Concluding the two-part interview with Roy Frumkes derived from "outtakes" from CHEAP SCARES! Low Budget Horror Filmmakers Share Their Secrets. Roy was also the subject of our very first Fear Zone Exclusive Video Interview.


Another credit of yours was called ZOMBIE HOLOCAUST, among other things.

That is true. My involvement in that was peripheral. There's a guy named Terry Levine. He ran Aquarius Films and his office was above one of the theatres in Times Square, on 42nd Street. Despite the fact that he released really sleazy, grindhouse stuff, he was a very intelligent guy. Australian, very well spoken. When I'd visit him in his office he had a set of barbells there and he'd be working out, staying in shape--

Because he was an Olympic medalist.

Is this true?

Yeah.

I'll be damned. I didn't know that. Well he was definitely staying in shape. He had acquired the film ZOMBIE HOLOCAUST, and apparently had a title sequence made and then learned he didn't have the rights to the title. He didn't want to spend real money on another elaborate title sequence and he had heard there was a zombie film shooting in Westchester. That was TALES THAT WILL TEAR YOUR HEART OUT. Westchester was crowded that year. We were shooting on the grounds of a mental institution, in an atmospheric access tunnel, and right down the block was a young guy named Jim Glickenhouse, who was shooting his first film. It was ridiculous, I mean, White Plains, New York? More than one film being shot there? Anyway, Terry Levine got in touch with me through his office manager and they asked if they could purchase three minutes of footage for $300. I brought in what we had shot, and they offered me a contract, guaranteeing me a credit on the film. I said, "Oh, that's nice, thanks." I mean, I got the $300, which was useful at the time, and then I forgot about it.

Much later, a film opened in Times Square called DR. BUTCHER, M.D., and Terry had this 'Butcher Mobile' driving around New York City to promote it. I was not inspired to see the movie until I got a call from one of the people who worked on TALES THAT'LL TEAR YOUR HEART OUT, from the theatre, saying, "There's footage in this movie from TALES, and you get a screen credit as 'Title sequence by,' and you're in the footage!" And I'm going, "What?" So I go down to check it out, and what they did was, they took footage from Brendan Faulkner's sequence, in which I play the zombie, and footage from one other sequence. My sequence was about the corpse of a serial killer who only kills unwed pregnant women. Crossing the street in pursuit of his latest victim, he gets hit by a car and killed, and when he returns to life, he hopes he's in time to complete the job, that his intended victim is still pregnant. And so I'm staring malevolently, and they intercut that shot with the Italian zombies from ZOMBIE HOLOCAUST staring back at me! (laughs) I guess that was the big surprise they said they were so proud of, that they'd cut in the footage so that I was making eye contact with a fellow zombie from across the ocean. Otherwise, I'm not fond of the film, but it has built up a reputation.

That's a whole new take on reflexive filmmaking.

Yes! And that's a mini-genre I've been contributing to for my whole career, so I guess I can add DR. BUTCHER to the list. Thanks.

I actually have a Terry Levine story for you. When I was in high school, living in Fredonia, I'd visit my uncle in New York City. He's always been in film distribution and he was friends with Terry. So I went up to that same office, which is how I saw the Olympic medal, and I saw the one sheet for DR. BUTCHER on the wall because I think it had just opened. He promised to mail me a copy of the poster but I never got it. Several years later, I was looking for financing for SLIME CITY, so I wrote to Terry and said, "You may not remember me, I'm Bill Thompson's nephew, and you had promised me a DR. BUTCHER poster which I never got. I'm trying to raise money for a horror film called SLIME CITY." I never got a response per se, but he did finally send me the poster!

What a great story! If I'm hearing that correctly in terms of the timeline, he might respond about the backing now, if you approach him for something else and say, "Remember me, I asked you for backing, you didn't give it but you sent me a poster for DR. BUTCHER ...." (laughs). I don't know if you know the happy ending to the Terry Levine story, but he owned that building, the Selwyn Theater or whichever one it was , and when the Disneyfication came they paid him--I've heard it was somewhere between four and forty million dollars--for his building, and he just retired and left.
(I may end a chapter here and start another one).

