Back To Dead End Street
Barrel Entertainment talks with Roger Watkins
by Art Ettinger

Roger Watkins began making films at age ten. His first film, Masque of the Red Death starred childhood friends Ed Beverly and Dave Day, who would later turn up in several of Roger’s 8mm World War II epics. The trio experimented with lap-dissolves and were able to achieve a primitive Jack Pierce style meltdown of a vampire who is staked through the heart (complete with blood and worms).

Roger attended SUNY-Oneonta where he continued to shoot whenever he could. SUNY professor and author Paul Jensen (Boris Karloff and His Films, Hitchcock Becomes Hitchcock) appeared in many of Roger’s college short films, including a tight adaptation of EC Comics’ killer Santa Claus shocker, And All Through The House.

In late December, 1972, Roger began work on a far more ambitious project. Armed with a 16mm camera and talent from SUNY’s film and theater department, he started work on his first feature, Last House on Dead End Street.

Paul Jensen: Orson Welles once said that there are two kinds of people: those whose first reaction to an idea is to say “no” and list the reasons why it cannot work, and those whose first reaction is to say “yes” and set about making it work. When Roger described his plan, I realized that it sounded impossible and even foolhardy, but I also realized that I must at this moment be one of Welles’ “yes” people. I had no idea if it could be done or how it could be done, but I decided to do what I could to help it happen.

It happened. A grim, pre-Able Ferrara exercise in violence and nihilism, Last House on Dead End Street maintains its power to shock and sicken, even thirty years after its conception.

Roger Watkins has worked with Nicholas Ray, Freddie Francis, Otto Preminger, Dave Day and Harry Nilsson, among others. He has directed several documentaries, including Heaven Knows, a harrowing fly-on-the-wall look at life in an insane asylum.

Roger lives in upstate New York and currently seeking the funds to finance his latest project, Hobo Flats.

This is Art Ettinger’s legendary interview with the one and only Roger Watkins. Terry gives the answers! Trust us, it’s a wild ride.

– John Szpunar

Barrel Entertainment: How many movies have you made altogether?

Roger Watkins: Fourteen, I believe.

BE: Do you have a filmography anywhere?

RW: No. (laughs) I never made films under my real name. One of them I did. That got out there by accident, and I was really pissed off about that.

BE: Which one was that?

RW: It never came out. I actually destroyed the negative.

BE: You destroyed the negative of your own film?

RW: I actually did. It was a mess. The reason it was a mess, is because I didn't have anything to do with the post-production, and – this is literally true – this woman who had never edited anything in her life, got the job by blowing the producers, and she just destroyed the film!

BE: Was it a hardcore film?

RW: No, no – it was a comedy called Spittoon. It was very bleak, but very funny. It was just ruined, mainly by cutting and music.

BE: And you just couldn't stand it, so you destroyed it?

RW: I might have to send you a copy, so you'll be one of the few people that has it.

BE: I'd love to check it out!

RW: It's awful. My real name wound up on that, and that bothered me.

BE: And that wasn't intended?

RW: No.

BE: Now, you've shot on anything ranging from video to 35mm?

RW: I shot one porno on video and that was it.

BE: Which one was that?

RW: I've never seen it. I did supervise the editing, but I haven't seen it since I edited it. It was called Decadence, which is not a very good title – I always run into bad titles somehow. You know, the original title of Last House on Dead End Street was The Cuckoo Clocks of Hell, which I really like.

BE: And where does that title come from?

RW: I went through this Kurt Vonnegut phase around, well, 1972, just before I filmed it, and I had read a bunch of his novels, like everything he had written up until then. I think it might have been in The Sirens Of Titan [It was Mother Night – JS] but I'm not sure now because I read them all together. But he talks about this imagery of the cuckoo clocks of hell, that only tell the right time once every thousand years, and that's perfect for Terry Hawkins and these people. To me, they make sense! To me, they're like avenging angels that are just doling out some justice here. (laughs)

BE: Do you have any favorite films that you did besides Last House on Dead End Street?

RW: Believe it or not, I like Corruption. Both Corruption and Midnight Heat I've made copies of, where I got rid of all the pornography – and they're only like thirty minute movies but they're good, and they look good, and they sound good, and I like them.

BE: What's your most recent work? Are you still directing?

RW: No, I just finished a script. I'm going to get back into directing, because I've written quite a few things. I wrote a movie – not too many people know this, but of course my father does – a war picture with a guy named Eddie Straussberg in 1987, about a very little known battle in World War II. I knew about it because my father was there, but he wouldn't talk about it. It was called the Battle of the Hurtgen Forest. And we wrote this script, and – I'm not making this up – we were offered all kinds of money if we'd compromise it. “We need women here,” this and that. We never would, and I was writing an HBO special for a comedian named Pat Cooper – I don't know if you've ever heard of him, he's always on the Howard Stern show, I was on there with him – and anyway, I showed it to these people at HBO and they stupidly write me a letter saying no, we're not interested in war pictures. To make a long story short, it was on two years ago. It was called When Trumpets Fade.

BE: So they ripped it off?

RW: Oh, absolutely.

BE: Such an obscure battle, it had to come from that.

RW: Exactly.

BE: Wow, maybe you ought to get paid off of that!

RW: Well, what happened was, Eddie and I were going to sue them. We had these copyright lawyers in New York City and they knew what it was; they had the script and they had the videotape and everything. So, they start suing and what happens is, HBO has two hundred and sixty-eight lawyers. And all of a sudden it's like “OK Roger, you've got to give us $18,000.” I don't have $18,000. I don't have eight dollars! So, that's what happened there.

BE: You mentioned you were on the Howard Stern show with Pat Cooper... what's the story behind that?

