Original subtitles

It's showtime, folks.

He was always there. He

wasn't one of these guys, well, take a crew and go out there and shoot this,

know. I mean, he'd be the first one to get out there and pick up a camera.

One fellow there that was playing the monster

almost... Almost passed out because I wasn't getting any air.

The material that I used on my face was kind of shrinking in on me, and boy, the

pain was really getting bad.

Those were the days when you really had to know what the heck you were doing.

They live for king, kill for king.

All of the major characters are skeezy bastards.

They live it up and love it up at a restless pace, driven by the

racing fever in their blood.

I remember distinctly eating a banana and enjoying watching this other guy

this girl.

Deadly sharks once saved his life.

Now he lives and kills as one of them. He was just going to shove it by her,

know, just so you'd see it was a real shark go by her. Well, that shark didn't

die. When they put it back into the water, it started moving around.

Here is sheer terror.

And it was alive.

She does a brilliant job because she's scared to death for real.

And that's mainly the director. They can take the film any way they want. It'll

be heaven or it'll be hell. It starts with them. But one thing's for certain.

there are rules to filmmaking, Bill will find a way to break them.

I think that's why they called him Wild Bill.

Movies, dreams, glamour, excitement are all a part of the continual fascination

with an industry which has become a multi -billion dollar business.

Bill, your background in the industry spans many years and includes numerous

film projects as a producer and a director, as well as an extensive

as an executive in various film and television companies. Billy, what makes

partnership so special?

I was born in Miami, Florida, which was a very small town at that time.

And what I remember most is up before the war, you know, we were still in the

Depression, and I used to get up to walk to school, which was about two miles.

And my parents had a restaurant, and I'd get up seven in the morning. When I

walked out to go to school, there'd be 50 men.

sleeping on our front lawn waiting for a dishwasher job.

You know, Saturday was a big day for us to go to the movies.

As a kid, you didn't know directors like you do today, but the one director that

impressed me the most was John Ford.

And I loved Drums Along the Mohawk, and then one of my other favorite movies was

Gunga Din.

with Cary Grant and Victor McLaughlin, which I don't think today they could

repeat that cast.

And what I loved about that, which I've always tried to do a little bit, is, you

know, here that was a serious, dramatic, more or less action -type film, but

still some of the action and the characters were what I call serious

Where's Sergeant Cutter?

Hey, take your hands off that man.

My sister was in the USO, and all the men were drafted. They drafted up to 45

years of age.

And so it ended up that they drafted me. I was like 11, 12 years old, to play

one of the parts. And they had a dance number that they did, the Chic of

So I played the Chic, and I sat there with my turban on, and all the girls

danced around.

In the summer, I'd go up to visit my aunt in Long Island.

And in those days, 42nd Street, there was about 10 theaters that played double

and triple showings of movies there, mostly older movies. And for

10 cents, I'd stay in the movies all day, seven, eight hours a day, just to

watch all of these old movies.

And then when I went into high school, I was sort of a maverick type kid.

I was sort of a Marlon Brando before Marlon Brando because I never dressed

wore t -shirts and all of that. And when everybody else was dressing up, so this

one teacher grabbed me and she says, I need you to be in one of my plays. She

sort of drafted me and I played Jonathan in Arsenic and Old Lace.

And so that sort of started me on the act again.

We did a one -act play called Submerged, which there were six men were trapped

in a submarine. So I memorized the whole play, and I played all six characters,

and I'd change from the rough guy to the meek guy, et cetera, et cetera. So I

won the Florida State Dramatic Contest in high school. Right after high school,

then I did Summer Stock.

up in Woodstock, New York.

Lee Marvin was one of the actors in Summer Stock with me. That playhouse

down, and a buddy of mine, Dan Magnum, and I hitchhiked over to Chatham on the

Cape, and a ride led us out in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and we're

through town.

And I said to Dan Magnum, I said, Dan, I need to get a pack of chewing gum. So I

walked into the...

Greyhound bus station, and here Grace is sitting there. Well, naturally we knew

each other from high school. We'd never dated her.

What are you doing here? Well, what are you doing here? So after doing summer

stock and doing some off -Broadway, when I came back to Miami, I called her up

for a date, and we've been married 120 years ever since.

I always say I'd seen too many John Wayne movies, and when the Korean War

up, I volunteered to go in the Navy.

And so I was in the Navy, you know, during the Korean War for two years.

the Navy, you know, I still had the acting bug, but I turned to writing,

and I wrote four or five screenplays, which I have the rejection slips.

prove that I wrote them because it was very hard to sell back then.

There wasn't enough money at that time. So I went on the Miami Fire Department

and I was a fireman.

Firemen used to sit around the fire station and wait for a fire to come.

And so I would write scripts then and there.

And it ended up that that was more like the bread and butter coming in.

when I was trying to sell a screenplay.

At that time, Fidel Castro was up in the mountains in Cuba. Nobody knew he was a

communist, and he was sort of a hero, and Baptista's army was trying to get

and nobody could find him and all that. So I wrote a script called Flight for a

Rebel, which was about an American soldier fortune that flew.

guns down to Castro and so forth. I ended up being the actor who was

the soldier of fortune.

So we filmed like a couple weekends and all of that, and it ended up that

he ran out of money and the pictures never finished.

A Cuban named Joe Rodero, he hired me to act in a couple of his movies. One was

called Beatrice. When we went out,

He only had like three or four people in the crew and, you know, we were

shooting on 35 millimeter.

When we looked at it on the big screen, you know, it looked pretty good.

So that sort of got an insight that you don't need these 80 people with all

these huge budgets, you know, you just need some good people that are gung -ho

and have an

a screenplay named The Checkered Flag.

The Checkered Flag was a young driver that really didn't have the

financing to compete with other sports car drivers.

And there was one character, the older one, which was played by Charlie Martin.

He was sort of a... Older, sophisticated type guy that was supposed to be a

multimillionaire. A young driver becomes more or less the kept gigolo or

lover of this older driver's wife.

Why should you pay me $50 ,000 when you can get some thug to do it for five?

Because no thug can drive a race car like you.

The first day, the director, who'd never directed a movie before, he was also...

producing the movie he had a loss of nervous breakdown and couldn't

continue and everything was chaotic well the only real professional on the crew

was a dp who was an old hollywood pro who had retired to florida said what the

hell the writer knows all about it make him the director you know so here i'm

sitting in the corner of the room like scared to death i'm going to direct this

movie So, you know, I knew the script, naturally, since I'd written it, and I

knew actors since I'd been an actor, but I knew nothing, nothing about the

technical end of which lenses and how the sound all works. So

from that, I always thought visually.

If I go, you go too.

Little thing I call double indemnity.

Car's ready, Bill. I took my vacation time for 30 days.

So I was still in the fire department when we did the checkered flag.

When the checkered flag was more or less a success, I quit the fire department

to go full -time in the film business.

I had to be completely, completely insane.

Because I had three little kids then. My wife was not working.

And here I gave up the security of a fire department career.

And when I think back, I had to be nuts.

three kids and a wife to support, to go full -time in the film business.

And at the time, there was really an industry growing in South Florida. I

it was there, but it wasn't really a lot of activity, but it was becoming the

low -budget film capital in the industry, slowly but surely.

And what it was, it was basically escapees from the North, so to speak,

who just wanted to go down and enjoy the weather.

And if we can make it pay by making a picture, all the better. In those days,

was a pretty whimsical business.

I mean, you know, you had a lot of people that were trying to be in the

business. Not unlike the current generation's, you know, attitude about

to make a film, but it was much more complicated, much more difficult.

It was a furnace, you know, that no matter what you came up with, no matter

bad or how good it was, you could get it played off.

Have you ever had an Egyptian feast?

Herschel and I were shooting in Miami.

You know, back then, we must have made 12 or 15 pictures somewhere down in

Florida, anything to get out of Chicago in the winter. And Bill Griffey came by

and introduced himself, said he'd heard about us and talked pictures.

He certainly knew what he was talking about.

I was much impressed that here was a sophisticated guy, not the typical hard

-boiled, cigar -chomping independent filmmaker, who treated me with respect I

didn't really deserve, because he already had something of a reputation as

successful independent filmmaker.

Where I was an intruder coming into his turf in Florida.

with a type of movie that hadn't been made before.

And it was very possible, I felt, that he might say, in his own polite way, who

the heck do you think you are? And that wasn't Bill at all.

Well, Del Tenney made two horror movies.

So Del came down to Florida to do this movie. And so he contacted me to help

get the crew and all that.

I ended up being the second unit director.

I still felt more comfortable in a studio with the actors rather than out

the swamp with the zombies and all that.

Behind the glamour of Florida's sporting life, a blazing torrent of emotions,

and suddenly a grueling race becomes a deadly vendetta.

I was looking around for subject matter to write another script to

get in to try and raise the money for. So I went to a boat race, which was

big hydroplanes, and there was an Italian driver named Enzio Selva who had

come over to the United States with his boat.

He had just beaten every American hydroplane there was all over the United

States. So he was 57 years old, and he announced before this race, this is my

last race, and I'm going to turn this race boat over to my son.

So he goes out, and he pours the coal to it. Well, he got going so fast that

that boat went like this, and he fell out, and the boat fell right on him and

killed him instantly.

And the whole water was just covered in blood. You can see the blood. And his

son dove off the dock there and tried to swim out to the boat.

So I looked around. I saw there was a guy up on top of a van.

And he was shooting a 16 -millimeter shot. And I ran up to him. I said, you

that. He said, I got it perfect. So I ended up, I bought that shot.

from him, the actual hydroplane flipping and turning over, and he'd shot some

other racing footage.

So I wrote a whole script about the same thing, but I switched it from an

Italian driver to an American driver. Sort of stole my own stuff from the

checkered flag about an older guy and a younger guy competing and all.

I had it where this young driver takes over the boat from his father who got

killed.

I had the father killed by this older millionaire drunk guy who was drunk when

he was driving.

Weave that flag down there! Weave that flag!

The only good actors in Miami were members of the Screen Actors Guild.

So they had a rule, you know, that Saturdays and Sundays was double time.

The very first person that walked through the door when I became an agent

Bill Griffey.

He said he was going to be filming on weekends with a non -union crew.

