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WAMG Interview: Gary Sherman, Director of DEAD & BURIED – Now Available on 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray From Blue Underground – We Are Movie Geeks

Interview

WAMG Interview: Gary Sherman, Director of DEAD & BURIED – Now Available on 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray From Blue Underground

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“You can try to kill me, Dan. But you can’t. You can only make me dead. ”

Gary Sherman directed just a half dozen theatrical features in his career (as well as dozens of TV movies and shows), but at least three of those are genuine masterpieces: DEATH LINE (1972 aka RAW MEAT), DEAD & BURIED (1981) and the relentlessly sleazy thriller VICE SQUAD (1982). Gary took the time to talk to We Are Movie Geeks‘ Tom Stockman about his life, his career, and why he won’t sign Tom’s RAW MEAT poster.

The DEAD & BURIED Exclusive Limited Collector’s Edition includes 4K UHD Blu-ray, Remastered Blu-ray, Soundtrack CD, Collectible Booklet, Reversible Sleeve and three different 3D Lenticular Slipcovers from Blue Underground will be available on July 20th. Order it HERE.

Interview conducted by Tom Stockman June 24th 2021

Tom Stockman Hi Gary. Where are you living these days?

Gary Sherman: We have a house in Michigan but we are living in Evanston, near Chicago.

TS: Let’s talk about your movies.  In the past week I’ve re-watched three films you directed: DEATH LINE (1972), DEAD & BURIED (1981), and VICE SQUAD (1982),. Have you seen the new 4K transfer of DEAD & BURIED? 

GS: I have and it looks great. The shame with DEAD & BURIED is that the 35mm prints did not survive. The Kodak stock back then was very unstable.  Every print of DEAD & BURIED has faded to pink. Back when we did the first DVD and the first Blu-ray, we did the a transfer from the negative for the scan and I always carry one of those around with me on disc when I go to film festivals. That way if they’re trying to show one of the faded prints, I just say I just prefer to show it digitally. What cinematographer Steven Poster and I went through to get the look that we wanted for that film was just unbelievable. And we shot that film wide open and we would close down either with neutral density filters or use a lot of flags to take light off of things, because I wanted that very short depth of field. 

TS: It was shot in California, correct?

GS: Yes, it was shot in Mendocino. 

TS: But does it not take place in New England?

GS: Yes we  made it feel like it was New England, but we never specified at all where it was. It took place in the mystical town of Potter’s Bluff which was kind of a play on Potters Field.

TS: From IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE?

GS: Yes but even Pottersville from IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE was based on Potter’s Field, which was a place where they buried poor people. 

TS: This new Blue Underground 4K edition has an impressive set of special features: four commentaries, several interviews including an interview with the woman that wrote the novelization of the screenplay. It’s really packed with extras.

GS: Yes and there’s a great interview on there with Stan Winston and another one with Robert England.  There’s also a really fun interview that (composer) Joe Renzetti and I did together. 

TS: You have recorded commentaries before.  Do you come well-prepared when you do a commentary, or you do you just wing it with your own memories?  

GS: I pretty much wing it with my own memory. I have a very good memory.

TS: It sounds like you do

GS: There used to be a time when I was watching one of my films, I could tell you the slate numbers on every shot. 

TS: DEAD & BURIED has some great gruesome effects. Were there some effects that (makeup effects designer) Stan Winston created that were just too much and had to be cut out? 

GS: No. Stan gave me what I wanted. That was a very young Stan Winston and also a very young Gary Sherman. When we made that film, Stan didn’t have his big studio. He did everything himself. And Zoltan Elek worked for him. Zoltan had just won the Oscar for MASK. He was more of an applicator while Dan was more of a sculptor. Stan was unbelievable. What a loss when he died. Unfortunately CGI was phasing him out anyhow which is too bad because practical effects are ten times more effective  then CGI.

TS: I agree. Don’t you think Stan would’ve continued to work with perhaps a mixture of practical effects and CGI?

GS: Oh yes, but Stan was leaning more towards directing  and I think that’s what he would’ve ended up doing. 

