By Greg Goodsell
His words come tripping off the phone with amazing alacrity. Director Ray Dennis Steckler, who blazed a path through the nation’s drive-ins and grindhouses in the Sixties and Seventies with such idiosyncratic gems as The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies (1964) and The Thrill Killers (1964) is still cranking them out with unbridled enthusiasm. Steckler is presently putting the finishing touches on his sequel to Incredibly Strange Creatures, and finds himself in the 21st Century concentrating on a series of docum
entaries focusing on his hometown of Reading, Pennsylvania.
Frequently dealing with low to no budgets, Steckler would often cast himself in many of his own movies. Bearing a strong resemblance to Dead End Kid comedian Huntz Hall, Steckler would often appear under the name of “Cash Flagg.” Steckler points out with a certain degree of pride that his signature costume of a blue hooded sweatshirt was used long before that article of clothing began to have street gang connotations.
Speaking from one of his two video stores in the Las Vegas area, Steckler is amazed to find out how his work in Hollywood has bled over into his hometown. “… in Reading, Pennsylvania, I found Bill Lloyd who was in Eegah! (1962) and Wild Guitar (1962), he was the lead kidnapper. I then found Richard J. Kozlowski who was in Wild Guitar, a friend of mine from Reading, Pennsylvania. We were born two days apart, lived two doors apart and he came to Hollywood with me and worked on The World’s Greatest Sinner (1962), Wild Ones on Wheels (1962), Wild Guitar and my short film Goof on the Loose (1960). Then he married and decided to give up his career, I’m sorry that he did, but I tracked him down in Reading, after almost 45 years. I put him and Bill together in my documentaries and they are absolutely fantastic! Unfortunately, Billy Lloyd was just killed in an auto accident a few months ago up in Mulholland Drive in Hollywood.”
When did Steckler leave the faded glitz and glamour of Hollywood for the faded glitz and glamour of Las Vegas? “I left it in ’69. I couldn’t find a place to park! I had just had enough of it. I really needed a break. I got there in ’59, and it was an incredible ten years, what I did, without really having any money, and all the wonderful people I met and worked with. I needed a change, and I thought that Las Vegas would be a very good change. I wanted to get my kids out of Hollywood and that environment.
“When we moved to Vegas, it was really a nice place to live in those days. It was not a concrete jungle. But I commuted anyway for 18 years to Hollywood. I had to go there every Monday and come back every Friday n
ight. It was the only place I was able to get any work, but I didn’t have my family living there.”
A longtime resident, Steckler has seen his Vegas mutate and change from a low-key gambling town to all-engulfing sensory overload tourist trap. “It started to change up here five years later. You can’t escape it! It’s impossible. There really is no place to move any more. You think you want to move someplace and when you get there, you want to go back to where you were.
“I traveled across the country for the past three years, so I could go to Reading, Pennsylvania, my hometown to visit my sister Judy, her husband Terry and my nephew Michael and make some documentaries there. I found, as I interviewed people all across America, which I did, I found out that home is where your family is. That’s home, as long as you’ve got your family, you’re home! It doesn’t matter what city you’re in. It’s not going to be different anywhere else.
“It’s just that being a filmmaker, you need new horizons, you need inspiration. The old saying is I could go out to Death Valley and I can photograph Death Valley as good as MGM, because I don’t have to build a set, you know what I mean? When I go out on the streets and shoot, it’s just the same as anybody else. But if I have to go inside and build sets and light it and all that, I get tripped up, because it takes money and time to do all that stuff. I like to go out in the streets and shoot. My new movie, the extension to the Creatures is all out on the streets everywhere, plus flashbacks and stuff.”
Favorite Pieces of Time
Still an active filmmaker with many projects in development, this writer asks Steckler what specific movie scene he wants to be remembered for.
Steckler hesitates for a moment. “That’s a tough one. One scene that I always liked was in the Lemon Grove Kids Go Hollywood (aka The Lemon Grove Kids Meet the Monsters, 1965), where I was forced by Huntz Hall to get rid of the baseball hat or he was going to sue me, so I wore this different hat. I have this scene with Carolyn Brandt, we’re on the couch, and we’re talking about school. She says, ‘What school did you go to, Gopher?’ and I say ‘Reform school!’ And that was just made up on the spot, which is kind of interesting. I always got a kick out of that, because the way I delivered it was so close to the way Huntz Hall did his scenes.
“It was like my moment where I really felt like Huntz Hall, who I loved dearly as a kid. I thought he was one of the greatest. I felt that it was good that for a moment I really was Huntz Hall. I really loved him and Leo Gorcey when I was a kid. I’m still watching their movies now; I got them all off of Turner Classic Movies. I wish they would put them out on DVD, I would buy each one of them twice for back
up!
“And two, one of the film versions that I like the best is ‘White Rabbit,’ which I did with Carolyn Brandt from Jefferson Airplane’s song from Surrealistic Pillow. It was put on a video album from England, there was only one copy at Best Buy, and fortunately John Roberts, a friend of mine bought it and made a copy of it, or I wouldn’t even have it.”
This writer tells Steckler that my personal favorite scene of his is the lonely ride up Angel’s Flight in Incredibly Strange Creatures. The poetic despair of that particular sequence is memorable, and Steckler says that the scene is also very popular among fans. “Another music video that I did with Randy Boone, he was a singer in Cimarron Strip with Stuart Whitman. That had to be made in the Sixties, 1968. ‘So Hard to Tell Mama Goodbye.’ You can check the date on the song. It’s the most underrated music video ever made. It was made for Europe. I did another music video called ‘Red Balloon,’ with Boyd Rice, which was released in England.”
