Empire of the 'B's: The Mad Movie World of Charles Band

By Dave Jay and William S. Wilson

REVISED EXPANDED EDITION

BY DAVE JAY, WILLIAM S. WILSON & TORSTEN DEWI

GUEST CONTRIBUTORS: NATHAN SHUMATE, JOHN KLYZA, CYRILLE BOSSY, DAVE WAIN & MATT BUDREWICZ

FOREWORD BY STUART GORDON

With a b-movie career spanning four decades, infamous producer/director Charles Band has been described as everything from 'The new Roger Corman' to 'The PT Barnum of Exploitation', released over 300 films, discovered Hollywood stars such as Demi Moore, Helen Hunt and Viggo Mortensen, and brought to our screens bona fide cult hits such as Tourist Trap, Re-Animator, Trancers, From Beyond and Intruder. With such an inexhaustible output, perhaps it is little surprise that no book has attempted to cover this most prolific of moviemakers, who grew up on his father's film sets; living and breathing horror, fantasy and sci-fi movies since his brief childhood appearance in the sword 'n' sandal epic The Avenger in 1962. No book until now, that is…

In Empire of the 'B's, writers Dave Jay, William S. Wilson & Torsten Dewi attempt to deconstruct the movies and career of Charles Band, spanning the 'golden age' of 1973-1988 via exhaustive movie reviews and exclusive interviews with many of the key players that have passed through Charlie's fun factory, including Stuart Gordon, Brian Yuzna, Robert Ginty, David Schmoeller, Tim Thomerson, Albert Pyun, Jeff Burr and Joe Haldeman, not to mention Charles Band himself.

Empire of the 'B's traces Band's 1970s drive-in beginnings through to his 1980s 'Empire Pictures' heyday as a movie mogul in Italy: an era of freaky fairy-tales, killer dolls, Lovecraft monstrosities and unexpected encounters with John Carpenter, Sam Raimi, Clive Barker, Frank Darabont, and Renny Harlin.

This edition has been revised and expanded by the original authors, featuring additional reviews, interviews and features, making this a tale that no true cult movie fanatic can afford to miss…

• Language: English
• Publisher: Encyclopocalypse Publications
• Release date: Oct 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215975992

Book preview

Contents

Foreword by Stuart Gordon

The Movie Madness of Charles Band

CHAPTER 1: Charles Band Productions 1973-1983

In Conversation with Charles Band

LAST FOXTROT IN BURBANK (1973)

MANSION OF THE DOOMED (1975)

CINDERELLA (1977)

CRASH! (1977)

END OF THE WORLD (1977)

LASERBLAST (1977)

AUDITIONS (1978)

FAIRY TALES (1978)

TOURIST TRAP (1978)

David Schmoeller Interview

THE DAY TIME ENDED (1979)

Wayne Schmidt on The Day Time Ended

THE ALCHEMIST (1981)

Robert Ginty on The Alchemist

THE BEST OF SEX AND VIOLENCE (1981)

FAMOUS T & A (1982)

Ken Dixon on Slave Girls, Sex & Violence

PARASITE (1982)

FILMGORE (1983)

METALSTORM: THE DESTRUCTION OF JARED-SYN (1983)

In Conversation with Richard Band

CHAPTER 2: Empire Pictures 1984-1988

In Conversation with Charles Band

WALKING THE EDGE (1983)

THE DUNGEONMASTER (1984)

In Conversations with Phil Fondacaro

GHOST WARRIOR (1984)

GHOULIES (1984)

TRANCERS (1984)

RE-ANIMATOR (1985)

Brian Yuzna on Re-Animator

SAVAGE ISLAND  (1985)

TRANSMUTATIONS  (1985)

TROLL (1985)

ZONE TROOPERS (1985)

In Conversation with Tim Thomerson

BREEDERS (1986)

CRAWLSPACE (1986)

DOLLS (1986)

DREAMANIAC (1986)

ELIMINATORS (1986)

FROM BEYOND (1986)

In Conversation with Stuart Gordon

MUTANT HUNT (1986)

NECROPOLIS (1986)

LeeAnne Baker on The Kincaid Years

THE PRINCESS ACADEMY (1986)

PSYCHOS IN LOVE (1986)

RAWHEAD REX (1986)

ROBOT HOLOCAUST (1986)

TERRORVISION (1986)

The Fibonaccis on TerrorVision and Valet Girls

VALET GIRLS (1986)

VICIOUS LIPS (1986)

Albert Pyun on Vicious Lips

ZOMBIETHON (1986)

THE CALLER (1987)

CELLAR DWELLER (1987)

THE CELLAR DWELLER SPEAKS!

CREEPOZOIDS (1987)

Thomas L Callaway on Creepozoids & Killer Bimbos

DEADLY WEAPON (1987)

ENEMY TERRITORY (1987)

In Conversation with Peter Manoogian

GALACTIC GIGOLO (1987)

GHOULIES II (1987)

PRISON (1987)

C Courtney Joyner on Prison

SLAVE GIRLS FROM BEYOND INFINITY (1987)

SORORITY BABES IN THE SLIMEBALL BOWL-O-RAMA  (1987)

ARENA (1988)

Screaming Mad George on Arena

ASSAULT OF THE KILLER BIMBOS (1988)

CEMETERY HIGH  (1988)

In Conversation with Ted Nicolaou

BUY & CELL (1988)

CANNIBAL WOMEN IN THE AVOCADO JUNGLE OF DEATH (1988)

CATACOMBS (1988)

Jeffrey S Farley on Mechanical & Makeup Imageries

DR ALIEN (1988)

Kenneth J Hall on Dr Alien

GHOST TOWN (1988)

INTRUDER (1988)

THE OCCULTIST (1988)

Tim Kincaid & Ed French Interview

SPELLCASTER (1988)

TRANSFORMATIONS (1988)

Jay Kamen on Transformations

ROBOT JOX (1989)

PULSE POUNDERS VOL. 1

CHAPTER 3: UNMADE EMPIRE

Jeff Burr on Empire's Development Hell

CHAPTER 4: ‘Too Gory for the Silver Screen’ Charles Band's Wizard Video

Wizard Video: The Lost Titles

Force Video

The Wizard Legacy

Wizard Video Games

(Serial #007) Halloween

(Serial #008) The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

Flesh Gordon and Beyond…

Afterword

Foreword by Stuart Gordon

Travels with Charlie

The first time I laid eyes on Charlie Band was during a screening of Re-Animator dailies in November of 1984. My friend Bob Greenberg, the man who had gotten me this, my first film directing job, pointed him out to me.