Earlier you told me how you met Nancy in tracking down that missing footage, and I'm using a sample page from THE PSYCHIC in my screenwriting chapter, so why don't you discuss the development of that project.

Well, I had been friends with a woman in Harrison, Shari Able, who was a psychotherapist, and she invited me--I was not part of her circle, but she invited me nonetheless--to a special seminar in which a psychic therapist was going to be talking to her and all her psychiatrist friends. And that was Nancy Fuchs, and I liked her, and I chatted with her, and she was doing some interesting things there. She was trying to teach them all about intuition. She wasn't really showing off, but I was impressed at the things she was getting from them. Some of them had almost frightened expressions on their faces; they couldn't believe what she was 'seeing' into them. And she talked about how she was a registered nurse so she had more medical insight into her gift than other psychics did, and that she did give seminars and these people might enjoy partaking of that opportunity. So it was almost more a promotional thing than anything that was directly benefiting all these psychiatrists who were there.

Now we cut to DOCUMENT OF THE DEAD, and the loss of 10% of the negative, and I call her, and she was very helpful in recovering some of the missing footage, and we became really friendly at that point, and I said, "Well, I think a film about you would be great," because her story was particularly interesting. I think most psychics, though, have interesting childhood stories because the gift manifests itself most strongly around puberty and is often very disconcerting to them. In Nancy's childhood, she didn't understand why she was seeing dead things, like while she was driving along with her parents she'd see a dog in the street and she'd say, "Look out!" but it would be the spirit of a dog that had been run over years before, you know, and she'd get her parents to swerve out of the way for nothing. It was really good material. So I suggested we write something. I sat down with her and her then-husband, I spoke with people that she had worked with in the police, that confirmed her gift in ways that were pretty astonishing. But I didn't need those kinds of facts to convince me because I saw so much evidence of what she had that was irrefutable, that it was very obvious she had a gift. I just never knew what the gift was. I think psychics are forced to surround their gift with a theory, and that all the theories that surround psychic gifts are very provincial. It's something they don't understand themselves, but they need to categorize it.

In any case, she had this rampant gift and we shot a 10-minute demo reel for the film to help raise money, starring Nancy, who we planned to star in the feature. Now it's funny, because psychics are known for not being able to help everyone else, but when it comes to using their psychic gifts on themselves, they often come up dry. First of all, she appeared in STREET TRASH as a sidewalk psychic, predicting doom for Freddy, the lead character. She sat around on the sidewalk all day covered with derelict makeup, and wouldn't you think she'd have known it wasn't going to be in the film? So in THE MELTDOWN MEMOIRS I asked her that: "If you're such a great psychic, why'd you do this? Didn't you know it was going to be cut out?" But in truth, they don't know a lot about their own lives. We spent a lot of time developing THE PSYCHIC script and that never got off the ground. That also was something I wish she'd forewarned me about, I might not have written it. But it's a good script, it's all true, it's just condensed and a few of the characters combined into one, you know, that sort of thing.

And Bill Chepil, who played the cop in STREET TRASH, was supposed to be in it?

Yeah, he would have definitely been in there. Bill Chapel, who played the cop in STREET TRASH, had in real life been a cop. He had worked with psychics and he didn't believe in them. Nonetheless, he and Nancy really got along well.

Had they known each other before this?

They had not, but she loved his cynicism. He's a lovely guy, very charming and outgoing and very original, and confidently benign in terms of his disbelief. Psychics have to have thick skins, they're used to all levels of disbelief, so she didn't mind that at all. She enjoyed sparring with him and a lot of that was written into the script; I got good material from both of them for that. And it's a shame it didn't get done, because look at what's happening now, with MEDIUM on TV and all those other shows. But Nancy, fortunately, has benefited. She's been on PSYCHIC DETECTIVE several times and has consulted on other shows, so she's doing fine with it. But it's a shame that when she was in her heyday this thing didn't get going.

