The Blackstones and their guests run for their lives. (L to R: Joe Sirola, Mary Woronov, Roger De Koven, Christine Pickles, Jonathan Frid, Martine Beswicke.)
scrape things, scratch knees. There was a lot of rough stuff in the film, and I didn’t use any stunt men. 1 couldn’t afford them. People started to get damaged. And I was a bit of a sadist. I did push people.
I wanted that madness to set in on the film, but most of it took place off-camera. It was one nightmare after the other. I mean, it
started with my nightmare and it just never went away. It was a continuous nightmare for three years with this fucking film!
H o . so? The stories are endless. People fucking other
people, the fights, the tension! The dwarf! I’ll never forget this... For some reason, the caterers brought chocolate cake to the house every day, and [Hervé Villechaize] got fed up with having to eat the same stuff all the time. So, one night, he walked up to the producer that had the house catered and said [IMITATES HERVÉ] “So you like chocolate cake, sonofabitch?” and dumped the entire cake in his face! Another night, Hervé decided to walk off an
evening’s intake of Scotch and fell into a 4-foot hole. I wasn’t aware of this at the time, but dwarves
are physically incapable of raising their voices, so he was unable to cry out for help. So Hervé is down in this hole and it’s getting darker and darker and— remember, this is Canada, and right on the lake— so the temperature is dropping by the minute. He shivered in the cold out there for nearly two hours, when Ed Mann happened to walk by and heard a voice in the ground whistling a French tune. All the time he was in the hole, he kept looking up at this arc light and thinking that somebody would be along any minute to take it down. He placed all of his hopes for survival on this arc light, and as soon as he was pulled out of the hole, he saw that it had been the moon all along. Three weeks into shooting, the Canadian cor­
poration that was putting up the $60,000 (in issued checks, roughly, of about $45,000 at that point) announced that they would have to pull out of the whole deal. Little did we know that their value was determined by the Toronto stock market. The market took a beating and, quite suddenly, the company was worth only about 1/5 of what it had been. Not only did they announce this, but they told us that the last $20,000 issued in checks was no good. They had counted on covering this, but now they couldn’t. So here we were, putting rubber
39
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