RW: That's a very famous show. What happened was, Pat Cooper is a big comedian, especially on the east coast, and he's very big now ‘cause of Howard. He's always on Howard. So – this is funny – he hired me to do an HBO special. The reason he hired me is because I made this very strange film, but very funny, and – he's sixty-four years old, this guy. I wrote him this bizarre shit that was really sick, but very funny, and he finally says to me, “Roger, I can't do this. I'm sixty-four and you're writing for a thirty year old man.” And that was the end of it. So one night he calls me up and goes, “Listen, I feel bad,” – and he really shouldn't have felt bad because he paid me, he's a good guy – he says, “I'm going to be on Howard tomorrow, why don't you come by and I'll give him your new script, and he'll probably like it, because he's crazy.”
So I get there in the morning, and I got there before Pat, and there's these people there, and I'm listening to them, and they're there to mean-mouth Pat. So finally Gary Dell'Abate comes out and sequesters them; I'm sitting there, Pat comes in, and I'm like “Pat, they're fuckin' setting you up, man – you're gonna go in there, Stern is gonna say, 'You ever mean-mouth me, Pat?' You're gonna say no, and they're gonna bring in your mailman, your butcher, your policeman, and they're all gonna say what you say about Howard!" (laughs) So what happened was, Pat just went crazy. They started videotaping it, Stuttering John and these people, so he just went nuts! But he calmed down, and it was funny because after they leave with the camera, he looks at me and winks because he knows this is "good copy". So he goes in, and I've got my little envelope with films and these bits I wrote for Pat that I think Stern would have liked... so all of a sudden Pat just storms out of the fucking place, and I'm like, “Oh shit, I'm never gonna get this stuff to Howard.” So the next thing, Jackie the Jokeman comes up and says, “Hey listen, we're a little afraid of Pat but you look like you could take care of yourself... come with us, we'll go look for him.” And it was really funny with me and Jackie out on Madison Avenue. We didn't find him. So, we go back inside and I'm putting on my coat, and all of a sudden I hear Howard Stern go, “Where's that guy who was with Pat this morning? Go get him and bring him in here.” And you don't have time to think – they just grab you. So I was on and I made up my mind, I wasn't going to try to be a wiseass, I'm not going to try to be funnier than Howard Stern because I'm not. I'll just be a gentleman and say some occasionally witty things. Which is what I did, so Stern and I got along really well. And I was on for like twenty minutes. It was funny, because have you ever heard of Billy West? He does the voices of Ren and Stimpy?

BE: Okay, sure...

RW: I didn't know Billy West was on the show with Stern. There was this guy sitting there, he seemed like a nice guy, and Stern said, “What films have you done?” I said Last House on Dead End Street and this guy who's sitting there goes, “Jeez, I love that movie.” Who is this crazy ass? How has he even heard of this thing? Turns out he was Billy West. He was really nice, because I wrote him a letter afterwards saying, “Jesus, I didn't know you were the great Billy West, my daughter loves you, I love you – could you just send an autograph to my daughter?” I gave him an envelope and all that, and the guy sends a cell!

BE: An animation cell?

RW: Yeah! He sends an animation cell to my daughter, autographed. It was really nice.

BE: Wow!

RW: So like I said, that show has been on three or four times since; he puts it on once a year because it's really funny, with Pat and everything. We're talking, and Howard says, “Listen, leave your script here with me and I'll read it, because if you're as sick at Pat says you are, we'll get along real well!” Now this sort of irritates me, but this is the way my career has been the last few years anyway. I leave it and nothing happens, I don't hear anything. I wait like three weeks and call up Gary Dell'Abate and say, “Gary, what the fuck happened with my script?” He says, “Oh man, did you have it in a big thick envelope, says 'To Howard from Pat'?” I said yeah. He goes, “Well, I called Pat and asked him what to do with the script, and he said 'Throw the fucking thing away!'” (laughs) So then I went down and met with him, and they got the script and then what happens is, I move. This has been the luck of me for the past few years. I moved, nothing really happened, and then I finally call up Howard Stern and they said, “Jesus, we were looking all over for you! You didn't answer the phone for the last year and a half!” So that's how I got on there.

BE: That's great. I'll have to look for that.

RW: I think people should hear about that.

BE: The way I heard it, people said you were on the Howard Stern Show on one of those newsgroups, where people were posting about Last House on Dead End Street.

RW: Very rarely do I see anything correct on message boards. Very rarely, unless I add to them or something. But that's what really happened.

BE: Do you watch movies? What are some of your favorite movies?

RW: I used to live for movies. I used to be obsessed with movies, especially horror films. Lately I haven't been, I don't know why. I think I'm just disillusioned with the whole thing because HBO owes me a million and a half; the distributors of Last House on Dead End Street owe me just under three million dollars... you know, I think I've become so pissed off and jaded over the last few years.

BE: It's kinda ruined your love for it?

RW: Not really, because I still worship the same films. I still watch them at least once a year, like 8 1/2. Orson Welles' The Trial, I don't know if you've ever seen that...

BE: No, I haven't seen The Trial.

RW: My absolute favorite films. The Seventh Seal by Bergman. I consider all these horror films, except maybe 8 1/2. The typical ones – Horror of Dracula, which I grew up on. I was in England, you know. I stayed with Freddie Francis. I don't know if you know who he is. He's a great cinematographer, but he also directed some horror films. So I was hanging out when I was twenty with Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee...

BE: Some of the Hammer crew.

RW: Yes, they were my big inspiration when I was a kid. I started making films when I was ten.

BE: What about Theater of Blood or Spirits of the Dead? Did those influence you?

RW: Spirits of the Dead I've never seen, but I want to, because Fellini directed one of those episodes. He did the one with either Terence Stamp or Peter Fonda. One of them. Theater of Blood was with Vincent Price, right?

BE: Yeah.

RW: That was after the Hammer films I liked. I like Hammer from '58 to '70 or so.

BE: Do you like any newer horror movies?

RW: I liked Night of the Living Dead a lot, which isn't new any more, is it? I don't see very many horror films that I like. I don't like Nightmare on Elm Street. I saw Horror of Dracula when I was ten, and one of the reasons I really, really liked it was because nobody in it was under forty. And I liked that. It was all mature adults, and it tended to lend some sort of legitimacy to the genre. These are not kids starring in this thing, these are adults, and they're all excellent actors... so I liked that. I really can't think of any horror films I like recently. Well, if you want to call it a horror film – to me, it's one of the scariest films ever made – Pi.

BE: Did you like Requiem for a Dream too?

RW: I haven't seen that. I should, shouldn't I? I think nothing can really scare me too much. Night of the Living Dead was the last film to really scare the hell out of me when I saw it. Oh yeah, I liked The Sixth Sense. I thought that ending was fairly chilling because that's been one of my nightmares since I was a little kid. That maybe I'm dead and I don't know it. That's always bothered me. I liked that. The Wild Bunch had a big influence on me, not just technically but philosophically. Recently, one of the ones I liked a lot was Sleepy Hollow. I like just about anything Tim Burton does; I think he's probably the only legitimate genius making film in America today – commercial film, I should say. Darren Aronofsky is probably a genius but not very commercial. I liked 12 Monkeys. What else can I think of that I like... I don't get excited, but I got very excited about Pi.