TS: Everybody remembers the needle through the eyeball sequence in DEAD & BURIED with Lisa Blount. Eyeball violence is always shocking. In fact, that image is on one of the three lenticular slipcovers for the new 4K.  That’s really going the extra mile. 

GS: Bill Lustig at Blue Underground always goes the extra mile. He has spent a lot of time and money putting this 4K together. 

TS: Do you know Bill well?

GS: Yes, I know Bill very well. I knew of Bill when we first met  20 years ago. I used to see Bill in New York a lot. It seems like I was often in New York doing something for Fangoria magazine, and Bill was always at those Fangoria convention. 

TS: I met Bill at one of those conventions around 1990. You were probably there. I recall Roddy McDowall and Tony Perkins were at that convention and both of those actors refuse to charge money for their autographs. The convention scene his changed a lot since then. 

GS: I would never ask anyone for money for an autograph.  I understand why people do, but it is just something that I wouldn’t do. I go to film festivals all over the globe and people run up and want me to sign a poster or take a picture, and of course I say yes. These are the people that made our careers. 

TS: That’s a good attitude and fans like me appreciate that. Herschel Gordon Lewis, the King of Gore, had that same attitude

GS: Yes, I knew Herschel. He was from Chicago. 

TS: Was the final version of DEAD & BURIED your vision of the film ? Did the studio give you the kind of control that you wanted? 

GS: Not completely. The studio, Avco Embassy, made a negative pick-up deal with the production company.  They weren’t making the film, but they were buying the film.  It started off with the Guinness Company which was headed up by Richard St. John.  It was a production company founded by the Guinness Beer Corporation.  Halfway through production, Guinness, because of another project, decided they did not want to be in the movie business.  So they sold it to a company called Aspen Productions. That company was headed up by John Hyde. So we shot the picture with that company and I’ll tell you, it was the best shoot that I have ever been on.  We all had so much fun making that movie and John Hyde was so supportive with everything that we wanted to do. They gave Ron Shusett and myself a free hand to make the movie we wanted to make. Then I had just finished my directors cut, when PSO, under the direction of Mark Damon, bought Aspen production. Mark Damon showed up at the screening of my directors cut, which was a great screening. Bob Rehme, who was president of Avco-Embassy  and Frank Capra Jr, who was vice president, came up and hugged me  and were just praising the film and the dark comedy in it. Then Mark Damon comes in and takes me to a corner of the screening room and says “it’s a good movie, but if I wanted Bergman to direct a horror film, I would have hired Bergman.  Now let’s make this into a horror movie“.

TS: What do he mean by that?

GS: That’s what PSO wanted; low down dirty horror. We set out to make a very classy horror film when we started making DEAD & BURIED. Mark’s problem was that there wasn’t enough blood or violence in the film for his taste.  He didn’t understand what the comedy was there for. They wanted to add two scenes to the film. One of the scenes was when the doctor gets the acid up his nose  and also the shot of the fisherman getting his face cut open.  My idea when I made the film was that there would be no red in the film. The only red would be in the title where it says DEAD & BURIED, and then when you see the beach scene with Lisa Blount, she was wearing a red blouse.  After that, there is no red anywhere in the film until the final scene where Jack Albertson is bleeding.  Even when you look at the film now you can see the fire engines were green, tail lights on cars were purple, There is no red anywhere in the film. I wanted that feeling of death because red is about life. Blood is red. You only have blood if you’re alive, but everybody in Potter’s Bluff was dead. It was subtle, but it really worked.

TS: It has a remarkable atmosphere and I think that the movie has aged quite well  and I’m sure that’s because of the attention to detail like you are describing.  It was marketed as “from the creators of ALIEN“. Is that because of Dan O’Bannon’s involvement? 

GS: Yes. Dan and Ron Shusett. 

TS: O’Bannon was a St. Louis native. How much of the script came from his mind? 