So I brought some actors in for him to have them read.

Because he wanted to use that SAG Actors, he had to make a deal with

Actors Guild. And we could only shoot on the weekends.

So that made it a little difficult.

I used Joe Morrison, who was a good young actor, and then again I used

Martin. Then he asked if I would play one of the parts because I'd been

opposite the actors, and I said, no, I don't think I'm supposed to do that. And

I said, I've never been around a film crew before, so I'd love to drop in and

see what's going on. At that time Castro had taken over, and Cuba had a very...

excellent film community, which had all fled to Miami.

When you have a country that's coming apart, and where you have a country

there's no law, Miami became a destination.

And it was a matter of having a room rented so that anybody who wanted to

over or could come over, basically, and more than wanted to, could come over,

would have a piece of the floor to flip in.

And so...

With that, a lot of professionals as well as a lot of labor came in.

So we organized all these Cubans that were good sound people and camera

and we used them on weekends when they weren't working.

I showed up on the weekend in Coconut Grove, and there was an actor named

Mavrelis who was on the set, and he was...

script supervisor for Bill. About halfway through the day, Perry Mavrelis

over to me, because he knew me from the theater days, and he said, I've got a

chance to read for a part over at the Grove here.

And he just handed everything to me, the book, the watch, the whole thing. I

walked over to Bill and I said, you know, you're in big trouble. Perry just

and he handed all this to me. Bill said, no big deal, just keep track of

everything, write it down, time it for me, okay?

Okay. And then I was not only the road producer and director, but I was also

the production manager, the assistant director.

wardrobe.

I did everything and I worked Monday through Friday

prepping for the next week and I'd shoot Saturday and Sunday.

And that was really my first memory of going to a set and the lead actor on

movie really didn't like children but I wouldn't give up on him.

And I kept on talking to him, and I didn't know really that he had to

for his lines, and I kept on bothering him and talking to him until finally I

think he thought, oh, this kid's pretty cool, okay?

Bill's movies are perfect examples of true regional filmmaking.

And with regional filmmaking, you really use the resources that you have at

hand. In many cases, that means pulling the family together.

Grace would make copies of the scripts, and in many cases, make lunch for the

cast and crew.

Or she was a corpse in an ambulance.

They put her on a stretcher and she was a corpse.

That's a part of low -budget filmmaking, too. Everybody is family.

The interesting thing about distribution back in those days is the majors were

all in New York City and the studios were out in L .A. and there were no

distributors out there. I screened it for...

Allied Artist, and the vice president said, yeah, we like the movie, blah,

blah. And I sat around New York for about a week, and they wouldn't make a

decision. I call up the president of Allied Artists, who was Steve Broidy,

was out in California.

So he said, jump on a plane, get out here. Let me look at the film, and I'll

give you a decision, yes or no. So I flew out to Los Angeles.

and I'd never been to Los Angeles in my life, and I only knew one person there

who was an actor, Dan Magnum, who I'd been in summer stock with back in

Woodstock. I went into Allied Artist Studios, screened a movie for him, and

Steve Brody said, you know, I like it. Come in my office at 10 o 'clock in the

morning, bring your attorney, and we'll iron out a deal.

So I faked it pretty good, and I said, fine.

Fine, I appreciate it, Mr. Brody. He got out of the studio, and I called up Dan.

I said, Dan, I said, I made this movie, and Allied

Artists is interested in it, and they want me to bring in an attorney. Do you

know any attorney that knows anything about the film business?

And he said, yeah. He said, one of my closest friends just opened his own

office. Geez, just opened his own office.

somebody that's got a little experience, a little gray hair, you know.

And he said, oh, no, no, no. He just opened his own office, but he, for seven

years, he was head legal counsel for Allied Artists, which was a company I

dealing with. So I hired this guy, and I walked in their office, and their legal

staff and all was there, and their mouths just dropped open.

Because my attorney had written this distribution contract and he knew every

zinger in it. And he made the best independent distribution deal in the

of independence at that time, which there were very few independents around.

And I became sort of Steve Broidy's fair -haired boy because I was a young

producer, director.

And he put me on to an Elvis Presley project.

which they had made a movie called Tickle Me with Elvis that had done good,

he wanted another one. So we ironed out the whole deal, and I'd worked months

and months on this, and so Steve had flown into New York, and so I went up to

New York to meet with him, and there was a big stock manipulation that had

overthrown him, and he'd been president for 15 years.

So the whole thing went down the tube.

So that taught me right then and there, when you're working on a major project

for a major, I always did that as a hobby.

And I always did independence as a living.

I had a company called Thunderbird International.

He was actually a building contractor in construction, but he got sort of

hypnotized by the glamour of the film business, which I always say, it's not

glamorous, it's all hard work.

And they had acquired Sting of Death.

I had a friend of mine who was involved with a thing, and his name was Al

Dempsey. I told him that I would be interested in going in there, that I'd

to work on that picture.

So I went for an interview with Griffay, but what he was interviewing was

elderly men, and at that time I was not elderly.

So I went home and took out the makeup.

And away I went. I started making myself up to be an elderly gentleman.

And I went back to him and sat down and read the lines for him and everything

else. So anyway, I did not get the part.

So I peeled off the makeup right in front of him and I told him, I said,

don't really want to be an actor in the thing. What I want to be is I want to be

the monster.

And I'm the only one that can play that part.

Doug was a reincarnation of Lon Channing Jr.

I mean, he just loved horror stuff with a passion, and he had worked with a

distributor producer named K. Gordon Murray, who had done a lot of stuff that

Doug worked on, that kind of stuff. So Doug came, and Doug just wanted so bad

do this jellyfish monster.

So Goodface says, all right, you're the monster.

Design me a suit.

Here's what you're going to look like. And he told me, and from there we went

on, and Dempsey and I created this suit. We took a quarter -inch neopron diver

suit, and we took the flippers that go with it, and we cut notches in the

flippers to look pointed, and then we also took a plastic beads -like and hung

them around the neck, and then we designed a big bubble, and we sealed it

together.

and it was in blue plastic, so it was difficult to see in there.

And then we coated it with Vaseline on top of that.

I mean, I don't know what a jellyfish man would look like, but

I'm not sure he should look like a giant condom, but that's what's so brilliant

about this. There's this guy wearing this, basically a garbage bag, and it's

perfect.

A couple of things on which was a disaster.

There was a scene where these people lived in a real nice house. He had a

beautiful house right on the canal in Miami.

So I had enough experience then that I knew what a film crew does.

I mean, they move into a house and it's a place to work.

I mean, they're dragging cable and everything across these beautiful rugs.

the worst thing happened was his wife had a...

antique Chinese vase that was hundreds if not a thousand years old or whatever.

And she had it mounted there and the boom man is following this shot.

He follows it and the end of the boom hits that thing and falls and breaks the

antique vase.

They like carried her away in a basket.

Anyway,

he learned his lesson quick.

And then you have a Neil Sedaka song.

doing the Jilly Jally Jellyfish.

And everybody, all these teenage guys and gals are doing this weird flap in

their hands.

And that brings up one of the things that's in every Bill Graffay film, and

is a dance number.

And Bill has this wonderful, he just zeroes in on the girls' asses, so you

all these beautiful bikini bottoms, just shaking it.

And what more do you want in motion picture entertainment?

Take it easy, Tiger.

That killed me.

He had a friend that had a hunting camp out in the middle of the Everglades. I

said, Del, you know, there's places near Miami that look just like the

Everglades. No, no, no, no.

We're going out to the real Everglades. And I got this hunting camp free.

Amazing. All of this out in the middle of the Everglades.

So we go out the Tamiami Trail, and we get in airboats, and we get the crew out

there and all that. When we finally got there, everybody was setting up. We get

all out ready to shoot, and there's a cable that runs from the air flex to the

battery, and it'd fall overboard.

They couldn't find it.

So we had to send an airboat back to the time we had to trail back to the

airport. So we didn't start shooting until one or two in the afternoon by the

time we got everything out there. Bill said, okay, Julio and Doris, listen to

me. The executive producer, the money man, is going to be coming in to see how

fast we're shooting, and we've got to shoot quite a bit of footage today. So

matter what happens, I don't care what happens, if I have to shut...

This shot's down because we can't shoot it. He said immediately, Julio, just

grab your camera. Doris, follow Julio. Go to the second shot, and we'll let the

crew clean up the mess. The A .D. can straighten things out.

We'll go shoot the second one. The first scene we were going to shoot, they were

going to be in an airboat heading for.

So I got to drive airboats. And you have control of an airboat as long as you

are maintaining speed or you're increasing speed.

But once you decelerate, you just don't have that.

Pretty soon he yells, action.

The airboat starts coming in. Everything's going great. And then we're

around a curve and I have to slow down. And I forgot.

And when you slow down, you can't control the boat, and it would come to

bend, and I couldn't make the bend.

Suddenly, things go out of control.

The airboat heads for a tree, slams into it.

And Jack Nagel, one of my, you know, co -actors and everything else, he fell out

and hit his head on a tree.

Jack Nagel's got blood running down his forehead.

And the guys, you know, Joe Morrison's trying to help him, and then this pretty

young lady who was the female lead, she don't know what to think. And boy, he

had a big, big scab there and everything else, so we had to write it in the

script, and then the shots that came before that, we had to draw one on and

everything else, so we would be consistent.

Bill says...

Go to the next shot. Go to the next shot.

So Julio and I take off for the next shot. Got about halfway through that

and all of a sudden these women that were off in the background over by the

hunting yard started screaming, Snake!

There's a snake over here!

Everybody went running to them.

And Bill just kind of threw his hands up.

But the executive producer did come that day, and we did get all the footage. We

did real well.

Really appreciated how he handled the people, because he was very patient, and

he knew what he wanted, and he got what he wanted. Our producer, executive

producer, had decided that we were going to go out into the ocean, and we had

a scuba diver with us who really was supposed to be top.

We had the beautiful girls that were going to be in the water, and the scuba

diver was going to be in the water, too.

So we show up in the morning, and there was 12 -foot seas, 30 -mile -an -hour

winds.

I said, Richard, we cannot go out and stew underwater in this.

