WAMG Interview – Actor Perry King – Star and Director of THE DIVIDE

By Tom Stockman | April 22, 2021

Perry King has been hard-working actor for 50 years. Recently, he made his directorial debut with the feature THE DIVIDE, which he also stars in. King always dreamt of directing his own movie, and he directed THE DIVIDE with skill and honesty outside of the Hollywood system. His own Californian cattle ranch in El Dorado County served as a backdrop. THE DIVIDE, a good-natured, neo-Western, tells the strory of Jack, a rancher suffering from the onset of dementia. The feature was shot entirely in black-and-white, evoking Perry King’s favorite frontier dramas from his favorite classic Hollywood directors.

Perry King has been an acting legend since making his film debut as Billy Pilgrim’s son Robert in George Roy Hill’s remarkable SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE in 1972. For the next decade, Perry starred in one memorable film after another: THE POSSESSION OF JOEL DELANEY (1972), THE LORDS OF FLATBUSH (1974), MANDINGO (1974), THE WILD PARTY (1975), LIPSTICK, ANDY WARHOL’S BAD (1977), THE CHOIRBOYS (1977), and as “Mr. Norris” in the cult classic THE CLASS OF ’84 (1982). In the 80s and 90s, Perry found great success in television, acting in TV movies, guest-starring on dozens of shows as well as the lead in his own hit series Riptide from 1996-99. Perry King would return to the big screen occasionally with roles in films like Blake Edwards’ SWITCH (1991) and as the US President in THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW (2004). Perry keeps busy these days with his cattle ranch and his hobby of racing cars and motorcycles. He has spent the last three years focused on THE DIVIDE which he is now promoting.

Perry King took the time to talk to We Are Movie Geeks about his career, working with legends such as James Mason and Andy Warhol, and his dream project THE DIVIDE.

Interview conducted by Tom Stockman April 12th 2021

Tom Stockman:  I’m super excited to talk to you. You’ve been one of my favorite actors for many years. 

Perry King: Wow! Thanks

TS: I want to talk about THE DIVIDE, the new film that you have directed in and star in, but first I’d like to tell you a story about how you, as an actor, made an impression on me when I was very young. 

PK: Sure, let’s hear it.

TS: When I was 14, my father took me to the theater to see THE CHOIRBOYS in which you played a cop named Baxter. I was pretty naïve about sexuality back in the mid-70s and had never really been exposed to S&M and there you were wearing this weird black leather mask with a zipper on it and getting whipped by Phyllis Davis.

PK: Yes, it was quite shocking for me too.  I accepted that part without considering certain things about the script, and it was surprising for me.  Was your dad sorry that he took you to see that?

TS: No. Dad never had regrets about things like that but I doubt we discussed the S&M on the drive home.  When you take off that leather mask in the film and are exposed to your fellow cops, there was this profound look and sense of anguish in your face that stayed with me. I wondered, at that young age, exactly what deviant sexuality was?  I couldn’t stop wondering why was Baxter so humiliated that he would kill himself. That character really haunted me.  I didn’t know what to think. You don’t see that type of sexuality presented that way today in movies.  Today’s audiences just take that sort of stuff for granted.  But you were so good as Baxter and at that point you became one of my favorite actors.  I sought out some of your older films and then would always go see your new films after that.  I’ve been a fan of yours for a long time.

PK: Thank you so much.  I could tell you stories about THE CHOIROYS for an hour.  I should tell you that that part changed the way that I chose parts, and said ‘yes or no’ to scripts.  At that point in my career I considered myself a typical method actor. I imbued myself with the character thoroughly, but I didn’t have the skills then to just walk away from a set and come back to it the next morning.  Playing a part, as I’ve often said, is not like playing a person, but being a roommate with that person.  And would you want to room with somebody that was suicidal? But that’s what I did. For three months I lived with my character Baxter Slade, and at the end of making that movie, it near killed me.  Living with him, thinking his thoughts, being him as much as I could, so by the end of the shoot I felt lucky to have lived through that.  After that, I was much more careful before saying yes to a roll.  If I had known what I was going to go through with Baxter, I may not have done THE CHOIRBOYS. 

