Stuart Gordon: Interviews (Conversations with Filmmakers Series)
Edited by Michael Doyle
University Press of Mississippi
I may have to consider buying another bookcase. My collection of film books is growing at an alarming rate and putting a serious strain on my bookshelves. This is something that the filmmaker Jamie Blanks tweeted about recently with a similar problem.
Until this book of interviews came along I'd been able to find relatively little in print on the life and career of filmmaker Stuart Gordon, who passed away in March 2020. When the term "genre ghetto" is used it feels more appropriate with relation to typecasting and the level of the recognition a filmmaker achieves rather than the actual quality of their work. Written features in old journals, fanzines and interviews online have shed some light on the man and his work while DVD extras, booklets and audio commentaries have also been useful sources of information. I felt that such a distinctive filmmaker and body of work deserved a worthy volume on his career and when I heard about the University of Mississippi Press releasing a collection of interviews spanning from 1968 to the late 2010s, it almost sounded too good to be true.
Simply put, this is by far the best of the UoM series that I've encountered so far. Most of the other filmmakers they have done volumes on have been covered in greater detail elsewhere and have well documented careers in print but this collection felt revelatory. It illuminated such a great amount of detail about its subject, that I ended up taking notes from nearly every page. This spans the whole breadth of Gordon's career in both theatre and cinema and hearing about it from the man himself as his career progresses gives a direct commentary and narrative to proceedings. In certain cases, this is the first time that the interviews have been published in their entirety.
Gordon is a very generous interviewee - informative, intelligent, honest, humourous, gracious and perceptive, with no delusions about his work or achievements. He's simply glad to hear that someone liked his films. Gordon flourished in the cult arena, never quite managing to draw attention away from the notoriety and shock value of his debut feature Re-Animator, which may be a reason why to this day he still seems like a hugely undervalued figure in American cinema, especially at a time when it seems that it has lost its ability to shock, provoke or even entertain in many cases. In a later interview he remarks, "Re-Animator has become my middle name". Like Tobe Hooper with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and George Romero with his 'Living Dead' films it was the work he was synonymous with. While graetful for how it launched his career it's a shame that other films didn't get as much of a following. I hope other films will get more attention as time passes. Books like this are very helpful in that respect.
Stuart Gordon saw horror as a medium for subversion, a quality he shared with his forebears from the 1970s such as George Romero, David Cronenberg, Tobe Hooper, Wes Craven and John Carpenter. It's sometimes forgotten that the 1980s produced its own distinctive breed of filmmakers of this ilk. Along with Gordon there were such notable figures as Frank Henenlotter, Brian Yuzna, Michele Soavi, Jorg Buttgereit, Shinya Tsukamoto and Clive Barker making their mark as directors and they all sought to bring an incendiary quality to their work. It was far from being the era of derivative slashers and franchises that some make it out to be.
The book sheds light on his theatre work in which Gordon was an active participant in Chicago in the 1970s and early 1980s, a period which also saw such emerging talents as David Mamet, Dennis Franz, William L. Peterson, Joe Mantegna, Gary Sinise and William H. Macy launch their careers. This was where Gordon developed his rapport with actors and an ability to tackle ambitious subjects with limited resources but boundless imagination and creativity. Some of the projects - pirate adventures, science fiction - had a cinematic quality and as a lifelong movielover it made the transition to filmmaking a logical next step in his career. He already had experience with gore effects when the time came to make his first feature in 1985.
The book made me aware of just how crucial the cinematographer Mac Ahlberg was to his work and how so many of the building blocks of Stuart Gordon's cinema were present in his debut film. Gordon reveals how Ahlberg taught him many of the fundamentals of filmmaking. There are numerous instances of this throughout film history, such as Gregg Toland schooling a young Orson Welles when he made Citizen Kane and Woody Allen said he learned a great deal about the technical side of cinema from Gordon Willis in his early work. His creative partnership with producer (and later director) Brian Yuzna reminded a little me of how Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur complimented each other in their seminal trio of RKO horror films in the 1940s. With Jeffrey Combs, Stuart Gordon found his ideal leading man and stock company member. He was a De Niro to his Scorsese, someone who occupied the worlds of his films so completely that it's hard to imagine anyone else in those roles (Herbert West in particular). Dennis Paoli was a lifelong friend of his who wrote numerous films for Gordon, some of which never made it beyond the initial screenplay stage.
As well as discussing the films he did make we also learn a great deal about some of his unrealised projects. It's fascinating to learn about all the films that Gordon had hoped to make but was unable to get the required funds to bring them to fruition. Some of the projects discussed in the book include adaptations of Joe Haldeman's 'The Forever War' and Bret Easton Ellis's 'American Psycho', a pirate adventure titled 'Bloody Bess', 'Berserker' (written for Arnold Schwarzenegger), 'Florian', 'Iron Man', ''68' (an autobiographical film about his involvement in late-1960s activism and the founding of The Organic Theatre), 'Kingdom Come', 'House of Re-Animator', 'Gris Gris', Soulmate (a ghost story that was eventually directed by its writer Axelle Carolyn, with Gordon's blessing) and at least two further proposed Lovecraft adaptations: The Lurking Fear and The Thing on the Doorstep. At least we have The Black Cat, one of his two 'Masters of Horror' episodes and something of a dry run for his play 'Nevermore', a one man show for Jeffrey Combs which he also hoped to turn in to a film. He gives his approval for Abel Ferrara's work on 1993's Body Snatchers, another film that Gordon was lined up to make before it got caught up in major studio politics and one that came out remarkably well under the circumstances. Earlier in the book, there are several mentions of a film version of Lovecraft's story 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth' as far back as 1986. It was initially planned as his follow-up effort to Re-Animator so it's heartening to know it would finally get made as Dagon in 2001.