Now Sukey was going to be the producer on that and you were going to direct it?

That's right. Good thing it didn't happen. I don't have a lot of faith in my directing skills even though I love BURT'S BIKERS and I certainly like DOCUMENT OF THE DEAD, because those were so incredibly simple, you know, just working with a few people at a time. But as I said, going back to my school days, I wish I had taken filmmaking in college, or had worked my way up for a few years from the bottom, instead of being thrust into a producer/director position, because there was a lot of information that I didn't have a grip on. To stand in front of crews that are so skilled, who are looking at me and asking me questions about f-stops and lighting and lenses, and me having to really think and remember and not just keep it moving quickly, was painful. I much more enjoyed producing, where I was on the periphery, where people weren't watching me, but I was watching them and making sure the film was running on schedule, than being the center of all these gifted technicians' points of view.

Well, there are all kinds of directors, though. There are directors who rely on their DP's for a lot of technical stuff and who use their AD's to keep all those people at bay...

Yes, that's true, and I certainly would have done that had that film gotten off the ground. And in future films like STREET TRASH and THE SWEET LIFE, when it was the director's first job, I was very careful about hiring crews that were very friendly and understood that it was a first-time director, and wouldn't push him around or run out of tolerance for him.

I did a film called DREAM OF THE DEAD, a TV special for IFC and Monsters HD. They called me because, apparently, Universal was not coming through to let them on the set of LAND OF THE DEAD, and someone there who knew me, and knew DOCUMENT OF THE DEAD, suggested, "How about if Roy Frumkes directs this?" And Universal came back with a "yes," so they called me and said, "Would you be interested in directing a TV special?" I knew that they said it to me assuming that I was an old hand at this kind of thing, but in fact I had never in my 40-year career been hired to direct anything. I had always initiated all the projects I worked on. Moreover, I have a problem with authority; I don't like people telling me what to do, so it never appealed to me or occurred to me to go looking for a job based on my credits. On the other hand, being offered this, it took me like 30 seconds thinking about it to decide, "You know, it could be fun doing something like this. What have I got to lose?" So I said okay.

And then I went in and what I found out was, these people knew less than me, even about shooting for TV, even though it was their channel. They were all very young. They told me they'd give me a Hi Def camera and I said, "I want two." And they said, "Why?" And I said, "You know, this is going to be the only time we're shooting this, and for a very limited amount of time. Magic things happen, you've got to have a second camera roaming around." And they reluctantly, not fighting with me, but reluctantly, gave in, and then later said that for all their future projects of this sort they would use two cameras. So I had really accumulated a lot of intuitive knowledge about how to do things properly. I was very comfortable doing that film and they took incredible care of me. They had assigned someone to me to make sure I was never too cold, they had a chair for me, I got a special suite in the hotel in Toronto and everyone else in the crew was sharing rooms. I was thinking, "I've bypassed this all my career!?" Good lord.

As I recall you actually had some very striking images and effects planned for THE PSYCHIC to depict Nancy's abilities, things you wanted to do with gels that I think were ahead of their time.

It was a carefully prepared film, and I discussed the effects with her. She was describing things that I'd never seen on film. I would run the ideas by her and show her the demos until she said, "That's it, you got it. That's what it looked like." It would certainly have been an interesting film.

What is your musical background, that you were able to contribute to the STREET TRASH score?

We had a piano when I grew up, and I had a very minimal gift for picking out songs and composing melodies. I had a tape recorder, so I would record music as I played it. And during post-production on STREET TRASH, which was a bit tense, I spent most of my time in the music studio with our composer, Rick Ulfik. It's a pretty full and lengthy score. I brought in ART OF NOISE to play for him, which was the kind of music I wanted, and Jimmy agreed. I thought that if Rick could find and sample found objects from the junkyard it would be very interesting, and he got the concept.

