The Extras - "The Man With No Name" Trilogy, "Touch of Evil," and "Silence of the Lambs" with Tim Lucas

Episode Date: May 22, 2022

Tim Lucas, award-winning author, novelist, film critic, and frequent contributor to home entertainment extras, joins the podcast to discuss his work on the Kino Lorber 4K releases of the "Man With No Name" Trilogy, "Touch of Evil," and "Silence of the Lambs."   We also discuss his screenplay and novelization of "The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes."LINKS:TIM LUCAS VIDEO WATCHBLOGBLOG: VIDEO WATCHDOGBACK ISSUES: VIDEO WATCHDOG BACK ISSUESMAN WITH KALEIDOSCOPE EYESSECRET LIFE OF LOVE SONGSOtaku Media produces podcasts, behind-the-scenes extras, and media that connect creatives with their fans and businesses with their consumers.  Contact us today to see how we can work together to achieve your goals.  www.otakumedia.tvThe Sitcom StudyWelcome to the Sitcom Study, where we contemplate the TV shows we grew up with and...Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify The Extras Facebook pageThe Extras Twitter Warner Archive & Warner Bros Catalog GroupOtaku Media produces podcasts, behind-the-scenes extras, and media that connect creatives with their fans and businesses with their consumers. Contact us today to see how we can work together to achieve your goals. www.otakumedia.tv

Hi, I'm film historian and author John Fricke. I've written books about Judy Garland and the Wizard of Oz movie, and you're listening to The Extras. Hello and welcome to The Extras, where we take you behind the scenes of your favorite TV shows, movies, and animation, and their release on digital, DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K, or your favorite streaming site. I'm Tim Millard, your host.

Today we are fortunate to have a very special guest on the podcast to talk about some of his recent work on the 4K releases of The Man With No Name Trilogy, Touch of Evil, and Silence of the Lambs, and to discuss his upcoming new novel, The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes, which has a fascinating backstory that we'll get into today. He's the author of three previous novels, 1994's Throat Sprockets, which was included in Jones and Newman's Horror, another 100 best books. The book of Renfield, A Gospel of Dracula, back in 2005. And The Secret Life of Love Songs, released in 2021. 2005, and The Secret Life of Love Songs, released in 2021. He's also the author of the Saturn Award winning critical biography, Mario Bava, All the Colors of the Dark. A leading authority on horror

and fantastic cinema, he has been editor and co-publisher of the influential magazine Video Watchdog and a contributor to magazines from Sight and Sound to Fangoria. He's also the award-winning audio commentator on more than 150 DVD, Blu-ray, and UHD releases. He's the proud recipient of 20 Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards to date, including with his wife Donna, their Legacy Award for Lifetime Achievement. Tim Lucas, welcome to The Extras. Thanks very much for having me. Well, just this morning, Tim, I was looking for your biography on Mario Bava, and I saw that it currently goes for $950 on Amazon. Yeah, I've seen it go for like $3,000. At least that's what someone has it priced as.

Wow. It was a limited edition of 2,500 copies, and the supply was exhausted fairly quickly. I think even though it was a highly priced book, when it was new, the price tag on the book was $250. Okay. But it's a 12 pound book. It's more than a thousand pages and it's good quality paper stock and it's full color inside. And besides that, it was the product of 32 years of my life spent researching and digging up information, you know, out of the ground. I mean, there just wasn't any reference before I really wrote that book and uncovered a lot of material

about his past. So it represents a lot of work. And my wife, Donna, designed the book in a way so that the book would be obviously impressive to anybody that saw it, even before they opened it and read a page of it. I had to end up writing that book between monthly issues of our magazine, Video Watchdog. It was like a seven-year process. And then once I finished, Donna had to start on the design of the book. And that took an additional four years. And during that time, I kept adding to it, which made her creation of the layout Living Hell. So it was sort of Living Hell for both of us. So it was a very difficult job. And so the book has become somewhat rare. We do still have the book available as a

digital version, which has a lot of additional bells and whistles, links to trailers and other goodies that are online, as well as some before and after shots of to illustrate the restoration aspect of the book, because we had to restore some very poor quality poster art and so forth. So, you know, we're very proud of that book. Well, you just mentioned the video Watchdog, and that's something you've been involved with since back in the 80s. So you have been at this film history and criticism for a long time. How did that all kind of begin for you? Writing about horror and fantasy film started for me just about 50 years ago. It's just over 50 years ago, in fact. Wow. I submitted a handful of reviews to Cinefantastique

magazine, which was a glossy fan magazine produced out of Oak Park, Illinois, near Chicago. And I had written a review of A Clockwork Lounge and also a couple of shorter reviews, including one for Godzilla versus the Smog Monster. But what they ended up using, they told me that they couldn't accept my Clothwork launch review because they had promised it to another of their contributors, but they were happy to accept a review that I wrote just a short one on a movie called Horror on Snape Island. So that was the beginning of that.

