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

  How did your parents come to live in Los Angeles?

  My parents were both from Michigan. My father grew up in Kalamazoo and my mother in Detroit, so they were not very far from one another but they didn’t meet until they both were working at the same paint store on Pico and Robertson in West L.A. My mother had come out here to be near her brother, because there wasn’t much going on for her in Detroit. My dad came out here to attend USC Film School. [1] After film school, it was very hard for him to get a job in the film business because film school wasn’t taken seriously in 1949. It was, “Film school? Are you kidding me?” It was a joke…

  Because none of the great filmmakers at that time had gone to film school?

  Right. Cinematographer Conrad Hall was in my father’s graduating class and he was the only one — at least that I know of — who went on to a big career. My dad was a very quiet, shy guy, and he didn’t really know what to do with his production knowledge. His other skill was that he was a magician in vaudeville, so he had that to fall back on. His best income was doing movies where they needed a fire-eater. He was a fire-eater in the famous film noir Nightmare Alley [1947], and in the Burt Lancaster [vehicle] The Flame and the Arrow [1950]. Casbah [1948] with Peter Lorre. Houdini [1953], the Tony Curtis-Janet Leigh film. I can’t remember all the movies he was in…pretty much anything made between the late ’40s and about 1960 that had a carnival or a circus in it. His stage name was “Navarre, the Man from Mars.”

  The very last thing he did was Americathon [1979] with John Ritter and Dorothy Stratten. He fell madly in love with Dorothy Stratten, and he was quite upset over her death. [2]

  But his lifelong fantasy was to make movies. Since he never got the opportunity to make movies, he kind of lived vicariously through my making films. When I was a kid and made these 8mm shorts, he was my coach, my mentor. He’d tell me what shots I was missing. He didn’t encourage me to go to film school, because in his experience it hadn’t done much good. He basically pushed me to get an industry job. He said, “Do anything you can to get into the business because it’s about showing them that you can do it. Make the connection so that somebody opens a door for you somewhere.”

  I’ve heard people say that the most useful thing about film school is networking. Did he do much networking at USC?

  I don’t remember my father ever having any close friends. There was nobody that he would call from the old days, nobody that came over to the house. I have a picture of him in my office with this Asian gentleman and they’re both editing in 16mm at USC. One time I said, “What happened to that guy? Obviously you two worked closely together…” He said, “Yeah, we saw each other for a while and then I don’t know what happened to him.” He just wasn’t good at maintaining connections. He kept very much to himself.

  When he passed on, I realized that there were so many things that I didn’t know about him because he really didn’t talk about things. He was in the service during World War II, but I never heard any stories from his time in the service, and I know there were a lot of traumatic things that occurred. He just wasn’t keen on sharing his personal life. And I don’t know if that was just part of his generation — that guys from that era just didn’t talk as much — or what.

  I am fascinated by the fact that he loved to get on stage. He had a stage persona that was completely different. When he was doing magic and fire-eating, he was someone else. Then he would disappear back into this shy little man. In the classic Irish tradition, it was only drinking that would allow him to come out again…but that was not the best side of him. That’s when all the frustration that was part of not accomplishing his dream [of becoming a filmmaker] came out.

  He had eight years of college and yet he wasn’t doing anything in life that showed he was well educated and capable. He wasn’t able to get a better job. I think it was a very frustrating life. He graduated film school when he was about forty, then he met my mom, got married and started a family. After that, he had to maintain the family and that didn’t really leave room for the dream.

  So your main connection with your father was through the movies?

  Absolutely. That was the connection. He didn’t have the same love of the Universal horror movies — although he had done a movie with Peter Lorre, so he appreciated anything that had Peter Lorre in it. One of my favorites was The Beast with Five Fingers. I would watch that over and over again. We had a station in L.A. that played the same movie every night at eight. It was called the Million Dollar Movie. So you could watch the same darn movie five nights in a row. And when they played something you liked, that’s what you did!

  When Peter Lorre died, my dad said, “Hey, do you want to go down and see Peter Lorre tonight? His body is on display at the mortuary.” I said, “Yeah, sure.” I guess I was about thirteen. [3] So we went to the mortuary across the street from Hollywood Forever Cemetery, and went into this room with a coffin and a couple of candles. And there in the middle of the room lay Peter Lorre. Nobody else was in there…It was a surreal experience. To my dad, it was just respect to a colleague. To me, it was something else. Here was this guy that was so frightening onscreen, that had become such a part of my life. (Whenever I wanted to freak girls out, I’d imitate his voice.) Now here he was. Dead.

  My mother definitely thought it was sick and twisted, but to me it was an incredibly bonding experience. Today, my son and I do our own “weird” things — like going ghost hunting. People say, “You took your son ghost hunting?” To me it’s great, because we share the same desire to pierce the veil…to see what might be on the other side. It’s not the usual thing — like going camping or playing baseball — but it’s something we share.

  You have to do what you’re both genuinely interested in, or the connection becomes forced.

