Charles Band Interview

Charles Band has been around films his whole life. His father, Albert Band made films continuously throughout the sixties and seventies. His brother, Richard Band, has been a film composer for decades, writing one of my own personal favorite main title themes for Re-Animator. Charles has close to 300 films under his belt and was one of the first entertainment personalities to exploit the future of cable television and the video market. Just before he started his tour across America for his Third Annual Full Moon Road Show, Mr. Band was kind enough to sit back and talk about his past and the future of Full Moon in general.

Bryan Layne: What have you been up to lately?

Charles Band: I am going to be doing a road show this summer. In June, we are actually going to be right by you in Knoxville, Tennessee. So, you should come and check that out.

BL: I’ll be there for that, you can bet on it. So, you are still doing the road show?

CB: Oh, yeah. I skipped it last year, but I am back with it this year. It’s going to be very well attended. We got some great venues and a lot of wonderful celebrities. It’s going to be a whole lot of fun.

BL: What brought the idea of the road show about and what was your goal with the whole concept?

CB: Initially?

BL: Yes, sir.

CB: Well, I’m not really sure. That’s a good question, actually. No one has ever asked me that one before. I don’t know how or why it all started. It’s just that for years I’ve been making these movies and there have been so many generations that have seen these films that I felt the whole body of work had taken on a life of its own. In the last two or three years I’ve attended some conventions. As I got up there and tried to entertain people, I found out that I had some kind of a gift for doing entertaining stuff on stage. Not just talking about my movies, but doing things with audience participation and girls who take their tops off… who knows what kind of crazy things I’ll be bringing to the stage. Then I thought that I’m kind of lucky and unique in the sense that I’ve made so many films in the genre. We would get up on stage at these conventions and have so much fun that the idea of doing a tour entered my mind. You know, much like a rock ‘n roll band gets out there and does a tour, performs and tries to spread the word. I’m kind of doing the same thing. I’m also very, very independent and not affiliated with any studio. I felt it was really hard to get these films out there. We do have reasonable distribution, but it’s not like the old days when there were tens of thousands of little “mom and pop” video stores out there that carry independent products. Now, there’s a handful of big chains that really don’t carry library. They just sort of carry the current releases. The whole dream of having a delivery system over the Internet is great, but not quite here yet. The biggest complaint we always get is fans not being able to find our movies anymore. They can get the newer ones, but they seem to also be interested in the films we did in the 70’s and 80’s. So, I thought maybe I should just get on the road and do a tour. That was, sort of, the concept behind the very first tour and it was successful on a lot of levels. We actually didn’t make any money; that was a bummer, but we did have thousands of people that showed up, a lot of goodwill and I learned a lot by getting out there and talking to the fans. I started to think I could do all of this again. I’d learned some tricks and I did a second year. I would do around twenty cities each year, which over thirty days was kind of tough, but the show we put together was great. Now, we have so many things happening with Full Moon and some other new deals we are involved in, that I secured a great promoter who has suggested that less is more. So, instead of trying to do twenty cities, we decided on doing twelve. We also planned the shows for over the weekends, which is really when people are more available. The idea is, let’s get bigger venues and just make these twelve cities a huge success. We booked kind of interesting and strange selection of cities. We’re not doing anything very west coast. We’re starting off in Phoenix, Arizona and working our way around the country. We’re going through the south and for the very first time, I’m bringing the show to New York, right on Times Square. I got a lot of people showing up who are going to… I was just with Bill Shatner yesterday on the set of Boston Legal and he’s going to make one of the dates because we’ve done some stuff together. It’s kind of a weird little, demented Ozzfest. I’m not exactly sure how I want to describe the road show, but ultimately, I hope it promotes goodwill, our film titles and the fact that some really cool new things are about to happen for Full Moon after being, sort of, a well-kept secret for so many years.

BL: How about that son of yours? He’s had quite the success with a rock music career.

CB: He has had an amazing success, at a very young age, with the rock band The Calling, they broke up, of course. He’s now been in the studio for quite some time and he’s releasing, a little later this year, his first solo work. I think his solo stuff is astonishing. Aside of the fact that I’m his father, I can certainly say that some of the songs are really, really powerful and I think he’s got some big hits in there. He has always been a musical guy and a singer/songwriter, so the fact that he’s actually in this substantially horrible business and already had a big success with a number one song, is just exceptional. He grew up on our movie sets, so he was certainly around the entertainment field. My brother has been a composer his whole life, so my son was surrounded by that, as well. He’s very gifted in his own right. He’s a relatively small guy, but he’s got this very deep voice; a voice that almost doesn’t go with his size and stature.

BL: What can you tell me about hanging out with your father, Albert Band, while on his movie sets as a young boy?