Bill kept saying, you know, you can't shoot this thing here. We need to go up

the middle of the state to one of the springs where there's clear water.

This is not going to work. I'm telling you, it's just too rough out there.

I hired this boat.

I'm not going to give up my money. We're going.

Boom, boom.

Then we go out. The soldier's key.

Slowly but surely, everybody on that boat was violently ill.

Except for Bill Graffay and me. We're running around that boat trying to help

people. And in the meantime, this same man is saying, no, no, no, it's all

right. Don't worry about it. So I said, Richard, we can't shoot underwater.

Look how rough it is.

And so one of these divers wanted to impress the bikini baby. And he says,

Richard, I'll go over the side and see how it is. It's got to be calm down

below. So this diver goes over, and within one minute, the guy, help,

help! And he's being swept out to sea, and we're throwing him donuts and all of

this, you know. And needless to say, the next weekend, we were up in the middle

of the state at one of those wonderful springs where you can shoot right

clear water sensibly.

Egon, there's a maniac loose around here. We've got to go to the mainland

help and get Karen and Louise to safety.

We've got to go now.

Two of the great things in this. One is the monster.

and the monster's secret lair.

And the lair is great because it's an underwater lab.

It's fabulous. It's got a little opening that everybody climbs up in and it's

got a little thing there and makes noises.

You know, I wish I had one myself.

I would hang out in there all the time. When we set up the fight scene between

Joe Morrison and myself... He came out of the water, and there I was standing

next to the tank, and I had an air hose that was going up the back of me and

through the suit and keeping that head blown up because it was necessary

to keep on breathing. So they had the air hose going. They had the compressor

outside the building, and the compressor was going, and I'm getting in there,

and I'm getting ready to do the fight scene with Joe Morris, and we're really

into it.

Somebody goes out, they're outside, and says, hey, they're shooting a picture in

there. We've got to turn off this compressor. It's making too much noise.

As soon as we started to roll film, we heard everybody screaming, and help him,

help him. Oh, my heavens, please. Where is everybody?

The head starts going down like this, and Bill's sitting out there in the

and he's noticing that head go down, and all of a sudden he jumps up and says,

get up there quick.

He got up there and he took a knife and slipped the damn thing open, the bag,

and so I could get a good, decent breath.

So, booger face saved my neck there, I'll tell you. When he was a trooper, he

kept playing until he was almost dead.

There was a little more horrendous than I thought it was going to be when I took

the part, but I enjoyed doing it nevertheless, even with the risk that

involved in the thing. We had finished the sting of death.

And in order to put it in a drive -in, you needed a companion piece because

wanted double features.

They had to get a picture for April 15th, which was always the magic date

the drive -ins to open up north.

So they couldn't find one, so they said the magic word, oh, if we could only do

another film immediately, we'd finance it. So Bill went home, and overnight, he

wrote a script.

He wrote Death Curse of Tartu.

Well, I'll take the ancient tried and true thing where the pyramids

in Egypt, the Pharaoh comes back.

So I just switched all that to the Everglades.

Ancient Indian witch doctor lives in a tomb, and anybody disturbs his tomb,

he'll come back as a wild animal.

you know, destroy them. Frankly, I'm afraid to set foot on that burial mound.

You're afraid?

Now that's hard to believe. True.

That mound is haunted.

One night I went to bed and I had a beautiful nightmare.

And this nightmare gave me Tartu.

They were selling bones in the cemetery based underneath the church

on Hallow's Eve.

And everybody was going there and getting their relatives' bones and

that. And I was in there looking around for something and didn't know what I was

looking for. Well, I finally found it in an open grave.

I looked in that open grave and I said, wow, that's me.

And that was Tartu.

And I said, now I know what he looks like. That's fantastic.

And I woke up.

And when I woke up, I told my wife, Rosemary, I said, put the coffee on.

I'm going to be busy. And that's what I did. I got it all made up.

and it took me like four hours to do it. And I was up at 5, so at 9 o 'clock, we

called Graffae and had him come over to the house, and he came over and took one

look at it, and he said, that's perfect, that's just what we want, that's going

to be great.

He said, the only problem with this thing is we're going to have to shoot it

seven days, which is impossible.

We were out in the Everglades.

The heat out there was terrible, and, of course, I got out there too early, I

think, because I was waiting around and waiting around, and all the time the sun

was beating down on me, and I felt like my head was in a vice because the

material that I used on my face was kind of shrinking in on me, and, boy, the

pain was really getting bad.

He's a strong boy.

He can take care of himself.

No! He was beaten in the face by his mate!

We had this scene where this girl was to be attacked by an alligator, and I had

this animal trainer, a fellow named Frank Weed, who was really a wild man.

He lived in the Everglades, and he had all kinds of animals. He had panthers

alligators and everything.

So I said, you know, we've got to do this scene in the morning, Frank, where

this girl brings me a really tame, docile alligator.

So we're all on the set, 7 in the morning, and he pulls up in his pickup

He had this alligator. It was so big. I mean, it was at least 12 -footer. It was

so gigantic.

What we did is we took a rubber arm, a fake arm,

and we dug a post hole with a post hole digger, and we put the real girl's arm

into the post hole, and then we had this rubber arm come out.

and the alligator was supposed to be chewing on her arm.

So I explained the whole scene to the girl, and the girl said, forget about

forget about it. There's no way I'm going to, you know, lay next to that

alligator. So I said to her, look, there's nothing to it. I said, let me

you what I do. So the alligator's there, and he had his, you know, thank God he

had his mouth wired shut.

So anyway, I stick my hand in the hole, and this alligator rolls right on top of

me, beating me with his tail.

And so I'm like Johnny Osceola. I got this alligator, and I'm wrestling, and

Frank dives in on top of the alligator, and the three of us are rolling around.

And by then, the girl's 100 feet away, running like hell, you know. So it took

me a long time to talk her into doing that scene.

And then there was a scene where we were inside the cave, and I was inside

a coffin.

I remember going into this little garage.

That was the set.

And I said to myself, you've got to be kidding.

I went in, and from the moment you open the door, you hit the wall of the cave.

It was all made of cardboard, painted in green and whatnot.

But it was pretty dark, so you couldn't get away with anything. A little light

here, a little light there, lots of close -ups.

but then you put sound effects of rocks instead of paper, and it's how fake we

make it.

I was working as a good Seminole Indian, and this actor came on the set, and he

refused to shave his chest.

And I went up to Bill, and I said, Bill, I'll shave my chest.

Put some more paint on me and a hat, you know, a fur hat or something.

They'll never know it's the same character.

So I ended up becoming the warrior.

And the lid went up, and then my hand came over to the side, and then I sat

And then when I sat up, I held a still position, and then there was a

between me and coming up with the Indian.

And there's this transformation of Tartu into me, and I go out into the woods

and run after this beautiful blonde.

and end up in quicksand.

But as the Indian was going down, froze it, and it transitioned, was back to

Tartu again, which was me.

So here I am, I'm in the quicksand, and you see me going down very, very slowly.

And that last little bit of hair on my head just whipped around, it goes down

inside.

The quicksand.

Bill always has had the imagination to be able to cast somebody and see what

potential there is.

They don't just go by the last name like they do here, you know.

If you're Hispanic, they only give you a Hispanic role. So he cast me as a

Seminole Indian, which is really interesting.

Tartu's prophecy was that only nature could destroy him.

How right he was.

Do you know what? We did it.

We did it and... The actors and the crew, just everybody worked so hard, and

got the thing ready.

I'm also very fond of Death Curse of Tartu, despite the fact that nothing

happens. I just think that's just great, and I love the, I just, you know, it's

low budget, it's cheap, so what? It's fun.

As I sat there, I thought, you know, I could probably not maybe do that, but I

could probably afford to get in the business at that level.

The idea of raising millions of dollars to make a movie would be like the man on

the moon for a kid like me, but the idea that I could make a movie in just a

week and write it in just a day and maybe get by for $25 ,000 or $30 ,000,

is still a lot of money, but it was not the kind of money that everyone in the

industry said movies were being made for. It was an incredibly low amount of

money. So I kind of went away thinking, wow, this is something that I might

could get involved in, and unfortunately I did.

They were very successful, and from that,

Joe Fink and Juan Gato, they had a story idea, which was true, about

two sisters in Mexico that would put ads in the paper and go out into

the countryside and entice these young girls into coming into Mexico City

and Tijuana.

What can I do for you?

I spoke to a lady a little while ago about a job. And it was a story about

that had been hired under false pretenses.

They were supposed to be like maids and servants and all, but they actually more

or less kidnapped them and used them as a house of prostitution, and then they'd

murder them and buried them on a ranch. So this was all a true story, and it was

called The Devil's Sister.

There was a big, she was Cuban and Latin American star named Velia Martinez,

who was well known at the time in the Latin community.

And so I cast her as Carmen.

I would only charge you a thousand pesos and you can stay all night.

And I played one of the villains. I remember distinctly eating a banana and

enjoying watching this other guy rape this girl. I mean, it was...

At the time, it was just an acting role, but, you know, in the circumstances, by

thinking about it, it was a horrendous story, which timely today exists.

If you want to eat, you have to let me make love.

The gun battle at the end, we had no squibs.

And I wanted squibs hitting in the dirt and all around the police.

And this guy says, oh, I've got an Army 306 Garand.

He said, I'm an excellent shot. I can shoot around you. Well, the cameraman

said, forget about it.

So I said, oh, what the hell? And I took the area and I laid down and they put a

sound blanket over me. And he literally shot 306 bullets all in front of me and

all the ricochets were going right in front of me, like a foot, two feet from

me. And I never told my wife that until.

when we watched the movie in the theater, and I said, you know how we did

When I see the film, I can't believe I shot this in 10 days.

And it was the only film I ever shot in black and white. The Devil Sisters was

Bill's fifth movie, and it was very different from all the films he'd done

before as well as after. First of all, he uses a flashback structure.

It's very downbeat, which is something he really has never done before.

I mean, it's nothing, nothing today, you know, to show a full nudity and, you

know. wild sex stuff, but in those days it was quite daring what we did.

As a child, growing up in this business and growing up with having a father who

made movies, it was just something he did for an occupation. The only

between my father and other parents was that he was more eccentric.

