The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen (43 page)

The Fall of the House of Usher—
or
The House of Usher
, as it is called on the posters to save on lettering—is made in a comparatively leisurely fifteen days. Vinnie shaves his moustache, under protest as if he were Cesar Romero, and wears a white wig, which he likes enough to model in his off-hours along Sunset Strip. There are only three other people in the speaking cast, so the star gets first bite of all the scenery available for chewing. On set, Vinnie objects to the line “the house lives, the house breathes!” Roger tells him “the
house
is the monster,” and Vinnie sells it with eyeball-rolling, velvet-tongued ham. In my capacity as “ass. prod.,” I have Boomba pose for a portrait as a degenerate Usher ancestor. Floyd, the camera genius, doesn’t get a good shot of it so you can’t see the chimp’s cameo in the picture.

This is how it plays. In some earlier century (no one’s sure which), a brooding youth with a Brando sneer and a Fabian haircut travels through burned-out wasteland to a painted-on-glass mansion where Vinnie twitches at the slightest sound and rolls his eyeballs as if they were marbles. He has extra-sensitive senses, which are a perpetual torment to him, and looks severely pained whenever anyone drops a fork or lights a lamp. Our hero is searching for his missing girlfriend, Vinnie’s sister. She flits about, showing cleavage, then faints and is buried alive in the basement. Girl claws her way out of crypt, irritated, and scratches out Vinnie’s eyes as if he were making a play for her date at the record hop. A candle falls over and the House of Usher catches light like Atlanta in
Gone With the Wind—
indeed, some of the burning building stock footage might
be
offcuts from David O. Selznick’s day. Vinnie and girl get crushed and/or burned. Our hero makes it out unscorched, and broods some more—presumably his agent has just told him how much he’s getting paid and he’s resolved to quit acting and become a producer so
he
can wave the foot-long cigars some day. A caption runs “‘and the deep and dark tarn closed silently over the fragments of the House of Usher’—Poe.” Just to make sure you know, Eddy’s name pops up several more times during the swirly credits.

Against expectations,
Usher
is a monumental hit, boffo boxo, molto ducats in the coffers. Roger makes money. Vinnie makes money. Sam and Jim make more money than they can imagine, and Jim at least has a great imagination. Edgar Allan Poe, or the Baltimore Society in his name, makes money. Even Boomba gets residuals for the use of his unseen likeness. There actually
are
residuals and Sam has to find out how to pay them. The matter never came up with
Voodoo Woman
or
Phantom from 10,000 Leagues
. Naturally, being Hollywood, this means only one thing—sequels.

The first pass runs to pitches like
Return to the House of Usher . . .
only there’s a stinking tarn where the old homestead used to be, so few dramatic possibilities not involving expensive underwater photography present themselves. I spin a story out of my head in which Roderick Usher’s ghost crawls out of the tarn as a green monkey with flippers. Jim sees straight off that I’m angling a star role for Boomba and nixes the approach. It would be easy to take offense—after all, the chimp is a better actor than the ducktailed hoodlums AIP put ruffs, doublets, and floppy-tasseled hats on in subsequent movies.

Skipping through my now-dog-eared and broken-spined
Tales of Mystery and Imagination
, Roger gets excited about “The Pit and the Pendulum.” The slavering sketch artist, about whom I’m starting to worry, draws a teenybopper in a tight sweater strapped down in a pit while Vinnie swings a blade over her bazooms. Jim and Sam love this, and are disappointed when Roger looks up the story and finds it’s a
guy
in the dungeons of the Spanish Inquisition. Never mind, he says, the
pendulum
is the monster. By this, he means the torture angle is grabby enough without the added distraction of bazooms. The artist rubs out the bosomage, and puts in a manly chest—revealed through pendulum-slashes in a frilly shirt.