CB: There’s so many phenomenal stories to tell there, that I really don’t even know where to begin. I grew up in Italy where my dad made his movies, as well as Spain and Yugoslavia, all the way through the sixties and early seventies. The pictures were either spaghetti westerns or big sword and sand movies, like the ones with Steve Reeves and Gordon Scott, all the muscle men of that time. Those were the films he was making back in the day and this was also the beginning of what people now refer to as the spaghetti westerns. You know, these really different and edgier westerns, many which were populated by American stars or American names from television. I was on every one of dad’s sets over the years and I was extremely lucky to have been a part of that. One thing I remember was we were all in Spain making a movie that my dad was producing called, A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die and it stared Robert Ryan and Joseph Cotton. These were older American actors, who had bigger successes when they were younger, but they had name value and you really needed that for these movies. So, we had that crew working for us and just outside of Madrid, at a hotel, there was another film crew. It was an all Italian film crew that was making a western that was a lot smaller than ours with this young, almost completely unknown actor who’d only been on American television. That crew turned out to be Sergio Leone’s and they were filming a movie called, A Fistful of Dollars. I remember that the vibes were one that we were the bigger, more expensive American film. It was still a European co-production, but we had three or four of these well-known names attached and then there was this strange, little Italian dude making whatever little Italian western that seemed pretty funny and silly with Clint Eastwood; which nobody was really familiar with. But, the rest is, of course, history. A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die, actually did do quite well and was well acknowledged at the time, but A Fistful of Dollars became an institution.

Another time, I think it was around 1978. I was probably three or four films into my career. I was lucky enough, at the time, to be working with some amazing talent who were young and just starting off, like myself. My first movie was a strange little horror film called, Mansion of the Doomed. It starred Lance Henriksen, Gloria Graham and a few others that were kind of well known at the time. I believe that one was Lance’s first movie. My director of photography was Andrew Davis, who became a big Hollywood director that made pictures like The Fugitive. My effects guy was Stan Winston who went on to win, I think, five academy awards. My editor, who used a pseudonym, was John Carpenter and he actually edited a few of my films. It was one of those great moments in time. A couple of years later, I was making a movie on location in the suburbs of The Hollywood Hills, a picture called Tourist Trap with Chuck Connors. I was sharing the same distributor as John known as Compass. John was making a film called The Babysitter Murders. We were literally a block apart on one of these little tree shaded Hollywood streets. I’m making the bigger movie because I had the big star. I think my budget was four hundred dollars and I had Chuck Connors. John was making The Babysitter Murders with a bunch of unknown actors. One day, John and I decided we should visit each other’s sets. He walked over to mine and met Chuck. Then I went over to his and saw his stedicam whipping around the house for some of the shots for what would later become known as Halloween. Once again, Tourist Trap has its little niche in the beginning because it is kind of a cool little film, but Halloween became…HALLOWEEN. So, there’s a little repeat of history in there somewhere.

BL: You’ve always been independent and done everything yourself, how do you feel about conducting business with major studios?

CB: It’s another business altogether. Big pictures are made by committee and, of course, if you are Steven Spielberg you’re really, really having a great time. You truly would have the final word about your film. Few people have that control when it comes to the big studios. I have a lot of friends who are making mainstream films and occasionally I’ll visit the set. We’ll hang out and I’ll hear the good, the bad and the ugly. The good is when a big project is finally rolling, there’s no end of money. It still doesn’t change the fact that if the script sucks, you’ve got nothing. There are some key elements that aren’t even tied to budget because the same hundred sheets of paper can be the two million dollar script or the two hundred dollar script. It’s the talent involved in the case of something like a screenplay. But, once you get on set, money buys you days, technology and there is something cool about that. It’s certainly not an even playing field when it comes to comparing my little shows to big studio films, but they all do wind up on the video store shelves at some point. I’m really proud of my most recent picture. It’s a movie called Dangerous Worry Dolls, which was made for well under two hundred thousand dollars. You can look at any horror film put out by a major studio and figure they spent between twenty and fifty million dollars to get it made. I’m happy to do what I’m doing, this is my world and I’ve never looked over there and thought, “Oh, wouldn’t it be nice to go with big studios.” I don’t necessarily have the tools or the money. There’s a lot of things I don’t have actually, but we have a ton of freedom and we really don’t have to answer to anyone. We’re still kind of victims of market conditions. To wake up and be independent to make certain kinds of film, to actually get those films made and get them out there within four or five months that’s the greatest part of being so independent and having our own little distribution channel. You know, sometimes you may think to yourself, “Gosh, I’m shooting this movie in seven days. It would be great to have three more days.” You realize that the big films sometimes shoot for half a year; 180 to a 200-day schedule. So, really it’s apples and oranges, but I’m happy to have been this independent for this long and I think the world, finallyB after some very difficult yearsB is spinning towards the ability to make edgier content and get it out there through a delivery system that isn’t fully stacked in the favor of the major studios. Today, DVD distribution is next to impossible because your fifteen hundred thousand dollar movie that played theatrically is just not getting on the stores shelves and there aren’t any tiny, little stores left anymore that will carry the independent products. The next frontier is digital distribution. I thought it was very significant that around two weeks ago for the first time in around ten or fifteen years, Wal-Mart lost their position as the biggest retailer of music to I-Tunes. I-Tunes is in its infancy. It’s the tip of an iceberg that didn’t even exist a few years ago and it has now generated more money, I don’t know what the quarter was for the year with the exact time line, but they past Wal-Mart in terms of Wal-Mart selling hard goods. So, that bodes real well for people like me down the line. It may take a few more years, but the idea of putting up a library of my films on something similar to I-Tunes one day soon and if enough people are there for downloading or renting films; I see it as a very good thing.