He would come home with shark fins and he would come home with body limbs, and

we were able to play with those body limbs, and our house was the cool house

come to.

Well,

I had had success with the checkered flag and racing fever, commercial

I figured, well, I'll now go to stock car racing.

So I wrote a script called Pit Stop, which was about a stock car driver.

We were just starting pre -production, and I read in Hollywood Report of

Variety, Roger Corman's Wild Angels, the biggest independent grossing film.

So that was like the first motorcycle film.

They're wild, and no angels.

Lordy fire.

getting their kicks from violence and torture.

Marlon Brando's film really didn't depict the now

-type motorcycle gangs that were now in existence.

So I went to my investors and I said, I know you think I'm completely nuts, but

I don't want to do Pit Stop. I want to rewrite it and call it The Wild

Rebels. But I still incorporated the race car driver where

this gang, they want to rob banks.

So rather than rob them on motorcycles, they used a car and they more or less

ticed him or kidnapped him to be the driver because he was an excellent

You don't love me and I hate it Loving you the way I do If you don't love me,

get in my world. There was no... Steve Alemo, at the time, was what I

call a bubblegum idol. He was a singer, and he had his own show on, I think,

either CBS or NBC, called Where the Action Was, which Dick Clark produced.

approached Steve to star in The Wild Rebels.

I was kind of scared. I'd been a performer, I'd been on television, I'd

performing in front of thousands of people, but...

For some reason, the camera is kind of intimidating because I get to play that

over and over again.

And when you see something on television, it's gone.

When you see something live, it's gone. But when you have it on film, you make a

mistake in word, it's over.

They can play that over. Here, see that mistake? See that mistake? So he made me

feel very comfortable.

Other members of the cast was John Vela played the head of the motorcycle gang.

John I'd used in several movies.

Are we going to the races?

We're going to the races.

Jeff Gillen was a really good actor, a good character actor.

And he was a real close friend with the director Bob Clark, who was also from

Miami. Bob Clark went on to do some really good films, you know, with

and so forth.

And there was a price fighter named Willie Pastrano who had been the light

heavyweight champion of the world.

And Willie was a wild and crazy guy, so I thought he would be great as one of

the motorcycle gang guys.

I remember Bill said, we're going to have these stunt guys that are going to

in this film, and some of them are real Hells Angels.

I said, they are?

And so they showed up, and yes, they were real Hells Angels.

Some of them were giving me a hard time.

Willie Pastrano became sort of my bodyguard, and he went, and Willie would

to him. I think they were a little afraid of Willie because he'd been a

heavyweight champion.

You going to join us?

Sorry, friends.

But I like these clothes.

I'm not about to exchange them for a suit of stripes.

And Willie Pastrano being a fighting champion and a very good fighting

was always a fighter even though he retired from boxing.

We had a fight scene in the script and It called

for me, this rock and roll singer, to beat up this bad guy who happened to be

Willie Pastrana.

And he said to us,

no, this is not going to work.

And he told Bill, he says, no, this is not going to work. And Bill says, well,

it's in the script. You're a bad guy.

You can't win.

So he says, all right, all right, but only if I get to choreograph this.

So now he's choreographing with left hook combinations.

uppercuts, right crosses, combination this and that and that. And I think I

learned more about boxing than I learned about acting because I spent more time

with Willie rehearsing these fight scenes.

There's a scene at the end of the movie where the gang, after robbing a bank, is

a big police chase and they go into a...

down on Key Biscayne, which is south of Miami.

There's an original lighthouse, which is a big brick lighthouse, but it had no

guts, no interior, no stairs or anything.

So we shot all of the exteriors there with them running in, but then I had to

get another lighthouse, which was up at Jupiter, which was maybe 60, 70 miles

north of us.

for the interior winding staircase wall, which there was this big chase in the

thing. I'll never forget when we shot the interior of that. I must have

those stairs to the top of that lighthouse a hundred times.

And even though I was pretty young at the time, my legs were like, I felt like

zombie. I could hardly walk. They were so numb from climbing those stairs.

He gave me a lot of confidence. It was something that I needed.

done a film for somebody who was a hard -nosed guy, I'd have walked off. If I

was making enough money then anyway, I didn't need to do a film.

But he made it comfortable for me, and I couldn't wait to do the second film.

See you later, creep.

We shot it, and I went out to California.

By then, distributors had moved out to California, several of them.

ended up with a company called Crown International.

Crown had a couple of really big accounts, including American

And at some point in the mid-'60s, Sam Arcoff and James Nicholson at American

International decided, well, we're going to open up some offices around the

country. We're going to handle our own distribution in the Western states.

And they cut out Crown. And the president of Crown, Newton Red Jacobs,

pleased with that, and so he began to compete with American International.

Red Jacobs saw the financial possibilities of Wild Rebels since it

second motorcycle picture out. Wild Rebels was really his all -out attack on

American International, which had had a big success with the Wild Angels.

We sold a negative, and I think in Boston alone the thing grossed.

hundred thousand dollars.

I came up with this script which was about these three guys that were

receiving drug runs from Cubans that were working with Castro and all.

Come on aboard, boys. Gather around the peace pipe.

Hey, amigos, don't be bashful. We won't tell Fidel. At the time, Jeremy Slate

was a well -known actor. He'd been in Born Losers. So I

knew Jeremy would be great for the part of Daisy, which was the leader of these

three guys.

We welcome them aboard our boat.

They smoke our grass, drink our wine.

All of a sudden, they want to split.

John David Chandler played Acid, who was really a wild and crazy drug addict in

the movie.

I'm just going to send up a whole battalion.

I try not to think too much.

about scripts.

I try not to think too much about my involvement in them.

If I can do a little bit of what Tracy said and just try to learn your lines

not bump into the furniture, I find that if I can keep it at least

in that direction, then for me personally, I'm better off.

Willie Pastrano had done such a good job in the Wild Rebels, I decided to use

Willie in the film.

You saw where we dropped the barrel?

Yeah, I couldn't miss it. Uh -huh.

Think you could get him for us?

If I could stop shaking long enough.

You got any something I didn't know?

Yeah, it's just fine gold, baby, fine gold.

Bill called me and said, I've got another film that we're going to do.

be interested in doing it? And I said, yes.

I couldn't wait to do it because it was kind of fun. And I thought, well, maybe

I can be a little better in this.

And this part was good. Plus, there was a really pretty girl in this one. So I

thought, this is worth it.

You know, I'm going to break your head open.

I'm going to bust your face.

You junkie.

All of the major characters are skeezy bastards.

And they're just mean -spirited.

Fox who just love killing people. I mean, it's fun.

The coconut grove at the time was a big hippie

compound, and we used one house that all the people in the movie were actual

hippies, practically, other than a few actors.

Life on this earth could be nirvana. If only we allow it, this is it.

Do you dig what I'm saying?

You leave with an uncomplimentary thought.

It actually isn't a drug movie, even though it's about drug smuggling. It's

actually a swamp movie.

We shot in Grinnell's Park, which is a park that has a lot of swamp area

and wooded area.

And here again, I learned my lesson. I don't go to the middle of the Everglades

unless some producer insists on it. He's paying the bills.

Why don't you guys give up, huh?

Why don't you shut up? So Willie lived right next to Grunold's Park.

So he had his big death scene where the FBI shoot him and he falls into the

swamp and all.

Willie Pastrano shot this gun off right by my ear.

And I went, oh, my God.

I can't hear anymore.

What am I going to do? This is how I make a living. I'm a singer. If I can't

hear, what am I going to do?

But Bill Griffey said to me, he said, Steve, take the cotton out of your ear.

So afterward, Willie came up to me, and he had a big 45.

It wasn't an automatic, but it was a .45 caliber revolver.

And it actually had blanks in it. And so Willie said to me, hey, man, I'm

finished shooting. I did my death scene. Can I go home? And I said, oh, yeah,

Willie. So Willie wanders through the Gretel's Park, which is a nice

family -type park.

And there's like a big lake.

And there was a man, his wife, and kids on one side of the lake.

And Willie comes out, and he's covered in stage blood and mud from this death

scene. And then Willie starts screaming at this guy.

Kid, I'm going to kill you and your wife and kids. And all they start shooting

blanks at this guy.

You know, I'm deep in the swamp area of that park there shooting at him. And

this poor guy harges.

wife and kids into a boathouse, and he makes a dash to where there was a

telephone, and he calls the police, you know, and here we hear all these sirens,

and by then Willie has wandered home, and the cops come and surround us, and

here, you know, we had guns and everything.

All right, hold it right there.

This is the FBI.

So it took me a long time.

I mean, there's a lot of blood in the film. I think everybody

gets killed.

It's marvelous.

And again, it's all shot in a swamp.

Bill Griffey is a regional filmmaker, and regional filmmakers use their

surroundings. There's a real time capsule element to the films. It gets to

point where Florida really is the star of most of Bill's movies.

What are you doing down there?

It's cool.

Oh, I'm coming.

I'm coming.

At that time, I had offices, and my company was Film Artists Company.

And so Doug Hobart was working with me.

You know these little gelatin capsules that you get?

The doctor gives you pills and stuff like that. We got big capsules.

And they had a little thing printed up that says, dope.

You put it inside these capsules.

The only thing is, you open the capsule up and take it out and it says, here's

the dope on the Hook Generation.

See it at your local theater.

And we'd go by, you know, high schools and colleges and we'd throw out hundreds

of these capsules and people would pick the capsule up and open and see the Hook

Generation playing at the Roosevelt Theater or whatever.

Worked like a charm.

Really enjoyed that. That was good.

Originally,

I came up with this story, The Grove, because Coconut Grove is more of a

compound of Florida, especially the Miami area.

So I came up with this.

a rich old woman that was sort of a patron of the arts, and she sponsored

writer. But the writer was really a young gigolo, more or less, that lived

the grove. Here, let me look at you.

Oh, aren't you a handsome one today?

I had in mind that the older woman would have loved to have gotten Rita

Hayworth. So I went out to cast...

and I met with Rita Hayworth's agent.

At that time, my budget was a big budget for me. It was $250 ,000.

So I met with Rita Hayworth's agent, and he wanted $250 ,000 for

Rita. I said, there's no way I can't afford it. I said, I can only afford $50

,000 for Rita.