‘That’s Charlie, he’s distributing the film.’

‘The old guy?’ I asked, pointing to a distinguished man in his fifties.

‘No, that’s Albert, his dad,’ whispered Bob, ‘The one he’s talking to.’

I couldn’t believe my eyes. Albert was talking to a baby-faced kid with shoulder-length hair who looked like he was a teenage pop star. Next to Charlie sat a beautiful blonde. Charlie fondled her knee as he conferred with his father. After the screening, Charlie, Albert and the blonde headed for the elevators. Bob and I followed at a distance, hoping to get a sense of what they thought of the dailies and, if they liked them, introduce ourselves. When we were close enough to hear them, I realised that they were not speaking English. I looked to Bob, confused. ‘Italian,’ he muttered through barely moving lips. ‘Charlie grew up there.’ And then the elevator arrived, Charlie, Albert and the blonde got in, the doors closed, and they were gone. The next day Brian Yuzna, my producer, informed me that Charlie wanted to replace our director of photography. I was shocked. ‘Why?’ I asked.

‘He thinks everything is too dark.’

‘What should we do?’ I asked Brian.

‘Replace him, I guess. He wants us to use one of his guys.’

His guy was Mac Ahlberg, the urbane Swedish DP who had directed tons of films himself, including the international hit I, a Woman. He taught me how to shoot a movie and to this day I still call him ‘The Professor.’ We wrapped principal photography just before Christmas and I returned home to Chicago.

When the VHS tape of the final cut arrived from Lee Percy my editor, my jaw dropped as I watched it. Entire subplots had been removed, the order of scenes re-arranged, and the running time was under 90 minutes. When I asked Lee about this, he told me that Charlie had his dad supervise the editing. Soon I was on the phone with Albert. ‘There was nothing going on in that scene,’ he gruffly informed me. ‘They were just talking.’  In retrospect, I now realise that Albert was being kind. He could have used his more frequent assessments: ‘Stinks on ice,’ or ‘Twenty pounds of shit in a ten-pound saddlebag.’ I gradually realised that Albert was right and his cut was working. Like Charlie, Albert was a gifted director, having made dozens of films including the 1950s classic I Bury the Living.

One night in May of 1985, I was awakened by the telephone. Brian was calling me from Cannes where Re-Animator was premiering at a market screening. ‘They love it!’ he shouted over the commotion of several hundred enthusiastic Frenchmen. ‘Charlie wants to sign us to a three-picture deal!’ So I packed up the family and we moved to LA. Upon arrival I would finally have a face-to-face meeting with the mysterious Charles Band.

Charlie’s company, Empire Pictures, had just moved into new quarters in a three-storey building on La Brea Avenue in Hollywood. Brian and I waited in the outer office under the watchful eye of the unflappable Bennah Burton-Burtt. She fielded several dozen phone calls during the thirty minutes we waited and finally we were ushered into Charlie’s spacious office. The walls were covered with garish posters of monsters and half-naked women. Charlie immediately leaped up from behind his gigantic toy covered desk, ‘Dudes!’ It wasn’t long before I was under the spell of his intoxicating charisma.

Charlie’s genuine love of making movies is irresistible and you’re quickly caught up in his very palpable and very contagious excitement. Anything is possible and immediate. Unlike other studios, at Empire there was no such thing as development hell. You’d talk about an idea, usually inspired by a poster or just a title and two months later you were shooting the film. And when it was done you were on to the next one. Brian and I were in the palm of Charlie’s hand, even though he dropped a pair of bombshells on us in the first five minutes. He told us he had just bought Dino De Laurentiis’ ‘Mega studios’ in Rome (every other word was ‘mega’ or ‘bitchin’’) and this fall we’d be shooting our three pictures with an all-Italian crew. Then he told us that our first film would be The Doll, ‘A bitchin’ script about killer dolls.’ I looked at Brian. We had already agreed that our first picture would be From Beyond, another H P Lovecraft story to follow the success of Re-Animator. When I brought this up, Charlie laughed and with a wave of his hand explained, ‘Dude, no problemo! This is just a little movie that you can knock off in a couple of weeks while you’re prepping From Beyond. In fact you can even use the same set.’

And so on Halloween of 1985, my family got on a plane to Rome where we would live for the next six months. ‘Dinocitta’ as the studio was called (after the famous Cinecitta) had been built in the early sixties and it was here that John Huston shot The Bible on sound stages big enough to accommodate Noah’s ark and its floating zoo. It was also here that Roger Vadim had Jane Fonda do her zero-gravity striptease in Barbarella. But in the following decade, De Laurentiis went broke and the studio was seized by the government, and now three-foot weeds were growing from the cracks in the concrete floors and the sound stages’ heating systems had been stripped to repay back taxes. But none of this mattered to Charlie, who quickly filled the sound stages with the same films whose posters had adorned his office walls: Zone Troopers, TerrorVision, Crawlspace and Troll. All were shooting simultaneously on the seven massive stages and the studio’s coffee bar became the hangout for the various casts who recovered from their jetlag by knocking back espressos and comparing notes, ‘I get murdered next Tuesday. When do you die?’