BL: How about distributing films that are only available as direct Internet content?

CB: If there is still life left in DVD it still makes sense because you still have places like Blockbuster buying them and putting your titles on their shelves. It’s not so much as the exclusion of DVD, but I see it as just being another delivery system. The world used to be really easy when I started off. You made some prints and you tried to get them onto the B-side of a double bill. Hopefully, we’d make a profit and the only other revenue, back in the day, was maybe a little television syndication. That was it; there was no other way to make a penny. This was before home video even. Today, it is just so fragmented. You’d think that it would be very profitable, like the heyday, but most of these systems you just can’t get into for all sorts of reasons. Hopefully, that’s all going to change. I think the Internet and all the various forms of digital delivery will be just another great way to get your product out there. Theoretically, if it becomes as easy and as widely accepted as I-Tunes is becoming, then it’s going to be easy for anyone to take advantage of that outlet. If somebody sees one of my movies and feels that film was enjoyable, they can go on a website like IMDB and discover I’ve done over 270 movies, but it’s really, really hard to find some of those films. If it’s easy to find all of them and the next step is something like I-Tunes, that, I think, makes the prospect simply amazing. Again, the world has got to catch up with this concept. I’m in the business and I don’t watch any movies on I-Tunes. I’ll download music. I will do that. If I want to see a movie, I’ll go find a DVD. So, I’m not even in that habit, but there are people who are watching them on their cell phones or computer screens. There is a real business being done that way. It may take several more years, but there will be a point where it’s so easy to avoid driving down to your local video store. If it becomes unbelievably easy for anyone to pop into a universe of title lists, push a button and then ten minutes later they can either burn a DVD or it’s on their hard drive…that makes since to me.

BL: How about filming on digital video? Do you enjoy that outlook?

CB: I think it’s okay. I’m a film guy and I only recently started filming my movies on Hi-Def. That decision was made only because I’m lucky enough to have a director of photography who does such a great job of making it look like it was shot on film. It’s a bit of a sleight of hand trick. We are in this world now and I mean, I was a real die hard for film. You know, up until about four movies ago, I shot everything on film. But, money was wasted and then you wind up with this entire film negative that never gets used or serves another purpose. It just sits somewhere and you have to spend money to store it. We are so in a digital world that it just doesn’t make much sense anymore, in a way. I wouldn’t have gone over to the other side if not for the fact that at the last two road shows, I had people still thinking I was shooting on film because the technology is pretty good, but also it’s the talent involved. It’s having a director of photography who really knows how to paint a picture and make it still look like you’ve shot the movie using film.

BL: Which of your films was the biggest financial success for you?

CB: The biggest financial hit for me was a movie called Ghoulies and part of that success was because everything was kind of lined up just perfect at the time. That was released back when we were still taking movies out theatrically. It was a real hit. It didn’t do a gazillion dollars for us, but it was singularly the most successful in terms of returns on investments. Now, the most successful series for me has been The Puppet Master series, by far. We haven’t even scratched the surface with that series because we are now in discussions with people who want to fund a big, grown-up theatrical movie. Which, I haven’t done in years and I felt like Puppet Master was the perfect franchise to make into a theatrical feature. I’m planning to do it in 3-D.

BL: What can you tell me about your latest project, Dangerous Worry Dolls?

CB: We are going to have like six releases this year and that’s the most current one. I have been a fan of the better, well-made women in prison movies and none of those have been made in awhile, so I decided to mix that genre with a visceral, edgy horror film. If you go to the site www.fullmoondirect.com , there’s a trailer up and you have to scroll down a bit to view it. I’m also very happy with the way the trailer turned out, as well. It’s kind of hard to describe that film, except that if you know what a worry doll is, a lot of people do and a lot of people don’t. They come from Guatemala and they’re pretty widely known throughout most of the country. They are these little half-inch tall dolls that usually come in this small, little wooden box. They’re different characters, usually a man, woman, child and sometimes a dwarf. The legend goes that you put these dolls under your pillow at night and they make all your worries go away. So, I thought, what a cool idea to take that and turn that one around and create something kind of crazy. I think it’s an example of a very small movie that was shot in seven days on a very modest budget. It just shows that you can do some quality work with great talent and very little money. I like that fact. I’m very excited about it and the road show. I’m sort of becoming like the Barnum and Bailey of horror, I guess.

Stop by www.fullmoondirect.com and www.fullmoonroadshow.com for all your need to know information on Charles Band’s films and his 3rd Annual Road Show.