Speaker 1: Welcome everybody to this surly you came to be Serious
the podcast for real?
Speaker 2: Okay, d If you try to stop me or vamp
out in any way, I will stake you without even
thinking twice about it.
Speaker 3: Last five, Hello everybody, and welcome to the Surely you
Can't Be Serious podcast Blame Boys.
Speaker 1: With your co hosts James D.
Speaker 2: Graves and Jason Collivin.
Speaker 1: All right, everybody, welcome to the Halloween edition of the
Surly you Can't Be Serious Podcasts. We are here tonight
and next week. Comparing Fright Night nineteen eighty five and
The Lost Boys nineteen eighty seven. Super jazzed to be
talking about these movies, Jason, what do you think? Man
oh Man?
Speaker 2: Completely fired up? Love these movies. I saw one. I
saw Lost Boys in the movie theater definitely, and Fridy
Night I caught up on HBO, I think and watched
it a bunch. Love them both. Though, very excited to
be talking about these what about you?
Speaker 1: Super excited to talk about these as well? Because I
was like nine and eleven when these movies came out.
I wasn't seeing them in the theater, but you know,
as soon as the folks are away, I was pulling
them up on the satellite.
Speaker 2: The gigantic satellite dish in the back of Yees, it's.
Speaker 1: The gigantic satellite dish that I had to go out
and hand crank to a notch inside of a steel pole.
Speaker 2: Huh.
Speaker 1: But I'm pretty sure through some glitchy kind of snow,
I caught both of these movies.
Speaker 2: These movies are great because they combine not horror, but
you know, sort of thrilling stories with comedy and a
sense of style and scares. For sure, that's just a
great combination.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they had kind of resurrected the vampire movie, which
had become a mockery in the early eighties. You had
Once Bitten and Love at First Bite and several other
just kind of cheesy vampire movies that were coming out,
and these two movies made vampires cool again.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I don't know if you remember this movie, but
there was a movie called The Hunger that starred Susan Sarandon.
It was actually the ex wife of Chris Sarandon, the
head vampire from Fright Night.
Speaker 1: Right right, Yeah it was. It was not a good movie.
Speaker 2: No, it wasn't. Okay, awesome, let's get into it.
Speaker 1: Man, Yeah, let's jump in, all right. So these two movies,
like we said, resurrected the vampire movie and made it
cool again. They retained some of the comedic value that
had come along, but they definitely made vampires scary and
exciting again. The first of these movies to come out
was Fright Night. So do you know the story behind
how this movie came to be?
Speaker 2: Well, I've heard a little bit about Tom Holland, who
wrote and directed this movie. He was working on a
movie that you and I both love from our childhood
called Cloak and Dagger.
Speaker 1: Yea.
Speaker 2: The story that I heard from that was that he
was working on Cloak and Dagger and got the idea
of sort of a horror movie fan becoming convinced that
he was living next door to a vampire, and imagined
it sort of as a Hitchcockian Rear Window type of story.
What do you know about it?
Speaker 1: Yes, it is actually based kind of upon a movie
from nineteen forty eight called The Window. Rear Window was
based upon a short story called It Had to Be
Murder by a guy named Cornell Walich. The Window, which
is about a boy who sees the murder, is also
based on a Cornell Woolwich book called The Boy Who
Cried Murder, Okay, And what happens in the window is
there's this boy who, you know, is constantly lying. He's
a younger boy, maybe ten twelve something like that, constantly
lying to people about what's going going on, creating tall tales.
And one of these tales gets him in big trouble
and he decides to or is forced to sleep out
on the stoop of his apartment complex. And when that happens.
The night that that happens, there's a murder by his
neighbors downstairs, and so when he tries to tell everybody
about it, no one will believe him because he's the
boy who Cried Wolf, right, He's told all these tall tales.
So while he's witnessed this murder, he's trying to convince people,
and the murderers are trying to get him. So sounds
pretty similar, pretty similar. That's pretty similar to Fright Night,
and also pretty similar to Cloak and Dagger. It was
the same type of deal. You know, boy who has
this active imagination about action adventure sees this very action
adventure kind of murder and nobody will believe him. Meanwhile,
the murderers are trying to chase him down. All super
similar and just you know, you know how my brain works,
I'm always making these connections. The actor that portrayed the
Boy in the Window back in nineteen forty eight, Bobby Driscoll.
You know him if you saw him. He was the
kid in Treasure Island. He was also in Song of
the South. He's in a bunch of Disney movies. And
he also was the voice of Peter Pan, which of
course is one of the three inspirational things for the Lost.
Speaker 2: Boys, right the Lost Boy, Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1: Sadly though, the other connection is he's this famous child
actor who then gets hooked on drugs, falls out in Hollywood,
nobody will put him in anything, and ultimately dies due
to his drug addiction, which is sad almost identical connection
to what happened to Corey Haim too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yep, that is sad. Back to Fright Night and
the genesis of Fright Night. So what you were saying
about the boy who cries Wolf combined with Rear Window,
combined with you know, old style vampire horror movie, he
thought the idea was good, sort of had a genesis,
but he didn't think it was enough to go on.
His thought process was, okay, so what's he gonna do?
I mean, who's he gonna tell? So he believes there's
a vampire next door? Who am I gonna tell? And
he couldn't quite solve that problem. So he's talking to
one of his friends who was the head of the
story department at Columbia Pictures, a guy named John Buyers,
and he said, well, you know, what would you do
if that would happen. John's like, I would tell Vincent Price.
And he's like, yeah, you know, that's it. And at
the time, I don't know if you may remember this,
but I definitely remember. You know, Friday night, late at night,
there was sort of on my local TV station or
some cable channels, there were these horror movie marathons, and
they would have these hosts that would sort of take
you to commercial and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: Elvira.
Speaker 2: I watched Elvira.
