As I've mentioned in previous installments of this column, CHEAP SCARES! Low Budget Horror Filmmakers Share Their Secrets is book I've written which McFarland & Company will publish soon (before Halloween, it appears). The book is comprised 50% of my own experiences working on low budget horror films, and the other 50% consists of in-depth interviews with other independent horror filmmakers. In most cases, I interviewed my subjects over the phone for two hours, painfully transcribed our conversations, then cut them down to a manageable length.

In the case of Roy Frumkes, my Film Production instructor at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, best known for directing DOCUMENT OF THE DEAD and writing and producing STREET TRASH, the conversations totaled closer to four hours. Roy gave me wonderful and revealing stories that I'd never read in other interviews with him. Editing a book is very much like editing a movie; you have to maintain the narrative's focus at all times. At one point, I considered cutting him out of the book entirely and pitching his complete interview as an entirely separate piece, but too much of the material was integral to my filmmaking book. In the end, I preserved the most relevant material for the book (it's still the longest interview), and am presenting the other material--the personal, "Origin of a Filmmaker" anecdotes--to you now.

What role did movies play in your life before you went to college?

My grandfather was Houdini's booking agent. He was the leading agent in the Keith Circuit, which was the largest booking agency in the country, and Houdini was the biggest act in the history of vaudeville. Sadly, Houdini died prematurely. But my grandfather had him for a few years. My grandfather and I got along really well. I don't know why my older brother Lewis didn't go into the biz; he went into my father's business, which was women's coats and suits. But I was enthralled by my grandfather's stories. He was an older guy who acted young and most of his friends were quite a bit younger than him, and that's not dissimilar from the way I turned out. Most of my friends are a good twenty years younger than me. Anyway, I was regaled by his wonderful stories and I wasn't terribly interested in my father's line of work

And I was a troubled kid, medically. I had one medical malfunction after another throughout my childhood, so I did spend a lot of time in bed. When I was five I had polio, and that was before the Salk vaccine. That was a year out of my life where I just laid there staring out a window - a beautiful big window with this magnificent tree with squirrels and stuff - and just created fantasy worlds for myself. That disease was so threatening that they quarantined me on the second floor of the house and everyone moved as far away from me as possible.

The rest of my family was all living downstairs in the living room. And so I was alone most of the time, just with my thoughts, and I'm sure that fueled my imagination. I'm not convinced that's what led me towards horror, however. Previously I'd had something called arythroblastosis when I was born, more commonly known as the "RH Factor." My mother's blood was a very rare O and my father's blood destroyed hers, so that by the time I was born I had no blood, and I was the second case in history saved that they knew about ahead of time. My doctor made the medical books because of me. As a result, actually, that condition ceased to be a life-threatening problem, they knew how to deal with it in the future.

Where did you live when you were quarantined?

I lived the first thirteen years in New Rochelle, New York, less than an hour from Manhattan. It was where Thomas Paine lived, and George M. Cohan, and it was a charming little town back then, and we lived not far from a lake, where I drowned a cat once. God, I'm still riddled with guilt about that. Some kid on the block cheated me so I snuck into his house and stole his cat and drowned it.

Did he settle up with you?

No, he never knew I did it. It was kind of like... a nameless revenge. The cat shouldn't have gotten the brunt of it. But I was eight or nine years old. It was a lovely street to grow up on, outside of incidents like that. The side of our property where that tree was, that vast tree, that universe of a tree, when years later I went back to look at it, the people who bought the house sold the property on the side, so there's another house there now instead of the tree. So that part of my childhood's gone.

And then I moved to Harrison, New York, which was upscale. My father came over from Russia when he was one year old in 1899. He and his brothers started a garment company called Monarch Garments and did extremely well. It designed and manufactured upper middle class women's coats and suits, and so my father was upwardly mobile, and we moved from a lovely house in New Rochelle to an even more prestigious one in Harrison, which is a considerably more wealthy community. And there I spent the next 13 years, until I got married and moved into New York City, where I've been ever since.