BE: That's nothing compared to your movie!

RW: I know, but it did excite me because it's so intellectual too. I'm not an occultist at all, but I'm well-steeped in occult lore and ritual and I know what to watch out for, because I do believe – this is a conversation I had with Christopher Lee when I was nineteen – he said, “Listen: I don't believe in any of this shit, but I believe it's dangerous.” And then he brought up Charlie Manson. He said, “They're dangerous!” (laughs)

BE: How did you get hooked up with Christopher Lee?

RW: Well, I had a bag full of films, which I still have of course. I just went to England. A friend of mine, Paul Jensen [the blind man in LHODES] had written an article on Freddie Francis for Variety, and he had his address. He had never talked to him or anything. It was 58 Wheatlands Heston Village. I'll never forget that. So I just fuckin' got a plane ticket and I went to England, and I'll never forget this – I get to his house, and nobody's home. So I laid down – I had this big duffel bad and I put my head on it and I just went to sleep. So this neighbor came over and she said, “Are you here to see Freddie?” And I said yeah. She goes, “Did you come far?” I said, “Well, from America.” And she goes, “Well he's in Sweden for the next month or so.” (laughs) But she's very nice, she goes "Why don't you come over to our house, my husband knows him, they're good friends." He was this big playwright named Alexander Foote. He was a nice guy, he goes, "No, no, Freddie's down in Bournemouth, he'll be back tomorrow.” He got him on the phone, and I talked to him. I went to London and stayed in Earl's Court that night. The next day I came back; Freddie was there; he invited me in – it was great! We had a couple beers, we watched soccer, which I didn't know anything about. He wasn't shooting anything then, but Roy Ward Baker – he's sort of a nondescript director – he was shooting a film called The Scars of Dracula. So I went to that shooting every day, and hung out. That's when I first met Christopher Lee and all those people. But the genre was already ruined. It was Christopher Lee and a bunch of eighteen year olds, which didn't appeal to me at all. It wasn't well done at all.

BE: What about your epic Last House on Dead End Street? It was originally called The Cuckoo Clocks of Hell and ran almost three hours, supposedly. Do you know where that cut is now?

RW: No. Well, I know where it might be. It was in a lab in New York. All the elements were in the same lab, and they're not there. Suzanne Rowe [Roger’s partner] had spent weeks just trying to find a print of [that cut] – anything, and we came up empty-handed. I mean, we're talking twenty-eight years ago.

BE: How was the original cut structured? How much do you remember about how that was structured?

RW: Well, first of all, it made so much more sense. First of all, the whole first twenty minutes of it – which was the title sequence – was set in the slaughterhouse. So you see all these cows fuckin' getting slaughtered, blood up to these peoples' knees, and it was just nightmarish.

BE: Did you film that slaughterhouse footage?

RW: Yes, I did. Also, you saw Ken, my little sidekick; he's working there. So what you're doing is cutting from the slaughterhouse to me. I was working as a protectionist in a porn theater. And you see me get arrested, so you know I have some sort of knowledge of how film is put together. Then you cut to Pat Canestro, the taller girl, leaving her husband, and then you cut to the littler girl meeting Pat, and all this is going back to the slaughterhouse. So by the time you came out of there, you knew who all the characters were. You were also meeting Palmer who was shooting a porn film. Which is so much better. So the characters were all introduced, rather well I think, and concisely, in the first twenty minutes and you knew who all of them were. So that opening scene that you see in the tape, where I'm walking up to that old building, that was twenty-five minutes into the picture.

BE: Is the picture as it is now basically sequential as far as there's more to it, or is it out of sequence?

RW: Well, there was a lot more to it. It's sequential, except they did stupid-ass things like out front as I'm walking into the house they show a bit of Ken cutting the girl's stomach out or something...

BE: Yeah and part of the strangulation is shown.

RW: Right. That's just stupid, and they did that, I guess, because they didn't think the imagery would hold the audience. They wanted to see blood right away. But it was linear time. Sequential.

BE: Besides the twenty-minute intro, what else do you remember about the cut? It was three hours…

RW: There's a lot more in the sense that you had Palmer making his little dipshit porn movies, but you had Terry Hawkins making some porn movies too. So he starts off making porn movies, and they're in some sort of competition. And then you have Sweet, who sort of prefers Terry's stuff, and then you have Terry, who just goes off the deep end and starts killing people.

BE: So would this have been shown before that scene where they're watching the bad porn?

RW: The scene where they're watching the bad porn would have been intercut with the slaughterhouse footage. So you'd have had me in the projection booth getting arrested, you'd have the girls getting together, you'd have had Palmer showing Sweet his shitty pornos, and you'd have had Palmer's wife getting whipped. All that stuff.

BE: Did you at any point edit it down to the length of a feature?

RW: No.

BE: So your edit was that three hour edit?

RW: Wait, I'm sorry – I edited it down to one hour and fifty-five minutes at some point.

BE: Did you know it was being released as The Fun House?

RW: No.

BE: At what point did you sell it and to who? You just left it on the side of the road or what; how did this happen?

RW: A friend of mine named Pete Roma had a studio over in Westchester. So I used to do some stuff over there, commercials and stuff. And this guy, Leo Fenton was his name, said, “I think we can release this Fun House thing.” His wife wanted to be a movie star. He wanted to release it so he could have a company that had a film, and then do another film. And I did do a horror film with his inept wife which I won't even discuss (laughs). That's what Spittoon was about – working for this dopey guy.

BE: What happened to that movie you did?

RW: Oh, that's out there.

BE: What is it?

RW: I'm not saying! (laughs) Originally the script was very tight and I liked it, it was written with Paul Jensen and it was called The Heritage of Blood, and it was a tight little script.

BE: And that's out there.

RW: That's out there! Oh God, is it ever.

BE: By the time it was retitled Last House on Dead End Street –

RW: Well, first it was The Fun House.

BE: All right, and by the time it was retitled Last House on Dead End Street, how did you see it? Did you see it as The Fun House or as LHODES?