So,
Pit and the Pendulum
gets a greenlight. Even Sam sees one picture for the price of two is a better deal if it hauls in ten times the gross of the average four old-style AIP creature features. He quietly squelches Bert I. Gordon’s
Puppet People vs. the Colossal Beast
project and Alex Gordon’s long-cherished
She-Creature Meets the Old-Time Singing Cowboy
script, and pours added shekels into
Pit
. It’s AIP’s big hope for 1961.

Only problem is, “Pit and the Pendulum”
isn’t
a story—just a scene. Guy in pit. Nearly sliced by pendulum. Escapes. Even Roger can’t spin that out to feature length with long shots of dripping walls, gnawing rats, and Vinnie licking his lips. The problem is solved, unusually, by the writer. Dick Matheson takes his
Usher
script, changes the names, and drops the climactic house fire in favor of Pit/Pendulum business. This time, brooding youth—not the same one, though you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference—is looking for his missing
sister
, and she’s married to Vinnie. But she’s still buried alive—twice, as it happens. The
Usher
sets are back, with new painted flats and torture equipment to bump the House up to a castle. The establishing shot is a bigger glass painting, with crashing waves included. Vinnie keeps his moustache, which saves behind-the-scenes drama—and wears tights, always a big favorite with him.

One morning, I wake and find I’ve grown a moustache too. Plus I’m thinner, paler and more watery-eyed. And my wardrobe—which was once full of snazzy striped threads—runs to basic black. I don’t think much of it, because the times they are a-changing.
Pit
is, if anything, bigger boffier boxo than
Usher
, and the walls start closing in.

Tales of Terror
gets through
its
remake of
House of Usher
in the first reel, and calls it “Morella.” Then, it runs through “The Black Cat” and “A Cask of Amontillado” (Peter Lorre and Vinnie compete in a face-pulling contest) for a second act, finishing up with “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (bad-tempered Basil Rathbone turns Vinnie into a “nearly liquid mass of loathsome—of detestable putrescence”). Since most of the pages are now torn out of my book, I venture the opinion we’re using up doable Poe at an alarming rate, especially since AIP are cranking out more than one of these pictures a year. I try to get “Rue Morgue” back on the table, determined Boomba will have his comeback before the well runs dry. After only one-and-a-half remakes of
House of Usher
, everyone is bored again—the curse of success in this business, if you ask me—and trying to break out.

First, Roger sneaks off to do
The Premature Burial
at another outfit, with Ray Milland playing Vincent Price, but Sam and Jim buy into the deal, so Roger is sucked back in.
Premature
isn’t quite as much of a remake of
Usher
as
Pit
and “Morella,” but it
is
a remake of the scheme-to-drive-the-husband-crazy subplot Matheson padded out
Pit
with. Roger wants to hop-frog off and make, I don’t know, socially significant movies about segregation. He winds up buried alive in Venice, California, in those standing Danny Haller sets. Decaying mansions with stock furniture. Tiny soundstage exteriors with false perspective stunted trees. Dry ice mist pooling over bare floor.

Piqued that Milland is daring to usurp his schtick, Vinnie hares all over the library, doing
Master of the World
,
Confessions of an Opium Eater
,
Twice-Told Tales
,
Diary of a Madman
, and
Tower of London
. In Vinnie’s mouth, Verne, de Quincey, Hawthorne, de Maupassant, and Shakespeare somehow turn into Poe. Brooding youths. Velvet jackets. Buried-alive girls. Vinnie a-flutter. Crypt in the basement. House burns down. Swirly credits. The Shakespeare (
Tower of London
is
Richard III
translated into English) is directed by Roger, who swears he can’t remember being on the set. He admits it’s possible the film got shot during a blackout he had during a screening of a Russian science-fiction film he was cutting the special effects out of to fit around rubber monster scenes shot by some kid to see release as
Rocket Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women of Blood
. Meanwhile, Vinnie is
muy fortunato
, lording it over the castles of AIP, hawking Sears-Roebuck art selections and cookbooks on the side.