One day someone showed me an article in Newsweek about Charlie that appeared under the title ‘The Prince of Schlock’. (Albert Band later told me that he had shown this to his old mentor John Huston, who lay dying in his hospital bed. After looking it over, Huston looked up at Albert and grinned. ‘Well, I guess that makes you the king,’ he told him.) The article mentioned that Re-Animator had made over twenty million dollars, and as it had cost only $800,000 and contractually I had 2% of the net, I was sure I had struck it rich. ‘Drinks are on me!’ I naively shouted to the denizens of the coffee bar.

The next thing I knew, Charlie had bought a castle in Giove, a picturesque town halfway between Rome and Florence. It seems Charlie, a collector of antique furniture and paintings, had gone there for an auction and discovered that the castle itself was for sale. A candle had been lit and silent bids were written down for each item. When the candle burned down, the highest bidder won. Ever impulsive, Charlie had made a ridiculously low bid on the castle and by the time the candle went out, it was his.

That winter, my entire family was invited to a grand formal dinner at Charlie’s castle. The event reminded me of equal parts The Great Gatsby and Citizen Kane. Charlie sat at the head of a huge banquet table before a roaring fireplace. At his side the beautiful blonde from the screening room who we now knew as Debbie Dion. She had started as Charlie’s driver on one of his films and they had fallen head over heels for each other. Now she was Charlie’s fiancé and a development executive at Empire. Armed with a rapier wit and a throaty laugh, she never failed to shock and awe. La bella vita!

Family is extremely important to Charlie and, little by little, I was lucky enough to become a part of the Band clan. I was constantly getting blitzed at gin rummy by Albert but hearing his tales of old Hollywood and never-ending jokes made it all worth it. His wife Jackie, a former model (whose picture Albert had seen on a billboard on Sunset Boulevard and fallen madly in love with at first sight), cooked us the best baked beans I’ve ever had. And Charlie’s brother Richard composed and conducted the amazing scores for all of their films. Empire was truly a family affair.

One evening I accompanied Charlie and Debbie to a London casino. Debbie counselled me to utilise what she called ‘The Dork System’ at roulette: small bets on black or red. I managed to do pretty well. But Charlie was clearly no dork and he amassed a mountain of chips by playing his favourite number and letting it ride. Unfortunately, he let it ride one time too often and was instantly wiped out.  I realised then that for Charlie it was all about living on the edge and beating the odds. ‘I climb a mountain every day,’ he once told me. ‘Sometimes you make it to the top and sometimes you fall off a cliff.’

Charlie’s Empire fell off a cliff. Expanding too fast, making too many movies (‘200 films by the year 2000’ was Charlie’s optimistic slogan) and by 1989 he had to sell the studio in Italy and Empire was swallowed up by a competitor. The last time I visited the offices on La Brea, security guards were searching Empire executives’ briefcases before allowing them to leave. They even confiscated a can of prunes Albert was caught smuggling out. When I got out of the elevator on the third floor I found Bennah cleaning out her desk, but she buzzed Charlie to let him know I was there. When I went in, I discovered Charlie sitting in the dark, the blinds closed, his walls bare, holding his head in his hands. When he glanced up at me he looked like an old man. My heart went out to him.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. But Charlie Band never wants pity.

‘Dude,’ he told me. ‘It’s time to make some movies.’

The Movie Madness of Charles Band

Introduction by Dave Jay

Charles Robert Band is one of the last great b-movie survivors; a genuine pioneer who has, over the last four decades, forged an idiosyncratic path through the no man’s land of independent genre cinema. It is an eccentric, ever-shifting career that has seen our Charlie cast as a minor, then major, then back to minor player within that rarefied world: the underbelly of Hollywood, where wide-eyed wannabes, world weary once-weres and certified no-hopers collide. Sure, Band’s current relationship with the ever-fickle Hollywood mainstream isn’t quite what it used to be and, when combined with the fact that he hasn’t produced a breakout hit in the new millennium, it is sometimes a little too easy to forget that this is the same man many once thought to be more than capable of seizing Roger Corman’s long-held title of ‘King of the B-movies’. But still Charles Band remains, doggedly and stubbornly churning out good-time genre flicks for the Full Moon faithful, albeit on budgets perhaps a tenth of the size of those earmarked for the average Empire production three decades earlier.

Wherever you stand with regard to his movie output, you have to admire the man’s single-minded persistence: from the formative drive-in days of the 1970s to the gravy years of the 1980s and early '90s, and on to this last, more troubled decade, Band has remained a dominant presence on the b-movie scene while so many of his peers have fallen by the wayside: Edward L Montoro, who allegedly stole a million dollars out of his company FVI and fled to South America in 1985, never to be seen again; Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, whose bloated Cannon Group spectacularly crashed ‘n’ burned in 1989; Bob Shaye, whose New Line went public in 1986 and later sold out to Ted Turner in the early '90s, extricating itself from the exploitation ghetto and transforming into a multi-million dollar, Oscar-baiting machine before collapsing in 2008; even Roger Corman himself, who has done little of note since selling New World to an investment group in 1983, happy to instead coast on glories past while churning out vastly inferior rehashes of much beloved New World and AIP hits.

The 1970s through to the late 1980s was, in many ways, the last great ‘golden age’ – not only for Charles Band, but for the b-movie community at large. As such, the fluctuating fortunes of Band during this era closely mirror the rise and fall of the indie genre scene itself. So, it might perhaps prove instructive to document the creation and destruction of Charlie Band’s Roman Empire, chapter by chapter.

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CHARLES BAND PRODUCTIONS (1973-1983)

As reported by Box Office magazine in a 1977 article on Band, "Charles Band Productions is housed in a converted warehouse on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood [with] the Samuel Goldwyn studios right across the street…"

Band’s first Hollywood mini-studio held everything needed for a full production operation, including soundstage, film processing rooms, cutting rooms and pre-production facilities, all as a means of reducing expenses (Band’s ambitions at the time being films that took only 100 days between inception and release, as he boasted to the Los Angeles Times in September 1977, on budgets "in the half-million-dollar range.")

