WILD BEYOND BELIEF! Interviews with Exploitation Filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s, by Brian Albright (2008: McFarland & Company, Inc., Box 611, Jefferson, NC 28640). Softcover, $39.95.
Review by Anthony Ambrogio
Wild Beyond Belief! brings together, in alphabetical order, sixteen Brian Albright interviews with greater and lesser lights of low-budget horror and action cinema—from director Al Adamson to writer James Gordon White.
Interview books are always a mixed bag: some of the interviews hold no interest for a particular reader, and some of the interviewees don't give particularly good interviews. On the other hand, sometimes a film personality one might have dismissed displays unexpected depths. Sid Haig, for example, comes off as intelligent and articulate.
Tom Weaver is the Master of the Genre Interview, having done hundreds (collected in thirteen books). Albright is not Weaver—yet. But one can see him becoming more assured and incisive as the interviews accumulate, and, from the first, he shows himself to be a professional who certainly knows his subjects and has done his homework. Thus, he is able to ask about various titles and supply us with missing information (picture release dates, full names of people referred to, etc.). One wishes he had dated the interviews so a reader could more easily place them in the context of the subjects' careers.
Albright's introductions summarize his subjects' professional life from their beginnings to the present day, but a filmography of some sort for each individual would have provided a handy reference. And more description of the titles under discussion would have helped too. If you are unfamiliar with a movie that Albright and his interviewee are talking about, you usually do not learn a lot about it from their conversation. Their remarks about some titles tantalize—but that’s all. For example, interviewee Gary Kent told the producer of the proposed nudie-cutie Secret Places, Secret Things (1971), which Kent eventually directed, "Let's make an art film. It will be a nudie, but it will be art" (p. 127). Those of us who don’t know the movie are curious about the finished product.
Another problem with reading celebrity interviews is that sometimes the celebrities' memories are so faulty, or sometimes what they consider important seems so trivial or meaningless, that their recollections are worthless.
You learn that what's funny to an interviewee may not be funny to a reader, either because the interviewee can't tell a good anecdote or the incident is not particularly amusing to the reader—or both. Case in point: actress Jenifer Bishop's story about herself on location during the shooting of The Female Bunch (1969), involving a horse, a ravine, and the reaction of Lon Chaney, Jr. (see p. 22). I had to read it several times before (I think) I got it.
You also learn that a subject may know his business well but be unable to explain it clearly. Case in point: Sam Sherman's "explanation" of sub-distributor "settlements" (p. 191). I read it several times and still didn't get it.
Part of the reason for this apparent incoherence stems from the author's admirable attempt to reproduce verbatim his subjects' comments (most of which were no doubt captured by a recording device). While there is merit in an in-his-own-words recital, most people are not exceptional extempore speakers and could benefit from judicious editing and rewording. Such paraphrasing is not dishonest; in fact, it's the kind of polish anyone would do if he or she had the chance. It's been my limited experience (interviewing food-service workers for a restaurant magazine) that as long as interviewees don't appear to be saying "red" when they meant "blue," they are generally happy with the emendations the writer makes to their quotations—and frequently assume that what comes out, rendered through this filter, is exactly what they said.
I guess it comes down to differing philosophies: Should the author leave the interviewees' words exactly as they were spoken, or should he or she craft them into clear renditions of what the subjects really wanted to say (as interpreted, obviously, by the writer)? I would opt for the latter. Albright apparently prefers the former, wishing to be true to the experience, no matter the result.
Despite this use of "raw data," a number of Albright's interviews prove very illuminating, even (or maybe especially) when his subjects put forth dubious propositions.
For example, Albright engages director Monte Hellman in a discussion about the "quiet spaces" now lacking in films. Former philosophy student Hellman maintains, "An audience can't really absorb oral stimuli and visual stimuli simultaneously. If you want them to see something, you can't have anything distracting on the soundtrack. If you want them to hear something, you can't have something distracting on the screen" (p. 97). This idea may be theoretically sound, but it's a great leap from this to suggest that dialogue or sound in itself is a distraction, as Hellman seems to. One could argue that—considering the elaborate musical scores written for many silent films or even the organ or tinkling piano accompaniment found in neighborhood theaters—film was never purely visual; or one could maintain, as Pauline Kael has, that the interrupting intertitles of silent films prevented them from being the "purely visual" works some critics labeled them; or—conversely—one could contend that silent film, lacking the dimension of accompanying sound, is an entirely different art form from talkies. It's an avenue of discussion that this reader wishes Albright and Hellman had explored further—although, since they agree about it, there was probably no place for them to go.
Albright comes into his own as an interviewer with his Jack Hill piece—possibly because he's asking intelligent questions of an intelligent filmmaker who's thoughtful about his work and provides useful insights. (Monte Hellman is an intelligent person, but Albright can't get much out of him except the refrain that Hellman rewrote practically every script he ever filmed. If true, this is not particularly impressive if one finds the majority of Hellman's films to be less than impressive.)
Overall, Wild Beyond Belief! makes for interesting reading—and for exceptional reading for fans of Sherman and Adamson's International Independent Pictures, since so many of his interviewees were connected with those films in one capacity or another.
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