The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen (44 page)

At the
Charles Dexter Ward
preview, we find out something mysterious and beyond imagining has happened during production. I settle into my seat, with a big bucket of popcorn Sam has made me pay for, certain that the HPLSoP is going to trash the EAPSoB in the coming fiscal year. The lights go down, the curtains crank open, and the projector whirrs. The AIP logo fills the screen. The opening title is not
H. P. Lovecraft’s The Curse of Charles Dexter Ward
. . . but
Edgar Allan Poe’s The Haunted Palace
.

There’s a rustling, creeping, sussurating, terror-filled sensation in the house. The wet cigar falls from Sam’s open mouth. Roger puts on dark glasses and starts to cry. Jim gets up and checks with the projectionist that this is the right film. I know now we’re all cursed, that we’ll never be free of Eddy Poe Rex.

The velvet jackets are back. The fog swirls on those same tiny sets. There’s a crypt in the basement, where the monster lives. It’s out of focus. Vincent Price, grieving for lost chances on the Great White Way, plods through a part written for a much younger, scarier man, bidding a bittersweet farewell to life as the New Rex Harrison (or the White Sammy Davis Jr.). Finally, as we sob in the screening room, the house burns down. It’s another remake of
House of Usher
. After burning beams collapse for the ninth or tenth time, there’s even a quote. “‘While, like a rapid ghastly river, through the pale door, a hideous throng rush out forever, and laugh—but smile no more.’—Edgar Allan Poe.”

We know how that pale throng feel . . .

In melancholy despair, Roger flees to Swinging England, vowing to make films about Oliver Cromwell and the Beatles. Unable to resist the fateful clutch of dread destiny, he shoots
The Masque of the Red Death
and
Tomb of Ligeia—
with Vinnie Price, buried girls, burning buildings, swirly credits, and end quotes. “The boundaries which divide life from death are at best shadowy and vague. Who can say where the one ends and where the other begins?” “And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.” There’s nothing Roger can do. He hires Richard Chamberlain, Christopher Lee, Shirley MacLaine, or Jerry Lewis, but visits the star’s dressing room on the first day of the shoots to find ashen-faced, quivering-jowled, red-eyed Vinnie Price having his eyebrows powdered and helped into another velvet jacket.

I wind up the HPLSoP and find myself shackled full-time to the interests of the EAPSoB, which has regional chapters in Boston, New York, Paris, and Antarctica. The Society brings a massive lawsuit against NASA, claiming that the Apollo program is infringing the intellectual property rights of “The Balloon Hoax.”

Boomba drowns in his swimming pool. At Hollywoodlawn, I march leaden-footed behind Cheetah, Bonzo, J. Fred Muggs, and Stanley (billed as “more fun than a barrel of teenagers” in Disney’s
The Monkey’s Uncle
) as they carry the child-sized coffin to the tiny grave. Judy, the simian slut who wormed her way into Boomba’s affections then stole a plum continuing role on
Daktari!
from him, makes a show of honking bogus grief into her Kleenex. The wake is a gloomy, ill-tempered affair. I repress an urge to daub the sanctimonious surviving chimps with pitch, string ’em up from the beams at Ben Frank’s, and set light to them.

Poe goes on. Roger, running in vain from the Red Death, takes a trip around the world in eighty pictures.
City in the Sea
,
The Oblong Box
,
The Conqueror Worm
,
Murders in the Rue Morgue
(finally—but with a goddamn gorilla suit and made in Spain!),
X-ing the Paragrab
,
The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether
. All the Tales and Poems are consumed, so AIP start in on the
essays
. In
Eureka!
, a velvet-jacket philosopher is on the point of understanding how the universe functions when his buried-alive niece claws at his eyes and the house catches fire.

My hair long and lank, my cheeks hollow, my eyes red-veined, my moustache floppy—I realize I
look
like Eddy Poe. Considering he was found near death in ill-fitting clothes borrowed from someone else, it seems I even dress like the unhappy poet whose still-beating heart of horror I discern beneath the floorboards of my office or bricked up in the basement of my bungalow (which doesn’t even
have
a basement). Everywhere I go, every mirror I look into, I glimpse the specter of myself, silently accusing, “Thou art the man!”