And I was, uh, 15 years old and I continued to write for them for the next 11 years. I also supplemented the work that I was doing for Cinefantastique with writing for local entertainment papers and also Cincinnati Magazine, which was the magazine of our Chamber of Commerce. I was their film critic for a solid three months. And then they decided not to use me anymore because I wouldn't write reviews for them that were non-critical. Right. And you're based in Cincinnati. Yes. Always have. Always have. Right. So then how did that lead you into the video watchdog? A friend of mine told me about a magazine that he had discovered that was coming out of Chicago that was called Video Time. So I approached them. They were another glossy magazine that was coming out near Chicago. And I approached them and their editor,

a fellow named Matthew White, and started reviewing for him. And they would send me beta cassettes and VHS cassettes every month to review. And I would send them back. And I also ended up writing and also editing a series of 12 books on home video releases that came out through Signet. My name was on the book, but it's in the book in four of the volumes as the author. I did the ones on horror, mystery and suspense, science fiction, fantasy, and movie classics. There were a bunch of other volumes that came out. They were just slim little paperbacks, but they were in all the big bookstores at the time. But I was noticing as I was going through the new releases

that sometimes the movies that were showing up on home video, they were in different form than they had been theatrically. And I especially took notice of the release of Hercules with Steve Reeves because I had just seen it on television the week before I got this videotape. And I realized the opening credits are completely different. And not only that, the dubbing was completely different. And that's how I discovered that there was an original dubbing release of the film that was done for the 1958 U.S. release. And then they dubbed it again, it appears, in the early 1970s when Joseph E. Levine released a somewhat shortened double feature version that went out with Hercules Unchained, the sequel. And so I was noticing that some things were pan and scanned. So you never saw the whole frame on the screen at the same time. It would just skate from one side of the screen to the other. And so I would talk about that. This is before letterboxing even came into it. That came in a

couple of years later, I think. But they liked the idea that I was catching on to this, and we thought that it might make a great column. So we initiated a column called The Video Watchdog that started in October 1985 or 1986. I think it was 86. And that lasted for about a year for the rest of the time I was with the magazine and they went out of business after that. And so from that point, I started migrating the column to other places. I was able to interest Pacific Arts Corporation. They were doing a magazine about home video on videotape that was called Overview. And I told them about my column and they liked that. And they said that they were going to fly me out to Los Angeles.

And I ended up hosting a six or seven minute long segment on Video Watchdog, which was you can actually see the video on our website. It's videowatchdog, one was, you can actually see the video on our website. It's videowatchdog, one word,.com. And, you know, Michael Nesmith, formerly of the Monkees, was the executive producer of Pacific Arts Corporation. I didn't get to meet him, but I got to see his Winnebago and I got to visit his office. There was a strong aura there. Well, that's going back to, I mean, fairly early on in the days of VHS then. That was January of 87.

I was out there, I believe, in November of 86. Right. And then after that, when they decided that they weren't going to continue with Overview, I took the column to Fangoria because I've been writing articles for them about people like Dario Argento and Edgar Wallace. And in talking about how a lot of Argento's films were messed with for their domestic release. uh, messed with, uh, for their domestic release. And I,

I pitched the idea of a column to them and they, they told me that they were actually planning on releasing or rather on, they were planning on initiating their own best competition in the form of a magazine called Gore zone. And so video watchdog became one of the hallmarks of that magazine, which, uh, I think in its first incarnation ran for about 25 issues,

something like that. And I took all of the material that I'd written for video watchdog up to that point later on. I, this was in the early nineties and collected them all in a book called the video watchdog book, which is still available. Well,

well, that's quite a history you have in, you know, home entertainment and, uh, films and classic films. And, you know, no wonder you've got quite, quite the resume of audio commentaries you've done. And it was actually one that you did somewhat recently, or actually the releases coming out. Um, and that's for the trilogy for the man with no name trilogy.

And I saw that you had commentaries on the, if it's full dollars for a few dollars more and the good, the bad, and the ugly that were being used on the 4k release from Kino. And that's kind of what sparked, you know, me reaching out to you. And those are films that I'm a little too young to have seen those in theaters. But of course, I've seen them over the years and I'm a big fan. And I thought it would be interesting to kind of get your take on a little bit of the history of that. Because I have to confess, as much as I enjoy the films, I don't know much about the history behind those films. Maybe you could fill us in a little bit on those Spaghetti Westerns and the impact they've had. Well, just to give you a bit of my

point of view, I mean, when I was 12 years old, I may have been 13, I went to my local movie theater to see the latest Elvis Presley movie, which was a Western called Charo. And I went at the time, the designated time when Charo was supposed to begin. And instead, the co-feature began, which was Once Upon a Time in the West. I was not a big Western fan, but I was a big Elvis fan. So I thought, oh boy, now I'm going to have to sit here until this movie's over. And it was like being struck by lightning watching that movie. It exposed me to a level of visual storytelling that I'd never been so powerfully exposed to.