RW: Now this is funny. It's 1979 and I'm making Her Name was Lisa, and I'm cutting it on 9th Avenue and 44th Street at the Film Center. So I'm coming out and I'm walking down the street, and this guy comes up to me and he goes, “Jesus! You're the guy in that movie cutting people up and shit.” I didn't know who he was. I said, “What are you talking about?” He said, “No, you're him, I can tell by the way you laugh! You're him!” I said, “How do you know about this?” He said, “You don't know what happened to the film, do you?” I said no. He said, “Come up to my office.” And he was an editor that somehow had gotten involved with this; he did the trailer for Last House on Dead End Street. But the trailer was just a scene I did for the follow-up film I made for the creepy guy Leo. So he didn't do any editing, it was just a scene I already shot! But he says to me, “This film, these guys distributed it already, they called it The Fun House and they had riots! They had a big riot in Chicago when they showed this thing.” And Dallas too! And they made four million dollars, mainly south of the Mason-Dixon line. He said, “I'm telling you, this film is coming out in three weeks, it's gonna be called Last House on Dead End Street, and it's gonna be all over the place.” And I'm telling you, three weeks later – the local stations in New York City are 5, 9 and 11 – every six minutes on every one of those stations was that trailer. It was a big opening and it was all over the place! It wasn't just one theater.

BE: When they decided to retitle it Last House on Dead End Street, had you seen Last House on the Left?

RW: Here's a classic for you! I finished shooting Last House on Dead End Street in January of '73. There's this movie that comes to town called Last House on the Left. So I go see it with my friend Ken Fisher, the guy who plays Ken. We just thought it was... I didn't like it! First of all, I knew it was a rip-off of Bergman's Virgin Spring. So on some level that offended me, that they couldn't come up with something a little more original than that. And that's about it. I thought it was creepy and shit. She bites off the guy's dick and you go, “Aggggah.” But what really fuckin' almost bothered me was there's a sequence in it that's like a dream sequence, and somebody wakes up and everybody's dressed like for surgery. When I saw that, fuckin' Ken is hitting me and I'm like, oh, fuck! If they do what we did... I'm gonna be really fuckin' pissed! And I think somebody put the chisel on a tooth, or something?

BE: Yeah. It's a dental thing.

RW: OK. And I was so happy. I was like, “We're safe!” So I did see it at the same time we had just finished shooting LHODES. But I'm offended by the title Last House on Dead End Street.

BE: You think it misrepresents the movie?

RW: Yes, I do. And because of the year it came out and all that, it makes me look like I was trying to take advantage somehow of that film, and I certainly never would.

BE: Did you have anything at all to do with the Sun Video release?

RW: No.

BE: Even they released a number of different versions, I don't know if you’re aware of that. Their tapes differ in where the cuts are and how long the tapes are...

RW: Really? I didn’t know that.

BE: There's a tape under the title of The Fun House.

RW: Really?

BE: Yeah. Most of them are under Last House on Dead End Street, but I actually have one under Fun House. It's the same opening credits but it has the title The Fun House – it looks like the original title, with an old sort of font.

RW: That Gothic sort of look.

BE: Yeah, the Gothic look.

RW: I've seen that. Cheap old black & white zoom-in titles.

BE: Exactly. Their longest version runs about 77 1/2 minutes. Do you know who handled the editing of their videos?

RW: I don't.

BE: Do you know why they put out so many different versions?

RW: I have no idea. I didn't know they did!

BE: Yeah, there's at least four different versions.

RW: No, I didn't know that. The one I had – I actually had to buy one – is pretty much the one I see most of the time. It cuts away during the disemboweling sequence.

BE: Does it have anything additional besides the remainder of that scene? Or is that mainly the big difference?

RW: That's the big difference. One thing there's too much of and always was, I would have cut it down considerably, is where the queer guy is sucking the deer's hoof. It just goes on too long.

BE: You think that scene's too long?

RW: I do. Don't forget, I cut it on rewind; I never saw it at speed! (laughs) The scene I like, nobody ever brings it up it seems, is when they hold a mirror up to his face and then the girl pulls the mirror down, and you see this disgusting sort of mask staring at him, right next to his face. I like that. And I would have trimmed that considerably. It's too long before the mirror comes down. That's one example of what I would do differently.

BE: That's interesting. Finishing up on the Sun Video thing, do you have any idea of how many copies are out there?

RW: I have no idea.

BE: Are those edits then basically your edits, just a shorter version of the movie?

RW: No, they didn't edit anything. They just took out whole scenes. The edits are my edits.

BE: The scene to scene cuts are yours?

RW: That's all my stuff. Like I said, it was never fine-tuned. They just said, “This is too long. Let's take this out, let's take this out. Hey look! We can lose 20 minutes right out front with this slaughterhouse shit. Let's just get rid of it.” And that, to me, was absolutely necessary.

BE: What's left now is real brief.

RW: Yes. It wasn't, and it was horrible! I had to force myself to have rare roast beef that day. Me and Ken Fisher. I'll never forget that.

BE: You had roast beef the day you were shooting the slaughterhouse footage?

RW: Yes, I had to. I might never have had roast beef again.

BE: Where did you shoot that?

RW: The whole film was shot in Oneonta, New York because my friend Paul was a professor up there, so he had the cameras. It was an Arriflex 16S, eight quartz lamps (laughs), and things that I would find and just use! All the stuff with the masks... I was there to make the film and I knew basically what I wanted to do, but I would go to somebody's house and this professor of theater had these masks, and I said, “Holy shit, this is great!” So that's how things would wind up in the film.

BE: So those masks... some professor had those for Greek tragedies or something?

RW: Exactly, it was for a production of Oedipus.

BE: What kind of reactions did the film have when it played theaters, that you know of?

RW: I knew supposedly they had a theater burn down in Chicago. (laughs)

BE: Did you see any news reports about that?

RW: I don't know, because I heard about it after the fact. The guy who I met on the street, he said, “You know, they burned the theater in Chicago!” I saw it for one night in the theater.

BE: What was it like? How were people reacting?

RW: It was like, eeeuuuhhh! You know, it worked! The only thing that I've never liked, and a lot of people like it because they think it adds to the disorienting effect of the entire film, is the dubbing. The dubbing was just never cleaned up! You have to clean that up. Me, I just cringe when I see people talking and the words come out a second later.

BE: That adds to the quality of the film, though!

