"That's Italian." "You can go pump or auto." "The .45" "Long Slide with Lazer sighting." "These are brand new, we just got them in." "That's a good gun." "Just touch the trigger, the beam comes on..." "Yeah, I remember after shooting this scene thinking, that guy is good." "He outta run for Governor." "Schwarzenegger?" "What Schwarzenegger?" "Me!" "Friend of mine was working for Roger Corman." "And he had to go drop something off and I said "Can I go with ya?"" "Dick Miller was an essential part of those early Corman films, he's in quite a number of them." "You got a thought, or do you want to sit there and play with your blocks?" "I'll play with your blocks, give him this." "Sometimes he has a small part, sometimes one of the leads." "Bucket of Blood was probably Dick's best role, he played Walter Paisley." "Oh Walter, I want to be with you." "Let's call the character Walter!" " Yo, Walter!" " Hey, Walter, its your wife." "It's just one of those things, it sort of got attached to him." "Walter Paisley is born!" "But you did shoot with naked ladies." "No, I don't remember naked ladies." "Dick did his share of gangsters and he did policemen." "You know, working stiff parts." "I don't know an actor who has been in the business as long as Dick has been in the business who isn't hiding a million wounds." "Dick came out here as a writer and that's what he wanted to do." "Our childhood was probably like everybody else's." "Who knows, you know, you hear stories, you don't hear stories." "I've been mistaken for him several times and I always thought I was better lookin' than him." "Sorry, pal, you're over the limit on this card." "He's that guy." "He's the guy that when you're watching a movie and you see him you say" ""There's that guy!" "He's in everything."" "He's like the Washington Monument of actors." "You can't turn on the TV or go to the movies without seeing this man's career spill out before you." "Listen, punk, I've handled jaywalkers who were tougher than you." "I do hope you'll write my book." "I grew up with Dick Miller." "I mean I really did." " Ever flub a line?" " No." "I take Master Charge, American" "Express..." "I blew the fuckin line!" "Yeah, maybe once or twice." "Dick Miller is the quintessential character actor." "Lets get outta here." "I hate cul de sacs." "There's only one way out and the people are weird." "He's in every Joe Dante movie, isn't he?" "What was he in "Innerspace"?" "Would you shut up, get back in your cab!" "I never thought of being a filmmaker, I was going to be a cartoonist," "I was just a film fan." "But then when finally I got a chance to make a movie" "I couldn't do it without Dick Miller." "I had to have Dick Miller in it." "Joe seems to adore Dick, they seem to get along fantastically." "What's so great about Dick is, it's the fact that he's so Dick Miller." "He's so himself." "Completely, 100 percent, undiluted pure Dick Miller." "He's so completely authentic." "You're never going to steal a scene from him." "Because how can you steal a scene from somebody who's so real?" "You're never going to steal a scene from reality." " No, that's what I said." " No that's what I said." " No, I said forget it." " I forgot about it already." "We're in New York because Dick is doing a film." "I'm so excited." "Back in New York, this is my stomping ground," "I started out here - a Bronx boy." "I haven't been here in a couple of years." "It's nice." "This one is with Abe Vigoda and its called "Cutaways"." "I've never worked with him before." "He's a nice, quite old gentleman." "My friends are still amazed and the people that I work with that my brother's an actor and he's been in so many films and he's such a well known face." "You look at him and you say:" ""I know that guy."" "But he made so many films, someone once told me he made about 300 which is an awful lot." "Can we have the check?" "It's on the house." " Really?" " Sure, what the hell." "Different rules apply when it gets this late, it's like after hours." "I love having him around." "I just love working with him." "Cause Dick's got a New York accent." "You feel at home." "Dick is a dyed in the wool kind of New Yorker, he's a super authentic guy, he's a no bullshit guy." "This is my first professional picture." ""Sorority Girl"." "Featuring Dick Miller." "Here's some more junk." "This is from "Gremlins"." "This is a Walter Paisley sign." "I've got Walter Paisley signs all over the house." " "The Undead"." " You played a leper in that movie, right?" "Yeah, he cleared up my skin nice." "This is "War of the Satellites"." ""Rock All Night"." "How many movies did you do for Roger, do you remember?" "I've been associated with him in about 49." "49 pictures." "That's he's either directed or produced, or something or the other." "The first film Dick and I worked on together was "Apache Woman"." "A two week western." "It was my third or fourth picture." "I was just learning how to be a director." "I was five when he made his first movie" ""Apache Woman" where he plays Tall Tree." "I would've made a great Apache Chief I." "Wouldn't I have, Tall Tree?" "Good Chief." "You Chief now" "And I think really that's the secret to his longevity in the film industry is his height." "Because there's always room for somebody