Infamous America - TEXAS CHAINSAW Ep. 4 | “Museum of the Morbid”

Episode Date: November 11, 2020

The full scope and scale of the crimes of Ed Gein comes to light, and it shocks 1950s America. He becomes the inspiration for books and movies, including “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” In Texas, Tobe Hooper and the producers become embroiled in a series of battles about their film, one of which involves the Mafia. The movie becomes an instant classic, but the unexpected success causes problems. The cast and crew struggle with the fallout and the legacy of the groundbreaking film. Join Black Barrel+ for bingeable seasons with no commercials : blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join For more details, please visit www.blackbarrelmedia.com. Our social media pages are: @blackbarrelmedia on Facebook and Instagram, and @bbarrelmedia on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This series contains violence and sexual references that some might find disturbing. It is intended for mature audiences only. Listener discretion is advised. San Francisco, California, October 1974. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was sneak previewed at a local movie theater. It did not go well. Half the audience got nauseous. Others threw refreshments at the screen.

Some threw punches in the lobby. Swarms, demanded their money back. At least that's allegedly what happened. But if it did, there's reason to believe that it was all staged for publicity. A second less dramatic version is that some local politicians went to see the taking of Pelham 1-2-3 as the first half of a double feature. The Texas chainsaw massacre mysteriously popped up, unannounced, as the second half of the double feature. The politicians were shocked and angered by the on-screen deprable. They told the press about the experience, and the press took it from there.

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And they have a 100-day satisfaction guarantee. Mood.com promo code infamous. From BlackBarrell media, this is Infamous America. I'm your host Chris Wimmer, and this is a four-part series on one of the strangest killers in American history, Ed Gein, and how he inspired one of the iconic cult films in American cinema, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. This is Chapter 4. Museum for the Morven. Plainfield, Wisconsin, November, 1957. The search of Ed Gein's farmhouse continued.

Authorities had already discovered the most appalling scenes. they'd ever heard of, and there was more to come. In and amongst the filth and squalor of the house, they'd found an unprecedented number of human bones, skin, and body parts. They were all from women of various ages, and the majority had been dug up from three cemeteries around Plainfield. All the morbid discoveries happened in the kitchen or the downstairs bedroom where Ed slept. But then officers found a boarded-off section of the house that hid another room. Their anxiety must have spiked. If all the insane things they just found were sitting out in the open,

they didn't want to imagine what might be behind that door. Investigators yanked the nails out of the boards that protected the hidden room. When they removed the wood and forced their way in, they may have been even more shocked than they were 10 minutes before, but in a totally different and unexpected way. Behind the boards was another bedroom, only this one wasn't in disarray. It was perfectly neat and tidy.

The bed, bureaus, rugs, bookcases, chairs, side tables, and curtains were in pristine shape. The immaculate condition of the room was almost as unsettling as the rest of the house. Even the clothes in the dresser were meticulously folded, and they were all women's clothes. This was the bedroom of Ed Gein's mother, Augusta. Although it had been over a decade since her death, the room appeared not to have been entered since. It was Ed's shrine to his mother. But by the next morning, Augusta Gein's preserved bedroom had faded into the background of the investigation. Searchers began to find the remaining parts of Bernice Warden's body. Most of it had been hanging in the summer kitchen,

but not all. Her heart was in a plastic bag in Ed's stove. A pile of entrails that were still warm were wrapped in a newspaper and folded inside a men's suit. One of the crime lab investigators spotted an old burlap feed sack. Steam rose from it. He nonchalantly reached in and pulled out Bernice Warden's head. It had now been 12 hours since Bernice Warden's son Frank had reported her missing from her hardware store. She'd been found and the crimes of Ed Gein had been discovered. Ed was locked in a cell at the county jailhouse as investigators tried to wrap their heads around the situation.

No investigator in American history could have been prepared for something like this. There'd never been anything like it. And as the details leaked out, the town of Plainfield was mortified. Rumors said that Ed Gein's farmhouse was a murder factory with the skeletal remains of at least seven victims. But that number would rise. There were so many pressing questions, but the top three were, Did Ed Gein kill all the women whose bones and body parts have been found in his house? If not, where did he get their bodies?

And finally, what was the extent of the desecration? Which meant, had he been eating them or having any kind of sexual contact with them? Ed flatly denied cannibalism or sexual contact. He said most of the bodies had been dug up from local graveyards. And on some occasions, he'd felt remorse and returned the bodies to their graves. He'd burned or buried spare parts he didn't want. In the early stages, he admitted to just one murder, that of Bernice Warden. But police currently believed there were parts of 11 women in his house.

