JR Bookwalter : Fun Box Interview (2021)
After a making a huge splash in the underground cinema world with the Sam Raimi produced Dead Next Door in 1989, and the hugely influential magazine Alternative Cinema, JR Bookwalter disappeared into a background role making movies at the behest of B-Movie stalwarts, Charles Band and David DeCoteau. Now he finds himself back in control his film legacy with his company Tempe Video. He’s remastering his back catalog and making them available to the collector market. I spoke to him about his legacy, regrets and the scorpion puppet that made him reconsider his choice of career.
Tristan : You are a huge influence on me. You’re definitely a hero to the DIY scene. How early did you know what you wanted to do?
Bookwalter : First of all, thank you for saying that. That’s very humbling. I was at the exact right age when the first Star Wars movie came out. In 1977 I was 11 years old and that was a huge early influence. Even though I’d had an interest in horror movies before that, I went in more of a science-fiction direction through that part of the seventies. Up until Dawn of the Dead came out a few years later. My mother had a super 8 home movie camera that she used to document my sister and I growing up. By that point it wasn’t getting a ton of use. I found it one day in the closet with my school friend David Barton. He would later do make-up effects for me on some of the features. We took it and started making little animated short films with our Star Wars figures. I pretty much knew from that point that, this was what I wanted to do. My prior interest, which was running parallel, was magazines and publishing, which I did eventually get a chance to do. From eleven on, that was what I wanted to do.
Tristan : I know a lot of people have mixed feelings about their pasts with Full Moon, do you have any fond memories of your time there?
Bookwalter : I was there about five years. When I first escaped from Full Moon as I called it at the time, I was sort of bitter about it, all though I shouldn’t have been, probably. One thing I’ll say up front is that I got every dime that I was owed by Charlie Band.
I was in an enviable position because I was introduced to him to do post-production and eventually became his post-production supervisor a few years, before going back to making movies for him. That put me in kind of a good position because I owned the majority of my own equipment and so he kind of needed me. I did have a period where I walked away from the whole thing and kind of felt bitter about it or whatever. I think it was more bitterness about the whole b-movie filmmaking thing at the time than it was Charlie. I look back on It now and I really do have a lot of fond memories and had a lot of really good times working with Charlie and everybody that was there. There were a lot of really good people working there and at the time when I was post production supervisor, there was a team of like twenty people I had assembled. It was sort of like my own mini-Avengers. We were cranking these things out and doing multiple productions a month. It was really insane the amount of stuff we were pumping out. At the time he had this deal with Kushner-Locke and they were making these kids movies and he had his surrender cinema label and he was making his soft-core erotic movies, and then they were doing the horror stuff. There were just so many productions at a time. I got into it, and I was doing less of the hands on stuff. I was cutting movies and doing the sound. Eventually I had to find people to do that, because I just became a scheduling guy just trying to keep on top of the schedules. On top of that, they had left Paramount and were doing their own distribution and we were having to do screener tapes that went out to the retailers and just an insane amount of stuff. I mean there was a long period where where I didn’t have much of a life (laughs). There was about a year and a half that I was working at Full Moon’s offices and then he kind of fired us all because he couldn’t afford the overhead anymore. This was after his deal with Kushner-Locke started to go South. And it was the funniest thing because I got fired on a Friday and Charlie was like, “Go down and fire everybody, but then let’s schedule a meeting for Monday so you can come back and we can figure out how we’re going to keep doing this.” So…you’re fired, but we’re gonna keep you around. I do have a lot of fond memories, I could also come up with a lot of bad ones, the biggest struggle with Charlie was always getting the money out of him. My negative memories are from too long ago. Aside from making Groom Lake… (laughs) the William Shatner thing that I produced for him that’s probably the most negative experience out of the whole thing.
Charlie was going through a lot of life changes. He was divorcing his long-time wife Debrah Dion his father Albert had passed away during this whole period of time. He was maybe not minding the store as much as he would have liked to, so he really leaned on me and people like me to keep product coming through. Because it’s a machine. That’s totally what it is. It’s not that there wasn’t creativity or there wasn’t work and effort being put into these movies, there was. It was just such a crazy schedule that you just had to get it done by a certain date because they needed it out. In those regards it was kind of a factory experience. But the productions I did there, we had a lot of creative latitude. I mean he would throw out a title and we would get the script written. He would handle the artwork and the marketing of course, because that’s his specialty. But we would come up with the scripts and go make the movies and he would read the scripts, look at the first cuts, make a few notes and beyond that we were on our own. Very few people who’ve ever worked with Charlie could ever say that.
