Interview
WAMG Interview: SAM SHERMAN – Legendary Exploitation Producer
At this time of our National Emergency, when people are being advised to avoid crowds and remain at home, how can the public go out into the world for entertainment and keep a safe distance from potential germ-laden crowds? The answer: take a trip back in time to a Drive-In Movie Theatre! As the coronavirus wreaks havoc on the movie industry and our way of life, major indoor theatre chains have been forced to close. As an alternative, Sam Sherman, veteran producer/distributor and showman of drive-in movies from the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties, will be making his newly-restored catalogue of “B-Movie” film classics from Independent-International Pictures Corporation available to drive-in operators nationwide with the help of veteran drive-in theatrical distributor Mel Maron; former AMC programmer, David Sehring of Drive-In-Sanity Films; drive-in promoter and movie reviewer, George Reis, who runs the popular DVD Drive-In website; and David Gregory of Severin Films who handled the restoration efforts on various titles in the library.
To celebrate the Great American Drive In, Sherman, who serves as President of Independent-International Pictures Corp., will kick off a nationwide road show featuring his most iconic film, “Dracula vs. Frankenstein,” on May 26 at The Circle Drive In in Dickson City, PA. Later this Fall, George Reis, who produces the semi-annual Super Monsterama Show at The Riverside Drive-In in Vandergrift, Pennsylvania, will be bringing Sherman’s Hemisphere Horror films back to the Big Screen including the popular Blood Island franchise of films produced in the 1960s. More special promotions and participating drive-ins will be announced in the coming months as the drive-in season gets into full swing on the East Coast. A self-described P.T Barnum of Drive-In movies, Sherman plans to provide theater owners with marketing ideas to “wow ’em” as well as some throwback nostalgia featuring gags, gimmicks and limited-edition souvenirs to coincide with an aggressive social media and marketing campaign plus “Special Guest Appearances” and raffles to lure customers and their communities to the thematic retro roadshow.
As a producer of films made for drive-ins, Mr. Sherman understands the appeal of seeing movies on the big screen. Sherman sums it up, “It’s Bigger. Better. Safer. Seeing movies at the Drive-In is a classic moviegoing experience and great American pastime. Not only does it provide a wonderful sense of community with family and friends, it is a perfect escape from the troubles of the world. Sherman’s films have become cult classics… all thanks to the Drive-In and a community of fans all over the world. The library of films includes the popular Tiki-themed Hemisphere Monster Movies (“The Blood Island” franchise) and the Al Adamson “Cult Classic” collection which features horror & sci-fi, martial arts, motorcycle, urban and other genre favorites (eg. “Dynamite Brothers,” “Satan’s Sadists,” & “Brain of Blood“).
Sam Sherman took the time to talk to We Are Movie Geeks about his career and his idea to bring his films back to the Drive-ins.
Interview conducted by Tom Stockman April 28th, 2020
Tom Stockman: Hi Sam. I’m calling from St. Louis. Have you ever been here?
Sam Sherman: Yes I have. I like the Arch there. I was there once for a western movie convention I know a great story about St. Louis. Are you familiar with the film MAD DOCTOR OF BLOOD ISLAND?
TS: Of course.
SS: Well, I had done the ‘Oath of Green Blood’ as a promotion for that film for Hemisphere Pictures. At the beginning of the film, the audience had to eat this green gel and recite this silly oath. I asked the Hemisphere representative for the Kansas City and St. Louis area if anybody had actually ever done that oath. He said that yes, he had seen the whole audience at the Loews Theater in downtown St. Louis do it.
TS: Yes, I recall seeing ads for the Loews Theater downtown. It was on Washington Avenue, but I was too young to have ever seen a movie there.
SS: When the movie came on, the audience had their packets of green blood and they stood up as one person and they recited the ‘Oath of Green Blood’ then drank the green blood. You can say that happened in St. Louis
TS: That and several other films from Hemisphere were shot in the Philippines by director Eddie Romero. Did you travel to the Philippines when there were being made?
SS: No. They wanted to move me there but I did not want to go there . I had heard that people in Manila carry guns and if you got into a quick argument you could get shot.
TS: Unfortunately there are no drive-ins left here in St. Louis though.
SS: I’m sure there were at one time.