Speaker 1: Elvira. Heck, yeah, I'm turning into that. Even if the
movies are terrible, I'm still gonna watch her hand or
two some.
Speaker 2: Elvira was awesome.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so Vincent Price had, you know, he had obviously
been a huge horror guy back in the sixties and
seventies and kind of this similar pattern. And also a
guy who we know from Star Wars, Peter Cushing, right,
which is how we get Peter Vincent as the character.
You got Peter Cushing with Vincent Price, and both of
those guys were in these some of them really pretty
cheesy horror movies. But he fully wanted Vincent Price to
come in and play the part of Peter Vincent. But
Vincent Price was like, listen, I have been categorized as
this horror guy. I don't want I'm not going to
do those things anymore. Not, you know. Plus I'm old
and I just don't want to do horror movies that morning.
Plus Michael jack rap at the end of a song,
I'm not going to do a horror movie.
Speaker 2: Michael Jackson has already screwed me out of all this money.
I'm not interested in doing ay of that stuff anymore.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So, I mean, Peter Cushing plays Grandma of Tarkin, who
is like second in command on the desk star in
Star Wars.
Speaker 1: He not only kills Tattooini's he also kills vampires. You
don't know how hard I found it signing the order
to terminate your life. Yes, so Tom Holland. He had
written several screenplays and had some that became movies. He
had written Psycho two, which was originally supposed to be
just like a straight to cable but what he thought
to himself is, I've got to write a script good
enough for Anthony Perkins to come on to play Norman
Bates again. And then once Anthony Perkins was in, then
they were like, oh, we're going to devote some time
and money to this, and it was actually was a
pretty well received sequel.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's good. I liked it.
Speaker 1: He also wrote Class of nineteen eighty four, which came
out in eighty two, but was about the violent gangs
in high school and had in it as one of
the major parts Roddy McDowell as a teacher. He's the
teacher that brings the gun to school. Right, Oh cool, okay,
and so kind of on the success of those two movies,
they had wanted somebody else to direct, but he was
like the other movie that he had done that he
had written was called Scream for Help, and he was
not happy with the way that it came out. It
didn't do very well, and so he was kind of
emphatic about directing this one. Well, at the time, he
had at least had he had done about like two
hundred commercials directing. He'd done acting work. He was actually
in The Incredible Hulk, which I was just like, Wow,
he's like a karate guy in The Incredible Hulky. But
he's like, you know, Nope'm not gonna let you do
this unless I'm the director, which just meant basically that
they said okay, but they devoted very little money and
or attention to it.
Speaker 2: They were going to let him direct, but they weren't
going to give a lot of time and attention and
money to the project.
Speaker 1: Right, which, as it turned out, worked out very well
for him because he basically ran the show once he
was directing it. There weren't studio executives in there kind
of picking a part what he was doing. They were
all concerned with Perfect which had John Travolta and Jamie
Lee Curtis, which I mean, if I was a betting
man in nineteen eighty four eighty five, I'd been like, yeah, sure,
that movie's definitely going to be a success. You're doing
another vampire movie. That's nice, Okay, whatever.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I heard this story too, so perfect with John
Travolta and Jamie Lee Curtis. Yeah, and the slugger's wife, right,
which was a Neil Simon story which I've seen some
baseball movie Honey good and I love baseball. So hey,
I was gonna mention one thing before we got rolling
too far away. When we're talking about Elvira. Cassandra Peterson
is the actress who portrays Elvira. Of course she wears
a wig and all that stuff. Did you know she
is in Pee Wee's Big Adventure. He goes to the
biker bar and he's like, I'm trying to use the phone,
and they all decide they're gonna kill him, right, and
I say we can stab him and then we kill
him and he says, ah, sir, we let him go.
And there's a woman biker and she's like, I say,
you give him to me and they all laugh. That's
Cassandra Peterson Alvirah herself.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna pluge p already on all things Pee Wee.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna plug Adventure every chance I get.
Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, thank you so much again for tuning in.
We are overwhelmed by your support. I wish I could
buy every single one of you a cup of coffee,
but I can't. But if you would like to buy
Jason and I a cup of coffee, you can go
to our Patreon page and subscribe for as little as
five dollars a month. They're extra perks that come along
with that.
Speaker 2: At the ten dollars mark, you get a pair of
great jogging earphones, I mean like earbuds. They are awesome.
Speaker 1: I'm a big fan of them. You've got different levels,
and you could be one of the executive producers of
our show, and then moving up from there you could
get headphones and coffee cups and all kinds of fun stuff.
So if you'd like to buy a cup of coffee,
give us a little bit of support, please check out
our Patreon page. So that's how Fright Night was conceived.
And then a couple of years later, you've got Fright
Night that's come out, you've got the Goonies that has
come out, and so a couple of writers think, hey,
that'd be a good idea. Let's combine the stories of
Goonies and Peter Pan who stays young forever, with vampires
because that's how they stay young forever, and so we're
to write a Goonies style vampire movie. And their names
were James Jeremiahs and Jan Fisher. And I was surprised
to learn they were paid four hundred thousand dollars for
the script. Four hundred thousand dollars. I looked at their history.
She's got seven writing credits, three of which are Lost
Boys related, and the other four are like an episode
of Ironside and Golden Girls. I mean, she's got no
other writing credits. He doesn't have any other writing credits
other than this, And they get paid four hundred thousand
dollars for a script that they ultimately completely changed.
Speaker 2: I know, man, it sounds odd. I mean, it only
takes one pitch to head a home run.
Speaker 1: Right. So they had different guys that they had considered
to make this movie, one of whom was Richard Donner, right.
And Richard Donner, of course, had been the producer on
The Goonies and Superman, oh yes, and the director of Superman.
And yes, I mean he's a big hitter. I mean
he's he's he's one of the one of the big
directors of the eighties for sure. But ultimately who they
ended up with was Joel Schumacher, who's got an interesting story.