who is that small." "You'll have to ask Dick about his secret." "I have no idea what his secret is." "I was playing an Indian in my first picture, and I felt good about it." "He says:" ""When you finish your work here, how would you like to play a Homesteader for me?"" "I said: "Yeah, sure." "When does that start?"" "He says: "Tomorrow! "." "So I played a Cowboy and an Indian in my first movie." "I think, part of the success of Corman, was that everything was well planned in advance." "Roger Corman was a well-educated young man who sort of stumbled into the movie business." "Corman was his own director and producer and he knew how to make these films, quickly and efficiently and had no pre-tense about them being great art." "Won't know when they're laying that track for two weeks yet." " We're all waiting for that big letter." " Yeah, and I'm waiting to carry it." "Roger was on a Western kick then." "I played cowboys for him, I played a Pony Express rider for him." "I was making a buck." "Dick came out as an actor from New York and started getting cast in all those movies and became this presence." "Frankly, at the time of those movies, I wasn't aware of Dick." "But looking at it in retrospect, he's the thread that you see throughout those movies." "He's like the everyman." "Jonathan Haze, by the way, is the one who introduced me to Roger the first time." " What do you do, kid?" " I'm here to keep Mr. Johnson healthy." "I don't even think we had each other's phone numbers." " No, who had telephones?" " Right." " How about I go rustle some cows?" " Ah, don't be stupid." " Who s stupid?" " You!" "Whose got any cows out here?" "Alright, I'll go rustle some chickens." "That was all pretty much ad-Iibed." "But it was the first time that Dick and I got to work together as a comedy team." " It's not here?" " Si, way back in there." "It's too big for this little squad, I think." "And it gave Roger some ideas about us playing comedy that paid off later on with "Bucket of Blood" and "Little Shop of Horrors"." "Jonathan Haze, Dick calls him Jackie." "But, he's Jonathan Haze." "They've been together as friends since New York." "They're known each other longer than Dick knows me." "When Jonathan Haze said he was going to introduce me to Roger," "I thought, I'm gonna sell him some Science Fiction if I could." "Didn't happen." "Roger at that time, he said: "What do you do?"" "I said I'm a writer." "He said: "We don't need writers, we need actors." I said: "I'm an actor!"" "The State Theater in Boonton, New Jersey." "That's where I saw my first Dick Miller movie which was "Not of this Earth"." "Mornin'." "I represent the Air Wave Vacuum Cleaning Company." " You the gentlemen of the house?" " This is my house." "Crazy." "I'd like to show you the product." "I didn't know Dick, because I hadn't seen any of his other movies." "But the vacuum cleaner salesman definitely made an impression on me so that when I saw him again, in another AIP picture," ""Oh, that's the guy!" "That's the vacuum cleaner guy."" "I know that better than you do, sergeant." "How well are you doing?" "Half my men are dead." "Nothing can stop that thing." "In "Not of this Earth" Dick plays a door-to-door salesman." "This, as they say in the vernacular, is the darling of the vacuum cleaning world." "And it was really one of the high-points, if not THE high-point of the picture." "It's a vacuum cleaner." "You purchase, you don't wanna purchase." "You wanna purchase, you purchase." "I don't want ya to purchase, mister." "I just wanna give you a free demonstration." "You wanna purchase, you purchase." "You don't wanna purchase, you don't purchase." "I ain't gonna force you to purchase." "It was a well-written scene, but Dick re-wrote it just slightly, just changed a little bit of the dialoge." "Crazy." "I said: "Wait a second." "Among my many occupations," "I was also a door-to-door salesman."" "I said: "And I didn't have a spiel, I just spoke naturally."" "It's a very simple operation." "You know, when people try to do homages to these B-movies, they do it sometimes with a wink." "The actors who worked for Corman, never did that." "There's no condescending to the material." "Its done with conviction." "I must have met a thousand cops and everyone of them is stupid!" "Tangling with punks like you for the kind of money they draw, maybe they are." "Got a picture here, it's called "Rock All Night"." "I said: "What do I do in it?" He said: "You're the lead."" "In "Rock All Night", Dick played what we used to refer to as The Little Guy." "Let go of me, you big ape!" "You know Dick is a very real guy." "He doesn't cut you any slack." "Fill it, will ya?" "And he's got that kinda New York attitude, in his performances." "Say somethin' nice or I'm gonna bounce you right off that wall." " Now start talkin!" " I'm talkin; you listenin'?" "What he was, was the underdog who rises to the occasion and conquers." "Roger started his career." "All of the people who grew up in the Corman camp, wouldn't be using Dick if Dick hadn't been an actor for Roger Corman." "I grew up in New Jersey and was a big fan of Roger Corman's." "I went to see "Attack of the Crab Monsters"" "and "Not of this Earth" when I was eight years old and I don't think I've ever been as