But when it came to other parts of the score like, oh, a melancholy theme for the kid, and his relationship with the Asian secretary, or Nicole's melt, Rick produced some really strident cues, but I felt those scenes should be mournful. He couldn't find those elements adequately. So I would just get up, go over to the electronic keyboard and play stuff, and then he'd orchestrate it. In the case of the theme for Kevin and Wendy, Nicole Potter came into the studio and sang a simple vocal note, and that was sampled in different cords and worked into the music by Rick. By that time I was dating Nicole, so that was a lot of fun.

Writing the music or dating Nicole?

(Laughs) It was a lot of fun incorporating Nicole into the score. The dating was great, too.

A lot of people probably don't realize that the first melting bum is Bruce Torbet, Frank Henenlotter's DP on BASKET CASE and BRAIN DAMAGE.

And he shot some of the Andy Warhol films. What I can say about Bruce is that he campaigned for that role pretty hard - he was in the short as well - and it was something he lived to regret. Things didn't move as swiftly as they did the first time, when there was no budget and they just rushed through the melts. This was a several-day ordeal, with him stuck in this giant toilet. He was appalled, and I think he swore never to act again after that. But to his credit, I think he's really good in it.

And you were involved in James Lorinz's project, SWIRLEE.

Lorinz took some of his money from CITY, the TV series--he spent a good deal of his money, I think he had two Jaguars, he kind of went high on the hog there for a while--but he had this project he had done in his third year at SVA, about a man made out of ice cream. I don't think he played the ice cream man in the SVA film. And it was in black and white as I recall. I also recall that he asked me to get Burt Young to be in it as Swirlee's roommate, who in the feature was played by David Caruso. I called Young and I said, "Look, I got a student here and he's doing this wonderful project and we'd love to have you in it," and he says, "Send me the script." I sent it to him, and I called him back, and he said, "This is a really good thing that you're reaching out on behalf of your student. I really like that. I ain't gonna do it!, but it's good that you asked, it was nice of you to try."

I remember Jimmy saying that you guys wanted Burt Young to be in STREET TRASH as well, as the collision yard owner.

Yeah, actually it was Black Suit I was thinking of, the cameo role, a three-day role for somebody, that's what I was thinking of. I had written one role for a guest star who would be in and out in three days. Burt Young read the script and wanted to do it, but he wanted to play Bronson, and I was afraid. I felt that we couldn't guarantee what days things would be shot on, I just felt that the thing wasn't necessarily going to go smoothly, whereas I knew that we could contain the Black Suit role to three days. So we didn't use Burt Young.

That's funny that you chose Vic Noto as a more reliable lead than Burt Young...

(laughing) Truthfully, Vic Noto was not my choice. He gave a terrific reading and all, but we picked a bigger guy who looked more the part, and the first day there, Jimmy was outside working with him, I was in the warehouse, and Jimmy came up and said, "Hey, man, this guy's not taking orders, he's not listening to me." I said, "Well, then, we'll have to do something about that." And I went upstairs and called Vic, or maybe Frank Farel (Production Manager) called Vic, but as I remember it, it was me, and I said, "Look, we're actually shooting now. I wonder if you'd still play the part. We have a guy here and he's not working out, and you were our second choice." And Vic said, "Hey, man, I'm an actor. I'll be there," just like that. Nicole came in the next day for makeup, and she had met this other guy and did a table reading with him. And she's in the makeup chair, and Vic is in the other chair, and he's saying, "Yeah, I'm playing Bronson." And she's looking at him like, "Who are you?" It was her first day on the set and there was someone else in the other role (laughs).

While I agree that Lorinz and Darrow were the live wires of the film and kind of stole the show, I actually think that Vic and Nicole were the two great actors in the film. They were well matched and they were brilliant. Vic was someone without professional training and Nicole was someone with solid professional training who was also an Off Broadway director, and she thought he was just fantastic. She kept saying, "Oh, look what he's doing, these are classic exercises." Like there's a scene when he's sitting on the throne at night, having an hallucination, and he's saying, "Who's on watch? Who's on watch? Who's on watch? Who's on watch?" He's doing this over and over, each time screaming it in a different way, and she says, "That's a classic exercise, how many different ways you can read a line with passion." I mentioned this to Vic and he said, "No, man, I just made that up, I don't know what she's talking about!" (laughs) But their styles melded, I've got to say.