TS: You were superb in it and I’m certainly glad that you did it. My girlfriend was not familiar with your career outside of THE CLASS OF ‘84,  so I showed her two Perry King movies over the weekend. Last night we watched THE CHOIRBOYS, and the night before we watched ANDY WARHOL’S BAD, which I have some questions about.  But let’s first talk about THE DIVIDE for a while, because I know that is the movie that you are out promoting.  Congratulations on THE DIVIDE, your directorial debut.  I thought you did a terrific job playing Jack, the old rancher who is starting to suffer the effects of dementia. I’ve watched my father go through dementia the past few years and what you captured so well was the confusion of being unable to articulate your thoughts.  There’s been so many times where my father just can’t think of a word, a word he’s used his whole life, and it gets so frustrating for him.  You just nailed that in your performance.

PK: Thank you. I think so many of us in this country right now are going through that, being around a loved one who is going through those issues.  My best friend for the past 40 years is going through deep dementia with Alzheimers.  When I am with him, I can just barely glimpse the old friend that I rode motorcycles with for so long. He’s a crazy old Scotsman, one of those one-off people who you’ll never meet anyone else like. We raced cars for 20 years together.  Now I can just barely see that guy.  He asks the same questions again and again. 

TS: Tell me how you researched and prepared for that role. 

PK: I’ll be glad to. The way I was taught to act at Juilliard and classes afterward, is that you just imbue yourself with something and then allow it to come back out when you have to film it.  I got lucky with THE DIVIDE in a lot of ways, but one of the ways was that we spent almost two years preparing the film. It was a personal project and all of that time I was working on this character of Sam.  More than any other part that I’ve had in my entire life, for the first time I was able to prepare a character and really understand him. When it came time to film I was able to, what actors call “making the marriage“.  That means ideally you should be able to tell your character ‘to go’, to literally open the door in your head, and the character, in this case Sam, could walk out.  Sometimes my character Sam would do stuff on camera  that I had not thought about.  It wasn’t a conscious choice on my part. The character just did stuff.  That’s because he was fully realized. THE DIVIDE was just so satisfying.  It’s been such a treat. For 50 years I have been a professional actor and all that time I have wanted to make my own movie and finally I got to.

TS: Why did it take 50 years Perry?

PK: Lots of reasons, but I think the easiest explanation is that I am a slow learner.  It took me that long to feel like I could do it.  All the lessons that I have learned by watching directors I’ve worked with over the years I carefully employed. THE DIVIDE has flaws. I can list them for hours, but it is the movie that Jana Brown, the writer and my partner in this, and I meant to make, and I am still stunned  that we actually pulled it off. I’ve never done anything else in 50 years that was nearly as satisfying as this.  The movie THE DIVIDE that you saw is the movie that we always had in mind.  Nothing ever works that way. I made the movie assuming that we would make an honorable failure, but it’s not a failure for us.  As much as I want people to like THE DIVIDE, it doesn’t even matter to me, because I like it and I can’t believe how lucky I am. 

TS: You’ve certainly worked with some legendary directors in your career. Men such as Richard Fleischer, George Roy Hill,  and Robert Aldrich, so I assume some of that stuff just has to rub off if you’re paying attention to what they were doing. 

PK: Yes, close attention.  And to this day I can repeat the advice that those directors told me.  I remember George Roy Hill talking once when we were stuck waiting on a set (of SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE – 1972). He was stuck with me and had no one else to talk to you. I was only about 22 years old then.  He told me then that 50% of making a movie is casting.  Wow, what a lesson that was.  Dick Fleischer, such an underrated director, once told me that a good script is made up of promises.  For example if a character says “if you’re not out of town by noon, I’m coming to kill you“, that’s a promise. You can put an audience through a lot of stuff, and you don’t have to deliver on the promise, and it’s better if you do, but you have to have the promise.  Another thing Fleischer said to me that was so true of THE DIVIDE was that you write a screenplay and start working on it, and you’ll rewrite it several times and make changes. He said that if you’ve gotten up to several rewrites and you find yourself with a terrible quandary that you can’t resolve, go back to the first version of your script , because you were probably right in the first place. 

TS: What were some of the unexpected challenges you faced as a first-time Director on THE DIVIDE? 

PK: The biggest mistake I made was vetting. I did not tvet some people thoroughly enough, and as a result, I had some problems.  I just hired people and hoped for the best. That’s not a good plan.  I’m not going to go into specifics, but there were several people that I had to fire, which is never good. Another lesson that I learned as an employer is to hire women!  The women worked on the film were magnificent.  Not just Jana Brown who wrote the script, but all of the women who worked on that film.  Jo Haskin, Jane Rayburn and so many more were wonderful. Yet I had lots of problems with a half a dozen men on the film.  They wanted to tell me what to do and they couldn’t, because for once in my life, I wanted to be the one that made the decisions.  The director is the Captain. It turned out so well.