Tristan : Charles Band is one of the last of the great old-time, carnival-barker, self-promoters. He and Lloyd Kaufman. You don’t seem to have that gene. Do you think that hurt your career?
Bookwalter: I’m maybe not as ruthless as somebody like Charlie is. I mean you need you need to be ruthless to a certain extent. That’s not my personality. I’ve tried moments of it throughout my own history where I’ve tried to get out there and be the carnival-barker, but it’s just not in my nature. I’ve tried to do it my own way. Charlie, Lloyd… these guys, it’s kind of enviable what they do, and that they’ve been able to do it for so long. Especially under the current market conditions because there’s no Blockbuster Video, there’s no Hollywood Video they’re barely doing any foreign business because there is none. The market conditions have changed so much, you’ve got to admire those guys for still going at it and doing it as close to the old school way as they can.
Tristan: Do you want speak to that at all? You’re still trying to market your back catalog, and I saw that you stopped even bothering with Amazon. What is it like trying to get your stuff to the streaming market these days?
Bookwalter : Well…it’s horrible, pretty much. (laughs) I learned a long time ago because when Netflix started their streaming business years ago, they relied heavily on businesses like mine. Because I could come in and bring them a catalog of like sixty or seventy movies, whatever it was back at the time. Hollywood wouldn’t have anything to do with them. They (Netflix) were very generous with us. We would loan them our masters, they would dub their own masters at their expense, which at the time was not cheap to do. And we were seeing pretty decent little checks every month. Because they would pay us, I don’t really remember, like fifty or sixty cents an hour when somebody was streaming the stuff. There was nothing else to watch other than our stuff. I was getting these checks every month and it was like I can’t believe it. Then, towards about eight months into that I think the reality hit them that they were shelling out more money than they had intended to, so they came back and said that deal doesn’t really work anymore, so we’d like to offer you a straight license deal. We’ll take all the same titles but we’ll pay you a flat amount for a certain amount of years.
Eventually they made a back door deal to get Hollywood content through Starz. When that happened that was the beginning of the end for companies like mine. Because they were very good with us on the DVD side too. They used to buy every DVD I put out, some in very significant quantities. I was kind of surprised there were probably five or ten titles that I released over that period of time through them that did very well, but all good things must come to an end. Similar to the way that the Netflix thing happened, was how Amazon did it. They opened their doors to the independents. You published everything, put it on Prime, and the numbers kept going up and up and up every month for about a year and then they basically ruined it and said we’re going to change the metrics of what we’re going to pay you. We’re going start monkeying with the system, and then they just started deleting titles completely for whatever reason. They have their own reasons and none of us know what they are. Titles that I had that I might charitably call garbage, in my own catalog, were staying up, and titles that were better were being taken down. Then you’ve got a company like iTunes, who in my eyes is sort of the Holy Grail of the digital stuff, but it’s so expensive to get titles on there that it’s not worth it for most of them. You have to go through a gatekeeper you can’t deal with Apple directly. Amazon had this great system where you could deal with them directly, but then they ruined it.
You could go through all the work and expense to QC the thing, and get captions made and they could just say, “No thank you,” and delete it.
A couple of years ago, that was gonna be my big thing. I was going to push streaming and not do physical stuff anymore because I personally was less interested in physical. Then things like this started happening with Amazon and I kinda had to change course. There’s an audience that wants to collect this stuff and they want it in the best possible condition that it can be in and maybe that’s the way to go. Me personally, I haven’t made anything new in a few years, and the big reason is because there’s no market for the stuff. I realize that everybody else is out there making stuff right now but I don’t how they’re making any money doing it because there’s just so little money in it to begin with. It’s not that I’m doing it strictly for financial reasons, obviously I went years without making anything on my movies (laughs), but you can’t do it forever.
Tristan: You can’t eat praise.
Bookwalter: Exactly. I mean I have a family, I have two kids, I’ve got a mortgage to pay for, and the reality sinks in that it’s gotta be a business at some point. You can’t do it for free forever.
Tristan: And that’s what you’re doing with Tempe right? You’re releasing physical copies of your back catalog, and you’re editing old movies that weren’t technically in…let’s say releasable quality.
