BARNSTORMING AMERICA WITH THE TALL MAN
What Avco Embassy Pictures lacked in financial resources they made up for with sheer enthusiasm and marketing savvy. It was a thrill to watch James Spitz, Avco’s distribution chief, as he rallied his sales troops after a marketing screening of Phantasm. “Gentlemen, the name of this movie is not Phantasm. It is MONEY!” All his regional reps burst into cheers!
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Then Avco Embassy received some devastating news. The Motion Picture Association of America Classification and Ratings Administration had reviewed Phantasm and slammed us with an X rating for violence due to the blood level in the sphere sequence. An X rating would have destroyed the film’s commercial value. The sphere sequence defined Phantasm in the minds of audiences, and if it was eviscerated, the movie would not have had the impact it did.
At first, I refused to make any cuts. The person at Avco Embassy who was in charge of dealing with the MPAA was Jon Davison (who later produced great movies like Robocop and Starship Troopers). We worked with Jon and it seemed to us that cutting the blood sequences shorter actually made the effect more violent. Finally we gave up and tried the old editor’s trick of making our print look worked on by scuffing it up and making a lot of splice marks without deleting any actual blood shots. The rating board saw right through that trick and the X rating was confirmed. Luckily a sharp and savvy executive named Walter Keenan over at Avco Embassy personally made a final plea to the MPAA and succeeded in getting us the R rating. I also heard a story later that, supposedly, Walter went to the meeting armed with an expensive bottle of Scotch whisky, which helped grease the wheels for us. I never did get confirmation on whether that tale was actually true or not, but I have subsequently found that a nice bottle of Scotch can solve a lot of problems.
Angus was an avid letter writer. I received hundreds from him. This one from a month prior to release is a treasure of mine. I love Angus’s excitement about Phantasm’s impending release, his inimitable humor, and his prescience. (Courtesy of Don Coscarelli)
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Avco Embassy booked Phantasm to premiere in Southern California. In advance of the opening they did something remarkable to build word of mouth. For the entire month prior to opening, every Saturday night they planned to hold a midnight sneak screening of the film in the Westwood district, near UCLA.
On the night of the first sneak preview, my girlfriend (and future wife) Shelley passed by the theater about two hours before showtime and called in with a report. Paul picked up the phone and listened, then yelled, “Shelley, you’re fucking lying to me!” Shelley was calling in from Westwood to report that there was already a huge line of people around the block waiting for Phantasm.
Avco Embassy was all about promotion and showmanship, as these tactics paid dividends and were also inexpensive. They started with a “hearse stuffing contest” in front of the Westwood theater in which a UCLA fraternity and sorority were drafted to see how many bodies they could pack into the Phantasm hearse. A bevy of news crews and photographers showed up to learn that the final tally was twenty-seven sweaty college students.
At these sneak previews the plan was to also have a surprise appearance by Angus Scrimm in full Tall Man costume as the film ended. These appearances were patently ridiculous, but the audiences just ate them up and they generated a lot of buzz. As the film’s credits came to an end a bright spotlight would suddenly flash on and the theater curtain was yanked back to reveal Angus looming in the wings. He would growl his trademark line, “Booooooy!” Then he would point to the back of the theater and suddenly a basketball-size sphere, wrapped in aluminum foil, would whiz down over the audience’s head on a string. It always got a huge roar from the crowd.
One time the above technique got way out of control. Angus and I were in Brisbane, Australia, and the Aussies were gung-ho to create a huge marketing spectacle in every theater we appeared at. They gave Angus a large butcher knife to brandish (I think they were still under the influence of the recent Halloween release) and had a special effects technician standing by with a huge fog machine. As the screening came to an end, they cued the tech and he started pumping out fog … a lot of it. As the fog rolled down from under the curtain someone in the audience screamed out, “Fire!” The entire audience bolted out of their seats. Quick-thinking Angus leaped out from behind the screen, still wielding the butcher knife. “It’s just me,” he deadpanned. The audience stopped in their tracks and just stared, then burst into a huge laugh of relief and all ran down to the front and swarmed around Angus.