TS: You have been acting for 50 years and you’ve never been in a black-and-white movie. Yet, here you are directing THE DIVIDE and it’s a black-and-white film.  Explain the decision behind that. 

PK: For me, it could never have been anything but black and white.  In the end I had to pay for that decision. Funding became tricky. I had several sources that were willing to put up money but did not want to produce a black and white film, only color.  I didn’t want those investors telling me what to do, even though I couldn’t blame them for discouraging black and white, so I had trouble finding funding where I could be left alone.  John Ford one said that black and white photography is real photography.  I never knew Ford, but he’s right.  When you’re watching a black-and-white movie, you are paying to attention to the people and everything else more closely.  Color tends to wash things out and make it amorphous.  Perhaps nobody will agree with me saying that today because we’re all so used to color.  Black and white is so much better. Did you see a movie a few years ago called IDA (2013)? 

TS: Yes, I believe that won Oscar for Best Foreign Film.

PK: Yes, it did. And the director did another one more recently called COLD WAR.  Both of those were terrific movies.  Just the black and white photography alone in those films is incredible.  Every frame of those films is like a beautiful Walker Evans photograph  

TS: You mentioned John Ford. Your film THE DIVIDE is a western in the sense that it takes place in the American west.  Were directors like Ford and Raoul Walsh and Howard Hawks an influence on your style? 

PK: Very much. Particularly John Ford.  Ford hated working in color.  He resisted color.  Even after color became the standard, color was more expensive, so that allowed him reduce his budget by continuing to make black-and-white films.  Back when he was photographing silent films, people noticed just how terrific his framing was.  It’s riveting. Look at the end of THE SEARCHERS. As good as that movie is, all you have to see is the last 30 seconds to appreciate the whole thing.  

TS: Besides THE QUIET MAN and THE SEARCHERS, it’s Ford’s black-and-white movies that everyone remembers.  

PK: And black-and-white works so well for westerns.  Westerns are inherently very black and white stories. Good and bad. Right and wrong.  Most Americans think that Hollywood invented movies, but we didn’t. The Russians invented movies. What Americans contributed to movies is the western, just the way the Japanese contributed the samurai films.  That’s our genre, and it’s a shame that we don’t do it as much anymore.  And I wondered about that forever. But a producer told me many years ago that the reason we don’t do many westerns anymore  is that we don’t have the people out there to make them with.  We don’t have John Wayne. Clint Eastwood is 90 years old. We don’t have those guys anymore. The only younger actor that I’ve seen in the past few years that I think is at home in a western as a John Wayne-type figure is Josh Brolin. I mean that. What are you going to do, put Tom Cruise on the Western?

TS: Yes. You mentioned Clint Eastwood. He has a new movie coming out later this year. 

PK: Does he really? He’s amazing. 

TS: He directed it and stars in it and it’s called CRY MACHO.  Isn’t that a great title for a movie directed by a 90 year old Clint Eastwood?

 PK: It is. While I was trying to figure out how to be the best director I could, I read a quote from Clint that went “When I am directing I try to be like the director that I want to have”. And I know who that is. It’s the guy who keeps his mouth shut  unless something is wrong, just a guy who sits there and says “beautiful. Print it.  Move on“. That’s all you want.  Directors are always meddling with you. You often want to say to them “you hired me for this, now leave me alone“

TS: You hired yourself to direct THE DIVIDE. What was it like directing yourself? Did you leave yourself alone?

PK: Yes. I had directed once before, one episode of Riptide. That was back in the day when we shot on film. So I knew that directing could be very schizophrenic. Usually you only get a few weeks to prepare before you start shooting something.  I knew that I wanted to have my character Sam be so clear to me that I could transfer in to this character as soon as I yelled “roll camera“. And that was crucial. I had months to prepare, meeting people with Alzheimers, researching it. I saw an episode of a morning show on NBC that showed how to enter the world of a loved one with dementia and see what it’s like.  First, you take a pair of shoes and you fill it up with things that make it very uncomfortable to wear. Then take a pair of gloves and tape the fingers together and make the gloves bulky so you really don’t have good use of your hands. Then put on headphones and turn it to a radio station that is mostly static and too loud.  Put on a pair of safety glasses with tape on it so you can’t see very well. Then with all of this on, proceed to do your chores.  Do your laundry, wash the dishes. I spent hours and hours alone doing that stuff.  It’s horrible. You want to rip the stuff off of you and that’s the point. The person that has this condition can’t.  It’s awful. I remember my father, who was a surgeon, said to me one time many years ago that the two things that kill people the most are heart problems and cancer. He said that even if we could completely solve both of those things, there would be something else. He just didn’t know what it was at the time. And it turns out he was right and that thing is Alzheimers. We are now basically outliving in our physical brain . It’s like my friend who has dementia. A few years back he had a heart incident and they were able to repair that but they can’t do anything about his brain.