The short version of SWIRLEE became a longer version, which would be the first act for the proposed feature version?

Yes, James, once he had this money, asked me to produce it. Caruso was his pal and was over here a lot and I'd occasionally run across them together. Jimmy was staying here in this apartment while my son Christopher was down in Houston for a year. It was a fun year, I've gotta say. All the girls who played the hookers in FRANKENHOOKER were over here, too, pretty much doing what they were doing in the film. But that's another story...

So I said, "Well, with the money you've got, let's do the first act (Rocco had written the script), and see if we can raise the money." He said, "Okay." Kelly Gleason, who had been a student of mine, and who was a really terrific makeup artist (she's now the head of the makeup union), she said she would have done it for free, she was so excited to create a makeup like that. But everyone did get paid, no one worked for free, same as with STREET TRASH. I mean, they didn't get much, but I believe people should get something, not just food and transportation.

We shot the first 10 or 15minutes' worth, cut it together, and started showing it around. Everyone liked it. See, that's the thing: all the studios we showed it to came back with offers. But they also came back with their story departments, or their marketing departments, having decided that this should be a children's film, like NINJA TURTLES. Nobody would go for James' version, which was kind of like ELEPHANT MAN meets RAGING BULL, something realistic, almost like a Scorsese film, only with a guy whose head is made out of ice cream. To his credit, and also to his loss, because obviously it never happened, James refused; he held onto his vision. And this thing has become an underground cult classic. There was that book that came out called The 50 Best Films Never Made and this was one of them.

I think it's brilliant. I've watched that short so many times since we screened it at that mini Frumkes festival.

Your feelings about it made me very happy, and him too. The Cinema Wasteland festival in Cleveland flew in Bill and Mike and James and me and put us up, and we were the featured attractions of the show. I know that Bill and James, particularly James because of the reception THE SWEET LIFE had in Buffalo, didn't believe there was a following for STREET TRASH. I don't think they really understood what's happening out there, and when all these thousands of people lined up, they were flabbergasted. Bill had initially declined to come, and he finally agreed to come with his son accompanying him to keep him company. Only I was aware of what was happening with the film after all these years, and when we got back, Mike and James both had been rejuvenated by the experience. Mike asked me if he and I could do a graphic novel of STREET TRASH and I agreed. That's proceeding wonderfully; he's at the top of his form as an artist. And then James said, "Jeez, let's finish SWIRLEE." I said, "Fine, but I have to tell you, time has passed. I'd like to have you--and I'll help you--write an updated version that's darker. I'd like this thing to be more of a noir and more mean spirited, maybe along the lines of STREET TRASH." He said, "Great," and he's about halfway through it now, and I'm committed to trying to get it off the ground.

What was THE JOHNSONS?

I was made the creative head of a Dutch development company in New York - RA Films. I was given $100,000 to spend in a year and so I threw some of that into an office with really nice furniture and a small staff of people I had previously worked with, and I said to Rocco, "Let's each write a script. Let's develop two projects. I'm in charge, so I'll pick them." One of them was THE SUBSTITUTE, which I wrote, and the other one, THE JOHNSONS, for which I had written a treatment, and Rocco took it and created the script. It was called THE JOHNSON-BLUES. It was based on the inbred hillbilly clan in the Adirondack mountains called the Jackson-Whites, but since they really exist and I didn't want them coming down to New York for revenge like they do in the script, I altered their name to a different color. Now this was a Dutch company. After developing both of these, to the extent that beautiful business plans had been created, and to the point where they were willing to pay Glenda Jackson a lot of money for her commitment to the project, she agreed to do it without the money because her son felt she should do a horror movie, and then she got us to Oliver Reed to play the head of the clan, and he agreed. With that and THE SUBSTITUTE, we had two really good packages.