Bookwalter: (Laughs)
Tristan: No…that’s not an insult! I always loved Robot Ninja, and just thought it was this fun backyard, punk-rock thing. Then I saw the rescanned Blu-ray and there were all these huge elements, the lighting, music, that I’d never noticed in the VHS release.
Bookwalter: That movie in particular, doing that restoration was very gratifying to me creatively. I think it was even better than I was expecting it to be. I knew that there was work that we had put into it that wasn’t represented in the original transfer, but when I saw how good it looked and how good the lighting was…I mean, the joke was, my first three movies I had this guy, Mike Tolochko (as cinematographer) we nick-named him “The Prince of Darkness” because the movies were so dark you couldn’t see what was happening. (Laughs) But after going back in and restoring those three movies, Dead Next Door, Robot Ninja and Skinned Alive, you look at them and you’re like, wow, this guy really did know what he was doing! And we all knew what we were doing a little better than we thought. You’re so used to seeing those crummy prints out there that it’s soul-crushing. I mean, I was involved in the post-production of Dead Next Door, but at the time the technology to take a super-8 movie and put it on video just it looked as good as it could. I just figured it wasn’t going to look any better. But with the case of Robot Ninja and Skinned Alive, those movies, I cut them and then sent them to California and somebody else was responsible for finishing them so that was just a monkey on my back for decades. Like, what if we could go back and finish that stuff…you know?
Tristan: I can’t imagine anyone making a better micro-budget superhero movie than Robot Ninja. It’s perfect for what it is. Were you a comic fan going into it?
Bookwalter: Yes, of course. Huge. I was more on the Marvel side than the DC side which is kind of funny since Robot Ninja probably has its roots more in the DC side of things with Batman and Frank Miller and all of that. But I had been a comics fan all through the seventies. It wained a little bit into the eighties. Maybe not my interest, it was just that I had more going on, with making movies and all that stuff. Then there was that period of time where there that period of time, because of The Dark Knight Returns that there was a resurgence of comic stuff and I was hanging out in comic shops more. That’s the thing. I got saddled with this title, Robot Ninja. I was like, “this sounds like the worst movie ever made.” (Laughs) And in some people’s eyes, I went and made the worst movie ever made! (laughs) Anyway, I figured anything I do is going to be better than that title. I just figured, I’ll just go for broke and make the movie that I would want to see, rather than the movie that people are going to expect to see. And I’m not sure that that was the smartest move. Had I made a literal robot ninja maybe it would have been a bit more embraced or successful? But that movie died. It just bombed. There was so much heat on it and then it came out and it just…so much went wrong in the post production process that even if it had turned out the way it looks now I probably would have been down on it. But time has a way of making things look better than they were.
Tristan: I can tell you, that at the time (give or take five years or so) I was working at Videoport the hippest of the hip video stores, and it was very popular. It was in the Incredibly Strange Film section and people loved it.
Bookwalter: It’s funny, because over the years before I had gotten the film elements back, I knew that it had some sort of reputation, because I would get on Instagram and see people posting the VHS tape all the time. And they had these bootleg screenings at these little theaters in New York City that I would hear about. Wow. People like this movie? I made the joke, its a stolen joke from when I approached Charles Band about wanting to make a DVD of Tourist Trap. “You and 5 other people want to see that movie.” That’s what I’d always say about Robot Ninja. If somebody would say that they liked it, “Yeah. Well, you and about five other people.” Tourist Trap was one of my favorite movies of his.
Tristan: That’s a movie that has totally flipped in public opinion. It was considered such a joke/garbage movie and it’s now hailed as a very influential very original piece of slasher movie history.
Bookwalter: That’s so funny. Again, I guess it’s just the passing of time. You get another generation’s perspective on something. In hindsight a lot of these movies look better than they were in their original release. And thank God for that.
Tristan: You’ve shot on so many different formats. You kept evolving as the cheaper formats kept evolving.
Bookwalter: The funny thing is that everyone just assumes that everything I made was shot on video because the bulk of what I did was (shot on video). I’ve even had people review Skinned Alive or Robot Ninja or whatever and say it’s a shot-on-video, and it’s like, “What!?! Come on, seriously. It looks like film!”
Tristan: You have always struck me as a very solid technical filmmaker. I think there’s no question that you are very a very competent filmmaker.
Bookwalter: (Laughs uproariously…) I think there are definitely some people who would question that!
Tristan: Absolutely zero question in my mind. I will fight them to the death.