And one deputy told reporters, there might be 50 for that matter. Ed said he'd been extremely sad after the death of his mother and went to cemeteries at night to cheer himself up. At least nine times he'd opened the graves of recently deceased women. They were middle age or older, and he'd seen their obituaries in the newspe. As Ed's admissions piled up, the more heinous charges had to wait for further investigation. At the moment, Ed appeared before a judge on an armed robbery charge. He'd stolen $41 from Bernice Warden's cash register. Bale was set at $10,000.

Austin, Texas, fall 1973. Toby Hooper was a perfectionist. He spent eight months editing a movie that took five weeks. to film. And it wasn't a three-hour epic. The final running time was 84 minutes. It barely qualified as a feature film. Throughout the fall of 1973 and the winter of 1974, Bill Parsley became impatient. He was the chief investor. He owned half the film and he wanted to know when he could see a cut. Hooper repeatedly blew him off or made excuses. Part of the delay was that Hooper was in a battle with the MPAA, the people who give films their ratings. Hooper wanted a PG rating, which would allow

teenagers to see his movie. The rating system was much different back then, but still, a PG rating was a real long shot. Hooper continuously called the MPAA and asked questions of whom ever answered the phone. And these were almost certainly questions they'd never anticipated. Things like, I want a PG rating, but I have a scene where a girl gets impaled on a meat hook. What should I do? The baffled board member would come back with something like, well, I guess it would help if there was no penetration shot. Conversations like that shaped the editing style that became one of the many revolutionary things about the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Toby Hooper edited the film in such a way that you never actually see the

chainsaw come in contact with any of the main characters. And that scene that has now become a classic, the scene where Leatherface plants actress Terry McMinn on a meat hook, Hooper took the advice of the ratings board. You never see the hook actually pierce her skin. But the editing style is so fast and so chaotic that you think you did. Our minds fill in the tiny shots that our eyes didn't really see, and the movie becomes a mind trick. For an extreme horror movie, there's very little blood on screen, and the direct violence is almost always hidden. But even after eight months of effort, Hooper's films still received an R rating. By the spring of 1974, the editing was done, but now there was a new problem.

Hooper had long spent the $60,000 that had been raised to make the film. He was now in debt, and he had zero cash flow. He was so broke that he couldn't get the actual film strips out of the lab. He only had one choice. Sell more. more shares of his company. And that perpetuated one of the last sagas of the Texas chainsaw massacre. It started simple and straightforward. Primary investor Bill Parsley formed an investment company to finance the film. Toby Hooper and Kim Hinkle formed a production company to make the film. Each company owned 50% of the finished product. Simple and easy. But then Hooper and Hinkle offered shares of their company to the actors in lieu of cash payments. Many of the actors accepted.

But they thought they were receiving ownership shares of the full movie. They didn't realize they were receiving small shares in a company that only owned half the movie. And as Hooper sank deeper in debt during the editing process, he and Hinkle asked chief investor Bill Parsley to buy 19% of their production company. Parsley said no, and he reminded them that if they didn't deliver a finished film, he'd end up owning 100% of it anyway, so he wasn't interested in 19% of their company. Hooper and Hinkle started making calls. They eventually screened 12 minutes of footage for a group of wealthy guys who played poker together. Six of them agreed to invest in the film in exchange for the 19% of the production company that Hooper and Hinkle

had offered to parsley. The new investors put in $23,000, and Hooper was able to fully finish the film. But in the process, the ownership shares that were given to the actors had been diluted even further, and they had no idea any of this was happening. And now there was another problem. How were they going to distribute the movie? They needed a distribution company to put up the money to make all the film prints and ship them to theaters across the country. And that's how the mafia got involved. Plainfield, Wisconsin, Winter, 1957. As the unique circumstances of Ed Gein's case became apparent, the police turned him over to the psychiatric ward of the Central State Hospital for evaluation.

Over the course of 30 days, Ed tried to explain himself. His confession filled more than 200 pages. Police originally estimated that there were seven victims in Ed's house. Then the number rose to 10 or 11. Finally, the police settled on 15 victims. But as yet, Ed had only admitted to one murder, that of Bernice Warden. And even in that instance, he'd tried to claim some level of innocence. He said he'd shot her by accident.