I mean, I don't know if you've if you've looked
into his story, but he started off involved in a
lot of drugs, basically, but managed to get over his
drug habit and got into the fashion world and worked
at this department store. I believe it's called like Henry
Baddell or something like that. Forgive me because it's like
a New York City thing, Kenny Bloomingdale's basically. But he
was a window dresser for this store. He'd put all
the clothes on the mannequins out there in the storefront,
and one day Woody Allen is walking by, he sees it,
and he's like, who did this? He gets Joel Schumacher.
He's like, I want you to come help me with
costuming from a next movie. And suddenly he's in the
movies making wee. He wrote the script for a movie
called car Wash, and then in seventy nine, John Landis said,
you guys are not willing to spend enough money on
the incredible Shrinking Woman, and I'm not going to direct it,
And so they said, all right, see you later. We'll
go get Joel Schumacher to come in and direct The
Incredible Shrinking Woman. And I don't It's been decades since
I've seen that movie, but I remember watching it all
the time on TV as a kid, like it would
seemed like it was just always on and I loved it.
Love Lily Tomlin thought it was a great movie. But yes,
Joel Schumacher directed The Incredible Shrinking Woman.
Speaker 2: Okay, that's very interesting. So I remember him from DC Cab.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the other mister T movie of the early eighties.
Speaker 2: DC Cab and say almost Fire.
Speaker 1: So when they get him aboard to direct The Lost Boys,
he's like, Nope, don't want to do this goonies thing.
Don't want these to be kids. My guess is that
he'd seen Fright Night at this point and was kind
of turned on by the idea of sexy vampires, and
so he's like, we're going to have our vampires be young,
rock and roll looking sexy vampires.
Speaker 2: Okay, Well, let's back up one second, because before Joel
Schumacher came on, Richard Donner was set to direct Lost Boys. Yes,
and he was going to direct it as a goonies
go vampire type of movie, but it took a little
bit longer than he wanted it to. He was kind
of tired of hanging around, and when it finally came
time to release it, he had another project that he
was going to go work on. You might have heard
of it.
Speaker 1: Leith a Weapon Yeah, yeah, lethal Weapon. Yeah.
Speaker 2: And so it worked out. I mean, I am so
glad that we got The Lost Boys from Joel Schumacher. Yeah,
and we got leith a Weapon with Richard Donner, right.
Speaker 1: And then Schumacher brings in another writer to rewrite the script.
That writer's name is Jeffrey Bohm. And Jeffrey Boehm is
the one who wrote leth a Weapon two and leith
a Weapon three and also wrote Indiana Jones and The
Last Crusade. I mean, he's a stud as far as
I can see. I mean, he's written some fantastic scripts.
Speaker 2: Wrote Interspace, which is a flavor of mind.
Speaker 1: Oh. I love that movie. Yes, Tuck Pendleton, Machine zero Defects.
What's amazing is how many people that were in this
movie were like unknown actors at the time that they
got cast in this movie. You've got You've got Key
for Sutherland, You've got Jason Patrick, You've got Alex Winter,
You've got Corey Hame. Corey Feldman was pretty well known
at this point, it was, but this certainly didn't hurt
his career at all. And and then you've got some
real veterans out there. You've got Diane West, You've got
Edward Herman, Edward Herman, I always get him, and Fred Munster.
Speaker 2: And then you've got Bernard Hughes as a grandpa.
Speaker 1: Need the TV guide, No, need a TV Bernard Hughes,
who I remembered from a TV show when I was
a kid called Mister Merlin. Did you ever watch Mister
Merlin played? It was like supposed to take place in
modern times, except he was Merlin, the magician from from
King Arthur Days.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, right right.
Speaker 1: And then of course he was also the crotchety old
doctor in Doc Hollywood, which is another favorite movie of mine.
Speaker 2: Okay, so let's back up. Let's talk about the cast
of Lost Boys for real quick, because you're absolutely right,
these guys were unknowns at the time.
Speaker 1: They tried to get Jason Patrick, and Jason Patrick said.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, no no. Yeah, like Richard Dreyfus, they
had to chase him. Right, let's all say it together together.
I'm not doing this movie. They went after Jason Patrick,
who I don't know if you know this or not.
He is Jackie Gleason's grandson, Jackie Gleason of Smoking the Bandit.
Speaker 1: Damn no way that you could come from my lawins.
Well we get home punch o Mama right in the mouth.
Speaker 2: Jason Patrick was Jackie Gleason's little possum pack.
Speaker 1: So so yeah, so he turned the movie down. He
didn't want to be flying around and biting people on
the neck and stuff, and so he said no. Key
for Sutherland obviously, I mean is the son of Donald Sutherland,
who was a huge actor in the seventies, and so
I always kind of had that same kind of idea
that hey, he's just a he's following in the family business, right,
But it turns out like Keifer Sutherland didn't really grow
up with Donald. He lived in Canada with his mom.
He ran away from home when he was fifteen years
old and really decided to go out and be an
actor and just did it on his own, and he
told his folks about it after he had already started
having some success with it. But I saw this interview
where they're talking to Jason Patrick and Key for Sutherland
and the interviewer says, you know, I heard that you
guys both turn this down, and Keifer Sutherland was like,
I didn't turn it down. I would have done a
Campbell super commercial at that stage because he hadn't done anything.
Speaker 2: He had done At Close Range, right. Joel Schulmacher was
moved by his appearance at the very end of At
Close Range. It's a courtroom scene and basically he was
emoting just using his face, right and stand By Me,
he had filmed, but it hadn't been released yet, so
he hadn't really didn't have a lot to stand on, right,
so to speak.