Many of Steckler’s films served as a vehicle for his then-wife, Carolyn Brandt. “I always tried to make he
r look the best. When she did The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher (1979), it’s very important that you watch her transformation from a dull looking woman to someone glamorous. At the end when she’s on that chair, and she shows those beautiful legs … people are still talking about her legs, I tell you. When we went to The Crest Theatre in Sacramento and she walked on stage … this was her Oscar that night. Her fans were there and she wore an evening gown with a slit right up her legs. She looked like a million dollars. She gave the fans everything they expected that night. That’s the only appearance she’s made in several years.”
One Steckler film that is a step removed from a family video is his minimalist Blood Shack (aka The Chooper, 1971). “Definitely home movies. That was kind of a fun film, because I got a chance to put Ron Haydock and Carolyn together again, and I always wanted to do that again, because they did so well in Rat Pfink a Boo Boo (1966). I felt they made a good team, and I though they did well this time even though they were at odds with each other.
“We shot the movie with three days of shooting, one day at the rodeo and one other day at a different rodeo in Pahrump, Nevada, five days altogether. The whole crew was me. I did the sound, everything. The shooting ratio was about one-and-a-half to one. I actually didn’t have enough film left over to make a trailer, so I never made a trailer of the movie. I used every frame of film in that feature, and that was in 16 mm shooting on short ends. Whoever thought of filming short ends with 16 mm? When you’re broke, you’re broke! You’ve got to make it work!
“My daughters Linda and Laura were so wonderful in the film and now they’re glad that they did that as children. Linda shows her movies all the time to Jade and Garrett, my grandkids. They just love to see their mother the same age! It’s kind of neat.”
All “Dolled” Up
While many of his X-rated films have come to light in the digital age, one of this writer’s favorite Steckler films is the moody, atmospheric Sinthia The Devil’s Doll (1968). On a double feature on the Something Weird DVD of Satanis, the Devil’s Mass (1970), Sinthia spins the tale of a troubled young woman coming to grips with the childhood murder of her father and his mistress. Sinthia is replete with exotic and colorful imagery filmed on a less-than-a-shoestring budget. Steckler says that casting the feature was a challenge.
“When I was going to make Sinthia the Devil’s Doll, I hadn’t even cast the movie. I didn’t cast it. I couldn’t get someone to play the lead, I could not find a girl that I was happy with, no matter what. I must have interviewed 500 girls, I swear, because I had nice offices at Sunset Boulevard and Doheny in Los Angeles. A friend of mine, Ted Roter (aka Peter Balakoff), who played the father, he was o
n his way over there, and he had car problems. So he asked this girl who was a Sunday school teacher, to give him a lift. She brought him in, and he said ‘I’m here.’ And I gave him the script and everything, and I looked at her and I said, ‘Oh! You’ve found my Sinthia!’ And he thought I was crazy, because she was this Sunday school teacher. Well anyway, the rest is history.”
Steckler has fond memories of his lead actress, directing her in her first – and only – film. “Her real name was Bonnie Allison, but because it was the type of movie it was, she was also engaged at that time to Jack Marin, who was a basketball player for the Detroit Pistons, but she wanted to do the part. It was her dream to star in a movie, and she was so cooperative, she was wonderful in the movie. Everybody loved her. She changed her name for the movie to Shula Roan.”
The visuals in Sinthia call to mind the work of America’s foremost “cinemagician” Kenneth Anger, whose films are now getting widespread acclaim due to a restored, two volume DVD release. Was Steckler trying to mimic Anger with all the colored gels in Sinthia? “I never saw Anger’s work, but if you say so, I’ll accept it! I had done a lot of commercials using colored gels, and I did a lot of music videos using colored gels. So it was nothing new for me. It’s just the way it worked out.
“Sinthia was shot on the beach in Malibu and it was shot in the same soundstage that I shot The Thrill Killers (1964), on Santa Monica Boulevard, near Kenmore Avenue. You had Herb Robins playing the devil, and then I had Brett Pearson play the psychiatrist. He also played the heavy in Body Fever (1969). He had done a lot of movies. One in particular, he had a fight scene with Steve McQueen. Believe it or not, he was a real psychiatrist! And of course, you saw Brett Zeller, portraying the gypsy fortune teller. She also played the drug addict in Body Fever. As long as people hung around me, they’re always going to get another part! But they gotta hang around me, because I don’t know how I’m going to do anything. It’s hard to pre-plan if you don’t have any money.”
Sinthia’s lush and beautiful music score was composed specifically for the film. “Henry Price, André Brummer is his real name. He did all my films. The same guy who did the Creatures. I stayed with him for almost every movie up until Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher, which was the last one he did for me. He recently passed away (in 2006). He was brilliant. I have a sort of ‘film family,’ although the people I work with work for other people, hopefully. Some of them never work for any other people. They were my team as long as they could find me or I could find them. And of course when I shot Summer Fun (aka Camp Robinson, 1997), I found Herb Robins, and he starred in it with my two daughters Bailey and Morgan.”
Coleman Francis … again
One of Steckler’s many contemporaries was bad filmmaker extraordinaire Coleman Francis, whose directorial trilogy The Beast of Yucca Flats (1961), Red Zone Cuba (aka Night Train to Mundo Fine, 1966) and The Skydivers (1963) would gain renewed cult appreciation with their skewering on the Mystery Science Theater 3000 TV show. Francis had fallen on hard times at that point in his life, and yet continued to find w
ork as an actor in countless low-budget features. His work with Steckler is a frequently told tale that has since become legend in independent filmmaking annals.
“I get e-mail and letters from all over the world, and I’ve been getting them for thirty, forty years now from people who are fans of mine. There are moments in my movies that they think are the greatest. I had someone call me yesterday from North Dakota and tell me about the scene in Body Fever (1969), with the old man in the Laundromat, which I think is one of the best scenes that I ever did. Whether you like the movie or not, and most people like the movie, it’s one of my few films that played on French television, maybe because they dubbed it and couldn’t tell any of the weak acting that way. But the faces in my movies tell my stories.