TS: Back to THE DIVIDE. I understand that it was filmed at your own ranch.  

PK: Yes. I was really lucky years ago and got the ownership of a cattle ranch in Northern California. 500 acres. I did a TV movie in 1998 called THE COWBOY AND THE MOVIE STAR. It co-starred Sean Young. It was an okay TV movie but there were two things that were great about it. One was Sean. She became one of my good friends. She’s a wonderful actress and a great person. She’s been somewhat mistreated and maligned by the business. The other great thing was that I was playing with this guy who had a cattle ranch. His wife was going to take his ranch away in a divorce and he was trying to figure out a way to keep it. Long story short, Sean plays a movie star who gets stranded close to his ranch. In the end, they fall in love and she buys the land and gives it back to him.  When I finished this movie, I realized how much I loved playing this character. I wanted to play him again so much but I knew I would never get that chance as that’s just not the way it works, so I figured I could just become him.  So that’s what I did. I bought this cattle ranch.

TS: Did they have to build sets on your ranch to make THE DIVIDE, or was it just filmed as is?

PK: No, one of the many things that we did that I thought was smart was that while Jana Brown was writing the screenplay, I could let her know when I thought things were ready. That way, she could write the screenplay to fit the location.  I met Jana when she did an interview with me for a school where she works that I had attended as a teenager. She wasn’t there at that time, I’m much older. She was interviewing people that had graduated from the school for the school magazine. She had contacted me but I didn’t think anybody that went to that school would find anything I had to say interesting. But that’s how I met Jana.

TS: Let’s talk about some of your older movies.  You mentioned that you enjoyed hiring women for THE DIVIDE.  Some of my favorite glamour girls from the 70s:  Susan George, Raquel Welch, Susan Blakely, Meg Foster, Phyllis Davis. What all those women have in common is that you got to co-star with them. I was always jealous of guys like you and Jan Michael Vincent and John Phillip Law and Marjoe Gortner, guys that played studs in the 70s because you got to interact, and sometimes have love scenes with, these actresses that I have worshiped since I was a kid. 

PK: Yes, but it’s very uneven. For example, Susan Blakely is still one of my best friends and one of the most wonderful people I’ve ever known in my life. She and I did four movies together. On the other hand, there’s Raquel Welch.  I don’t want to say anything about her because I don’t like it when people badmouth others. 

TS: Burt Reynolds co-starred with Raquel Welch twice and famously disliked her. 

PK: Reynolds got mad at me because Loni Anderson and I had a great time working together on a TV movie! He was jealous even though he himself was wildly unfaithful. He just assumed that she was too. But there wasn’t anything between me and Loni. We just enjoyed each other’s company. Actors can be very neurotic. When I hear a young person tell me that they want to be an actor, what I’m hearing them say is “hey, I’m just as f**ked up as you are“. Actors are very screwed-up people.  The one thing that every actor I’ve known has in common is that if they are performing in front of 100 people, and 99 of them are applauding and enjoying the work, they will only focus on, or care about, that one person who’s not. That’s the only one that matters. That’s neurotic. That’s unhealthy. But the world would be a lesser place without people like Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep and Lawrence Olivier, who is on record as saying that acting is a ridiculous way for a grown man to make a living. 

TS: When we watched ANDY WARHOL’S BAD the other night, my girlfriend became quite upset when the baby was dropped out the window. 

PK: We did too! Carroll Baker and I said to the director Jed Johnson about halfway through shooting that we would walk away and not let them finish the movie unless they promised us that they would cut out that scene and the baby would not get dropped out the window. We were assured that scene would be written out, but they left it in. Warhol himself was in control only in terms of budget and financing. 

TS: What was Warhol like? 

