Brian Trenchard-Smith on Megiddo: Omega Code 2

In the Belly of the Beast: BRIAN TRENCHARD- SMITH on Megiddo: Omega Code 2

[Excerpt from the chapter "THAT's Godsploitation! A Blinkered View of Christian Apocalypse & Rapture Cinema" in Jack Sargeant's forthcoming anthology SUTURE 2]

With the outrageous success of The Omega Code, Trinity Broadcasting ordered a second romp through the Book of Revelation. The previous film’s Antichrist figure, Michael York, is recast and reworked as Stone Alexander, supported by a surprising cast of exploitation cinema veterans - the ever reliable Franco Nero, the cold fish eyes of Udo Kier, who also did a Satanic turn in End Of Days and Blade, and R.Lee Ermey, the drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket who is promoted in Megiddo to US President.

At the helm was one of Australia’s greatest exports, the UK-born Brian Trenchard-Smith (or BTS), whose career spans over 30 years, from Antipodean actioners - The Man From Hong Kong (1975), Deathcheaters (1976), Turkey Shoot (1982) - to later lower-budget exploitation features such as Night Of The Demons 2 and the direct-to-video franchise. LeprechaunMegiddo is Trenchard-Smith’s aggressive rejigging of The Omen trilogy into a $20 million war movie - a low budget by Hollywood standards, but BTS’s largest budget to date, who clearly grabbed the cash and ran amok with a CGI paintbox, using the entire Jezreel Valley as his blank canvas.

Condensing The Omen through to The Final Conflict in first 30 minutes, Megiddo opens with the first stormy stand-off between future Antichrist Stone Alexander and his Christ-like younger brother David. The child Stone drops a match into his baby brother’s crib and stands back smiling while his Nanny beats out the flames. Stone is sent off to military school run by a concerned-looking General Francini (Franco Nero), who recognizes Stone’s innate genius but notes his complete lack of humanity. The kids taunt the impassive Stone with “Baby killer! Baby killer!” and is watched over by a Satanic Knight (Udo Kier) with his restless hounds of Hell.

As a young man, Stone (now played by Noah Huntley) catches the eye of Francini’s daughter Gabriella (Diane Verona) and proposes. Franchini finally uncovers Stone’s secret and tries to expose him, but Stone sets one of the CGI hell hounds on him and he dies of a heart attack.

25 years later, Stone (a campily pompous Michael York), now married to Gabriella, has wormed his way to the head of the European Union. He hurls his suspicious father off a third-storey balcony. By now, Satan has truly taken hold of Stone; he sends in tanks to an unnamed Middle East country to flatten a few peasant villages, then proclaims victory over terrorism by the United World Union. His grave-faced brother David (Michael Biehn), Vice President of the United States under President Benson (R. Lee Ermey), sits back and watches as the US is left out of the world block (clearly playing on America’s paranoia over “Fortress Europe”) along with renegade Red China. Benson goes with David to Stone’s European mansion to make him see sense - he shakes Stone’s hand, and a serpentine electric bolt shoots through the President’s bloodstream into the President’s heart and flattens him. David Alexander finds himself in the unenviable position of President of the United States.

Now convinced his brother is the spawn of Satan, David faces a no-confidence vote from his government, dodges an arrest warrent and is on the run. Meanwhile a vengeful Stone taunts God with “Pour out your bowls of wrath upon the Earth!” and within moments floods, riots, the Colloseum is knocked down like skittles by a buge meteor, and an earthquake tears the Sphynx in two. Stone strikes back in front of an enormous crowd in Africa and cuts them down with flames, screaming “Worship MEEEEE!!!!” and, in a particularly jaw-dropping moment, vomits a horde of bees that pour over the Great Wall of China.

China declares war on the United World Union and, along with the United States and South America, sends tanks into the Valley of Megiddo. At this moment of great worldwide despair the fugitive David Alexander emerges as the “chosen one”, a Christ-like figure of salvation, and sets out to halt Stone’s plan for eternal damnation. At Megiddo, Stone presides over a part-real, mostly CGI battle of Armageddon, then splits open to reveal the twenty-feet winged reptilian form of Satan himself. The sun turns blood red, then black, and out of the darkness, like a 50s Red Scare wet dream, the Second Coming erupts as a gigantic mushroom cloud that cuts a swathe through the unrighteousness.

Megiddo is evidently less concerned about scripture and more about action - there’s no Rapture, no Mark of the Beast, no Antichrist’s resurrection. Instead, BTS’s film is more about taking wild swings at Revelation for a wider audience - with deeper pockets.

BTS: Is ‘Megiddo’ still renting in Australia?

Andrew: Megiddo is, yeah. And it still trickles down to the same expression when they bring it back - "What the hell was that?" I think the whole church angle, the Book of Revelation angle, is so strong in it that it knocks people for a bit of a loop. I don't think they're used to seeing Church-funded apocalypse films.

During the Reagan years here in America, I think it was James Watts, the Evangelical Christian cabinet minister, was asked about the government’s rollback policies that were now damaging the environment. And he basically said, the environment doesn't matter - the Rapture is coming!

Yeah!

And, God will make it all over again if He wants to, so who cares, it's not important. What is important is for us right-wing Republicans to make as much money out of the environment as we can in the meantime….OK, he didn't say that. He didn't say THAT bit. Not out loud. Pardon me. I jest. And I'm a mind reader.

Yeah. Reading between the lines it's really quite a frightening concept.

Indeed, how did that longing for Rapture affect foreign policy? Nuclear Holocaust? No problem! Authoritarian Ideology of any kind is frightening, whether it is Calvinist, Islamic, or anti-intellectual Maoism of the Pol Pot variety.

Given the eccentric and irreverent nature of many of your films, Megiddo seems an odd choice. What do you say to critics who have accused you of using your skills to make propaganda for the religious right?

In a free society, everybody is entitled to get their message out there to anyone who will listen. That includes Evangelical Christians. There are 26 million members of registered Christian organisations in the US. One group of Pentecostal Christians, Trinity Broadcasting - wanted to make a movie about the battle of Armageddon, and were offering me the largest budget of my career. (So, careerism did enter into my decision.) But I had no qualms about telling their story, despite the fact that their message did not align with my spiritual beliefs. The Jewish line producer felt the same way. Of course I would not make a film for the Satanists. That’s a mental illness, not a religion. Or if the Taliban wanted an instructional film on “The Joy of Stoning”, I would also decline. In this instance, the Pentcostals wanted a product made – something they described openly as a “conversion tool”. Personally I find their philosophy a little judgemental, punitive and patriarchal for my taste, but they’re entitled to their views.

But what are your views?

Personally I believe that all religions are simply different cultural expressions of the same human yearning for answers to the meaning of life. Religions should be in harmony not conflict. How could “A Just God" create competing belief systems that encourage different races to make war upon one another in His Name? That would be cruel, and inconsistent with the concept of a benign super-intelligence capable of creating the cosmos. Empathy should make the world go round, not money. And this philosophy is common to all the great religious teachers that have influenced mankind. Treat thy neighbour as thyself. God is not the problem, we are. Society needs a moral code based on spiritual values - but throughout history, the ruling elite in different parts of the world always re-tooled religion into a control system. Some day in the future the world will unite under one religion, but it will be a religion that mandates racial and gender equality, embraces all major religions of the past as valid steps on the path to enlightenment, and applies spiritual values to solving economic and environmental problems. Not that anyone is going to take seriously religious instruction from the director of Leprechaun In Space, but those are my views, and the people who financed Megiddo are entitled to theirs also. It is important to have their views on display, so people can judge for themselves. So I said I would film their script, but invest it with a little of my sense of cinema humour at the same time. In this way, people not normally attracted to religious material might find it entertaining. Even revealing.

Let me digress on the subject of propaganda. It has its uses. Why? Because propaganda is a two-edged sword. It always reveals more about the people behind it than they realise at the time. Triumph Of The Will played very well to the German audience of its day. But to the rest of the world it was a clear warning to those still unconvinced as to where Hitler’s dreams of empire were headed. That film galvanised political opposition in England and America. There was much debate as to whether the director Leni Reifenstahl was a committed Nazi, an objective documentarian, or just a self serving careerist. Opinion will always remain divided. But her film provides mankind with a vital portrait of the arrogance and military triumphalism that imbued Hitler’s ideology, and a warning against allowing national pride to reach those toxic levels again. So propaganda of any kind – take cigarette advertising up to 1960 for instance – provides a useful addition to the public record. Let me hasten to add that I do not equate religious fundamentalists with Nazis, though the Taliban were getting close. The Pentecostals that I met through the movie all sincerely believed that their brand of Christianity was the way the world would be saved from despair. I saw their charities in operation. I met crack and heroin addicts they had rescued from skid row who were now living happy productive lives. There was a lot I saw that impressed me. But I just cannot buy this War-on-Satan thing as a driving force. Because I do not believe in Satan, this aggressive power of evil walking the earth, looking for ways to help people make themselves miserable. Satan is a metaphor for negative thinking. He is a fun movie character, but, like Jason and Freddie, he does not exist.

So how did you approach the movie?

As you know, I'm interested in genre gene-splicing. I thought, what this particular church wants to show its followers is a Cecil B. de Mille Ten Commandments type religious epic dealing with grand themes in allegorical terms on a world stage, culminating in the battle of Armageddon and The Second Coming. The script they gave me was florid melodrama, full of grandiloquent speeches substituting for relationships. It was The Greatest Script Ever Written, and changes were out of the question. That is, until Michael York and Michael Biehn both expressed their serious concerns about their characters, then I was allowed a pass at the script within strict guidelines. While giving the stars more meat to feed on, I tweaked the structure into something like: The Omen meets Airforce One in the End Of Days. They fight The Battle Of The Bulge ( Gulf War style) and are rewarded by The Second Coming. The melodrama of the piece could not be disguised so I embraced it whole heartedly. I pitched the tone of the film earnest and solemn for its religious market, and a little high camp for the secular audience, both of which were present on opening night. Stirring religious moments got applause, and a lot of Michael York’s dry asides got the laughs I was aiming for.

I'm sure that sociologists can deconstruct the film with glee, and they should. But hopefully there's my own small cult audience that might like it as high camp. That's why Michael York and I put in so many Biblical and Shakespearean quotes. He's a great Shakespearean actor so if you've got it, flaunt it. I felt if he had to make a lot of speeches, then they should be florid, literate speeches. Let him get his tongue around that, he's got one of the better tongues on the soundtrack these days. He used his Shakespearean skills to make the part constantly interesting. And you can't take your eyes off him when he's on the screen - he gobbles it up, with great skill.

You can tell he's not really taking it all very seriously.

No, he's having tremendous fun. So did I. I always have tremendous fun. Because I can always see the irony in things.

Where is Armageddon supposed to take place?

Prophecy suggests the battle will be fought round a hill overlooking the Jezreel Valley in Israel, the hill of Megiddo. This is the reputed site of the stables of King Solomon. It is also the site of numerous battles over the last six thousand years, a crossing point into the Jordan Valley. General Allenby defeated the Turks in 1918 on the Plain of Megiddo. Armageddon means “ at Megiddo “. So it's a place where strategic battles were always fought, so I guess that's why they nominated it for the 'final battle'. So I went there to check it out, and it looked just like agricultural land in Bakersfield, California. It didn't look like a dramatic landscape appropriate for staging the end of the world. I needed a place that evoked Masada, the mountain retreat where Israelite freedom fighters held off a Roman Army for three years, before committing mass suicide. Also, the 2000 Intifada was heating up. Israel was not going to be a healthy place to be shooting battle scenes from a Christian movie in a few months time. So we choose a part of California that looked like the traditional image of Israel, where the greatest danger would be driving the freeway to get there. In the Santa Clarita Valley, there is a place called Mystery Mesa, a large plateau which rises about 300 feet in the air and gave us a commanding 360 degree view of surrounding valleys and mountain ranges. Our Jewish line producer Larry Bettman was smart enough to spot it from the air in a light plane. It looked just like Masada and yet it was 30 miles from LA.

How much re-writing of the script were you allowed to do?

The original script spent nearly 40 pages on back story before Michael York is on the screen. Fascinating though the Anti-Christ’s childhood and military school experiences may be, the story treads water, the star is absent, and the audience is undoubtedly impatient. But the back story was ruled a sacred cow, so to speak. I streamlined and condensed as much as I was allowed to. The opening sequence was originally intended to be placed in the middle. I took it and placed it at the beginning, so at least we'd get Michael York up on the screen in the first few seconds, announcing his agenda, and the audience could immediately understand, oh, this is a sort of a Biblical allegory with grandiloquent speeches. And then it goes into strictly generic Omen-esque territory, so that people feel grounded in a familiar genre. Then, after some teenage romance to set up future conflict, and some slight grinding of gears, it changes genres into global political drama with supernatural trimmings. A bit of a dog’s breakfast – all over the place – but personally I like genre cocktails if they move fast enough and exult in their excesses. 4 movies in one has got to be worth watching.

Why is there a paintball battle in an era before the game was invented? Did you feel the need for another action scene and anything would do?