I
am
that “unhappy master whom unmerciful disaster followed fast and follows faster till my songs one burden bore—till the dirges of his hope that melancholy burden bore—of ‘Never-Nevermore’!”

But I’m not alone in being by horror haunted, by Eddy ensnared, by Allan alienated, by Poe persecuted . . .

By now, it’s not just Roger films and Vinnie vehicles. It’s
everything
Jim and Sam put into production. Alongside remakes of
The House of Usher
, AIP are doing annual reunions of
Beach Party—
itself a thinly disguised remake of
Gidget
—with beach bums and bikini babes surfing and smooching to tunes from Frankie and Annette, plus comedy Hells’ Angels led by Rocco Barbella from
Bilko
. Even in the first
Beach Party
, the first signs are there when “Big Daddy,” who runs the hangout shack on the beach, looks up and turns out to be . . . Vincent Price. AIP try a James Bond skit and it comes out as
Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine
, with Vinnie Price using a razor-pendulum to part Frankie Avalon’s hair. Soon,
all
beach pictures bear the mark of Poe—
Buried Alive Bikini
,
Beach Blanket Berenice
,
Muscle Beach Metzengerstein
. Annette spends more time in a shroud than a bathing suit, with a black cat entombed in her beehive hairdo. Rod Usher takes over the Hells’ Angels, wearing a studded velvet jacket and a floppy-tasseled cap, and complains that the revving of bikes is torture to his over-sensitive ears.

We’re all drinking heavily now, and choking on the poison. The
Hollywood Reporter
prints an item that Jim is on the point of marrying his thirteen-year-old cousin.
Variety
claims Roger is trying to raise funds for a Southern Literary Magazine when he ought to be shooting a motor-racing picture in Europe. At the Brown Derby, they say Sam is never seen without a raven flapping ominously after him, croaking whole stanzas. Vinnie lands a prime-time comedy special, but it comes out as
An Evening with Edgar Allan Poe
. My second-best client, a rare and radiant exotic dancer whom the angels name Lenore, flies from my agency door and I spend much time agonizing about her lost and lovely tassels.

Still, it continues. AIP try a war picture. It turns out to feature a brooding young commando who storms a Nazi castle in search of his missing girlfriend and finds Vinnie in a velvet SS uniform before inevitable torture, burial alive, and burning-down. With his producer’s hat on, Roger sends some film students and the Nicholson kid into the desert to make a Western, and they come back with Vinnie as an accursed cattle baron, doppelganger gunslingers, and a cattle stampede flattening the ranch house in place of the fire.
Rocket Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women of Blood
eventually sells to television with the hammer and sickle insignia on the spacecraft blotted out. It is somehow re-edited. A brooding young astronaut lands on a haunted world where
Mr. Touch-and-Go Bullet-Head (Vincent Price) rules a telepathic tribe of ululating bikini girls who are interred living within the tomb as doom-haunted dinosaurs set fire to the whole planet.

Then, it’s not just American International.

The plague shows up as little things in little films. Two Cavalry troopers called “William Wilson” in
The Great Sioux Massacre
. A “Pink Panther” cartoon called
Dial “P” for Pendulum
. A premature burial in
John Goldfarb, Please Come Home
. Then, a descent into the maelstrom. The Red Death arrives during the revolutionary scenes of
Doctor Zhivago
, and the rest of the film finds Darkness and Despair descending illimitably over Omar Sharif and Julie Christie.
The Agony and the Ecstasy
features Charlton Heston laboring for decades over a small oval portrait of one of Roderick Usher’s ancestors.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
winds up with Richard Burton clutching a purloined letter and ranting that the orangutan did it. Even a John Wayne–Howard Hawks Western turns on a Poe poem,
El Dorado
.

The curse is complete when movie theaters book
The Sound of Music
as a roadshow attraction and get
The Sound of Meowing.
In vast, empty, decaying haunted-picture palaces across the land, Julie Andrews climbs ragged mountains and pokes around a basement only to find Captain von Trapp (Vincent Price) has walled up his wife along with her noisy cat. At the end, Austria burns down.