“The story is that Coleman Francis, who was also in Lemon Grove Kids, Coleman also starred in a movie with Rock Hudson The Sea Devils (1953). He had a nice career as an actor before he became a director. He was known to drink a little too much. Ron Haydock and I had just finished shooting Body Fever, which at that time we were calling The Last Original B Movie, we have that version out now. The only thing was I took all the Los Angeles scenes out and put in San Francisco. I did it for my few fans in San Francisco.
“We were at Hollywood and Vine at the Ranch Market there, we used to go there to get the ribs after we were done, and it was dark, a little damp out and we walked up to where we parked the car in the parking lot next to it and right in the corner there was somebody laying in the gutter. I said, ‘Oh my God! There’s someone laying there! And I pulled him up and put him on the bus bench there and I saw that it was Coleman Francis, who had already worked for me.
“I said, ‘Coleman, what the hell is going on here?’ He was disheveled and filthy and drunk and completely broke. He had no money, nothing. And h
e just felt that life was over for him. I said ‘Well, I’ll try and get you some work.’ He said, ‘As an actor, I hope? I want to act!’ He wasn’t concerned about getting some money to help me fix my house or anything like that. Specifically, if I was going to help him, it would have to be as an actor! Right to the end! ‘I am an actor! Find me work! That’s what I do!’ I said, ‘Yeah, I have a part for you tomorrow.’ Ron looked at me because we had just finished the movie, in fact that’s what we were there celebrating for with the ribs, that was our cast party, Ron Haydock and me. I gave Coleman fifty bucks and I said ‘Here Coleman, here’s $50, I’ll give you another $50 tomorrow, I want you to meet us at Sunset and Bronson, where’s there’s an old deserted Laundromat. There was a lot of light coming in there, especially from the windows. I said, ‘we’ll meet you there,’ it was about nine o’clock and I described it one more time, and Francis says ‘I will be there, ready to go to work!’ We left him, and he had some money, and I knew he could get something to eat and everything. Ron basically said ‘You’ll never see him again!’ I said, ‘Oh, sure he’ll be there!’
“So all night long I start thinking about this scene, about a derelict that is sleeping in a Laundromat. I’m thinking about it all night long, I get down there and I call Paul Bram my assistant, he meets us there, Keith Wester shows up -- who’s now nominated for seven Academy Awards for sound. We’re all there, its 9:05, 9:10 and (Coleman is a) no show, and Ron is looking at me like ‘you know, you shouldn’t have given him the money!’ And I said, ‘hey! He’s an honest guy.’
“Then all of a sudden, down on the street I saw this figure a long way down Bronson about a quarter of a mile below Sunset and I saw him coming closer and closer and closer, and here he comes. And when he gets across Sunset Boulevard and gets to the Laundromat, which is right next to the freeway. Coleman comes up and he’s all dressed up, clean as a whistle. His hair has been trimmed and cut, he’s had a shave, he has a sport coat on him and he looks like a used car salesman! He took the fifty dollars and got himself to look professional and look good for me; you know what I’m saying? He didn’t spend the money on booze or nothin’! The only thing was I was expecting a derelict! Coleman says ‘I’m here, Ray, and I’m ready to go to work! What would you like me to do?’ We shot the scene, we made it up. Some people have said certain things as to why they didn’t like it and so forth. One girl in particular, Brett Zeller said ‘You should not have asked him if he wanted the money! You should have just took the money and put it in his pocket!’ I told her that did not fit Charles Smith’s character.”
Steckler is proud to have given Coleman a favor in his time of need. “Regardless of the fact that he was an alcoholic, you look at that film and you see that day, he was trying to get his Oscar nomination. If there was an Oscar nomination for a B-movie, I think he would have won it that day. I played off him completely. By playing off of Coleman, he made me look really good. That’s one of my favorite scenes in my movies.
“Of all the scenes I’ve done in all my movies, I always think about that one and Coleman Francis who did The Beast of Yucca Flats and the way he was winding up in Hollywood. When it was all over and years go by now, I know for that one day, that one moment I gave him life again. I gave him respect. I’m proud that I did that. Should I ever get in that position, I hope that somebody would do it for me, too. But I think that’s what you’re supposed to do with your fellow men and fellow talent and fellow performers …”
Out of the mainstream
Steckler is indifferent that his films have never found widespread, mainstream acceptance or popular adulation. “I have to tell you, I’m out of the mainstream, the low-stream, everything. I’m completely isolated now from everybody in the industry. People come to me and do interviews, and film me and all that stuff all the time. Somebody will call me, up, I have no idea who they are, they want me to answer a few questions, sometimes they’ll get rude on the phone and I’ll just say ‘we’re done!’
“Not everybody loves me, by the way. Some people think my movies are terrible, they think they’re crap and junk, but even John Ford, they knocked a few of his movies. I don’t understand why people who don’t make movies bother to knock other people’s movies. I think that if you a re a filmmaker and you’ve made movies, you have a right to give your opinions because it’s your trade. Critics, if they’ve never made a movie, they should shut up because they don’t know what could possibly go through a filmmaker’s mind on the set. There’s no way. Some of the greatest moments in movie history, whatever they are, and they’re so many of them that they probably happened accidentally. It’s just because all the cards fell into place, like in Casablanca (1942). It just happens!”
Steckler relates a story about one of his favorite filmmakers, Michelangelo Antonioni. “At the Cannes Film Festival, Antonioni made L’Avventura (1960). They booed it off the screen. They were so bored with it, it was so tedious. The critics just crucified it! He went home and two or three days later, it dawned on him that the critic had crucified it, because he had never seen anything like it before. He didn’t interpret it right because it was completely different. The critic, after three or four days, he saw it again, and then he really understood the movie and looked at it in a completely different view. The first time, it upset him, because there was no music, there were just sounds and the shots seemed to be overly long and it did not have the conventional, classical type editing that movies have. The pacing was different. All the people who thought they didn’t like it went back to see it again, and again and again, and its history. It’s one of the greatest movies ever made!