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I guess it's worth noting, that one of the reasons that I'm legitimately an upbeat person and rarely upset or unhappy with life, and genuinely shocked and delighted with the career I've had, is because one of the illnesses I had, which had my poor parents terribly upset, was Tourette's Syndrome, before it was given the name. That was when I was seven or eight, and they took me to two psychiatrists who told them that I should be institutionalized, that I was incurable, and that I would never be able to function in society. Unable to accept that verdict, they took me to a third guy, hoping for a more optimistic opinion, and he said, "Nah, he'll outgrow it." I still remember going to the third guy; I remember him playing games with me on the floor and observing me.

But Lewis said that he could go into my grade school, I was in second or third grade, and it was a two story building, an extensive building in New Rochelle, and he could stand in the hallway and listen and he could tell what classroom I was in because of all the noises I was making. Tourette's at that age isn't cursing, it's barking, making inarticulate, uncontrollable sounds. I was told, many years later, that I brought it under control myself by starting to write in notebooks when I was in high school. I've had a new notebook every month since I was sixteen, and I was told it was a way of ordering my life, by compressing everything into these pages and controlling the urge. That particular phenomenon, the Tourette's urge, is like the Monster from the Id in FORBIDDEN PLANET. That's an exact analogy, it's this thing just trying to get loose and it's lurking inside of me all the time. So considering the things I've had to deal with physically, and still do, I'm amazed that I've had the career I've had. Amazed and really happy about it.

Going into high school, were you involved with the drama department?

Yeah, particularly at camp. It wasn't until college, I think, that I was writing screenplays. I really was hoping I'd impress my grandfather, who was still alive, but the kind of stuff I was writing, which was on the level of STREET TRASH, was material he didn't know what to make of. I feel bad for having submitted him to that. Underneath it all he was conservative and I was showing him all these really obscene things that I was proud of.

However, even as late as college I had no real faith that I would have any kind of career in the industry. Everybody in my town, Harrison, where I was at that time, believed in me. My father got me a 16m Bell and Howell camera and when I was in high school I was shooting movies, with stories, using the kids at school. I was the only one doing that, so everyone believed I would have a career in it except me, you know? And then, here's something interesting also, which is odd: someone in my family, I won't get specific here, but someone in my immediate family, owned Columbia Pictures.

This is while I was in college. In fact, before I went to college I went up and had a chat with Abe Schneider, who was then president of Columbia, which is not the same as owning it, in fact he worked for this person in my family if one would examine the hierarchy of power. And he advised me to major in anything but film. And I do believe, and have believed for a long time, since I got out of college, that he did that maliciously, because I think film school would have been a good idea. I don't think I ever got the basics in film that I should have.

I went to Tulane University from 1962 to 1966, and I majored in English and minored in Creative Writing, and certainly that was helpful with my screenwriting, which is the only area of filmmaking with which I feel comfortable, but I should have gone to an NYU. There were film schools then. There weren't as many, you know, but they existed, and I believe I was intentionally misled because of some antagonism that he had toward this person in my family. And that person unfortunately died before she was able to help me because I know that I would have had a very different trajectory into the industry. But it never came to pass; nothing of value ever came from that remarkable connection.

Did you make any student films?

At Tulane? No, I didn't. I don't remember there being any film department, or any film classes. I was the entertainment editor of the school newspaper. It was called The Tulane Hullabaloo. And New Orleans at that time, in the 60s, before Cajun and Creole cooking had extended beyond the state, the city was very provincial. They were into themselves, they were into Cajun and Creole culture, and they were into jazz, period. They were interested in nothing else but their own eccentricities. Beignets, Hurricanes (the drink), Mardi Gras, Spanish Moss, things involved with local pride. Yet because of its pictorial beauty, lots of motion pictures--Hollywood films--came to shoot there. Back then in the 60s they still had Spanish moss hanging everywhere. The city looked mythological. There was no place like it anywhere else on this planet. Spanish moss, incidentally, is a fungus, and a few years after I left Tulane, a blight hit the area and it all died, so that at least in the city there was none left. The last time I was there, about 10 years ago, it looked like a colorful, dirty city.