And then the owner of the company decided to just dissolve it, and as a parting gift, as a kind of bonus, they gave me THE SUBSTITUTE, which they owned. They just gave me all rights to it, and they took THE JOHNSON-BLUES back to Holland. I would say it was a very successful venture because both films got made. In the case of THE SUBSTITUTE, I did really well off that and it turned into a franchise. In the case of THE JOHNSON-BLUES, Paul Verhoeven having left Holland, their number one director was Rudolf van den Berg, and he did the film. It underwent a complete rewrite, and when Rocco and I finally saw the finished film, we were utterly bewildered by the weirdest things they'd left in from our version. The names of the characters were the same, the garbage strike was there, a number of things that we had written were there, but the basic concept had really mutated into being about these seven bloody fetuses that grew up and became mutants. None of that was in our script.

A couple years later, Rudolf van den Berg was in New York, and was interviewed by FANGORIA. He found out during the interview that we existed and he called us and he said, "I didn't think that those were real names, I was just given this project." We got together, and he was a lovely guy, and it was through him that I got to do the script with Jodorowsky - networking in this industry is amazing, and I've really done very little of it. In my case it's been more like good luck; people come to me. But we all did the commentary track in L.A., supervised by Bill Lustig, for THE JOHNSONS when Anchor Bay released it. It was me, Rocco, and Rudolf, and it was really funny because Rocco is a very glib, sassy, cynical kind of guy, and Rudolf is sweet guy and doesn't have total command of the English language, so that he would have to think about it when asked questions.

Well, we were going very fast during this commentary track session, and Rocco would say stuff like, "So Rudolf, I hear that you originally were going to have the lead actress pull out this huge, bloody tampon and beat these mutants to death with it," and Rudolf, his eyes staring widely, because he was trying to digest the statement, and it really wasn't even slightly true, would say, "Yes, we shot the scene but didn't use it..." And at one point Rocco said, "Yes, FANGORIA's going to promote this, they're going to be putting out this new product, Fangorios, and it's going to be shaped like a bloody tampon," and they cut that all out. Lustig and his people in the booth were just shaking their heads. That was THE JOHNSONS.

Let's use THE SUBSTITUTE as an example of how screenwriting collaborations work, and how these things can actually become profitable.

THE SUBSTITUTE I had written as a vehicle for Bill Chepil, which I thought I would produce after STREET TRASH. During the last week of the filming of STREET TRASH, we were out in Jersey, shooting the liquor store sequences, and M. Django's meltdown, when Rocco called me. Rocco'd been a student of mine, and he'd had a writing partner named Rico who was also in my class. So it was Rocco and Rico. And they had done a number of scripts together. They had a different approach to team writing than I did. Whenever I worked with someone I would never be sitting and working with them except in the formative stages before we started writing. After a few weeks kicking the idea around, one of us would go off and do the treatment, then the other one would do the first draft of the script, then the first one would do the second draft, etc. And we'd both know we were there to fall back on if we were stuck, and we'd be motivating each other as well. It's good to know you have someone out there waiting to read what you've done.

Rocco and Rico had rented an office and they went to work every day from 9 to 5 as if they were being paid to write, and Rocco would pace and Rico would sit at the typewriter and they would knock this stuff out. And then Rico got married and decided to go straight, in the sense that supporting his family became most important, and he had to drop out of the writing. So Rocco called me out of the blue and said, "Listen, Rico's kind of deserting me. Would you be interested in doing some writing with me?" And I said, "Well, let's get together for a drink." So he came over to the location and we went into a bar across the street. And I thought it was a great idea because I was not motivated to write. I'm motivated to just enjoy myself and watch DVDs, and I tend to need someone to want to write something with me. I need someone to motivate me. So this seemed like a great idea. In addition, he provided a specific skill to the team which I didn't have; we each had gifts - I was a good idea man, and he was great with dialogue. We had different skills to contribute, different parts of our brain working. So we signed a deal where not only were we writing partners, but everything we had written to date would become shared material, even if only one of us had written it. And in the future, no matter who wrote stuff - for instance, I wrote the Jodorowsky script alone, it's not Rocco's type of material; and he wrote THE SWEET LIFE alone, I merely served as an editorial voice. But we'd receive shared credit on everything, and that was useful because we'd often be writing two things at the same time.