GS: Ron and Dan bought that script originally from two guys who I never met and can’t recall their names. They sat down and did a total rewrite. They didn’t pay much for the script because, before ALIEN, Ron and Dan did not have much money.  Ron showed up at my door one day. I had just moved to Los Angeles from London and he introduced himself as someone who was going to be the biggest producer in Hollywood and he also said he was the world’s biggest fan of DEATH LINE. And he had this script that was horror laced with comedy that he wanted me to direct.  But I had not directed anything since DEATH LINE nine years earlier, and I really didn’t want to.  I was quite happy making commercials and television  DEATH LINE had turned into a nightmare for me because of American international pictures. 

TS: Yes, RAW MEAT.

GS: What they did to DEATH LINE is a story that I think a lot of people have heard. 

TS: I must say that I do really like the U.S. poster for RAW MEAT.  

GS: Oh no! I hate the RAW MEAT poster! 

TS: It’s very ‘70s. Sleazy and lurid.

GS: Yes, but that has nothing to do with the movie!  It was made to be very serious and also very political.

TS: You’re right that the US poster does not capture the essence of the film well, but I still like it.

GS: DEATH LINE is a movie that has always been in circulation, and I think that’s because of its political views.  But anyways, as far as Dan and Ron’s script, Ron and I wrote the final draft together. 

TS: Was there ever talk of doing a sequel to DEAD & BURIED? 

GS: There was at the beginning, but then the film did not do very well initially. Rob and Dan went off and did other things .I did VICE SQUAD right after, so I was not looking back. We just went on our merry way. But then of course, Jack Albertson died 

TS: As I recall, DEAD & BURIED went to HBO pretty quickly.

GS: Yeah, the problem was there was such a fight between our Avco Embassy and PSO, because PSO insisted on making these changes and the animosity between the studio and the production company  became massive so eventually everyone just said “fuck it. Let’s just make our money back“. I was never asked to do any publicity for the film. Avco put a lot of publicity into VICE SQUAD. They said “pick a script and we’ll make a movie. We love what you did and we hate what they’re doing to it  so let’s just get away from it“. That’s what happened.

TS: Too bad. Let’s get back to Jack Albertson because I always liked him when I was a child because he was on Chico and the Man and was Grandpa Joe in Willy Wonka. What was Jack Albertson like to work with on DEAD & BURIED, his last film?

GS: He was a dream. You could not have asked for a kinder, more attentive gentleman. He would come on the set singing and dancing even though he was very ill. He never talked about being sick, but we all knew that he could die at any moment.  He was suffering from severe cancer but he was just fantastic. Never a grumble or anything negative.  He knew his lines and he was there to have a good time.  We did a ADR (post-dubbing) after the film was finished, and I went through his footage as quickly as possible to cover any ADR that we might need from him because we knew it was getting close to the end.  We did the ADR one afternoon, then he and his wife and I went out to dinner. Jack ended up passing away the next day. 

TS: Well, he went out on top co-starring your excellent film. Let’s talk about you a minute. You were born in 1945 in Chicago. What were you like as a young man in Chicago in the 1960s?  

GS: In the 60s I was a hippie, definitely. I had hair down below my shoulders. Actually I looked more like Jimi Hendrix because I had curly hair.  I went to art school and smoked a lot of drugs. I was an artist searching for a medium  

TS: Were movies a passion of yours at this time? 