RW: I know a lot of people think that, so what can I say. That always bothered me. I remember going to see the film and here it was, fifty feet wide and my lips are six feet wide, and words are coming out at the wrong time! (laughs) I was just, like, shrinking in my seat! But you're right. A lot of people – a LOT of people – just think that really works. I don't, though.

BE: You mentioned something happening in a theater in Dallas?

RW: Supposedly. This came from the same guy on 9th Avenue. Actually, that's where it opened. They opened it in Dallas, Texas as The Fun House and evidently there was some violence in the audience, people kicking the shit out of each other, people screaming and yelling and going nuts...

BE: Was that a theater or a drive-in?

RW: Theater.

BE: Now, did it play in multiplexes when it had this bigger opening in 1977?

RW: There were really no multiplexes in 1977. It was all still big old theaters.

BE: There were multiplexes beginning then.

RW: It played in big theaters, on the big screen.

BE: Did you go see it then? That's when you saw it on 42nd Street?

RW: I saw it on 42nd Street when it came out as The Fun House.

BE: Did you see it as Last House on Dead End Street?

RW: Yes.

BE: Was the movie actually rated R?

RW: Yes.

BE: With the full disembowelment scene?

RW: Well don't forget, when it came out and I saw it, it didn't have the full disembowelment scene.

BE: It didn't have it in the theater when you saw it?

RW: Nope.

BE: It had the cutaway?

RW: The guy picks up the tin snips, and-

BE: As soon as he cuts to the robe, it –

RW: Right. They were outta there.

BE: See, the version that I saw that has the full disembowelment scene does have an R card on it.

RW: I couldn't believe that with the slaughterhouse footage it [got an] R! Back then, especially. Nobody ever did anything like that before.

BE: The MPAA's website lists the production company as Warmflash Productions, Inc.

RW: That's true. That's who did the trailer from the second film. That was the guy I met on 9th Avenue.

BE: What were you trying to do when you made Last House on Dead End Street? What was the theory behind it?

RW: You know what the budget was on that movie, and I'm not making this up?

BE: What was it?

RW: I had $1500. I was high on speed and I made a movie for $1500, and that's no lie. (laughs.) That's absolutely 100 percent the truth.

BE: Why make this movie?

RW: Well, how am I going to compete with Hollywood? How am I gonna make 8 1/2? How am I gonna make The Seventh Seal, which is more where my sensibilities lie? I'm not, but I can make something so shocking that people will notice it.

BE: How do you view the movie's antihero, Terry Hawkins?

RW: Like I say, I like him. I liked all those people. I see the other people as the villains. I just see them as corrupt, immoral pieces of shit, that in the end probably get what they deserve and the world is certainly no worse off for the loss of any of them.

BE: So that's why you've said you don't like the voice-over at the end...

RW: Oh, I hate it. It makes me crazy.

BE: But Hawkins was an ex-con in the original script, right?

RW: Yes. Well, he got arrested in the beginning.

BE: But that voice-over in the beginning where it said that –

RW: There was no voice-over. You see him get arrested –

BE: But in the movie as it is now, he's walking in the building and he's basically saying he just got out of prison. Was that yours?

RW: I had to make it up when we were doing the dubbing, so everyone would know what was going on.

BE: OK. But the voice-over at the end, that one you had nothing to do with.

RW: I had nothing to do with that. That was a guy named Bernie Travis, who committed suicide and I was glad when he did. Piece of shit.

BE: I actually showed Last House on Dead End Street to a college film class. I was teaching a little student-run course on sick movies, and a lot of people, especially with the juxtaposition of the people viewing the bad porn, thought that the message was that it was an anti-porn movie.

RW: No. I think it might be an anti-pornographer movie! (laughs) It might be that.

BE: The hilarious lesbian porn scene where the dog is walking in and out – what's that all about?

RW: That was my friend's Weimaraner. Ken Fisher's. We're shooting at his house and I just thought it was funny. (laughs) The guy that does that, the guy who plays Palmer, was a theater professor up there named Ed Pixley. He was a very proper guy and I couldn't even believe he was in this fuckin' thing! I said “Ed, you've got to live with your family and shit.” He goes, “I don't know. I just always wanted to be in a movie!” So he did it, and he was good! Everybody else in it is an undergraduate.

BE: You said you finished shooting in '73?

RW: January, '73.

BE: Had you heard of snuff movies?

RW: Oh yes, of course! Here's how the whole thing happened: I was living with a director named Nicholas Ray. I was editing his last picture. Nick was strung out, for a lot of different reasons. They wanted Nick to make a film in Czechoslovakia with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Nick says to me, “Roger, I can't even go to this meeting. You go.” So I'm like, “OK, I'll go.” I went to the Chelsea Hotel, he was a very nice man, I don't recall his name, and we're talking [about Nick], and he goes, “You know what I'd do if I were you? I would make a movie about Charlie Manson, because you're a sick-looking fucker and you could pull it off, and there's money in that shit!” So that's how I got the idea. I had read The Family by Ed Saunders so yeah, I knew all about snuff films.

BE: Had you seen the movie Snuff or heard of that?

RW: Oh that was out years later.

BE: It supposedly played in '72.

RW: No, that's not true. I saw that movie in '77 or '78. I knew Roberta Findlay, the woman who did that footage at the end. She was a friend of mine. Actually, I wrote a couple of movies for her. So that's when it came out. It never played in '72.

BE: Do you believe in snuff movies? Do you think they really exist?

RW: Probably not. I don't think so.

BE: I just realized that I forgot to ask you for a general biography - where you're from, who you are, what you do for a living now...

RW: Same thing! Of course, I haven't done anything in two years but fortunately I've had some money to live off of. Actually, I have just finished [writing] this Hobo Flats thing that I want to do. It's done now. It's miles ahead of Last House. Miles. And it's still just as perverse and bizarre, but it's also very funny. It's the one film I really do want to make.

BE: Do you plan on funding that yourself, or are you looking for someone to do that with you?

RW: I'm looking for funding. The thing is, this film is a bit more expensive than what I've done. I budgeted this at around six million dollars. But then again, I have Dennis Hopper and people like that, so it's a slightly different ball game than Last House on Dead End Street.

BE: What's the general idea?