And even though the movie was quite long, it was cut down, but it was still something like two hours and 20 minutes. Wow. And a lot of the story is just told visually. was still something like two hours and 20 minutes. And a lot of the story is just told visually. Someone once compared the film to an opera in which the arias are stared. And that's a very good analogy for the storytelling.

And it was just powerful. It was like a slap in the storytelling. And it was just powerful. It was like a slap in the gut. And by the time the movie ended, you know, they started showing the trailers between the two features. And I realized that the Elvis movie, no matter how good it was, was not going to equal what I just experienced and needed to mull over, needed to absorb. And so in what I look back on as the first adult decision of my life, I got up and left without seeing the Elvis movie. And after that, you know, it was, I think about six months, eight months, uh, it, it showed up on television with at least one additional scene I hadn't seen theatrically, which had Lionel Stander in it as a bartender out in the middle of nowhere. And it was just, I became obsessed with the film. And the soundtrack was a big part of it. Ennio Morricone's soundtrack, which is just one of the greatest movie scores of all time. Because if you don't have dialogue, you really do need to have a score to sell the picture and to keep an audience in

its seats. And even in the early part of the movie, you don't hear music for a long time, not until the moment when you actually see dead bodies on the ground for the first time. It sort of hits you as this child whose name was Timmy was exposed to these dead people on the ground for the first time. It sort of hits you as this child whose name was Timmy was exposed to these dead people on the ground, the bodies of his family who had been killed. But before that, the sound effects had actually been orchestrated in a uniquely musical way. And actually Morricone had control over the sound effects. So he was creating musical effects with just creaks of machinery and things like that. So it was just an incredibly big thing to absorb. And my devotion to the film was such that I would watch it every time it came to local television. And at the same

time, I knew that he had also directed the Clint Eastwood Westerns, but in some sort of a strange, inexplicable oath of fealty, I refused to see anything else that Leone had directed for 10 years. I just continued to absorb Once Upon a Time in the West whenever I could see it.

And then when I finally got around to them, again, they didn't have the same effect on me that they had on most other people of my generation and slightly before. But I could still appreciate what they were and could see Once Upon a Time in the West as the kind of culmination of what those films showed Leone ramping up to achieve. films showed leonie ramping up to achieve so i i know a lot of people who who just you know they swear by by the movies the soundtracks um i wasn't that particularly into it but when i was asked to do the commentaries i immersed myself in those movies really for the first time. And fortunately, Brett Wood, who was my producer at Kino Lorber, he was a contributor to Video Launched Off back in the day. And he thought that I should be doing commentaries for more mainstream films.

He's always happy to let me do commentaries for the, you know, the offbeat obscure cult films that I love. But at the same time, he wanted to prepare me to do more, more prominent films and to get more exposure. So I'm able to write about movies like the, uh, the man with no name trilogy from a somewhat different angle. And I think that that has worked out because I got a lot of great feedback on, uh, on the work that I did on those films, even from people who are really, you know, diehard spaghetti Western fans. So when you dove into the research, what was it about, you know, the first of Fistful of Dollars? And then, you know, obviously these were made and released first in Italy. But what kind of led Leone to to go down this path and do Westerns in Italy?

Stay with us. We'll be right back. Hi, this is Tim Millard, host of The Extras Podcast. And I wanted to let you know that we have a new private Facebook group for fans of the Warner Archive and Warner Brothers catalog physical media releases. So if that interests you, you can find the link on our Facebook page or look for the link in the podcast show notes.

Well, I think it was a response to oddly enough, the, the Hercules films with Steve Reeves. And also the fact that Westerns did have a place in the silent era of the Italian cinema. In fact, Sergio Leone's parents, his father was a director who worked under the name Roberto Roberti, and his mother was an actress in Roberti's films.

So he had this as part of his heritage, and they made westerns together. So Leone, his first feature was The Colossus of Rhodes with Rory Calhoun, a western actor, but it was a sword and sandal adventure. And if you look at sword and sandal adventures closely, you can see that they are sort of western screenplays that have just migrated further into the past you know into the age of myth right and so i i think

you can see that in in leone's westerns you can see that they have this strong mythic quality that you would associate with a mythological uh or greek fantasy picture and. And it's appropriate to where the films are made. Even though they're Italian productions, they were primarily shot in Spain. And so the setting dictates the way they look. And they just look a lot earthier than American Westerns, which acquired a kind of homogenized look as the Hollywood studios got behind them and made

