GL: Yeah. I had a gag with Alex’s severed hand jumping onto the floor and running up Mary’s leg like a spider. I offered the job to a classmate of mine who had worked on STREET TARSH, and for 2 stop motion animation shots, he wanted as much as Tom and Scott got for all of the other effects combined. I was so pissed, I didn’t even try to come up with an alternative, I just cut the bit. The headless body’s guts were supposed to shoot out, wrap around Mary’s neck, and pull her head into the stomach. I cut that because in the year between the shoot that didn’t happen and the one that did, RE-ANIMATOR came out and had a similar gag. It was painful enough that they had so much business with that damned head!

HYB: You got a chance to work on Frank Henenlotter’s classic Brain Damage. How did that job come about. It must’ve been cool to work with all you buddies on that film. This was right after you wrapped shooting on Slime City. How was it? Did you pick up any directorial pointers by watching Frank work?

GL: Peter knew Frank before I did, because he worked at that Times Square video store before I did. BASKET CASE was the first horror video priced at $19.99, and we couldn’t keep it in stock. Have you ever worked at a video store? You talk to a lot of people, and you look forward to talking to the cool ones, and you love talking to the ones who made BASKET CASE! Frank and his producer, Edgar Ievans, gave Peter and I a lot of pointers on the business end of film making, and hooked us up with their lawyer, who drew up all of our partnership agreements. They struggled to get financing for BRAIN DAMAGE–it’s almost always a struggle–but when they got it, they brought us on as a team, just like what happened on I WAS A TEENAGE ZOMBIE and PLUTONIUM BABY. Keep in mind that we’d only worked on low budget, 16mm films at that point. BRAIN DAMAGE had a $900,000 budget, or so we were told. Ed worked on that, too, and Jimmy. Frank and Edgar rented a warehouse on 34th street, 2 blocks from the dorm where Peter and Jimmy and I once lived. There was an equipment rental house on the ground floor, and then a floor that we built living quarters for the SFX crew in–and when I say WE BUILT it I mean it—another floor for the SFX lab, and the top floor was where we built all of the sets we used. Every apartment and hallway on the film is a set that we built, and the club. So it was a much bigger production than we were accustomed to, and there were 3 teams playing: the BASKET CASE team, the SLIME CITY TEAM, and the STREET TRASH team. It was alot of fun, but also a lot of stress: a lot of the BASKET CASE people bailed, and the rest of us had to step up to cover their absence. Frank is a real leader, and a real mentor; he’s a film historian, and knows more about exploitation films than anyone I know.

HYB: I love hearing about how supportive the low-budget indie “scene” was back then.

GL: This was a unique situation, having the crews from 3 different films of that era under one roof. But there’s a dark side to that rainbow; it was a tough shoot, in the winter. We shot for 3 nights in the samejunkyard they used for STREET TARSH, and there was no place to get warm. That part really, really sucked.

HYB: Please tell me what the heck is Plutonium Baby. You worked on that film as well but there is almost no info on it that I could find. You’ve called it the worst movie ever made.

GL: It was directed by a guy named Billy Zarcha, who did a movie called SOUTH BRONX HERO, which starred Mario Van Peebles. He and his producer came up with this idea to shoot a monster movie take on SILKWOOD in the woods in Connecticut, a 10-day cheapie shoot. Let me tell you right off the bat, if you want to make a good movie, budget for more than 10 days! 18 is about the minimum, I’d say, except for the rare exception, like THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. They hired Scott to do the SFX, and Dan Fry, Scott’s SLIME CITY assistant. For some reason, the NYU crew walked off the location after only 4 days. So Scott called and asked if we were available to come out to Connecticut and help. Peter, me, and 2 guys who were helping us took the train up there. And it was a mess. They’d rented no lights, so we could only shoot in the day, and we partied at night–not something I’m in favor of. Billy was impressed that I’d actually seen his first movie, so he trusted me. But he had trouble with some of the actors, so I found myself doing more and more. At the end of the week, on the last day of shooting, I said, “You’ve only got half a movie here. We’re all willing to stay on an extra day for free to get you more footage.” He said “Nah, I’m tired. I want to go home.” Well, the rough cut came in at 37 minutes, so they fired him and brought us back to shoot more scenes. A LOT more scenes! But the star was a kid who was loyal to Billy, and he wouldn’t come back. So they made the second half of the film a “ten years later” sequel, and Central Park doubled as the woods! Oh, my God, what a disaster! But guess what? They made a profit. The funniest thing that happened on PLUTONIUM was friction between Scott and Peter. By contract, Scott wasn’t supposed to use any of the props he built for SLIME on any other film. The time comes for us to shoot a scene where some hunters get killed by a creature. We look up into a tree, and see the headless body from our movie! Peter was furious, on principle. Scott came over to talk to us, and Peter was like, “get away from me, I don’t want to talk to you.” On the last day of filming, we’re supposed to get our first glimpse of the monster that one of the characters has mutated into. Dan got more and more nervous, and Peter and I knew we were in for a surprise. Well, the guy comes running out of the woods–and he’s wearing Robert’s face!

HYB: That’s absolutely hilarious. If only someone had a camera it could’ve been a great documentary on the perils of B-movie production. I want to talk about the process of writing now. Your a screenwriter and published author, what is your writing process like? What helps you “get into the mood”? Is there a specific place, music, atmosphere that helps your creative flow?

GL: It used to be, when I was single, that I could just “turn it on” whenever I was alone. Now I’m married, and I have a 7 month old daughter, and a house–a lot of responsibility. Writing time can be hard to find. With my screenplays, I never worked from an outline; I just had 2 or 3 keys sequences in mind, and surprised myself. So far, my novels are based on scripts, so I have that outline. But I’ve learned that in making the translation–an expansion more than an adaptation—I have to throw away a lot of my favorite moments from the script, and develop the characters and scenes a lot more. I wrote PERSONAL DEMONS to Jerry Goldsmith’s score for THE OMEGA MAN; it has that blend of SF and horror, and the movie’s about a guy all on his own. For the screenplay of JOHNNY GRUESOME, which has a heavy metal aspect, I listened to a lot of Metallica, Ozzy, and Alice Cooper. I never found one single piece that I listened to for the novel of JOHNNY. My werewolf piece has a character who’s an American Indian, and I like to listen to a guy named Billy Childish when I’m working on it. He sings about the American Indian experience, and he likes guitar and poetry. I do my writing in my home office, surrounded by books and DVDs–and now baby furniture.

GL: Reid Diamond from HOMICIDE would make a great Jake Helman. The main characters in JOHNNY GRUESOME are teenagers, and I’ll just say that I’d never want to use any of the overexposed kids from any WW, UPN or CW shows!

Thanks again to Greg Lamberson for a great interview.