SLIFF 2015 Interview: Gerald Peary – Director of ARCHIE’S BETTY

ARCHIE’S BETTY screens Sunday, November 15th at 12:00pm at The Plaza Frontenac Theater as part of this year’s St. Louis International Film Festival. Director Gerald Peary will be in attendance. Ticket information can be found HERE 

In ARCHIE’S BETTY, journalist and filmmaker Gerald Peary embarks on a personal journey to determine whether the beloved characters in “Archie” comics were modeled on real-life people. As an “Archie”-obsessed child, Peary believed that somewhere in America there was a real town of Riverdale, where Archie and his teen friends went to school. As an adult, he found that his fantasy might have basis in fact: Riverdale could indeed be the city of Haverhill, Mass., where Bob Montana, the original cartoonist of “Archie,” attended high school in the mid-1930s. Did Montana love Haverhill High so much that he based “Archie” characters on students in his classes? Was Archie inspired by a girl-crazy Haverhill High cutup? Was Veronica modeled on the most popular girl at the high school? Was Betty based on the girl living next door to young Bob? And what of Moose and Jughead? For ARCHIE’S BETTY, Peary meets with Montana’s surviving classmates, a veteran “Archie” cartoonist, and “Archie” experts to unravel the real story. A long-time film critic, Peary is a SLIFF alum whose documentary  FOR THE LOVE OF MOVIES: THE STORY OF AMERICAN FILM CRITICISM played the fest in 2009.

Gerald Peary took the time to answer some questions for We Are Movie Geeks 

Interview conducted by Tom Stockman October 28th 2015

We Are Movie Geeks: I enjoyed your documentary or ARCHIE’S BETTY. After all of the heavy, more political documentaries I’ve seen it was nice to see something that was simply a throwback to a happier time.

Gerald Peary: Yes, there’s definitely no political agenda with my film.

WAMG: I could really relate to the comic books at the barbershop that you start off the phone with. When I was a kid there was a barbershop with a cabinet full of comic books and I used to love to go there just to read the comic books.

GP: That’s where I discovered Archie, at a barbershop. I doubt barbershops today have stacks of comic books laying around. But the more people ahead of me to head to get their haircut, the better. That way I got to read more comics.

WAMG: Do you remember the comic book machines? Where you would put a dime and two pennies in a vending machine.

GP: Oh I’m so old I remember the 10 cent comics. In my day we just go into a store and buy them. People have become so inundated with superhero comics that they forget that there were others about actual human beings. Archie is popular around the world. I’ve discovered that Archie is read in places like Pakistan and India. Over a million copies of Archie comics are sent every month to India. I showed the film in Argentina where he’s known as Archie Gomez. He’s known all over the world. This is a movie that shows the teenage life of Archie and Betty and Jughead and Veronica.

WAMG: I think I liked Archie a little better later, after I read the superheroes. I remember the digest-sized Archie books.

GP: The Archie digests, which are a smaller format book, still exist. I talked to a comic book store owner and he told me that thousands of those are sent every month to Nigeria of all places, so Archie continues to be a worldwide phenomenon.

WAMG: Did you grow up a comic book collector?

GP: I collected some comics but I didn’t have a lot of money. I remember when I was seven years old and going to someone else’s house for a birthday party and walking into their bedroom and there were probably 1000 comic books in these beautiful stacks and I remember wishing I had more money to spend on them. I think maybe once a month I could afford to buy one comic book. Usually it was Archie, but occasionally it was Gene Autry, my favorite cowboy star.

WAMG: Archie made his debut in Pep Comics number 22 in 1941. Do you have any idea how much of that comic book is worth?

GP: That one is probably worth 50 or 60 thousand dollars. The first standalone Archie comic, Archie #1, sold for $170,000 which is the most any non-superhero comic book has sold for. I was at the home of someone in Boston recently who owned a copy of that comic book and I got to hold it in my hands and have my picture taken with it. Archie started out as six pages in the back of a Pep Comics and that was so popular that after a while, Archie became his own comic book. Next year, 2016, will be the 75th anniversary of Archie comics so happy birthday Archie!