PK: He was fascinating.  I loved hanging out with him. Once we were having lunch together and he brought this tiny little 8mm camera with him  and a tiny reel-to-reel tape recorder. This was in the 70s.  Warhol was constantly filming and recording whoever he was having lunch with with this little recorder. I asked him why he was doing that. His answer was “I just want everybody to be as uncomfortable as I am”. The front of his hair was white, but the hair on the back of his head was black.  I asked him why he didn’t bother bleaching the hair on the back of his head.  He said “I don’t care. When I look in the mirror I can’t see the back of my head“.   He was amazing. I would walk into The Factory in New York.  I would just go in the back door. This was years ago when there was very little security and as a result, he got shot.  Anyway, I would walk in the back door and inside, in this huge room, were stacks of Warhol paintings. Just stacks of them that he did not have in shows, ones that he had done recently. He was such a smart businessman. He understood that if you poured the paintings out willy-nilly into the market, it would bring the price down. He made his art available at the right time where he could make top dollar. One time I was there and Warhol was on his knees signing these paintings with his finger in the wet paint at the bottom of one of those silkscreen portraits. In those days you could commission him to do a portrait of you. It would cost a couple of hundred grand and all he would do was take a Polaroid and send the image off to have it silkscreened onto a canvas. Then he would have them send it back to him when the paint was still wet and he would sign it with his name with the wet paint with his finger.  I asked him why he was doing it like that with his finger.  He said “They always want to know that it has been done by the hand of Andy Warhol“. When I did ANDY WARHOL’S BAD, I was so out-of-step with everything that was going on. So was Carroll Baker.  And remember, Susan Tyrrell was in that film as well.

TS: Oh I always liked her. 

PK: She was crazy, but also a magnificent actress. I’m not sure if she is still around.

TS: No, she passed away in 2012. She had lost both of her legs to diabetes a couple of years before that. 

PK: Oh, poor girl.  She was wonderful and so caring. Carroll Baker and I just thought everything was so crazy while we were shooting that movie but Susan Tyrrell was wonderful.  Carroll Baker and I were just blown away by her. Carroll and I both approached Susan one day and asked her to help us. We both thought we were terrible in the film and we asked her for advice because we were feeling a bit lost with this strange script. Susan just laughed and told us that we had made a terrible mistake by reading the script in the first place. Susan never read the script and had no idea what was going to happen in the story. She said that that was the way to do an Andy Warhol movie.  And she was right.  Carroll and I were trying to do traditional characters with story arcs and all that stuff you normally do with a character. Finally on the last day of the shoot, director Jed Johnson, who was one of Andy’s protégés, didn’t like what I was doing, so I said that “This is a comedy that we were working on, right?”  It was a rhetorical question. Jed looked at me and says “It’s not a comedy!“ I realized that right then, on the last day of shooting,  I finally understood that in Andy Warhol world, ugly is pretty, tall is short, funny is sad. It’s like Alice through the looking glass working on a Warhol film. I realized that I was not in the same movie that they were making.  At all. I was in another movie on the other side of the looking glass.  But it was too late. The movie was over. 

TS: It’s certainly one of the most mean-spirited movies ever made. But in a good way.

PK: I asked Andy what the movie was about and he said “I wanted to make a movie about mean women and incompetent men“. So that’s what he had in mind. To tell you the truth, I think I’ve only seen that film once in my life. 

TS: Director Jed Johnson was killed in the infamous TWA flight 800 explosion in 1996.

PK: Tragic.

TS: Let’s talk about another move you co-starred in, MANDINGO.  What was it like acting alongside the legendary James Mason? 

