Carpe Noctem Interviews - Volume 1 Page 7

  You say you went to University of Indiana? What was your major there?

  Marketing.

  Up ’til then, had you been a big horror film fan?

  No, that’s the thing that bothers some people who are really into it when they find out that I was not a fan. I was just like any other kid growing up and watched the old Universal classics with Karloff and Lugosi and things of that nature, but I never really was into it like I later found out [others were]. My god, I was getting all kind of letters from people telling me I made a mistake here or “Why don’t I play this?” Strangely enough, there were a lot of people out there who were making horror films, young kids with 8mm [cameras]. Some of these kids later went to work for me when I moved to the Bay Area. I still bump into them today. They give me credit for a lot of things I don’t deserve. [laughs] I would have these experts on whenever I could and some of it sort of rubbed off, I guess. We had a network of these people, many of them are in Hollywood today, some of them work for Lucas Films. I hear from them all the time.

  At the time there were a lot of people like The Ghoul out in Cleveland, Zacherley in Philly and New York, and, of course, later Elvira in Los Angeles, and one of the things I appreciated about Creature Features was that you weren’t one of those” Spooky Horror Hosts” who did schtick. You just came off like a guy who just happened to love horror films and, admittedly, even when the films you were showing were bad, you gave the proceedings a sense of dignity. Now, you were solely responsible for that format?

  I came up with the concept. I never ran it by management or anything. The guys who owned the station, the Kelly Brothers (one was younger than I was and one was slightly older), they could do anything they wanted to. Their father had owned the station and he’d passed away. They were very successful in their own right and the station still exists today. In fact, they had me back for a thirtieth anniversary or something and I did the same show with the same movie, Attack of the Mushroom People. [laughs]

  The thing I really liked about the show was you would give interview space to people who were just fans or, like you say, kids who had done a film on eight millimeter. I remember a film you showed about a barbecue like a Weber…

  Attack of the Barbecue. They had a barbecue or something like that.

  Right. But the fact is that guy would have never received that kind of exposure to that kind of a market if it hadn’t have been for you and Creature Features.

  Well, you know it certainly did open up an avenue or venue for [what was] almost all young people and almost all males. There were some females into costuming and vampires and things like that. When I still get letters and they pat me on the back for giving them the incentive to do this and that and that’s wonderful. You know, they even have film festivals in theaters for kids who were really into 8mm, but the adults, and me included before I started the show, weren’t aware that was going on.

  I know you mentioned the station’s owners, but did the program director ever have a problem with anything you showed? Did the advertisers, sooner or later, come around to appreciate what it was you were doing?

  Well, the magic thing is ratings and that show quickly jumped into the top show at that time slot. One of the reasons I was able to survive all those years at different TV stations (I worked for 3 or 4 of them along the way), was my marketing background. I was also able to schedule the movies I wanted at certain time slots and certain dates. I was also a student of the ratings book, because I had clients in various shows even before I started this show. I knew what was hot and what was going up or going down. Ratings give you the audience and the audience sees your product and it’s that simple.

  Did you ever have much interaction with the other horror hosts across the country?

  I had some of them go after my job when they got let go. [laughs] The only gentleman that I became very close friends with was John Stanley who worked for the Pink Section of the San Francisco Chronicle. John was always writing about me, giving me press and so forth. He was the gentleman who eventually took over the show when I retired.

  Was that done on your recommendation?

  Pretty much so. There were three or four people who wanted it and I knew that John knew the movie business, especially the horror thing. He puts out a paperback publication every few years. He’s a very nice guy.

  Now, here’s a question you have probably been asked a million times, but I’ll be one of the tribe and ask it yet again. What are some of your most favorite and least favorite films of those you showed?

  Well, the most favorite one was Night of the Living Dead, which was made by George Romero from back east. He’d made that film on a low budget and it was frightening, it was black and white, it was well done. Every time we played this, and here again, we would play it during the rating period, it did extremely well. So, that was my favorite from a selfish point of view. George even flew out for an interview when he was making a sequel to it. The least favorite one was… God, there were so many of them. [laughs] I’d have to pick some of the Japanese stuff.

  I remember watching stuff like Horror at Party Beach and The Mole People and that kind of stuff. The good thing was, while watching those, you almost thought, “I could do this kind of thing and do it just as well.”

  I’m sure that gave hope for a lot of kids.

  You’ve interviewed a lot of great guests over the years; were those names culled from a list given to you by some of the kids or would you find someone and go after them?

  No. First of all, since San Francisco and Oakland is such a big market, most of these people were coming to town with a press agent and would contact us immediately if, indeed, it had to do with science fiction or horror. Sometimes, it didn’t have to have that. If they had been in a picture that we had shown, like we had Christopher Lee on and, of course he had done many works. We interviewed all the Star Trek people and the people from Star Wars. There was always somebody out there. Then, after a while, I would be a guest in Hollywood on some of their junkets to interview people. One of the biggest thrills was meeting Boris Karloff and talking to him. He did a promo for me and I asked him, “Mr. Karloff, have you ever heard of the Bob Wilkins Show?” He said, “I’ve never heard of the Bob Wilkins Show, but if he plays my movies, God bless him.” It was a short ten second thing. Afterwards, he asked, “Who is Bob Wilkins?” I told him and he did not want me to play it. He thought it was terrible. He was such a wonderful guy.