Bookwalter: Good! I’m glad I’ve got somebody in my corner there!
Tristan: You clearly know what you can get out of the technology you’re using. How much did you compensate with lighting etc. knowing it’s going to be transferred to VHS.
Bookwalter: Well… I mean, back in the days, if you’re talking about Dead Next Door being shot on 8mm film, I mean, I didn’t know what I was doing. And Sam Raimi, who was my benefactor at the time, he didn’t know what he was doing either. He had made some short films on super 8, but they had never transferred those to video in any professional way. He was just fascinated with the idea of making a feature on Super 8, and never got around to doing it. Then I came along, and I was the guy that was going to do it, I guess. We never entertained the idea of cutting the film. He would send me books on finishing your movie electronically. This was my homework that I had to do. So, I mean I learned by doing it, and if I may use the language, I leaned by fucking things up. On many, many occasions. I learned from walking into walls. It’s like, well… don’t do that again, we’ll go this way! Go through the door, not through the wall.
Tristan: So you never cut Dead Next Door on 8mm?
Bookwalter: No. No. The original time it was tape-to-tape from a film transfer, when we did the Anchor Bay one for the DVD, when we did the re-mastering, we took the film and at least cut it down to the whole takes, so we didn’t have to transfer so much film. I had a friend of mine Dennis Peterson who went and pulled all the takes out.
Tristan: Wait…So you had to re-edit the whole movie every time?
Bookwalter: Yeah. And when I did the 2k remaster, I had to go back to those film elements. I had to do everything by eye, because that’s the only way to do it. I don’t think a lot of people understand how much work goes into these things.
Tristan: That is bat-shit crazy. That is so much work.
Bookwalter: Yeah. It’s a lot of work. (laughs) I’m glad somebody recognizes it!
Tristan: You had a series of movies that you rereleased under the name “Bad Movie Police”. What, to you, is the difference between a bad movie and a BAD MOVIE?
Bookwalter: The one example I can give you is, with that series there were five of the six shot-on-video movie that I made through Cinema Home Video that were bad enough to be Bad Movie Police. The one that I excluded was Kingdom of the Vampire which was the first of the six movies that were shot over a seven month period for them. I just didn’t think that it fit. I probably takes itself too seriously compared to the rest of them. The rest of them are just goofy fun. In my mind I put more effort into Kingdom of the Vampires (Laughs) than I did into the other five, so maybe that’s why I separated it. I don’t know. Everything I’ve made, certain people will look at it and say, “That’s a bad movie.” And there’s other people who will praise the stuff. To the right people, “Bad Movie” is almost an invitation. I want to see that! Why should that have a negative connotation? I think all of those movies, even though we were calling them Bad Movie Police, they were made in the right spirit. They had the right intention behind them. They were just kind of, creative misfires that didn’t turn out the way we hoped they would. Because they all had to be delivered on insane schedules. We were out of our minds for doing them in the first place. The budgets were just non-existent. They were work for hire. That’s what a lot of people don’t understand. They were assignments. I wasn’t like, “I’m gonna make a movie called Zombie Cop.” It’s not that I wouldn’t do that, it’s just that particular Zombie Cop was an assignment. I’m veering off. To me a bad movie is one that fails to entertain me. I’ve had people who’ve watched those movies and were so entertained that they watch them on a regular basis. It’s all so subjective. Everybody’s got their thing.
Tristan: Do you ever go out of your way to watch genera movies, or is it too much like work for you at this point? Probably not Full Moon, but maybe Corman or something like that?
Bookwalter: Most of my movie diet is older movies. I’m trapped in the sixties, seventies and eighties. That’s the era that I have the fondest memories of so I’ll tend to watch movies made in those years. I recently listened to the audiobook of Gunnar Hansen’s book on the making of Texas Chainsaw, which I’m way, way, way late to, but it made me want to go back and watch Texas Chainsaw again. Then I got on a kick and said, “i’m going to watch all the Texas Chainsaws again.” I had only gone up to the fourth one previously. So I just decided to keep on trucking.
Tristan: Most people get to Matthew Mcconaughey's robot leg and then call it good.
Bookwalter: Yeah…That movie was a mess, but I saw it when it was first released, so I knew what I was getting myself into. I hadn’t seen it in so long…It didn’t age any better really. (Laughs)
Tristan: I still like part two more than part one.
Bookwalter: You know, I walked out of that. I think I saw that one at the drive-in. Boy I hated it at the time. But you know, that’s the most quotable, the most memorable. That’s the one that has stuck with me the longest…except for the first one of course.