Speaker 1: Here's a story on that real quick. It's totally sidetrack,
all right, sidetrack Okay, So he was in that movie
with all of those guys, including Corey Feldman, but also
River Phoenix, right and stand By Me, and he knew
how to play the guitar. River Phoenix was learning how
to play the guitar. And if you don't know, stand
By Me is based upon a Stephen King story called
The Body, and that's what the original name of the
movie was going to be, was The Body. And so he's,
you know, between takes when they're not working. He's working
with River Phoenix on the guitar and he's like, oh,
do you know the song stand by Me? That's a
simple one, it's a good one to start off with.
And he starts to teach him how to play it.
And while they're sitting there playing it, Rob Reiner walks
by and he's like, oh, stand by Me. I love
that song, And like three weeks later that became the
title of the movie.
Speaker 2: Wow, that is a great story that I've never heard.
That is really cool. Just as a side note, the
body stand by Me written by Stephen King. Yeah, fright night.
There are a lot of similarities to Stephen King's story
called Salem's Life.
Speaker 1: Back to the cast, Yeah, so we're still we're working
on the cast of Lost Boy still okay. So ultimately
Joel Schumacher met with Jason Patrick and convinced him to
do it by saying that he would allow him to
have some creative input on how to handle things, and
Keifer Sutherland said he was actually kind of instrumental in
the way that the movie turned out. Interestingly, he and
Keifer Sutherland are very close friends. But whenever key for
Sutherland broke off his engagement with Julia Roberts. She ran
off to Europe with Jason Patrick and they were a
couple out there.
Speaker 2: I know, I know that's awkward, but I've heard him
talk since then their friendship has outlasted that little trade off.
Speaker 1: So the outlasted the runaway Bride, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2: Jason Patrick is also very instrumental in hiring Jamie Gertz.
They yeah, they would not have hired her only because
of Jason Patrick's insistence she had been in a movie
with him called Solar Babies. When they were looking to
hire an actress for the part of star, Schumacher was
looking for someone a little more like Meg Ryan, blonde, right,
that sort of shorter haircut. Burnett was not even on
the board. But you know what, as a fourteen year
old boy at the time, we're very thankful that they
went with Jamie Gertz.
Speaker 1: Right, nothing wrong with Meg Ryan, but yeah, Jamie Gertz,
she had her hot going on in this movie.
Speaker 2: Yeah, majors.
Speaker 1: So they've got all of these newbies and then they
they they said, let's swing for the fences and let's
try to get Diane Weese to play the mom. Now
she is just won the Academy Award for Best Supporting
Actress for Hannah and her sisters. So they're just thinking
there's no way. Nope, she totally said, yeah, sounds great,
Let's do it.
Speaker 2: Let's do it.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: This is the introduction the to Corey's right, Corey Felderman
and Corey Ham became friends in this movie, and they
did a bunch of movies together, you know, movies like Dream,
A Little Dream, and Licensed to Drive and Some Fun
Used to Drive.
Speaker 1: Heather Graham so pretty.
Speaker 2: But this movie gave us Alex Winter Yeah, Bill s
Preston Esquire as a vampire.
Speaker 1: Yeap, how cool is that?
Speaker 3: Excellent?
Speaker 2: Okay, flip back to casting for Fright Night.
Speaker 1: Did you ever watch The Edison Twins?
Speaker 2: No, not familiar.
Speaker 1: I watched it all the time. Apparently that was Corey
Ham's first big role. His sister was the one who
wanted to be an actress, and he would just go
with her to her auditions. But they noticed him there
and so he got he got parts and various things.
Started acting when he was ten in The Edison Twins,
and of course he did Lucas, which is a huge
one from the eighties. Charlie Sheen, who was up to
be cast as Charlie in Fright Night. I know it's awesome,
but Tom Holland looked at him and said, no, you
look like a hero. You look like a superhero. You're
too good looking. No, how't you go? We want somebody
who looks more like the boy next door. And I
think that they cast it perfectly.
Speaker 2: I did too. Walliaem Rexdale does a great job. He
is whiny enough, but you can see him trying to
become a man, you know what I mean. Yeah, Charlie
Sheen just walks in the room AND's like, I'm gonna
go kick his button. You believe it.
Speaker 1: So he had been he had had a failed audition, decided,
you know what, I've met that casting director. I'll give
her a call and see, if, you know, if I
can take her to lunch. And so he said, you
want to go to lunch? And she said no, but
you have a part that you'd be perfect for. Why
don't you come out in audition for this Fright Night movie.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about Chris Sarandon for a second. Okay, before
Fright Night, I didn't know who this guy was. To me,
He's he's always going to be Jerry Dandridge the killer
cool vampire.
Speaker 1: To me, he's always going to be Prince humperdink.
Speaker 2: I've got my bride to kill, my wedding to plan,
which pump.
Speaker 1: Like Jason Patrick, he was not excited about doing this
movie and was going to turn it down. He had
been in another kind of horror type movie called The Sentinel.
It was not a good experience for him. And that's
kind of ironic because both The Sentinel and Scream for Help,
which was the Tom Holland movie that he was super
disappointed about, were both directed by the same guy. Both
directed by Michael Winner. So Michael Winner not a Winner apparently.
So what happened was he read that he started reading
the script and he couldn't stop, he couldn't put it down,
and he said to his wife at the time, this
is actually an amazing story. I'm just still a little
worried about how it's going to turn out on film.
And so within the next couple of days he's arranged
a meeting with Tom Holland, and Tom Holland had so
much love and devotion to this script that he was
able to go through basically shot by shot with Chris
Saranon about what was going to happen, and basically played
the whole movie for him in two hours just by
reciting it to him, and Chris said, I'm in let's
do it.
Speaker 2: That's awesome. I love that. Love that story when a
director is that passionate about a project and can sell
an actor and say, hey, come do this with me.