RW: I hate to describe things. I'm no good at it. I could write a full length screenplay better than a three page synopsis. What's it about? How can I word this... it's about a de-gloved gynecologist. He's wandering around in the desert in the beginning, and he witnesses this horrible accident but he doesn't really care, and then he drifts into the desert and he's trying to figure out how he got to be what he is. So the whole thing takes place as a flashback; well, not quite because it'll cut back to the desert now and then. And the desert is filling up with people from his past for no real logical reason, but they're there, having a picnic. And it goes back to one day and one night in his life when he was thirteen years old. And it's quite funny. And I don't know what to say beyond that, without going into the whole picture.

BE: When you say you've got Dennis Hopper, you mean he's agreed to do it with you?

RW: I was with Nicholas Ray. He directed Rebel Without a Cause, They Live by Night... he's just one of the big, big Hollywood directors. When I was twenty-one, I was staying in his house, editing his last picture. If you can find a film by Wim Wenders called Lightning Over Water, it's about Nick when Nick was dying of cancer. But in the film, Nick is actually showing some scenes that I edited for him. They're not very good, and the film wasn't very good, but that led directly into Last House on Dead End Street – knowing Nick. Because that's how I wound up in that producer's hotel room on 23rd Street. But it's an interesting film if you can find it. It's very disturbing, especially if you knew Nick. I mean, what he's doing is dying and he's trying to make a film about his death with Wim Wenders! So it's almost unwatchable by most people. I think the first six minutes is just Nick sitting up in bed coughing. It's pretty disturbing. Anyway, Nick said, “Before you leave, let me write you a letter of recommendation.” And he did, on his own stationary, with his signature and everything, which was phenomenal because he never did this for anybody in his life. So a year or so ago when I was trying to get a hold of Hopper, I just made a copy of that and sent it to him. And I got a call from him right away. So that's the Nick Ray/Dennis Hopper connection.

BE: I was surprised to hear you say you were into Tim Burton.

RW: Oh, yeah. I love a lot of his things. I loved Beetlejuice, I loved Sleepy Hollow, I loved Ed Wood. I thought Ed Wood was one of the best films of the decade, really. Just because it was an act of love, and it was done so well. Ed Wood in real life was sort of this despicable alcoholic. (laughs) Nothing really nice about him, and he didn't have any talent at all. But the point of view of the film, I thought was nice. I liked it very much.

BE: You also said that The Wild Bunch was something that influenced you...

RW: Very major influence on my life. Saw it on 42nd Street when I was about nineteen.

BE: That would be the place to see it!

RW: Yeah, that was great. You get the proper audience there too.

BE: Now, it's all Disney. A lot of the theaters are there, but they're all owned by Disney.

RW: They're bad. It used to be: See three horror films, or three exploitation films, for 99 cents. It was great. I remember once, I went to see a film called Putney Swope, which was a really funny, underground sort of film, directed by Robert Downey Sr., the father of the actor. And I'm sitting there watching it with two of my friends that I dragged there, and as we're watching the film, someone comes in and shoots the guy in the head sitting right in front of us! (laughs) It was great.

BE: Did you see the rest of the movie?

RW: I did, yeah! I made my friends stay. Phil Aiston and Tom Leslie. I made them stay.

BE: Back to Last House – Who made up those aliases?

RW: That guy I told you about that killed himself, Bernie Travis.

BE: So you had nothing to do with the names.

RW: Nothing. Nothing. I was appalled.

BE: You intended to have your own name on it?

RW: No, but I intended to have no name on it, because I was pissed off at how they cut it down so much and just rearranged some sequences which I didn't approve of. I didn't want my name on it.

BE: If they had left it as is, would you have left your own name on it?

RW: Absolutely. Absolutely. I believed in that film.

BE: I mentioned to you that when I was a kid, I rented it in a regular video store. Did you ever see it for rent anywhere over time?

RW: This guy down the street here from where I live rents it, independently of me. He didn't know I made it. I’d seen the old Sun Video ones years ago. In 1982 and '83, I remember seeing it in stores all over the place. The one the guy has down the street... that guy has the best video store in the world. In the world.

BE: Which video store is that?

RW: It's in Piermont, New York. It's called Piermont Video. And this guy, I mean, forget anything commercial... he's not interested. He's got Last House on Dead End Street and Cannibal Holocaust and shit like that. Anything obscure. For instance, one of my favorite horror films, maybe my favorite [is] a film called Vampyr by Carl Dreyer. I wanted to see that all my life. He had it. I wanted to see Witchcraft Throughout the Ages all my life. He had it. So if you ever come just outside of New York City...

BE: Now we're really getting into the nerdy fan material. Have you ever seen a BETA copy of Last House on Dead End Street? Because it was released on BETA, supposedly, by Sun Video.

RW: No, I didn't know that. I believe it, because there was sort of a schizophrenic video release back then. You could get BETA and you could get VHS.

BE: I've never seen one, and I do have a working BETA player... I've looked for the tape and I can't find it.

RW: I haven't seen it, no.

BE: What can you tell me about the cast of the movie?

RW: The cast of the movie were all friends of mine who were undergraduates.

BE: Were you in school there?

RW: No, I had graduated in '72.

BE: From Oneonta?

RW: Yeah. I had actually been asked to leave Cornell (laughs). This is actually a funny story. Cornell looks out for her people. And what happened was I was just into drugs and shit when I was there as a freshman. So they'll say to you, “Listen. If you're going to flunk out, why don't you quit?” Because if you quit, you don't have a bad record. If you flunk out, you're fucked. So I left, and this girl I liked was going to school in Oneonta! (laughs) Which was a far inferior school, but I could hop right into there, so I did. I was a good student, straight-As; I decided I didn't want to go to Vietnam and everything, and needless to say as soon as I get there I have nothing much to do with the girl at all! But I liked it there, I had a good time, and I met this guy Paul Jensen.

BE: The blind man.

RW: He's the blind man, but if you look him up, he's written a lot of great books: Boris Karloff and his Films was good, The Cinema of Fritz Lang... he's got what I think is the best book on horror films I've ever read, called The Men Who Made the Monsters. Very, very good. He just had a book come out three or four months ago on Alfred Hitchcock called Hitchcock Becomes Hitchcock. He's very good, but we had nothing in common except film, which of course was everything. So we became fast friends, and I was with him a lot. We just became good friends. I started making films on my own when I was ten. He knew there was no teaching me how to make films or anything, so he didn't bother. What I would do is do whatever I wanted and he would give me independent study credits for whatever film I brought to him. And they were good films.