But as Ed Gein slowly understood that he was caught and there was no way out, he solved a three-year mystery. He confessed to the murder of Tavernkeeper Mary Hogan. Every list of infamous American serial killers will have Ed Gein near the top. but it's generally accepted that he killed just two people. The grotesque things that were found in his house were mostly made from the bodies of women who were already dead. And as Ed talked to the doctors about all the elements of his life,

his overbearing, religiously fanatical mother, his alcoholic father, his extreme loneliness, and everything else, they began to understand the complexity of his situation. At the end of the 30-day evaluation period, the doctors submitted their findings to a judge. The lead examiner wrote, Mr. Gein has been suffering from a schizophrenic process for an undetermined number of years.

Although Mr. Gein might voice knowledge of the difference between right and wrong, his ability to make such judgment would always be influenced by the existing mental illness. Because of these findings, I must recommend his commitment to Central State Hospital as insane. While the doctors evaluated Ed Gein and came to a conclusion that probably sounded obvious,

the town of Plainfield fell under a national spotlight. In Middle America in the late 1950s, Ed Gein's story was in a realm that was beyond shocking. There wasn't a word for it. In 1957, Gunsmoke and the Little Rascals were two of the most popular shows on TV, and Leave It to Beaver had just started. Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley and a whole host of others were just beginning to transition music from the old big band crooners to the new sound of rock and roll.

The Beatles and the Rolling Stones were years away. The counterculture revolution of the 1960s was a decade in the future, and a country called Vietnam was still under French colonial rule. So when America learned about the crimes of Ed Gein, the tiny town of Plainfield, Wisconsin, found itself under siege. Tourists came from all over the country to see the town where the mad butcher lived, as some called him. Before long, a new nickname emerged, the ghoul of playing field. Store owners hated the notoriety. One man got so tired of answering the same question about

the location of the Gein Farmhouse that he drew a little map on every sheet of a 100-page notepad. Whenever a car pulled up, he tore off a copy and handed it to the driver without saying a word. Relatives of the victims filed lawsuits against Ed Gein. Ed had no money, so his farm went up for auction. Residents of Plainfield were furious when they found out someone was charging 50 cents to tourists to walk around the farm. The whole thing was turning into a circus. Then on Thursday, March 20th, 1958, at 2.30 in the morning. A huge fire was spotted in plainfield. Later that morning, a psychiatric officer informed Ed that his house had burned to the ground. Ed quietly answered, just as well. More than 2,000 people showed up for Ed Gein's auction,

despite the fact that the house was gone. It didn't matter. Most weren't there to bid. They just wanted to look. The 195-acre farm sold for a little over $3,800. The big shock of the day was that Ed's 1949 Maroon Ford sedan, in which he had transported Bernice Warden's body, set off a bidding war. It sold for $760, which seemed like way too much. But there was a reason. The owner equipped it with a pair of wax dummies. The one in the driver's seat was modeled after Ed,

and the one lying in the back represented one of his victims. It was dubbed the Ed Gein Goolcar. 2,000 people paid 25 cents to look at it. But like everything, the fervor slowly died down. 17 years passed and America changed drastically. In February 1974, just eight months before the Texas chain saw massacre was released, Ed Gein was back in the news. He filed a petition claiming he had fully recovered his mental health,

and he should be released from the hospital. The petition was denied. Ten years later, in 1984, Ed Gein died at the age of 78. He was laid to rest next to his mother. Austin, Texas, late summer, 1974. It had been a year since Toby Hooper had filmed the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The movie was done, but the filmmaker needed a distribution company to get it into theaters.

Columbia Pictures offered a $25,000 advance, but then rescinded the offer after its board of directors were disgusted that the studio would even consider getting involved with what they called a low-life film. The last hope came from a company called Brynston Distributors in New York. An executive saw the film and loved it. He offered $100,000 on the spot.

after more high-level people at Brynston viewed it, the offer was doubled to 200,000. On August 9, 1974, the day President Richard Nixon resigned, the deal closed at $225,000, and 35% of the revenue from ticket sales. The film was released two months later on October 11, 1974. Johnny Carson mocked it. The Los Angeles Times called it despicable, ugly, and obscene. Stephen Koch, a friend of Andy Warholz, said it was a vile little piece of sick crap and part of a growing, hardcore pornography of murder that should best be compared to snuff films. But audiences loved it.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was an instant blockbuster. It made between $5 and $10 million in its first week and nearly $12,000. 27 million in its first year. It seemed to reinforce the expression that there's no such thing as bad publicity. People flocked to drive-ins and late-night screenings, and distributors came up with some ingenious marketing ideas to keep fueling the momentum. The infamous, and possibly fake, screening in San Francisco was one. If a movie caused such outrage that the audience threw things at the screen

and got into fistfights in the lobby, then of course people wanted to see it. A print was sent to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The museum hadn't requested it, and no one knew why it was there, but when they accepted it, a press release went out that shouted that the movie had been accepted to the Museum of Modern Art. Seven years later, the movie was re-released by New Line Cinema. It made another $6 million, which was a crazy number for a movie that was already out on home video. It's made over $150 million to date. And that caused the last great battle in the story of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