Tristan: It’s impossible to make something more visceral or influential than the first one so it seems like, why even bother returning to that well. You should just go as far afield as you can.
Bookwalter: Yeah. And going back to how time sort of changes your view of things. I mean, I couldn’t appreciate what Tobe Hooper did on the second one at the time because it so different from what my expectations were. I was expecting it would literally be the second part of the first movie, and it wasn’t that at all. He took it in a whole different direction. Once you view it from that perspective, where it’s similar characters in a new situation. There’s a good little movie there.
Tristan: You worked with David Decoteau a lot. How did that come about?
Bookwalter: When Dead Next Door was in post production hell…
Tristan: That early?
Bookwalter: Yeah. This goes way back. This was the beginning of ’89. I had a mutual friend, David Barton who I mentioned before he was living in LA at the time, and he had gotten a gig on a movie called Beverly Hills Corpse.
Tristan: (Laughs) I’m sorry…It’s just a great fucking name.
Bookwalter: Yeah, I know, right? Anyway, he called a mutual friend of ours Dave Lang about coming out on a Greyhound bus, because he couldn’t afford much more, to bring him out to California to help on the crew. Because it was just David Barton and his colleague at the time that were doing this FX work. I didn’t have anything going and Dead Next Door, the picture work was done, but the sound still had to be done and I didn’t have anything going on, so I scraped together some money and said, “I’ll go out on the bus with you if you go.” Just spend a couple weeks out there or whatever. Long story short, that’s when we wound up finishing all the post sound on Dead Next Door. In that process I met Dave Decoteau who was writing and directing this Beverly Hills Corpse, and Linnea Quigley was starring and co-producing as well. They would come to David Barton’s partner’s shop, which was basically just the garage of his house and visit. I got to know them and hung out with them a little bit. Of course I knew who Linnea was, I had a huge crush on her and I had a passing familiarity with Dave. I don’t think I had seen any of his movies at that point, but I’d read about Creepazoids in Fangoria, and I knew who he was. So at some point I convinced them to come inside the house because I was actually working in that house finishing Dead Next Door, doing the music score and whatnot. I brought them in and showed them the first twenty minutes and Dave was floored. He was like, “where did this come from? You’ve got to get out there and make some movies!” David Barton was actually the one who said, “hey, (Bookwalter) is thinking about doing more of these things, you should put a bug in his ear and see if you guys can do something.” So while they were shooting the second unit make-up fx inserts on a soundstage in Hollywood the one day I had tagged along to do some behind the scenes video. There was a break, and I kinda pulled David Decoteau aside and said, “Hey, I’m done with this thing, then I’m looking for my next thing.” He was like, “Yeah, lets have lunch or whatever and talk.” Long story short, that’s what led to Robot Ninja. Because originally I had approached him with projects from two other filmmakers that I was just going to produce, and he just decided that he wanted to work with me. I know you, I’ve seen your stuff, let’s do something together. So that’s how Robot Ninja came about. And Beverly Hills Corpse, that eventually came out as Murder Weapon in case you were wondering.
Tristan: How did they drop that name?
Bookwalter: I know! And then go to the more generic one?
Tristan: That name is pure gold.
Bookwalter: Yeah, I know. And I don’t think anyone to this day has made a movie with that title.
Tristan: Dammit… I’m going to have to go talk to some people about trademarking something…
Bookwalter: Yeah! Exactly! So that led to Robot Ninja, and while I was in post on Robot Ninja I convinced him to finance Skinned Alive and also Ghoul School which I was initially involved with and then dropped out then came back and supervised for him. Then we did tons of other stuff together. I wound up moving to LA and working for him cutting the first two shock cinema tapes that he was putting out and I wrote a book about him and Fred Olen Ray. Long since out of print, that was sort of a vanity press thing that he wanted to do.
Tristan: Why can’t you get that back?
Bookwalter: Well, I own the rights to it. I’m just too lazy to do anything with it.
Tristan: Come on man! I want to read that!
Bookwalter: All the information is so outdated. It was published in, what, 1991? It’s like a time capsule. It covers those guys, the first ten to twelve years they were doing stuff. Which is of course the big era that everybody’s interested in.
Tristan: All the VHS nerds would be stoked.