PK: That’s something I’ve thought about for a lot of years.  I thought I should write a book. Not about myself, but about all of these extraordinary people that I have worked with.  James Mason would be right at the very top of that list.  Incredibly talented man, but also incredibly generous and kind.  Others I would put on that list would be Shirley McClain and Katherine Hepburn and James Coco. Claude Raines was the first one that was so wonderful to me. When I was a kid, he spent an afternoon with me because he knew I wanted to be an actor. He was very old and sick then, and only had a few afternoon left but  he gave me one of them to help me.  At the end of the afternoon, my father was dragging me out of his house.  As I was leaving I asked Mr. Raines “What is the most important thing for me to remember?  Claude Raines said to me “(imitating Claude Raines’ voice) The most important thing is the enthusiasm!“ That advice was such an incredible gift to me. It’s amazing how much you can get through life with enthusiasm.  I help out sometimes in a very good acting school in LA.  I’ve been acting for a half of a century in what I like to tell the students there is how good my experience on MANDINGO with Richard Fleischer directing and James Mason starring was. You don’t have any problems if you’re on a project like that. All you have to do is recite the words.  People like James Mason pull you up to a level that you could never get to by yourself.  It’s not usually like that. Most of the time, you’ve got director-as-traffic-cop.  They don’t care so much about what you’re doing as they are preventing people from bumping into each other. But it’s when  you’ve got actors that are selfish or are not good actors, and when  you’ve got a terrible script filled with stuff that you would never see in real life, that’s when you have to be enthusiastic.  Another actor that I’d like to write about is Natalie Wood.  She would show up on a set at 6 o’clock in the morning, before anyone was really awake and she was so excited and would say “Oh this is going to be great! This is such an exciting scene that we are filming today!“. Now if anybody in the world had a right to be cynical, it was Natalie wood,  someone who had been a star since they were a child, But no, what you saw with her was just her raw enthusiasm. 

TS: What project did you work with Natalie Wood on?

PC: That would have been a TV movie called THE CRACKER FACTORY (1979). She’s good in that. I’m not, but she is. 

TS: Why didn’t you return as Hammond Maxwell in DRUM, the sequel to MANDINGO? 

PC: Dino DeLaurentis wanted me to do DRUM and I just thought I’d rather die. DeLaurentis promoted MANDINGO as if it were a piece of junk. He did that not because he thought it was, but because he thought it would a bigger profit if he promoted it as an exploitation potboiler. And he was right, but James Mason and the Director Richard Fleischer and I believed in that movie. We thought it was a really fine film. Ugly in parts, but true and accurate. I still think that, but I’m not sure anyone else agrees with that.

TS: I would agree with that. 

PC: The sequel was going to be more like Dino had paid for. Junk. I avoided it.  I did have a contract with Dino so he could put me in any other movie he wanted to and he did. That movie was LIPSTICK which costarred Margaux Hemingway.  But I would not do DRUM. 

TS: I always thought it was funny that Hammond Maxwell, the character you play in MANDINGO, grows up in the sequel and played by Warren Oates.  Here’s tall, handsome Perry King, and then in the sequel you get grizzled old Warren Oates. 

PC: Yes, I think he was miscast in that part but Warren Oates was a far better film actor than I will ever be.  But yeah, Ha! I don’t know how they went from me to him. 

TS: I think DRUM is an excellent film with a terrific cast. Kaphet Kotto and Pam Grier are in it. 

PC: Yes. It was really what Dino wanted MANDINGO to be.  But he hired the wrong director for MANDINGO. He hired a Director that ended up making a good film out of it.  Not that it has been seen that way. The perception is that it is a piece of crap, but if you care about what people think, you die quickly. You just become a pool of flesh on the ground. You can’t be in this business and worry about what people think. 

TS: Let’s talk about THE CLASS OF ‘84.  Are you surprised at the depth of the cult following that THE CLASS OF ’84 has today. A younger generation of movie buffs has embraced that movie. 

PC: I guess I’m not really aware of that. I was at Cannes recently with THE DIVIDE and I ran into Mark Lester, who had directed THE CLASS OF ‘84.  It was funny because he was sitting in a bar that everyone goes to, and I walked in. We just looked at each other and burst out laughing.  There we were, over 35 years later, and we both looked 35 years older. It was just laughable. We looked like we had both been hit by a truck. That’s what life does to you.  I can’t say I ever liked that movie much, but I did like Mark Lester a lot  

TS: I love the film and have seen it many times.

PC: I’m glad you do. It’s all personal.  I had an idea for an ending of that film that I tried to talk Mark into shooting that I thought would have been a great ending.  I was the one who thought of having the 1812 Overture playing during the climax. I told Mark that at the end of the film he should really do it the way that Shakespeare’s tragedies are done, where everything comes around full circle.  I told him that at the end of the film, they should have a scene where, just like in the beginning,  you show all of the kids going into the school  and there’s me walking into the school.  Same look, same clothes, same way that I walk, but then when the camera gets a better look at me, it is another man.  The same thing that’s going to happen all over again.   That to me would’ve made the film better.  

TS: I think one reason younger audiences have discovered and embraced that film is Tim Van Patten and some of his over-the-top lines as the villain. 