  Karloff is such an idol.

  We later had Karloff’s daughter on who wrote a book about him. Bela Lugosi’s son came down and he had a book on his father. I used to get a Christmas card from Mrs. Bela Lugosi in San Francisco. I thought it was a joke, but about the second or third year, I looked in the phone book and there she was.

  I understand she just recently passed away.

  Oh really? She was the nurse from the hospital who married him.

  I’ve run into Sara Karloff and Bela Lugosi, Jr. as a result of the push they were doing for the US Postal stamps. I’m glad to see that finally happened.

  Oh yeah. They were gorgeous.

  Have you kept up with a lot of what’s been happening in the horror genre?

  Not really. When something big comes out, it attracts my attention. I keep waiting for the old days to come back when horror films aren’t all the blood and gore.

  Even though films like Scream are successful, they are still just basically slasher films.

  You know, I could see that coming. I remember talking to Bob Shaw and saying, “I’ve got to get out of here. These Freddy Kreuger films are what we’re going to be getting down the road.” They were just coming out when I left. I said, “I just can’t play that stuff.” I think all the things going on around the country today are because of the movies. People don’t understand the power of film.

  It’s funny. I have a teenage boy and we grew up watching people talk about Jason and Freddy and all of that. Just recently, I sat him down and said, “Trust me on this. Black and white
film. 1960’s. Rated G.” We sat and watched The Haunting and he was just blown away because here was a film where there was no blood, there was no killings going on, but it was really scary. When he finally saw things like Friday the 13th, his take on them was that they were all exactly the same, and therefore not scary, just boring. It’s very easy now for the horror genre to become targets for parental groups, and in some cases deservedly so, but the genre is doing it to themselves. They’re just setting themselves up for that kind of attack. Once you see a person being killed and then you are exposed to that same image again and again, there’s no horror there, there’s no suspense.

  It’s a good point. In Night of the Living Dead, where this ghoul-like character kills someone, they run a knife through them like forty or fifty times in the original film. Well, I went in to the film room and said, “We’re not going to leave all of that on. He can punch her three or four times and that’s enough. I want all of the rest of that out of there.” The head of the film department, first of all, he didn’t like me coming in there and telling him how to cut the film. He was a truist and he wanted everything to play just as it was originally made. I said, “You know, I’ve got kids at home and a lot of people in the audience do as well. If you want me to go to the Program Director, I’ll cut it down even more.” So, that’s the way that film played and that’s how strongly I felt about it. It’s just like some of the things in the headlines today where people in the schools are emulating what actually happens.

  I do think that films of a graphic nature, such as the films of Dario Argento or Lucio Fulci, are fine for people seventeen or older, I’m not going to sit my seven year old in front of something that is a fabricated snuff film.

  Also, today, kids can tape those shows, their friends can tape them or bootleg them.

  I find it interesting that if my child went to go rent a sexually explicit tape, they wouldn’t be allowed by the video store to do so, but they can go rent some of these films we’re talking about with no problem. Further, the people who are renting them these films don’t even bat an eye. I’ve even seen pre-teens renting films that are unrated, which, I think, should be more restricted than the NC-17 films.

  It’s just like cigarettes. Some kids came up to me the other day as I was outside a store waiting for my wife, and they wanted me to go in and buy them cigarettes. My wife teaches at a local school and I said, “Did you see those two kids who just walked by you there?” She said that she had had them as students. She said, “They’re only eleven or twelve years old.” It’s the same way with the videos.

  Speaking of kids, you had mentioned Captain Cosmic. How did the Captain Cosmic gig come about?

  Captain Cosmic, again, was the program people called me and a fellow named Tom Breen said, “With the advent of Star Wars (and everybody was lining up to see that thing over and over again), we can get a hold of some Japanese product, animation and live action, all about outer space and things of that nature. The stuff is very inexpensive. We want you to come up with a concept and maybe host it.” I said, “OK.” The wonderful thing about working for Channel 2 was that all I had to do was go back and show them what the idea was and no one talked to me again. It was my project. So, I went home and thought about it for a while and came up with the costume I would wear and I would have to cover my face and I would tell them during the early shows that I was using a voice from their area to disguise mine and all that stuff. I don’t know if you remember the opening, but racing the BART train… A friend of mine, who used to write me letters when he was ten or twelve years old in Sacramento, in high school he had a robot for a project and it was in his garage and that’s where the robot came from. We took it to a car painter and he sprayed it and we called it 2T2 and we were on the way. It became the number one show for children in about three weeks.

  I remember watching it and I had grown up watching Captain Satellite and Sergeant Sacto and entering the contests and when you came around, I remember thinking, “Now, we’re talking!” I remember that it was one of the worse kept secrets who Captain Cosmic was.

  Of course, I wasn’t fooling anybody. My kids were young at the time and they’d go to school and there would be whispering and they’d come home and say, “Dad, they know that it’s you.” [laughs] That show lasted almost three years and it would probably still be on the air, but the Japanese product ran out and we re-ran it and then we got into the only thing left, we got the old Flash Gordon serials and the kids would not buy that at all. So, that was it. It died.