The cast and crew saw virtually none of that money. When the actors saw the box office numbers, they were ecstatic. Most of them accepted payment in the form of ownership shares of the film instead of up-front cash. Or so they thought. In reality, they'd accepted shares of a company that now, owned just 15% of the film. They didn't know that yet, so they pestered Toby Hooper and Kim Hinkle for their checks. Nine months went by, and then a few checks finally arrived. Ed Neal, who played the hitchhiker, got one for $28.45. He was furious. Gunner Hansen,

who played Leatherface, received a check for $47. That was how many of the actors found out that that they owned something like one quarter of 1% of the film. All the various investors demanded to be paid back before the actors received their meager shares. So by the time the money finally trickled down to the cast, it was a pittance. But what no one knew at the time, not the investors, the filmmakers, or the actors,

was that they were all getting screwed by the distribution company. Variety Magazine reported that chainsawhead grossed more than $12 million at one point in the year. But the distribution company, Brynston distributors, claimed it only made $1 million. Then the film's producers learned that the heads of Brynston were Lou and Joe Pirano.

According to the FBI, the Pirano brothers were in the Colombo crime family. It could never be proved, but it was almost certain that the Peranos were stealing the money. The investors, led by attorney Robert Coon, were tired of being Stonewall. They demanded a meeting with the Pirano brothers, whom Coon nicknamed the Piranha brothers.

In 1975, the year after the movie opened, they met the Piranos in their New York offices. Two large henchmen hovered behind the desk. Coon asked to audit the books. The Piranos laughed and refused. Coon threatened to sue. The Pirano said, You don't have enough balls to sue.

Coon sued anyway. But by the time the case made it into court, there was no money left to recover. The Piranos had financed a string of bad films, and their company owed so much money that Prince of Chainsaw were being held by labs and sub-distributors as collateral until they got paid. Coon kept filing lawsuits, but they went nowhere. By 1976, the Pirano brothers had completely vanished. Finally, a court judgment instructed Brynston to pay the filmmakers half a million dollars, but it was worthless.

By then, the company had declared bankruptcy. After tabulating all the hours, the actors had worked under grueling conditions. They hadn't even made minimum wage. And worse yet, they were shunned by Hollywood. Universal Studios, Hollywood, California, 1976. Toby Hooper and Kim Hinkle had made virtually no money on the film they'd co-written, but they'd earned respect from some powerful people in the movie business. Now they were moving into their new office on the Universal Lot.

They had a three-year deal to make movies for one of the biggest studios in the game. Steven Spielberg's company, Amblin Entertainment, was on the same lot. So was William Friedkin's office, the man who directed The Exorcist the year before Chainsaw came out. Friedkin loved chainsaw and was instrumental in getting Hinkle and Hooper the deal with Universal. The two young filmmakers felt like they were on top of the world, but the feeling wouldn't last, and it never even arrived for the actors. For whatever reason, working on the Texas Chainsaw Massacre became a scarlet letter. It was a curse, despite its huge success.

Some of the cast and crew took the film off their resumes. Just two years after chainsaw, Marilyn Burns, the lead actress, was out of the business and working for a telephone company in Houston. Terry McMinn, the young actress whose character was famously impaled on the meat hook, appeared in a few soap operas. She finally gave up on Hollywood in 1984, at the age of 32. For about a decade, she ran a specialty flower shop in Austin. Paul Partain, who played the wheelchair-bound Franklin, appeared in two small films and then left acting in 1979 to become a salesman in the electronics industry.

Ed Neal, who played the hitchhiker, became the leader of the angry, unpaid shareholders of the production company. It might have ruined whatever chance he had it on-screen acting. Instead, he became one of America's top voiceover actors for Japanese films in the film. CD-ROM games. Alan Danzinger, who played Jerry the Van Driver, spent 10 years as a social worker, then started a singing telegram and party planning company called Three Ring Service. Gunner Hansen, who played Leatherface, created the mold for future generations of horror movie villains, the physically imposing monster who uses a very specific type of weapon and

never speaks. There have been countless copycats and variations. And the film itself created a new paradigm that's been replicated countless times. A group of seemingly innocent kids ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time and gets decimated by a monster. As strange as it may sound today, no one had ever done that before. At least not with the success of chainsaw. Gunner Hansen accepted some small film roles over the years, and he was offered lots of chances to reprise his role as Leatherface, but he turned them down.