Bookwalter: Yeah, for sure. Dave was responsible for me getting into Full Moon in the first place. I had moved back out to LA in 1997 and I didn’t know what I was going to do with myself. I had just sold Alternative Cinema, the magazine that I was publishing prior to that. I had a little bit of money in the bank and was just trying to figure out where I was going to go with my life. Dave saw me helping these two filmmakers from Wisconsin finish this movie called Sleepwalker, later changed to Vengeance of the Dead, another Full Moon reference. And that was shot on 16mm so he was paying attention. The shot-on-video stuff he sort of thumbed his nose at, “Oh…Shot on Video? Bleah.” Anyway, he was about to make a movie for Charlie (Band) called Shrieker and he asked me, “I’m shooting it on 35mm. It’s going to be anamorphic. Would you be interested in editing it and doing the sound mix?” I was like, “Yeah!” And that was how my whole Full Moon association came about. Because I was some guy across the valley in North Hollywood. Decoteau was sort of, I’m not sure if he wanted to wait and see what he was getting. (laughs) He didn’t want to play his card with Charlie until he saw that I was going to deliver. The long and the short of it was that they were all very happy with Shrieker, and I got to cut Curse of the Puppetmaster right after that, and from there it was literally a blur. Because that led to five years of working on probably hundreds of things at full moon.
Tristan: Did you at least get invited to Charles Band’s Romanian castle?
Bookwalter: That’s actually in Italy, the castle that he has. And, no. I did go to Romania to direct Witchouse 2 which was the last…no there was one more production, Prison of the Dead, but yeah, I was the next to last Full Moon show that was made in Romania.
Tristan: I thought they owned that property in Romania where they shot all that stuff?
Bookwalter: No, it was always independent. You’re talking about Castel Films. (Band) helped them start it, but then they turned around and went to a bunch of other studios all over Hollywood. They got one of the big Highlander sequels shot there. They brought so much other business in that they didn’t need Charlie anymore. That was about the time that I came in. (To Romania) I was just this little pissant production and my requests were not huge, but the things that I wanted I had to fight for. Like, I want to see this demon smash through this glass. “Well… Ok.” By that point I was just an annoyance. Anything Full Moon was just an annoyance for them. The crew was great, but they just wanted to see how cheap they could make it for because whatever they didn’t spend they could put in their pocket.
Tristan: There’s a real mid-western sensibility going through your movies. Skinned Alive has a guy who’s so midwestern polite that he won’t kick the thrill-killers out of his house. How much of an influence is that upbringing on everything you do?
Bookwalter: Oh, huge. Because I’m from the suburbs of Akron, Ohio, Raimi and that group were four hours north of me in suburban Detroit. A couple hours east of me you had Pittsburg and George Romero and all that kind of stuff. It was a huge influence. If you drop a pin somewhere around Kentucky and draw a circle around it, the amount of independent filmmakers that have come from that region compared to everywhere else in the country, it’s pretty insane.
Tristan: Akron especially seems to be a counter-culture art hub. You’ve got DEVO, Chrissie Hynde, Jim Jarmusch, that guy from Tool, Sifl & Olly…
Bookwalter: Marilyn Manson lived 20 minutes from me in Canton. There’s something about the upbringing here. Maybe it’s more laid back? You meet the people who were born and raised in LA. They have something about them. You’re a Valley Girl whatever. Here you come from a friendlier, more folksy background.
Tristan: Sure it’s folksy, but it seems so interesting that the DEVOs and the Jim Jarmouch’s are really apt at working outside of the system, like you do. It seems like there’s an outsider mentality at play.
Bookwalter: Well, we’re just far enough from LA, and just far enough away from New York that we just kinda have to fend for ourselves. You are forced to do it your own way because there’s no one else to lean on. No studios or that kind of stuff. We don’t have those influences.
Tristan: You are clearly a horror fan. Was Romero the thing where you realized you wanted to make movies?
Bookwalter: No, I have to credit Star Wars with that. Which is strange, because you would think you’d look at Star Wars and say, “How the hell am I going to do that?” Certainly Romero gets credit for making it seem more accessible by far. Because he was using the same people all of the time. Same crew, some of the same cast. Just the fact that he was doing it two hours away from where I lived. He made the movies that I would have loved to have made. Never got that close. Dead Next Door was an homage to what he did, or tried to build on what he did. People used to kick Knightriders around, I think now it’s hailed as a masterpiece. There was a time when he got knocked around for making it. I would have loved to make a movie like Knightriders. It never would have happened, because I didn’t have the money and I didn’t have access to somebody like Ed Harris but…
Tristan: Yeah…Where…Who…How…Did that movie get made?