No way, forget about it. So I call up my investors in Miami and I said, you

know, guys, you've got to trust me. You've got to wire me $50 ,000.

So they wired me $50 ,000 and I went to the bank and I got a cashier's check.

And I walked into that agent's office and I said, there's $50 ,000. I said, I

will put that in any bank in the state of California in escrow, but that's it.

Guy said, you got a deal.

Gee, you are a juvenile bitch siren, and you just killed a poet in there.

Hope that's all.

There was a young actor, Stephen Oliver, who was on Peyton Place, which was a

very big television series. So I sent his agent, and Steve himself

called me up, and he was so excited about it.

co -starring in a movie with Rita Hayworth.

So anyway, I got a real good cast out of that.

Pirates World had built a brand -new studio there, so I'd made a deal with

Pirates World, and we built a complete set, which was going to be Stephen

Oliver's Kogan at Grove.

We'd made a deal with a furniture company to rent all of their furniture,

we're going to start shooting on a Monday, and Saturday the guy comes in.

He said, you know, I changed my mind on this rental. It's now $5 ,000.

And I said to my associate producer, I said, well, let me see the contract.

Well, Bill, I just made a deal. I didn't get a contract.

So the guy thought he had us over the barrel because he knew we were shooting

Monday. And everybody panicked.

I wouldn't let a pirate take me like that, even though we were shooting at

Pirate's World.

So I got the whole crew and the secondary cast in there, and I said, I

to bring your dining room table in. I want you to bring a vase.

I want you to bring, you know.

So I signed everybody.

Everybody went home, and we furnished that whole apartment.

on a Sunday and we start shooting Monday morning, you know.

I

used

Ford Rainey who was a very good established character actor in

and he played Rita's husband.

There was one scene where he's shooting at Stephen Oliver, and this squib

behind him went off and it hit a little piece of metal and went in Stephen's

head. Stephen was a trooper. He went on and completely kept playing, you know,

and didn't let it hold up production at all.

Well, The Naked Zoo was shot under the title The Grove, and at some point the

distributor decided that it needed, I guess, some pepping up of some kind.

So there were sex scenes added, and the rock group Canned Heat was brought in to

do a song.

They do a special appearance in the film. Apparently that didn't do enough

the box office, so a year later it was retitled The Hallucinators, and it was

put out with a completely different ad campaign.

Still, I don't think.

made much of a dent in the box office.

Well, Ivan Torres was really the godfather of Florida

big -time filmmaking.

In other words, he wasn't exactly independent.

He'd been all tied in with the studios. So he loved that area so much, he bought

a big studio there and then added to that studio, which became Ivan Torres

Studios.

And he produced a couple series there, Flipper, Gentle Ben.

So anyway, they were looking for someone to take over the management and become

head of production in the studio. So I met with Ivan, and Ivan hired me, and I

became head of production.

You know, I would go to the Flipper sets and really never thought.

Anything of it, just that I had a really cool dad who did a great occupation,

and I was able to learn a lot of things. Being tied to a desk really wasn't my

forte, so I had in my contract I could do one independent film a year, but I

haven't had that first crack at it, you know. So Bill had another friend, a guy

named Terry Merrill, and Terry was the Greyhound bus driver in the daytime,

filmmaker at night.

calls me up and says, I got a deal with Terry and we're going to go make a

picture in California.

He had made a deal for a bunch of old equipment.

And we had to go like literally restore this equipment to get it into working

order. And then it had like a trailer that we were going to pull behind a van

and we were going to drive that out to California.

Come to find out in the early part of this that we're making this film with

trading stamps.

I mean, not necessarily the S &H kind of trading stamps, but some kind of weird

trading stamp that Terry Merrill had come up with. And the other thing, after

you find out about the trading stamps, is that there is no story, essentially.

It's a docudrama by today's standards.

This producer, he was a wild and crazy guy at the time, and we were driving

down Sunset in a convertible.

And we had a handheld area and we were shooting all these hippies.

Hippies were with knapsacks and everything all along Sunset. So we were

lot of background pickup shots.

All of a sudden he said, Lita is calling me.

Lita's calling me. And I said, who's Lita? And I found out later Lita was a

famous witch that had five pages in Esquire magazine.

The church is your whole life.

If Terry recognized an actor or actress, he would immediately go up to them and

say, hey, I want to put you in my movie.

And very few actually went for it, of course.

By a miracle, the thing came out.

It was playable.

It wasn't a great movie, but it was playable.

And at the time, it was called The Jesus Freak. Then before it was edited and...

I became president of Ivan Tor Studios, which was a family -oriented situation,

so I couldn't take credit on a hippie, drug -related movie.

So I just took cameraman credit.

I noticed that he got very low -key sometimes.

Where's Bill, you know? He's off making a deal for another movie he was planning

on doing, you know?

So I was out in California in business, and I read Variety, and Variety had

headlines, Willard, biggest grossing independent film.

My God, look at the rats.

You made me hate myself.

Well, I like myself now.

Where your nightmares end, Willard begins.

I thought to myself, wow, well, this animal thing, this might be the next

So I don't know what I ate that night, but I went to sleep.

I dreamt this whole story.

Bill called me and said, you know, I had a dream last night.

I dreamt this story about a snake. And I said, well, yeah, well, man, you know,

I had my head in the attaché case trying to find my favorite drug at the time.

I'd given Ivan the...

first crack at him, and he said, Bill, I can't do this because I'm a family

-oriented production company with flipper gentlemen, et cetera, et cetera,

can't, you know, do a suspense horror -type film.

And so he had talked to Red Jacobs of Crown International, and Red thought it

sounded like a good idea, let him read the treatment. He said, I don't have any

treatment, I just have a dream.

Red said, how much will you make this for?

And I said, $125 ,000.

Red shook my hand and he said, you got a deal.

He said, I'm only going to put one monkey on your back.

I've got to have this in the theater April 15th for when the drive -ins open

north. We can play all the drive -in circuits.

Well, this was now like November.

So that meant I had to start shooting almost immediately.

Bill said, meet me down at LAX.

And I have notes here I made from my dream.

And I went staggering down there in my attaché case with drugs and guns and

knives and sat down. And he says, you know, I know you'll be perfect for this

because we have to write it in a little over 48 hours and you never sleep.

So, you know, you can do it. And I said, sure, I can do it.

Our tribe now calls you the lover of snakes.

The snake.

Think I care?

We had a good cast, which Chris Robinson was well -known from 12 O 'Clock High.

I remember this Indian jacket was, I think, necessary, and I think I dyed my

hair black, and I tried to look like an Indian.

When I was 16, I used to lecture for alligator wrestlers.

And they were feminiles. And I was the white guy, white kid, putting his way

through high school.

I got to be in the pit with the alligators and tell the tourists out

the Indians were doing and how they were putting the alligators to sleep and

then the power of the jaw and all that.

Anybody can tell the difference between a man and an alligator.

When it comes to an engine, you can't tell the difference between them and a

stinking snake in the grass.

Maybe.

Now, Craig, you just stop irritating this boy.

Even though his father was off the reservation fishing on land leased to

mean, it was an accident, you and Bob shooting him and that and all. And we

Alex Rocco who...

which later became famous, and The Godfather's Mo Green. He got shot

eye. The Paramount sent him down to Miami for a week to promote The

So while he's down there, Bill cops him to do a part in our film, and he didn't

have to put him up, feed him, nothing. Paramount was subsidizing him to be in

our film.

I'm sorry, Stanley, but you're going to have to stay in the truck.

People just don't understand friendly rattlesnakes. We used, I guess, about

every kind of snake in Florida. There was five poisonous kinds of snakes in

Florida, more than any other state in the Union.

And Stanley was played by a Florida ground rattler, which is about 37

1⁄2 feet long, pretty muscular snake, and deadly. So we had a great animal

trainer, Frank Weed, that Bill had worked with before.

I'm sure I have.

Well, is it faith?

Are the snakes all right? Am I going to get bit?

I mean, you know, you want to know.

And then you're in your dressing room and you look outside and you see this

standing there with a stick and this rattlesnake striking at his boot.

And you watch and he's striking at his boot. And then finally he grabs the

and he bleeds the rest of the venom out and all that. And then you see him do

some other stuff.

Was that a wild rattlesnake? Yeah, this is going to be sandwiched.

They kind of like surgically sewed the mouths of the

rattlesnakes and clipped their fangs out of them. But they were still

rattlesnakes.

you know they're surgically sewn together it's like saying the gun's not

well they didn't lose the will to strike but when they couldn't do any harm by

striking they die so we went through five stanleys they needed extras and i

in a waiting room and stanley the snake came running in and of course my voice

and can carry very loudly and he needed me to scream and i think i broke the

sound man's eardrum but just by screaming and running out the door

Don't know.

He said, you're going to do these scene where you're going to drown in

quicksand. Oh, that's nice.

And then besides the quicksand, there's going to be this one scene where you

actually get bit by a rattlesnake in this. Oh, and what are you going to use

this rattlesnake? He said, a rattlesnake.

Stanley.

Bite his hand?

What do you want me to do?

Do you want me to say I lied about your father?

And I'll tell you, he is so gutty, Bill.

We had a cameraman there.

Cliff Pollard was the cameraman.

And the scene called for the camera to go into the quicksand, get a point of

view of one of the actors going under as the snake bites him.

And the cameraman wouldn't get into the quicksand.

So Bill said, oh, hell, I'll do it.

And that's the kind of stuff that made, instead of it being, you know, another

day, you know, let's get this damn film over with. Who do I have to fuck to get

off this film?

You know, it made it a pleasure. It was a love fest, Stanley.

And that's mainly the director. They can take the film any way they want. You

know, it'll be heaven or it'll be hell. It starts with them.

At a scene, Alex played a very wealthy guy that every morning went out for a

swim to exercise.

Chris Robinson is supposed to load his swimming pool with water moccasins and

all. We're ready to shoot it. And Alex came up and said, Bill, he said, you

know, I've been an actor for 12 years. He said, I have never refused to do

anything. And the director tells me, but he said...

I'm definitely afraid of snakes.

He said, no way am I going in there with live snakes.

