A Strange Idea of Entertainment: Conversations with Tom McLoughlin Read online




  A Strange Idea Of Entertainment: Conversations With Tom McLoughlin

  © 2014 Joseph Maddrey & Tom McLoughlin. All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, digital, photocopying or recording, except for the inclusion in a review, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This version of the book may be slightly abridged from the print version.

  Published in the USA by:

  BearManor Media

  PO Box 1129

  Duncan, Oklahoma 73534-1129

  www.bearmanormedia.com

  ISBN 978-1-59393-560-3

  Cover Illustration by Melissa Bentley

  eBook construction by Brian Pearce | Red Jacket Press.

  Table of Contents

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Part I: Wonder Years

  Growing up at MGM / Dad, the fire-eater / Peter Lorre’s wake / Chaplin off the wall / Mom & Vincent Price / Monterey Pop / The southern California version of Mick Jagger / Opening for The Doors / Backing up transsexual strippers / The end of the Sixties / Off to Paris

  Part II: Comedy and Horror

  Marcel Marceau’s School of Mime / Mr. Hulot / Convincing Woody Allen that he’s funny / Goofing off with Dick Van Dyke / Studying with the stars at Sherwood Oaks / Meeting Frank Capra / Playing the mutant bear / The second fastest gun in the universe / Psychic vampires / A personal ghost story

  Part III: Myths & Monsters

  The first director’s cut / Resurrecting Jason Voorhees / The dying man and his angel / Mysteries from a magic pawn shop / Frank Capra meets Freddy Krueger / Stephen King’s greatest hits / Life, death and Indian burial grounds

  Part IV: Men & Women

  Real-life monsters / The Luminol scene / Alison’s legacy / A Radio Shack future / The female version of Taxi Driver / One of God’s true children / The battle for ambiguity / Directing Kirk Douglas / Coppola’s advice

  Part V: More Myths & Monsters

  Ghosts and innocents / Arthur Conan Doyle, Harry Houdini and the power of imagination / Yes, Burbank, there is a Santa Claus / “Survival movies” / Exit elves? / Meeting Marlon Brando / A Hawksian love story / The return of The Exorcist / Tone wars

  Part VI: Kids & America

  Demons from the Id / The murder in heaven / American terrorists / Christmas blues and black humor / Teen noir / Seduction, obsession, addiction / Twenty-first century witch hunting / Reality vs. docudrama / The grindhouse girls

  Part VII: Looking Ahead

  Part VIII: Tommy Lives!

  Filmography

  Appendix: Jason Lives!

  Dedicated to GOD

  For His Vision and Humor

  Foreword

  A toast to my pal, Thomas Maurice McLoughlin, on the event of his sixtieth birthday at Hollywood Forever cemetery

  BY STEVEN BANKS

  In 1950, the following people were born: Bill Murray, Cybil Shepherd, Mark Spitz, Peter Frampton, Stevie Wonder, Richard Branson, Jay Leno, and Karen Carpenter. Seven of them are still alive. But we don’t care about them. We care about Tom McLoughlin.

  Who is Tom McLoughlin? Well, if you took a bit of Frank Capra, some Marcel Marceau, Mick Jagger, James Brown, Chaplin, add some Walt Disney, Sherlock Holmes, a little Alfred Hitchcock, Tod Browning, Bobby Sands, Martin Scorsese, tossed in some Keaton, Jacques Tati, John Ford, some Norman Rockwell, some Richard Pryor, Mark Twain, tossed in Truffaut and some other French directors whose names I can’t pronounce properly, Stan Laurel & Oliver Hardy, Houdini, Marx Brothers, threw in a couple of Beatles, some Kinks, Orson Welles, Chucko The Birthday Clown, and Snitz Edwards — if you took all of them and mixed them in a big, giant blender…it would be really disgusting…with all that blood and bone and organs. But if you mixed all of those people together…it would be the man we know as Thomas Maurice McLoughlin.