them more expensive they just became more homogenized looking even though in the 1950s some of the greatest uh i would call you know maverick forms of of uh western cinema uh came along like like the anthony mann westerns uh which were a bit grittier than the usual run-of-the-mill Westerns, the programmers that were sort of even the more famous form of Western in those days. The big Westerns showed an inclination toward realism that Leone took beyond the next frontier. realism that leone took beyond you know the next frontier also wanted to mention that that eastwood himself you know had come to to do these films during summer breaks from his his role on uh rawhide rawhide the television series so he had a big following from that and for some reason i i think the music had a lot to do with it i think uh the the wry sense of humor

had a lot to do with it and and just the uh the dynamic quality of the directing which which i think visually actually shows a big connection to how comic book stories are laid out you can you can tell that the movies are meticulously storyboarded. And so they're just like these big machines of entertainment that just become more serious with each new film. And the relationship with the composer, Marconi and Sergio, was that, had they collaborated before the first of these films? No, no. But Leone had actually done the music for a couple of earlier Italian Westerns. Leone didn't actually start the movement of the new Italian Western, but the ones that came before him, there were a couple of films about a character named Ringo. Those were sort of like Italian versions of the American Westerns that were being made at the time.

of like Italian versions of the American Westerns that were being made at the time. You know, they were Westerns where a cowboy would go into a bar and order a glass of milk, that kind of a thing. And actually, Mario Bava made a Western prior to Leone. He didn't have Morricone working for him, but the Ringo films, I believe, did have Morricone scores. So Leone went to him. And then when he first met with Morricone, he said to him, you don't remember me, do you? And he said, should I? And he said, we went to school together and took him and showed him a photograph. It was like a class photograph. And they're sitting almost side by side as children. So, uh, you know, they were sort of really fated to go hand in hand. They were, they were one of the great, uh, director

composer relationships in cinema. Yeah. Well, when the films came out in Italy, they, they came out in 64, 65 and then 66, I think. Is is that right and then what was the release in the u.s was it much later much later until like 67 it looked like maybe the films were released back to back in 67 they came out very closely after one another and yeah and they were the United Artists Campaign laid this moniker on the man with no name, which which doesn't really figure in the films themselves. He actually has names. And I think all three movies. Right. But they're different names, too. So he's a sort of mythic figure who, you know, it works out this way in some other series films, too, where they will just use a character's face or his name and bring him back in different forms. It happened with the Machiste films in Italy, for example, which start a number of different actors in the role of Machiste. But he could be in 12th century Thebes and then, you know, he could show up in 17th century Scotland.

And, you know, he could be anywhere at any time. It's just wherever oppression was overruling people and where justice was needed, he would materialize. And that's sort of the way the Leone films work, too. Well, the first one was, you know, based kind of on that Kurosawa film, wasn't it? Yo-Yimbo? Yeah, that's right. And, uh, I think they actually were sued, you know, by the production company over that fact, but, um,

They worked it out. Yeah. They worked it out. But the, uh, the ones after that, those are fully original, weren't they? Yes. Yes. Yeah. They were. And another odd thing about, about these movies, when they were in theaters, they became such a kind of ritual of manhood, actually. For a lot of young men of that period, the United Artists released them on double bills and finally triple bills. And then they would have like dust-to-dawn shows where they would add other movies.

It might be another Clint Eastwood movie like Coogan's Bluff, or it might be a James Coburn movie like The Honkers, but they would say, you know, spend the evening with Clint Eastwood. And Clint Eastwood, of course, his star just took off from this time, from these films to become a huge, huge movie star then in the seventies and since then. Yeah, he became a major star and he's made a lot of great films. I was actually fortunate, I think, to be able to do a commentary for his later film, Play Misty for Me, which was his directorial debut. And, you know, the thing about doing audio commentaries is that they force me to sit

down and look at each scene closely and inquire after its meaning. I have to not sort of get lost in the forward movement of a film. I need to look at a specific scene and determine why was this decided to be put here? Why was this chosen to be put here? And in so doing, I mean, I realized that there were all kinds of connections in Play Misty for me to Edgar Allan Poe's poetry about, you know, the lost Lenore. And, you know, it takes place in San Francisco, right there in the Bay Area. So they're right by the sea. And there were a lot of scenes that corresponded to me in the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe. to me in the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe. So, you know, it's just one of the fringe benefits, I guess, of doing these commentaries is that you have to find something to say to keep you going through the running time

and they can lead you. They can force you actually into noticing things about the films that you haven't really reflected on before. Well, for fans of these films, the new 4K versions of A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More, just want to let everyone know that those will release on May 31, 2022. And I think I might've mentioned that The Good, The Bad and The Ugly 4K released actually in April of 2021. So you can upgrade your collection with these fantastic new releases from Kino Lorber. And they all include Tim Lucas's audio commentary, where you can learn a lot about the background to each of those films.