My senses are more painfully acute by the hour. I can not venture out by day unless the sun is completely obscured by the thickest, gloomiest cloud and after dark can tolerate only the tiniest, flickering flame of a candle. My ears are assaulted by the faintest sound. A housewife tearing open a cereal packet two blocks away reverberates within my skull like the discharge of a Gatling gun. I can bear only the most pallid of foods, and neglect my formerly favored watering holes to become a ghoul-like habitué of the new McDonald’s chain, where fare that tastes of naught save cardboard may be found at the expense of a few trivial cents. The touch of my secretary becomes as sandpaper upon my appallingly sensitive skin, and raises sharp pains, sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at my pores. Few in the industry return my telephone calls, which is all to the good since I can of course scarcely bear the torture of tintinnabulation . . . of the bells—of the bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells—of the moaning and the groaning of the bells.

Movies are only the beginning. Soon, Poe is everywhere. The
house
is the monster, and the house is the United States of America. The breakout TV hits of the next seasons are
The Usher Family
,
The Man from U.L.A.L.U.M.E.
, and
The Marie Tyler Roget Show
. Vincent Price takes over from Walter Cronkite, and intones the bad news in a velvet jacket, promising “much of madness, and more of sin, and horror the soul of the plot” in reports from Vietnam, Washington, and the Middle East. Sonny and Cher take “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” to Number One in the hit parade, followed by Procol Harem’s “A Whiter Shade of Poe,” Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco (Be Sure to Put Some Flowers on Your Grave),” the Mamas and the Papas’ “Dream a Little Dream within a Dream of You,” the Archies’ “Bon-Bon,” and Dean Martin’s “Little Old Amontillado Drinker Me.” Vinnie hosts
American Bandstand
too, warily scanning the dancers for a skull-face figure in red robes.

A craze for floppy shirts, ink-stained fingers, and pale faces seizes the surfer kids, and everyone on the strip has a pet raven or a trained ape. Beauty contests for cataleptics are all the rage, and “Miss Universe” is crowned with a wreath in her coffin as she is solemnly bricked up by the judges. The Green Berets adopt a “conqueror worm” cap badge. Housing developments rise up tottering on shaky ground near stagnant ponds, with pre-stressed materials to provide Usher cracks and incendiaries built into the light-fittings for more spectacular conflagrations. The most popular names for girls in 1966–7 are “Lenore,” “Annabel,” “Ligeia,” and “Madeline.”

In a kingdom by the sea, we are haunted. In the El Dorado of Los Angeles, white fog lies thick on the boulevards. The mournful “nevermores” of ravens perched on statues are answered by the strangled mewling of black cats immured in basements. And the seagulls chime in with “tekeli-li tekeli-li” as if that was any help.

During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hang oppressively low in the heavens, I pass alone in a Cadillac convertible through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length find myself as the shades of evening draw on, within view of the melancholy House of Roger. I know not how it is—but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervades my spirit. I try to shake off the fog, like the after-dream of a reveler upon mary jane, in my brain, and rid my mind of the words of Poe. Yet he sits beside me, phantasmal, fiddling with the radio dial, breathing whiskey and muttering in intricate rhyme schemes. I have taken the Pacific Coast Highway to Malibu, where AIP and Corman—flush with monies from the Poe pictures—have thrown up a studio in a bleak castle atop the jagged cliffs. From the road, it looks phony as a glass shot. The scrublands all around are withered and sere, and I’m not even sure what “sere” means.

The castle seems abandoned, but I gain access through a wide crack in the walls. In the gloom, I find the others. Roger, in dark glasses with side panels. Sam, with raven chewing on his cigar. Jim, haunted by the doppelganger who no longer claims to be his son. Vinnie, worst of us all, liquid face dribbling over his frilly shirt, eyebrows and moustache shifted inches lower by the tide of loathsome, of detestable putrescence. A few others are with the crowd—the embalmed, toothless corpse of Lorre; an ancient withered ape just recognizable as Boris Karloff; barely breathing girls and a teenage singer coughing blood into a handkerchief; an ignored brooding youth or two, hiding in the shadows and trying to avoid being upstaged.