ROMA, gennaio 1995

How did you start working for TV?

Well, I wasn't particularly interested in TV. In 1977 I made Animal House for Universal Studios, and from then until now I had offices in a building at Universal Studios and I never had a deal there. From this building I made movies for Universal, for Paramount, for Warner Brothers and for Disney but I never had a deal at Universal. About six or seven years ago Sid Sheinberg, the president of Universal, called me and said: I want you to do me a favour. I went Oh-oh! because it was like the Godfather calling! I thought he was going to ask me for rent. Actually his problem came from the fact that was that MCA -which is the company which owns Universal- had produced in the Fifties a lot of what they called "Anthology Television Programs". The most famous was called "General Electric Theater", because General Electric sponsored this series of half-hour-long weekly melodramas, which were hosted by Ronald Reagan (which is why they're the most famous): but there were others like "Jane Wyman presents" and many more. There were about 800 half-hours,400 hours of shows that Universal owned. They couldn't syndicate them nor make money out of them because they're in black and white, they're melodramas and mostly they are boring! Sid said: Can you figure out a way to make money out of this stuff? So I looked at them and at first I didn't find them interesting at all. What was amazing about that material is who was in the shows: because MCA had a great power as an agency in the Sixties and the Fifties, all the great stars were in it from Gloria Swanson and the Marx brothers, and Abbott and Costello, Jack Benny, and Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart and on and on... Everybody, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and such young, almost unknown, actors as Tony Curtis, Robert Redford, Paul Newman, Charles Bronson and so on. I loved the idea of working with these stars! I finally had the idea of thought balloons like in a comic strip. Martha Kauffman and David Crane -two young writers who had never written anything- they created the show.

The show is on HBO, which is a cable station: since you have to pay for it, they must offer something normal TV stations cannot offer. They wanted us to do a situation comedy, but somehow different. I thought that first of all we'd have people talking the way they really talk, which is: they swear; when someone says Fuck you! he says Fuck you! and not something like Go away! The other point was a very frank depiction of sex. Here in Italy you've got lots of naked women everywhere and this kind of stuff, but for us -because of the strict puritan country we live in- it is quite different. Actually, in Dream On nudity is not the point: the point is that you actually see people having sex instead of cutting to something else. The other thing about Dream On is the characters behave very realistically: no matter how exaggerate (it gets very exaggerated sometimes) they behave in a realistic way which means, sometimes, badly. They lie, they cheat... they don't steal but they're jealous and behave the way people behave and they don't always make the right decision. I directed the pilot and it's been a great success: we've made like 127 of them and we're about to make 17 more on our sixth season. I enjoy it very much and it's on in many countries.

I noticed in the last two years you increased a lot the number of episode you personally direct...

It's fun. Whenever I have free time and I can, I like directing it.

How long does it take to shoot one show?

Every episode is shot in five days, and it is shot like a movie: one-camera film. It is very low-budget so we shoot very quickly, like a low-budget movie. I like my actors very much and I really enjoy doing it. We also often get big movie stars because the show has become very prestigious and many want to be on it because we have such freedom. For some actor the fact that they can swear is such a big deal! Tom Post, who appears in the hour-long special Oral sex, lies and videotape, he's such a big TV star in America that the scene he gets a girl giving him a blowjob is so shocking for America.

Is it true they're planning to do a movie out of it?

Well, Universal would like to. I don't think it would sustain for a movie. It gets harder to find the clips: for the first two years we only used the television clips, but we started to run out so now we're using movie clips too. Actually, we now use mostly movies.

I still do not know anything about Fast Lane...

That's nothing. Universal asked me to develop a show called Fast lane; so we developed the show and then we decided not to do it. Nothing of it exists. They've been announcing it but it was not true.

What happened to the sequel to An american werewolf in London?