So those come highly recommended. I've also heard that there's been additional restoration work done on these new versions of Fistful of Dollars and for a few dollars more since Kino's 2K HD releases on Blu-ray, there's been some additional work. So these are going to look much more like the versions people remember seeing in theaters. Right. And there are other extras on those as well. They have the 5.1 surround sound as well. So it's the image quality. And then they also include legacy extras that were on the previous releases. So I think it's well worth,

if you're a fan of the trilogy, picking those up. Well, another recent 4K release that I wanted to talk to you about that you brought to my attention was a release in March just of 2022 of the 1958 noir classic Touch of Evil. That stars and is directed by Orson Welles with an all-star cast of Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh, Marlene Dietrich, among others. And for this release, you recorded a brand new audio commentary. I suppose, I mean, there's just so much you could talk about on this film, isn't there? Oh yeah. It's, it's a movie that I discovered, you know, like early in my, in my teens, there was a theatrical revival and, and what I was able to,

I was able to do my commentary for the theatrical version, which is the one I know best. Uh, and, and, and the one that in some ways I think, I'm not sure that it's the best of the bunch, but I think it still has a good deal of validity in the face of the other versions that have come out since. Orson Welles was always sort of one of the patron saints of my magazine, Video Watchdog, because he's really the Christ on the cross people think of when they think of directors who have had their director's cuts thrown out you know and who have been forced to stand in opposition to you know hollywood authority right uh and struck out on

their own as independent filmmakers whenever i watch a documentary about Orson Welles, you know, and he talks about the indignities that were heaped upon him along the way, you know, I always end up crying a little. So he's an important figure to me. And Brett Wood, who I told you was my producer at Kino Lorbert, he had actually written about Orson Welles for Video Watchdog. When we did one of our issues on his work, he wrote about Lady from Shanghai, I remember. So he asked me if I would do this, and it was a great honor. I mean, I had actually written extensively about Mr. Arcaddon for Video Watchdog,

but I had never written extensively about Touch of Evil. And so it was a great opportunity. One of the things I did immediately was to read the original source novel, which I've always heard in anecdotes Wells just tossed out, but there are actually a lot of things in common with the novel, which is kind of hard to find now, especially at a decent price, but I happened to luck into a cheap paperback copy. And so my commentary contains a lot of information about what was taken from the novel and how it was modified. Well, there's a I mean, there's a lot of history to this one, too.

I think that the that the new release includes the version that had some of the additional scenes that were cut that Orson wanted in. And so there's, there's a lot there, but what wasn't this also his kind of his last film in Hollywood before he left? It was, it was his last Hollywood film. And when you think about it, when you, I'm sure that even though the movie was not a commercial success, uh, when it was released, it must've made its money back many times over, over the years. Uh, because it's one of those movies that just has a tremendous shelf life.

People are going to go back and study that film for as long as people do study films. What goes into that? I mean, obviously there's the storyline, there's the cast, but what makes it such a must to see for fans of noir? Well, I think it's, it's a case of a noir film where it's not just noir, but it's, it's Baroque, you know, it edges into the dreamlike and the nightmarish. So you can look at directors that came before Well that worked in the vein that's now referred to as film noir. And then you can see what Well's brought to it, which was a much more aggressive artistic flair. as I think I say in my, in my commentary, he brought a sense of carnival to the story in the way it jumps back and

forth over the border. Right. You know, no character just walks across the screen. It has to be some huge somersault of the camera and people are constantly cutting across the screen in odd zigzag patterns. And then there are these, you know, every time Wells walks on screen, the camera drops to a really low angle to make him look more towering so these are real uh nightmare moments and and in dreamlike scenes and they all conjure up this sense of you know a sort of uh sinful underbelly that hangs around both sides of the border you know that that touch of evil that's referred to in the title,

which was not the title of the book. The book was called Badge of Evil. And the book in no way presents anything like the film presents visually. And it just shows why Wells was great. He could take a fairly plain piece of material and he didn't just ogreize it. He didn't just make it a surreal experience. He also did a lot of very sensible changing around of the characters. I mean, in the novel, you have an American policeman with a Mexican wife. And so Wells switched those around so that you had a Mexican policeman with an American wife and put her in much greater danger south of the border.

So you had a man who was crusading, so almost against the stereotype of his own people and having to deal with the way people looked at him because of the way other people behaved. So there's a really adroit study of racism in the film, as well as everything else that's going on. There's a very socially progressive air to the film. And that's something that also runs throughout all of Wells' work. You know, he tries to show ways in which the world is corrupt and points to ways in which the individual can work to make it a better place.