We're going to make this really cool project. It's great.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 2: One of the guys I think that does an amazing
job is Steven Jefferies, the guy who plays Evil Ed.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So he had just come from a movie also
with Amanda Bierce in it called Fraternity Vacation, which is
not a good movie. It's just one of those you know, dumb,
it's a screen great yeah, spring break movie. I to
believe it had Tim Robbins. Robbinson who of course then
went on to Nucleus with Susan Strandon from Yeah from
Bull Durham. Interesting thinking. So yeah, so Stephen Jeffries and
Amanda Beers were both in Fraternity Vacation at the time
that they got cast in Fright Night.
Speaker 2: Okay, so Amanda Beerce was the last actor cast for
Fright Night. Yeah, and I think Stephen Jeffries even said, Hey,
I just got done working with this girl. They had
played a couple in that movie.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and he's like, hey, she was good.
Speaker 2: She looks like the girl next door and they brought
her in and she was perfect.
Speaker 1: Yeah. You know.
Speaker 2: She was twenty seven when she did Fright Night, which
I think was really good because over the course of
the movie she goes from naive, scared prude team to sexy, active, sexy,
passionate vampirius. You need a woman to pull that off,
I think.
Speaker 1: And Stephen Jeffries, you know, he had been he had
thinking he had been thinking that he was going to
get cast in the role of Charlie Brewster and was
actually disappointed when he found out that he was going
to be evil ed. But he is one of the
most memorable parts in the whole movie.
Speaker 2: Oh you're so cool Browster.
Speaker 3: I can't stand it.
Speaker 2: You know another movie he was in at Close Range
with Keever Settlin.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, how about that fantastic? So Vincent Price said
he's not going to be Peter Vincent.
Speaker 2: So they talked to Vincent Price. He turned him down.
Of course, he was not well health wise, and he
wasn't really interested in doing horror movies at that time.
Roddy McDowell had been in Planet of the Apes in
a movie that I used to watch a lot called
The Black Hole. That they went to him and said, Hey,
we're doing this horror movie. We want to play it
as a Vincent Price type of character. And he said
in his mind, he was like, I'm going to play
this as like a bad imitation of Vincent Price. So
they went to him and he was like, yeah, okay,
I can think I can do something with this.
Speaker 1: What he decided was he was not going to be
He was going to be the ham actor who could
never do anything better than these bad horror movies. And
they've had that character in that first scene that you
see him in the TV and the he's got the
spike and he's about to drive it into the He's
got the spike backwards.
Speaker 2: That is so funny, and a lot of people don't
realize that he's going to go stake the van Barness.
The business end of the stake is bording the wrong direction.
Speaker 1: Okay, So did you know that there were actually TV
shows called Fright Night?
Speaker 2: Really?
Speaker 1: Yes? So back in the seventies there were a couple
of different shows. One was broadcasted by an LA station.
One was by its sister station in New York City,
but it was called Fright Night and the host originally
when it started back in nineteen seventy they called him
Sinister Seymour, but his real name Larry Vincent. Hey got
to be the inspiration, right eight.
Speaker 4: It's like Peter Vincent's cousin, right, yes, yeah, And he
would just he would make fun of the audience for
watching the movies that they were putting on because they
were just really the worst of the worst be horror movies.
Speaker 1: So he would call them four flushers. And it's a
hard time. But then Larry Vincent died in nineteen seventy five.
Another guy takes over for a while and eventually the
show's looking like it's going to die out. But then
in nineteen eighty one they decide to revive the show
and do you know who the new host is? Tell
me Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, and they renamed it
Movie macab.
Speaker 2: That is awesome, man, I love Elvira.
Speaker 1: What other podcast are you going to get that kind
of information?
Speaker 2: That's awesome, man, that's awesome. Jonathan Stark plays Billy Cole,
who he had been involved in like Second City. He
was an improv type guy, mostly comedic type of stuff.
Speaker 1: When he came in to do his audition, he did
the part where Charlie has brought the cop over to
try to find the dead body or whatever accusing Jerry
of murder. And so he looked at that scene and
said to me, the way to play this is to
play it funny. So I'm going to improv it a
little bit and I'm going to play it up as funny.
And that's what went in the part, and it was
a great They did a great job with that scene.
He and the cop, who was played by Art Evans,
they did a fantastic job of kind of riffing off
each other in that scene to make it funny. And
that's and it went better that way. It went better
to have them making fun of Charlie because that's really
kind of what would happen.
Speaker 2: Right yep, for sure.
Speaker 1: And then, of course, an extremely well played performance of
Hooker by Heidi Sorenson, who has also been in spies
like Us Sharp Looking Lady.
Speaker 2: She was the Playmate of the Month July nineteen eighty one.
Speaker 1: Say it.
Speaker 2: Google Search when she did her part Okay, we have
to talk about this. I don't know if this will
make the final cut, but the director of the movie
really wanted her to be stunning and something that would
really catch Charlie's eye.
Speaker 1: Yes, so he wanted tode.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. So he went to the costume designer and said,
do you think you could tell her to, you know,
rub ice on her nips to try and you know,
get Charlie's attention.
Speaker 1: Yep, And so she did and effective. Effective.
Speaker 2: We're giving it up to Heidi Sormson.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So a couple of similar events happened in both
of these movies. The breaking of Bones so key for
Sutherland is plays David in The Lost Boys, and he's
they did all of their own motorcycle scenes, right right,
They all drove their own motorcycles. And so at some
point between takes, he's on his motorcycle on the boardwalk
and there's this kind of hot girl walking around at
the boardwalk, and so he starts popping Wheelie's to show
off for and ultimately loses control, runs the bike into
the railroad tracks, which falls over on top of him
and breaks his arm in three places. You will notice
at some point in the movie that he a hand
becomes gloved and stays gloved throughout the remainder of the movie. Well,
Jamie Gertz didn't know about this, right, and so they're
doing these motorcycles and because it's his right hand that's broken,
they had to they had to revamp the do you
like that pun nice vamp? They had to revamp the
motorcycle and put the throttle on on the left hand side.