He moved back to his home state of Maine and dedicated himself to writing poetry and nonfiction. He supplemented his income by appearing at horror movie conventions, where he was always a crowd favorite. He passed away in 2015 at the age of 68. For Hooper and Hinkle, three years went by in the blink of an eye. Their contract with Universal was up, and they had nothing to show for it. Then Toby Hooper got a big break. He was hired to direct a movie called Poltergeist. Stephen Spielberg was a writer and producer on the film, and he and Hooper had grown close over the last three years. But for Hooper, even this seemingly great opportunity caused problems. Spielberg was always on set, and one day, a Los Angeles Times reporter paid a visit.

Hooper was shooting in the backyard with the first unit while Spielberg was out front directing the second unit. In the article, the reporter implied that Spielberg was ghost directing the movie and Hooper was incapable of doing it himself. When the movie received good reviews, most insinuated that Spielberg had been the real director. It was devastating for Toby Hooper. For the rest of his career, he was limited to small horror movies.

He made the first sequel to Chainsaw, which starred Dennis Hopper, but it wasn't accepted by fans. The film world lost Toby Hooper just a few years ago, in August 2017, at the age of 74. Hooper's partner on Chainsaw, Kim Hinkle, went back to Texas after their brief deal with Universal. He'd seen enough of Hollywood in his three years out there. He settled in Puerto Rancis and became a part-time college professor who occasionally dabbled in the film industry. In 1994, 20 years after the original chainsaw, attorney Robert Coon urged Hinkle to write and direct another sequel.

It wasn't easy. Coon said he had to do everything but put dynamite under Hinkle to get him to do it. The result was the Texas Chainsaw Massacre Next Generation, starring two relatively unknown actors from Texas, Matthew McConaughey and Renee Zellwiger. Both were about to become big stars, which should have been good news for Kim Hinkle, but it wasn't. After Next Generation, McConaughey and Zellwiger worked on the movies that made them famous, A Time to Kill, and Jerry Maguire.

When it was time to release Next Generation, the representatives of those actors, and the studios that were involved in those high-profile movies, didn't want this little horror film to tarnish the stars. Next Generation got delayed and delayed. It was finally released in a few cities and then went straight to video. It marked Kim Hinkle's last major foray into the film world. He accepted superficial producer roles on the various chainsaw remakes and reboots that came out in the early 2000s. But at this point, he's content with the quiet life in Texas.

There's only one Texas chainsaw massacre. The original was truly groundbreaking. There was nothing else like it. and it paved the way for almost every horror movie we have today. In Texas, some things have changed and some have stayed the same. The gas station where things started to go wrong for the five friends in the film is still there. It's now a barbecue joint that doubles as a horror movie museum. But the mesquite break where Leatherface chased Sally is gone.

It's been bulldozed. And the land where an old Victorian house once sat is gone too. It's scheduled to be a condo development. But if you head 50 miles northwest of Austin to the town of Kingsland, there's a restaurant that might look familiar. It was once a rental house on a lonely dirt road in Round Rock. You can stand on the front porch where Leatherface wielded an old chainsaw. You can eat dinner in the infamous dining room

and try to imagine what it must have been like for 40 young people back in the sweltering summer of 1973 to make one of the most iconic films of all time. Thanks for listening to what I hope was a fun experiment here on Infamous America, the dual stories of Ed Gein and the making of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Next up on the show,

we're going to take you to one of the most mysterious places on Earth, the Bermuda Triangle. That series begins November 25th, 2020, for the general public. But our Black Barrow Plus members will receive, the entire series to binge one week earlier. You can sign up through the link in the show notes of this episode or on a website, blackbarrelmedia.com. Plans start at just $5 per month.

Special thanks to Dan Madigan for his insight into the life of his friend, Toby Hooper. This season was researched and written by Brian Frazier and myself. Original music by Rob Valier. Audio editing and sound design by Dave Harrison. I'm your host and producer, Chris Wimmer. Find us at our website, blackbarrelmedia.com or on our social media channels. We're Black Barrel Media on Facebook and Instagram and B-Beryl Media on Twitter. And you can stream all our episodes on YouTube.

Just search for Infamous America Podcast.