Even the critics start noticing they get the same picture every time. Recalling that this happened before, I propose an ingenious solution. When Universal got in a rut with Frankenstein, Dracula, and Mummy pictures, they had the monsters meet Abbott and Costello. Comedy killed off the cycle. Once you’ve laughed at a horror, it’s never frightening again. Since Lou has passed away, we can’t get the team back, but I suggest it would at least triple the hilarity if Bud’s new comedy partner is a rotund, talented chimpanzee . . . and AIP can launch a new series with
Abbott and Boomba Meet the Black Cat
. It’ll slay ’em in the stalls when Boomba starts tossing loathsome, detestable putrescence at Vinnie Price’s moustache. We can bill Boomba as “The Chimp of the Perverse.”

Before I sell Jim, Sam, and Roger—not to mention Bud Abbott—on this, Matheson dashes off a
funny
remake of
House of Usher
, purportedly based on “The Raven.” It breaks my heart to tell Boomba he’s been benched again, but the “ass. prod.” gig is still live and EAPSoB dues are pouring in.
The Raven
, for comedy value, casts Vinnie as the brooding youth in tights, makes the buried-alive chick a faithless slut, and has Boris Karloff play Vincent Price. The castle still burns down in by-now scratchy stock footage, which almost counts as a joke. Lorre is in it too, driving Karloff nuts making up his own dialogue. The juve is some piranha-toothed nobody who lands the job by spreading a false rumor he’s Jim Nicholson’s illegitimate son. When it comes out that he isn’t, Sam swears the grinning kid will never work in this town again, though it’s too late to cut him out of
The Terror
, yet another remake of
House of Usher
that Roger shoots in three days because he still has Karloff under contract. The twist here is that the house is washed away rather than burned down.

After sending the cycle up with
The Raven
and cynically hammering it into the ground with
The Terror
, there’s no way this perpetuation of Poe can persist. So, relief all round, and a sense everyone can move on to better—or at least new—things in 1964. Jim thinks H. P. Lovecraft could be the new Poe, and buys up a ton of his stories. Yes, AIP lay out for
film rights! Banner headlines in
Variety
. Having missed out with Verne, Hawthorne, De Quincey, and the other bums, I found the Howard Phillips Lovecraft Society of Providence. I pore through
The Outsider, and Others
, determined to find a tale with a good part for a chimp—the best I can manage is a rat with a withered human head in “Dreams in the Witch House,” which should be close enough. But first up on AIP’s Lovecraft schedule is
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
. Only it’s going to be
The Curse of Charles Dexter Ward—Curse
, which sounds like swearing and violence, is a better movie-title word than
Case
, which sounds like measles and bedrest.

For some reason no one can fathom, Roger wants the non-bastard Nicholson to play Charles Dexter Ward. He thinks up this scene where Chuck is possessed by his evil wizard ancestor and smashes an axe through a door to get to his terrified wife (Debra Paget) while shouting something from
The Tonight Show
. I know that will never work, but keep quiet. Vinnie, meanwhile, happily breezes off to play Big Daddy in
Sweet Charity
on Broadway, intending to conquer a whole new career as a musical comedy star. The velvet jackets go in storage. The burning-building footage goes back in the cans. As per HPL, this time, the
monster
is the monster.

Though I don’t live anywhere remotely near a Witch House, I’m tormented by dreams—not of human-faced rats or green monkeys, but an angry Eddy. In my restless slumber, Poe comes at me with a long list of grievances that, in my official EAPSoB capacity, he wants presented to Congress, the publishing industry, drinking establishments long since gone out of business, the United States army, and sundry other bodies and individuals. With his name writ large on panoramic magic lantern screens undreamed of even in the thousand-and-third tale of Scheherazade, he feels he has the attention of a general public who once gave him the shortest of shrifts—and wishes to plead for a redress of wrongs done long ago. I put these dreams down to the rich foods I’m able to afford thanks to “ass. prod.” fees, and think hard about cutting down on lunches.