  Exactly. The other thing that is sort of unique to my childhood was that on Sunday nights, my dad would pull out this old German movie projector that he had taken from the streets of Paris when the United States invaded France [at the end of World War II]. Soldiers grabbed everything they could, and somehow my father managed to get this German movie projector and all these reels of film. He didn’t even know what the films were until he got them back to the States.

  Most of them were old Charlie Chaplin movies with German subtitles. On Sunday nights, he would pin up an old sheet on the wall, and Mom would make popcorn, and we’d sit on the floor and watch these 16mm prints. None of us could read the subtitles, but with Chaplin you didn’t need the subtitles. That was my earliest exposure to pantomime. It showed me how you can tell stories non-verbally. After that, whenever we would put on a school fundraiser or something, I would get my friends together and I would imitate Chaplin. My dad would sort of direct me, because I was not smart enough yet to figure out how to do it on my own…but right away I knew that’s what I wanted to do.

  You said that your father lived vicariously through your filmmaking…What kind of films did he want to make?

  That’s a good question. I don’t know. I would guess anything with an attractive woman in it. [laughs] I remember when he took me to see Dr. No, the first James Bond movie. He loved it for his reasons — mainly Ursula Andress — and I loved it for mine. He also had a thing for Bridget Bardot and Marilyn Monroe. I developed an interest in that type of woman partly because of his fascination. He didn’t pick out gorgeous women on the street — it was always the women from the movies.

  He did have a dark side too. Judging by some of the things he did in his USC days, he was a bit of a surrealist. He liked action films quite a bit…suspense and thrillers.

  Sounds like a film noir guy.

  Yeah, Laura made a huge impression on him. We always talked about how that period in cinema, from the late ’40s into the early ’50s, had a great aesthetic.

  Film noir isn’t such a big stretch from the monster movies you grew up on…They both come from a place of anxiety.

  Definitely. My father was supposed to have gone into the priesthood. He went to semina
ry for maybe two and a half years, and he did a lot of plays during that time period, which fueled his desire for being in show business. I think that was his internal struggle. Since the age of ten, he had wanted to be up on stage, doing magic and things. As much as his mother wanted him to be a priest, he wanted to go into show business. I think he felt incredibly guilty about that. Although he never talked to me about it, my mother sometimes talked about it. My father’s parents were deeply disappointed that he chose show business over the priesthood, and I think that had a lot to do with my father’s darker side…He felt conflicted about where he really belonged in life, and maybe that’s why he never made it as a filmmaker. He couldn’t fully commit.

  When you really want something, you have to endure a lot of pain. You have to learn to love the pain. I loved the fact that becoming a filmmaker seemed so impossible. That made me want it all the more. I was willing to put everything else second. Of course, that becomes harder once you have a family. Then you think: I can’t ask them to make the same sacrifices that I’m prepared to make. That’s why a lot of people put the dream on hold. They say, “I’ve got to put this off for a little while in order to be loyal to the role of a husband and father.” What I learned is that expanding your world to include other people doesn’t mean you have to surrender your dream…You just have to bring other people into the dream with you.

  Your mother had a nervous breakdown when you were eleven years old. What was your home life like during that time?

  In hindsight I can see the writing on the wall. For weeks, everything was building…but at the time I couldn’t quite understand what was going on. It seemed like maybe my mother was mad at me, or upset about something I had done. Like any kid at that age, I personalized it. I was thinking: What did I do wrong?

  I always had a really close bond with my mother. Probably because my dad was so introverted and there was so much that my parents didn’t talk about. I think my mother made her biggest emotional investments in me, although I didn’t realize that at the time. She talked to me because I was there, and it was important for her to have someone to talk to. I wasn’t old enough to understand that she was treating me like an adult…or that I was acting like an adult in a lot of ways.

  Suddenly, that person that I was so close to was walking around in a — for lack of a better term — “zombie state.” She was still in her nightgown when I came home from school. She was afraid to drive; afraid to leave the house. I started to realize something wasn’t right, but I thought maybe she just had the flu or something and she wasn’t talking about it. When I came home from school, I obviously wanted to go out and play. I didn’t want to think about what was wrong with my mother. I wanted to be a kid…But then when there’s no dinner, and my parents are arguing all the time, and the arguments start getting more intense and more ugly. I remember going to sleep at night, listening to screaming and yelling that was so disturbing, and trying to block it out. I think it was even worse for my younger sister Kathy and my two younger brothers, Mike and Kevin. We were all so lost and confused.

  I remember in those days I was doing my own magic shows. I put a sign in the front yard that had a drawing of a bunny coming out of a top hat, and below that I listed the start times of my magic shows. My mother opened a ketchup bottle and splattered ketchup across the sign. I looked at this sign — all bloody, you know — and I couldn’t figure out what that was about. When I asked her about it years later she told me that she thought the magic was going to steal me away from her. She said, “I felt like you were becoming your father — because he loved his magic more than he loved me — and I was so angry that I just wanted to kill the magic.” There were so many things that she was trying to piece together in her own mind. She was constantly trying to figure out why she was doing what she was doing. That was how I began to understand that anyone’s actions can be interpreted, in another person’s mind, as a form of madness. So much of that has crossed over into my work over the years, particularly when I did Murder of Innocence.