WAMG: Do you think that they will do something in Haverhill Massachusetts to commemorate that?

GP: I hope so. Haverhill Massachusetts is a town that Riverdale is based on. My movie is about who the real life people in Archie comics are. Bob Montana, who was the original cartoonist for Archie went to Haverhill High. He moved to New York when he was 21 but he based these characters on people he went to high school with. So that’s what my movie is, going back to Haverhill and figuring out who these real people are – who’s the real Archie, who’s the real Betty, who’s the real Veronica who’s the real Jughead, etc.

WAMG: But this sort of grew out of a Boston Globe article that you wrote 25 years earlier, correct?

GP: Yes, 25 years ago is when I first tracked this story down. I went to Haverhill because I have read a little item in The Boston Globe that said that Archie and Betty have lived in Haverhill Massachusetts. I got The Boston Globe to send me on this assignment. I spent a month in Haverhill and met all these people who claimed to be the real Archie and the real Betty, Then I left the story for 25 years and came back to it, this time is a documentarian.

WAMG: Had a lot of these people passed away in the 25 years between?

GP: Yes that was a problem, so many had died. But I still had a couple of people in my movie who are in their 90s. I have one woman in my film that dated Bob Montana. She went to the prom with him in 1937 and she’s still around at age 94. She thinks she’s Betty because Betty went to the prom with Archie in the comic.

WAMG: But you met some other people in Haverhill who may or may not be Betty as well.

GP: That’s the mystery. My movie is called ARCHIE’S BETTY. It’s like a mystery. We moved from Haverhill Massachusetts to a place called Edison, New Jersey where perhaps the real Betty is. Her name is Betty Tokar. I don’t want to say too much more about her now because obviously I want people to see the film and find out.

WAMG: Did you know about Beckie Tokar when you wrote the Boston Globe article 25 years ago?

GP:  I did not. Betty Tokar was a new person for the story. I originally only had a few candidates for Betty who lived in the town of Haverhill. One of the reasons that I made this new film is that a guy from Seattle Washington, who is an Archie expert, got in touch with me and told me that I had some things wrong in my article. His name is Sean Clancy and he told me I was wrong about Betty. So I made a film this time, and act three of the film is meeting the new Betty. If you’re an Archie fan and you care about Betty and Veronica, this woman is really amazing.

WAMG: And she was married to someone else for many years and in the movie she says that she never told her husband that she was the inspiration for Betty.

GP: Yes, she had a very jealous husband. He was a police chief, a very tough guy, and I’ve actually talked to some of her relatives who found Betty’s husband a bit scary. After her husband died a couple of years ago, Betty could at last tell the story that 70 years ago she had a boyfriend named Bob Montana and that he was the original Archie cartoonist.

WAMG: Bob Montana died relatively young though.

GP: Yes he died in his mid-50s. His father had a bad heart and so did he. He died cross country skiing and it’s one of my regrets that I never got to meet him. Even the original story I had to write without input from Bob. But everybody that met Bob Montana loved him. He was known as a sweet, sweet man.

WAMG: But wasn’t he a private man?

GP: He was a very private guy and there are not a lot of interviews with him out there. The interviews that we have found might have two or three quotes from him. So one of the mysteries is that Bob Montana himself never claimed to have based the characters in Archie comics on the people of Haverhill. He never mentioned names. This is why I call my movie a mystery.

 WAMG: It is a mystery and there are clues throughout the mystery. There are last names of people that pop up here and there throughout the history of the comics. I found that fascinating. Let’s talk about this fellow named John Goldwater, the publisher of Archie comics..

GP: Right, he’s long deceased as well but he told people that the characters in Archie comics were based on people that he knew as a young man.

WAMG: I get the impression that you sort of dismiss his claims. Talk about that a little bit.