  Tom started off as a small child…

  But, enough about Tom, let’s talk about me, Steven Banks.

  I met Tom on a 7UP commercial in 1978. He got the part. I didn’t. They wanted someone older. With longer hair.

  Throughout the years, I’ve done many things with Tom. I’ve worked with Tom on many projects; I’ve vacationed with Tom; I’ve dressed up as a banana with Tom; I’ve slow danced with Tom in public (and gotten paid for it); dressed up as a woman with Tom and cooked a pig’s head (and not gotten paid for it); I’ve pretended to be a homosexual with Tom so we could hang out in a dressing room and watch the female models walk around with their tops off; I was in The Black Hole with Tom (not the bar, the movie); and I’ve dressed up as a monster and scared children with Tom on numerous occasions. I’ve been to Disneyland, strip clubs, apple orchards, carnivals, sideshows, and looked at Ike Turner’s corpse with Tom. I’ve enjoyed many parties at Tom’s house with his lovely wife, Nancy, his children, Shane and Hannah, and their 347 pets. I’ve been directed by Tom, in the beginning of One Dark Night, as the man carrying a large pole.

  One thing’s for sure, Tom McLoughlin is cool. Here are the Top Ten Reasons why Tom is the coolest guy I know:

  #10. He joined Scientology for a hot woman — the only reason to join Scientology — and then left when he broke up with her.

  #9. He once enjoyed medicinal herbs with Jimi Hendrix in the sixties.

  #8. His band opened for The Doors.

  #7. He kissed Albert Ash on the lips.

  #6. He saw, in person, the Monterey Pop Festival, and The Beatles at Dodger Stadium, and Led Zeppelin at The Whiskey.

  #5. While entertaining an obnoxious and pretentious woman at a dinner party at his house, he served some of his dog Kelly’s feces on a plate and announced to the woman that these were a special dessert called “Kelly’s Brownies.”

  #4. He went to Larry Fine’s funeral…and if you don’t know who Larry Fine is, you were probably born in a cave.

  #3. He was propositioned by the great ballet dancer Rudolph Nureyev on three separate occasions…and turned him down…or so he says.

  #2. He is one of the few people who can actually say “Some people call me Maurice” and not be joking.

  And the #1 reason Tom is the coolest guy I know: His wife gave him a birthday party in a cemetery.

  But back to me, Steven Banks.

  Tommy gave me the greatest birthday gift I have ever received: a personal visit from one of my heroes, the great comedian Wally Boag…and if you don’t know who Wally Boag is, get out your iPhone4 — if you can get service — and Google him. I wanted to bring one of Tom’s heroes here tonight, but they’re all dead. One of them may be buried here, so at least we’re close.

  But, seriously…on a personal note: if it wasn’t for Tom McLoughlin, no one would know what Home Entertainment Center or Billy The Mime was and I’d still be doing junior high school assembly shows…and addicted to crystal meth.

  We are all here tonight because we love Tom or admire Tom or are hoping he will hire us on his next movie — which I wish he would shoot in Los Angeles so I could get a small part.

  Now to paraphrase Clarence in It’s a Wonderful Life: “No man is poor or a failure who has friends.”

  A toast to my other big brother, Tom McLoughlin, the richest man in town.

  Tom’s sixtieth birthday party at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Photo credit: Bern Agency

  Introduction

  I met filmmaker Tom McLoughlin in the spring of 2008. I was searching for interview subjects for a documentary on the history of American horror films, and my friend John
Muir recommended Tom. “He knows a lot about classic monster movies,” John said. I knew that McLoughlin had directed a respectable Gothic horror film called One Dark Night and the best sequel in the Friday the 13th series, but I didn’t really think of him as a “horror director.” Even so, I decided to call.