BE: What are the films like?

RW: Let me tell you how I started making films. Nobody actually knows what it was that fascinated me about this process. People have asked me, what was the first film I ever saw, the first horror film? My mother took me to see Tobor the Great, which absolutely floored me. I played Tobor the Great for two years. When I was ten, I was a child who was absolutely fixated by time. I remember being four and walking down the street in Binghamton, New York and I was real happy because it was sunny...

BE: That's where you grew up?

RW: Yes. I had this overwhelming sadness at the passage of time. Because I'm so happy, I'm just a little boy, right? But it hits me, this has got to end... and all of a sudden I'm profoundly sad! Which I'm sure is not normal. (laughs) I don't think that's a normal thing for a four year old to do, but I did it. When I was nine years old – and this is what's important, because this really determined my life – it was a summer night, and there was a strange guy in my neighborhood named Jim Brochus. This was a strange guy; he couldn't pronounce his Rs. A very imaginative guy, but so imaginative that everyone thought he was crazy. But I liked him. So he comes up and he asks me what I'm doing, and I was just real bored so I say nothing. I'm just hanging out. He goes, “Listen, I got a movie projector.” Which didn't really mean much to me, because I'd seen home movies and things like that. So he says, “No, you've got to see this – you crank it! You've got to see this, you turn a crank...” I really wasn't too excited, but I went over to his house. He just lived down the street, and in the cellar he had this black, 16mm movie projector with like a 100 watt, regular light bulb, not even a tungsten, and a hand crank, and no take-up reel, and he had one movie, and it was Felix the Cat. It was probably from the '30s, black and white, and I remember it had nail polish on it, bright red nail polish, just drips on it... it might have been paint, but it looked like nail polish. I said “Alright, let's check this out.” So he puts it on, but what fascinates me right away – I liked the cartoon because it looks real strange and I've never seen one with nail polish on it before – but what's really fascinating to me is this crank. Because with this crank, I can go backwards, I can go forward, I can go really fast or I can go really slow, or I can stop everything. And all of a sudden it hits me: I'm manipulating time. I can actually make it go fast, slow, backward, forward, and I went nuts. I made him show me that until his mother finally threw me out around midnight! We watched that film probably forty times! (laughs) And every time we watch it, we have to put in back on the reel with a pencil because we don't have a take-up reel. So it's just spooling out on the floor. So that did it to me, right there; I had to make movies. My birthday was going to be in a month or so, so I ask for a movie camera and my mother got me a Brownie Fun-Saver, which I still have. It was funny, cause I started scripting movies in my head even before I got that camera, and I had this friend named Dave Day and Dave Day was into this too. So I made all these movies and he was in all of them; we'd get other people but we'd usually kill them and we'd have nobody else to be in it so they'd have to come back as different people (laughs), so they were the same actors, dressed the same, so it was always funny. And that's how it started! The first film I made was called The Masque of the Red Death, only because I liked the title. I liked the word "masque", but it was really The Pit and the Pendulum. We built our own pendulum and all that – it was awful, but it wasn't awful, really. Nick Ray was fascinated by it. That's one of the things I dug about Nick, he loved all the stuff I made when I was ten, eleven... he didn't care about nineteen or twenty. Of course, he was on drugs! (laughs) But anyway, that was the beginning of it. I'm telling you it had to do with that specific projector, that specific film, and that specific time in my life. That's what it was. If Brochus hadn't come to my porch that night when I was sitting there, who knows what would have happened. Nobody knows this. People know that I saw the Felix the Cat film when I was ten, but they don't know the effect or why, the projector itself, nothing. Most people ask me very superficial questions so I don't bother giving them good answers. But I'm telling you the truth.

BE: Back to Last House on Dead End Street. Anything interesting about any of the other actors or actresses?

RW: Before we get there, a couple of quick things.

BE: Sure.

RW: So I made a bunch of films, and some of them are really good. When I got to be seventeen or eighteen, I was doing some really good stuff. When I was nineteen, I went to England. The director named Freddie Francis, who was a Hammer film director. Did we talk about him?

BE: We talked about him. You talked about first camping outside his house.

RW: Right. And then I was with Otto Preminger, do you know who he was? I did the same thing – I went to his door, knocked on it. It's funny, when I got out of college I went to California I absolutely hated it. I hated it! I hated it! And I had a job my first day, on the set of Blood Orgy of the She-Devils. This is something nobody knows. My first day in Los Angeles, Blood Orgy of the She-Devils is being made by Ted...

BE: Mikels?

RW: That's it! Ted Mikels. I couldn't take it. These people were so stupid, and untalented, and just nothing; I left, and ran into this other guy, and he knew Burgess Meredith so he calls him up. And Burgess Meredith says to me, “What are you doing in California? There's nothing happening here. Otto Preminger is staying at my house.” That was like two miles away from where I lived. “I'll call him; you go see him.” I go back there and knock on the door; there's Preminger. Of course, Burgess Meredith never called him. He forgot, or whatever. But Preminger was cool. I said, “Listen, I'd really like to show you some films!” He goes, “You won't waste my time, will you?” I said no, not at all. So he says, “All right, come by Saturday with your films.” So I did, and Otto Preminger and I are sitting in his bedroom, showing my movies on the wall. And he was cool! And this guy came from The New York Times to interview him; he was doing a film called Such Good Friends. Preminger says to this guy from The Times, “This is Roger Watkins. He's the best young filmmaker I've ever met in my life!” I'm like, whoow! So I hung out with Otto, and I guess just after that was Nick Ray – I met him in maybe February or March of '72, and by December of '72 I was shooting Last House. So that's how that happened. And that's why I'm more than happy to accommodate anybody who comes to me. Because when I was a kid, people like that did a lot for me. Otto Preminger gave me... you know that little Super-8 camera that you see in Last House on Dead End Street? Otto Preminger gave me that, which was a cool thing to do.

BE: The base of movies I usually watch from are the exploitation films of the '70s and '80s, hence my love for your movie.