While it proved to be by far Charlie’s least productive phase (a mere 16 releases over a 10-year period), Band’s formative years nevertheless provided his audience with a fair few cherishable movie moments. All were, of course, derided or, even worse, ignored outright at the time, but as the decades have rolled on a handful of titles have slowly gained the affection of the exploitation community: quirky, garish drive-in fodder such as Mansion of the Doomed, Tourist Trap and, perhaps most memorable of all, Charlie’s X-rated, ‘vaudeville porn’ adaptation of Cinderella, starring tragic b-movie icon Cheryl ‘Rainbeaux’ Smith. Such movies were typical of the kind of product Band would turn out fast and cheap for both Irwin Yablans’ Compass International (who hit paydirt straight out of the gate with Halloween in 1978 then struggled to replicate even a fraction of that film’s success as the decade came to a close) and Brandon Chase’s Group 1 International (an eclectic company, to say the least, distributing anything from Carlo Lizanni’s The Last Days of Mussolini on down to Bill Rebane’s The Giant Spider Invasion).

This was also a time that saw Band producing his most authentically grindhouse-orientated material, such as Harry Hurwitz’ wonderfully grimy and slyly satirical Auditions and possibly the first ever direct-to-video exploitation trailer compilation in The Best of Sex & Violence, directed by Ken Dixon, hosted by a decrepit but ever-wily John Carradine, and released through Band’s own genre label, Wizard Video. Unfortunately, the most high-profile Charles Band Productions tended to be clunkers, not least John Hayes’ stultifying End of the World – a film that headliner Christopher Lee considered to be one of the worst on his résumé – and that darling of the Mystery Science Theatre crowd, Laserblast.

Quite unexpectedly, Band’s first decade in film would culminate in no less than Universal Studios giving his second 3-D effort, Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn, a nationwide, stateside release in 1983. The movie, while ambitious, was little more than a hopelessly ramshackle sci-fi/western hybrid. Nonetheless, this was also the movie that would seemingly send Band’s entrepreneurial aspirations sky high, leading to the birth of an Empire.

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EMPIRE PICTURES (1984-1988)

The months and years following Metalstorm’s release saw Band recasting himself as the new movie mogul on the block, purchasing the ‘Dinocitta’ studios outside of Rome, Italy, and setting up ‘Empire International’ with a view to creating a mini-major in the mould of Avco-Embassy or the Cannon Group. Having been burned on more than one occasion by unscrupulous distributors, Charlie decided it would perhaps be preferable to ‘cut out the middle man’ entirely by producing and releasing his own pictures to US theatres.

The resulting Empire catalogue represents perhaps Band’s most consistently entertaining genre titles and Charlie obviously had faith in much of his product at the time, even opening the likes of Troll and Eliminators to 900+ theatres nationwide. But the Empire years can also be seen as the era during which Band developed a few bad habits that continued through to the 1990s, his feting of quantity over quality being the most damaging (as has already been stated in Stuart Gordon’s foreword, Empire’s most notorious promotional tagline was ‘200 movies by the year 2000!’), resulting in a string of severely underfunded and near-unwatchable ultra-quickies such as Robot Holocaust and Galactic Gigolo. While a large proportion of these were not ‘officially’ Empire movies, instead going out as either Wizard Video exclusives or under the ‘Urban Classics’ banner in the US and ‘Beyond Infinity Sales’ worldwide, they were often promoted as Empire product abroad and, the odd title such as Scott Spiegel’s Intruder aside, quickly sullied the previously reputable Empire Pictures imprint – not a good move for a company already beginning to flounder in the increasingly volatile marketplace.

By 1988, Empire Pictures was on its last legs, with Band claiming to have learned a valuable lesson that customer confidence must be maintained at all times in order for a brand to prosper. With Band out of the way, Empire was swiftly acquired by ‘Epic Holdings’, headed up by Trans-World’s Eduard Sarlui and Moshe Diamant, who in 1989 completed production of Band’s most ambitious and troublesome project, the long-gestating Robot Jox, and then dropped the Empire banner altogether, going on to produce Larry Cohen’s The Ambulance alongside forgettable tripe such as Men at Work and Ski Patrol before folding soon after.

Unpicking Charles Band’s legacy can be a tricky business, as the minutiae of his career has become somewhat muddied throughout the years, not least due to the man himself having occasionally perpetuated inaccuracies that in time have become accepted as gospel (and Charlie would be the first to admit that his powers of recall aren’t as sharp as they could be). But it was while attempting to sort through such factual errors, through extensive interviews with key Band alumni conducted between 2004-2010, that a tale less told slowly emerged: a tale of the actors, writers, directors and producers that have passed through Band's fun factory, most of whom haven’t been able to fully account for themselves until now. And it became increasingly clear that a startling number of these newbies, who had at some time found shelter at Charles Band Productions or Empire Pictures, were, and still are, surprisingly erudite and skilled students of film – craftsmen who somehow found themselves knee-deep in the b-movie mire, churning out drive-in flicks for a drive-in audience that, thanks to the unstoppable rise of the video market in the 1980s, no longer existed.

The odd Tim Kincaid aside, many of these filmmakers are far from opportunistic hacks; indeed, most were once propitious apprentices of the same ilk as any household name you’re likely to encounter in Peter Biskind’s ode to Hollywood’s 1970s golden era, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. For example, take Peter Manoogian (director of Empire’s Eliminators, Enemy Territory and Arena): a man who was not only an NYU student himself, but whose father, the late Haig Manoogian, actually created the acclaimed NYU film programme, mentoring Martin Scorsese during the director’s time there and ultimately producing Marty’s first full-length feature, Who’s That Knocking at My Door? Or Tourist Trap’s David Schmoeller, who studied theatre and film at the Universidad De Las Americas in Mexico City under Luis Buñuel and Alejandro Jodorowsky and who was nominated for a student Academy Award for his short The Spider Will Kill You. Even the much-maligned Albert Pyun began his directorial career in earnest as a protégé of no less than Toshirô Mifune and Akira Kurosawa.