In any case, he looked through my file cabinet, in the process of reading everything I had done, and found THE SUBSTITUTE. And he said, "This is a Hollywood film. I'm telling you, man. Except you've got to change the ending. He can't die at the end because this is going to be a franchise. He's got to go on to other schools." And I said, "Well, how about you just write the new ending and don't show it to me?" So he added this scene, and in the script that we sent out to Hollywood, it had my ending, which was very bleak, but then you turn the page, and there's one little word in normal type, not even in a large font, in the middle of the page, which says "Or," and then you turn to the next page, and there's Rocco's ending. What we learned later was that as it made the rounds, readers or story editors or whoever was getting it, would tear my ending out of the script so that only Rocco's would remain. At first there still wasn't a sale, but then a film came out called DANGEROUS MINDS with Michelle Pfeifer, about a military career woman who goes into a high school class and helps them out. It was only remotely like THE SUBSTITUTE, but it was a huge hit, and so, as is Hollywood's want, they were immediately on a quest to find something as close to it as possible, and there we were. Following the box office success of DANGEROUS MINDS, THE SUBSTITUTE was immediately grabbed. It went on the fast track.

It was optioned by Live Entertainment. They were the biggest video distribution company at the time and they had just decided to go into actual production, probably to create product to feed themselves. They wanted to start with two films, and the reader's report, which I have, was so laudatory it was as if we had done it ourselves. They told us they wanted to do this in a hurry, that they were going to go into preproduction while we were doing the rewrite. We didn't believe them. I had been around too long. But I was wrong; they were serious.

However, as the project was just rushed down the line, it was miserably tampered with. They made us do a few rewrites, which we tried to keep as honest as we could. Then when the director came on, he brought in his own guy - Alan Ormsby - to do a rewrite, which I thought diminished the film quite a bit, although in fairness to him there were some good scenes, but there were an equal amount that were not better than what we'd written, and a number of scenes that were inappropriate. They went down and shot it in Florida. When we saw it - we got into an exhibitors' screening, months before the critics' screenings - we felt it was good. Not great, but we felt it was a good film and it had a nice feel to it, and stood a chance of holding for a second week, which is a defining thing for a film to do in this country. It opened second in the U.S. It was a surprise to the industry, and it got a lot of attention. It was the kind of thing where on TV they'd say, "And in the top box office this week, a film no one's heard of, a surprise sleeper, THE SUBSTITUTE." And whereas we had been unable to get an agent until that point, suddenly we were being asked to join various agencies and we went out to meetings.

So the success of that film turned our careers around in terms of how we were perceived. It didn't do much for us in terms of money, outside of how lucrative THE SUBSTITUTE franchise was. There were three sequels, and on the first film we had a really good lawyer, a lawyer I can't afford any more, but I saw that this was an important deal that we were doing, and that we had better get some kind of terrific contract, and he locked us into the film's genesis in a way that I'm sure they were just disgusted with at Live. I still get checks for it, I mean good checks, every three months, for that damned series. It's almost my retirement fund.

If I remember correctly, you wrote only the first two sequels.

We wrote the first three films, and not the fourth, but by then the franchise had changed hands, it had gone from Live to Artisan [and it's now owned by Lion's Gate], and Artisan had apparently not read the fine print on the original contract. They were only looking at the contracts for the third one, which had been the first they'd done with us, and they didn't realize that in the original agreement it stipulated that if we weren't asked to do each one, we were still entitled to half our original salary. Well, they had their own person - a friend of the director's - they wanted to do it, so they didn't ask us, and our lawyer said, "Don't make a fuss. Just wait until it's done and I'll make the call." And he did, and we got our money. And I'm sure the head accountant there lost her job over that deal.

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Roy Frumkes is the editor of Films in Review.