And so she gets on the back of the bike
ready to shoot this scene, and she's looking and she's like,
why is it on the other side? And then she
sees his arms. She's like, what happened to your hand?
And he's like, I broke my arm in three places
and she's like, are you sure you can drive this thing?
And he goes, well, we'll see and takes off.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I thought that was an interesting story. So
Kei ver Solon broke his wrist. William Ragsdale injured his
foot when he was running down the staircase during the
last shot, filmed on Christmas Eve nineteen eighty four, just
three weeks into principal photography. So this is the scene
where he had to come down the stairs and meet
Jerry the vampire right right, which that the scene is
kind of goofy anyway, because anytime I call my teenager
to come downstairs for me, he's like whistling a tune
and coming down.
Speaker 1: Sure, moom, what's going on?
Speaker 2: I'm like, that never happens in my house. The director said, Okay,
let's try it again, just do it faster. This is
literally the last shot before they break before Christmas break. Yeah,
and he stumbles and falls and breaks his foot when
he's coming down the stairs.
Speaker 1: Yeah. They he's he falls and he's like, I sprained
my leg, guys, and so they could grab some iceenter
icing it up. And the guy who's the sound guy
comes over to Tom Holland and says it's not sprained,
it's broken. He's like what, He goes, I heard it.
I heard it break And they went up. Yeah, yeah,
and it's sure enough it was broken. So he had
to postpone his more active scenes until later on in
the movie.
Speaker 2: Wow, that's cool. Let's talk about location for a second. Okay,
both of these have an interesting location, I think, yes. Well,
Fright Night was filmed at the same Hollywood backlot as
the Bourbs. You ever seen the Tom Hanks movie The Burbs.
Speaker 1: Love It Yeah, also has Corey Feldman and of course.
Speaker 2: Yep, same street. And then of course The Lost Boys.
There's that shot in Santa Cruz, California. You have the
Santa Cruz Boardwalk and you have that amusement right there
setting heavy Lost Boys, and they were actually reluctant to
have the movie film there because of the Murder Capital
of the World line from The Lost Boys and that place.
Santa Cruz had had a murderer in the seventies who
was who had gone on a killing spree, and so
they were real reluctant to have the murder Capital of
the World story, But because the movie made the boardwalk
look really cool and fun, they decided to do it.
Speaker 1: So from nineteen seventy until early nineteen seventy three, Santa
Cruz was terrorized by two serial killers and one mass murderer,
turning the once sleepy beach down into the murder Capital
of the world. So there were actually three killers in
a three year period, operating heavily at the time, so
it really was the murder capital of the world. That's crazy,
isn't that insane? Cruz.
Speaker 2: I think it'd be cool to go out there sometime.
I think that from this roller coaster still there and
still operates, and I know that every summer they have
a free beach movie series that they show while they're
out there, and Lost Boys is on that list. They
always show the losts.
Speaker 1: So in addition to the two Broken Bone stories, we
also have two going out in costume stories. Keifer Sutherland
and Jason Patrick were in the midst of the scene
where they're fighting each other and they're both vamped out
and they broke for lunch and Keifer was like, man,
I don'tant to eat the studio food again. Let's go
get something to eat. So they went out in like
full makeup, out driving to go get a burger or something,
and somebody they pull up to the stoplight and some
lady looks over at them and she she goes, you're disgusting,
and then it's off and it was like, we felt
like we were a success for the day. And the
same thing happened to Nathan Stark. Yeah, John John Yeah, yeah.
Jonathan Stark had been in that. He was he had
finished up with the scene where he melts, and so
they get done shooting for the day and he's like oh, hey,
can I go shower off before I go home? And
they're like, oh, now, the plumbing's messed up. You can't
shower here. He's like, okay, well, I guess I'm just
going to drive straight home. So he gets in his car,
and of course he's almost out of gas. So he
got to stop at a gas station, and he says
the guy. He goes to a full service station. The
guy walks up to his window and just turns white.
He got the gas for him. Didn't say anything, but
like as soon as he pulls off, he's looking in
his rear view mirror and he sees the guy running
for the phone, and it's like, sure, he's calling the cops.
I'm gonna have the cops pull me over on the
way to my house. He's talked about this before the
Billy Idol haircut, so you had said, Hey, I've heard this,
I haven't confirmed it. I've got it confirmed. I heard
the story from Keifer Sutherland. Here it is okay, yeah, okay,
so old Schumacher says to Keith for Sutherland, listen, I
want these guys to look like rock and rollers, So
let your hair get long, stay long, but I want
it to be white, and so Keifer Sutherland's letting his
hair grow really out. It's already pretty long. Then he
does the white hair and he says, I looked like
Rick Flair the rest. I look ridiculous with his long
white hair, And he said so right at this time,
Billy Idol had just gone out solo. He had just
left Generation X, gone out solo and was super popular,
and so he was like, I'll get the top cut
like Billy Idol's hair, and I'll leave the back long.
So that's how you get That's how you get David's haircut.
He didn't invent the mullet, but he certainly made it
popular for another few years after after that movie came out,
the kind of Bosworth business up front party in the back.
Speaker 2: No, I definitely agree. It's it's Billy Idol mixed with
a little bit of Ryan Bosworth.
Speaker 1: Very cool.
Speaker 2: And then the final fight scene is basically Billy Idol
fighting Jim Morrison.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because Jason Patrick really does. I have to think
that's why they wanted him so bad. It is because
how much you looked like Jim Morrison back then. Because
they've got the huge Jim Morrison poster in the in
the Sunken Hotel, they play the doors, people are strange,
and the intro of the movie there's definitely a Jim
Morrison bent going on there for sure.