Bill thought, I wouldn't think of doing anything like that. And of course, when

Alex jumps into the pool, it's all full of live snakes.

And Alex ain't acting. He's screaming and yelling. Never forgave Bill for

It was the most scariest moment of my life.

And I heard the director say, throw in more snakes on the rock. You know? Tim

went crazy.

And what more could an actor ask for than to become a little bit insane?

I had her freaking

out.

But when they did the scene, her hysteria was real.

She does a brilliant job because she's scared to death for real.

The game people came to us. They said, well, the report is that you're killing

lot of snakes out here.

And I said, well, we don't do that.

When you're going insane and you're trying to portray someone who's going

to the point that he would do things like this and be upset with the person

loved, Stanley, I think there may have been some of the dead snakes that I took

and threw around and just tore them up, but actually they were real snakes.

We got it in the can and just spent, we were editing like 20 hours a day.

Finally got it and I got it delivered in time for the drive -in release April

15th. Normally in those days they started with only about 50 prints and

used to bicycle them around the country to various cities and all because prints

were expensive, they're still expensive today.

But it ended up there was over 300 prints of Stanley because it was

well. But it was interesting to see films that were made in Florida that

actually getting what seemed to be national distribution because most

-made films were just like being screened off at a little theater here

there. They'd be the third feature, and then down at the snack bar, the star

would be standing there trying to give out autographs, and they were just very

regional.

Stanley seemed to make it on a national scale, and I understood at the time that

it was one of Crown's most successful pictures ever.

I must say that Bill's pictures certainly had a professionalism on them.

all looked good. They looked like they were major company made.

They were well edited, well photographed, and well acted.

When there were so many charlatans, so many flim flammers, so many phonies in

the film business in South Florida, To have this titan, Bill Graffay, who knew

his role in that industry, that he had to represent the top level

of independent film production.

Maybe in hell.

I don't know what I am.

Goldfinger, Dr.

No, and Ernst Stavro Blofeld, villains to James Bond movie fans all over the

world. But none could hold a candle to Agent 007's scariest adversary, the

Animal Kingdom.

Steve Latchaw reports on James Bond's Florida connection and a filmmaker who

never met a gator he didn't like.

I had gone to the Cannes Film Festival over in France.

on Ivan Tor's business, and I met the producer of all of the James Bond

-type films.

And so when they were going to do Live and Let Die, they called me up and asked

me if I wanted to get involved with some of the action sequences that were being

shot in New Orleans and Miami and Jamaica and so

forth. So we had to do all of our...

shark footage over in Bimini, which we always used Bimini.

So we had to build tunnels and haul them over to Bimini and put these tunnels

in.

We'd capture a lot of sharks and set them through the tunnel and so forth. So

anyway, I more or less coordinated a lot of the action sequences.

It was quite an experience for me because...

What they gave me for a lot of the second unit work, I could have made

feature films. So I wasn't used to having money, you know, because I was

on budget restrictions.

Ivan ended up, when his wife died, he sort of lost interest in the studio,

and he ended up selling it, and he moved to Africa. So I went back to

independent filmmaking with my company, Film Artists.

There was a fellow called Mike Viola who had never made a movie in his life. He

was involved with this lady that was a multi -billionaire.

So at that time, the tax shelter situation.

And that situation and the number of wealthy people who were retiring and

in Florida created this sort of petri dish of independent, low -budget

filmmaking that went on during that time. And you saw a lot of films being

that they were destined to fail. They wanted them to fail. It was like that

play, The Producers. They didn't want a hit. They wanted a loss.

But what it did do, though, is it created... a venue for people to make a

movies. He got together with Mickey Rooney, and Mickey Rooney said, oh, I

great script I want to do. Veteran actor Mickey Rooney, who lived in Fort

Lauderdale at the time, wrote a screenplay called The Godmothers, which

intended to be a G -rated children's film geared toward all the kids who were

locked out of The Godfather, which was R -rated.

all the other R -rated films that kids weren't allowed to see. He really wanted

to make a movie for them.

The casting director said, you know, Mickey wanted to direct it, you know.

But she said, boy, that, you know, you're going to go so far over budget

forth. So anyway, they called me and they asked me to direct it.

Don Palermo, played by Frank Fontaine, is looking for somebody in his crime

syndicate to marry his daughter Rosa, who is not very attractive.

The assignment is this.

To round up the most eligible bachelors in the whole organization.

And the lucky one is going to have the honor of marrying Don's daughter Rosa.

He zeroes in on two brothers, the Mastroza brothers, Rocco and Ricky.

played by Rooney. Ricky's played by Jerry Lester. We had a great cast. We

Billy Barty, the little dwarf.

and we had him playing the hawk, which was the big killer in the movie.

When Rooney was writing the script, he intended there to be three Mastroso

brothers, Rooney, Don Knotts, and Marty Allen.

The part of Don Palermo was originally supposed to be Shecky Green, and Rooney

really wanted Cass Elliott to play the daughter, Rosa.

One morning, we get to the set.

Seven in the morning, and Mickey comes up to me. He said, I had a great idea

last night. He said, I wrote a whole scene about us in a Japanese restaurant.

And I said, well, what are you talking about, Mickey? And he hands me, like,

eight pages, which I'd never seen, you know.

So we had no costumes. We had nothing, you know.

So I went to the producer, who was a layman. He didn't do it.

I said, you know, this is insanity.

He said, oh, it's Mickey Rooney. You've got to do it.

And if I ever read what I just read, I'm going to make you an

offer you wish you could refuse.

So we went out and we scraped together this Japanese restaurant. We got the

costume. We didn't start shooting until like 2 in the afternoon.

I hear Mickey and Jerry Lester show up and they got these fake teeth and like

Japanese teeth and all of that.

And the people working were in Japanese in the restaurant and they were

really ticked off. They were rattling dishes and talking and making all kinds

noise, disrupting the shoot.

and how I ever shot those pages and never seen the script before.

There were test screenings of The Godmothers in Philadelphia in 1973.

It also played in Illinois and Florida.

At one point it was actually on a double feature with National Velvet.

All the Mickey Rooney fans wanted to see the sublime to the ridiculous.

A lot of times they didn't even try to get decent distribution.

They just, they went out, they even formed their own distribution company to

make sure they lost money. You know, they would do anything they could.

Apparently there's room for three Godfather movies in our lives, but...

Not one godmother's movie, so it faded quickly into obscurity.

This tape will self -destruct in five seconds.

Goodbye.

Socrates Ballas was an actor and worked with me in production on several of my

films. And he'd been associated with a TV series called Rat Patrol.

So Socrates wanted to be a producer.

A gentleman named Tony Crichelis had written a screenplay out in California.

It was originally called Wanna Ride, Little Girl.

So now Socrates and I are going to go out to Tinseltown to try and get an

through the Miami airport, and here comes William Shatner walking.

We said, Shatner? Look at Shatner. So we stopped Shatner and gave him a whole

pitch on the movie.

We ended up with William Shatner starring in the movie, so we canceled

went to California. We got our lead.

I'm not afraid of you.

One thing that's great about Shatner is while he can do the heroic Captain Kirk,

he can also play the skeeviest, guzziest, limiest guys on the planet

Originally, the way it was written, he was more of a stereotype villain type.

And so I sat down with Shatner and I sat down with Tony. We rewrote the script

based where he was more of a slick type con man.

William Shatner plays this sleazy gigolo type who preys on older, wealthy women,

marries them, kills them off, takes their money. While he's doing this, he's

being pursued by Harold Adjob Sakata from Goldfinger, who plays Karate Pete,

a private investigator.

That could have been your head.

He's front and center. I mean, Impulse is a really sleazy, skeevy, slimy little

movie because that's who it's about. It's about a guy who is.

Hey.

All right.

Hey, little girl, I'll take you to school.

This is definitely not the William Shatner that we knew at the time from

years of Star Trek.

This is killer Shatner. This is over -the -top, ugly, shirt -wearing Shatner.

Oh, damn.

Damn. Damn.

Damn. Really strange things happen on this production.

For instance, the hanging scene.

Shatner sets up a deal where he lures...

odd job into a car wash, and he has this rig set up where he's going to hang

him. I developed a hanging rig for it, and I hung myself half a dozen times off

the balcony of the motel where we were staying at to make sure the thing worked

all right.

And it worked fine.

But at the time when they were going to use that hanging thing, I had to go

someplace else to take care of something. I didn't know they were going

that scene.

So they had somebody else take my place.

You put the rig on.

So, Harold Sagada, I pulled up from the cable, and he's supposed to be hanging

from the cable.

He's all set. He's going, and I'm up on the roof up there. I slipped down the

rope. When he came down the rope, we had the rope, and we sort of nodded, and he

hit one of the knots and literally broke his finger.

But he kept playing the scene all the way, never stopped.

Now, I've broken my finger on the rope because it has knots, and it's a humid

night, and I've slipped. And I'm thinking, what a great actor, but he

a punching bag.

So I punch him. I whack him again. He's gah, gah, gah, gah.

And I think, oh, he's so good, I'm going to take his arm down because he

wouldn't have his arm up there. So I'm taking the professional wrestler's arm

down. I'm young, and I'm strong, and I've got him.

See, and he's grimacing there. I hit him again on the stomach. It's not good

enough.

I'm going to hit him again.

And he's like trying to find a pencil and paper, I think, to write help.

He's holding on to it.

Wait a minute. I grab him by the ass, and I get help.

He was choking.

He almost died.

That was a bad scene. That should never have happened.

But if I'd have been there, it would have been done correctly. But I wasn't

there at the time. I was doing something else at the time.

Impulse was sold as a supernatural horror film, although it has no

elements whatsoever.

That may have contributed to its box office success. I know it made enough

to get a full -page ad in a box office magazine.

The way it was received is they'd never seen Shatner in a character like that.

So the film went over really good in the theaters.

Stanley turned out to be such a success, I decided to stick with the animal

trend. But this time I went with sharks.

From the harmless nurse.

To the majestic tiger, the treacherous hammerhead, and fearless bull.

The shark has been hunted and feared by all men.

And I thought immediately I'd get financing on that.

Couldn't get arrested.

And then a guy named Steven Spielberg and a guy named Benchley came up with a

movie called Jaws. And Variety, Jaws' biggest grossing film in history.