  I talked to Tom one dark night while he was editing Fab Five: The Texas Cheerleader Scandal. It turned out to be the first of many long conversations. Horror movies, he explained, had helped him to get through his formative years, growing up across the street from MGM studios. When he was about ten years old, his mother suffered a nervous breakdown. Around the same time, Tom became fascinated with Vincent Price — particularly the maniacal characters he portrayed in Roger Corman’s film adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe. On weekdays, he would skip out on classes at St. Timothy’s Grade School and take a city bus to Santa Monica for the noontime movies, where he reveled in the artificial madness of Roderick Usher, Nicolas Medina, and the evil Prince Prospero. Around the same time, he discovered the classic Universal monsters on television. After watching Dracula, he rode his bike to Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City and sat beside Bela Lugosi’s grave, remembering the dead man’s immortal words: “To die…to be truly dead…that must be glorious.”

  One week after that first conversation, Tom and I sat down in my Studio City apartment and recorded an interview for Nightmares in Red, White and Blue. We talked for more than two hours, until the tape ran out. Afterwards, I wanted to keep going…not just to hear Tom’s thoughts on horror movies, but to hear more about his life, which sounded fantastic enough to be its own movie. In the days that followed, I realized that Tom McLoughlin is living proof that Hollywood myths can profoundly shape a person’s life, blurring the line between fiction and reality.

  Before he was a filmmaker, McLoughlin was a singer in a rock ’n’ roll band that played regularly on the Sunset Strip in the late ’60s, opening for classic rock bands like The Doors, The Animals, and Chicago Transit Authority. When the music died, he went to Paris and studied mime with the legendary Marcel Marceau. When he returned to Los Angeles, he tried his luck at acting, and slowly worked toward his ultimate goal of becoming a director. Along the way, he crossed paths with countless legends: Woody Allen, Dick Van Dyke, Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett, John Frankenheimer, and Frank Capra, who became a personal mentor. All of this happened before he made his first film.

  McLoughlin’s life and career are nothing if not eclectic, but his stories — fiction and nonfiction alike — are bound together by an unyielding sense of adventure and whimsy. In Friday the 13th Part 6: Jason Lives!, a cemetery caretaker discovers an open grave and an empty coffin. Believing it to be the work of teenage pranksters, he grumbles something about “damn kids” — then promptly breaks the fourth wall, turns to the moviegoing audience and quips, “Some folks have a strange idea of entertainment.” It’s an amusing self-incrimination.

  This book is the outcome of the ten lengthy interviews conducted in the fall of 2008, through which I tried to glean as much as I could about the filmmaker’s creative process. I have always believed that true creativity is based on a subtle dialogue between everyday life and art, and McLoughlin’s answers consistently reinforced this idea. His movies have drawn heavily on his early childhood influences, from Charlie Chaplin to Famous Monsters of Filmland. Likewise, his adult relationships with friends and family have played a major role in his fiction. In 1990, while McLoughlin was directing Stephen King’s Sometimes They Come Back — a film about letting go of the past and facing the future — his father died and his daughter was born. This was a turning point in his career as well as in his personal life.

  Over the course of the following decade, he took his wife Nancy and two young children with him on every shoot. Nancy often appeared in supporting roles, while Shane and Hannah made frequent cameos and helped with production. Each film was a family affair, and the director’s real-world experiences as a father and husband continually found their way onscreen, in a succession of films about family dynamics.

  In 1993, McLoughlin directed two back-to-back films about mental instability. He describes A Murder of Innocence, based on the true story of spree killer Laurie Dann, as a reflection of the “dark side” of his mother’s illness. The Yarn Princess, a story about single mother with mental deficiencies, is a rumination on the qualities that made his mother such a wonderful caregiver. Similarly, The Lies Boys Tell (1994) provided McLoughlin with an opportunity to eulogize his father.

  The filmmaker turned his focus toward young children at a time when he was re-experiencing childhood from an adult perspective. He was interested in exploring both the dark side of those formative years, starting with Journey and The Turn of the Screw (both 1995) and culminating with The Unsaid (2001), as well as the light side, in Fairy Tale: A True Story (1997) and the surprisingly ethereal Murder in Greenwich (2002). As his own children got older and entered high school, so did the characters in his films. In 2004, McLoughlin kicked off a series of Lifetime movies about teenagers struggling to find their places in the world: She’s Too Young (2004), Odd Girl Out (2005), Cyber Seduction: His Secret Life (2005), Not Like Everyone Else (2006), and Fab Five: The Texas Cheerleader Scandal (2008).