TS: Oh of course, many. The last one in St. Louis county closed in 2001. I was a bit too young to see most of your films at the drive-in, although I did grow up enjoying them on television. DRACULA VS FRANKENSTEIN is a favorite of mine.
SS: So you’re familiar with my films then?
TS: Oh yes. I’ve read the book on Al Adamson and I’ve listened to your commentaries on various DVDs. Have you received the new box set of all the Al Adamson films?
SS: I worked on that with David Gregory of Severin Films. He did the documentary on Al and the restoration of all of the Al Adamson films to HD. It’s quite a set. I don’t have mine yet, I’m still waiting for it .
TS: Yes, I’m still waiting for mine as well. Hopefully later this month. So you’ve come up with this idea of showing some of your old films at drive-ins now because the virus has shut down all of the theaters.
SS: That is correct. I had this idea that, since the studios are closed and out of business at the moment, people would want to go to the drive-in so they can feel safe in their own cars. We restored all of our films so I’m offering them to the drive-ins to show again , We’re starting May 26th at a drive-in in Pennsylvania and there are others interested. My friend David Sehring, who used to be one of the heads of the AMC network is behind this.
TS: I saw where Zandor Vorkov (who played Dracula in DRACULA VS FRANKENSTEIN) has been unearthed and is starting to do conventions. Do you think maybe you could get him to show up at the drive-ins for screenings of DRACULA VS FRANKENSTEIN?
SS: He’s agreed to do the one in Pennsylvania. He has been a friend of mine for many years. I’ve told him that he is very popular with a lot of fans and that he should start doing these horror conventions, but I could not talk him into it! Finally David Gregory talked him into coming to Los Angeles for a personal appearance at the Egyptian theater for a screening of the Al Adamson documentary BLOOD & FLESH: THE REEL LIFE AND GHASTLY DEATH OF AL ADAMSON. They also screamed DRACULA VS FRANKENSTEIN that night and Rafael Angle, who had been Roger Angle, and was renamed Zandor Vorkov by Forry Ackerman (legendary Editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine) and his wife made his first live personal appearance for DRACULA VS FRANKENSTEIN. There were a lot of people there, fans who loved meeting him. He realized for the first time that he had this fan base out there. He had planned on attending some upcoming conventions with David Gregory but now this virus nightmare has come out and these conventions are all canceled.
TS: Yes, I see the drive-ins opening before theaters and the studios aren’t going to send digital prints of big new movies like WONDER WOMAN 2 or QUIET PLACE 2 just to the drive-ins, so the drive-ins are going to need programming.
SS: It would seem to me that that’s true.
TS: I think showing some of your movies would be perfect.
SS: I just saw a clip on TV of the Ocala Drive-in in Florida . They have two screens there and on one they show contemporary film and on the other they show classics. If other drive-ins go with that, my pictures will certainly fit the bill. So we are encouraging that. I think there are a lot of young people who have not seen these films and will get a kick out of them.
TS: Did you used to have drive-in premieres back in the day with guests and gimmicks?
SS: Not to my knowledge, but I would go to the drive-ins and see my pictures. I used to tour the country marketing films. But we did not see the need for having big premiers at the drive-ins. The films were popular enough at the time .
TS: Right, the movies sold themselves.
SS: Yes, during this time before I started Independent-International Pictures with Al Adamson and Dan Kennis, I had worked with Hemisphere Pictures and I got them into the horror field. They had primarily been making war pictures before that and they were the ones that were interested in all of these gimmicks though I came up with the idea of the ‘Oath of Green Blood’. There were a number of those promotions for Hemisphere. The craziest one was for THE MAD DOCTOR OF BLOOD ISLAND where they sent out a woman to the theaters who was a snake handler. She would bring snakes around to the theaters in a sort of glass case.
TS: It’s amazing how well DRACULA VS FRANKENSTEIN has held up over the years. Why do you think that is?
SS: Well, it had two great names in horror with Lon Chaney and J. Carrol Naish. That was my idea at the time to help make something that was marketable . The reason to use popular actors for a film is that the producers of small pictures don’t want their films to look like a lot of unknown junk. But if you had recognizable people in them, they look more like a film made by a big studio. This makes them easier to sell to theaters and to market overseas. Another idea of mine was to use the word ‘blood’ in the titles. We had picked that up from BLOOD FEAST, which had been a big hit. I did that when I started my company, using the word ‘blood’. But DRACULA VS FRANKENSTEIN had an unusual story, and many changes . It started out as a biker film but my idea was to put in Dracula and Frankenstein monster to give it a bit more value.
TS: What was Lon Chaney like at this stage in his career?
SS: He was very sick, he couldn’t talk. He had throat cancer. My partner and director of the film, Al Adamson, had never met Lon Chaney or J. Carrol Naish before casting them. We tried casting other people and had no luck finding people who were suitable . We tried to get Paul Lukas, the Oscar winning actor. He was Hungarian and spoke like Bela Lugosi . He turned down the script, claiming he couldn’t do it because it was just too ‘bloody’. Then we tried to get Frances Lederer, who had played Dracula in RETURN OF DRACULA . He was Czechoslovakian and had a European accent. He would’ve been great but he turned it down, he just wasn’t available. He was a banker at that time. It was hard getting somebody suitable, but an agent offered us both Cheney and Naish for the price of one. So we grabbed that offer but we had not met them and did not know that they were both not well. Naish was not really in a wheelchair at that point but he looks so frail that audiences assumed the actor really was in a wheelchair.
TS: You said that Lon Chaney was sick, but was he pleasant to be around? Was he drinking?
SS: Oh yes he was drinking but I was not on the set the days that we shot with him, so I just know what Al told me . Al’s dad, director Denver Dixon (real name: Victor Adamson) knew Chaney very well. So he was drinking and sick and really on his last legs.
TS: Were you there the day that Forry Ackerman filmed his scene?
SS: Yes I was there for that. Forry was a close friend of mine. I used to work for Warren publishing and worked with him on Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine.
TS: What did you do for Famous Monsters?
SS: I ghosted stories for Forry and I supplied stills for the magazine . I was there from the second issue on, so Forry was a good friend and when I got the idea of changing this film (DRACULA VS FRANKENSTEIN) and adding the monsters, I wanted to get him involved. It was originally called BLOOD SUCKERS and it wasn’t shaping up well. The backers at one point wanted to cancel the film. I was the original producer and decided just to take it over and find a way to make it more commercial and I asked Forry to help. I got him to come in and play a small part and he put me in touch with Kenneth Strickfaden (electrician and set designer who had worked on the original Frankenstein films for Universal) who supplied the high-voltage electrical machines. It turns out Forry knew J. Carrol Naish and they were neighbors. Naish seemed very ill and unhappy on the picture. I teased him and told him this wasn’t exactly PRC. He had been in some PRC movies like THE MONSTER MAKER. They were a very small company. He said to me “you bet your ass it isn’t“. I guess he thought this was an amateur thing done by a bunch of kids who didn’t know what they were doing and he wasn’t well. We did what we needed to do to get the scene with him. I was going through my files on DRACULA VS FRANKENSTEIN recently and I found a letter I had written to J. Carrol Naish. It was an answer to a letter he had written me asking what ever happened to that picture and that he would like to have some pressbooks and stills from it. I wrote him a long letter and sent him tons of promotional material. It was the last film he made and probably his most famous. He had costarred in a lot of famous films and he had even starred in the Charlie Chan on a TV series where his number one son was played by James Hong who had had a large role in our film the DYNAMITE BROTHER . It’s strange how all of these things tied together.
TS: I remember DRACULA VS FRANKENSTEIN being on the cover of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine.
SS: Yes, I’m still friends with James Warren, the publisher of Famous Monsters. He’s still around. I just got a birthday card from him. We were very good friends for many years so as such, when I had DRACULA VS FRANKENSTEIN I asked him if we could get some coverage in the magazine. There was a lot of free publicity, even when the title was still BLOOD OF FRANKENSTEIN. Warren agreed to put Zandor Vorkov on the cover, which was very considerate. DRACULA VS FRANKENSTEIN was a small picture that started out with a budget of $65,000, then collapsed. I took control of it and worked on it and worked on it, we kept changing things and going back-and-forth , But the picture has been famous for all of these years . How many small, cheap pictures are remembered by anybody? Some of the dialogue we wrote for Zandor is unbelievable. Who’d of thought anybody today would now be studying that sort of dialogue?
TS: Who is your favorite actor that you worked with?
SS: I liked a lot of people that I have worked with but my favorite actor is Bob Livingston. He starred in the Three Mesquiteers western series. He was The Lone Ranger in the 1939 serial. I got to know him personally and wrote about him in the Warren magazines. I was his agent for a while and his son is still a friend of mine I wanted to bring him back for leading role in films after he retired, so I brought him back for three films, THE NAUGHTY STEWARDESSES, BLAZING STEWARDESSES, and GIRLS FOR RENT. He was great to work with and we had a lot of fun on BLAZING STEWARDESSES with the Ritz Brothers. I always liked comedy.
TS: Is it true that the bits that the Ritz Brothers did in BLAZING STEWARDESSES was originally written for the Three Stooges?
SS: Not exactly. The backers of BLAZING STEWARDESSES wanted a sequel to THE NAUGHTY STEWARDESSES, which had been a big hit, but I did not want to do it. I figured I would just make a comedy Western and put the name in ‘Stewardesses’ in it and that I would enjoy doing that. I got the Three Stooges to agree to appear in that. It was Larry Fine, Moe Howard, and Joe DeRita at the time, but Larry Fine passed away. We talked to Moe and they were going to replace Larry with Emil Sitka, who had worked with them in the past. But the week we were to start filming, Moe got sick and couldn’t work. We shot part of the film but had to shut it down for a while. I was trying to figure out who I could replace the Stooges with. I called my friend Joe Franklin in New York. He’s a famous TV host there. He kept talking about the Ritz Brothers but he didn’t know where to find them. There were two remaining Ritz Brothers but their agent did not want them to work for me because had never heard of me. My friend Joe Bonomo, who had been a famous strong man in films dating back to the silents, put me in touch with the agent and he agreed to have them work with me. They put together some of their routines that they had done years earlier, but they did not do the same thing the Three Stooges were going to do. The Stooges we’re going to be running a health club on this dude ranch in the movie. Imagine that. Regina Caroll, Al Adamson’s wife, who was in the picture, she was going to be in the health club and the Stooges were really going to mess her up. We were going to put a rubber leg on her and we were going to have them twisted around and put mud on her face, really mess her up . It was very funny stuff and we spent a lot of time with Moe and Emil and Joe DeRita, planning this all out as it was all scripted. Then the first week we were shooting in Palm Springs, I called Moe and told him I was going to send him a plane ticket to get to Palm Springs. He was up in LA. At first he said he didn’t like the fly. I offered to send him a car to drive him there. He said he does not like riding in a car either and told me to call him the next day. Well, the next day he went to a doctor and his son-in-law called me and told me how sick he was. So I called Moe and I offered to come to his house and film his scenes. I said he could be on the phone with the other two guys who are at the ranch. He told me that he knew I was a big fan of his but that he was really sick and did not need the money. It was such a sad phone call. So we didn’t know what we were going to do with the comedy elements, we tried getting Mickey Rooney or some classic comedians I could afford but no luck. But once we got the Ritz Brothers and they started filming, they had a lot of fun with it. They were always putting me on and trying to embarrass me. Just messing with me. I was just laughing and laughing at them. I always wanted to be involved with comedies, which I never was.
TS: I know you had made some documentaries about silent comedians.
SS: Yes, I love Charlie Chaplin. The first picture I ever wrote and directed was CHAPLIN’S ART OF COMEDY. I love the old comedians. Even ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN influenced DRACULA VS FRANKENSTEIN and Bud and Lou in RIDE ‘EM COWBOY influenced BLAZING STEWARDESSES.
TS: I read that you have a memoir coming out.
SS: Yes I am almost finished with the book. I thought ‘When Dracula Met Frankenstein’ would be a good title because everybody knows that picture . Of course there’s a lot more to it. It’s all about how I got into the industry and about how Al Adamson and I got together and made all these films. There’s a lot of other stuff that’s never been written about before. Some of it is funny. I know by being a fan that I enjoy this kind of thing. Ever since I was a little kid I’ve been a fan of crazy movie and cult movies. I collected 8 mm films and 16mm prints of films. I went to film school and then I went ahead and got jobs in the film industry as a film editor and promoter and this that and the other thing. I’m still a collector. I collect films. What’s your website called again?
TS: We Are Movie Geeks.
SS: Well, I am one of the original movie geeks.
TS: Sounds like you are.
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