It's interesting, the casting of Charlton Heston as the Mexican DA, I think it is. of Charlton Heston as the Mexican DA, I think it is. What was the cast take on the film and the response that it had in Orson leaving Hollywood and all? Well, they were all outraged. I remember I actually met Charlton Heston briefly at a book signing. And I told him, I said, I just wanted to thank you. And he said, oh, really? What for? And I said, for helping to get Orson Welles a job, because it was really, uh, his suggestion to, uh, uh,

an executive that got Welles the job to direct the film to come back after a lengthy absence. And he, he told me, I'm very proud of that. And, you know, everybody's disappointment in regard to the picture after it was made was that Wells never got another chance. And in fact, you know, the picture was taken away from him and they were forced by contract to appear in scenes that were going to doctor the film even before anyone had a chance to see the version he shot. going to doctor the film even before anyone had a chance to see the version he shot. The executives insisted on reshooting scenes to make them more obvious, to bring out details in the plot, to remind people of where they were in the story. And they acted in these scenes against their will, so to speak. And, you know, afterwards, they all regretted that Orson never had a chance to come back and make another picture in Hollywood.

So what happened to Orson Welles after that? I mean, he went off to Europe? Yes. He also, you know, he did shoot his own independent film in Hollywood, The Other Side of the Wind. But that didn't finally come together until well after his death. It's on Netflix now. It became a Netflix picture. Well, this is a terrific movie,

and it looks great in the new 4K master, and it has your brand new audio commentary on it, plus the legacy extras for the fans. And I just want to bring it to everybody's attention because it just came out this last March, and think is uh is worth having in everybody's collection now you also mentioned that last fall you worked on another cinema classic and that was the 1991 Silence of the Lambs, which was released in 4K in October of 2021. And you recorded a brand new commentary for that release. Yes. That film is recent enough that I remember when I first saw that one and you could just tell it was an immediate classic. I mean,

it was just thrilling and chilling. Tell us a little bit of your thoughts on that film now that it's been, you know, several decades. It holds up extremely well. And also it was the first horror film, I think we can call it a horror film, that was able to win so many mainstream awards and garner such attention from the mainstream public. People really embraced Hannibal Lecter. Right. public, people really embraced Hannibal Lecter. And I think that's because they embraced Jodie Foster's character of Clary Starling as much as they did. And revisiting the film in preparation for the commentary, I was struck by how beautifully constructed the film is as a story of a woman who is climbing the ranks in the FBI and the obstacles that she faces every day in the most innocuous ways just for being a woman in a man's

world. And it was really the first, it may have been the first movie I ever saw that made such a point of that without it seeming like they were really grandstanding to make a point. I mean, it's just perfectly modulated in the storytelling. And it's just a matter of how people can talk about her like she's not in the room when she is in the room. How people don't defer to her when they're on the elevator with her, and just little things like that. But the first thing you see of her, she's out there running the obstacle course. Right. And you can tell that just on a physical level,

she's really asserting herself just to keep up and to keep moving forward and to keep climbing. And so Hannibal Lecter becomes a sort of devil figure, a kind of manipulator, someone who sort of admires her, but also wants to challenge her in a way. And so he becomes her advisor, but she really has to earn his trust and his assistance by being clever enough to find it where he's offering it. It's a beautifully made film, and I think it's also very true to Jonathan Demme's other work. He was, ever since his earliest days at New World Pictures, he was very interested in telling stories about the real America, you know, the, the, uh, the weird, the weird side of America. And I think that very much comes to light in silence of the lambs, much as it did also in, in something wild and crazy mama, which was one of his early new world

pictures, uh, about a female, uh, criminal who's sort of on a crime spree and just goes across the country. But it's also got a lot of great character actors in it. So it's a real movie movie. Right. And it's also got one of the great surprises, I think, in suspense film history. When Clarice goes to knock on the door, or rather when the rescue team go to a house and you think that she's about to be saved, but they've gone to the wrong house. You really feel the bottom of your stomach drop out when that happens.

So it's, it's, it is a classic film and it's, it's based around classic performances. Yeah. You have Scott Glenn in there as well with Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster. It, it also includes, I, you know, such a chilling portrayal of this psychopath, um, Buffalo Bill and that set up. It's got the complexity that a novel brings by Thomas Harris. And then as you mentioned, the director, uh, Jonathan Demme, he just, the ability to interpret something of that complexity and bring out those performances, make it a classic for sure. And it just seemed to have kicked off to a whole, after that, a whole

kind of almost sub-genre of these psychopathic killer thriller type movies. Yeah. And also true crime pictures. It's not a true crime picture, but films that are about, it all comes from Thomas Harris going back to Manhunter. And I think 1987 or 6. But the idea of investigators who sort of have to mentally become the criminal they're stalking in order to find him. That's definitely a sort of sub-genre that came in after that. And I have to mention, too, that as I like to do whenever I'm doing commentary based on a story that originated in a book, I also went back and read the three Thomas Harris books on Hannibal Lecter. And I have to say they really aren't my cup of tea. Just reading about crime and true crime, especially, I find upsetting.

So they weren't pleasant reads for me, but the films themselves, I think, work really well. I actually had a very good time looking at all of the Hannibal Lecter films to see how they all stacked up. I don't think I ever went into a comparison thing when I was doing the commentary, but I found that all of the films had something interesting about them. I love the scene in Manhunter, for example, where the tooth fairy character takes the blind girl to the vet's office and she gets to pet a drugged lion or tiger. And she's just running her hand over the beast and feeling it with her hand. And only because I read the book, that's where Harris actually gives you the analogy of what the killer is thinking at that moment. And that he is showing her his inner self. And I have to say that in the movie, I never drew that analogy, that conclusion.

But I think it's a powerful thing about the film. And it was a great scene in the movie, I never drew that analogy, that conclusion. But I think it's a powerful thing about the film and it was a great scene in the movie. Considering how much you've written and how much you've done in horror, it was interesting to hear you just say that these weren't necessarily, the books weren't necessarily your cup of tea. It's just because of the true crime element of it, just kind of the realism. Yeah. I saw the movie in cold blood at a very early age i was about 12 years old and it really upset me and one of the ways i dealt with the upset was to read the novel and the novel was even more disturbing and so you know it's it's just not a pleasant place for me to go right i know a lot of people are very, very into it.

To me, I mean, horror always needs to have some element of fantasy or even beauty. One of the reasons I love horror films is because they're the only place where you can find a certain kind of perverse gothic beauty. It doesn't turn up anywhere else. And so I like to see that aesthetic brought into practice. I should mention too, that, you know, I script all of my commentaries from beginning to end. They're all written according to time code and meticulously spoken and sometimes re-spoken. I edit them carefully. And I do that because for the very reason that you're hearing now, when I'm just left to talking off the cuff, I get lost. I get caught up in my own shoestrings. I don't extemporize as well as I do when I sit down and type.

Well, this is another great restoration in 4K that was released by Kino. And it has your brand new audio commentary. It has the HDR Dolby Vision, 5.1 surround and 2.0 lossless stereo. And the Blu-ray disc that comes with it has a ton of the legacy extras. So for fans of Silence of the Lambs or Thomas Harris or Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, Jonathan Demme, that's one you're going to want to add to your collection. Well, among your many talents, Tim, you're also a novelist. And you were telling me that you have a new book coming out soon, The Man with Kaleidoscope Eyes.

And I was just doing a little bit of research into that. And it has a fascinating backstory. Maybe you could tell us about that. Well, The Man with Kaleidoscope Eyes started out as a screenplay that I wrote with my friend Charlie Largent. Charlie Largent. And I had the idea for this script and I had to, again, create it between issues of my magazine, which was going on at the time. And so knowing that I would need a kind of spur to keep moving forward, I contacted my friend Charlie, who also knew a lot about the subject, which was Roger Corman. So we collaborated on a screenplay, which we ended up writing the first draft of in 12 days. We just had it set up as an email game of ping pong.

You know, I would write a certain number of pages until I ran out of steam and then I would fire those off to him. He would edit them, tweak them, add his own additional pages until he ran out of steam and then send it back to me. And that's kind of an absurdly short amount of time for anybody who's ever tried to write a screenplay. Yes. But if you're writing about Roger Corman, it makes a kind of funny. All right. You're in this kind of just dreamlike intensity of outpouring of creativity. like intensity of outpouring of creativity. Yeah, it was, it was a wonderful experience and we,

we laughed a lot. And the first and only director that we really wanted to present it to was Joe Dante and he agreed to do it immediately. But, you know, he, he also wanted us to, to make some changes. So we addressed ourselves to that. I think after the first year or a year and a half went by, they told us, Joe and his wife and partner, Elizabeth Stanley, told us that people just, you know, they liked the script, but they couldn't put their finger on why it didn't completely work for them. So they brought in another couple of writers, the writer and director, Michael Almerida, and his partner, James Robeson, who's a novelist. And they did a draft, which did introduce some interesting changes. I should mention that the story is about Roger Corman in 1966, getting the idea to make his movie, The Trip, his LSD exploitation picture of 1967, and his interactions with Peter Fonda and its screenwriter, who was a young Jack Nicholson, actually not too young of a Jack Nicholson. He was already into his late 30s at the time and thought that his career as

an actor would never happen. So they had actually had, Michael Almerida had actually had personal experience of working with people like Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda. So he brought some of his own insights into it. And then we also had to write scenes that would make the script more affordable, you know, as the budget dropped, you know, and also as people came aboard. There was a period there when a well-known actor was considering taking the role. And so some changes were made to make it more suitable to him. But that ended up not happening. And long story short, I mean, we started this in 2004. And it's still not made.

But Elijah Wood's Spectre Vision has come aboard as co-producers, and they are still trying to find funding. And a few years ago, they held a live table reading duplicating the famous cadences of the Mormon voice. And also doing a little bit of Vincent Price, who shows up in a television clip. If you're writing a script for Joe Dante, you need to have a television clip that offers some subtext. And then Roger himself popped up at the end to play himself at the end of the story. He turns up to interact with himself as a younger person. And so that was very well received. It was like 400 seat theater that sold out. They had to turn a lot of people away, one performance only.

And they build it as the greatest movie never made. And Roger had entered his handprints and signature into the cement outside the Vista Theater. It was a big evening. Unfortunately, I couldn't be there. But, you know, I'm glad that it had that exposure. We thought that the movie was sure to go forward after the success of that evening, but it hasn't. They're still trying to find the right cast.

Well, that all led you trying to find the right cast. Well, that all led you then to do the novelization. Is that right? Yes. I mean, it's really a way of creating more interest in the film project. In the course of writing a novel about that, I mean, there were opportunities for me. I mean, I actually was in contact with not only Roger, but his wife, Julie, and Francis Dole, who was Roger's assistant for decades and who was also a major character in the book. People don't know her as well as the other characters, but she's a very important part of the script and the novel. input from all of these people. And they told me little things, little details, like where Roger's office was at that time, what kind of car he drove, what his earlier experience with drugs had been. And it turns out that some marijuana was around when he was making the Wild Angels with the Hells Angels. And he would actually help them be cooperated by bringing them beer.

And they would be passing around joints. And so Roger had some exposure to that at the time. But again, he said, I prefer my martini. So there's a lot more detail and reality, more of the reality of the characters in the novel, because I had to get inside the characters' heads. And there's a lot of fantasy there. I mean, people can tell me as much as they like about the way things happen, but I had to get into their heads and provide thought processes and so forth. And so there's a lot of invention in the book in terms of the way people think and the way the order in which events happened. Because it had to be a story that flowed from one point to another.

And, you know, the subtext of each section of the book had to remain true and they had to, you know, complement one another. section of the book had to remain true and they had to you know compliment one another so it was it was a more difficult thing to write because i had to deal with so much of the work that went into the screenplay you know i also had to be true to the screenplay right and there were changes that needed to be made there was one thing that i wrote about roger as it was just a a way of showing his something something about the way that he dealt with his personal relationships. And we had a device that we thought was was dramatically clever. And Julie, Roger's wife, actually objected to it. She said Roger would never do that.

And, you know, it's in the script still at this point and needs to be revised, I think. It's in the script still at this point and needs to be revised, I think. But the thing is that I fought against taking it out because it was such a big part of the screenplay and the way scenes connected with one another. I really had it woven in there beautifully. But when I took it out, and I didn't realize this, I didn't notice this until I'd actually gone through the effort of taking it out as an experiment. But the book flowed much better without it. So there's, there's some truth to that, uh, saying kill your darlings. Um, Joe Dante also is very, uh, complimentary about the book. He, he told me it's my magnum opus. This comes out here and, uh, at the end of May, This comes out here at the end of May, is that right, of 2022?

It's supposed to be premiering at the Chillerton UK on the weekend of May 29th. So they'll begin to mail out the copies to the people that pre-ordered it after the end of the month, early June. So you've written several other books before The Secret Life of Love Songs and The Man with Kaleidoscope Eyes. How can listeners learn more about your books and order them and more about the projects you're involved in? I suppose the best place where people can keep track of what I'm up to is to follow me at my blog, which is video watch blog dot blogspot.com. It's a place that I don't maintain every single day. And sometimes you might even see me not show up for a week or two, but I will show up with article quality updates periodically. I review new work when it moves me. And that's where I write about

what's happening, the commentaries that I have coming up and so forth. That's where I write about what's happening, the commentaries that I have coming up and so forth. So besides that, there's also my Facebook account. I'm pretty much at my limit with friends, but I do also have an official individual page. And then there's the video watchdog page. And I also copy material from my personal page over there when it's pertinent. So that'd be the best way people could follow what I'm doing. And I'll be sure to get those from you, Tim, so that we can have those in the podcast show notes and on the website for folks so that they can follow you and see what you're

up to. Well, Tim, it's been great having you on the show today. You've just shared a wealth of information on a lot of great films that I think fans are interested in. Oh, sure. I'm glad to do it. I hope I was semi-coherent. For those of you interested in finding out more about the films and books we discussed today, there will be links in the podcast show notes and on our website at www.theextras.tv. So be sure and check those out. Also follow the show on Facebook or Twitter at The Extras TV or Instagram at TheExtras.tv to stay up to date on the latest episodes and for exclusive images and behind the scenes information about the episodes and upcoming guests. If you're enjoying the show,

please subscribe and leave us a review at iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast provider. Until next time, you've been listening to The Extras with Tim Millard. Stay slightly obsessed. The Extras is a production of Otaku Media, producers of podcasts, behind the scenes extras, and media that connects creatives with their fans and businesses with their consumers. Contact us today to see how we can work together to achieve your goals at www.otakumedia.tv or look for the link in the show notes.