GS: Yes as a fan. I always watched movies and I love horror movies.  I have been into horror movies since I was a little kid. My brother took me to see HOUSE OF WAX in 3D at the theater when I was five or six years old. It just blew me away. I grew up in a strange time in Chicago when there was a series of child murders. It was always on the front page of the paper.  It really freaked me out and got me in touch with my fears. I was working my way through school because my parents did not want me to go to art school.  They wanted me to be a lawyer, or an engineer, or a doctor.  When you’re Jewish, you have to be one of those three things. I was also a musician at that time. I played music and sang, so it was either music or art that I was going to dedicate my life to.  My parents were against both of those things so I left home and worked my way through school as a musician.  I worked at Chess Records as a session musician. I was the token white guy at Chess Records.  I knew a lot of the famous black rock ‘n’ roll stars.  That led me to my first movie which was THE BO DIDDLY STORY. I just found a movie camera at school and then asked Bo if I could shoot some footage of him, and he said yes. I showed the footage to Marshall Chess, who is the studio’s founder Leonard Chess’ son. He loved what he saw and said we should make it into a movie.  So we made THE BO DIDDLY STORY which won awards all over the place and was sold to 75 television stations around the world. So there I was, suddenly making movies, and other record companies started calling me. One of them was Crescendo Records and I did a film for them for a group called The Seeds. Sky Saxon was with them. Pushing Too Hard was their big hit.  I did the video, but of course they did not call it a video back then, they called it a music performance film.  I did one of those for Sonny & Cher, and then I was hired to do a bunch of performance films for upcoming musical groups.  They were like demonstration films.  I did one for Ginger Baker after Cream broke up and he was putting Air Force together. I had a lot of fun. That led me to commercials  

TS: How did you end up in the UK where you made DEATH LINE? 

GS: I was filming commercials there. I kind of wanted to leave Chicago after the 1968 Democratic convention. I was in the middle of all of that and I did not want to be in the United States anymore. I was so disgusted at what went on at that convention that I went to England. It was easy for me to do that with my mother being British. I started shooting commercials in England and that led me to DEATH LINE. That was all because of Jonathan Demme. He was my producer. We owned a production company together. Initially Michael Mann was part of that as well but, to make a long story short, Jonathan and I were really glad to get rid of Michael.  Michael Mann is one of the most evil human beings I’ve met in my life.

TS: Is this on the record? 

GS: Sure, I’ve badmouthed Michael before. He was so bad to Jonathan and myself it was unbelievable, but I’m not going to get into what happened.  Anyway, Jonathan and I formed this company after Michael left  making commercials and that was doing pretty well. Everybody kept telling me that I should direct a feature film. I asked how to do a movie, and I was told to write something   A friend of mine, David Casten, was an ad agency owner who had worked with on commercials. He was very good friends with Ray Davies from The Kinks and Ray decided he wanted to star in the movies so Ray had us write a script for him. We did. Jonathan was involved as well as David and myself. We wrote the script and it was very political, because, with the exception of David, we were these ex-pat Americans and we were all very left-wing.  But everything we wrote was way too political, and nobody was very interested. We wrote this thing with Ray, who is also very left-wing, and because Ray was involved, we sold it. We made a deal with Helmdale, which was John Daly and Daven Hemmings’ company. We were very close to making that film when Ray’s brother asked him if he wanted to be a rock ‘n’ roll star or a movie star. He said they didn’t have time to be movie stars if they were going to be rock ‘n’ roll stars.  Ray took that advice pretty seriously and pulled out of the film. 

TS: So was this the script that eventually became DEATH LINE?

GS: No. This was a completely different script   I asked Jon and Dave if we could make the film without Ray Davies, and they said absolutely not. The only reason they were going to make it because Ray Davies was going to be in it. They thought I was a really good writer but I needed to write something that they could sell. They suggested trying horror. That’s when I came up with the idea for DEATH LINE.  But when I wrote the script for DEATH LINE but it never got back to John Daly because Jonathan Demme  looked at the script and took it to Paul Malansky, who took it to Jay Cantor and Alan Ladd Junior. They immediately made us an offer. 

TS: How did you get the idea about this lineage of cannibals that live in these London tunnels?

GS: I am a research freak. Anything that I come across and find interesting, I will research. I used to ride The Tube every day to the office. I just became interested in The Tube and started doing research on it. In the 1860s, when they first started thinking about building The Tube, I read that there had been a lot of accidents. There were all these wildcat companies digging tunnels and trying to get the contracts and I thought that was interesting. And then I also read the legend of Sawney Bean, who was a Scottish highwayman who became so notorious that he couldn’t show his face anywhere. He had his whole clan around him and they had to hide because the price on their heads was so high. They were starving so they began eating their victims. The British are quick to point the finger at Americans and call them racist, but if anyone is guilty of racism, it’s the Brits.  I love the Brits but I got tired of them pointing a finger at Americans when they were doing it themselves.  I looked at DEATH LINE as an opportunity to do something political and hide it inside a horror film. 

