned it into one of cinema’s wildest and most successful rides. And he introduced Johnny Depp as Capt. Jack Sparrow, an unusual pirate who marched to the beat of a different rum.

In two sessions with journalists on November 15 and 20, 2007, Verbinski answered questions in an online forum while bonus features from the DVD played on a small screen. Journalists submitted questions, then Verbinski decided which ones to answer. Different journalists participated in each session, and the rapid-fire questions and answers reflect that.

Since these group interviews, Disney has kept the franchise moving forward, with Rob Marshall directing On Stranger Tides, Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg directing Dead Men Tell No Tales, and Rønning enlisted again to direct an as-yet untitled sixth film in the franchise without Johnny Depp. But Verbinski and Depp laid the groundwork, as this interview attests.

The maelstrom scene proved to be a major success, but also offered up major effects obstacles. Was there ever a moment you didn’t think it was going to work out?

Definitely. The biggest issue hit us about eight weeks prior to the release. We were suffering from a scaling issue that seemed insurmountable. The physics of a whirlpool this size overwhelmed the team at ILM. The path we were heading down was not achieving the desired results, so it all had to be reworked. The initial rendering backgrounds were used as out-of-focus plates for close-ups, which bought us time by getting 100 or so shots in the pipeline and allowed us to completely rethink and re-render the maelstrom for all of the wide shots. This is the exact opposite of how you would normally go about producing this sequence. John Knoll and the team at ILM ultimately pulled it off, but it was a real nail-biter.

Fans of the horror genre know some of the milestones. In 1960, Alfred Hitchcock, wanting to prove that a good movie could be made with a small budget, adapted the novel Psycho for the big screen, arguably creating the first slasher film. In Night of the Living Dead (1968), George Romero brought zombies into everyday American life—no longer something that existed only in Transylvania or as a curse from the past. Then, in 1972, Last House on the Left featured murderers as the horror, an inhuman human element that made it all the more shocking. But another big milestone came in 1974 when Tobe Hooper created The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. That film redefined the horror genre by jumping right into the deep end of the pool and creating a sense of menace from start to finish. And who can forget Leatherface? The masked, chainsaw-wielding psychopath started a new trend in horror films. After that, we’d see a succession of masked horror villains in Michael Myers (Halloween, 1978), Jason (Friday the 13^th, 1980), and Freddy Krueger (Nightmare on Elm Street, 1984). The genre would never be the same.

With Dark Sky Films releasing an ultimate two-disc version of the classic 1974 film, which heavily relied on a single, hand-held camera, James Plath (then of DVD Town) talked with Hansen about his role as that memorable chainsaw horror villain, Leatherface.

Born in Reykjavik, Iceland, Hansen moved with his family to the U.S. when he was five years old. The family lived in Maine until he was 11, then moved to Texas, where Hansen completed high school and earned a degree in English and Scandinavian Studies from the University of Texas. Having participated in a few theatrical productions, Hansen heard about Tobe Hooper’s auditions and decided to try for a part. After playing the mentally disturbed killer in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre—his first acting credit—he would appear in 30 more short films and features. In addition, he wrote stories and documentary scripts, among them Portrait of an Island (1990), Maine: America’s Coast (1995), and Ralph Stanley: An Eye for Wood (2015). He also wrote a memoir titled Chain Saw Confidential. Hansen died in 2015 at the age of 68.

The interview took place by phone on August 18, 2006.

Are you basking in the glow of the new release—the renewed notoriety—or have you always found yourself, because of this role, sort of notorious?

I think this movie has always remained strong because of the fan base. The great thing to me about a re-release is that the attention brings in a new fan base—people who are younger and may have heard about Chainsaw, but when Chainsaw isn’t getting a lot of attention they’re not inclined to look at it.

Jimmy Buffett once sang, “I don’t want the fame that brings confusion, where people recognize you on a plane.” You’ve certainly not had that problem

It’s been great for me.

What are people’s reactions when they find out? And how do you bring it up?

Well, it’s nice for me, because of course nobody recognizes me, and I’m pretty private. So I like the idea that it’s a separate thing. People are very surprised when they find out. Obviously, at a horror fan convention it’s different. But when I’m just on the street and I’m introduced to somebody, they’re always taken aback . . . and they really don’t know what to say. I’ve asked my friends, “PLEASE don’t tell them I was in the Chainsaw Massacre as the first thing you say about me. Surely there’s something else that’s interesting enough,” because the problem with telling them that first is that they truly don’t know what to say. They’re shocked. And I find it’s better that they find that out maybe as the second or third thing.

In the summer of 1996, the nationally recognized literary magazine Clockwatch Review: a journal of the arts was planning a special Western issue and mailed a series of questions to a number of actors that had appeared in Western films or television shows. Three—Charlton Heston, Will Hutchins, and Michael Pate—responded, while another, Hugh O’Brian, preferred to talk by phone during a later October 6, 1996 interview. That special issue of Clockwatch Review never left the corral, but it seemed a durned shame to waste the actors’ responses to James Plath’s questions.

Heston, who died in 2008, was quick to point out that he didn’t appear in many Westerns, but one of his most memorable roles was Will Penny (1968), an aging cowboy who takes a job at a large cattle spread and finds that things are changing rapidly. He also appeared in such Westerns as The Savage (1952), Arrowhead (1953), Pony Express (1953), Three Violent People (1956), The Big Country (1958), Major Dundee (1965), The Last Hard Men (1976), and The Mountain Men (1980).

The Australian-born Pate, who also died in 2008, had a film career as a character actor that spanned 40 years. He appeared in such TV series and films as Broken Arrow (1956), The Adventures of Jim Bowie (1957), Zorro (1958), Sugarfoot (1958), Westbound (1958), The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin (1959), Black Saddle (1959), Wanted: Dead or Alive (1959), Zane Grey Theater (1956-60), Maverick (1961), Tales of Wells Fargo (1960-61), Laramie (1960-62), Have Gun Will Travel (1957-62), The Rifleman (1958-62), Rawhide (1959-64), and Gunsmoke (1957-64). He also played Chief Puma in McLintock!, the rousing 1963 John Wayne Western, and 10 years earlier played Chief Vittorio in Hondo, which also starred Wayne.

Hutchins, still living, co-starred in two Elvis Presley films but is best known for his signature role as “Sugarfoot” Tom Brewster in a one-hour Western series that ran from 1957-61. But he also appeared in TV episodes of Maverick (1960), Cheyenne (1961), Bronco (1961), and Gunsmoke (1963), as well as the later Western films The Shooting (1966), Maverick (1994), and Gunfighter (1999). 

O’Brian, who died in 2016, was best known for playing famed Western marshal Wyatt Earp in TV’s The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp (1955-61). He also played Earp or himself as Earp in cameos on The Danny Thomas Show (1956), Alias Jesse James (1959), The Secret World of Eddie Hodges (1960), Paradise (1989), Gunsmoke: The Last Apache (1990), The Gambler Returns: The Luck of the Draw (1991), and Wyatt Earp: Return to Tombstone (1994). Other Westerns he appeared in include Little Big Horn (1951), Buckaroo Sheriff of Texas (1951), Cave of Outlaws (1951), The Raiders (1952), The Battle of Apache Pass (1952), The Cimarron Kid (1952), The Lawless Breed (1952), Seminole (1953),  The Man from the Alamo (1953), The Stand at Apache River (1953), Taza, Son of Cochise (1954), Saskatchewan (1954), Broken Lance (1954), Drums Across the River (1955), “Billy and the Bride” on TV’s  Stage 7 (1955), The Virginian (1962), and The Shootist (1976), John Wayne’s last film. O’Brian founded the Hugh O’Brian Youth Leadership Foundation, which has sponsored more than a half-million students since the nonprofit youth leadership program began in 1958.

Did you WANT to play a western hero/sidekick/villain, or did you resist?

Heston:  Of course I wanted to play in Westerns, though so far I’ve made less than a dozen.

Hutchins:  I played all three: Sugarfoot, a reluctant hero; the notorious Canary Kid, Sugarfoot’s nemesis; and Warren Oates’ sidekick in The Shooting. Loved all three.

Pate:  Of course. Didn’t every youngster in the Western world of the ‘20s, ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s, and the ‘60s—the decade they stopped making Westerns, real Westerns that is, with the exception perhaps of Lonesome Dove. I hated the Unforgiven, but don’t tell Clint. In those far-off, halcyon days, every young fella played cowboys and Indians—but I doubt any one of them ever wanted to be an Injun!

O’Brian:  The wardrobe was a major fight, because they wanted me to wear a light-colored hat. They showed me what the hell they had laid out—they wanted me to wear the Gene Autry, Roy Rogers type clothes, the singing cowboy look—and I said, “Oh shit, forget that,” and I went and picked out what I felt Wyatt Earp wore. I looked at all the pictures and stuff and I picked out the black, flat-brimmed hat because I saw a picture that he had a similar hat and I picked it. And it was a frock coat and vest because that’s what the guy that owned the drug store wore, or the guy that owned the hardware store, or the mayor, because that was the wardrobe for a businessman. There weren’t any uniforms in those days. I mean, the only thing that came close to it was the badge.

Although Charles Dance has appeared in more than 150 films and television productions, he is perhaps best known to younger audiences as the ruthless patriarch Tywin Lannister from HBO’s Game of Thrones (2011-19).

Born in Worcestershire, England in 1946, Dance studied graphic design at art school in Leicester but eventually was drawn to acting, which led him to the Royal Shakespeare Company. His breakthrough came in 1984, when he played the part of Guy Perron in The Jewel in the Crown for Granada TV.

The Inn at the Edge of the World, which will be the second feature film that Dance has directed, is currently in pre-production. Based on the award-winning book by Alice Thomas Ellis, it’s a drama about five people who respond to an advertisement to escape Christmas and all its enforced jollity in London and retreat to an Inn of the West coast of Scotland.

Dance’s first time behind the camera came in 2004 with Ladies in Lavender, which prompted this December 15, 2005 phone interview with DVD Town’s James Plath.

Ladies in Lavender stars Judi Dench and Maggie Smith as two sisters who become enthralled with a mysterious foreigner who washes up on the beach of their 1930s Cornish seaside village. They tend to him and soon learn that he has a special talent: the violin. He awakens feelings in the sisters that they haven’t felt for years, feelings that are complicated when a vacationing Russian woman takes an interest in the man and threatens to spirit him away. Ultimately, though, his effect on people is far-reaching. Just as he touched the sisters, he brings about a transformation in the villagers, who become not just accepting of the stranger, but eventually claim him as one of their own.

I thought that Ladies in Lavender was a charming film, a beautiful film . . .

Thank you.

. . . but I couldn’t help thinking if the genders were reversed and it was two septuagenarian brothers who became enamored with a beautiful twenty-something woman they rescued from the sea, and if one of them behaved as Judi Dench did—however innocently—they would have been branded “dirty old men.” I was wondering if you were conscious of this double perceptive standard while you were writing the screenplay or directing the film.

To be honest, Jim, it didn’t occur to me. It didn’t enter my head at all, actually . . . because it’s a kind of fairy tale, the story, rather like all the other stories in this collection of short stories that I took it from. They all have a fairytale-like quality, you know, and there is a kind of innocence in fairy tales. And the feelings that go on in Judi Dench’s character are kind of many and various: they’re maternal, they’re kind of physical but not in a lecherous way, it’s love . . . you know, his presence awakens so many things in her, but the story doesn’t take it any further, and I didn’t intend to take it any further. And if the audience thinks that if he’d stayed and if perhaps the ages were a little different it might have gone further, then that’s up to the audience. But what you see is what happens, and that’s what you get. I didn’t think along the lines of “What if?”

So there was no real change, then, from the original story to accommodate two older women, as opposed to the fortysomethings that were in the short story?

Well, yeah, I kind of blew the story up a fair bit and embellished it in many ways, and so there are things that happen in the film that don’t happen in the story. I changed their age . . . well, I didn’t change their age, actually. I mean, when I read the story, the only people I had in mind were Judi Dench and Maggie Smith. The fact that they are the age that they are—they’re both seventy, which is extraordinary, because they behave like 17 year olds most of the time—the age to me was kind of immaterial. However, if I’d have tried to find two women who could have been able to play those parts and would also have been as bankable, in their forties, which is the age that William J. Locke has them, and then set it in 1936, which I did, rather than the turn of the century, it would have meant that they would have been flappers in the Twenties. And if they were the age that Judi and Maggie are, they would have been too old to have been flappers. That time would have come earlier for them.

The daughter of an Inupiat Eskimo mother and a French Canadian/Cree father, Irene Bedard was born in Anchorage, Alaska. Like most children, she grew up watching films and thinking how especially wonderful Disney movies were. Ironically, or perhaps appropriately, her first role as an actress came with Disney’s Squanto: A Warrior’s Tale (1994), and she went on to give voice to Disney’s Pocahontas (1995) and a sequel (1998).

Since then, Bedard has appeared in roughly 70 feature films, shorts, TV movies, and mini-series, including Lakota Woman: Siege at Wounded Knee (1994), Smoke Signals (a 1998 film based on a short story from Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven), Navajo Blues (1998), The New World (2005), Into the West (2005), and The Stand (22020-21). The multi-talented Bedard also sings in a band with husband Denny Wilson. As an activist, Bedard helped to found Guardians of Sacred Lands, which is devoted to educating the public about sacred lands and other Native issues.

In 2005 Disney released a 10th Anniversary Edition of Pocahontas, the story of an adolescent Algonquin Indian girl who saved the life of Capt. John Smith near Jamestown. This interview was conducted by James Plath in May 2005 and originally posted at the now-defunct DVD Town.

I understand congratulations are in order. You landed a part in Steven Spielberg’s big TV series?

I play Margaret Light Shines Wheeler in the story of a Lakota family and an Anglo family over a period of about 70 years, and it’s been a real great part. I just finished two days ago.

Were movies a part of your life when you were growing up, or did you come to them late?

I was really shy growing up, and movies for me were a really wonderful way for me to sort of be a part of the world in a different way than I was quite able to do at the time.

And did any movies leave a lasting impression on you when you were going through that phase?

For me, I always loved the science fiction stuff—you know, the E.T., the Close Encounters of the Third Kind, (laughs) all those really great ones—and for me, also, growing up with all the Disney stuff and Bugs Bunny and those things. They were a part of American history, by this point.

So it must have been a thrill to be a part of something like Pocahontas.

Oh, yeah, definitely, and it’s something that I’m really proud to be a part of.

Before his first appearance on television, December 15, 1954, Davy Crockett was a folkloric character of the Johnny Appleseed variety—known, but hardly famous. But after “Davy Crockett, Indian Fighter” aired, followed by “Davy Crockett Goes to Congress,” “Davy Crockett at the Alamo,” “Davy Crockett’s Keelboat Race,” and “Davy Crockett and the River Pirates,” there wasn’t an American young or old who hadn’t heard of the Tennessee pioneer and his trademark coonskin cap. The TV episodes, though shot in color (Disney was a visionary), aired in black-and-white because of TV’s limitations, but later were edited into two color feature films that played in theaters:  Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier and Davy Crockett and the River Pirates.

Actor Fess Parker became a household name and Crockett mania turned into a marketing bonanza estimated at $300 million. Just about every youngster in America sported a coonskin cap. Later, the craze would be analyzed in dissertations, because, as Margaret J. King pointed out in her 1976 study at the University of Hawaii, it demonstrated the power of a medium still in its infancy to shape generational behavior and values.

Although sidekick Buddy Ebsen went on to play Jed Clampett on The Beverly Hillbillies and private investigator Barnaby Jones, Parker, under contract for longer and defined by the frontiersman role, continued to work in the Disney “stable” and Western mode. He appeared in such films as Westward Ho! the Wagons (1956),  The Great Locomotive Chase (1956), and Old Yeller (1957). Between 1964-70, Parker donned the buckskins again to play Daniel Boone in the highly successful NBC series.

At the time this interview was conducted (June 28, 1995), Parker was busy putting his coonskin cap on wine labels—the logo for Fess Parker Winery vintages. Tourists who visited his winery in the gently sloping terrain of Santa Barbara County hoped for a glimpse of every baby-boomer’s hero, or better still, a snapshot and an autograph. Graciously, the man who will always be known as the King of the Wild Frontier, obliged.

This interview, conducted by phone on June 28, 1995, was first published online by the now defunct DVD Town in 2004. Asking the questions was James Plath, who had hoped to include the interview in a special Western issue of his award-winning journal of the arts, Clockwatch Review.

What was it that made Davy Crockett as Disney and you portrayed him so popular?

Well, first of all, Walt Disney was an icon.  Disney certainly had people who thought that some of his animations were a little too adult for children, but in general he was considered a beloved figure.  And when he decided to do television, I don’t think it mattered what Walt Disney was going to put on.  He would have drawn an audience. 

Ryan Potter lived in Tokyo until the age of seven and grew up bilingual. He knows Tokyo and San Francisco and he’s a student of White Tiger Kung Fu. That made him a natural fit to play Hiro in Disney’s animated feature Big Hero 6, a superhero film set in fictional San Fransokyo that came to Blu-ray and DVD on February 24, 2015.

Potter is only 19, and he’s only been in the acting business for four years now—which makes him sound young. But in 2011, the same year he was cast on Nickelodeon’s “Supah Ninjas,” he founded Toy Box of Hope, a charity that benefits children living in homeless shelters and transitional living facilities. That makes him sound old. And you know what? Talking to him you get the feeling that he’s just a guy who has it all together and isn’t letting his quick rise in the business go to his head.

He went from answering a flier for a Nickelodeon series to playing Mike Fukanaga on Supah Ninjas for two years, playing Fred’s best friend on Fred: The Show, appearing in a short film titled “Save the Date” (2013), and then working in two highly rated 2014 feature films—Big Hero 6 and the indie flick Senior Project. All in the span of four years.

Family Home Theater’s James Plath had the chance to talk to Potter on February 17, 2015 for a brief one-on-one phone interview, and he shared his thoughts about Big Hero 6 and his groundbreaking role as Disney’s first multicultural hero.

What were your favorite Disney animated movies when you were growing up?

I love The Lion King. It’s one of the classics, but really my favorite of all-time would be Treasure Planet. It’s kind of one of the ones that flew under the radar, but it really is a phenomenal film.