The only reason there is a totally anachronistic paintball battle sequence at the Italian military school ( Remember, this is 1975, guys!) is that principal producer Matthew Crouch, whose father financed the film, led his paintball team to victory in the State Championships, and he wanted the scene in the film. So that was that. Peripherally the scene demonstrates the Anti-Christ’s ruthlessness (if we were still uncertain) and his grasp of military strategy (take the enemy by surprise from behind). I introduced colored smoke into the battle and that gives the sequence an interesting look. On balance the paintball battle does give the film a burst of visual energy before a bunch of wordy sequences preceding the murder of the father. Then the structure motors along quite nicely (or absurdly, depending on your point of view).

Embellishing character within this structure had its challenges and restrictions. If you feel that there is a rather passive protagonist in the film, the Michael Biehn character, it's not for want of trying. I think he did a wonderful job, I hasten to add, but he didn't want to take the part until I could make the character as active as it is currently in the film. But the hero was not allowed to do anything on his own initiative that was not already pre-determined by God. The real hero of the movie is God, the protagonist is merely his tool. So this means that the heroic actions of the protagonist, which generally in cinema drama cause the tables to be overturned and the matters to be resolved in favour of the forces of good, in any allegorical tale, that formula was not permissible because the message of the picture is "Only God will decide, God will rule." And so you have to obey God's will at all times. Those are His chosen terms. So I originally wanted Michael Biehn to go up the hill for his final confrontation with his brother the Anti-Christ, with a tracking device in his boot, so that he could be the homing signal for Tomahawk missiles to blow up the Beast. But that was not God’s plan, it was explained to me. God required the protagonist to go on a suicide mission with no plan, just sacrifice himself. Then God would intervene, because everything is His show. He says when, where and how. Personally I have difficulty in reconciling this dictum with the massive amounts of Undeserved Misfortune in the world today. I have a problem with any belief system that models the spiritual world on tribal, hierachical command and control structures that have existed in human society throughout history, primarily to benefit the elites. Surely the Supreme Being is smarter and kinder than that? But what would I know? I am just an ethical hedonist who enjoys making movies.

Another of the script problems was that everyone was making speeches at each other, rather than having relationships. So what I worked on was to give Michael York a relationship with his wife, played by Diane Venora. Her part was so appalling no actress would take it! So I had to really clean it up and give her more to do, so that women were not just...

Hand-wringing kind of martyr types.

That's right. Or just clueless.

"I just realised he was the Beast!" Gasp!

Well, yes, that was a question Diane asked me often. "How come I have not really known all this time?" And I said, well, the only way you can justify this is that you haven't wanted to know. You know that there's a bucket under the bed, but you just don't want to lift the lid. You know something's there, but if you keep it hidden under the bed you don't confront your complicity.

But there is a little bit of a clue, too, that she's seduced by the charitable work with the poor that he's been doing, and so she actually does believe that he's doing good.

Indeed, his overt position is –“ I may be ruthless at business, but I’m just doing it so that I can pour a whole lot of money back into helping humanity”. So she turns a blind eye. The message there is that the Devil can seduce you with false values other than the obvious mercenary ones. Some of us can be seduced by our own sense of pride in our moral rectitude or level of compassion. The Devil will find your weakest point, whatever pride you're susceptible to, and exploit that. And you know, that's reasonably plausible. My view is that the Devil is a metaphor for selfishness, from which all human failings stem. But in this kind of movie it is fun to visually create The Beast. However, his final depiction in Megiddo by a sorry digital effect, scarcely worthy of Playstation 2, was my greatest disappointment with the film. That’s a problem with CGI. The experts assure you it will look great in the final render. When it doesn’t, it is too late and too expensive to start over. Overall, our VFX supervisors did a great job with limited resources, but The Beast let us down. He should have been really scary.

I'm really keen on the early scenes, the Omen inspired ones. The attempting to burn the baby. Which is always a nice moment! (laughs)

Well yes, I had fun with that. There was an attempted baby burning scene in the original script, and it had to take place, and there had to be this line from the evil kid: "The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away." And that was an edict from on high. So I made the most of it. I mean, I've watched it with mothers present, and they shift very uncomfortably in their seats. But we were at great pains not to endanger the baby, or even the doll!

And of course, one of my other favourite moments is the first appearance of Udo Kier, because it was so totally unexpected! (laughs) I fell off my chair when I saw Udo.

Udo, yeah, he's great. He's quite a character.

So I've got a feeling that you're more than compensating the Brian Trenchard-Smith cult audience -

Well, I would HOPE so!

- by populating the film with people like Udo Kier and Franco Nero particularly.

Well, I'd like to take credit for that, but in truth we had to get some names that had some theatrical value in Europe. So that, we knew the film would get a theatrical release in the United States, because they were basically going to four- wall it, through whatever theatres they could get. Three hundred ultimately. But to make sure that it would get a theatrical release in Europe it had to have some European stars, in addition to Michael York, who certainly is a British name. Udo and Franco were friends with Larry Mortorff, one of the 'secular' producers. He's got thirty producer credits on movies. He's a lawyer, and a significant powerbroker in his own way in Hollywood. And he knows everybody, so he can call in relationships. He knew Franco and he knew Udo, from past films, and said hey, think about being in this. I talked to those guys over the phone and we worked something out. I mean, in the script Udo’s character had absolutely no part at all, and I just used every opportunity to have him as an observer in scenes. So we built him up as much as possible, but as far as Udo is concerned, it's still not nearly enough part! But it was all I could manage, particularly in something that had to be shot in 38 days. And in Italy, they work ten hour, not 12 hour days. But it was a wonderful castle, Bracchiano Castle, about a hour outside of Rome, which has been used in Midsummer Night's Dream, Othello, and a number of other pictures.

So the question, I still haven't asked the question, how DID you become involved, in a church-funded apocalypse film? I mean, how were you first approached?

I was approached by a friend of mine who'd just had lunch with Mrs. Michael York. She said, "We're having real trouble finding a director that WE like for this follow-up to The Omega Code."

Because Michael York was listed as one of the producers.

Yes, well I'm sure that was an inducement for him to come on board the second one. And indeed, he's written a book about it - 'Dispatches from Armageddon' by Michael York. He kept a daily diary, which, I think, is an interesting rose-coloured view of things! But he's very kind to me, and to what I did, and yeah, I'm sure you could get that book on-line if you wanted. Because that could help you with your book, or your chapters, because there would be some quotes from him, relating to the film.

Anyway, Mrs York told this friend of mine, David Baxter, gee, I wish we could find a good director. And he says, "I know one!" I should give him credit for that. David Baxter is a young producer about to score with a lot of projects. And he's been a friend of mine since we met at the UCLA fencing club.

That sounds like a good place to network!

Anyway, David called me on my cell, and says, "Hey, get your reel over to Michael York's manager." And so I did. And so Michael duly saw my demo tape, and then I was called to meet him at a book signing he was doing for his book on Shakespeare. And as he said in his Megiddo book - ” five minutes later I could see that I was a man he could do business with”. And so he knew I didn't have a fixed vision, that I was going to be a conductor of fine instruments, as I often call myself as a director. You have to be a conductor of fine instruments, pick the brains of everybody and then weld their ideas into your ideas. I mean, immediately it was obvious that we should put Shakespeare in, Shakespearean quotes in the script. So when he saw my fondness for Shakespeare too, then I think that helped.

So then I was given to the Trinity Broadcasting people to have my professional past examined. I think they saw Britannic , the story of Titannic’s sister ship, which also sank. They deemed it very good value for money and special effects. I made it for $3.5M, ( perhaps little more than James Cameron’s catering budget!) So, they thought that I could handle a big look in a short shooting schedule. And I did. In fact, the schedule was originally going to be 44 days, and it was reduced to 38 days, which was a struggle but we did it. But I wouldn't have missed it for the world, it was great fun, and it may one day, someone will deconstruct it for a more popular audience.

I figured in some cases it probably would need someone holding their hands through it, saying, "Look, I don't think everybody's taking this so seriously, you know."

Much of the Christian press praised it, loudly.

Because they do...

And I am glad that the bulk of the Christian audience that saw it enjoyed it. Because how often does a big-scale VFX heavy Christian themed action picture come their way. Friends of mine called me after seeing it with suburban audiences a couple of weeks into the run. There was cheering in several spots and applause at the end. My job is to please an audience in whatever genre, so that was satisfying to hear. On the other secular side of the fence, I think only one reviewer got my tandem approach. Harry Knowles's Aint It Cool News review, well he had one correspondent who called it the kind of overtly high camp old fashioned B movie that they basically don't make any more. I'll take that as a great compliment.

That IS a good compliment!

Yeah, well I'm always interested in reworking a genre. Sadly only the faithful went on the release date, the week after the 9/11 attack. The secular audience stayed away from a film whose ad line stated….” In the beginning, the End had a name…( MEGIDDO )…That time is now…” Comforting words a few days after the worst attack ever on American soil. If they had written off the publicity expenses already committed to, and postponed the release till after Afghanistan – say February – and changed the ad campaign to a message of hope – then they would have done twice the business.

But according to an interview that I forwarded to you, the producers really did think that they were recording history as prophesied by the Bible.

Yeah, indeed, they said that God had positioned the release date of Megiddo to occur just after the terrorist attack when mankind needed to reflect on its ways. And there are those that believe that Biblical prophecy is about to come true, that we are in the time of Tribulation, which immediately precedes Armageddon, and will be followed by the Rapture. There are those that believe what George Bush is doing in occupying Iraq and inviting the terrorists to come there and fight American forces will bring about the very Jihad crusade that Ousama bin Laden set out to create, a clash between Muslim and Christian nations. However there are those that believe this is a Good Thing, because God will intervene on the Christian side, smite the heathen, and institute a New World Order. There are Right Wing Christians who justify American Imperialism as the Lord’s will. God created America to take control of the world for its own good.

A good way of disguising corporate interests.

Well yes! You'll die for what you're told is your God. But, if the God of the people who are telling you to die is -in truth- Money, then you've died for someone else's profits. I can't think of a justifiable war this century, other than World War Two. And again, if people hadn't been as craven and spineless and morally flexible in the 20s and 30s in relation to what was happening in Germany, Hitler could have been stopped. Hitler would have been avoided if the Treaty of Versailles had not been so punitive, and basically created the economic conditions that would bring about a fascist demagogue. And the present Middle East conflict would have been avoided if the British, French and Americans had not arrogantly carved up the Ottoman Empire to suit their own interests, while ignoring the interests and needs of the different ethnic groups in the region.

One thing I didn't ask was, have you actually watched the first Omega Code.

Yes I did. It has a promising start, some interesting mood and atmosphere and intrigue... but I'm afraid that from the moment that Casper van Dien leaps over that sofa on the talk show introductory sequence - it's all downhill from there. By the end, it is confusing and hard to sit through. Michael Biehn said to me "Did you see that first film they made? I tried to sit through it FOUR TIMES and I can't get to the end!" Well - it has one or two interesting moments, but it wasn't the compelling thriller it was advertised to be, but the Christian audience were so starved of anything that related to their area of interest, they went to it in great numbers. And it spawned the sequel.

Well, it's the whole concept of the starving man in the desert and the box of Sayo biscuits. He's gonna LOVE that packet of Sayo biscuits when he finally comes across them!

I thought surely there was a better movie to be made out of this kind of material. And lo and behold, I got my chance to try. But look, none of our films are perfect, certainly not mine.

It's incredible. Have you seen the Thief In The Night series?

The ones that you mentioned, those Seventies apocalyptic Christian ones, I've never seen those.

Oh, those Seventies ones are absolutely amazing. And you know I'm interviewing the filmmakers on Thursday. They're trying to get a miniseries, based on the seventies apocalypse series, off the ground for some Christian cable network.

There is a rival group of Christian filmmakers, who make the Left Behind series.

That's the one, yeah. I can't remember the name of their company, but they brought out Revelation and Tribulation...

Right. They've done VERY well.

They've done incredibly well, and yet… they really ARE awful, they're true B films.

But that's how starved the Christian audience is, for anything that speaks to them as decent. I mean, what can you say?

It's really quite interesting, because they're involved with a ministry called the Jack Van Impe Ministry. He's, I guess, one of the big Pentecostal bigwigs, who organised, I don't know if you know this, he organised an internet - not a survey, but a petition, an internet petition, that was sent out to about a thousand cinemas across America, with the names of thousands and thousands of born again Christian names, saying "We will blacklist your cinema unless you start to play Christian product." And that was about two years ago.

So that may explain why Trinity was able to get Megiddo into four hundred cinemas.

Yeah. I think it was only three hundred at the end of the day. They lost the states of New York and Washington D.C. - no theatre there would book the film after 9/11. Every theatre in those states cancelled their bookings.

Why, because it was seen to be in bad taste?

Yeah. You see a shot of the Pentagon in the film - and when I saw it with an audience 9 days after the Pentagon was hit, the audience winced at that shot. Now, I don't think that means you should cut it out, I think you should release the film at a more sensible time. Or a more prudent time in the market, or at least wait and see what a prudent time is. Megiddo is not a film that would ever have gone out of date, because it is, in a way, already dated - a Sixties epic in modern dress. Ten Commandments meets the Book of Revelations. Good versus evil, the wrath of God, the clash of nations, brother against brother - hey, you know, sounds like good stuff. But anyway, they decided to embrace the disaster of 9/11 and make it all part of the plan. And I think that was a major credibility blot, when God did not reward them with boffo box office.

Did you say it only got about six million?

$ Six million. Which is half what its predecessor got, but it did ship at least 450,000 video copies in the US and Canada alone. And it's a better film than its predecessor, I say with my customary modesty, and it's by no means perfect. But it's an interesting effort. But it could have done substantially better if they had judged the mood of the country more prudently, spent a bit more time thinking about it.

It was almost like the case of the fundamentalist minister who came out within a week of September 11 and said that New York deserved it, because it was a city full of paedophiles and sinners and sodomites! You know, that sort of thing is not good PR for the church.

No. Well, I think the church has got quite a few questions going on at the moment. I mean the Catholic Church, certainly. But I'm glad I made the film, I don't think it's harmed anybody, I don't think it will spiritually corrupt anyone, and it is certainly a visual document that is quite eloquent as to the whole philosophy of a particular branch of the Pentecostals in America, a very powerful branch.

One element that is missing from Omega Code and Omega Code 2, which was in the Left Behind series, is the whole concept of a rapture.

Yes.

So was it not in the job description to put in the rapture and...

I think it became ultimately a matter of budget. I mean, in the script, as Michael Biehn lies dying, he sees the Diane Venora character floating above him like an angel, so she's in heaven - but there was not a scripted rapture, other than the Mount of Olives splitting open and water gushing out. THAT aspect of the rapture, prophecy wise, was reflected, but the spirits all rising up out of the ground was not. And I think there was a genuine concern - perhaps a wise concern - by the producers, that it could look awfully hokey, it could look like something out of an early Sam Raimi film. Well, Sam Raimi would have done an interesting job on The Omega Code series (laughs).

I think so, yeah. If you look at those Seventies apocalypse films or even the recent ones, the Left Behind series, they always include the Seven Seals opening and the Four Horsemen. You sort of hinted at the whole thing about the Four Horsemen, the Pestilence and Starvation visiting the land, in a series of news stories.

Yeah. We were going to have more tribulation, we were going to have a blizzard of giant hailstorms smash the Pacific Design Center. There was meant to be all sorts of freak weather, which ultimately I got out of stock footage, and I created these little news broadcasts, to tell the audience about things we couldn't afford to do. Which is a low budget technique. But yeah, we could have had more, but that's the idea - God tests the people of the world with tribulations Will they still worship him in times of trouble? Or will they switch allegiance to a plausible celebrity who claims to be a benefactor to mankind, but really he represents the forces of evil. So those that side with the pretender, 'they will be cut down like winter wheat'. And that's the message

My point was that the other films are kind of almost beating the audience over the head with this whole Biblical Book of Revelations concept of the false prophet, and people accepting the mark of the Beast. In one film they're actually getting what looks like ink stamps on their arm, that kind of resemble bar codes. You know? And at one point the ink is kind of smudged, so it looks kind of shitty. And so I think to the credit of Megiddo you haven't kind of spelt it out to the audience.

I tried to eliminate scenes that would be so absurd in their internal logic that they took you out of the movie. However, there are those that believe the “ mark of the beast “ is your credit card number, and ultimately fallen believers will show their allegiance to the Antichrist by having it stencilled on their body, thus permitting them to receive food and water in the time of Tribulation. This was too complex a side issue for the film to explore.

In the light of all my comments, I don't want to appear to be stabbing the movie in the back retrospectively. I'm really quite pleased that it is what it is, that it turned out as well as it did, given the fact that it was an extremely difficult film to prep in eight weeks from a standing start, including rewriting. And shoot in 38 instead of 44 days. The works.

And the whole point of the article is particularly not to belittle the first Omega Code either, or to say that all these films are a little silly. You know, I'm seriously applying what is seen to be, what do they call it, apocalypticism, into that whole Christian theory of rapture, tribulation, armageddon.

You know why I think that the apocalypse movies and books and so forth are so popular right now, is because the world has become so complex, and so threatening. Not only are you threatened by geopolitics that you have no control over,and an environment and a food supply that is becoming more and more polluted and contaminated, you seem to be threatened by an economic system that becomes more and more oppressive to the middle class The rich get richer, the poor get audited, so that the once-contented, happy-little-vegemite middle class are now feeling the squeeze and they're frightened about the future. So if they can convince themselves that there's a future beyond the immediate future, that will give them what they've worked so hard all their lives for, to give them contentment and a life without fear, and all the things that Heaven promises - and all they have to do is obey the precepts of God's messengers on Earth, then that is some measure of comfort. But in a way, it's almost a neurotic reaction to a traumatic situation.

But it's a very human reaction too.

A very human reaction, we all search for the unknowable. I mean, my particular religious beliefs are completely different. I believe in the essential unity of all religions as different cultural expressions of the same search for the meaning of life, the imponderable, the unknowable. We don't know the answer. But we need to try to find it. So I believe that religion should not be a reason for conflict, it should be a reason for unity.

Well, that's pretty much my position too. But I'm sure that you didn't tell that to the Pentecostals! Unitarianism is possibly one of the big buggaboos or possibly one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse too.

Yeah, well, this is the way they are. Religion can be used as a control system, with a centralised authority that doesn’t like to share. But I would like to add that the rank and file Pentecostals that I dealt with on the film were all genuine decent likable people. On the last night of shooting, 300 Christian volunteers were swelling the ranks of our extras in the battle scenes. It was freezing cold. Groups of them huddled round small gas heaters for warmth singing Christian songs between set ups. I went over to one group to thank them for their contribution. And they decided to give me a blessing, crowding round me, laying their hands on me, even though I was not one of them. They prayed that I might find God like them. They were genuinely happy people. It was very sweet. I was touched. I accepted the blessing. Did it make me a better person? I think I am still the same. Perhaps it stopped me getting any worse! Anyway, that's it for the night.

Ferd Sebastian interview 1999

Interview with GATOR BAIT's FERD SEBASTIAN

[Interview conducted over two emails, mid 1999. Previously unpublished]

Ferd: Andrew, good to hear from you.......

How do I feel about exploitation films today?? I love every film I ever made. It was a part of my life and enjoyed making them. True there are some things I would not make today, because I would not want to warp some mind out there in movie land. If everyone was normal it would be OK. People would know it is just make believe. However we have some sickos out there and I would not want to be responsible for pushing them over the line.

You didn't say on Gator Bait if you had 1 or 2. If you have Gator 1 with Claudia Jennings, that's great. Claudia, is no longer alive. She was one of my closest friends. She died in a auto accident in Malibu, California. I will always miss her.

We also made a Gator Bait 2. Paramount is the distributor. The female lead in that one is Jan Duncan. She married my oldest son after that show.

If you haven't seen The American Angels, your missing another good one. Paramount is again the distributor. It is about female wrestlers. It will do very well for you.

Andrew: You talked about some of your films possibly being taken the wrong way by "sickos" - do you mean the early ones like The Hitchhikers etc? How do you think they could be viewed?

Sickos is the wrong word. Impressionable would be better. It's not just my films, it's any film. Mine are just the only ones that I had control of. I believe we are a product of our art. We create the world’s morals and we haven't been doing a very good job. You mentioned The Hitchhikers. That is a great example. In most of my films the good guys win, even if they’re anti-heroes. In The Hitchhikers people who rob and steal win. It looks like fun, and an easy way to live. A kid could say, why work, look at those guys. They got the babes, the money, and are having a blast. That is what I meant. Not really a sicko, I think we get into them in the more violent films.

How did you meet Beverly, and what got you both into making films?

Beverly and I meet at a roller skating rink in Houston, Texas when we were 18 & 19 years old. We ran away and got married 10 days after we met. We have been together for 47 years. We got into films by. First I was a photographer, then went into TV commercials, then movies. We made enough money in TV coms so we financed our first movie. Sounds like a big deal, I Need it cost $7500. Like in most of our films we did all the work. But in that one I mean ALL, there was only the two of us and the cast which was about 4 people.

Claudia Jennings is an amazing presence on screen. What was she like as a person, and as an actress to work with?

As I told you, Claudia was mine and Beverly's best friend. We loved her dearly. She was the most free person I have ever met. I first worked with her on a film I made for Dimension Pictures, The Single Girls. It is not on your list it was made after The Hitchhikers. That is when our friendship started. She ask us to write a show that she could star in. We wrote Gator Bait. She was fun, honest, sexy, I think the best of the B actresses, easy to work with and a true friend.

I haven't seen Red White & Blue, but I read that Dave Friedman was interviewed in it, and he released it. I'm a big fan of the films he produced (and directed), can you tell me more about him and Red White & Blue?

RW&B was about the President’s commission on obscenity. We followed the commission report, and then interviewed the people they did separately and showed the type of work they did. I really did it for Dave, he was my best male friend in Hollywood. Dave was a great promoter. He started going ahead of carnivals as a front man drumming up the crowds. He was meant to exploit films he was the best. He was likable, lovable and looked like the Kentucky Colonel. His nick name was the Colonel.

Some of your mid 70s films like Delta Fox are really great action films made on ultra-low budgets, with top actors. How did you do it with the money you had?

We just used very small crews and again we do so much of the work ourselves. Also Beverly is the best producer and scheduler I have ever seen. Danial Pertie, a big director in Hollywood at that time (it's his son you hear of now), asked me to come out to his set and show him how to save money. I went out and never saw so much waste in my life. I started telling him all the people I would get rid of. He said why? I said because they would get in my way. I would not be able to move fast enough because I would trip over them.

What made you go back & do a sequel to Gator Bait? Is it true Jan Mackenzie was a pro wrestler???

Paramount. At that time Gator Bait was the #1 grossing film in Europe, and they wanted one. So I made Gator Bait 2. Claudia was dead so found a new actress. Jan Duncan, who later changed her name to Jan Mckenzie, who later changed it to Jan Sebastian. She is my daughter-in-law. No, she is not a pro wrestler. I had a choice of getting a pro wrestler and teaching her to act or get an actress and teaching her to wrestle. I chose the latter.

The last film I could find your name on was Running Cool in 1993. It seemed like a real labour of love - were all the bikers friends and members of your Ministry? Do you have any more movies in the works?

All the bikers were friends, however although many may be Christians, they are not part of my ministry. Beverly thinks we might make one more. She saves retired racing greyhounds and is considering writing a show about greyhound racing. Really I have my hands full helping people with Jesus. Although if she did it I would do it with her.

I seem to get my fill of the entertainment business with my son and Jan; they produce and direct a national TV show which is now in it's second year. Maybe in another 5 years it will make its way over, or under. It's called Real Life 101, it is a teenage show.

I've tried to compile a filmography for you and your wife, I know it's not complete. Could you add any titles that are missing?

I Need (1967)

The Love Clinic (1968)

Marital Fulfillment (1970)

Red White & Blue (1970)

The Hitchhikers (1971)

Gator Bait (1973)

The Single Girls/Bloody Friday (1974)

Flash & The Firecat (1975)

Delta Fox (1977)

On The Air Live With Captain Midnight (1979)

Rocktober Blood (1984)

Gator Bait 2 (1986)

All American Girls (198?)

Running Cool (1993)

If you ever find a print on I Need or The Love Clinic let me know. The lab went bankrupt and all the negatives they had were stolen. So they might show up some day.

Andrew, don't let the blood rush to your head walking around upside down all day. Hope this helped you. Ferd

About 2jesus...... About 11 years ago I got very ill and without Jesus I would be dead. I will put my testimony below and you will see how he changed my life.........

My name is Ferd Sebastian, I am 65 years old. I've wasted most of my life fighting the world, trying to get ahead. Eleven years ago, I found I was not Superman. There was always someone faster, meaner, or uglier to aggravate my life. After pounding my body to the breaking point I was brought to my knees. My heart was clogged up from stress and improper eating. I needed open heart surgery! But I wasn't whipped yet. I had money. So I told my Doctor to get the best surgeon, which he did and my operation was a success. However after six months my bypasses started stopping up. I got the bad news. I was down for the count. The doctors said my best chance would be if they blocked off or killed half of my heart. I would be severally restricted in my activity but that if I didn't do it I was sure to have a massive heart attack which would probably kill me. I told them I would let them know my decision and left.

I was a film producer living in Los Angeles at that time, so dejectedly I went to the studio. However Jesus jolted me. A thought came as clear as day. Ferd, you can't handle this. There is nothing you or your money can do. You need help.. Somehow, thank God, I knew Jesus was the answer. I asked my son if he would pray with me and we went out to a vacant sound stage. As we were walking out to the stage, I remembered something my father told me as a child. That Jesus made promises to his followers. One of them being answering prayers. I was 56 years old at the time of my heart problems, and I hadn't been to church or picked up a Bible in probably 40 years. But I wanted to claim Jesus' promise. So we prayed to Jesus to heal me. I told Jesus I didn't know where it said this in the Bible but I had faith that he could and would heal me. I felt a small snap in my chest. Jesus reached down and picked me up and said. "Why didn't you call on me sooner? I've been with you all the time, but you wouldn't listen." So He healed my body., renewed my mind, and filled me with His Spirit and love.

From that day on I got stronger. I told the doctors, Jesus had healed me. They didn't believe me. They gave me a test where they put a radio active solution in my veins and photographed my heart. It was healed. I had full circulation. They told me that something else must have happened, but I knew Jesus was a man of his word, even if I didn't know where the word was. That was the start of waking me up to Jesus. I had not been putting Jesus first in my life. Jesus was lucky to be in fifth place after work, money, family and play. In other words I though of Him very seldom. But he had not forgotten me. He gave me the chance to live and I thank Him with every breath I take.

I wanted to help other people so I started to talk to heart patients as my main ministry as I could related to how they felt. At that time I didn't know why my prayer worked. I started reading the Bible and asking God to make His word clear to me. It became interesting to me and I started reading it like a novel. It never made much sense to me before but now it did. From a Minister in California, I learned that the Bible was God talking to me. I also found that every time I read the Bible I learned something new. I will read a particular book, say John, that I have read many times before and find something that I wonder how did that get there. How could I have missed that. The only thing I can think of is God keeps opening my mind and revealing new things to me. Thank God for His teaching, now I can better serve other people by going over with them passages in the Bible.

In 1996, my Doctor told me my lab reports indicated that I had prostate cancer. What did I want to do about it? I told him I would be back in a month and take another test. I went home and prayed to Jesus to heal me. After 30 days I went back to the Doctor to take another test. The test was NEGATIVE. Praise The Lord!

When I was 64 years old, I had a stroke. My left side was paralyzed with no feeling. You could drive a nail thorough my arm and leg and I would not feel it. My wife called 911 for an ambulance to take me to the hospital. While we were waiting we called our son long distance and with the phone to my ear, we all prayed together for Jesus to heal me. Before we were through with the prayer my left arm started tingling and I could move it. By the time the ambulance arrived I could walk and I had all my feelings back. PRAISE GOD, I LOVE JESUS SO MUCH. HE HAS BEEN SO GOOD TO ME!

They took me to the hospital and gave me a cat scan, they were looking for the clot. I told them they would not find it. Jesus took it away. They didn't find it, but this time, I think one of the nurses believed me. They kept me in the hospital three days for observation, everything was OK. My wife picked me up to go home and on the way we decided to stop for lunch. The owner of the small cafe was a friend of mine and was concerned about my being in the hospital. I told him not to worry Jesus healed me. He asked would I talk to his cook. His father had just had a stroke and the boy was terribly worried about him. I turned to my wife and said "Now I know that having my stroke like my other two illness was a blessing. I've got a whole new group to minister to. If you are a Christian, God can always turn your misfortune into blessing. Use your misfortune. God is instructing you so pay attention and use these lessons in life to glorify God.

You have the POWER to help other people!

(John 14:12-14,) Jesus says, "I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Son will bring glory to the Father. You may ask anything in My name, and I will do it."

I'm not trying to claim that anything I do is Christ like. Far from it. However, I do have FAITH and TRUST in JESUS. Thank God that when He looks at me, He doesn't see this faulty person I am. All He sees is the Christ that lives inside of me and to Him that makes me perfect.

"PRAISE GOD, THAT HE GAVE HIS ONLY BEGOTTEN SON TO SAVE US. THANK YOU JESUS FOR COMING!

Why did I get all of these ailments? God certainly didn't give them to me. No, that would be counter productive, and that isn't how God operates. God doesn't make you sick, just so He could heal you. I got all of these illness because I am 65 years old and live a normal American lifestyle. By the time you are 65, you will probably have one or more of these illnesses also. Will you let them kill you? Or do you want to live? Don't wait as long as I did to find the key to health and happiness in this lifetime.

COME 2 JESUS!

So... Andrew, now you see why I've changed and why I have 2jesus. I was meeting with people that were sick and explaining how Jesus heals. A lot of them have been healed I would say about 80%. Were talking cancer, heart problems, major illnesses.

I had to start 2jesus to reach more people. We get over 2000 hits a day. I have people from all over the world that through Jesus I am able to help. We have people from Australia, China, South Africa, South America to name just a few. We've had many diseases cured and people that have attempted suicide have come 2jesus and have had their lives changed.

There is no contest as to what I have to do the rest of my life. I had pleasure in entertaining people. But that is no comparison to the pleasure of seeing a 33 yr old man with terminal brain cancer that the doctors have given up on, go back to the doctors after prayer and they can not find any trace of the tumor.

Andrew, thank you for asking about me. Visit me anytime.

God bless you, Ferd

Click on Ferd's Monster Film Partners website for an on-line infomercial on the Sebastians' latest film projects

"That's Godsploitation!" Tim Ormond interview 2003

"THAT's Godsploitation!" TIM ORMOND on his family's Christian gore films

[Excerpt from the chapter "THAT's Godsploitation! A Blinkered View of Christian Apocalypse & Rapture Cinema" in Jack Sargeant's forthcoming anthology SUTURE 2]

The Ormond Film Organization was a grass roots film production and distribution company from Nashville headed by husband and wife team Ron and June Ormond, later with their son Tim. Ron worked from the late 1940s on Lash LaRue westerns through to the cheesecake jawdropper Mesa Of Lost Women (1953), and later with the rest of the family on a series of increasingly lurid exploitation titles: Untamed Mistress (1956), Please Don’t Touch Me (1963), White Lightnin’ Road and Forty Acre Feud (both 1965), and my favourite Ormond shocker, The Exotic Ones/The Monster And The Stripper (1968). By the early 1970s the Ormonds found Jesus and from their work on outrageous gore-laden If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? (1971) as hired guns for doomsday Baptist sermon-monger Estus Pirkle, the films took on a new purpose; their’s were still exploitation films at heart, but were first and foremost exploitation films for God, or “Godsploitation” if you will. I found Tim Ormond by sheer chance through the website for his current position at Film Nashville, and he was more than happy to talk about his family’s film history, both secular and devotional.

Ron Ormond

“My Dad and Mom met way back in vaudeville, and they did stage shows and they traveled and they managed the Three Stooges and they had a grand life. And finally a point in time came when they decided to get out of stage shows, and go into films. And that’s a story in itself, which I’m finishing up a book on. We were never famous, we never got rich, but we had people who were kind of followers of the Ormond films throughout the South East. And that was grand and fun and that type of thing. But throughout the years, my dad, and my mom too, always had an interest in spiritual things. My Dad took a tour of the Orient way back in the fifties, just kind of doing a comparative religion study, so this was always something that interested him.

“On the premiere of Girl From Tobacco Row [1966], which was going to be in Louisville Kentucky, my Mom and Dad and I climbed in our Beachcraft Bonanza. And instead of getting to Louisville in style, our engine quit and we had to make a forced landing. The forced landing happened moments after take-off, or at least minutes, and there were not too many choices of where to land. We ended up crash-landing in a field, and basically my Mom felt – she told me this later – that it was the hand of God that kind of spared us. She said, ‘I could see an angel sitting on the wing.’ Whether she did or not, that’s what she said to me. So we did crash, the airplane was literally torn in half, but my dad was a command pilot in the airforce so he was a very good pilot, he was able to put it down safely. I got out of it without a problem, my Mom and Dad had fractured backs. Whenever you face death, it forces you to look at life a little different. And I’m not saying that from one night to another our lives changed, but nevertheless it puts you in a different mindset.

“So it’s not like the following Monday we got a call from Estus Pirkle, it didn’t happen. As a matter of fact, we got another airplane, a twin engine airplane this time. And that was fun, we went on doing what we were doing. Until on the way back from the Bahamas, one of our engines quit! And we had a second engine, so we were able to land safely. But still, it shook us up. Because that’s two – one crash and one forced landing. But we were fine.

“Shortly after that second incident, my dad heard from a friend of my Dad and Mom’s back when they were touring in vaudeville. He was a local radio announcer and he interviewed my dad. They kept in touch over the years. Well, flash forward in time, to when a preacher found that same person and preached his message on that local radio station. And of course somehow in the course of the conversation, the man, Estus Pirkle, said ‘I would like to make this into a film.’ So the gentleman I’m referring to said, ‘Well, I know someone in the business, let me get in touch with him.’ So he in turn calls my dad. My dad then gets on the phone, talks to Estus Pirkle and a guy by the name of Monty Stanfield who was his partner at the time. Or at least associate. And they agreed to meet at an airport, I think in Shreveport, Louisiana if I’m not mistaken.

“And so the three of them met in an airport and had their initial conversation. Now, Estus didn’t know the first thing about making a film. He assumed he would stand up in front of the camera and preach for an hour and that would be the end of it. But my dad, of course, coming from Hollywood and a story background, he says, ‘Well no, we’ve got to make it into a film that’s interesting to, you know, audiences.’ So they came up with the storyline of If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?, which was basically Estus’ sermon, and then my Dad’s screenplay, combined into a one hour Christian film, which was pretty shocking for the time. And it showed around, and it was very well received in the very fundamentalist circles of Estus Pirkle. But he made a decent amount of money off of it – the numbers actually escape me. We didn’t necessarily have a wonderful relationship with Estus, but we had a decent business relationship. We were coming from two opposite sides of the fence. He was like really really REALLY fundamental, and we were coming from Hollywood, so that kind of says it right there.”

"Ladies and gentlemen, I am Estus Pirkle."

“REALLY fundamental” is more than an apt description of Baptist preacher Estus Washington Pirkle. From his home base at the Locust Grove church in New Albany, Mississippi, Pirkle thundered relentlessly across the Baptist circuit in the Southern States until ill health slowed him down, and passed away in relative quiet in Tupelo on March 3rd, 2005. Like all touring preachers, he had one sermon he was famous for; his calling card was a virulently anti-Communist diatribe called “If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?”, a violently apocalyptic vision of America under Godless Communism. The titular “Footmen” are Communists abroad and godless liberals at home paving the way for the Apocalypse; when the real Horsemen appear, Pirkle postulates, will YOU be prepared to meet Jesus? Its timely appearance at the height of fears of a North Vietnamese victory (and by following the falling dominoes a Red Chinese takeover) in South East Asia, not to mention lingering paranoia over a possible Soviet invasion via Cuba, struck a powerful chord among churchgoers. Pirkle even recorded his sermon for an LP in 1968, the lines “Communism is good...Communism is good...” sampled by Negativland on their track “Christianity Is Stupid” in 1987.

Pirkle didn’t just see Reds under the bed - they were in the streets gunning down children, or in the pulpit up to their elbows in Baptist entrails. In his “Footmen” sermon he quotes Communist Party USA leader Gus Hall in 1961: "I dream of the hour when the last congressman is strangled to death on the guts of the last preacher” - Hall himself alluding to the famous quote by Diderot, who said he dreamed of strangling the last king with the guts of the last priest - “and since the Christians love to sing about the blood, why not give them a little of it. Slit the throats of their children and drag them over the mourner’s bench and the pulpit and allow them to drown in their own blood; and then see whether they enjoy singing these hymns."

When Pirkle approached Ron Ormond to make a filmed record of his “Footmen” sermon, Ron certainly didn’t forget his exploitation roots and crafted what can only be described as an absurd combination of classic cold war propaganda (a Biblical “duck and cover” training film) and hysterical Baptist fire and brimstone fear-mongering, tarred with a thick layer of fake blood and feathered with donations from Pirkle’s congregation in return for bit parts or screen credits.

If Footmen Tire You... opens with shots of Communist soldiers (Russians or Cubans - their ludicrous accents are never that clearly defined) riding on horseback through Mississippi forests. An off-screen voice asks, “Reverend Pirkle, are the pictures we are about to see true facts or figments of imagination?” Pirkle, still off-screen, replies, “I can document every statement I make in this film...” It can and will happen in America if Communism takes over. “Will we be trampled down under the feet of our enemies like the horses in Revelations trampled down God’s enemies? Ladies and gentlemen, I’m Estus Pirkle...” And with that, Pirkle’s commanding stare from behind horn-rimmed glasses fills the screen. Pirkle was a small man in real life, tightly wound and utterly compelling to watch in action, his body rigid with righteous anger and indignation, with only his mouth breaking into a contorted grimace, his voice staying between a carefully controlled “People say to me, PREACHER...” and barely more than a whisper (“Will you come...will you come...”).

Pirkle again eyes his congregation of frightened big-haired matrons, stoic Southern gentlemen, mature-aged boy scouts and spooky Addams Family children. “The things that are happening in America today are like a Sunday School picnic compared to that which will take place within the next 24 months unless revival breaks out in our country.” If not, he reasons, God will simply pack up and leave America for, say, Indonesia. In his place, there will be millions of dead Christians - 67 million to be exact. They will be gunned down in their homes, in front of their churches, in front of their children. So much blood, and Ron Ormond’s camera captures the envisioned carnage in lurid detail: or’nary folks and their chill’un torn to ribbons by fat, sweating, laughing Commies with hammer-and-sickle armbands. Again and again, Ron returns to the same blood-splattered corpses for pronounced dramatic effect.

Meanwhile, young wayward Judy leaves her boyfriend’s swanky car for church. Only to make an appearance, mind you. She asks her greasy beau if he’ll join her. “No way baby,” he shoots back, sunglasses showing an impassive front. “I’m a lover, not a Christian.”

Judy saunters into the church in her cha-cha heels while Pirkle turns his steely eye on today’s youth. “Mother and Daddy, are you willing to let your children be destroyed?” The footmen of the Apocalypse, he reasons, are already among us. On the TV, and in our schools: we see a teacher taking a sex education class, about to launch into an examination of “the seven erotic zones of passion”. At the drive in: “Have you considered what goes on down there? It’s nothing more than a spawning house for sex!” Even dance halls get a black X: “Dancing is just as wrong as it’s always been!... It’s the front door to adultery. The thing that starts on the dance floor is expected to be finished in a parked car or a motel somewhere!”

"There IS no candy!"

Under these Godless conditions, Pirkle reasons, Communism can take hold with “jet-age speed”. Without warning, news bulletins hark the New Age of America under the iron glove of socialism - the President is dead, the Cabinet are dead, and the invasion of the United States has begun. Almost immediately, children are taken from their parents for some good old fashioned re-education. One of the menacing Communist officers asks a classroom of children how many believe in Jesus. All hands go up. He then asks if they believe Jesus can perform miracles. All hands again. How many of them would like candy? “Let’s see if your Jeee-sus will bring candy now...(long pause) I don’t see any candy. I don’t taste any candy. There IS no candy!” He then suggests they ask their new beloved leader Fidel Castro for a miracle. A soldier enters the classroom and throws a huge bag of candy over the children. “Take all you want!” the Commissar tells his foundlings. “This is a miracle...”

Under Godless Communism, even the children are treated like slaves and forced to work in the fields. To prove they are not immune from punishment, the Commissar (Cecil Scaife) is shown gunning down a preacher in front of a horrified group of kids. The boys are then hogtied and one has a bamboo spike rammed through his ear. You imagine a Christian film would spare you the spectacle, but there it is, in glorious close-up, as the young boy vomits what looks like his own brains. The soldier then mumbles, “We punctured your ears... so you cannot hear... the word of God!”

A relentless litany of tortures follows, all captured by the Ormonds’ unflinching camera, from a young Tim Ormond forced to shoot his own Christian mother (“She is a diseased animal and must be slaughtered!”) to a family vainly trying to keep their father suspended over a patch of upturned pitchforks, while a soldier laughs at their futile efforts. Mental torture consists of families forced to sit on benches listening to 16 hours of recorded loops: “Communism is good... Communism is good... Christianity is stoopid... Christianity is stoopid... Give up... Give up...”

Back at Pirkle’s Church, Judy flashes back to moments of her own wickedness - dancing (the front door to adultery, baby!), smoking cigarettes and scoffing beer from a Styrofoam cup, all the while ignoring her sickly mother’s pleas: “I implore thee, read the scriptures!” Even on her deathbed, Mom had kept up her missionary zeal. At the thought of her mother passing, Judy’s blue eyeshadow starts to melt. Her resolve is beginning to weaken.

But Estus has one more horror story up his sleeve: the tale of a young boy (based on fact, of course) whose parents are gunned down in front of their church by a satisfied Commissar, in the same sinister closeup used throughout the film. The boy - played by Estus’ son Greg Pirkle - comes looking for his Momma and his Daddy. “You keeled them, didn’t yew?” “Yes,” the Commissar replies in his best Bela Lugosi voice, “but think how much better off you’ll be. Now you belong to the State... We don’t want to kill you, but ve vill, unless you co-operate.” He casts a picture of Jesus onto the ground and shows the boy how to grind it under his heel. The young lad looks at the picture, then into the sky: “Jesus, one day you died for me, now I’m willing to die for you.” “Why, you stupid little fool!” the Commissar spits out, and slices the boy’s head off with his cutlass. Bounce, bounce, bounce, the boy’s head goes down the hill in slow motion: possibly the most outrageous moment in Godsploitation, and certainly as awe-inspiring as the moment in the Ormonds’ secular shocker The Monster And The Stripper, in which six foot eight Sleep LaBeef beats Cecil Scaife (not surprisingly, the Commissar in Footmen...) to death with his own severed arm.

“Noooooo!” screams Judy, imagining her dead mother’s coffin materializing on the altar, Momma still imploring her to surrender to Jesus. “What about you, Judy?” Estus prods. Judy kneels with Estus and tearfully accepts Jesus into her heart; the organ music swells, and a fixed closeup of Estus fills the screen. “But right now this very moment, wouldn’t you like to receive Jesus as your own personal saviour... Will you come? Will you come?” And in a barely audible whisper, Estus delivers one final “Will you come?”

The Burning Hell (1974), a glimpse of a sinner’s own personal apocalypse, was the Ormonds’ second and most widely-seen Christian feature. Little wonder it traveled so well South of the Border - boasting a cast of hundreds (again, Estus Pirkle’s family and deep-pocketed congregation) and international locales, The Burning Hell is an intense, over-the-top theatrical experience. Credits flash over an all-girl Baptist choir singing a joyful “Hell Awaits You” as Estus W. Pirkle stands looking thoughtful, perched precariously on the rocky slopes of Mount Sinai in Israel. Moses suddenly appears, complete with huge department store Santa beard and eyebrows, to face a crowd of renegade Israelites and calls upon God to opens up the Mount to swallow them up. Without warning the camera shakes and a smoking hole appears; helpless sinners and even entire tents fly into the gaping mouth of Hell. Pirkle turns his horn-rimmed gaze on the camera and spits out, “Does that shock yew?” This is but a glimpse of the horrors to come, courtesy of the fertile imaginations of the Ormond Organization, for those of us who do not believe in a literal Burning Hell.

Cut to two ragtag Jesus Freaks, Tim (a more mature Tim Ormond, now sporting a beard and leather jacket) and the aging delinquent Ken (Chuck Howard). They call on Estus and, amidst a chorus of “yeahs” and “groovies”, force their hip modernistic reading of the Bible onto him, not realizing he is a preacher. When square daddy-o Estus lays a bum trip on them by pulling out the trusty King James and quoting the scriptures, particularly the part about a literal Hell, they shrug and Ken announces, “Hmm... well, that’s heavy!” Estus invites them to his sermon on Hell. Ken becomes quite angry and says if he goes to Hell, his friends will all be waiting for him. “You do your thing, I’ll do mine,” he says before jumping on his motorbike. “I’ve got me some livin’ to do.”

By now Estus has joined his congregation, a similar looking crowd to the Footmen peanut gallery, staring open-mouthed as Estus rattles off his dubiously sourced statistics: 6000 people die each hour, and HALF of them head towards Hell. “At this moment”, he says, “someone is heading to a burning Hell.” Meanwhile Ken and Tim power along carefree on their motorbikes. Ken hits the throttle and speeds along ahead, then hits a patch of rocky road - literally and figuratively. Tim comes across the broken bike and, lying next to the wreckage, Ken’s severed head.

The distraught Tim limps into Pirkle’s church mid-sermon, just as Estus assails the shell-shocked congregation with more “facts” about Hell. “There will be no TV programs to watch or movies to go see. There will be no cookouts to enjoy or sunsets to watch together... All will be one long night of sorrow, remorse and regret for ever and forever!” The concept of “forever” is hinted at on a chart with a one and three hundred zeroes after it. Even after these many years, Estus asks, “What time is it? Well let me say this - after this much time has been consumed, there will still not be one speck of hope for a sinner to ever escape Hell!” Tim relates the story of the accident, and wants to know if Ken has even a slight chance of going to Heaven. Without missing a heartbeat, Estus shoots back, “Chances are he’s burning in the flames of Hell right now.” Cut to Ken, now roasting slowly in the Bottomless Pit. Around him are screaming, contorted faces covered in sump oil and silly putty and pipe-cleaner hats, and the ever-present flames superimposed on the action.

There’s scant relief from the relentless downward spiral into the pit with the odd bloodless tale from the Bible, all filmed in the Holy Land with a staggering array of fake beards and headdresses. But fear not - whenever the pace lags for a moment, the Ormonds head straight back to the good ol’ eternal torment, “where the worm dieth not and the flame is not quenched”. And in case you don’t believe there will be worms - they’re right there in the Bible AND, in true Ormond style, front row centre on the screen. Close-up after hideous close-up of squirming maggots on contorted faces. “Think of the terrible odours!” Estus point out. “The continual itchiness!” For the grand finale set in Hell (or “Hay-yull”), the Ormonds outdo themselves with a nightmarish menagerie of creatures, including the “locusts” described in Revelation: a surreal creation with the body of a horse, gold breastplate, teeth like a lion, hands of a woman, a crown of gold and a scorpion tail lashing at sinners. Even the Devil shows up dressed like the Riddler, an incessantly tittering fop who taunts a wide-eyed Tim Ormond with the promise of everlasting anguish. The crazed soot-covered killer of John the Baptist spies Tim from across the flames, and in a Southern honk cries out, “He’s still alive! He’s still alive! But this time I’ll kill him!” In agonizing detail, the killer spears Tim through the stomach while the Devil’s tittering grows unbearable.

In a flash, Tim wakes in Church clutching his stomach, and is so shaken by the nightmarish ordeal that he immediately goes forward to the altar. He admits to wanting to receive the spirit of Christ out of fear. “That’s OK”, says Estus gently, “You’re looking at a man who in 1940 got scared to die and go to Hell.” He fixes the camera with same unwavering stare as in If Footmen Tire You..., and continues: “I came to Jesus and he saved me. He would do the same for you if he’ll let you. He wants to save you.”

After making The Land Where Jesus Walked (1975) for the Sword Of The Lord Organization, Sword’s Dr John Rice suggested the Ormonds make a sure-fire soul winner with Rice’s powerful friends Jack Van Impe (later producer of the Cloud 10 rapture thrillers) and Jerry Falwell, both guaranteeing marquee value on the Southern Baptist circuit. Each starred in his own segment, staring directly into the congregation via the camera’s lens and railing against “demonic forces”. The firebrand Van Impe gives us a vision of things to come with his memorable introduction: “Those who embrace these false teachings will be accompanied by a - GRIM Reaper into a fiery hair-yull!” The Grim Reaper (1976) is a less surreal reworking of The Burning Hell, made fundamentally different without Pirkle’s endless sermonizing but with the basic framework intact. There’s the wayward soul scared into finding Jesus, the budget-conscious yet still Bruegel-esque scenes of Hell (in typically theatrical Ormond style), and Bible stories - Moses from Exodus, Paul and King Saul, and a scene-stealing June Ormond as the Witch of Endor, an eccentric pantomime role behind a black pointy hat and droopy latex mask with that unmistakable voice cackling through.

The Grim Reaper starts, appropriately enough, in a Baptist church. Cecil Scaife, the craggy Communist general in If Footmen Tire You..., turns in a more low-key performance as Vern Pierce, a distraught father at his son Frankie’s funeral. The funeral eulogy has been delayed as the preacher is not convinced that the wayward Frankie has gone to heaven. Vern is appalled by the suggestion, and says he’s glad he stayed away from church all these years. “Perhaps if you hadn’t stayed away,” states the preacher coldly, “your boy might have been saved.”

The Ormonds’ cameras stay on the family as Vern joins his Christian wife (Viola Walden, also in The Burning Hell) and preacher son Tim (a more clean-cut Tim Ormond), who is convinced Frankie is in the fiery depths of Hell. The preacher echoes Tim’s sentiments from the pulpit, and exploits Frankie’s eulogy to warn the congregation about avoiding Hell. With Frankie’s open coffin in the background, the preacher continues his heartless rant: “His fate is sealed, there’s STILL a chance for others.”

While the family view Frankie’s inert body, Vern flashes back to a happier time where he and Frankie are sitting on the couch drinking beer and watching TV. Mom and Tim arrive home from church; Tim implores Frankie to join their services. Frankie laughs and says. Tim, in his conservative Sunday best, gently tries again, but Frankie, with his “modernistic” wide collar and white man’s afro (or white-fro), gets angry: “Look, this religion thing is YOUR scene, not mine.” He’s more concerned with his racing car career, its big engines and big money. “Religion? Not for this dude. No way.”

Harking back to the Ormonds’ earlier White Lightnin’ Road (1965), the action switches to the race track for a few tightly edited moments of car action before a multi-car smash, where Frankie’s car flips over several times. The ambulance crew rush to Frankie’s broken body with Vern and Tim, but it’s too late to save him from his internal injuries. “I want to pray for him,” says Tim. To Frankie: “Will you accept Jesus as your personal saviour?” “I’ll accept him, Tim, when Dad does - right, Dad?” “Right, son,” a grim-faced but resolute Vern replies. Frankie sinks back onto the grass covered in engine smoke resembling a black cloud of hellfire.

Still in the same endless flashback but now four months later, Tim and his Mom walk through the cemetery. Mom says she wants to contact Frankie from the spirit world. That’s the occult, reasons Tim. “Talking to the dead is dangerous!” “Talking to the dead is NOT dangerous,” says Dr Kumran, a fakir in a bright blue turban, to Vern. Tim walks in appalled to find an occultist in his home. He grills the fakir about his dubious spiritual credentials and his Church of many gods before denouncing him an occultist “energized by demonic spirits”. Kumran spins in his turban and leaves.

Vern then describes (in a flashback within a flashback) his first meeting with “Doctor” Kumran. Ron Ormond had always been fascinated by Eastern mysticism and metaphysics, and so sinks his teeth into a wonderfully cheap seance going horribly wrong: furniture shakes, candles are snuffed out, and warped ghostly figures appear, along with quick flashes of the Devil’s red visage over Dr Kumran’s face. Was it real, wonders Vern. “It was,” Tim shoots back. “Satan is alive - and he’s EVIL!”

Mom tries to sleep in one of the separate marital beds but is woken by a strange moaning. She looks up horrified to see the ghostly figure of Frankie appearing through the wall, clothes in tatters and more burnt than ever. “Momma,” he groans, “I can’t stand it!” “I’ll call Dad,” says Mom. “No, not Dad! He’s the reason I’m here!” A demon suddenly looms from behind Frankie and drags him screaming back into the depths of Hell.

Back at the funeral, Vern falls asleep, only to find himself in Hell. This time the Ormonds’ infernal scenes are even more spectacular, with huge flames shooting up from behind the tormented souls (reportedly from burning tyres on the Mississippi shoot, covering the entire cast in soot). Amidst the screaming of the damned and the demented, the Devil - more of a circus clown than in The Burning Hell, with what look like candy snakes for hair - guides Vern towards the Great White Throne. “It’s JUDGMENT DAY!” “I’m not even supposed to be here!” yells Vern. “I’m not even dead yet!” With the sound of the hellish chorus behind him, he is cast spiraling down into the Lake of Fire... FOR ETERNITY...

Vern wakes with a start: “I’m all mixed up!” he confesses; the vision of Hell takes him to the altar with Tim, but he still won’t accept Christ as his saviour. Tim prays for his father, and Mom joins them, united as a family for the first time since Frankie’s death. Vern relents. The preacher, Dr Gray, then turns to the off-camera congregation and asks the Fallen to do the same. The picture fades out; once again, more thousands of souls have been saved courtesy of the Ormond Organization.

TIM ORMOND INTERVIEW

My dad and mum met way back in vaudeville, and they did stage shows and they travelled and they managed the Three Stooges and they had a grand life. And finally a point in time came when they decided to get out of stage shows, and go into films. And that’s a story in itself, which I’m finishing up a book on. That led my Dad and Mom into making initially a series of Westerns, with Lash LaRue. Lash was a good friend of mine until he passed away, about five or six years ago now. He’d stop by the house once a month and spend a couple of days. He was like an uncle to me, great guy. So he and my dad made the Westerns, and that went on for a while, and then Lash went in one direction, my dad went in another, and did his own thing. Till a point in time came where they decided they wanted to leave Nashville and move out in the South, somewhere it was less crazy and hectic. And I think they were considering how I would grow up, that was part of it.

So back when they were in vaudeville, there was a thing called the Kemp Time, and the Kemp Time was a circuit which ran through the South. I couldn’t tell you the cities, but it was just like a one night stand here and a one night stand there. Well, as time went on, instead of Mister Kemp retiring, he just kind of moved from vaudeville into booking movies at drive-in theatres and things like that. So since they already had the contact, it was a natural ‘in’ to talk to Mister Kemp and then through him they met other people. Not too much time passed before they had a series of people throughout the South East who would agree to play their films. And so we had a nice little living. We were never famous, we never got rich, but we had people who were kind of followers of the Ormond films throughout the South East. And that was grand and fun and that type of thing. But throughout the years, my dad, and my mum too, always had an interest in spiritual things. My Dad took a tour of the Orient way back in the fifties, just kind of doing a comparative religion study, so this was always something that interested him.

On the premiere of Girl From Tobacco Row, which was going to be in Louisville Kentucky, my Mom and Dad and I climbed in our Beachcraft Bonanza. And instead of getting to Louisville in style, our engine quit and we had to make a forced landing. The forced landing happened moments after take-off, or at least minutes, and there were not too many choices of where to land. We ended up crashlanding in a field, and basically my Mom felt – she told me this later – that it was the hand of God that kind of spared us. She said, “I could see an angel sitting on the wing.” Whether she did or not, that’s what she said to me. So we did crash, the aeroplane was literally torn in half, but my dad was a command pilot in the airforce so he was a very good pilot, he was able to put it down safely. I got out of it without a problem, my Mom and Dad had fractured backs. Whenever you face death, it forces you to look at life a little different. And I’m not saying that from one night to another our lives changed, but nevertheless it puts you in a different mindset.

So it’s not like the following Monday we got a call from Estus Pirkle, it didn’t happen. As a matter of fact, we got another aeroplane, a twin engine aeroplane this time. And that was fun, we went on doing what we were doing. Until on the way back from the Bahamas, one of our engines quit! And we had a second engine, so we were able to land safely. But still, it shook us up. Because that’s two – one crash and one forced landing. But we were fine. But shortly after that second incident, my dad heard from a guy by the name of Monty – I’d have to look up the exact name of the person, he’s actually a character in one of the Estus Pirkle films, If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? He was a friend of my Dad and Mom’s back when they were touring in vaudeville. He was a local radio announcer. And he interviewed my dad – I’m talking about in the past, about what he was doing. But they kept in touch over the years. Well, flash forward in time, to when a preacher found that same person and preached his message on that local radio station. And of course somehow in the course of the conversation, the man, Estus Pirkle, said “I would like to make this into a film.” So the gentleman I’m referring to said “Well, I now someone in the business, let me get in touch with him.” So he in turn calls my dad. My dad then on the phone talks to Estes Perkel and a guy by the name of Monty Standfield who was his partner at the time. Or at least associate. And they agreed to meet at an airport, I think in Schweport Louisiana if I’m not mistaken.

And so the three of them met in an airport and had their initial conversation. Now, Estus didn’t know the first thing about making a film. He assumed he would stand up in front of the camera and preach for an hour and that would be the end of it. But my dad, of course, coming from Hollywood and a story background, he says, “Well no, we’ve got to make it into a film that’s interesting to, you know, audiences.” So they came up with the storyline of If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?, which was basically Estus’s sermon, and then my Dad’s screenplay, combined into a one hour Christian film, which was pretty shocking for the time. And it showed around, and it was very well received in the very fundamentalist circles of Estus Pirkle. But he made a decent amount of money off of it – the numbers actually escape me. We didn’t necessarily have a wonderful relationship with Estus, but we had a decent business relationship. We were coming from two opposite sides of the fence. He was like really really REALLY fundamental, and we were coming from Hollywood, so that kind of says it right there.

But anyway we had a working relationship. Then that led, after its success, to The Burning Hell. The Burning Hell was an enjoyable film, even though it was rather horrific in many aspects. Enjoyable, because I got to participate in it much more. I was the lead actor, we got to go to the Holy Land for several of the scenes…

It was actually filmed in Israel?

A good deal of the establishing shots were filmed in Israel. And then the tie-in shots were filmed in Mississippi or wherever we choose to do it. So The Burning Hell was extremely successful. It made a ton of money, and I’m not talking necessarily in the millions. But in the scope of a small religious film, it made a great deal of money. Unfortunately, because of that situation, our relationship with Estus Pirkle began to be less than favourable. And I’m not going to go into details concerning that, except to say that after one more film – which was called The Believer’s Heaven – we agreed to disagree, and no longer work together. And that was kind of bad, it was not a good parting, but I feel that we did good work together, and the rewards for that are spiritual rather than financial. And my memories, as I look back on it, are of the good times, of going to the Holy Land, and my Mom did the make-up and the script, I was Director of Photography and lighting and an actor. And of course my Dad was the screenplay writer and the director. And we edited it ourselves, and were the main distributor. It was just the business end of it that didn’t work between the Pirkles and the Ormonds. So as I say, we made one more film, ‘The Believer’s Heaven’, and that was pretty much the end of our relationship with Estus Pirkle.

However, during that time we also met some other people who were also Christians, but in a different field than Estus Pirkle, and that group was called John Rice – the Sword of the Lord. I always remember John Rice as kind of being like Moses, but contemporary. Not that he looked like Charlton Heston (laughs) but he was truly a saint. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting some people who were masquerading as Christians but were closer to the Devil. And then I’ve met some people like John Rice, who were truly saints on Earth. And I don’t mean that in the Catholic term, but they just saintly individuals. John Rice and my Dad became close friends, and a couple of the other people at The Sword of the Lord, which was a publication that continued for years and years – a very fundamental, down to Earth, straight-laced paper, but run by beautiful people. And I did not necessarily agree with them on every matter, every jot and tittle, as the Bible says, but I did appreciate their sincerity, so we all got along good. So John Rice invited my Dad, and then my Dad of course said well I need to bring Tim, to go on the Holy Land tour, and he said, “And maybe you can photograph it.” Well, that became The Land Where Jesus Walked. Which was the first film we did in cooperation with the Sword of the Lord. And basically that’s not a great film, that’s more or less a travelogue, but then we interspliced it with some scenes. As we would come to, let’s just say, the garden tomb, and there would be John Rice talking to the tour group, then we would dissolve through and show a scene, that we would fabricate ourselves back in the States and cut them together, so it became a – I don’t know, a travel documentary, a travel feature, I don’t even know if there’s a term for that, but basically a travelogue.

A dramalogue?

It was pretty nice, and it had some limited success. But it wasn’t a dynamic “hit them in the guts” film, it was more a gentle tour with John Rice that was illustrated. From there, we thought to ourselves, we’re no longer in association with Estus Pirkle, we wish him well – and we still do – but we no longer had The Burning Hell, but it had elements in it which were great for these fundamental circles, so what can we do which is a similar type of film. That led to a second film with The Sword of the God, called The Grim Reaper. And The Grim Reaper was basically a story about a family with one son – played by me- which was trying to live the straight and narrow, and another son who was trying to live like James Dean, racing fast cars and such and such. So the second son, who was Eddie King, and he’s still a friend of mine today, he dies in a car accident without having accepted the Lord. And then the remainder of the movie is the father and the mother coming to grips with that, and then visualising through dreams – Eddie, the second son, coming back and being dragged back to Hell by a demon. And the father is the one who actually comes to know the Lord at the end of the film, because of the mother and because of me and because of the dreams he had and such and such.

Interesting piece of trivia – the man who played the father is Cecil Skase. Cecil Skase ended up, was a close friend of our family and remains so today. He was in my father’s secular films, and he was in the first film If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? I don’t think he was in The Burning Hell, but he was then in The Grim Reaper. And then he ended up being in another film, which I haven’t talked about yet, called The Second Coming, and then another film, called The Sacred Symbol. So he was kind of my dad’s pet actor, and later became my pet actor.

He was the General in If Footmen Tire You…?

Yeah, exactly, the one who says, “I have come here to sleep with your wife.” But the funny thing about that is, the girl playing ‘the wife’, was actually his daughter! She was just playing the part. Cecil was a good friend of my dad’s and remained a good friend of our family’s through the years. And he’s up in years now, but nothing but very good memories with the Cecil Skase family. Who was in the music business – his son is successful here in Nashville as a music producer. So after The Grim Reaper – other things happened in there, and I’d have to sit down and make up a chronology or a filmography. We also met Bill Rice, who was the half-brother of John Rice, and did a couple of films for them, mainly promotional films. Bill Rice headed up an organisation called the Bill Rice Ranch, and it was I guess about ten miles away geographically from The Sword of the God, the same area. But their ministry was to the deaf, because Bill Rice’s daughter was born deaf, and they began thinking, how can we tell her about Jesus. And they said, well, she’s deaf, so we have to find a way to communicate. So once they found a way to communicate to her, then in turn they said, we can tell other deaf people, and that led to the formation of a camp. And that still exists today, the Bill Rice Ranch. So we made a couple of films for them, promotional films. Then later in time, after my dad was gone, I was the director of photography on a Bill Rice Ranch film, which was directed by Dave Ute, who is now with Bob Jones University. Dave made a film called When Silence Speaks, which was a very good film, which still shows around, and as I said I was Director of Photography on that one.

So let’s see… oh, then another association which happened was Pete Rice, who was the son of Bill Rice. Bill Rice had two sons, Bill Rice Junior, and Pete Rice. Pete Rice was the second son, therefore, I guess you could say biblically speaking, he would not inherit the mantle of running the Bill Rice Ranch, he wanted to do his own thing. So he formed an organisation called ‘Pray’ – [which stood for] Pete Rice And You – and then we did a couple of promotional films with Pete, where we went out to, for instance, Pete would go out and minister to the Navajo Indians and we would catch him out there doing his thing and talking to the Navajos. He went on since that time to have Worldwide Ministries, kind of like a Billy Graham, but at a different vein. He travels all over the world. The Phillipines, Mexico, I think he’s even been to Australia. And he continues to travel. I haven’t talked to Pete in a while, he lives out in New Mexico now. But I remember him well. The film we did with him was Surrender at Navajo Canyon.

That kind of brings me up to the point where my dad was getting sick. We were working together on a script, and that was called The Second Coming. And The Second Coming was a script that I wrote, but the way I would write it was, I would sit down and I’d discuss it with my dad. And I’m a night-owl, as you have gathered, and I would go out to a little travel trailer that I had out in the back, which was kind of my little cubbyhole, and I would literally write all night long, and then I would put the pages on his chair. So when he got up the next morning – and as I said, he was sick – he would read the pages, and then when I got up in the afternoon, we would discuss the story and then I’d go out and write for that night. And it was a continuing process. But basically my dad, by not helping me write it, but just discussing, was kind of proving to me that I was a writer on my own behalf, and I didn’t necessarily have to have him. He knew he was dying at that point, so he wanted me to be able to accomplish something on my own.

Unfortunately my dad died before we could shoot the first frame. But we did go into production on it. Within a week after his death, we made a pilot – which was like a twenty minute fundraiser, we basically took one scene and photographed it, and then I went around to various people to try and raise money for the complete film. Which we did about a year later, and then made the finished version, called The Second Coming. So from that point, the last Christian film I made – which does not mean I’m not still a Christian, I am, I’ve just kind of gotten involved in other things. I still keep in touch with some of my other friends. But the last one I made was The Sacred Symbol, which was in essence – when my dad went to the Orient, I mentioned earlier in the conversation, he shot a whole lot of footage of very unusual and strange things. Anything from fakirs to snake handlers to Buddhists to the flagellantes. Well, I had all this footage, but I was now making Christian films, so I thought, what can I do with this strange footage?

So I wrote a script around the footage, and it was called The Sacred Symbol. And basically the storyline was, some people met at the Adventurer’s Club, and they discussed their guest speaker, John Harvey, who in real life was John Calvert, who was a famous worldwide magician and who was a friend of my dad’s back in Hollywood. And so at the Adventurers Club they discussed his travels, and he talks about, I’ve been here and seen this, and I’ve been there and seen that, but I finally found something which amazed even me, when I uncovered the ‘sacred symbol’. And then he started talking about Christ and such and such, and that led us into the finale of the movie, which was, “There’s all these various different things and religions, but there’s the true path and such.”

Could you elaborate a little bit more on The Second Coming, because it’s a film that I haven’t seen.

I can tell you some of the high points. After my dad died, I came to the final scene, which was the – and the way we got around things in general, was, someone would say, that’s not the way it’s gonna be, and I’d say, well, this happened as kind of the way this person imagined it or dreamed it. Like Daniel would have this dream. So that’s the way we would alibi things in case a theologian would say “Well that’s not the way it’s supposed to happen.” But anyway. This particular character in The Second Coming was visualising Christ returning on the white horses, wielding the sword with His face aglow… well, I had to stage this scene. This was of course before computer graphics were like they are today. And even so, the cost would be prohibitive. So I went to Hollywood, along with my Mom, and we looked up old friends and we went out and we found the wrangler who did Little House on the Prairie and we found some of the old friends of my dad who’d worked on the Westerns. And I began to put together a crew and a shoot in Hollywood that would be staging this last scene. But simultaneously, I had made a phone call to my friend in Nashville, Eddie King, who had played my brother in The Grim Reaper and asked him if he could try to put together the same shoot in Nashville, because it would be much less expensive. So I guess, just a few days before we were ready to go into production in Hollywood - and I’m just talking about on that one scene – I talked to Eddie, and he had put it together in Nashville. So we came back to Nashville to shoot it, merely from a cost standpoint.

So on that particular night we gathered at Riverwood Riding Academy, which was a great big field out near a park, not too far from my house, and people began to gather with the horses. We had a searchlight come in from Huntsville, which could basically shine this very bright, illuminating beam of light on Christ’s face – he was wearing a reflective surface so it would reflect the light back as bright as possible. He was dressed in the red robe, all the horses were white and groomed, all his angels were riding alongside of him wearing white robes, we had fog on the ground, we had lights, we had big blowers running to move the fog…

And the funniest thing is, right exactly next door – I’m talking about a hundred yards away, but across a fence – was the park patrol. Just sitting there in the dark watching what was going on. And we didn’t know this. They didn’t bother us, but they were talking on their scanner. And one of my crew – actually the wife of the director of photography – was listening to them, and one guy said, “Come on, you’ve got to come over and see this! They’re doing a commercial for the Ku Klux Klan!” So that was kind of a funny incident. But when it was done, it turned out very well. Of course, the ground was fairly dark on purpose, and there was a layer of fog. We superimposed that over the clouds, and it does then appear like Christ returning triumphantly in the clouds. Which is a pretty graphical representation of the way it reads in the Bible. So that’s one little scene.

The difficulty in making a Christian film, unless you’re telling an easy, gentle ‘forgiveness’ type story, is you’re always going to step on someone’s foot. Because they say, “Well that’s not necessarily the way I think it should happen. I think it should be this way.” So as I mentioned earlier, the way we got around that was saying, “That was the way this person who’s our central character visualised it in his mind.” And basically the character wakes up one morning, and it’s the Tribulation, and everyone is gone. And he looks for his mum, and he looks for his friend, and he can’t find anybody. And he begins to read the Bible, thinking, “Oh my God, this is the Rapture and everyone’s been taken except me, and what can I do?”

Then we go into his run and his escape from the soldiers of the Anti-Christ – which was an interesting story in itself. There’s a gentleman here in town who I happened to work with on an unrelated matter, about a month ago – his name is Tony Maples – and he makes machine guns. And he is supplying the forces around the world, not just American forces but U.N. forces, with machine guns. Completely legitimate, there’s nothing wrong with them, but that’s just what he does. Well, way back then, when we made The Second Coming, I had to get a kind of a half-track type vehicle. I didn’t have any contacts, or any money to rent one. So someone told me about Tony Maples, and I went and saw him and told him what we were doing, and he very graciously gave us the people to man the vehicle, and the vehicle itself. He had it transported – at his own expense – down to our location where we filmed. It was a very ominous looking scene, of the Anti-Christ soldiers searching for the people who hadn’t accepted the mark. And so it was a lot of fun to make; it was very challenging to make, and it was very emotional to make, because it was something that I had thought my Dad would be involved in. Instead he was gone. But we felt, I think, if I’m not mistaken – I haven’t looked at the film myself in some time – but I believe I have in there, “Dedicated to the memory of Ron Ormond.” I’m pretty sure I did that, as a tribute to him.

I wasn’t actually sure from reading the synopsis in the ‘Psychotronic’ interview if it WAS a Rapture scenario or not.

Yeah, it was. But I mean, in essence it’s a little bit more than that. Of course, I learned to make my films from my dad and he learned from making Westerns. So there’s always action. For instance we go back to Nebucenezzer, and we redo the scene where Nebucenezzer has the vision of the statue with the head of gold and the chest of silver, and the thighs of brass, or whatever – I’ve forgotten the details. And then he envisions this giant stone coming down and smoting him on the feet. Does that ring a bell with you?

Not that story, no.

Well anyway, look it up in the Bible and you’ll see it. And in essence, I re-established, rebuilt that scene, and we filmed it. Once again, not with computer graphics, but we actually built a seven foot statue out of plaster of Paris – filled it with dynamite, the right amount. And literally got a high speed camera, went out to a location, and filmed it blowing up at 500 frames a second. And it’s a great scene. And so King Nebucenezzer – who once again is Cecil Scafe, who played the General – we got him in the wig, we would get our wigs from Universal Studios, my mum was a friend with one of the wardrobe people out there. So whenever we would need a wig, she’d order it from them and they would send it to us. So it was first quality. And we made a decent looking set, with tapestries and beds and lines and candles, and it really looked like King Nebucenezzer’s bedroom. And he was having the dream. And of course the dream was of the statue blowing up, and then the rest of the story is Daniel then interprets the dream and such and such…

So we would go back in time, I would do that. Also, at the beginning of the film, it starts out with Christ’s ascension with the disciples when they saw him transfigured and then going up into the sky. So it is a Rapture, but it’s a little bit more than just like Thief in the Night where it’s just a Rapture per se. I just tried to build a little theology and history into it, and you know, I kind of did. Then the very ending, which actually turns the central character, convinces him to come to the Lord, was, he imagines himself in one of the battles. So I got a lot of stock footage from the army and navy archive, and we would intercut that with… whenever we would want to do something, we would basically do it for little money but we would do it ourselves. So we went out to a friend of mine’s farm and basically burned off a field so it looked like it was war-torn. And then we planted explosives all around, and we would set them off as our guy would go running though the burned out field, trying to survive. And so we had a lot of intensity and drama built into it. And it was a very good film. It was never necessarily popular. Thief in the Night which was a very popular film some years later, was a very successful film. This one was moderately successful. I don’t think, I think the most successful of them all in the religious circles was The Burning Hell. And it’s still out there, doing its thing. Although I no longer have anything to do with it, and I don’t know what Estus Pirkle is doing with it. But I do know that from time to time I hear about it out there. So yeah, it’s a Rapture film, but it’s a little bit more than that. It’s got some theology, some drama, some wars, some history, you know, a little bit of a love story. Everything we could pile into it, to make it an interesting film, as far as that goes.

So obviously you’re familiar with the Thief in the Night films.

Oh sure. My Dad was still alive when that came out. He and I and my mum saw it around the corner from our house. Matter of fact, I met the producers of that some years later.

Russell Doughton? I talked to him a couple of months ago.

Yeah, I met him at a Christian film producers meeting some years ago, although we don’t keep in touch or anything like that.

Talking about Estus Pirkle, I was surprised to see that he’s still actively doing his ministry.

Right. There’s not much I can tell you about Estus Pirkle that I haven’t already said. I don’t keep in touch with him. I don’t have any animosity towards him, but we did cross some bridges that we won’t recross. The way I find out about what’s happening with Estus Pirkle is, I talk to a good friend of mine who’s still a minister, who was in our original films, he was in The Burning Hell, he was in The Grim Reaper, he helped me with The Second Coming. And he remains a good friend to this day. Although I hardly ever see him anymore. He’s an evangelist, his name is Tim Green, and I’ll talk to him once or twice a year, just to say hi, and I’ll say, “So what’s going on with Estus?” And he’ll catch me up. The way I understand it, Estus is kind of sickly these days, but to the best of his abilities, he still does carry on his ministry. But beyond that, I really couldn’t comment because I just don’t know.

Because I did notice on one website, Estus Pirkle Films are still renting out 16mm and video copies of your films.

Well, he had children, he had a son and a daughter. I would imagine – matter of fact, in Footmen, his son is the one who the General chops his head off! Of course, that was back in like ’72 or something like that. He’s an older man now. But yeah, I don’t know if Estus himself is necessarily running it, but I’m sure his associates – his wife, his children – someone is still running it. But I don’t keep up with that.

The point I was making was, those films that were made – well, Footmen is over 30 years old now – they are still regarded as successful ‘soul winners’. And I think that’s testament to the actual film making. I mean, if you actually look at it as, if you looked at it completely objectively, as - if you could call it a propaganda film, it’s a very, very powerful tool for getting a message across.

Well film in general is a powerful medium for getting a message across. That’s always been the truth. It’s how you use the tool, for good or… there’s so many different venues, anything from Christian films to pornography, from adventure to family – it depends on the person behind the wheel. As Shakespeare said, “The play is the thing.” So I agree with you, and from my Dad’s standpoint, I’ll say thank you on behalf of him. And I agree. Although when I look at Footmen today I think, “Yeah, it’s kind of hokey…” But in Third World countries, The Burning Hell and Footmen did great! I remember taking The Burning Hell along with Tim Green down to Mexico, showing it on a sheet, and people would just pile in. It was on a screen, in just some little vacant yard next to a church! Of course we had translated the film into Spanish, so after the film was over, people would come up to me and speak to me in Spanish – I couldn’t answer them! And they said, “But we saw you – you speak Spanish.” Because they saw me speaking it on the screen. So I always thought that was funny.

But that particular film is a very theatrical film too. So I’m sure that translates very well.

That comes from my dad; that’s purely him. I can’t take any credit for that except for being an actor. I was just a kid then, learning. But you know, he made a Christian film that was theatrical, exactly like you said. Exploitation was his calling card back in his movie days, and he carried it forward into his Christian film days. Because the thing of it is, you’ve got to capture someone’s attention before you can tell them anything. And that’s what he was trying to do in his own way.

I could imagine that he never looked back on the Sixties exploitation years with a certain amount of embarrassment or anything like that.

Oh no, that was just life. You walk down a path and you know… I think my mother said it best, “It’s not how you start out in life, it’s how you end up.” So I don’t think – I don’t remember him ever saying, “Oh I wish I hadn’t of done that.” No, he had a lot of fun making the Lash LaRue series, and all the rest of the films. And he just used that education he had to make the Christian films. So no I don’t ever remember him saying “I wish I hadn’t done that.”

Obviously you make a conscious decision at a certain point to NOT make secular exploitation films, and, rather, make religious exploitation films.

Well, that happened after the airplane accident.

But was The Monster and the Stripper already made by then?

Yeah. You know, I’m telling you a story that happened - in a verbal conversation, it happens fairly quickly. In real life, it happens – as I mentioned, we got a second airplane, and I’d have to go back and study my actual chronology to know the exact date. But if I’m not mistaken, the first crash was actually maybe two or three years before we met Estus Pirkle. And we had a second airplane – and when THAT engine stalled… I went into the service, and my mum and my dad were doing whatever they could, so no, it didn’t happen from Monday to Tuesday. It might have happened over a period of a couple, maybe three years would be a closer approximation of it. But it’s always the way you look at it is, we were almost killed, and not too long after that, I get a phone call about a guy who wants me to make a religious film. And I think other avenues were kind of closed at that point in time, so he felt that that was God talking to him. And yeah, at that point in time, I believe it probably was a conscious decision of thinking, I need to do something positive for God with my talents. Although I don’t think he felt the Lash LaRue films were negative, he just thought that he needed to do something with a more specific spiritual message to it.

Because The Monster and the Stripper is just an amazing cap on a particular period in your family’s film career. It’s probably one of the most outrageous films I’ve ever seen. Probably one of the most entertaining too, but outrageous.

Well, it just showed this past summer here in Nashville, at the Nashville Independent Film Festival. And my mother and I went to watch it, and she answered questions afterwards. So it’s still got its little cult following. It was kind of fun to look back in time like that. It’s a great – oh! Cecil Scafe was in that too.

What part did he play?

Well he’s the one who got his arm torn off and beaten to death.

Oh, of course he is… which has got to be one of the greatest exploitation moments of all time!

Oh yeah, that was truly great. I love to keep my dad’s name alive. And my mum is still doing well, she’s ninety and a half now. She lives here with me. So she’s doing fine, for ninety and a half. I mean, she’s slowed down. But I guess as recently as six months ago she was in a local TV commercial and was kid of acting it up and having a good time. So she’s not an invalid or anything, but she’s ninety and a half so she’s slowed down and kind of takes life quiet now. She’s doing fine and healthy. Nothing wrong with her except just that she’s getting old, which is just the natural course of life. And you know I certainly feel that when her time comes, although I’ll miss her, I’ll feel that she’ll be reunited with my dad, as I will one day. So that’s the one good thing about being a Christian, no mater if you make a film or not. When you come to those tribulation points in your life – and I don’t mean tribulation as that ‘capital T’ point in time – you can have some peace in knowing what’s going to happen or where you’re going to go. And I get people who argue with me sometimes, “how do you know for sure”, and I say, how do you know it’s not? And what if I’m right and you’re not? I have complete peace as far as that goes. I have nothing negative to say about any of the events or time that I spent with Estus Pirkle or any of the people – they were points in time. We’re all human, and we just didn’t see eye to eye with Estus Pirkle on all points, so we just agreed to disagree. And that’s pretty much the long and the short of it. So far, so much water is under the bridge since then, it’s not something I spend much time thinking about.

Believer’s Heaven? I can’t seem to find any information about it.

Well, Estus got on this kind of kick, which I don’t know that he ever really followed through. He felt – and I don’t think this was anything except – it certainly wouldn’t be attributed to luck, because he wouldn’t have believed in that. But anyway... B.H. for Burning Hell, B.H. for Believer’s Heaven – then, had we stayed together which we didn’t, we were going to make B.H. for ‘Beloved Hill’, standing for Calvary. Which we never made. Believer’s Heaven wasn’t exploitation like The Burning Hell, so it never grabbed people the way The Burning Hell did. The Burning Hell was kind of a story that scared you. Like, oh my God, if I don’t get right, this is what’s going to happen. And Believer’s Heaven was more, “Well, everything’s going to be wonderful because I’m going to heaven.”

The good memories I have about Believer’s Heaven? Well, we got to go to Hawaii. And we got to go way up on top of a mountain. I don’t have dramatic memories of Believer’s Heaven like I do on The Burning Hell, just because it was exploitation for the masses. And when we made it, there were so many dramatic moments, the motorcycle crash and having to create the fires, the people falling off the cliff and so many things like that. Believer’s Heaven – it was my first time I actually wrote a scene by myself, that got actually on film. I wrote the scene, and actually played the part between when Abraham was deciding to leave the city sand go off on his own and basically find whatever God wanted for him, and I remember writing the scene and we actually filming it. We got a backdrop from 20^th Century Fox and hung it down there in Myrtle Mississippi, where Estus has built this big warehouse which was kind of a studio but basically just a big warehouse. But it had nice high ceilings so we could film, so that was kind of fun to have actually gone to Hollywood, gone to 20^th Century Fox, gotten the wonderful fake beards and costumes and going all through – I think it was called Hollywood Costume – picking out all these costumes, having them shipped to Myrtle Mississippi then setting up everything. Then filming right there and that was kind of an enjoyable experience. That’s a good memory.

Then we had to film the Great White Throne in that same area, and that was challenging. Because I was doing the lighting – I’m pretty good at lighting, I make part of my living doing lighting for a variety of functions. Not so much any more, but I did. But back then, I was just learning. So I had to – our camera angle was way up high, looking across the Great White Throne, and we had this big book which was symbolising the Book of Life. And then all of Estus’s parishioners and others from far and wide came to basically fill the room with people dressed in white robes and we had the smoke on the floor, the dry ice, and as I said the Great White Throne. And then I had to light all these people without putting out shadows – because this was Heaven! And that was my first great big lighting challenge, of how in the world do we do this, it just isn’t going to work. And then sitting there, figuring it out and things like that. So that’s a very good memory.

As I said, Hawaii was fun, because we got to fly over there, we got to visit the volcanoes and go to certain spots in Hawaii where if you photograph it right, it almost looks like you’re just standing on air. Which is basically up on some high mountain, and you stand fairly near the cliff. On the right day, then, early in the morning, there was a kind of a fog out there, so it looked like you were standing amongst the clouds. So we filmed a lot of the Heaven scenes – or Estus’s interpretation of Heaven anyway – up there on the mountaintops in Hawaii. So that was kind of fun. But it’s funny - over the years, ‘Believer’s Heaven’ has just kind of faded away. I haven’t seen it myself in years and years. But I think one of the things Estus portrayed was the ‘nevermores’. He would go and show, we would go and photograph people, actual people who were Christians but they had suffered from very bad deformities. And the reason we photographed them was because, he said, in Heaven we will nevermore have to have something like that. So it wasn’t done in a bad way, but it was – that’s just a memory, thinking it was a strange thing to be photographing.

But I don’t know that I can go into any details about Believer’s Heaven. Not for any reason, except that particular film is a foggy memory to me. And I think that was because it wasn’t that well received in the churches. Not that it was panned, but it didn’t have an edge like The Burning Hell. And it doesn’t have an edge in my memory. If I sat down and watched it with you or something, I could say, “Oh, we did this, that and the other.” But it’s just kind of a little bit foggy. I do know that we got to meet Doctor Robert Lee, who was eighty-something at the time, and one of the most illustrious speakers I had ever met in my life. And he was nearing of course the end of his career, but we got to go photograph an opening of him in Memphis Tennessee. And we had to ask him – his claim to fame, besides just being a great person, was he was a very, very eloquent speaker. And when my dad said, “Well, can you give us thirty seconds or a minute on Heaven?” he said, “That’s like emptying out the ocean with a teaspoon!”

But he did. He sat there and came up with 35 or 40 seconds, straight to the point of what he believed Heaven was. I think the film opens with two or three preachers, Doctor Robert Lee being one of them, who gives a very pointed, poignant statement about Heaven. I remember him, just because of him saying that, I can’t remember some of the others. But gosh, the storyline. It just kind of, it’s a vanishing memory. I’d have to go back and watch the film again to give you – I mean, if you decide you need some more stuff for your book, I’ll have to see if I can get a copy from Tim Green and look at it. I haven’t looked at it in so long, I’ve just forgotten it.

So you don’t keep video copies of your films?

Ah, well, technically – and since I’m on a recorder – I’ll just say we don’t have any of the Estus Pirkle films. And we of course have copies of the other films, and I guess that’s as far as I’ll say since I’m being recorded here! But I’m sorry, I just can’t help you any more. What I could do, is you could give Tom Green a call. Unfortunately he’s not reachable via email, and he could fill in some of the blanks if you want. He was like a brother, as I mentioned, and he still remembers Estus Pirkle. And he was in a lot of the films, as I say, and he helped us. Many of the incidents which I’ve told you about, he was right there with me.

You would have been around the family while they were making their films.

Oh, sure. I grew up doing it! I wasn’t there for the Lash LaRue films, though Lash was a friend of mine. But that gets into a whole other avenue of conversation, like why do I have the screen name Belas Godson II – which I don’t want you to publicise, because I don’t want a bunch of people emailing me for no reason. But my godfather was Bela Lugosi, so Bela’s Godson, that’s my screen name. But yeah, I grew up watching them make the movies. As I said, I wasn’t there for the LaRue’s, but I have memories of being on the set at a very early age, watching them do their thing. I obviously didn’t travel with them while they were on the road, that was before I was born. But they would tell me, and it wasn’t too many years ago, I was watching Turner Network Television late one night, and in between movies they showed a little short. And my mother was in the short, and it just floored me. Like “Oh my God, there’s my mum.” And so I was able to get in touch with the right person at Turner Network, and they re-aired it for me like a week later, and then I was able to tape it. And this was back when she was just a girl, like 17, 18, performing with Bob Hope. So they’ve got an illustrious history, well before the films. My mum was actually very famous in her circles before she ever met my dad. Matter of fact, she was more famous than my dad back then.

I guess your mum and dad were kind of grooming you, from an early age, to enter the family business?

Well, I don’t know if they were grooming me in that sense of the word. It was just a natural flow of events, but I guess in a way they were. I always remember my dad – and I guess my mum too, but I specifically remember my dad, trying to - flashing forward here to The Monster and the Stripper – and I’m singing to the monster. What he’s trying to do there is get me a recording contract in Nashville. The problem was that I really couldn’t sing, and I didn’t really care about singing, so it was not something which ever happened. But he actually did set up some appointments with record producers. Because back at that time, he pretty much had free rein here in Nashville, because there weren’t any other people making movies here. So he could talk to whomever. I remember hanging out with Johnny Cash one night, I can remember Curly Puttman coming over to the house – he wrote ‘Green Green Grass of Home’, and he came over to tell my dad about it right after Tom Jones had recorded it. So they were like friends of his. So had I been able to sing, I’m sure I could have gotten a recording contract. But I couldn’t sing. So he was kind of grooming me, I guess you could say it that way.

I guess you always wanted to be in show business though?

To a certain degree. And to a certain degree, I always explored other things. Actually, in the service, I was an air traffic controller. And I considered going into that. And then of course I am a writer, and I still do that, but of course that kind of revolves around show business too. Yeah, I guess it’s almost a genetic thing with me. It’s like… I ran into a friend of mine who was a comic, still is, and I hadn’t seen him for some time. So I said, “Well, have you gotten a job or what?” And he said, “A job? I haven’t had a job in my life, and I’m not going to start now.” It’s kind of the same with me – this is what I know, and this is what I do.

Because you can.

Because I can, or because of the old expression, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. You’ve heard that? I guess that’s all true. It was a lot of fun, and it still is. I have great memories. Although I had the typical rebellion of any teenager growing up, as an adult now I look back and I had a great dad, we got along well. As I say, my mum’s still living, so I don’t have any surpressed desires or any Freudian things about ‘my parents this’ or ‘my parents that’. They were good parents and they tried to do their best for me, and I appreciate it. But I guess to a certain degree they were probably grooming me, and they had the vehicle of making a movie. And if things had gone perfect, maybe I would have gotten some other movie offers from appearing in their movies. I don’t know exactly what was going through their minds. But yeah, they were always 100% behind me. And as I say, great parents.

White Lightnin’ Road was my first movie, and it might have been their first movie away from Hollywood. It was made in Cummings, Georgia. Why they ended up coming to Nashville was, back in the vaudeville days they had met some country music people who lived in Nashville, and I guess they stayed in touch with them. The people’s names were Smiley and Kitty Wilson. Smiley Wilson was the original manager for Loretta Lynn. And so Smiley I guess called up my dad and said, what are you doing, and dad said, making a movie. “Well, why don’t you come up to Nashville and edit it here?” So he came up to Nashville, and he edited White Lightnin’ Road at a studio in town called UMC, which stands for – actually it was called Trafco then, Television Radio And Film Commission of the Methodist Church – and he rented the editing room, with equipment, for $125 - not per hour, but per week. And so he said, “Well God, I have to cut it here, there’s just no other place this cheap.”

Then flash forward in time, and we actually shot The Monster and the Stripper in their studio, although they didn’t necessarily appreciate that one! But since they didn’t know what it was…so it all kind of, one hand washes the other. Actually I just saw one of the people from those days, her name was Dixie Carter, now Dixie Reynolds. She ran the studio. I saw her as recently as nine months ago, and she still works at UMC, which is the new name for Trafco. Of course, they’ve got different facilities now, but the same type of thing. But that kind of led us to Nashville. As far as actually making the movie, yeah, it was my first one. I was in boarding school down in Louisiana, and the reason they stuck me in boarding school was, number one, it was near some relatives so I could see them on the weekends or whenever. And number two, my dad was born in Louisiana, so he wanted me to have a little country blood in me I suppose. And number three, they were travelling, and they didn’t have any roots at that point in time, so they needed to keep me in school while they figured out what they were going to do. And then that led them to Nashville. And finally I think I spent a couple of years at the boarding school – of course I’d be with them in the summer. And during one of those years, we made White Lightnin’ Road and of course they got me an excuse from school for a month or so, so that was a real lot of fun to get out of school. Of course, I had to do my homework and everything, but that was a lot of fun.

It was my first one, but we had a great time and I had nothing but good memories. That one I can sit and tell you about. Believer’s Heaven is just kind of gone, but White Lightnin’ Road was kind of firmly implanted in my mind. Lots of good memories on that film. And it was very well received. It played all over the South. I think it came out a couple of years after Thunder Road with Robert Mitchum. And the same type of clientele, the same type of storyline, and it was just kind of a bang ‘em up, car race type film.

I’m sure the drive-in circuit would have been really good for that.

Oh sure. I still keep in touch with two of the characters in the movie. Earl Richards, who was Earl Snake in the movie – dressed all in black, kind of a James Dean character – I talked to them around Christmas time, he and his wife, and just said hi. We don’t hang out together any more, but we still keep in touch.