And so my phone rang off the hook because all the distributors and money

that I'd shown Mako Joe's A Death Script to would turn it down.

And I knew I could jump on the bandwagon on this trip.

Introducing Mako.

A shark unlike any you have ever seen in a motion picture that will send chills

down your spine.

I had to go out to California to cast it. And this actor, Henry Silva, was

really big in the European market. He was an American actor. And so I had in

mind casting Henry Silva as the lead in this. And Henry said to me, he said, you

know, Bill, I love the script. I'd love to do it.

But he said, you know, I'm a New York boy. And he said, I can't swim a stroke.

Can we fake this?

And I said, I'd love to try and fake it, you know, but this is, it calls for an

actor that does scuba diving and, you know, knows water work and all that and

swims with sharks and all that, but can't, you know.

So thank the good Lord Henry couldn't swim because I ended up.

With Richard Jekyll. Academy Award nominee Richard Jekyll stars as Sonny

a man of fierce loyalties and emotions.

Jekyll was a familiar face to anybody who watched war movies like Guadalcanal

Diary and Sands of Iwo Jima. He did seven movies, I think, for Robert

including The Dirty Dozen. And just a couple of years prior to Mako, Jaws of

Death, he was nominated for an Academy Award for sometimes a great notion, the

Paul Newman movie.

So he was definitely a familiar face and a great choice for the lead role.

In a moment of danger, deadly sharks once saved his life.

Now he lives and kills as one of them. I went back to my old standby, John Davis

Chandler, and I used Harold Oddjob's cicada, and I used Jennifer Bishop, who

was one of the stars.

Definitely Mako Jaws of Death is an extension of Stanley.

I mean, even down to the point where the baby sharks have been killed.

for science or whatever it is, and it pushes Richard Jekyll over the edge. The

killing of Stein's beloved friends triggered a metadata within Stein that

send fear into all of his energy.

You pick up a newspaper, and sharks are being killed from helicopters from the

Goodyear blimp.

The sharks have been here much longer than man has, and they'll probably be

long after we are.

Ow, am I crazy?

The Aeroflex had just come out with the Arri BL, which was a lightweight, self

-blended camera.

Prior to that, we used a giant Mitchell, which weighed about 200 pounds.

So my whole directorial thing was about using this handheld camera aboard boats

and all that.

So anyway, the first day of shooting, I'm in the trailer.

First AD comes in, and he said, Bill, are you sitting down? I said, yeah.

He said, we just wiped out the Airy Bill.

I said, you wiped it out? What are you talking about?

So I didn't quite panic, and I said to the AD, I said, you've got to send to

equipment house and bring out one of those Mitchells.

It's going to be a nightmare for me, but bring the Mitchell out. I said, bring

the boats up.

And I got this scene where the boats arrive, and we'll shoot the boats. So

back to rehearsing the actors.

He comes back.

15 minutes later, Bill, are you sitting down?

Now what's wrong?

I said, the boats are stuck on a sandbar. It was low tide, and we can't

off the sandbar. So now I got no main camera. I got no boat. So I still didn't

panic. So I said, well, get Richard Jake on here.

And so Richard came in, and I said, Richard, I've got this one scene that I

think I can shoot with a wild airy, and we can loop.

No problem, Bill.

So he runs out, and ten minutes later, the AD comes in. Bill is sitting

down.

Now what's wrong? We just rushed Richard Jekyll to the hospital.

I was in the prop truck, and Jekyll jumps up into the prop truck and hits

head and has, like, gashes open his head. So Bill has to send him to the

hospital. But now I started to panic because I had no...

lead actor i had no main camera i had no boats he says okay well we have another

scene we can shoot now it didn't slow down nothing we just went over and

shooting the cover set you know god bless richard he came back and was about

stitches or so i can't can't remember how many in the back of his head

demanded to work, and the guy never missed a beat the whole movie.

I mean, the vast majority of that film was shot on location. Well, I'd say

almost all of it was shot on location.

And we were in the ocean, under the water.

Captured with some of the most daring underwater photography ever brought to

motion picture screen.

We had a scene in the movie where this girl is in a tank behind a bar where

there was portholes in the bar.

She was doing this acrobatic thing.

Without further delay, I'm proud to present the Aquamade's real, live, own

Aquamade, Karen.

Once again, this is Bill using something that's unique to Florida.

Those bars where the mermaids, where the women, you know, swim around as

mermaids. He does the theme with Jennifer Bishop as a mermaid who gets

by a shark. And the shark was supposed to go by her.

So this guy, who was the shark wrangler, who was, you know, from the Keys down

there, had got this shark. It took its teeth out.

So anyway, this shark had been out of the water for like an hour.

All of a sudden, we shoved this shark, and the damn shark's alive.

And he goes right for the girl, and the girl's doing her acrobatic act. And you

see in the movie, it's boom, and he grabbed her leg.

It was alive.

You know, and you never saw a woman so terrified in your life when she figured

out that that shark was still alive. But in the movie, you could actually see

the shark coming and the jaws opening, grabbing the girl's leg.

I had already seen Jaws.

When it came time for my character's death scene, the

end result is that I have to end up in the water. And I said, no, Bill.

And we got into this whole thing about Jaws. And he said, John, he said, but I

thought we had an understanding.

I said, no, but I never knew that I was going to have to drop into the water.

I said, switch the role to some degree and give it to Zicotta.

Have Harold die and he go into the water.

And he couldn't do it.

He dares defend man's most dreaded enemy.

Instead of first editing the movie, I edited a seven -minute promo reel.

You trying to make up with me, huh?

All right, I forgive you.

Their distributor went to Europe, and we sold, pre -sold Europe. It got

more than our negative cost back out of Europe, and it ended up that we beat

Universal out in Europe.

with Jaws of Death before Spielberg's Jaws was released.

Stare into terror if you can.

Mako fully depicts the Jaws of Death.

I enjoyed Mako. I enjoyed Mako. It didn't get the kind of distribution that

Stanley did. I don't think the people who put it out had nearly the clout.

Cannon released Mako the Jaws of Death.

usually just under the title Jaws of Death during the 1976 -77 drive -in

And I think that's one of the reasons why Mako's a little harder to see now

perhaps a little rarer or maybe doesn't have the same cachet that Stanley does.

I know it hit television fairly quickly. It was on the CBS late movie by May of

1978 and played into the 80s. So a lot of people saw it on television.

Well, Whiskey Mountain was based on sort of three of my loves.

One is the mountains of North Carolina, because I have a home up in the

mountains, and it's a beautiful, beautiful area.

The second love was dirt bikes. I had dirt bikes that we rode throughout

the mountains on old logging trails and so forth.

The third love was the Civil War.

collector and more or less a fan of the Civil War and so forth.

So I came up with a story where this one girl, her grandfather, told this story,

which after the Civil War, they hid these couple hundred of these

Civil War muskets in an old cave in the mountains.

And so on a vacation, they decided to ride their dirt bikes into the

try and find this cave that was in a place called Whiskey Mountain.

Well, you see, my great -granddaddy buried them, and he gave me the map, and

we're going off to find them.

That's right.

We're going off to find them.

There was an actor that was very hot at the time, a fellow named Christopher

George. He had starred in a...

TV series called Rat Patrol.

He also co -starred in three John Wayne movies and had been a leading man in a

couple of studio films after the Rat Patrol.

He had gone to college in Florida, so Bill knew him, and he was just the right

person to be the lead in Whiskey Mountain.

And here again I called on my old friend and tried -and -true character

actor, John Davis Chandler, to play the leader of the heavies up there.

It's on the way to Whiskey Mountain.

Well, in the summer, tourists ask about that place all the time.

Everybody knows it doesn't exist.

I mean, it just ain't real.

The movie makers have discovered Georgia as a colorful setting for filming

outdoor epic, and Plains is not the only community that's changing.

David Snell takes us behind the cameras and what they're discovering.

With Whiskey Mountain, we see Bill making a shift from Florida to the

and Georgia.

And there are a couple of interesting connections with Whiskey Mountain and

Deliverance. First of all, Whiskey Mountain was shot in the same area as

Deliverance. Also, the star of Whiskey Mountain, Christopher George, had been

the original choice to play the lead in Deliverance, the part that eventually

went to Burt Reynolds.

went to the production office, which was one of the rooms downstairs in this

little hotel in Clayton, Georgia.

And we're standing around and people are coming in and checking in with the

office. And there's a bunch of the local guys around.

And they're all standing around and they got their mason jars with moonshine in

it. So we all started sipping their moonshine.

And before you know it, everybody's smashed.

Because, I mean, you don't have to drink much of that stuff.

But I'll never forget the next morning.

We go out, and we're going in a caravan out to the location, and every half a

mile we have to pull over because everybody has to throw up. People are

to puke by the side of the road.

Chris had just come off a John Wayne movie.

He had his own trailer. In my budget, I had one Winnebago that was the makeup

trailer, the wardrobe, and four actors all over.

came up to me and said, well, where's my trailer? And I said, well, you've got

to share it.

Anyway, he was a pretty good sport.

So when we'd go on location, I couldn't afford a hunting wagon, which is a big,

giant trailer that has bathrooms and dressing rooms.

So we went to the local place and got these porta -potties, and we put them on

little flatbed trailer. The guy in transportation said, Bill, I got no

to tow this out, you know. And I said, well, hook it on to the actor's

and tow it out.

So they hooked it on, and Christopher George came up to me and he said,

Professor Fay, I've put up with a lot with you.

Not having my own trailer and all of this. I said, but, God, here you're

me tow two shitters out to location, you know.

The cameras are rolling, and onto the porch of a ransacked cabin walks Richard

Bowser Batterson.

And everybody was a part of it, even the locals.

And so we had the locals doing gripping. You know, they built sets, and

you name it, my dad embraced the locals.

Frank Grittman was my uncle. He helped find the locations.

and do the construction.

My dad was the first director to hire a female first AD.

At that time, women in this industry were meant to be script supervisors or

makeup artists.

They were not meant to be assistant directors telling men what to do. Well,

there's this one character by the name of Booger, and Booger and Luther Rickman

didn't like...

telling them what to do.

But they did it anyway.