GP: I’m skeptical of it but I don’t dismiss it. There was a meeting around 1940 with John Goldwater the publisher and some of the illustrators and this is where they talked about this new comic that they were developing. I wasn’t at this meeting and nobody who’s still alive was at this meeting so it’s all speculation what actually happened. I try in this movie to be very fair and to give several narratives. Bob Montana and his fans and his relatives say Bob created all the characters. John Goldwater, The publisher, who was sort of like the Walt Disney of the world of Archie, says it was actually based on his story. He claims he went to a town called Hiawatha, Kansas and based Riverdale on that. He claims to have met two pretty girls in San Francisco that he based Betty and Veronica on. He also claims he went to school with a kid named Archie and based Archie on him. So he claims he was the creator and basically just told Bob Montana what to draw. I tend to be on the Bob Montana side but I do think that John Goldwater should get some credit. He certainly seems to be the one who conceived the project. He’s the guy that, in 1939 when the original Superman debuted in Action Comics and everyone was enthralled with superheroes, decided to do something different; a comic book about an everyday boy. He had seen the Andy Hardy movies with Mickey Rooney and that was a huge influence and there was a popular radio show called Henry Aldrich about a teenage boy. Goldwater thought doing a comic book about a teenage boy would be a good idea, so he gets a lot of credit for that. If he claims the name Archie came from a high school friend of his, I will accept that, but we don’t know who came up with things after that. In general my movie is on the Bob Montana side but more than anything, this is a pro-Archie movie, more than I care who created the characters. I love the Archie comics and I would love to get more people to love the Archie comics.

WAMG: Do you still read Archie comics?

GP: I’ve read a couple of the new ones. It’s gone through a crazy reconfiguring. A few months ago there was a new Archie number one starting all over with a redrawn Archie and a redrawn Betty and Veronica. He’s a rock and roll guitarist. The drawings are pretty interesting but I have not been too crazy about the storyline. In my movie, I salute the new Archie because Archie keeps changing and must change with the times but I am an older person and my heart remains with the old Archie comics that Bob Montana created.

WAMG: You talk in the movie about the new Archie comics and about how there’s the new supernatural Archie and there’s even a gay character and a gay marriage in the new Archie. What do you think Bob Montana would think of the new Archie?

GP: I think he’d be very confused. It’s such a different world. We live in a very multicultural world, and I’m happy about that. But I also like the old fashioned, insular world of the old Archie comic. People all over the world love the old fashioned world of Archie. Archie comics have tried to reinvent themselves over the past few years. It’s a very interesting thing that they’re trying. I’m a very liberal person and I appreciate the fact that Archie has a gay character and that there was a gay marriage that took place in Riverdale, and I know that got a lot of heat from right wingers, and I commend that, but I still like the old Archie comics.

WAMG: Has your film shown in Haverhill?

GP: Yes, and it was wonderful! What happened was all the relatives of people in the movie and a couple of people that were still alive and knew Bob Montana showed up and we had two tremendous screenings there in Haverhill. I had a stack of DVDs of the film, which I will be hawking there in St. Louis, but I didn’t bring enough. I ran out of DVDs because so many people in Haverhill wanted one as a record of their city and the people from Archie comics. They’re very proud of that there.

WAMG: I’m sure they are. You have been the St. Louis once before for the St. Louis international Film Festival, correct?

GP: Yes I was there in 2009. I was a jury member. It is a very well-run festival. I have been to other film festivals that are not nearly as well-curated as the one there in St. Louis. I like St. Louis. There are so many people that came from that city that most people don’t realize. People like T.S. Eliot and Vincent Price, and  great jazz musicians, author Jonathan Franzen, etc.

WAMG: 100 years ago, St. Louis was the third largest city in the country. When you’re in town you should go to Blueberry Hill, a very popular restaurant and bar. About 30 years ago it was featured in an issue of Archie comics. There is, framed on the wall in Blueberry Hill, the panels from an Archie comic where you see Archie entering Blueberry Hill restaurant. It’s pretty neat.

GP:  I didn’t know that. I will have to check that out when I am there.

WAMG: Good luck with ARCHIE’S BETTY and we’ll see you in St. Louis for the screening at the Saint Louis international film Festival.

GP: Thank you, I look forward to it.