Bookwalter: Yeah. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when he pitched that. But again, he made that on the back of the strength of Dawn of the Dead and Creepshow. He was then able to make something that he wanted to make. You gotta respect that. A lot of people would say, “Well, we’re on this gravy-train let’s just keep it going.” Let’s make Dawn of the Dead 2, 3, 4…
Tristan: Are you ever going to do a film again?
Bookwalter: It’s that never say never thing… I went through a period…I think I burned myself out on Full Moon. I can tell you when I was making the last of those movies there was this awful giant scorpion thing called Stingers. He retitled it Mega-Scorpions I think now that he finally released it? I was up in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night, making this thing with this…to charitably put it…terrible scorpion puppet. This was before there was supposed to be any CG in it. And I just kinda was looking at this situation and going, “Where did I go wrong? Who did I piss off that this is how I wound up? I started off OK…” My biggest thing, and I did it with David Decoteau and I did it with Charlie Band as well… I’m not good at saying, “no" to things. if somebody offers me something it strokes my ego just enough that I’m like, “Ok. I’ll do that.” I’m not blaming it on them. I’ve made my own poor decisions. (laughs) I remember I had befriended Jeff Bird back in the Full Moon days. His advice, when I had finished Witchouse 2 was, “Take it, and run.” Instead, I stuck around and made Stingers.
By the same token, Bruce Campbell, who I worked with on the post sound on Dead Next Door told me the same thing, we were on the way to pick up some dubs of the movie after it was finished in LA and I’m telling him about this fifteen thousand dollar movie called Robot Ninja that I’m about to do for David Decoteau, and he’s like, “what? Why would you do that? You need to take these VHS tapes and go to Cannon films, go to see Charlie Band.” This is what he told me, how ironic is that? I didn’t listen to him. I made Robot Ninja instead. I would love to make something again, but I’m probably terrified to do it. I think that I would be a far better filmmaker than I was thirty years ago, forty years ago, whatever it is. Everybody keeps saying, “You’re bitching so much about the films that are coming out today, why don’t you go make your own.” Well…I know enough to know that it’s easier said than done. Whereas back in the days when I was a bit more naive and stupid I would have just done it. I overthink everything now.
Tristan: You have a lifetime of practical experience making films. You may have spent more time making movies than any person on earth. It’s such a shame to let that amount of experience and skill go to waste.
Bookwalter: Well, I appreciate you saying that. You know I jokingly tell people that when I’m done restoring all of these movies and putting them back out again, I’m going to have nowhere left to go. I’ll either have to retire from it or finally go make something new. And I am running out of titles to restore. So we’ll see. I used to say no. I’m not going to do it. I’ll tell you what it comes down to for me. It’s a pain in the ass to make these movies when you don’t have any money. The biggest problem is I burned myself out doing things for no money over such a long a period of time. I’m down on the ground doing these low angle shots or whatever doing everything yourself, and it just burns you out. I’ve had a fifteen years or whatever break, and you’d think that would be long enough. It’s fun to do it still. I haven’t lost the urge to do it. When I was restoring Robot Ninja a year and a half, two years ago like I said was a very gratifying experience. It sort of renewed my interest in doing it. But then at the same time, you’ve got the financial implications of it, and how do you make money doing it. I can’t just go do it for fun. I’m not independently wealthy, I can’t just stop paying my mortgage to go make a movie or worse yet, take a second mortgage to go make a movie. I’m too much of a realist to go too crazy.
Tristan: How do you feel about this rash of intentionally bad movies? The Sharknados or Lavalantuas of the world.
Bookwalter: I’m not a fan. I feel like they’re being made with the wrong intention. It’s one thing if you go into it and it just doesn’t turn out to be that good. Even though you put your heart and soul into it. It’s just as easy to make a good movie as a bad movie. It’s just that you don’t know which one it’s going to be when you’re doing it.
Tristan: I think that’s why there’s such fondness for the low budget movies of the eighties. You guys had to be creative and work against time and budget. You put your heart and soul into this thing with massive limitations. It’s like a punk song.
Bookwalter: Exactly. Some of my favorites are like, The Mutilator, The Incredible Melting Man. The people who made them probably had no business making them, (laughs) but I love those movies. Those are not bad movies to me, they are my comfort food.