  How did your father respond to your mother’s illness?

  Did you ever see John Cassavettes’s A Woman Under the Influence? Gena Rowlands plays this woman who’s having a nervous breakdown and Peter Falk is this blue-collar guy. A “deese, dem, dose” kind of guy. And he can’t understand what the hell is wrong with her. My dad was just like that. He did not know what was going on with her. And over time she slipped further and further away from reality, due to lack of sleep…One day I got home from school and my father said, “They took your mother to the hospital.” That was when I realized, “Oh she’s really sick.” I was terrified, but I hid it.

  You’ve said that your mother’s personality — her warmth as a human being — has also influenced a lot of your films. So your memories aren’t all bad…

  My father gave me a love of the movies and my mother gave me a love of people — because the one thing she really knew how to do was to be loving and supportive. No matter what I was doing or what was going on in my life, I knew she would always be loving and supportive. She was never critical of me. She didn’t try to tell me how to live my life. She never felt comfortable doing that, because her sense of self was so uncertain, from the moment she was born.

  My mother was a twin and her twin sister died at birth. I think there’s always something unusual about twins where one doesn’t survive — maybe because the other one grows up wondering what it would have been like to have a twin. Whatever the cause, my mother never had a very strong sense of self or security.

  To make matters tougher, she got pregnant at sixteen. When my grandmother found out, she said, “We’re going to Canada, you’re going to have it, and your brother and his wife are going to raise your baby.” At the time, she didn’t have a really good relationship with her brother — so she had to stand aside all those years and watch her firstborn be raised by her brother and his wife. And she was forbidden to tell her child that she was the real mother. She was sworn to secrecy until my aunt died, and it was only then that she came forward and said she was his birth mother. That happened just a few months before [my mother] died.

  So she carried this dark secret for her whole life. It was one of those things that just built and built, until she snapped and she had to be institutionalized. And once you’ve been labeled as a person with “mental issues,” I think it’s very hard to get yourself out of that. No matter what happens, you feel like you can’t really handle things. You’re always afraid that something bad is going to happen…so you’re constantly thinking, Who can help me? What kind of medication do I need to go on?

  My father didn’t understand the need for medication, because in those days people weren’t taking pills for mental illness. Either you were locked up and that was the end of it, or you were supposed to snap out of it and then come back into real life again and carry on as if nothing ever happened…but it doesn’t work that way.

  I guess all of this stuff — my mom’s illness and my dad’s unfulfilled dreams — created a sense of urgency in me. I thought, Okay, if I’m going to do something in life, I’ve got to separate myself from this. And as soon as I turned sixteen, I got out of there. My girlfriend Amy and I moved into a little house in Hollywood. I still stayed in touch with my parents, but I just couldn’t live in their house any longer.

  Is that when music became a major influence in your life?

  Actually, it started a few years before that. I was twelve in 1962, when the Beatles hit and the whole music scene changed. There was this huge excitement that something new was occurring. Here was something that was unique because it wasn’t American and these guys sounded different; they looked different…and girls loved them. Girls screamed at them. I was different, but girls weren’t screaming at me.

  Getting girls to scream was the goal. To achieve that, I was willing to get thrown out of high school; I was willing to get kicked out of restaurants; I was willing to get spit on; I was willing to get beaten up and all of that — so that I coul
d have the rock n roll look with the longer hair and different clothes. I was willing to take the slings and arrows of the establishment to be a part of that.

  The first band that I put together was with my longtime friend Ron Natchwey and Henry Mancini’s son Chris. I was pretty overwhelmed walking into the world of Henry Mancini, multi-Grammy and Oscar winner, and knowing his kid — who was just as rebellious and crazy as I was, but who had the means to buy amplifiers and guitars and the ability to get into places that I couldn’t get into. When we were sixteen, his father gave us was two tickets to the Monterey Pop Festival. [4] Why my parents didn’t question it, I don’t know. I think they loved the idea that their son was hanging out with Henry Mancini’s son. Somehow that made it seem okay to them — and they had no idea what we were up to. The sixties music scene really made no sense to them.

  We drove his cherry red convertible Mustang up to Monterey, and sat front row center. You can actually see us in the Monterey Pop documentary. I’m sitting there with my mouth hanging open — a stoned sixteen-year old watching the most incredible acts. We were all seeing them for the first time: Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Who, and then all these other musicians that I never would have been exposed to otherwise — from Hugh Masakela to Ravi Shankar, Simon & Garfunkel, The Mamas and the Papas, Otis Redding.

  That festival was very different, I think, from Woodstock. I wasn’t at Woodstock, but from watching the documentary and talking to people who were there, I get the sense that Woodstock was sort of homogenized into a “hippie” event. Monterey was something else. It was the beginning of “the Love Generation.” The San Francisco crowd was supporting it, but everybody was into their own thing. There were so many different styles, from Otis Redding and the Mar-Keys, Ravi Shankar to Jimi Hendrix…I said to myself, “Now I know what I want to do with my life.” At that point, it was crystal clear.