And so finally, I think it was like the fourth or fifth day, she'd tell them

what to do. And here we're going to go over here and do this and that.

And the booger turns to Luther and he goes, ain't nothing that woman needs

a good licking.

We had a scene in this cave and there was supposed to be a lot of marijuana

sacked up in this cave. So needless to say, we were going to prop it up and use

something instead. So I remember going back in the cave.

And it's full of marijuana, all right, you know, but it wasn't fake marijuana.

mean, those boys had loaded in about a half a ton of pot, which they were

growing themselves, and it was all stacked in the back of this case. And so

outside, walking around, Barbara Walters, all these people were out there

this other documentary or reporting it in whatever fashion they were.

Our prop was, you know, enough to get everybody sent to jail. And up there, it

didn't matter.

Yeah.

For two days, we tried to steer you all off.

Well, this kept coming, and you just wouldn't stop.

Just call them plain stupid, Mr. Rudy.

Dumb. Not stupid.

Dumb! One of the most memorable sequences in Whiskey Mountain is this

harrowing rape scene that's shown entirely in Polaroids.

Another highlight is a fantastic motorcycle jump.

I had a big stunt at the end of the movie where we had this bridge.

And it gets blown up, and Christopher George is supposed to make this

jump. So I put out a call in Hollywood, and there was one guy, I think in Ohio,

who could make these big, long motorcycle jumps. One guy wanted like $6

make the jump, and the other guy wanted like $8 ,000.

So I'm in pre -production, and this local came in.

and said, I hear you're looking to make a motorcycle jump.

So we go down there, and I see this bridge, and I'm checking out, and I had

run up to that bridge, just a great long run. There was no practicing.

You know, they blew the bridge up, and it was my job to jump it. So

we looked at it. It was a little intimidating.

Break! You've got to jump it!

I can't! You can't!

I can't, Bill!

You can't get me! Don't jump it! So anyway, it came time.

And action and all that. And I came around.

And I'm in fifth gear just hammering. And I said, I don't need this. And I

clicked it in sixth. Never had hit it in sixth.

And cleared that jump.

It was amazing how many people said, oh, I could have done that. I wouldn't

charge as much as you did.

I could have done that.

It was colder during that film in North Georgia

there than I have ever been in my life. Bill didn't stop for rain. He didn't

stop for anything. All he did was just make a little note in the script.

We were all down at the motel office ready to leave for location, and Chris

George wasn't there.

So I called up.

Chris said, Bill, what are you talking about?

You can't shoot in this kind of weather.

And I said, Chris, you know, you're on a Bill Griffey movie. You're not on a

John Wayne movie. Get down here. So he came down. We shot all day in that

drizzling rain.

It worked out OK for us, but we were all miserable.

One of the major selling points of Whiskey Mountain, in addition to the

beautiful poster, is the theme song by Charlie Daniels' band.

I had a fellow who worked on the movie called Louis Perlis. Louis looks up and

he says, boy, this film would be great for Charlie Daniels to do the music on.

And I said, forget about it, I can't afford Charlie Daniels. He says, no, no,

I'm a good friend of his. And I said, oh, really?

I said, here's the telephone.

Call him up. So Charlie told him, he said, listen, you know, it's a situation

that I've got like three gigs a week and we're on the bus and I can't take time

off, you know. So I thought that was the end of it. Maybe a couple weeks later.

He comes in, he said, Charlie just called me, and he was opening a walnut,

the knife slipped and went through his guitar hand. He had a cancel, and so he

wrote the original song, Whiskey Mountain, and did all the music for it.

Then when we got in the distribution,

We had several offers on it. I mean, even AIP wanted it. But this darn

tax shelter people, they wanted their own distribution thing.

And they set it up. And the picture really didn't get the release it should

have. I really consider Whiskey Mountain to be Bill Griffey's last movie.

because it's the last one that he directed.

But he didn't remove himself from the film industry.

He just concentrated on the production end of it. Okay, cut.

That's a wrap.

What happened is, after Whiskey Mountain, I went to a restaurant

called Mike Gordon's Restaurant. All of the Bacardi, the president, the

executives, everyone, they all had lunch there.

So I met them. At the time, there was no advertising hard liquor on TV.

And they made these half -hour films. So the president of Bacardi said, do you

want to try one of these, Bill? Bill had developed a great relationship with

Bacardi and somehow enlisted William Shatner to be the spokesperson.

For those projects?

In person, Shatner's a very funny guy. He calls me and he says, Bill, I got to

get my wardrobe.

I'm going to buy it out here. How much we got in?

I said, well, all you need is a shirt and a pair of slacks. I got $100.

There was a pause and Shatner said, well, maybe I could go to Kmart and find

something. What's that?

What?

That building there looks like a bat.

Yes, it does look like a bat.

The bat's a Bacardi trademark. That's their plant.

Oh, that's the Bacardi plant.

Shatner was crazy.

He would ad lib it or do whatever he felt like.

It was really a fun project to do. I didn't want to just do a thing on the

distillery, so I wrote a whole thing and took advantage of a big castle and fort

they had.

their moral castle and had him playing a pirate that comes in.

Mr. Cooper is keeping them busy on the south wall.

There's a skiff waiting for us.

On the northwest, this way.

And I ended up doing 25 half -hour films for Riccardi. And those kind of...

took up the time while we were waiting for the next feature project to develop.

They were pretty good little films because they'd always take something

a subject matter of the time. When they did that rodeo movie that Travolta

did, we did a rodeo movie,

you know, a half hour about a rodeo. So anyway, they weren't just hard film.

They had a little dramatic and a little storyline to them, you know. So I got

waylaid from features by doing these 25 Bacardi films.

Even though he did direct one additional film after that, he really concentrated

on production with Ceasefire, Master Blaster, and a couple of other films.

George Fernandez, who was an actual Vietnam veteran, he was also...

a student at the University of Miami, and David Nutter was a student at the

University of Miami. George had written the script, Ceasefire, and they wanted

to make the movie.

And so they went to Egon Steffen, who owned the big equipment company.

Egon had read the script. He said, boy, you guys can't produce this. You've got

to hire somebody who knows what they're doing.

Why don't you call Bill Griffey?

So they called me up, and anyway, I made a deal to produce the movie for them.

You don't usually want to argue with the professor in college. Do you know what

I'm saying? You might argue with a student, but you're not arguing with the

professor. And that's what Bill was. Bill was the professor. He was teaching

of us.

I saw the well, man!

I saw the well!

Don Johnson's only claim to fame at that time was A Boy and His Dog, but we knew

he was an excellent actor, so we ended up getting Don Johnson to be in the

movie. So when we were shooting, Michael Mann and Yorkevich came into Miami, and

they were looking at locations, trying to figure out whether it was feasible to

shoot in Miami. So the Michael Mann people called me up.

I said, Bill, you know, we got this guy Don Johnson. We see some dailies on him.

And so I showed him the rest of history, you know, and Don got Miami Vice.

I want to know what the hell you think you were doing the other night. The

your son saw his father crawling around the living room with a knife.

I don't want to talk about it.

I don't want to let go. You try to talk about it.

I don't want to. Damn it, let go of me. The series came out.

We had just, we were almost finishing the editing, you know, and we didn't

what was going to happen, you know, with Miami Vice.

And so I told the investors, I said, look, if Miami Vice makes a noise, then

we might have a name actor in the thing, you know, let's sit on it.

And they didn't like the idea of sitting on it, but I talked them into seeing

it. So we sat on that movie for like...

six months and it was finished.

Ceasefire really is a case of one hand washing the other. It was the movie that

helped get Don Johnson the role on Miami Vice.

Once he got that role, the movie was out on video and became a huge seller

on videocassette because of his appearance on Miami Vice.

Richie Stiles, who was a good friend of mine, in fact, I...

I started him as a director on Ceasefire. I gave him the shot of being

unit director.

Well, he got into directing, and he put together a movie over in High Point,

North Carolina, called Escape.

And so he called down and asked me if I'd produce that film for him. You know,

got into producing and doing second unit stuff and all that.

There was a movie called Just a Chance, which was for the Christian television

network. They asked me to direct that film, and I ended up

writing half the script and directing the film. And it was about street gangs

and violence and all, but at the end they all, you know, get happily.

religion and live happily ever after. But it was not just a typical religious

film. It was all about drugs, violence.

Bill is not as well known as other exploitation filmmakers who were

the same state during the same era.

You ask somebody knowledgeable in film who Doris Wishman is, they'll say, oh,

she made the nudies.

You ask somebody knowledgeable in film who was Herschel Gordon Lewis, oh, the

godfather of gore.

Bill, not as well known, and I feel it's because he was working with a Hollywood

mentality in an exploitation field.

But as the industry grew, he was a part of that industry, and he is the icon

that made, in my opinion, Florida filmmaking.

Well, you see, what Bill did was make it visible to us of what the possibilities

were. for people without a major studio connection to shoot a respectable,

playable picture in South Florida.

He always lends a hand to any young filmmaker and returns phone calls and

his time to help. I love him. He's a very unpretentious filmmaker. He's a

unpretentious man.

And he loves the process of filmmaking.

And there was a man who was doing an independent, low -budget film.

which those are the ones you normally have the most tension and pressure with.

And Bill Graffet was just pleasurable, no nonsense, mild,

enjoyed what he was doing.

Even in his exasperation with the fact that this young fool won't go in the

water for five seconds, he was still pleasant.

Bill was probably...

One of the best of all of us.

He has none of the arrogance, you know, the riding crop and the boots and

strutting around the thing and all that. He doesn't care about his name on a

chair or nothing. He just has fun.

That's a word you don't find in Hollywood much anymore.

The key word for making a movie was fun.

It's a gasp.

The films that he did that the young people today love.

I think that's a wonderful thing and a tribute to this man.

Something always seems to come up from this past, more so than any of the other

films I ever did. But it's great memories. Great memories.

Glad I did it.

It's easy to sell Bill short by saying, oh, Wild Rebels is just another biker

film in the wake of the Wild Angels. It's easy to say that Stanley is just

Willard with snakes, or that Mako the Jaws of Death is just... Stanley with

Shark. But if you really want to know what sets Bill's movies apart, you

have to buy a ticket.

And I'll sue you at the movie.