“I’ve never had the money to make a movie, the money upfront, in my whole life! I have never been able to say ‘I want twenty dancing girls and fourteen sets. I’ve never had anything as far as that goes. I’ve always said, ‘gee, when I was a kid, playing baseball, we would get a pickup team of whom ever was there. You get them, I get them, whatever. You get a good game going, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. You can’t say ‘I have to have $50 million dollars or I can’t make the movie.’ I gave up teaching film at the University of Nevada Las Vegas on account of that, although I had some nice students. Most of them just wanted to go to Hollywood and become another Steven Spielberg, because all they see are the final results, the big expensive movies. I’ll challenge any filmmaker in the world to go into the street here with me and a Hi-8 camera, with no money, not even lunch money and match me with what I’ll do that day with my camera. Anyone. So put the word out.
“If Spielberg wants to come out with his Hi-8 next to me, at the same street corner and start a movie, with no money, we’ll see what he can do. I think that what I do is the best as anyone can do it. Another thing that I will not be modest about is what I do is me, it’s my stuff and my originality. I’m not running around and copying anybody else’s stuff. I have been impressed many times by filmmakers. Spielberg, who I think is a wonderful director. He was born to make Schindler’s List (1993). I think John Ford was born to make the Western Trilogy with John Wayne. I think Antonioni was born to make L’Avventura. Fellini, who could make 8 ½ (1963) better than Fellini? Bergman’s The Silence (1963), who could make that? All of us were born to make something on film, they were born filmmakers. I think filmmakers are born, that’s their calling the moment they’re put on this earth. That also includes plumbers and doctors, because we sure need them!
With the easy availability of home video cameras and easy, digital editing software, countless would-be auteurs are filling the world with their own idiosyncratic visions. It’s a trend that Steckler enjoys seeing. “Those three guys made a film and did every scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) on 8 mm film years ago. Did you see that? Spielberg and George Lucas gave them their blessing to do whatever they wanted. It’s getting a lot of notoriety. They never did another film because they plagiarized the whole movie. At least they started out with a good script anyway. Now, if somebody else were to do that, we’d be in jail!”
Home again, home again, jiggity jig
Steckler has seemingly come full circle with his series of hometown documentaries he’s currently producing. “In my documentaries that I did on Reading, Pennsylvania, I told my wife Katherine to drop me off at any street corner and come back in an hour. I tried to capture stuff on the streets. When I would interview people and they would talk, I would put their interviews in the film, I would not edit them. If they were four, five, six minutes, I didn’t want to edit it. Because it’s a real truthful moment of time, form the time they start talking to the interview is over, I thought it was more important to capture those moments exactly – if those moments drag the film, who cares? They’re in my movies, I can do what I want with them.
“I found this wonderful old man who was in his nineties, and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Paul Kegerice, I videotaped them, and it went on for eight or nine minutes, I swear. He told me about his whole life in Reading, from the time he was a kid to now. That’s like eighty, ninety years of time that he brought to the screen. Why would you one to take one precious moment out of that? Let the people, who like to hear about Reading or hear about Reading of that particular time, let them see what someone has to say. Why chop it up? I like real time. Antonioni movies were so great, because if someone were to cross the street, he would let them cross the street, he wouldn’t cut it to save one 15th of a second like in Hollywood, to move it a little faster. If it takes you that long to cross the street, let it go man! I like that.
“That was what I was saying about Bill Lloyd and Richard “Punchy” Kozlowski from Reading, Pennsylvania, getting them together for my Reading series again. After all those years, it’s like 1963. Looking them up and getting them back into my life. Both Lloyd and Punchy gave me so much energy and so much enjoyment to be with my friends who are still alive after all those years. It’s like finding a long-lost relative and being able to share that love again …”
Steckler is also excited about his sequel to Creatures, starring alternative mainstay and sometimes Screem contributor Johnny Legend. “The one film that I’m doing now, which is an extension of the Creatures, is so bizarre, I can’t even describe it! I’m making it up as I go along and it’s all a part of me, what I feel like doing that day. What happens happens and I let it ride. We were shooting Johnny Legend at the Bunkhouse here in downtown Las Vegas. All kinds of things happened. The girls started jumping all over him and falling in the floor in the dark spots where there were no lights. Fortunately, I had a night light on my video camera, shooting in Hi-8 by the way. That’s what I felt like doing this time. I flipped the night light on, and there they were in the dark. They’re hugging him and kissing him and he’s singing “Rat Pfink A Boo Boo” I said, ‘boy! You could never do this on film!’ These girls just came out of nowhere; you know what I’m saying?”
Steckler is supremely confident that his movies, no matter how low budget, individual or quirky will always have an audience. “We’re capturing these moments, and this is so much fun! Who cares? Do you have to shoot in 35 mm with a major star and actress in order to get it made? Who cares? Who would want to see it anyway? The only people that I’m making this movie for are for my fans! Fans, family and friends! That’s why I’m making the movie! I don’t care about the rest of the world! If they want to see it, if they want to watch it, if they enjoy it, fine! But I’m going to tell you something … even after they see the movie and they stare at the movie and say to themselves, ‘what was that?’ Was it good, was it bad? I’m not sure! Oh, it was terrible, oh, it was fantastic, and that’s what’s going to happen anyway. The thing is, is that I would like everybody to have a copy in their back pocket. I’ll release it and then release it with the original Creatures as a dual pack. It’s the only way to send it out.”
Steckler does offer a friendly warning. “I’m only going to release one million copies of One More Time and then it goes into moratorium for 30 days. Please order your copies early!”
His words come tripping off the phone with amazing alacrity. Director Ray Dennis Steckler, who blazed a path through the nation’s drive-ins and grindhouses in the Sixties and Seventies with such idiosyncratic gems as The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies (1964) and The Thrill Killers (1964) is still cranking them out with unbridled enthusiasm. Steckler is presently putting the finishing touches on his sequel to Incredibly Strange Creatures, and finds himself in the 21st Century concentrating on a series of docum
entaries focusing on his hometown of Reading, Pennsylvania.Frequently dealing with low to no budgets, Steckler would often cast himself in many of his own movies. Bearing a strong resemblance to Dead End Kid comedian Huntz Hall, Steckler would often appear under the name of “Cash Flagg.” Steckler points out with a certain degree of pride that his signature costume of a blue hooded sweatshirt was used long before that article of clothing began to have street gang connotations.
Speaking from one of his two video stores in the Las Vegas area, Steckler is amazed to find out how his work in Hollywood has bled over into his hometown. “… in Reading, Pennsylvania, I found Bill Lloyd who was in Eegah! (1962) and Wild Guitar (1962), he was the lead kidnapper. I then found Richard J. Kozlowski who was in Wild Guitar, a friend of mine from Reading, Pennsylvania. We were born two days apart, lived two doors apart and he came to Hollywood with me and worked on The World’s Greatest Sinner (1962), Wild Ones on Wheels (1962), Wild Guitar and my short film Goof on the Loose (1960). Then he married and decided to give up his career, I’m sorry that he did, but I tracked him down in Reading, after almost 45 years. I put him and Bill together in my documentaries and they are absolutely fantastic! Unfortunately, Billy Lloyd was just killed in an auto accident a few months ago up in Mulholland Drive in Hollywood.”
When did Steckler leave the faded glitz and glamour of Hollywood for the faded glitz and glamour of Las Vegas? “I left it in ’69. I couldn’t find a place to park! I had just had enough of it. I really needed a break. I got there in ’59, and it was an incredible ten years, what I did, without really having any money, and all the wonderful people I met and worked with. I needed a change, and I thought that Las Vegas would be a very good change. I wanted to get my kids out of Hollywood and that environment.
“When we moved to Vegas, it was really a nice place to live in those days. It was not a concrete jungle. But I commuted anyway for 18 years to Hollywood. I had to go there every Monday and come back every Friday n
ight. It was the only place I was able to get any work, but I didn’t have my family living there.”A longtime resident, Steckler has seen his Vegas mutate and change from a low-key gambling town to all-engulfing sensory overload tourist trap. “It started to change up here five years later. You can’t escape it! It’s impossible. There really is no place to move any more. You think you want to move someplace and when you get there, you want to go back to where you were.
“I traveled across the country for the past three years, so I could go to Reading, Pennsylvania, my hometown to visit my sister Judy, her husband Terry and my nephew Michael and make some documentaries there. I found, as I interviewed people all across America, which I did, I found out that home is where your family is. That’s home, as long as you’ve got your family, you’re home! It doesn’t matter what city you’re in. It’s not going to be different anywhere else.
“It’s just that being a filmmaker, you need new horizons, you need inspiration. The old saying is I could go out to Death Valley and I can photograph Death Valley as good as MGM, because I don’t have to build a set, you know what I mean? When I go out on the streets and shoot, it’s just the same as anybody else. But if I have to go inside and build sets and light it and all that, I get tripped up, because it takes money and time to do all that stuff. I like to go out in the streets and shoot. My new movie, the extension to the Creatures is all out on the streets everywhere, plus flashbacks and stuff.”
Favorite Pieces of Time
Still an active filmmaker with many projects in development, this writer asks Steckler what specific movie scene he wants to be remembered for.
Steckler hesitates for a moment. “That’s a tough one. One scene that I always liked was in the Lemon Grove Kids Go Hollywood (aka The Lemon Grove Kids Meet the Monsters, 1965), where I was forced by Huntz Hall to get rid of the baseball hat or he was going to sue me, so I wore this different hat. I have this scene with Carolyn Brandt, we’re on the couch, and we’re talking about school. She says, ‘What school did you go to, Gopher?’ and I say ‘Reform school!’ And that was just made up on the spot, which is kind of interesting. I always got a kick out of that, because the way I delivered it was so close to the way Huntz Hall did his scenes.
“It was like my moment where I really felt like Huntz Hall, who I loved dearly as a kid. I thought he was one of the greatest. I felt that it was good that for a moment I really was Huntz Hall. I really loved him and Leo Gorcey when I was a kid. I’m still watching their movies now; I got them all off of Turner Classic Movies. I wish they would put them out on DVD, I would buy each one of them twice for back
up!“And two, one of the film versions that I like the best is ‘White Rabbit,’ which I did with Carolyn Brandt from Jefferson Airplane’s song from Surrealistic Pillow. It was put on a video album from England, there was only one copy at Best Buy, and fortunately John Roberts, a friend of mine bought it and made a copy of it, or I wouldn’t even have it.”
This writer tells Steckler that my personal favorite scene of his is the lonely ride up Angel’s Flight in Incredibly Strange Creatures. The poetic despair of that particular sequence is memorable, and Steckler says that the scene is also very popular among fans. “Another music video that I did with Randy Boone, he was a singer in Cimarron Strip with Stuart Whitman. That had to be made in the Sixties, 1968. ‘So Hard to Tell Mama Goodbye.’ You can check the date on the song. It’s the most underrated music video ever made. It was made for Europe. I did another music video called ‘Red Balloon,’ with Boyd Rice, which was released in England.”
Many of Steckler’s films served as a vehicle for his then-wife, Carolyn Brandt. “I always tried to make he
r look the best. When she did The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher (1979), it’s very important that you watch her transformation from a dull looking woman to someone glamorous. At the end when she’s on that chair, and she shows those beautiful legs … people are still talking about her legs, I tell you. When we went to The Crest Theatre in Sacramento and she walked on stage … this was her Oscar that night. Her fans were there and she wore an evening gown with a slit right up her legs. She looked like a million dollars. She gave the fans everything they expected that night. That’s the only appearance she’s made in several years.”One Steckler film that is a step removed from a family video is his minimalist Blood Shack (aka The Chooper, 1971). “Definitely home movies. That was kind of a fun film, because I got a chance to put Ron Haydock and Carolyn together again, and I always wanted to do that again, because they did so well in Rat Pfink a Boo Boo (1966). I felt they made a good team, and I though they did well this time even though they were at odds with each other.
“We shot the movie with three days of shooting, one day at the rodeo and one other day at a different rodeo in Pahrump, Nevada, five days altogether. The whole crew was me. I did the sound, everything. The shooting ratio was about one-and-a-half to one. I actually didn’t have enough film left over to make a trailer, so I never made a trailer of the movie. I used every frame of film in that feature, and that was in 16 mm shooting on short ends. Whoever thought of filming short ends with 16 mm? When you’re broke, you’re broke! You’ve got to make it work!
“My daughters Linda and Laura were so wonderful in the film and now they’re glad that they did that as children. Linda shows her movies all the time to Jade and Garrett, my grandkids. They just love to see their mother the same age! It’s kind of neat.”
All “Dolled” Up
While many of his X-rated films have come to light in the digital age, one of this writer’s favorite Steckler films is the moody, atmospheric Sinthia The Devil’s Doll (1968). On a double feature on the Something Weird DVD of Satanis, the Devil’s Mass (1970), Sinthia spins the tale of a troubled young woman coming to grips with the childhood murder of her father and his mistress. Sinthia is replete with exotic and colorful imagery filmed on a less-than-a-shoestring budget. Steckler says that casting the feature was a challenge.
“When I was going to make Sinthia the Devil’s Doll, I hadn’t even cast the movie. I didn’t cast it. I couldn’t get someone to play the lead, I could not find a girl that I was happy with, no matter what. I must have interviewed 500 girls, I swear, because I had nice offices at Sunset Boulevard and Doheny in Los Angeles. A friend of mine, Ted Roter (aka Peter Balakoff), who played the father, he was o
n his way over there, and he had car problems. So he asked this girl who was a Sunday school teacher, to give him a lift. She brought him in, and he said ‘I’m here.’ And I gave him the script and everything, and I looked at her and I said, ‘Oh! You’ve found my Sinthia!’ And he thought I was crazy, because she was this Sunday school teacher. Well anyway, the rest is history.”Steckler has fond memories of his lead actress, directing her in her first – and only – film. “Her real name was Bonnie Allison, but because it was the type of movie it was, she was also engaged at that time to Jack Marin, who was a basketball player for the Detroit Pistons, but she wanted to do the part. It was her dream to star in a movie, and she was so cooperative, she was wonderful in the movie. Everybody loved her. She changed her name for the movie to Shula Roan.”
The visuals in Sinthia call to mind the work of America’s foremost “cinemagician” Kenneth Anger, whose films are now getting widespread acclaim due to a restored, two volume DVD release. Was Steckler trying to mimic Anger with all the colored gels in Sinthia? “I never saw Anger’s work, but if you say so, I’ll accept it! I had done a lot of commercials using colored gels, and I did a lot of music videos using colored gels. So it was nothing new for me. It’s just the way it worked out.
“Sinthia was shot on the beach in Malibu and it was shot in the same soundstage that I shot The Thrill Killers (1964), on Santa Monica Boulevard, near Kenmore Avenue. You had Herb Robins playing the devil, and then I had Brett Pearson play the psychiatrist. He also played the heavy in Body Fever (1969). He had done a lot of movies. One in particular, he had a fight scene with Steve McQueen. Believe it or not, he was a real psychiatrist! And of course, you saw Brett Zeller, portraying the gypsy fortune teller. She also played the drug addict in Body Fever. As long as people hung around me, they’re always going to get another part! But they gotta hang around me, because I don’t know how I’m going to do anything. It’s hard to pre-plan if you don’t have any money.”
Sinthia’s lush and beautiful music score was composed specifically for the film. “Henry Price, André Brummer is his real name. He did all my films. The same guy who did the Creatures. I stayed with him for almost every movie up until Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher, which was the last one he did for me. He recently passed away (in 2006). He was brilliant. I have a sort of ‘film family,’ although the people I work with work for other people, hopefully. Some of them never work for any other people. They were my team as long as they could find me or I could find them. And of course when I shot Summer Fun (aka Camp Robinson, 1997), I found Herb Robins, and he starred in it with my two daughters Bailey and Morgan.”
Coleman Francis … again
One of Steckler’s many contemporaries was bad filmmaker extraordinaire Coleman Francis, whose directorial trilogy The Beast of Yucca Flats (1961), Red Zone Cuba (aka Night Train to Mundo Fine, 1966) and The Skydivers (1963) would gain renewed cult appreciation with their skewering on the Mystery Science Theater 3000 TV show. Francis had fallen on hard times at that point in his life, and yet continued to find w
ork as an actor in countless low-budget features. His work with Steckler is a frequently told tale that has since become legend in independent filmmaking annals.“I get e-mail and letters from all over the world, and I’ve been getting them for thirty, forty years now from people who are fans of mine. There are moments in my movies that they think are the greatest. I had someone call me yesterday from North Dakota and tell me about the scene in Body Fever (1969), with the old man in the Laundromat, which I think is one of the best scenes that I ever did. Whether you like the movie or not, and most people like the movie, it’s one of my few films that played on French television, maybe because they dubbed it and couldn’t tell any of the weak acting that way. But the faces in my movies tell my stories.
“The story is that Coleman Francis, who was also in Lemon Grove Kids, Coleman also starred in a movie with Rock Hudson The Sea Devils (1953). He had a nice career as an actor before he became a director. He was known to drink a little too much. Ron Haydock and I had just finished shooting Body Fever, which at that time we were calling The Last Original B Movie, we have that version out now. The only thing was I took all the Los Angeles scenes out and put in San Francisco. I did it for my few fans in San Francisco.
“We were at Hollywood and Vine at the Ranch Market there, we used to go there to get the ribs after we were done, and it was dark, a little damp out and we walked up to where we parked the car in the parking lot next to it and right in the corner there was somebody laying in the gutter. I said, ‘Oh my God! There’s someone laying there! And I pulled him up and put him on the bus bench there and I saw that it was Coleman Francis, who had already worked for me.
“I said, ‘Coleman, what the hell is going on here?’ He was disheveled and filthy and drunk and completely broke. He had no money, nothing. And h
e just felt that life was over for him. I said ‘Well, I’ll try and get you some work.’ He said, ‘As an actor, I hope? I want to act!’ He wasn’t concerned about getting some money to help me fix my house or anything like that. Specifically, if I was going to help him, it would have to be as an actor! Right to the end! ‘I am an actor! Find me work! That’s what I do!’ I said, ‘Yeah, I have a part for you tomorrow.’ Ron looked at me because we had just finished the movie, in fact that’s what we were there celebrating for with the ribs, that was our cast party, Ron Haydock and me. I gave Coleman fifty bucks and I said ‘Here Coleman, here’s $50, I’ll give you another $50 tomorrow, I want you to meet us at Sunset and Bronson, where’s there’s an old deserted Laundromat. There was a lot of light coming in there, especially from the windows. I said, ‘we’ll meet you there,’ it was about nine o’clock and I described it one more time, and Francis says ‘I will be there, ready to go to work!’ We left him, and he had some money, and I knew he could get something to eat and everything. Ron basically said ‘You’ll never see him again!’ I said, ‘Oh, sure he’ll be there!’“So all night long I start thinking about this scene, about a derelict that is sleeping in a Laundromat. I’m thinking about it all night long, I get down there and I call Paul Bram my assistant, he meets us there, Keith Wester shows up -- who’s now nominated for seven Academy Awards for sound. We’re all there, its 9:05, 9:10 and (Coleman is a) no show, and Ron is looking at me like ‘you know, you shouldn’t have given him the money!’ And I said, ‘hey! He’s an honest guy.’
“Then all of a sudden, down on the street I saw this figure a long way down Bronson about a quarter of a mile below Sunset and I saw him coming closer and closer and closer, and here he comes. And when he gets across Sunset Boulevard and gets to the Laundromat, which is right next to the freeway. Coleman comes up and he’s all dressed up, clean as a whistle. His hair has been trimmed and cut, he’s had a shave, he has a sport coat on him and he looks like a used car salesman! He took the fifty dollars and got himself to look professional and look good for me; you know what I’m saying? He didn’t spend the money on booze or nothin’! The only thing was I was expecting a derelict! Coleman says ‘I’m here, Ray, and I’m ready to go to work! What would you like me to do?’ We shot the scene, we made it up. Some people have said certain things as to why they didn’t like it and so forth. One girl in particular, Brett Zeller said ‘You should not have asked him if he wanted the money! You should have just took the money and put it in his pocket!’ I told her that did not fit Charles Smith’s character.”
Steckler is proud to have given Coleman a favor in his time of need. “Regardless of the fact that he was an alcoholic, you look at that film and you see that day, he was trying to get his Oscar nomination. If there was an Oscar nomination for a B-movie, I think he would have won it that day. I played off him completely. By playing off of Coleman, he made me look really good. That’s one of my favorite scenes in my movies.
“Of all the scenes I’ve done in all my movies, I always think about that one and Coleman Francis who did The Beast of Yucca Flats and the way he was winding up in Hollywood. When it was all over and years go by now, I know for that one day, that one moment I gave him life again. I gave him respect. I’m proud that I did that. Should I ever get in that position, I hope that somebody would do it for me, too. But I think that’s what you’re supposed to do with your fellow men and fellow talent and fellow performers …”
Out of the mainstream
Steckler is indifferent that his films have never found widespread, mainstream acceptance or popular adulation. “I have to tell you, I’m out of the mainstream, the low-stream, everything. I’m completely isolated now from everybody in the industry. People come to me and do interviews, and film me and all that stuff all the time. Somebody will call me, up, I have no idea who they are, they want me to answer a few questions, sometimes they’ll get rude on the phone and I’ll just say ‘we’re done!’
“Not everybody loves me, by the way. Some people think my movies are terrible, they think they’re crap and junk, but even John Ford, they knocked a few of his movies. I don’t understand why people who don’t make movies bother to knock other people’s movies. I think that if you a re a filmmaker and you’ve made movies, you have a right to give your opinions because it’s your trade. Critics, if they’ve never made a movie, they should shut up because they don’t know what could possibly go through a filmmaker’s mind on the set. There’s no way. Some of the greatest moments in movie history, whatever they are, and they’re so many of them that they probably happened accidentally. It’s just because all the cards fell into place, like in Casablanca (1942). It just happens!”
Steckler relates a story about one of his favorite filmmakers, Michelangelo Antonioni. “At the Cannes Film Festival, Antonioni made L’Avventura (1960). They booed it off the screen. They were so bored with it, it was so tedious. The critics just crucified it! He went home and two or three days later, it dawned on him that the critic had crucified it, because he had never seen anything like it before. He didn’t interpret it right because it was completely different. The critic, after three or four days, he saw it again, and then he really understood the movie and looked at it in a completely different view. The first time, it upset him, because there was no music, there were just sounds and the shots seemed to be overly long and it did not have the conventional, classical type editing that movies have. The pacing was different. All the people who thought they didn’t like it went back to see it again, and again and again, and its history. It’s one of the greatest movies ever made!
“I’ve never had the money to make a movie, the money upfront, in my whole life! I have never been able to say ‘I want twenty dancing girls and fourteen sets. I’ve never had anything as far as that goes. I’ve always said, ‘gee, when I was a kid, playing baseball, we would get a pickup team of whom ever was there. You get them, I get them, whatever. You get a good game going, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. You can’t say ‘I have to have $50 million dollars or I can’t make the movie.’ I gave up teaching film at the University of Nevada Las Vegas on account of that, although I had some nice students. Most of them just wanted to go to Hollywood and become another Steven Spielberg, because all they see are the final results, the big expensive movies. I’ll challenge any filmmaker in the world to go into the street here with me and a Hi-8 camera, with no money, not even lunch money and match me with what I’ll do that day with my camera. Anyone. So put the word out.
“If Spielberg wants to come out with his Hi-8 next to me, at the same street corner and start a movie, with no money, we’ll see what he can do. I think that what I do is the best as anyone can do it. Another thing that I will not be modest about is what I do is me, it’s my stuff and my originality. I’m not running around and copying anybody else’s stuff. I have been impressed many times by filmmakers. Spielberg, who I think is a wonderful director. He was born to make Schindler’s List (1993). I think John Ford was born to make the Western Trilogy with John Wayne. I think Antonioni was born to make L’Avventura. Fellini, who could make 8 ½ (1963) better than Fellini? Bergman’s The Silence (1963), who could make that? All of us were born to make something on film, they were born filmmakers. I think filmmakers are born, that’s their calling the moment they’re put on this earth. That also includes plumbers and doctors, because we sure need them!
With the easy availability of home video cameras and easy, digital editing software, countless would-be auteurs are filling the world with their own idiosyncratic visions. It’s a trend that Steckler enjoys seeing. “Those three guys made a film and did every scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) on 8 mm film years ago. Did you see that? Spielberg and George Lucas gave them their blessing to do whatever they wanted. It’s getting a lot of notoriety. They never did another film because they plagiarized the whole movie. At least they started out with a good script anyway. Now, if somebody else were to do that, we’d be in jail!”
Home again, home again, jiggity jig
Steckler has seemingly come full circle with his series of hometown documentaries he’s currently producing. “In my documentaries that I did on Reading, Pennsylvania, I told my wife Katherine to drop me off at any street corner and come back in an hour. I tried to capture stuff on the streets. When I would interview people and they would talk, I would put their interviews in the film, I would not edit them. If they were four, five, six minutes, I didn’t want to edit it. Because it’s a real truthful moment of time, form the time they start talking to the interview is over, I thought it was more important to capture those moments exactly – if those moments drag the film, who cares? They’re in my movies, I can do what I want with them.
“I found this wonderful old man who was in his nineties, and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Paul Kegerice, I videotaped them, and it went on for eight or nine minutes, I swear. He told me about his whole life in Reading, from the time he was a kid to now. That’s like eighty, ninety years of time that he brought to the screen. Why would you one to take one precious moment out of that? Let the people, who like to hear about Reading or hear about Reading of that particular time, let them see what someone has to say. Why chop it up? I like real time. Antonioni movies were so great, because if someone were to cross the street, he would let them cross the street, he wouldn’t cut it to save one 15th of a second like in Hollywood, to move it a little faster. If it takes you that long to cross the street, let it go man! I like that.
“That was what I was saying about Bill Lloyd and Richard “Punchy” Kozlowski from Reading, Pennsylvania, getting them together for my Reading series again. After all those years, it’s like 1963. Looking them up and getting them back into my life. Both Lloyd and Punchy gave me so much energy and so much enjoyment to be with my friends who are still alive after all those years. It’s like finding a long-lost relative and being able to share that love again …”
Steckler is also excited about his sequel to Creatures, starring alternative mainstay and sometimes Screem contributor Johnny Legend. “The one film that I’m doing now, which is an extension of the Creatures, is so bizarre, I can’t even describe it! I’m making it up as I go along and it’s all a part of me, what I feel like doing that day. What happens happens and I let it ride. We were shooting Johnny Legend at the Bunkhouse here in downtown Las Vegas. All kinds of things happened. The girls started jumping all over him and falling in the floor in the dark spots where there were no lights. Fortunately, I had a night light on my video camera, shooting in Hi-8 by the way. That’s what I felt like doing this time. I flipped the night light on, and there they were in the dark. They’re hugging him and kissing him and he’s singing “Rat Pfink A Boo Boo” I said, ‘boy! You could never do this on film!’ These girls just came out of nowhere; you know what I’m saying?”
Steckler is supremely confident that his movies, no matter how low budget, individual or quirky will always have an audience. “We’re capturing these moments, and this is so much fun! Who cares? Do you have to shoot in 35 mm with a major star and actress in order to get it made? Who cares? Who would want to see it anyway? The only people that I’m making this movie for are for my fans! Fans, family and friends! That’s why I’m making the movie! I don’t care about the rest of the world! If they want to see it, if they want to watch it, if they enjoy it, fine! But I’m going to tell you something … even after they see the movie and they stare at the movie and say to themselves, ‘what was that?’ Was it good, was it bad? I’m not sure! Oh, it was terrible, oh, it was fantastic, and that’s what’s going to happen anyway. The thing is, is that I would like everybody to have a copy in their back pocket. I’ll release it and then release it with the original Creatures as a dual pack. It’s the only way to send it out.”
Steckler does offer a friendly warning. “I’m only going to release one million copies of One More Time and then it goes into moratorium for 30 days. Please order your copies early!”
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