Speaker 2: Find Okay, I've got something on production that both of
these have in common that I thought was interesting. Go ahead, Okay,
think back to nineteen eighty six. If you had vision
problems and you needed contacts. They're not the soft, comfortable,
easy going things that we have today. They're made of glass.
They're uncomfortable, they're difficult to put in. So both of
these movies feature full on entire eye glass contact that
were super cool. They are super effective in the movie,
but very painful. Can only shoot for three or four
minutes and then you got to pull them out. Not
something I want to do very often. But they're very,
very cool looking. Stephen Jefferies actually had some temporary blindness
and had severe scratches because of these.
Speaker 1: So Jonathan Stark had Originally he was supposed to have
those lenses in when he's coming up the stairs at
him like the old Abbot Costello routine. Yep, but he
kept tripping on the stairs. Just take them out, Just
take them out. And Amanda Beers was like when they
put hers in, She's like, this is unbearable. I didn't
know how bad this was. It's really unbearable. And then
they realized they hadn't sanded it down, so she actually
had a rough edge on these glass contact lenses.
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1: But probably the most important thing that happened from these
glass contact lenses is with Keifer Sutherland in Lost Boys.
That moment in the movie where he sheds a tear,
uh huh. It is because of the glass contact shooting
and shooting and like it was supposed to be you know,
you're done in seven minutes, and he was like on
minute eight and it was just like I could not
stop it from happening, just could not stop it.
Speaker 2: That's awesome, that's awesome. I heard him talking about it.
So the scene where they're hanging upside down in the cave,
so he's talking about the filming process, right, you know,
this really long. He said. They were forty feet up
in the air, dangling from the top of the cave,
he said, which that took time to get them up there,
set up ready to go. They had to put those
stupid contacts in their eyes, uh huh. So they had
all this effort. Plug their eyes. Okay, here we go,
ready action, and you got like three or four minutes
to get everything you've got and then okay, that's it.
Get them down, take the things out of their eyes.
So just a tremendous amount of effort to get that shot.
But again it works. It's really good.
Speaker 1: We're kind of moving into special effects a little bit,
so before we get there, I just want to tell
one quick story. So Keifer Sutherland talks about how much
he learned about acting from this movie. You know, obviously
you've got a lot of young, very new actors, but
you've got these handful of older, more experienced actors. And
he says he can remember shooting the scene with Diane
West where she's making the call. You remember when they're
in the restaurant and she comes to talk on the
phone to Sam because he's freaking out because Michael's, oh,
he's coming to get me. Well, yeah, so she when
she picks up the they're shooting the scene. When she
picks up the phone, she takes out her ear ring
and puts the phone up and Joel Schumacher's like cut
and he's like, Diane, what's wrong? And she's like, what
are you talking about? And he goes, well, you took
your earring out? Is there something wrong with your earring?
And she's like, no, I'm about to talk on the phone.
That's what a woman does when she's about to talk
on the phone, and she takes her earring out so
that it doesn't smatch her earring. And Keifer Sutherland like
was that was such an impactful moment because you have
to bring the reality of your own world to whatever
character that you're playing, and it was just kind of
neat to see that play out.
Speaker 2: That's cool. I've got an I've got another little tidbit. Interestingly,
the word Michael is said one hundred and eight times
in The Lost Boys. Yeah, and there's you can go
to YouTube and and and have a video of every
time it said dings for you, Michael, Michael, Michael, Michael Michael.
But in Fright Night, the word Charlie has said sixty
two times.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 2: Just kind of interesting. They say the main character's name
a bunch.
Speaker 1: Kind of like Titanic Jack Jack Jack Jack Jack Jack.
Speaker 2: Uh. So, before we move into special effects, I've got
a couple of tidbits from Fright Night, that I will
throw at you. So one of the sort of interesting
things that they discover in Jerry's house is this painting
of a woman who looks very similar to Amy. That
was actually Chris Randon's idea. He wanted Jerry Dandridge to
have a humanity to him. So the fact that Amy
represented a long lost love of Jerry was an extra
layer to that character that Chris Randon came up with.
And also the fact that he when he first approaches
Charlie in his room and give you something I don't
have gives him a choice choice. He's got him up
against the wall, he's totally overpowered him, and he asks Charlie.
He says, forget about me, Charlie, if I kill you,
that would give you something that I don't have a choice.
What he say, forget about me? And Charlie pulls out
a crucifix and you see that that scene, the emotion
of that scene, it's like it saddens and disappoints Jerry.
It's sad because he has to kill Charlie. Yeah, and
even though he's a total vampire badass, he still has
a humanity to him.
Speaker 1: So the apple bit, you know, he's always walking around.
That was another contribution by Chris Sarandon, and He's like,
I I had just had, you know, I wanted I'm
looking for ways to make him more human or give
him humanity, like you said. And so I started reading
about bats, and I learned that ninety percent of bats
are actually fruit bat type of bats. You know, they
eat fruit for survival. And so I just decided that
I've got some fruit bat DNA and my ancestry. And
so that's why I'm always walking around eating these apples
with the idea that I'm cleansing my palette after I've
devoured a victim.
Speaker 2: Super cool, super subtle, and he even uses the apple
to kind of draw Charlie out neat idea. I think
here's something that I thought was really cool. Just another
little tidbit from behind the scenes at Fright Night. The
cast and crew members of Fright Night recalled that Roddy
McDowell spent tons of time videotaping behind the scenes. He
had his own little camera, little camcorder and videotaping. Nobody
ever saw the tapes, and nobody knows where they are.
Speaker 1: We ready to move on to special effects.
Speaker 2: Let's try to go for special effects.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the when they decided to do Fright Night,
they're like, let's give Rick Baker a call, because who
else you're gonna call if you've got a monster movie?