Of course, not all such moviemakers found themselves doomed to b-movie purgatory – in fact, contrary to popular belief, Band has been witness to the embryonic stage of many a successful Hollywood career, among them John Carpenter, Frank Darabont, Roger Avary, Lawrence Bender, David S Goyer, Clive Barker, Renny Harlin, Andrew Davis, JF Lawton, and Ron Underwood… sure, it may not be as impressive an array of talent as that fostered by Corman in the preceding decades but, let’s face it, the ‘80s and ‘90s didn’t produce as many truly great Hollywood writers, directors and producers anyhow. And those few who did emerge tended to bypass the introductory, zero-budgeted blood, tits ‘n’ ass route entirely, instead opting to produce some sappy ‘Miramaxed’ rom-com or uplifting, ‘against all odds’ human drama: inoffensive calling cards aimed squarely at the mainstream movie-making machine.

Speaking of the Miramaxes of this world, it was again Peter Biskind, who in his book Down and Dirty Pictures (which charted the ascendancy of the Disney-subsidised ‘independent’ cinema of the 1990s) said of the scene, ‘If Hollywood is like the Mafia, indies are like the Russian mob.’ And, in typical Hollywood Babylon style, certain accusations regarding the dubiousness of Band’s business practices have been voiced, off-record and on, year in and year out – not to mention the well documented lawsuits surrounding two of Charlie’s biggest hits, Ghoulies and Re-Animator. However, while a small section of the Band alumni questioned for this project have alluded to payments unforthcoming and promises not kept, very few seem to harbour overriding regrets about their time spent working for the man, at least from a monetary point of view…

Rather, the frustration that arose during many of these filmmakers’ terms spent toiling away for Charlie Band was seemingly borne out of the Empire topper’s point-blank refusal to deviate from the particular brand of movie he was both recognised for and comfortable with. As Ted Newsom, writer/director of Flesh & Blood: The Hammer Heritage of Horror and one-time cohort of Band, makes clear:

‘[Band’s companies were] akin to the old Hammers, or AIPs. But unlike those companies, Charles Band never resented his product being ‘typecast,’ he relished it.’

Band’s production-line ‘comfort zone’ was referred to many a time while researching our subject, not least in a discussion with Manoogian regarding the underrated gang war thriller, Enemy Territory – the only straight thriller Empire would release aside from the Robert Forster pick-up Walking the Edge – during which the director commented:

‘It was a good script – it was a script that Debbie Dion [Empire’s head of development] found. Charlie never would have made it, but Debbie wanted more involvement in development and was married to him by then, or was soon to be… She wanted more influence in the product that was made at Empire and her taste was a little more sophisticated than Charlie's. And Charlie made this movie, I think, to appease her.’

By all accounts, both Debbie Dion and Charlie’s father, the late Albert Band (who, it should be noted, was himself a protégé of John Huston), did on many occasions attempt to move Band out of the teen-aimed fantasy/horror ghetto he had created for himself and shift Empire towards relatively higher-minded, more adult-orientated genre projects, a handful of which were green-lit (Prison, Catacombs, The Caller), but most of which didn’t even make it past the initial pitch (the most tantalising being a proposal by Irwin Yablans and screenwriter Courtney Joyner to remake Fritz Lang’s classic expressionist slasher M in the style of a modern poliziotteschi).

Perhaps surprisingly, the one man who seems to have had the least problem churning out genre quickies for Band was probably the most talented filmmaker of them all: Stuart Gordon, who began his professional life as founder of Chicago’s Organic Theatre Company – a haven for maverick writers and actors of the calibre of David Mamet and Joe Mantegna. Gordon, while having a little more lateral freedom than most in his choice of Empire projects, was nonetheless also occasionally subject to Band’s infamous filmmaking ethos (‘here’s the poster, now go make the film’), as Dolls amply demonstrated.

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THE CRUMBLING OF AN EMPIRE

It was while researching the causes behind the regrettable collapse of Empire Pictures in 1988 that yet another narrative thread seemed to develop – perhaps the most historically important story from a cineaste’s point of view: that being the story of the death of the theatrical, indie genre b-movie. Not entirely the case, of course (as of this writing, Lions Gate Entertainment – which was itself borne out of the Montreal-based independent Cinépix – remains in rude health), but unquestionably the end of an era when exploitation product truly flourished and even regional filmmakers could compete on a relatively level playing field with the then-floundering majors.

In interview, Empire’s downfall tends to be somewhat skirted over by Band himself, which is a shame as the company’s collapse was a significant factor in the overall demise of b-movies’ own ‘golden age’ – an age that began in the 1950s following a sea-change within the movie industry (as a result of court rulings that signalled an end to unfair distribution practices), lasted for over thirty years and, thanks in part to money loaned by the controversy-ridden Credit Lyonnais bank to not only Empire but its contemporaries Trans-World, Cannon, and Dino De Laurentiis, was then dismantled within a matter of months in 1988 and ’89.

And so, here we are in 2020, with the Empire years little more than a distant memory. For a while, Charlie managed to maintain a profile for both himself and his current company, Full Moon, by travelling from state to state with his Full Moon Roadshow – some wag even tagged him ‘the PT Barnum of the exploitation world’. But financially his prospects have dwindled, budgets have shrunk and shooting schedules have shortened, forcing Band to almost never venture out of his creative ‘safety zone’. This is a situation recognised by Charlie himself who, during a series of often frank and open interviews for this project, made it clear that his own heart lies more with Ray Harryhausen-esque sci-fi movies (such as the unreleased Primevals) than the teen-aimed, puppet/doll-themed flicks that he is known for today. But the market is such that one simply has to go where the money is. There is very little room for even the slightest of deviations.

As a result of this, despite continuing to proudly survive as a lone wolf in the direct-to-video wilderness, some detractors unfairly see the Charles Band of this last decade as a shadow of his former self; a near-demented puppet master perpetually staging his mad, pointless puppet show to an ever-dwindling audience. Yet fans the world over continue to support our Charlie, knowing full well that it is highly unlikely the movie world will see the likes of him again. Yep, Charles Band is undoubtedly the last of the old-school b-movie legends, and it is only fitting that a book should be written to cover the halcyon years of his career – an era that saw Band take his rightful place as the Emperor of the ‘B’s.

CHAPTER 1: Charles Band Productions 1973-1983

In Conversation with Charles Band

Dave Jay) You’ve given many an account of how you grew up on your father Albert’s movie sets whilst living in Europe during the 1960s and this obviously led on to you following in his footsteps when you created your own movie empire from the 1970s onwards… but what are your overriding memories of those early years?

Charles Band) ‘Well, I was blessed to have such a great dad. He was definitely the Paterfamilias and what he did was intriguing. I mean, I knew a lot at the time when I was a little kid – I was very entrepreneurial. I wasn’t sure I was gonna be making movies when I was super-young, but I was definitely fascinated by the whole process and sort of eager to learn. And he definitely had me apprentice and do just about every job I could do as a kid – to some degree in front of the camera which quickly learned I didn’t enjoy, to behind the camera on the set and in post-production. And I actually was more excited about post-production at the time and, later on, the whole marketing side of making movies.

But I remember it was always an adventure – at five years old we were flown to Sweden where he made a movie called Face of Fire and he put myself and my younger brother in front of the camera briefly… just the magic that happens on a movie set. And back then, even on a low-budget film, everything was bigger: the lights were much bigger, the camera was bigger, there were more people, it was a big production and kind of mind-boggling to a little kid.

So I loved all that, and later on I acquired a taste for horror and sci-fi movies, all those elements combined and it all made sense – it made me really excited to make some of my own films.’

DJ) But your first notable contact with celluloid was the small role you played in Giorgio Venturini’s Rome-lensed peplum The Avenger, which starred Steve Reeves and was produced and adapted (from Publius Vergilius Maro’s Aeneis) by Albert in 1962…

CB) ‘I did – I was playing the son of Steve Reeves and I was a pretty thin little guy, so I don’t know how they figured that out. But they curled my hair and put a tunic on me… and next thing you know I was the son of Steve Reeves! Yeah, it was all part of this lucky, rich experience of growing up in Europe, being on sets in Spain, Yugoslavia and Italy and being close to my father, so it all worked…

Y’know, I’m blessed with a really strange memory – I’ve managed to erase a lot of things that weren’t pleasant over the years, so you can sort of call it a memory of convenience, and that’s helped me not look back too much and just look forward, ‘cause as an independent producer/director you have your ups and your downs and there’s plenty of downs too. And even though I’ve managed to make a lot of films, there were periods that were very difficult, so the whole early years – the travelling and being away from my father on occasion because he went off to make a movie somewhere – all that is a jumble in my mind.

There are slivers that are very vivid, like going in 1956 to the set of Ben Hur which was being shot in Rome, not knowing that a few years later we would wind up living there for 11 years. But just being on that set, they were shooting at Circus Maximus and everything was so gargantuan ‘cause they built everything – this was before CGI and all the trickery of today – so there was everything from thousands of horses and warriors and huge sets… and I remember meeting Charles Laughton at the time. Everything was bigger than life.’

DJ) Your first credit as director actually preceded your ‘Charles Band Productions’ era as, whilst out in Italy in the late ‘60s, you shot experimental short films which apparently played theatres in Rome as support to many an Andy Warhol movie. What do you remember of these shorts?

CB) ‘Yeah, there was a whole period from when I was 15 to maybe 18 where I was making my own little movies – art films. For a while I fancied myself as an Andy Warhol type, y’know? The first films were very esoteric and weird; I was in high school and I was very clever in finding all sorts of ways to be in school as little as possible, as that was not at all what I wanted to do. There was even a point when I managed to get the school’s principal or administrator, whoever the hell they were, to help fund a movie about the school that I made on 16mm. The undercurrent, the subtext of this film was how drugs were beginning to infiltrate school-life, and I made it all weird with a guy in a stocking running around… it was just a weird movie.’

DJ) Do you remember the title of it?

CB) ‘In the Time of Our Lives. (laughs) And then what happened was that I made either one or two of these art films after I’d done those earlier films. One or two had got some acclaim and, for one summer, one of my films – I don’t remember the name – opened in a small arthouse in Old Rome. That summer they were playing a lot of Andy Warhol material so I was invited to sort of be the opening act at this very artsy, highbrow arthouse.

So I remember for four or five or six Saturdays I would come there with the film, there would be 80 or 90 people – the strangest crowd ever – and I’d be introduced as this young, innovative filmmaker. Of course, they were all there for Andy Warhol, but I got a good reception and in several cases I was asked to talk a little bit. I was 15 and really had no clue, but even back then I spoke good Italian and would be answering questions about what was intended with some of these movies – the things that people read into films made in that style were way beyond my ability to talk about at that time! But it was a very heady experience and there were a couple of little articles written.

And then… I don’t know if this is what happened or not in my memory… but my father fell on hard times. He’d had a great run in Europe and then money dried up. Y’know he was not a good businessman and all of a sudden we were coming back to the States – I was 20 and it was 1970 – and all those great years in Europe and the way we lived, all that was over. But by then I was a big fan of horror and sci-fi, so although I had some allusions towards wanting to continue on as this art film director, a) there was no money in it, and b) I had no money. And I forget where the influences were exactly at the time but having spent most of my life in Europe it made sense to make a small commercial film and, of course, a horror film. But the thought even back then was I’ll make a few of these commercial horror films and get some money and then I can make my art films again. Which, of course, didn’t really happen! (laughs) But there was a little stretch where I was a young Andy Warhol-type, making the weirdest movies.’

DJ) Well, we were all young once, weren’t we?

CB) ‘Exactly!’ (laughs)

DJ) But I would like to clear something up – I guess we should swiftly discuss 1973’s Last Foxtrot in Burbank, which is often listed as being your first full-length movie with you as producer/director (under the name ‘Carlo Bokino’). Yet you have often claimed not to have had any direct involvement besides helping to set up the film. So who was Carlo Bokino? And what was your precise involvement with Last Foxtrot?

CB) ‘Here’s the deal. I went on a one-year deviation from my great plan to make a horror film because I became very friendly at the time with a writer named Frank Ray Perilli. Frankie was a good friend of my dad’s, they had met through another writer and Frankie is just a great, engaging and very funny man who was a stand-up comedian, did a lot of burlesque and was a partner of Lenny Bruce’s for a while. Anyway, Frankie and I became close and he convinced me – and it took years to recover from this – that if you wanna make some money, forget a horror film, let’s make a parody; a satire on a film that had just come out, Last Tango in Paris. And we’ll go out with it and we’ll four-wall cinemas and it’ll be funny – and, of course, Frankie was very funny.

So through a combination of not knowing any better, being always amused by Frankie and his stories and having done no research whatsoever (at the time I didn’t know that parodies and satires all failed), I put my energy into raising money, finding money, borrowing money to make this little movie which was directed by Michael Pataki. Now, Michael Pataki also played the lead in the film – so I was not the director, but I was a producer and found the money and developed it with Frankie. And even as we were shooting this film I just knew we were heading down the wrong track, but I really didn’t think it would be such a huge loser, that nobody would show up.

A story that no one knows: one, that the picture was finally finished, and I didn’t really shop it around to get an advance which would have been smart if I’d been able to get one. But Frankie was all excited about ‘four-walling’ [whereby the moviemakers rent the cinema and show the movie themselves, taking the income from the tickets while the cinema keeps the concessions] and he had a friend at the time named Brandon Chase who was in operation as an independent distributor…’

DJ) He headed up Group 1, didn’t he?

CB) ‘Yeah, Group 1. So, Brandon would hang out a bit and he wasn’t really interested in the movie but he said, Yeah, you can four-wall some theatres and make some money, take those prints and move them around the country… Anyway, after I’d put myself on the line for whatever the investment was on the film, now there was a second amount of money to raise in order to take the movie out theatrically in LA and doing promotion and whatnot.

So that was the plan… and I got pretty good at raising the money, I booked the theatres – one in Hollywood and one in Westwood – and we had all sorts of hoopla that was designed, press and acrobats in front of the theatre. It was our first opening screening and then the regular run would begin the day after – it was free and the press was invited and there was a clever ad for the movie that most people didn’t even get ‘cause it was a little TOO clever! But, in any case, this was my first experience – we made the movie, I co-created the marketing, rented the theatres and there was a horde of people that showed up, it was absolutely packed. And the reaction was probably a little better than lukewarm, but there were so many people I was thinking, My God, if even half of these people show up for the regular screenings, I’m gonna make some money!

I mean, I was motivated to make money as I wanted to make more movies; I just thought that if I could make a little money, I’d finally have enough to make my first real movie, the horror film that I wanted to make. Well, the next day was the actual beginning of its run, it was a Friday. And I was advised that, even though we were dealing with Pacific Theatres which was a big chain here in the States, there was a lot of cheating going on so you should have a hired person stand by the door with a little clicker who would ‘click’ for every person that was admitted. So then, if the theatre said that you’d had 900 people and the person with the little clicker said no, it was more like 1100, you’d have some bargaining power to say, I think we’ve been short-changed.

And I’ll never forget the phone call after the opening screening, as I think two people showed up! Anyway, it was a complete disaster – no one really cared about this strange little spoof or whatever you wanna call it. It quickly disappeared, I quickly abandoned all hope and found the resources and stamina to begin again and make what became my first horror film.’

DJ) One last question about Foxtrot and then we’ll move on: looking at the movie’s credits, the film was edited by one ‘John T Casino’, which I take it was none other than John Carpenter (as he later edited his own Assault on Precinct 13 under the similar pseudonym of ‘John T Chance’). Is that correct?

CB) ‘Yes. John and I were friendly and so yes he did.’

DJ) You’ve mentioned in many an interview how you worked at a Los Angeles tie shop for a very short time in the early 1970s before hitting upon the idea of binding and selling original runs of the New York Times to be sent as birthday gifts, which proved so successful that it provided you with enough money to fund your first ‘real’ movie…

CB) ‘Yeah, within four or maybe six weeks we had maybe around a quarter of a million dollars. Long story short, it’s the newspaper business that allowed me to have the money and a little bit of extra cashflow to become a filmmaker. So, I started my own company and until 1980 or ’81, when other events occurred, that’s how I scraped through 6 or 7 years of the ‘70s and made… I don’t know, 8 or 9 movies.’

DJ) But I also heard from director Jay Woelfel that you spent a very short time working for b-movie legend Samuel Z Arkoff (co-founder of American International Pictures).

CB) ‘Well, I guess technically I did. What happened was that my father, who was a terrific filmmaker, a journeyman producer/director who made films for AVCO-Embassy and started off as an editor for Warner Brothers… the 11 years we spent in Europe were quite successful for him, but he only knew to get his paycheque, put it in his account and spend it for survival. The concept of investing... he never invested in anything, he never put in any money into a retirement fund. That was not in his blood. He was an artist and as long as he had money to cover rent, he was happy. And we lived really quite well for the time but as the ‘60s were ending and the epics that he was making – the sword and sandal movies and the spaghetti westerns – were fading, so were the jobs and little by little the money ran out.

So, we all came back to the States absolutely broke. I mean, I was still 20 and my brother was 18 but my poor dad was sort of defeated and had to get going again. I wanted to work, I wanted to make some money and I worked for that men’s clothing store but that was maybe a three-month gig. I’m a good salesperson, I guess, but I’m completely colour-blind so I was matching ties to… God knows. Those poor people.’

DJ) It was the 1970s, so they probably didn’t notice.

CB) (laughs) ‘But my father was knocking around, trying to get some work and relatively soon after our return he, with Frankie Ray – this wonderful, funny man who led me astray with Last Foxtrot in Burbank – who had just had a hit with a movie with Lou Garfinkle called The Doberman Gang... for those who don’t know, The Doberman Gang was about a pack of Doberman pinschers who were trained to rob a bank… Anyway, trading off the same theme they said, Let’s make a movie that could star a hot chick of the time – the girl who became that hot chick was called Angel Tompkins – "And let’s do a spin on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." In this case, she’s a bank robber and she’s got these trained midgets and dwarves that would go and rob banks. (laughs) I forget the story exactly, but that was the premise.

The title they had at the time was The Little Cigars, and my father managed to sell that because he’d had a prior relationship with Sam Arkoff and James Nicholson. So they got a deal with AIP to make Little Cigars, to be shot in LA, and that was the first film that my father made in the States after the whole Italy run. So he said, Hey, if you want to be involved in any way, probably the only thing you could do is be a production assistant. Which is really a fancy word for a runner, but that was better than selling ties on Hollywood Boulevard. So I said, Sure!

So, I started work and hung out with Frankie and my dad and saw the casting… but I was officially employed by AIP as a production assistant on a Monday and by the end of that week I realised this is completely not for me. I mean, I wanted to make the movie, I wanted to raise the money, I wanted to be the guy in control… I didn’t want to be the guy running around getting coffee. So, in the nicest way possible, I quit at the end of the week and went off and did my own thing. But I can actually say that was the only legitimate job and paycheque I’ve ever received in my entire life! Even the Hollywood Boulevard clothing store experience was more helping someone out and getting a few dollars under the table, so that wasn’t officially on payroll. And after that, I began making my own movies and generating my own income, or lack of income… so there was never a paycheque again. But I can say I did work for one week and got a real paycheque with all the taxes deducted. I think the cheque was for five dollars after all of the deductions!’

DJ) You finally got your first official picture rolling in 1975: The Eyes of Dr Chaney AKA Mansion of the Doomed. Was this always the initial project that you wanted to embark upon or did you have a few different ideas that you were considering at the time?

CB) ‘No, that was my idea and Frankie Ray wrote the script. I made the movie and funded the movie and for better or worse it is my first effort. I was hands on and I hired everyone. Then, because Brandon Chase was kind of a friend of the court – I’d hung with Brandon through Frankie for a few years prior – Brandon said, Hey, this is right up my alley, it’s a horror film, it’s exploitation, I’ll distribute it for you and give you an advance. Unfortunately…’

DJ) That was the only money you saw?

CB) (laughs) ‘Man, yeah… there were some bad years where the small advances were all I’d see. It takes forever to learn lessons, I guess, for me. Eventually, I learned that’s not the way to go. But that’s jumping forward six or seven years.’

DJ) Michael Pataki once again took up the reigns to direct Mansion. But did you not consider directing the picture yourself?

CB) ‘I didn’t feel I was ready and it just wasn’t something that was that important to me. But I made the deal with Brandon, not knowing any better it wasn’t a good deal. And, in addition, he said, "The Eyes of Dr Chaney – no one’s gonna understand that title. It’s a terrible title. We should call it Mansion of the Doomed!" Even then I didn’t have my marketing head on, but I knew that was just a really bad b-title. But that’s what he wanted to do and he certainly had the right to re-title it.’

DJ) Of course, when it was released to video in the UK it had an even more garish b-title: Massacre Mansion…

CB) ‘Massacre Mansion? That’s even worse! (laughs) Well, I don’t know. They’re both pretty bad. That’s funny. But the irony, of course, is that John Carpenter and I kept in touch for a number of years – we lost touch probably once we hit the mid-‘80s. But, shortly thereafter, he wrote a movie that was released called The Eyes of Laura Mars.’

DJ) Of course!

CB) ‘So The Eyes of Dr Chaney wasn’t far off. But the picture got released and made just enough money, I guess, to make Brandon want another movie of mine and so I began the stretch of making one movie at a time and getting sucked in to these promises from distributors that never worked out. But I got just enough money back or just enough of an advance along with monies I would beg, borrow or steal to somehow make another movie. So there were three movies that I made that Group 1 distributed.’

DJ) Crash! and Cinderella being the other two…

CB) ‘Yeah.’

DJ) The occult horror-flick-cum-road-movie Crash! is probably one of your more obscure titles from this era, and certainly one of the strangest. But it has just about everything you would want from a b-movie: occult possession, telekinesis and countless car stunts. Is it fair to say that the general idea was basically an amalgam of Carrie and The Car, two big mainstream movies of the time?

CB) ‘Carrie? I don’t remember, it was all in the same few years. But I’m sure Crash! wasn’t about ‘let’s rip off whatever’. At the time it seemed like an original idea – I don’t think there was a predecessor movie about a haunted car. I may be wrong, but it seemed like the right movie to make.’

DJ) You finally hit paydirt in 1977 with the X-rated porn musical Cinderella. Perhaps surprisingly, Cinderella proved to be one of your best and most loved productions of the 1970s and