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The head of marketing at Avco Embassy, Herman Kass, had little money for television ads, so he replaced that with relentless publicity tours. Angus Scrimm and I were drafted to represent the picture and were sent on a nationwide tour to every corner of the Lower 48. Back in those days this was easy to do as Avco, to save costs, distributed regionally. Therefore Angus and I could barnstorm through the Southwest in advance of the opening and then be dispatched to the Northeast for those openings three or four weeks later. It was a crazy experience. Our typical day would start at dawn for the local morning TV shows. I would appear as the young filmmaker and beside me would be my horror star Angus Scrimm in full Tall Man makeup, including his black suit and elevator boots. It was great fun, as I was the straight man who would set up the story and film clips and then Angus would sneer into camera and then hit them with his punch lines in character that always got a laugh. “I have a freezer full of Corpsesicles. May I offer you one?” Then it would be off to the radio stations to do their drive-time shows, followed up by lunch with a local film critic.
The response from critics was generally positive, but every once in a while our publicist would warn us that the local film critic we were meeting did not like our movie. Angus was the one who taught me that we should not be dismayed by such news but should use the opportunity to convince the recalcitrant critic that our movie was actually pretty good. So this would become our challenge. We would never be confrontational; we would always be self-effacing and genial.
It would start with the food and drinks. Avco Embassy pretty much gave us an unlimited budget to wine and dine critics. Angus really knew his liquor, and if the critic was so inclined Angus would order wines and whiskeys and we all would quickly be feeling no pain. Then it was my job to portray the earnest young filmmaker who was just doing his damnedest to make a movie that was different and worthwhile (which was the truth). Then Angus, since he had been a film critic himself, could talk with some experience about the difficulties of writing relevant film criticism. We would wrap it up with some serious conversation about filmic influences. Angus had been a film fan for decades and could lead us into the history of horror film, and we could discuss in depth revered horror filmmakers such as Fritz Lang, James Whale, and Val Lewton. As the meeting drew to a close, we would bid the critic a fond farewell and most often, within minutes, our publicist would come back with a response something like, “He told me that the more he thought about it, the more he liked your movie.”
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As our American publicity came to an end, Angus and I were invited on a three-week tour down under by Graham Burke and Greg Coote of our Australian distributor, Village Roadshow. Phantasm needed to be retitled in Australia due to a recent soft-core porn release there called Fantasm. Not wanting any confusion, our distributor retitled it as The Never Dead, which in retrospect was actually a pretty darn good title. It was a memorable time in a great country meeting lots of wonderful Australian horror fans and being shepherded around by our ace Aussie publicist, Harvey Shore. We traveled all over the country and generated a lot of interest, which included several national television appearances.
One afternoon in Sydney a friendly journalist casually asked if we were familiar with the work of Peter Weir, the Australian director of films such as Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Last Wave. Angus and I responded with enthusiasm as Weir’s films had been very popular in the States, and we were both huge fans. Surprisingly, the journalist rang Peter Weir up and within minutes we found ourselves at the director’s house. With typical Australian hospitality Peter treated us to an afternoon of drinks and snacks, and I’m fairly certain he had no clue as to who we were because The Never Dead had not yet been released in Australia. However, Angus and I relished this surprise opportunity to meet and question this affable and brilliant filmmaker about some of his very artistic and yet inscrutable films.
Upon return to the States, the very last interview I was assigned in support of Phantasm was in New York City at Rockefeller Center for an appearance on NBC’s then late-night show, The Tomorrow Show. I guess it must have been a slow news day but somehow, of all people, George Romero, the director of the legendary Night of the Living Dead, and I had been booked to spend an hour with host Tom Snyder and promote our respective horror films. George was publicizing his new sequel Dawn of the Dead. In the NBC green room I was seriously nervous, having never appeared on a major American network before. Also, the Avco Embassy publicist mentioned to be careful, that Snyder might go after us about excessive gore and violence in movies. George arrived and immediately put me at ease. He counseled that there were two of us and only one Tom Snyder, so we could tag-team him. From that point on it was fun for me. The set was so dark you couldn’t even see the cameras and George was so relaxed the entire tenor changed. In his inimitable progressive fashion, George was happy to deflect the tougher questions into political discourse with Tom and that made it a breeze for me. After the show George and I walked out together onto Fifth Avenue and exchanged contact info and promised to stay in touch. I received a big Romero bear hug and then was on my way.
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Phantasm ended up being a critical and box office success, not only in the States but around the world. The summer of 1979 had been called “Hollywood’s Scary Summer” by Newsweek magazine, and it was very satisfying to see the box office charts in Variety listing Ridley Scott’s Alien as number one and Phantasm as number two. I had learned a lot about marketing from the scrappy independent distributor Avco Embassy, lessons that would serve me well on my future indie endeavors. After several long years and a lot of hard work, I was finally finished with Phantasm, or so I thought.