But Rick Baker and Rick Baker said, no, I don't
really want to do that, but you guys should give
Richard Edlin to call. And Richard Edlin was kind of
like his main guy had helped him out with Star Wars,
and Richard Edlin and a lot of the guys who
did the Fright Night stuff had just finished with Ghostbusters,
which has some pretty cool special effects, right. I mean,
you don't really think of it because it's such a comedy,
but Ghostbusters actually had some really pretty cool special effects,
and so it was a much higher budget film. And
so they come over from Ghostbusters to do this movie
and they do all kinds of cool stuff, just amazing
things that they do with the bats. When Jerry gets
stabbed with the pencil and he has his transformation, and
Jerry cannot handle pain, right, He's he got some humanity,
you know, and his choice giving and his apple eating,
and then he's also got some monster and as I
can't handle pain, and I'm a little bit petty. He
was a little I felt like he's a little bit patty.
I felt like the cooler vampires would have let some
more of that stuff goes. But he was just like, no,
I'm just a guy who's kind of a bully about things.
So this is the way it's gonna be. But anyway, he.
Speaker 2: Destroyed Charlie's car for the fun of it because he's
gonna kill him the next night. Anyway, right, what about
you're gonna kill me, but you're gonna trash my car.
Speaker 1: Really? That car, by the way, was Tom Hollands car.
I don't know if you knew that Tom Hollins car.
Speaker 2: Oh cool.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So Steve Johnson was one of the main special
effects guys who's just hilarious. There's a great documentary on
fright night and he the guy's funny. Like the first
thing that he says is I love doing this movie.
I mean, for one thing, they had a lot of cocaine.
And so he was the guy responsible for the pencil
through the hand thing. And he had seen you know,
when you're a special effects guy, when you watch a movie,
what are you gonna do but look at the special effects?
Right right, So he had seen EXCaliber, And there's this
scene where where Lancelot is naked and he gets a
sword through like his abdomen and you can see you
can see the sword going in and you can see
the sword on the other side of him. Huh, and
then the sword. He pulls the sword out, and you know,
a point comes out, and the point isn't behind him anymore,
and he's just like, how the heck did he do that?
How did they do that special effect? And so it
was this really kind of tricky thing. He turns just
momentarily as he's pulling the sword, and he's like, they
had to have a string on that point that they
had in the back and a retractable blade for the front,
and so when he pulls it out, the retractable blade
comes out, and as he turns, somebody yanks that point
off with a string, so you never see it. And
so he went through that whole process with pencil in
the hand. He's like, right, you're going to see the
pencil going through his hand and then you're going to
see him pull the pencil out of his hand and
it's going to be awesome. And so he rigs the
whole thing up. They do the scene. It works perfectly,
and they start watching dailies now, but I think it
was even after dailies, it's looked like they had done
a pretty well one of their final edits. Yeah yeah,
And he's watching with Tom Holland, and Tom Holland does
an inter cut scene of Charlie's reaction as he's pulling
the pencil out and he's like, you run the Yeah.
He's like, everybody's gonna just think that it happened while
you did the cutaway this with you know, you've ruled it.
So Tom Holland's like, okay, okay, yeah, well we will
take the reaction shot out for you and your special effect.
Speaker 2: That's a great story, and we don't have practical effects
hardly anymore at all. These weren't computers. They didn't have
green screens, and they didn't do all this stuff.
Speaker 1: So they looked real because they were real, right, and.
Speaker 2: We've lost that. I think anytime there's lots of times
I watch a movie, I'm like, these stupid computer effects.
They look like John.
Speaker 1: It's it's like watching American Werewolf in Paris after having
seen American Werewolf in.
Speaker 2: London, exactly really exactly.
Speaker 1: The heck is that the actors had to endure hours
and hours, like Chris Sarana to get into his makeup,
like the full on monstered Out. Chris Arana took eight
hours and they had to He had to do that
for several days, and so he was just their bored
and he said, can you guys teach me how to
do something so that I can do something for you guys?
Maybe speed this up a little bit and I'm not
going insane while I'm just sitting here. And so he
ended up putting the fingers. They showed him how to
put the finger extensions on when he had the long
pointy fingers. So Chris Sarana, you know, learned to do
some special effects for the movie. And then they had
they had Stephen Jeffries in the wolf costume. You I
don't know if you call it a costume. I mean
they they basically made him the wolf and that was
like eighteen hours, yep, and pretty brutal. He had and
he had that fa I mean, the most maybe the
most memorable scene in the whole movie to me is
the scene where they where he burns the cross into
his forehead, which a cool scene, fantastic brilliant, brilliant scene
they had to use. He had to go through the
wolf process and it was miserable for him as well,
but they did. They had a really great the transforming process.
When that wolf is crawling along and he's half wolf
and half man. It's I was sitting there going is
this a machine? Is this a person? That looks real?
I can't figure out how they're doing it. They did
a really great job.
Speaker 2: With Yeah, it's heartbreaking. That's that scene is truly heartbreaking
every time I watch the movie where Evil ed Is
has been stabbed and is transforming back to the boy
and he reaches out. I saw an interview with Chris
saran and talking about the finger extensions right, and they
are super effective. They look really cool. We can talk
about some of the vampire lore that we see throughout
these movie, but he talked about how the fingers tensions.
Although they looked cool, it did make it difficult for
him to go to the bathroom.
Speaker 1: Okay, that will do it for this episode. Please come
back for our next episode where we will continue the conversation.
We're going to talk more about the composers and the
awesome soundtracks involved. Here. Some of the special stories involved you.
You can't miss it. Come back for the second episode
of Fright Night Versus the Lost Boys next week.
Speaker 2: Awesome.
Speaker 1: D it's been fun man. Yeah, see you guys next week.
Speaker 2: Oh you're so cool, Broaster, I can stand it.