TS: Yes it’s brilliant. I just re-watched it a couple of nights ago. There is that long famous continuous take that goes throughout the cannibal lair, a shot that goes on for seven or eight minutes. You’ve seen that sort of ambitious single shot in movies made in the past couple of decades, but you never really saw that in the 1970s.  How much of a challenge was that shot? 

GS: A big challenge. I was a big fan of Orson Welles, especially the opening shot of TOUCH OF EVIL. Hitchcock also did some great tracking shots. Doing commercials, I got into doing ones that we’re all done in one shot, so I was used to creating single shots that were really complicated.  In commercials though, I can only go for a maximum of 60 seconds. I wanted to do a shot in DEATH LINE that lasted a whole reel. That could’ve been up to 10 minutes since you had to change reels every ten minutes back then. I thought that would be a great way to show the history of what went on there and introduce the audience to the underground and to connect the abandoned tunnels down there to the contemporary tunnels. I wrote that one-shot concept into the script. While I was writing the script, I got the location manager to get me down there into the abandoned tunnel so I could see what I was writing about. I walked through that shot before I wrote it and timed how long it would take. It was a very complicated shot and back then, the equipment to do it properly really didn’t exist. The fact that we were actually in a Tube tunnel, getting the equipment down there was almost impossible. We could not get a full-size dolly down there, so I had to shoot that on a pedestal. It was only because I had an amazing crew who gave me their all, that we were able to pull it off. Jay Cantor and Alan Ladd Junior had only produced big-budget movies. They would come down to our set at the end of each day and were amazed that I was able to get 22 or so set-ups per day. So one day they showed up at the set, and asked how many set-ups we did that day.  I told them I didn’t shoot any set-ups that day and they looked at me with total fear.  But I explained that we had just rehearsed that shot that we were going to film the following morning. We spent the whole day rehearsing the shot and getting it ready, then the next morning we filmed the shot. It’s eight minutes long.  Eight minutes of screen time that did not need any post-production. 

TS: The way the sound is mixed in in that shot is really the stuff of nightmares.  How did you get Donald Pleasence and Christopher Lee involved in this film? 

GS: At that time Donald was considered the ‘actor’s actori in England.  When Ceri Jones and I wrote the script, we wrote it with Donald in mind. We had heard through the grapevine that Donald wanted to do a comedy and that he could not find a good one.  We wrote the part of Inspector Calhoun as pure comedy. We kept the comedy upstairs and the horror downstairs.  I would never combine comedy with horror in a horror scene and I would never put horror in a comedy scene. I love doing horror scenes and comedy scenes and juxtaposing of them. We had Jay Kanter as our executive producer. He was at one time one of the biggest agents in Hollywood. He helped get Donald involved. We sent Donald just a version of the script with the Inspector Calhoun scenes, the comedy.  Donald’s agent got this offer from Jay Kanter and he took the offer very seriously. Donald loved the character and wanted to play him. I flew to New York to meet him. He was doing The Man in the Glass Booth on stage at the time. It was then that I told him that inspector Calhoun was in the middle of a horror film and he said he didn’t care, that he just loved the character and wanted to play it.  Once we had Donald cast, we were flooded with requests from other actors to get involved. Casting Norman Rossington was a really big deal.  Here I was this first-time director who had the audacity to get Donald Pleasence to star in my movie. Then Christopher Lee wanted an offer. We knew that Christopher made more per picture than this film’s entire budget  but Chris just wanted a one-on-one scene with Donald Pleasence and agreed to do it for scale. Apparently working with Donald was a dream for Chris, so we added that scene into the movie and had Christopher Lee. 

TS: Your next film was VICE SQUAD nine years later. I saw that at the theater when it was new but for years never made the connection that it was the same director as RAW MEAT (DEATH LINE).  VICE SQUAD is so relentless and sleazy. Did you write that film? 