PC: Tim Van Patten has become one of television’s busiest directors.  Very successful.  Just goes to show, you never know, because I would’ve never thought that in a million years after working with him on that film.  Nice guy to work with, but if you told me he was going to become a very good and successful director , I would not have believed that was possible.  Another person in the film was Michael J Fox. He and I spent a lot of time working together.  We filmed that in Toronto.  I remember hoping that Michael’s dad had a factory somewhere he could take over,  because I didn’t think he knew how to act at all.  Boy, was I wrong about that. 

TS: I guess he honed his craft on television. 

PC: Michael Fox was good then, I just couldn’t see it. 

TS: Is it true that you auditioned for the role of Han Solo? 

PC: Yes. The footage of that is somewhere out there.  I think in one of the special edition Star Wars DVDs they added, as an extra, footage of some of the auditions of actors who weren’t cast in the film.  I watched that footage recently and thought “Good God, no wonder I didn’t get the part!”  I was so bad.  Awful. But nobody could’ve ever played that part better than Harrison Ford.  I was able to do Han Solo later. National public radio produced three Star Wars stories on radio.  It’s really good. You wouldn’t think that Star Wars would work on radio. For some reason that I am unaware of, they came to me for that part.  So I missed being in the movie but I got to do it on the radio. Radio is actually very fun acting. 

TS: How often do you kick back on the couch at night and throw in an old Perry King movie? 

PC: Never.  I hate watching myself.  The one exception is THE DIVIDE. I was involved in the editing of that so I spent a lot of time watching myself in that.  But besides that I hate watching myself. I find it brutally painful.  Early on in my career, I would go to dailies, where they would show the footage from the previous day in the evening.  I wish I hadn’t because in some ways, it ruined whatever I was bringing to the film.  All I could do was judge and criticize myself.  There have been times where I have turned on the TV, and there I am.  So I change it, flip to another channel, and there I am again!  I just turn the TV off at that point. Spencer Tracy was famously like that.  Katherine Hepburn told me that he hated to watch himself. She told me the story of how one night Spencer Tracy went to see a movie,  then he thought that he had seen the movie, then, when he walked on the screen he realized it was one of his own films.  He said “God dammit“, and he walked out.  Have you ever heard the genesis of an actor’s life?

TS: Tell me. 

PC: I will use myself, but this is an acting joke amongst actors.  It starts “who is Perry King?”  Then it’s “get me Perry King!“, then it’s “get me a young Perry King”, then it’s “get me a Perry King  type!”, then finally it it’s “who is Perry King?”  That’s an actor’s life.  Today I can walk down any street and nobody knows who I am. And that’s fine by me. 

TS: Well I think that a lot of movie buffs, especially those that grew up in the 70s and love films from that period, would certainly recognize you.  I’ve always enjoyed your work so much.  I’ve been with this site We Are Movie Geeks for 13 years and I have conducted over 200 interviews and I’ll tell you right now that this one will be amongst my top 10 favorite interviews.

PC: Oh, thank you very much . Do you have time to hear one more story about James Mason and Director Richard Fleischer on the set of MANDINGO?

TS: Sure.

PC: I’ve told a lot of young actors this story because young actors always want to know what’s the difference between stage acting and film acting.  The real difference is that stage acting is hard, and film acting, by comparison, is easy.  James Mason in MANDINGO what the subject of a single shot where it was just him on screen.  They were filming him from the chest up.  I was just off-screen by the camera, because Mason is talking to me.  It’s the end of the shot, Dick Fleischer said  “Cut. Print!“, and then the crew burst into applause.  James Mason was very courteous because he was a wonderful man. He took a little bow and thanked everyone, then walked up to Dick Fleischer and very quietly asked him if they could do another take of that scene.  Fleischer said “Why? You just got applause“.  Mason said “Yes that’s why. If it’s big enough for the crew, it’s too big“. They did another take, this time with Mason toning down his delivery, and the crew did not applaud.  That’s the point. The camera is so intimate that an expert at his craft like  Mason thought that if he received applause from the crew, then he had given into his stage acting,  and realized that he needed to pull it back. So many people have taught me things in my career but I learned more from James Mason than anyone else. 

TS: Such great stories Perry. I’ve enjoyed the heck out of talking to you. Best of luck with THE DIVIDE and all your future projects.

PC: Thanks a lot. I have enjoyed talking to you too as well. 

Here’s Perry King’s STAR WARS audition: