Drew Turney
If you’re a member of Generation X several names in Hollywood shaped the film lover you are today like Spielberg, Lucas. Zemeckis or Donner. But while those names have slowed noticeably (or left the business altogether) since the 2000s, one pioneer of the fantasy/sci-fi/adventure age is as productive as ever.
As a longtime lover of classic sci-fi and horror from the 50s, Joe Dante started off working for fast and cheap king Roger Corman, honing the crafts that would eventually give movies like The Howling, Gremlins and Innerspace such hand-tooled charm.
To add to a long line of industry appreciation and awards, he’s the honoree at the 2nd annual Mammoth lakes Film Festival in the mountain country of California, a few hours east of San Francisco. He spoke to Moviehole.net about his life and times, his work and where it might all end (hint; never).
Congratulations on the award. Very exciting.
Yes. Very unexpected.
This must happen to you all the time. You get a call from a random film festival or film body wanting to give you an award?
Well sometimes they just invite you to come. They don’t necessarily give you an award but it’s always nice. It shows that people are paying attention and that you’re not doing this in a vacuum.
You’re great at that fan engagement because of things like your website trailersfromhell.com. Talk about being not just a filmmaker but trying to inspire and foster a love of film.
I grew up in an era where you saw movies in two places – you saw them in theater and you saw them on television and that was it. In the New York area there were five TV stations and if you didn’t see a movie when it was broadcast then you might not be getting a chance to see it again for another year and a half.
So I always dreamed how great it would be to project movies on my wall or project them on the ceiling at home. So I bought 8 millimeter cut downs, 10 minute cut downs of silent movies. It wasn’t quite as good as having a real movie so I started collecting 16 millimeter prints of movies.
That gave me access to a movie. I just put it on the projector and I watched it. That was special then, now pretty much anything that you want to see is available online. The problem is that there’s so many things available now, particularly movies that haven’t been seen for sometimes 60 or 70 years.
You need somebody to say, ‘well there’s a lot of stuff here and here’s something you should pay attention to, this is interesting, this director is interesting, the actor’s interesting, this movie is interesting, and you wouldn’t have known about it without us telling you’.
So I had a big trailer collection because I used to make trailers and I was thinking of putting them up on the internet but anybody can do that. So I said, well what if I did a commentary? I put five trailers for movies that I liked and I did a little commentary with them, like on a DVD extra or something.
Some of my friends saw it and they said, ‘I have a movie I’d like to talk about, can you find a trailer?’ So it gradually grew into what it is now. We’ve got over 12,000 of these things with 40 or 50 different commentators, all of which are film professionals, all talking about what made them want to make films, movies that they think that you should see and movies that inspired them.
It’s been successful in the sense that people come up to you and say, ‘I never would have gone to see that movie if I hadn’t seen it on trailers, I didn’t know it existed, I found a print or I found a disk and now I really like this director/actor/writer and I’m going to look at his other movies’.
It’s because there’s so much stimuli now and there’s so many places for people to go that I thought we needed something to say there is a past. That part of it has worked out. The financial part maybe hasn’t worked out quite as well.
Prior to the internet movies were released into kind of a vacuum, now there’s a much bigger forum to give the love of movies context.
It is, but the one thing that I sort of miss is that when I was in college we would go to the movies. Then we would come back and talk about the movie. There’s not a lot of actual peer to peer discussion about movies anymore. The film magazines that existed are mostly gone except for a couple of them because the print media is out of business basically. You have to go to the internet to see real discussions.
Some of the blogs are as good as any of the writing in film magazines was 20 years ago and sometimes even better. Also, at the push of a button, you can get all this information about movies that have been very obscure for many years, they only had a line in Leonard Maltin’s book or something. Now you get real discussions about this from people that have actually seen them.
Something else a lot of people think is missing is the serendipity of discovery that we used to get from wandering around a video store.
Yes that is a shame because the one thing that the video store had was the boxes that you could look at. You could read what the movie was about and it was right next to some other movie in that section. You could make an informed decision based on the artwork and all the accouterments that come with having something physical in your hand.
Now if you go to Netflix it’s basically a title. You don’t really know much about it. I mean they give you a little synopsis but it’s like, I’ve never heard of any of these movies. What are they? In the video store at least you could give yourself the information of who’s in it, who made it, what country it is, that it’s in English or not English, you know.
Now you’re on your own and it’s a lot harder and young people I think basically don’t want to be bothered. Also they don’t want to watch black & white. They don’t want to find out about the stuff that doesn’t mean anything to them because it’s irrelevant because it’s not of their time.
When I was a kid I was nostalgic for things that happened long before I was born, like all those Universal horror pictures that went to TV in the late 50s. Most of the performers were dead and the movies hadn’t been seen in many years and they were all made before I was born but I was fascinated. That was a world I could relate too. I’m not sure if that’s still the case anymore for kids.
Everything from the 80s is being remade nowadays, including (supposedly) Gremlins. You have any involvement or know anything about it?
No. Gremlins was a work for hire which means I don’t own it. I don’t have anything to do with it. Every so often they would put out a story saying that they were working on a new script and they’re going to try to do a reboot.
I didn’t want to make a sequel and I went off and did other things. They tried for five years to make a sequel to Gremlins and they couldn’t. They couldn’t really figure out how to do it because they didn’t quite get what the first movie was about.
So they finally came back to me and said, ‘if you’ll do it, we’ll let you do whatever you want, we just want another Gremlins movie’. So I made the Gremlins movie to end all Gremlins movies, apparently, so it’s been difficult to come back from that. I really don’t know what’s going on with it or if it will ever happen. But they’ve got to do something with it because the title is so famous.
What would a Gremlins remake need to work? They’d probably want to do it all in CGI.
Well maybe, maybe not. You know in the new Star Wars movie, there’s a lot of animatronics and there’s a lot of on-set stuff because the guys who made that movie liked that stuff. I think they realized that there’s a certain un-reality to the CGI world, things that don’t have any weight, things that don’t really seem like they’re in the frame.
So they used a lot of old fashion techniques. Of course they upgraded and updated them as you would. But if you made a Gremlins movie today and you decide to use puppets, they can be much better operated because the operator could stand right in the shot, then you just do another pass and take them out.
We had to build sets up on stilts and put people build walls and behind chairs to try to hide what we were doing because there was no technology to erase them. But now the technology has caught up to a point where I think you can take the old style of effects and marry it to CGI and get the best of both worlds.
If you had the chance to talk to the remake writer or director, what would you tell them are the essential elements to a Gremlins movie?
I don’t think I would be arrogant enough to do that. Whatever they’re going to do is what they’re going to do. I would just say do what you feel you need to do. The audience may or may not expect something like the first two pictures. They may want to see something completely different. It’s really out of my hands.
After your love of old style sci-fi and horror, you went a bit more commercial in the 80s with films like Explorers, Inner Space and The Burbs. Did they scratch your creative itch just as much or were you conscious that you were moving away from stuff you loved?
You thrive on working, what you get offered is one thing and what you create on your own is another. You can have your own projects that you’re trying to get made but for the most part if people came to you and said, ‘here’s something we want to do, do you want to do it?’, in the old days that was great.
That meant they had the money and they were going to do it. Today if they come to you with something they don’t have the money, they just want you to say you’re going to do it. Then you have to go out and help raise the money, so there’s no guarantee that there’s ever going to be a movie. So I certainly liked the system as it was in the 80’s because it led to actual movies that got made.
I was also lucky in that I pretty much got my way on most of the movies except for Explorers which was released unfinished. The rest of the movies I can pretty much say ‘that’s my movie. That’s the way I wanted to do it and I can stand behind it’.
But then into the 90s and the 2000s there was just so much more pressure because it cost more money to make the movies and the distribution system is so much different there’s no guarantee any movie you make is actually going to play in the theater. They just end up on video on demand.
A couple of your recent films have done just that. Do you design a film for the possibility it will end up not playing theatrically?
No. I think everybody who makes movies designs them to be seen in a theater. Certainly a comedy is not a movie that you want people looking at on the computer. You want them to see it in the theater so that they can laugh along with other people and there’s a feeling of shared camaraderie and everybody having a good time which you just don’t get if you look at it all by yourself.
You know the Marx Brothers used to take their material out on the road and test it out with audiences. Then when they made the movies, they left spaces for the laughs. Now when we see those movies on TV with no audience there’s a dead spot. The dead spot is where this huge audience laughter used to be which is still there if you see the movies theatrically but is not there if you watch them on television.
So you have to really make the movie for theater unless you know you’re making a movie for video. If it’s only going to be seen on video you’re editing would probably be different.
You always have a lot of projects lined up, ever dream about slowing down?
I was just looking at this story about Morley Safer, the newsman who retired and died a week later. I thought ‘Gosh, you know, I think maybe it’s a good idea to keep working’.
Joe Dante appears at the 2nd annual Mammoth Lakes Film Festival, May 25 – 29 (MammothLakesFilmFestival.com)