  Interestingly enough, the exposure to the Japanese product has now sparked this whole Anime interest. I think that’s really cool.

  Exactly.

  Although I hear now they’re having some problems with some of the Japanese cartoons. They reported in the paper that they discovered a TV show that had a lot of flashing lights in it and it was causing seizures in some of its viewers. So, they’re pulling a lot of that product and looking at it very closely.

  There again, the power of television.

  Now, at some point, you decided to leave Creature Features and to stop doing Captain Cosmic. What prompted you to leave? Was it just that you’d seen enough of films like The Severed Arm? [laughs]

  Well, to be honest with you, I stopped while the show still had good ratings. It was because of two interviews that I had. I knew, and I told this to John Stanley who took over my show, I said, “One day, they’ll knock on the door and say that it’s over. I don’t want that to happen. I just don’t want to be in that position. I want to knock on their door and tell them that I was going to leave and thanks for everything.” Not to beat them out of anything, but the timing had to be right for me. So, in doing the show over the years and having a wide audience, I knew that I was going to return to advertising and I wanted to open my own agency. I had interviews with two people while I was still on the air. One was George Lucas, who was a fan of the show when he was living in Modesto as a kid. He was over in Marin County and he diagrammed to me, on a piece of yellow paper, his dream of building a ranch there in Marin County. I still have that piece of paper. He said, “I want you to be the president of this firm.” I said, “George, the president? Are you sure?” He said, “That’s right. I don’t like to talk to the press. I don’t like to deal with people in general. This would be your job. There’s only one drawback. You’re going to have to go to Los Angeles and work until this ranch is ready and it’s going to be two and a half to three years.” I told him, “I can tell you right now, I would never take my family to Los Angeles, but thanks for the offer. I’ll get back to you on it, but that’s my early feeling.” The other interview was an interview with Nolan Bushnell. Nolan was the inventor of the Pong game and he had been a fan of the show and we had some of the Chuck E. Cheese people on. He wanted me to handle his accounts and he was going to go national with these restaurants. That was the offer I took.

  Wow, I didn’t know you’d worked for Nolan. See, when I got out of high school, I worked at Chuck E. Cheese and Nolan would come to the restaurant all the time and come drag me from the kitchen to play this game he was addicted to which was Space Invaders. Here I was, a young kid, and I’m playing a video game with this guy who had more money than God. You ended up going to work with Nolan?

  I didn’t work for him. I started my own agency and he was one of my first accounts.

  So, you left the show and John Stanley took over…

  John Stanley took over and John did it for four years, I believe. He was shattered when they knocked on his door and told him it was over…

  as prophesized by you.

  He called me and I said, “John, what can I say? I know how you feel a little bit, but television doesn’t last forever.” What really killed John was that he worked for the Chronicle for over twenty years. They knocked on the door to tell him he was gone. They gave him a payout. So, both of those jobs were taken away in a short period of time. John was a workaholic and I really felt sorry for him.

  A friend of
mine had sent me some of the interview portions of the John Stanley episodes of Creature Features on tape and there at the end was the final episode of the show. So, I’m sitting there watching it and out of the shadows comes the one and only Bob Wilkins. It was so amazing, even though here it was over ten years later I still got this pang of astonishment that they’d take Creature Features off the air. How was the final episode to do? Was that like leaving all over again? It seemed very emotional for John.

  It wasn’t that emotional for me, but I did feel sorry for John because we had been close friends and television management is very cruel sometimes. I’d always said that it was all about ratings. I’d always said that they would eventually have somebody there who would cut the show in the middle of a movie.

  Just turn the lights off…

  Yeah.

  So, after you left Creature Features, you started your own ad agency…

  I was in the agency business for about ten or twelve years and then, finally, I retired – period.

  That’s what you’re doing now? Just living the good life out there in Nevada?

  Yep. Just relaxin’.

  Would you ever consider doing another show?

  I don’t think so. I think I might be a consultant or something or come on a show as a guest or something like that, but I don’t think I have the desire or the energy to do anything like that again.

  I’m just curious, do any of the old tapes of Creature Features shows that you hosted still exist?

  What happened recently was that Channel 2 in the Bay Area had a retrospective of the show and I came down and did a two part series for their Ten O’Clock News. All of a sudden I’m starting to get letters and email and somebody put me on the email because I did an interview for a publication. The fans were asking if I still had any of the old shows. In those days, they put the shows on two inch videotape and then, later, it went on one inch tape and then three quarters, then half inch tape. All this technology kept changing. Each time the show was done, it was erased for the next show. My answer was always, “No, nothing exists.” Well, when they were going for their retrospective, Bob Shaw – who was a young man who used to write to me when he was twelve or thirteen years old about the horror movies – I later invited him on the show and pretty soon he was working for me doing research and eventually wound up as a film editor at Channel 2. He found in the archives there about ten hours of old shows, the openings and closings, and even some Captain Cosmic stuff. What we did was transfer them down and I’ve been selling the tapes.