And now that Katrina has washed the contents of all the graveyards into the water supply, I wonder what it'll turn into. There's a zombie-like scenario just waiting to be developed. But in any case, lots of films came to shoot there and, wanting to promote their presence, they would call the Tulane entertainment editor rather than the town papers, who weren't that interested. So I made a lot of good contacts in the industry while I was at Tulane. THE CINCINATTI KID was shot there, HOTEL with Rod Taylor, THIS PROPERTY IS CONDEMNED... I would get to know the publicists, and then I'd keep in touch with them so that when I got out of college the people I knew were in the publicity departments, and it was kind of useful.

It sounds as good as being on Law Review if you're studying law at Harvard.

Oh, that's true. As soon as I got out of college I joined the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures. I was the youngest person there for many years. It was an old, respected organization, non-industry related, but in the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s, it says, "Passed by the National Board of Review" on every film. They were a right-minded group of citizens who saw, as early as 1909, that censorship was happening to films in an aesthetically brutal way. This was even before features were being made. The local communities were cutting films, religious leaders were going up in the projections booths and eviscerating the prints, and they made an attempt - not as political or aggressive an attempt as the MPAA, much more benign - to act as a referee between the industry and the community, and they succeeded, and for a long time they were a very important adjunct to the film industry. So I joined them and I wrote for their magazine [Films in Review ] for thirty years before I did THE SUBSTITUTE, made some money, and bought the magazine from them.

What non-film jobs did you hold as a young man?

Everything I did after I got out of college was film-related. The first thing I did was manage movie theatres for the United Artists circuit. I managed a movie theatre in Mamaroneck, New York, and I used to see a very young Matt Dillon as a junior high school kid walking around, looking exactly the same as he does today.

The Mamaroneck Playhouse gig was interesting. It was a huge old movie palace, not yet broken up into mini-theatres as it is today, and the manager who had been there had been there forever, since the 20s, and he had lived in an actual three-room apartment in the theatre, under the balcony, and as manager I was given that apartment to live in. I figured this was going to be the wildest bachelor pad imaginable, that after this huge theatre closed at night I would drag women up to the balcony, open the door, and entertain them in a three-room bachelor's pad hanging underneath the projection booth. Well, I never spent a single night in the damned place! The first night that I locked up and went upstairs to this place, and the creakings echoed in that darkened theatre, it was like I was in THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA. I literally ran out of the theater, completely terrified.

However, I did take advantage of the candy counter girls. I actually dragged one candy counter girl behind the screen and was having sex with her when the film was playing. The screen was porous, so the audience couldn't see you because the brightness of the film reflected back at them, but from behind the screen I could look out and see a hundred people staring at me and this girl.

What was the next step?

Well, then I worked for a publicity company called Great Scott. I was in charge of the only Academy Award campaign ever conducted for a porno film. It was Gerard Damiano's MEMORIES WITHIN MISS AGGIE. He had already done THE DEVIL IN MISS JONES and DEEP THROAT. MISS AGGIE was a vulgar film, though it had artistic pretensions, which he decided to promote himself. He put up a reasonable amount of money to have this Academy Award campaign conducted. I was in charge of organizing the screenings for the East Coast Academy members and one of them was Boris Kaufman, who shot ON THE WATERFRONT and won the Academy Award for Best B&W Cinematography for that film. I revered this guy, I thought he was one of the great cinematographers. He was about eighty-years-old. When I sent out the screening invitations, he called and said, "Mr. Frumkes, this is Boris Kaufman, I'd like to come." And I said, "I'm begging you not to come. This film is awful, I'm just doing it to get the director some publicity." He says, "No, I feel I should see everything. My wife and I would like to come." I said, "Please, I'll pay you, just don't come!" (laughs) I finally discouraged him, but Tony Randall showed up and had his coat zipped up over his head as he ran in (laughs). That was the last nine-to-five job I had. After that, it was all struggling to survive in the industry.

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On his partnership with Harry Hurwitz:

And when we did THE PROJECTIONIST we used, jeez, maybe 20 minutes of film clips representing every genre and phase, from BIRTH OF A NATION up to the man on the moon. And all the studios, believing that we might know something that they didn't, gave us everything we wanted in exchange for 1% of the film. Each studio took 1%. Warner Brothers sent over the original negative for MALTESE FALCON--I mean, we were looking at John Huston's splices, we were sitting there saying, "This is insane, that they'd let this material out of the vaults." We made a decent film, and because of their participation we made it very inexpensively. It would have cost several million if we'd made it today, when we would have to buy the rights to all those clips, you know? But we got them for free.

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After directing DOCUMENT OF THE DEAD on location at the Monroeville Mall:

When we had the 66-minute version of DOCUMENT edited, and we went to Noelle Penraat to do the negative cut, she informed us that about 10% of the negative was missing. Now we had stored the negative at SVA, and I became really concerned that just through slipshod behavior some of it may have gotten thrown out. Nevertheless, I went to a psychic, a very well known psychic, and Suki went to a psychic, too, who worked for the police department, and who had worked on the Boston Strangler case. He was very famous and he was too busy to help us, but he did tell her that I was going to have a problem with my right leg and this other stuff that we didn't need to hear. My psychic connection in New Jersey was Nancy Orlen. She had made it to the National Enquirer, and in those days, for a psychic, that was like winning the Nobel prize. She told me that it had been maliciously stolen and that some of it was destroyed and would never come back. She named two people, and it wasn't like "Tall, curly hair, walks with a slight limp sometimes..."-- she specifically named them without any prompting from me, and I knew them both.

But I believed she was picking it up from my mind because they did not know each other, and I felt that she was wrong about it, that she was just picking up every possible clue that was floating around in my aura. However, then she said, "Wait a minute. There is a small piece coming back. Not a lot. There's a small piece, it was mislabeled, it's in a little silver can. Does that mean anything?" I said, "Sure it does, all film is stored in little silver cans. And they're not really made of silver, but they're in these metal cans that are silver-looking." She said, "It's where you looked already. You have to go back. And it's mislabeled."

I went to Technicolor, who had done our processing. They had also done DAWN OF THE DEAD. I said to Joey Violante, who was the key post guy at the lab, the guy that would accept and sign in footage, "I need to get into the vault." He said, "Why's that?" Now, these guys are not exactly like your knee-slapping, fun, open-minded, liberal guys. These are hardcore, working-class, union guys. I said, "Well, this psychic told me that some of my film is in the vault, mislabeled." And all these guys are just standing there staring at me. It was like a scene out of THE PRODUCERS when the Nazi Busby Berkeley dance goes off. And Joey deserves a lot of credit because he said, "Okay," although he didn't believe it for a minute.

And when he opened the door the negative vault, there were two million feet of film in there. I'm looking in and there's RAGING BULL and a hundred other films of that nature. And I walk in, right to a shelf - and I mean literally within one minute - and there's a little silver can and it says, DOCUMENT OF THE DAWN. They had mis-labeled it, combining the name of my film and DAWN OF THE DEAD, which was also one of their jobs. There were 22 shots we needed in that can. 22 out of 60 came back. We never did locate the rest.

I actually chose to go to SVA because my uncle sent me a flyer for DOCUMENT OF THE DEAD, and the first DVD I ever owned was a copy of the first release.

Is that right?

Yeah, you gave it to me at the premiere of NAKED FEAR, and I don't think I even bought a DVD player until a year later.

Wow. Jeez, that's wonderful. That's really nice.

I'd like to jump back and discuss BURT'S BIKERS, even though it's not horror, because you directed it and it's a very unusual film that most people won't get to see unless it gets some kind of special DVD release.

I am doing a restoration, and I'm about halfway through. I had a new negative made for about $3,000 off of the A and B roll. They did a very nice job. But for me to put it on DVD, for protection I'm going to have to do Hi Def, and we're talking about $15,000, so I'm kind of holding off on that for the time being. But I have this new negative, which will be good for a long time. And I have one check print which is about 90% correct, you know there are some shots that are too dark and stuff.

I showed it last year in a film festival which is called the Sprout Film Festival which is about disabled people and it had a huge response, it really went over wonderfully and a lot of people from it showed up. Jimmy Calalhan, who shot it and was our second camera guy on DOCUMENT came up to me, he wrote me a letter actually, and he said, "You know, I had no idea when I was doing this how timeless it was going to be and how it holds up today, and you did a marvelous job, I think it's the best thing I've ever worked on." And this guy is working constantly on PBS and doing these huge productions and stuff, and that was very touching.

Because back then, I'm low key and I'm easygoing, and I don't think the crew had faith in me. I mean, they were getting paid a little, and I picked them well, but I think they didn't know what they were doing, you know, having lunch out under a tree with all these handicapped children, and lunch boxes. These were aspiring union guys, and I would hide these miniature liquor bottles in their lunch boxes so they'd at least be able to have a shot and the kids wouldn't notice. We shot over a period of a couple of months and there were real problems with the children, not because they were handicapped, they were terrific, they were bright, their intellects had just been frozen at a certain age, but up to that age they were really bright kids and they understood blocking and they memorized lines.

We started with the three cameras going at all times and after about three weeks I abandoned it and just went with the one because they were fine, they understood the medium. But, genetically, they were more prone to illness, so it was a rare day that I could get them all together. In addition, there were rules about how many hours in a row I could even sue them. So I would get them two hour in the morning, then two hours in the afternoon, so that would give me half to a third of a normal shooting day on any of my other films, so it really stretched in terms of time.

But Jimmy Callahan has a real artistic eye. I wanted a Technicolor look, very different from DOCUMENT OF THE DEAD, which I wanted blue and gritty look. We strung extension cords into every classroom in that school building, it was the middle school in Julian Curtis Public School in Greenwich, Connecticut, to get enough power to light the classroom. We were flooding the place with light and then stopping down, so that the colors became super saturated and then we picked beautiful pinks and luminous greens for the kids to wear, we lit them so the big shadows, genetic shadows under their eyes disappeared, they looked charming. It was really something. Did I show that one up in Buffalo?

No, you showed it to us in class, certainly, and when you came up here I requested a copy to show my wife Tamar and you gave me a VHS copy.

I don't know it looks on VHS, but on film and on DVD it is a beautiful looking film.

Well, it's such an emotional film that it still worked despite the format. Why don't you go ahead and describe what the film is and how it came about.

It's a docudrama. It had a screenplay but it used all real people. It was the real people having to learn lines and playing themselves. I spent months in advance with them. The project was brought to me by Suki Rafael, she was my producer at the time. She had co-produced DOCUMENT OF THE DEAD and she felt I should get away from horror and broaden my chances as a director, which I think is something a producer is supposed to do, and her father, Burt, was a pioneer in the field of special education and in particular was very proud of a biking method he had created for handicapped children. And she suggested I do a film about this, and I said, "Jeez, I don't know any Down Syndrome kids, I've never met one, I'm afraid of them, to be honest with you. There's something about them that's off putting." She said, "Well, do me favor. Come up and just sit in the back of the class for a day." And I said, "Well, okay." I came up, and anyway it was really a revelation, what he had done with these children.

When I arrived they were conducting a mock marriage; one of the kids was marrying another, they had set up all the chairs like in a church, and the two kids were walking up, and all the other kids were the families, Burt was the priest conducting the marriage, and it was a riot. I mean, the kids were funny and each had a totally different personality and I was utterly convinced. I came out of there and I said to Suki, "If you can get me the money I need, and if you can get me complete creative freedom because I'm going to do a comedy." And at that time there had only been one other film about the subject that was funny and it had been cut to shreds. It was by John Cassavetes, and was called A CHILD IS WAITING, and the studio, United Artists, when they saw his cut, were afraid of how an audience was going to react to mentally handicapped kids being funny, and they just cut the film to pieces and I know he disowned it.

So she got me the creative freedom, and there were times when the community was very against it, they didn't like what they were seeing, because the money was raised very quickly. People that had handicapped children put up the money in Greenwich. Greenwich was the wealthiest community in the United States. They had the best school system for these kinds of kids. And they had put up the money, but also the local corporations, were anxious to be involved, to just give money, just to have their names on the film. So Pepseco and Amex and those places gave money, with no interest in getting the money back. They just gave us the money.

And we worked through a parent based organization called GARC--Greenwich Association for Retarded Citizens. The term "retarded" is politically incorrect these days, but that's what it was called. And they acted as our executive producer; they would take our proposal and go to these organizations. Within a month we had the money to shoot. It was unlike anything, there was no precedent for the film, so there was no way of knowing how long it would take, what kind of footage we'd get, so we did go over budget and had to keep--again, it's something I'm very familiar with--we had to keep raising money--but it wasn't difficult in this instance.

Anyplace we wanted to shoot, there was a roller rink in New Rochelle, outdoors, because the kids could all skate, they just gave it to us. "Just take it, have it." Playland, a big amusement park in Rye, New York, I wanted part of the ending there, this lyrical third act, to be shot in an amusement park--they just gave it to us. "You can run all the rides, Roy. You do anything you want." I will never have that experience again, you know, where because of the subject matter everyone gave us anything we wanted for free, including the Beatles giving us the rights to the song "I Will" for free. It was amazing.

And it turned out well. That was a nice experience. And I think it's very much me, I think the film is very much my film, it's filled with things I wanted to do all my life, and it has my sense of humor, and the lyrical ending and all. I'm proud of it and I don't think it's out of place in my filmography.

Did it go directly to NBC?

Yeah, we started showing it around. It was 78 minutes ling and we were going to try to get it out theatrically, and then a film called BEST BOY, a great film about a mentally handicapped adult, shot by his cousin. It was a grainy, unpleasant looking film, but it was a very powerful, wonderful film. I called the director. It had opened theatrically and it had won the Academy Award for Best Documentary, and then it opened. I said to him, "How'd it do?" and he said, "We lost every cent. Everything we put into it, everything we put into marketing it, we lost it all because no one wants to pay $7.00 to see a movie about a handicapped person." I got off and I turned around to Dennis, my editor, and I said, "We're cutting this to an hour for TV. It's ridiculous to try to release the film and no one's going to go and we're going to lose more money."

We spent another month in the editing room, we cut it down to 55 minutes, and we started showing it around, and typical of this film, at NBC, the woman who was in charge of programming, her daughter taught handicapped children and a deal was made on the spot and that was it. What I am sad about is that for some reason it never came out big on VHS or anything. It did go to libraries and it did go to organizations like GARC but I think it was worthy of more than that, and I'm going to see what I can do myself. I contacted GARC and I told them I'm putting this money in myself, money that they wouldn't, to restore it, and I wanted them to turn all rights over to me and they did, They just wrote me a nice letter. They're still entitled to get their money back, but it's now mine to do with (as I please), and that's good.

This resurgent interest in '80s horror films that's helped us both has taught me that timing may be everything, but if it's not with you on a project once, it may be with you for that same project at another time. Everything may get a second chance if you persevere.

Yeah, yeah! Really.

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There's more to come--not to mention the actual book!

(c)2008 Gregory Lamberson