It seems nearly every filmmaker has a cursed production at some stage in their career and Robot Jox certainly had more than its fair share of setbacks. External factors beyond the filmmaker's control are made clear. Don Coscarelli shares similar stories in his autobiography 'True Indie', with relation to Bubba-Ho-Tep. Gordon talks about how 'Fear Itself' was taken off the air half way through the season to make room for the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Despite decent ratings the remaining shows weren't broadcast when the games were over. Of the films that did get made he laments that certain titles never got a chance to find an audience in cinemas, in particular The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit (made for Disney's Home Video division) which got caught up in a dispute between warring factions at the head of Disney and Dagon (which went straight to DVD). It's especially galling today when the multiplexes have become such a wasteland. Like many others, I discovered Gordon's work on VHS and later DVD, a reminder of how pivotal home viewing has been for film lovers over the last 40 years or so. He points out that Robot Jox did very well on VHS, despite its reputation as a flop. The home video market allowed his films to find an audience in ways that cinema distribution never could.
Severe stress and health concerns surrounded the making of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and eventually forced him to drop out two weeks before the film was scheduled to begin shooting. He says that the finished film is not too far removed from what he set out to make, because much of it resembled the work he had already planned and storyboarded. It could have taken his career in a very different direction and garnered other major studio assignments. It's a fascinating "what if?", much like with David Lynch being offered a chance to make Return of the Jedi in the early 1980s. I consider the period from Robot Jox (1989) through Daughter of Darkness (1990) and The Pit and the Pendulum (1991) to Fortress (1992) to be the least impressive stretch of his career. Just for the record, I still find all of these films to be highly watchable but I think they lack some of the zest of his best work. The professional struggles he encountered and difficulties working with studio meddling as well as the many projects that floundered in Development Hell may have had a detrimental effect on his work but there is never a stage in his career where one might have lost faith in his abilities.
He accurately predicted there may not be too many more films left in a 2006 interview. It's sad to read during the most productive phase of his film career that he wasn't sure how many films he had remaining in him and made me wonder how long his health issues (his death in 2020 was a result of multiple organ failure) were effecting him. Many film enthusiasts didn't realise how lucky we all were to have John Carpenter until he stepped away from directing after the hostile reception to Ghosts of Mars in 2001. Gordon's film career similarly came to an abrupt end. That no new films would get made by him after Stuck is a perfect example of the sorry state of American film since the financial crash. If such a thing doesn't already exist, there is probably a great thought piece to be written on US cinema since 2008 and how the industry has gradually bottled out of investing in any project that carries the slightest element of risk, uncertainty or even vaguely challenging ideas, something that has been exacerbated by the rise of streaming platforms.
After reading this collection, Stuart Gordon's post-2008 career now seems like a much more productive and fruitful period than I had previously thought. For a long time I held out hope that another feature would get made but I should have been searching elsewhere. Despite several film projects failing to get off the ground, resulting in a huge array of unproduced scripts, he remained active in other fields, and got to make acclaimed theatre work, a radio play and an autobiography (see below). The later theatre projects 'Nevermore: An Evening with Edgar Allan Poe',* 'Taste' and 'Re-Animator: The Musical'** all sound like he was open to risky and challenging new ventures. There was also the radio play "The Hound" from Tales From Beyond the Pale, which actually gives us a further addition (or addendum) to his series of Lovecraft adaptations. This collection also made me aware of other projects he was involved in and I made sure to add The Dentist and Progeny (both of which he co-wrote) to the top of my rental list. Like Joe Dante (another worthy subject for film studies), Gordon was an engaging cinephile and made several entertaining contributions to the Trailers from Hell website in which he covered films such as Nightmare Alley, Ride the High Country, Mr. Sardonicus and Cannibal Holocaust. A chapter where he discusses two of his favourite filmmakers - Roman Polanski and Stanley Kubrick is full of great insights in to their work and what made makes them masters of their craft. It also contains lovely tributes from the likes of Barbara Crampton, that really brings home what made his work so special and a splendidly detailed bibliography of articles and weblinks.
While scrolling through the bibliography I noticed a mention of 'Naked Theatre and Uncensored Horror', a book written by Gordon with a 2022 publication date. This had escaped my attention until now but it seems that Gordon had written his memoirs prior to his death two years ago and FAB Press had announced in 2020 that it will be publishing the book in the near future. Wonderful news and much like with Tobe Hooper it seems that fans and film scholars will have two incredible resources to draw on for assessing this remarkable career with plenty of information coming directly from the subject himself. At one point Gordon states: "I think movies have life spans" (pg. 65) and his work certainly lives on and only gains in stature as a result of this excellent collection. Already a major highlight of 2022 for me.
* A one-man show, featuring Jeffrey Combs as Poe. I don't think there is a film or audio version of this show available. Gordon was interested in doing a film version but according to Combs, he was opposed to the idea of doing a taping of the show.
** It's a source of regret now that I may have been able to see a performance of this at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival had I known about it sooner.
Links:
FAB Press announcement: https://twitter.com/fab_press/status/1557692979393007618
FilmInt book review by Thomas M. Puhr: http://filmint.nu/stuart-gordon-interviews-michael-doyle-review-thomas-m-puhr/
Wicked Horror.com review: https://wickedhorror.com/horror-reviews/stuart-gordon-interviews-a-singularly-subversive-spirit-book-review/