  On the verge of his fourth decade as a filmmaker, McLoughlin is trending toward more socially-conscious films. D.C. Sniper: 23 Days of Fear (2003) and Not Like Everyone Else are harrowing reflections of post-9/11 America. The Staircase Murders (2007) and The Wronged Man (2009) are unsettling depictions of contemporary crime and punishment. As always, the filmmaker’s focus remains on the characters because, as his mentor Frank Capra taught him, movies are a people-to-people medium.

  The director’s first responsibility is to empathize with his characters (even the most reprehensible ones) and to understand their thoughts and motivations. That’s how McLoughlin has established personal connections with nearly all of the stories he’s told, and that is why he’s a filmmaker worth studying. The best filmmakers comprehend our everyday hopes and our fears, our trials and our triumphs, and show them to us through the magic of the movies. That has been — and continues to be — the story of Tom McLoughlin’s life.

  Part I: Wonder Years

  Growing up at MGM / Dad, the fire-eater / Peter Lorre’s wake / Chaplin on the wall / Mom & Vincent Price / Monterey Pop / The southern California version of Mick Jagger / Opening for The Doors / backing up transsexual strippers / The end of the Sixties / Off to Paris

  JOSEPH MADDREY: You’re a Los Angeles native, born in 1950 in Culver City, which was home to the MGM back lot. That means that The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca were practically filmed in your backyard. What was it like growing up in the dream machine?

  TOM MCLOUGHLIN: Technically I was born in Santa Monica, and then grew up in Culver City. In those days, Culver City was a pretty sleepy town. The back lot of MGM extended way up into the Baldwin Hills area where there are now apartments and condos. It was enormous! So it was a great place to go play as a kid.

  You were allowed to play there?

  Well, it wasn’t allowed…but there was only maybe one security guard there on the weekends, so you could do a lot of screwing around before you’d get caught.

  What about your parents? They let you wander?

  Yeah, that was one of the great things about that period. People weren’t so paranoid about letting kids run wild. I didn’t realize how much things had changed until a few years ago. I was watching some kid walking down the street and I thought, “Why is he out walking by himself?” Then I thought, I can’t believe I’m thinking this way. When I was growing up, kids would disappear after school for hours and hours and hours. You might get punished if it was dark when you came home, but as long as you got home just before dark, you were okay.

  The old Hal Roach studios were still around in those days — that’s where Laurel and Hardy and The Little Rascals were shot — and all of those sets were still up. Desilu Productions, w
hich is now called Culver Studios, also had a back lot. Twentieth Century Fox had their back lots there. I went to school at St. Timothy Catholic School on Pico Boulevard, which was two blocks away from the Twentieth Century Fox lots, and my friends knew how to get into those places. So I really did grow up in “movie city.”

  I accepted the fact that this fantasy world existed side-by-side with the real world. At the time, nobody said, “Wow, you live near the studios?!” I didn’t think of it as magical at the time, because I took it all for granted. It’s only once those old buildings were torn down that people said, “God, that must have been amazing.” And looking back on it, it was.

  Did growing up in Los Angeles affect the way that you watched movies?

  No. Not at all. In fact, because all that stuff was so commonplace to me, I wasn’t interested in most of the mainstream American movies. What was interesting to me was the Universal horror movies — because they were set in Europe. When I finally went to England and France years later, and saw all of these landscapes that I knew from movie facades, I had an inclination to walk behind them and look for the slats holding them up. It was a surreal experience. I could suddenly appreciate what a good job the filmmakers did — how they made those facades look like the real thing — and how you could make any part of the world literally exist in your own backyard.