RW: Well, I've always been schizophrenic in my film-making. For instance, I knew growing up that if I make something sensationalistic, people are going to watch it. So I would make something like this film I made called Ron Rico which was about a dwarf with no arms looking for Jesus; it's funny, but it's also kind of touching. But it's really accessible, it's got rock & roll music, it's got everything you want to see, the imagery is pretty interesting... but at the same time, I made a film called Requiem, which is a half hour film about my reactions to my best friend's death in Vietnam. Very understated. Very quiet. To the uninitiated, possibly boring. I don't know, and I don't care.

BE: Watching Last House on Dead End Street, you get the feeling that everyone involved was a real maniac. What was the atmosphere like on the set?

RW: Nothing like you would imagine. The atmosphere on the set was me higher than shit on methamphetamine. And Ken Fisher... I must tell you, if it weren't for Ken there, would be no Last House on Dead End Street. Because he was the one who would say, “Come on Roger, you've got to do something here, you've got people waiting around, you've got to think of something, you've got to do it...” And I'd say, “All right, let's do this.” And he would set lights for me and everything! I mean, Ken Fisher was indispensable in this film in terms of getting it done. He's the guy who would wake me up in the morning and say “Listen, you've got to come, everyone's waiting,” and stuff like that. Very indispensable. He played Ken, the calf-fucker there. So he was very important. Basically, my mind was fairly insane, I think because of the drugs. It was speed. It was all speed.

BE: Were the other cast members...

RW: No. (laughs)

BE: Were they wild?

RW: No, not at all. Not at all. In fact, everybody was always shocked that I would get anybody to do these things. I'll run 'em down: Ken Fisher, he was older than the rest of us. He had been in the service and everything; he was just out of the Army or the Air Force and he looked crazy, but he wasn't. Kathy Kurtin, the little girl, the shorter girl of the two, she was like Betty Crocker. Pat Canestro the older girl, she's a schoolteacher now someplace. None of these people were crazy, none of them were wild, none of them were anything but good friends of mine who were doing me a favor, really.

BE: You were planning on showing the film at Cannes.

RW: I was.

BE: Did you show it at Cannes?

RW: No.

BE: What's the aspect ratio of the movie?

RW: When shot it in 16, it was meant to be projected at a full 16 aperture, because to tell you the truth, I didn't know about aspect ratios to save my life. I had no idea. So it was composed for a 16mm frame. Obviously when it gets blown up, you lose a little off the top and bottom right there. For instance, I'll give you a good example. The scene where you see me and Ken in jail; that strange looking jail with the silver pillar that I'm leaning against, and he's on the couch, in proper framing at 16 you see all of my face below my chin. In the 35mm, I'm cut off half way up my chin. Things like that would really disturb me.

BE: So those Sun Video tapes are taken off a 35mm?

RW: Right.

BE: Was any part of the movie filmed with sync sound at all?

RW: None. Not a frame.

BE: I could tell from talking to you that you obviously did the voice of Terry Hawkins, did the other actors do their own dubbing?

RW: Nobody. Nobody did.

BE: And Francis Ford Coppola had a part in the original dubbing?

RW: Yeah. What happened was this. The whole thing's tied up in legal shit now. I was home one day, I was living in Brooklyn, and Paul Jensen told me that Coppola's going to be at the YMHA on 96th Street, talking and shit. I thought, that's cool, that was going to be on a Saturday night. This was a Friday. So I think, “Friday... he's got to be staying in New York, I'm gonna call some of the hotshot hotels and get him.” I called the St. Moritz first, I asked for Mr. Coppola's room... sure enough, some guy gets on. I say “Yeah, is Francis there?” He says, “Hold on, I'll get him.” Now this is funny. He goes, “Francis, it's for you,” and you hear Francis going, “Tell him I'll taking a shit! Tell him to call back in ten minutes, my ass is killing me!” (laughs) So I call back in ten minutes and Coppola gets on the phone, he goes, “Man, I gotta tell you, my ass is on fire. I had fuckin' peppers yesterday, I'm dying here.” So I started talking to him and he was really nice; he goes, “Look, I'll tell you what: Come on down to the YMHA tomorrow, and after the thing we'll talk a little bit.” So I went down there with Paul Jensen, and Coppola's speaking, and he showed about ten minutes of a workprint of The Conversation... so you can nail down the time that was. After it was over – it was just an illusion really, but Jensen took a picture of me and Francis backstage and it's like I'm talking and gesticulating, and Francis has his finger on his chin and he looks like he's really intensely listening. I'm sure he was probably thinking, “I've got to take a shit!” But anyway, I tell him about the picture and everything else. He didn't see it, so he goes, “You've got to finish this thing. I'll set you up down in Princeton, New Jersey and you can go down there and dub the whole thing.” So he did! And we went down there, and they were all real people there. It was a good job, I thought, the long version. So we went to Princeton and did it, and I was happy with it. We come back years later and the thing is being dubbed by the distributors – these assholes, they just redubbed the whole picture.

BE: But you participated in it, right?

RW: I did. It was my voice; my former wife dubbed a couple voices. She did Kathy, the little girl. A girl named Nan Bernstein who became a big producer at United Artists is a couple of voices. They were all Broadway people and stuff.

BE: Where did the idea of having the chick in the S&M scene wear blackface come from?

RW: I don't know. I just thought it was outrageous.

BE: Did you intentionally refilm that scene in Pink Ladies?

RW: Why, is it in there?

BE: Yeah, there's a woman in front of a mirror putting on a white face mask. It's very much the same setup.

RW: Hmmm, I don't know. I haven't seen that in so long and I don't want to see it. Possibly, but I don't recall.

BE: And where'd you get the little kid who hands the whip to the hunchback? Whose kid was that? That's one of the sicker things in the movie – suddenly this young boy comes on screen!

RW: Well, this house was owned by this very wealthy woman named Georgia Brasie who had a big huge department store in upstate New York called Brasie's. And that kid, I think was maybe her grandchild! (laughs) But I agree, that's a pretty odd thing to let your grandchild do.

BE: How long did the movie take to shoot?

RW: Let me think: Four murders, four nights... of course, Palmer's started in the afternoon and then went into the night... I would say approximately ten, maybe twelve days, tops.

BE: That's impressive. You go to see crap in the theater and they spend months on it.

RW: I know. (laughs) Do you know a guy named Andy Copp? He has a magazine called Neon Madness. He's out of Dayton, Ohio and it's an interesting little magazine... he actually did a nice little article on LHODES he sent me, before anybody knew it was mine. But it was interesting, and he sent along a little film he had made inspired by Last House on Dead End S