GS: Yes.

TS: What do you think those LA locations where you shot the film are like today? Do you think they are cleaned up and gentrified? 

GS: Somewhat. Hollywood Boulevard is so much different now than it was back then. The police have gained control over it to an extent. We shot VICE SQUAD on the streets of Hollywood and there was not a single night where production was not interrupted by real police activity.  There were shootings and all kinds of stuff going on everywhere while we were making that movie.  It was unbelievable. We’d shoot all night then I’d head back to the hotel where I was staying during that shoot.

TS: Wings Hauser was quite a force in that film. What was he like to direct? 

GS: That film was such a deviation for Wings. Until then he had only played nice guys. He was a character named Greg Foster on The Young and the Restless. I had known Wings earlier. He was married to Nancy Locke, who’d played the mother of the little boy in DEAD & BURIED.  So Wings had been up in Mendocino with Nancy when we were shooting.  Wings and I got to know each other and become friends.  I knew there was a person living inside of Wings and that was not Greg Foster. Wings and I would play guitar together and talk a lot and drink and open up and I told him that I had a character that I was working on. He and I would read the script together and act out some of the scenes. I could not believe the anger that I could get out of Wings Hauser.  When we were casting the movie the producers at Avco asked me who I wanted to play Ramrod . When I said I wanted Wings Hauser, they looked at me and said “Greg Foster?!“. They thought there was no way Wings could be that character. So I brought Wings in to read for the executives at Avco Embassy who were sitting around a table. Wings comes in with this look on his face that would’ve scared the shit out of anybody. He and I had practiced this.  Wings zeroed in on Bob Rehme, who is a big guy, and reached over and grabbed him by the tie. Then he whispers to Bob: “Are you the motherfucker that said I’m not mean enough to play this part?!“   Poor Bob. I had to apologize to him for that, but he was convinced.  But later Wings said that was the day that I ruined his life. Wings really didn’t want to play villains.  He made me promise that I would take him out and drink with him in the morning after shooting because he did not want to go home to Nancy and the kids as Ramrod. 

TS: You mentioned that you had written music. Did you write the song Neon Slime that plays during the credits of VICE SQUAD?  ‘

GS: Simon Stokes and I worked on the lyrics together  and Joe Renzetti wrote the music. 

TS: Did you ever make cameos in your own movies? 

GS: DEATH LINE is the only film that I’m actually in. I was in the background  on the train when David Ladd and Sharon Gurney are riding. The only way I could direct them was to be in the car with them.  I’ve done voices in all of my films where I re-voice a character, so I do little audio cameos.  In DEAD & BURIED, every time someone says “Welcome to Potter’s Bluff“, that’s my voice. 

TS: How often do you kick back and watch your old films?  

GS: For a long time, I didn’t, but then I started getting invited to film festivals and started watching them again.  I pretty much remember everything though.  For me, when I watch one of my old films,  what comes back to me is what went into doing the scene,  as opposed to actually watching a movie.  

TS: Any interest in directing again?

GS: I don’t know. I get offers to do things  Directing to me is a real commitment. I would never take the job to direct casually. During the 80s, there were times where I did some television movies just for fun, and now I look back on it and wish I had not done some of those.  I feel like when directing, every decision that I make I will have to live with the rest of my life. It becomes obsessive. Now I have a life, which I never really had as a director.  When I was directing, directing was my life. Now I’m happily married and have a couple of houses and I get to spend time with my wife and my little dog who is right next to me now. I write a lot. I have a couple of projects I’m working on now.  

TS: That’s great. Can I send you a movie poster from one of your films that you can sign and send it back to me? 

GS: Sure, as long as it’s not that RAW MEAT poster!  If you send me that poster, I will scratch out RAW MEAT and doodle all over the poster!

TS: Or you could just sign it ‘Michael Mann’!

GS: Right! Ha! 

TS: Thanks for taking the time to talk to me. I think this has been a terrific interview and I really appreciate it

GS: My pleasure.