Polygram asked me a story which I wrote: they hated it, so I will never be made. It took place in real time, fourteen years later. Do you remember, at the beginning of American Werewolf, the two boys are walking and talking and they mention a girl called Nancy Kline, which Griffin Dunne wants so badly to make love to? Well the story is about Nancy Kline. She's coming to London to work as a literary agent, she gets in a flat and she gets very realistic nightmares: very vivid and scary. She has an affair with a young english man who works at her agency. Do you remember when David was in Jenny Agutter's apartment alone, and he walked around and around? Well, it turns out that that day he wrote her a letter, because he had been sleeping with her for years and couldn't tell his friend! He wrote her this letter and he died just the day after; but the story on the newspapers had been that a truck carrying a lion for the Regent Park's zoo had been in a collision and the lion had gone out: there had been chaos, people had been killed and they had finally shot the lion. Nancy tells her friend she wants to know what happened and they decide to find Jenny Agutter. They find out she works in this hospital, where they find Dr. Hirsch: he's very mean to them, not nice at all; he says it was a long time ago, that Jenny Agutter has left England and now lives in France. They're taken aback from how he is hostile. Nancy's nightmares become worse and worse, and her boy-friend becomes growing concerned because she's terrified: you get to the point in the movie where you're not sure (and she is not sure) what is real a what's not.

So they decide to go to East Proctor, where it all began. They go to the "Slaughtered Lamb" and it's EXACTLY the same:it's the SAME people (only 14 years later) and everybody is being very unfriendly, EXACTLY as the first time. Then they leave and as they're driving, their car stops on the moors. They spend the night sleeping in the car and it's very scary, but nothing happens... Terrible things happen, actually, but it turns out none of them are real. So they go back to London and by now she thinks she's losing her mind. On the newspapers she sees the name of Detective Sergeant McManus (he was the stupid policeman: not the one who had his head taken off, of course!) so she calls the police and they tell her he's in Brixton. They call him and he's very nice to them and invites them over: they talk for a while, then she realizes he's totally insane. You see in his mind that the experience -when the wolf came out and bit his mate's head- got him MAD. He's very warm and friendly but he's crazy. And he says: Yeah, they say it was a lion. But I saw it and I think it was a wolf. I think the boy was telling the truth. and he tells them EVERYTHING, but both of them think he's nuts. Then McManus says: You know, you should see Jenny Agutter. They go: We thought she was in France and he goes Nooo! She lives here, here's the phone number.

So Nancy calls her, and you see the phone ringing and an answer phone goes: Hello, I'm not home, please leave a message after the beep. So she talks and says: Hello, I'm Nancy Kline, I called because blah blah blah... And then you see this hand comes in which hangs up the line, but the hand is a skeleton and you realize it's Jack: only fourteen years later so he's really messy. And he screams: DAVID! and you see the inside of the apartment. David, who's not in better shape than Jack, is watching television and he goes: WHAT? So Jack goes: Why is Nancy Kline calling here?...They both would have been puppets, because they're so horrible: you remember, in the cinema he had only been dead for about six months; this is fourteen years. Anyway they're acting completely normal, and Jack is furious: I can't believe you fucked Nancy Kline! and David goes: All right, all right. There's this big fight and then Jenny Agutter comes in and she looks up and she says: Why are you making so much noise and we realize she can see them. As they go on talking we cut away and it's the day after: we see Nancy and her boy-friend at the hospital, with Dr. Hirsch, and they demand to see Alex. Dr. Hirsch is looking at his watch and looking out the window and says: I have to leave, I have to leave; stay here and I'll get her. He goes to the nurse station and they tell him she just left so he goes: DAMN! and he takes a taxi to her house, but Nancy and her boy-friend see him and go Wait a minute!. So they run after him. Now Jenny's on the subway, the Doctor is in the traffic, and so are Nancy and her friend in a taxi: you keep cutting between the three of them. Finally Jenny goes into her flat and as she talks with the two dead guys Dr. Hirsch comes him and you realize he can't see the two of them. It's starting to get dark and the Doctor says You must hurry!; he opens a closet and there are these huge chains and manacles, and he starts chaining her up. And she does it too! She gets one leg on, and an arm, and he takes out a syringe. But at that point Nancy and her boy-friend get in and he screams: What the... GET OUT!!! and then the moon comes out and Jenny starts to turn! She throws Dr. Hirsch across the room, like ten feet away, and he hits his head and he's all bloody and falls to the floor. She's still in the middle of the mutation and she leaps for them but because of the chain she stops just a few inches from them. It's a big scare and they scream. And then she's turning more and more and she rips the chain out of the wall. She goes for them but BANG-BANG-BANG and she falls to the ground. It was Dr. Hirsch, who's still alive and is holding a gun; ita would all be very scary: he's very angry and he keeps saying: Why did you do that? Why did you do that? Everything was under control!. And then he looks at himself and he's all all bloody because she had hit him and he's been scratched in the face! So he looks at them and he goes: BANG! and shoots himself in the face. It's very shocking, blood goes everywhere and so on.

Then you cut to Piccadilly Circus and you see David Naughton, and Griffin Dunne, and Jenny Agutter and Doctor Hirsch, completely looking fine! And they're sitting on the Eros Fountain and Griffin says: I can't fucking believe that you fucked Nancy Kline and as they're talking they slowly just disappear.

They HATED it! Polygram really hated it.

Why do you think this happened?

I don't know: they hated that the doctor shoots himself... they HATED it! They just felt that it was too... you know why? For the same reasons that everyone hated American Werewolf, because it was too different. It was very strange, but it was a true sequel. They started asking why was Jenny a werewolf: that's because he fucked her, that's why! I liked it, but they hated it. I really would have liked to do it. They own it, they bought it. But now, what they're doing it will be a sort of a remake, even if the title will be An american werewolf in Paris, which was the title of the original screenplay for the first movie.

Why did you decide to buy back Schlock and to make it disappear?

Because it's TERRIBLE. I just wish I could do that with many other films of mine! No, but there's also another reason. The distributor stole from us: we never got any money for Schlock, and because of this the investors never got any money back. All the distributor paid was for two day's shooting -so we could add a couple of scenes- but that was all! They made a lot of money out of it on our investors' expenses. It's very hard to get it back, because you have to sue them and that will also cost a lot of money... So, to try to generate some value from it, you have to take it away making it unavailable for years. then we'll might release it on a videocassette... Actually, I don't really know if it does have any value...

You know, this reminds me of Ed Wood. Tim Burton just made a film about him, which is good. I met the real Ed Wood, because Forrest J. Ackerman was his agent, so Ed Wood came to a screening of Schlock; it was very sad because by then he was a pathetic old man. Well, you know he made Plan Nine From Outer Space, which is a very funny movie and which is fascinating because he was so individual in his craziness. He couldn't give away this movie because nobody wanted it -it was completely worthless- but this year, about 35-40 years later, it will make two million dollars on videocassette. In fact it will make more profit than Ed Wood, the Tim Burton film (which, by the way, is very good)! It is so ironical!

Is there any chance that we will ever see the uncut version of The Blues Brothers?

No, they destroyed it! You know we had to cut about twenty minutes out of it because on that summer the exhibitors didn't want to play a film with an intermission, therefore losing a show every day. About three years ago Universal came to me and said: Would you do a director's edition of Blues Brothers, for a laser disc edition. They do this because it's a way of re-selling the same material. I said it was fine with me so we tried to find the negative that had been cut but it turned out that in 1985 they threw it all away for space! You see, 1985, it was before the videocassette boom: nobody really realized that you could do more money from old material... except for Walt Disney, who's the only one who kept everything. You know that more than 50% of all the films ever made in the U.S. do not exist anymore, because they were thrown away. I'm sure that's true for Italy too, and for France. They just didn't realize they could make money out of them. Do you know what the great William Wyler called movies? Canned goods!

Have you ever had any censorship problem with Dream On, and did you have any with Innocent Blood?

There's no censorship on cable TV so I never had problems. In fact we had some fucking in Dream On that would get us a NC-17 in a movie. Anyway, for each scene they swear or there's nudity, we shoot alternate scenes because sometimes it gets shown on regular broadcast television and there you can't show the risquČe parts. It doesn't really make that big difference because we do them at the same time. And now I'll tell you a shocking thing about Innocent Blood, which completely fucked me over for a while and only now I can tell because a couple of years have gone by, so it doesn't matter anymore. America is the only country in the world which has no Government Censorship, but there's still lots of people who want to ban something. So the Motion Picture industry created the MPAA which gives ratings to movies. De facto, this becomes censorship because what happens is that they would give you a NC-17 and the theaters will go: No, we don't want this because it's pornography! Before now, the rating was an "X" and do you know in fact why did they change it to "NC-17"? Because the porno industry use to put a triple X on their movies, even if no porno movie has ever been rated! So X got a porno connotation, even if it wasn't from MPAA. NC-17 means you can't go if you're under 17. So your problem is to get an R rating, which means that under 17 they can go if they're with someone beyond that age... basically it means they can go. Sometimes it's stupid: The Blues Brothers is R-rated just because they swear a lot. Trading Places was R-rated because Jamie was naked, and because they're swearing. Anyway, for Innocent Blood they gave me an NC-17 because... well it makes no sense, actually. No matter from who, any censorship is arbitrary and irrational: censorship is completely EVIL! But with Innocent Blood, which is very violent and gory, I had to cut some of the love scenes. Then there was a shot where a bullet come uot from the back of some guy's head, and I had to cut that out. All in all, it was about three minutes of gore that I had to cut. So I said to Warner Brothers: For Europe, can I keep these things? and they said: Sure, yes!. But what happened was that, based on my first preview I made many cuts -I always do it to make it tighter- so the version in America is my cut, even if there were those few scenes missing. Then I went to Brussels, where the movie was shown in a fantasy movie festival, and as I'm watching the movie I kept thinking: What's wrong?. I couldn't figure out but there was something. And then with Leslie Belzberg we realized they had taken my first-preview print and just sent it to Europe. Which means that it's too long here: it's about four minutes too long! And I couldn't say anything to the journalist, I couldn't say The movie is wrong! You know at the end, when Macelli/Robert Loggia comes and gives that big speech while he's on fire? Well, it's very short in America: he says three or four things and then LaPaglia shoots him. Originally, because now in Europe he talks for FIVE MINUTES! He goes on and on and on and on and on... it's TOO LONG! I was like AAAARGH! It's wrong! And it was too late, and there was nothing I could do: they made the print and they sent it out and that was it! I can talk about it now, but at the time you can't really say anything because you don't want to be negative about the movie. It's very frustrating but the film in America, which is missing some shots, is actually closer to what I meant than the Europe version, which has the gorier scenes. You can't win. William Friedkin once said: Only the projectionist gets final cut and it's true. You always get fucked over by some technician, or some projectionist.

I'd like to know more about some projects of yours which apparently disappeared. What about Sinbad?

Sinbad was an animated film. It was an iranian and finnish co-production with a wonderful mexican animator from Los Angeles and... they ran out of money. They paid me, we did all the storyboards and beautiful drawings... I believe a lot of that Disney film, Aladdin, had some very similar things... I saw Aladdin and went: "Waaait a minute..." Some of the animators on Sinbad went to work for Aladdin, so it might be possible. I don't think the financers will come back with money to finish it. Apparently it was a scandal in Helsinki: the guy had got the money from the Government somehow... He was a very nice guy and we did wonderful work and one day he came and said: We have no money! In America, as you make movies for the studios, this doesn't happen so I was shocked! It was just finished! I don't know what he did: it's depressing.

And what about the sequel to The Blues Brothers?

Next Tuesday I'm meeting Dan Aykroyd to talk about it. I don't know about it: I would like to do it but at the same time it's far. In fact Tuesday night, at Danny's night club "The House of Blues", Dan Aykroyd and the band, and James Brown and Jim Belushi are doing a big show as the Blues Brothers.

And Connecticut Yankee?

I'd still very much like to do it but they want me to change it. It is my dream. But it took me 12/13 years to get American Werewolf made, so...

The podcast version of this interview is available for download in Berto's Garret.

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