scared since." "He was able to get the money to make those little movies." "I guess little by little he got better at it." "People liked them." "Which surprised the hell out of me." "But in High School I learned to appreciate Dick Miller." "I learned to appreciate how he could bring life to even the smallest of roles." " We don't have that much time, Dave." " We've got plenty of time," " they're just calling for Rocket 1." " I'm going on Rocket 1." "Dick Miller's first ten feature film acting jobs were all for Roger." "Dick is top billed in "War of the Satellites"" "and he tries hard to suppress his Bronx accent and is pretty successful with it." "Is it fantastic that there's an intelligent life out there that stops at nothing to keep us quarantined on our own planet?" "Is the Sigma Barrier fantastic?" "But he plays it more like a leading man, then the character actor that he is." "And manages, I think quite convinsingly, to play against his blue collar persona and portray a scientist." "It's harder then anything we have yet been able to devise." "And it has a fantastic thermal resistance." "Well, I didn't know that." "I think the first movie I saw, was "War of the Satellites"." "I remember years after that my brother Gene said:" ""You know, where did Dick learn all those big words?"" "Have the gentlemen here ask themselves why these aliens are so concerned that we do not penetrate the Sigma Barrier?" "If Lenny Bruce could've acted, he would've been Dick Miller." "Especially the young Dick Miller, cause Dick had this kind of hipster quality about him." " Hello?" " Hello, Sybill?" "This is Dave." "One of my absolute favorite moments in the Dick Miller filmography is in "War of the Satellites", where he plays this absolute hipster scientist." "They never identify him as a hipster, but you know he's off boppin' at night, smokin' reefer." "And there's one moment when he comes in to see Richard Devon." " Can I ask you a question, personally?" " Certainly." "Dick sits down and does this little thing with his head that he sometimes does." "Which is the exact same thing that Lenny Bruce used to do in his act." "That's the coolest guy in movies, guys!" "So that's why when he gets to play Walter Paisley people use that as a reference to who Dick Miller is." "That's not Dick Miller at all." "For a while I was writing in New York." "So I came out here with a bunch of stories." "Science Fiction things." "I knew he was writing, but I really thought that what was going to happen in the end would be his acting, because he's gone to a theatrical school and he seemed to have a lot of talent." "But I knew he'd been writing, but I didn't know if he was successful with that or not." "I got out of the service, so I went to an upholstery school." "I went there and filled out all of the papers, but there wasn't any night classes anymore, just the clay classes, start at 8 o'clock in the morning." "I said: "That's no good, I don't go to sleep until 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning."" "Right next to the New York School of Upholstery, was the New York Theatre School of Dramatic Arts." "I called them up and asked "What time do your classes start?"" "He was on his own at a young age." "He always learned to rely on himself and I think that's good." "I really didn't know much about acting." "I didn't care to be an actor." "I had fooled around a little, played drums, sang a little." "So maybe the formative years and the separation from the parents, had more of an affect on him than, psychologically, he wants to admit." "My mother." "She was an opera star." "She was soprano and very good." "And we were raised really on that type of music." "But she was very talented, quite talented." "I was about 8 or 9 years old, I guess." "I came home to just one of the usual arguments." "Of course my mother and father divorved." "I think all of his interest in show business stemmed from his mother." "My mother was prepared to give up everything." "He just couldn't understand why she wanted to sing and wanted to be happy." "It had a big affect upon Dick and I think Dick, over all felt, my father wasn't fair to his mother." "I didn't know why the got divorced." "My father was living someplace else, and that was it." "So he went out to California sort of alone." "You know Gene was going his own way and we had a large family in California and they took care of him to a large extent, but mostly he took care of himself." "I was busy living life." "And I came out to California and unfortunately my mom died before she could see any of my films." "I will talk to you of art." "For there is nothing else to talk about." "For there is nothing else." "Life is an obscure hobo, bumming a ride on the omnibus of art." "Burn gas buggies and whip your sour cream of circumstance." "And hope." "And go ahead and sleep your bloody heads ofif." "When you talk about quintessential Dick Miller roles, the common agreement is that its Walter Paisley in "Bucket of Blood"." " Yes man, yes!" " Hi." "The image we have of Dick Miller was created in "Bucket of Blood"." ""Bucket of Blood" I think is maybe my favorite Roger Corman movie." "Hey, that?" "a pretty far out name for a statue." "I saw a statue once it was called" ""The Third Time Phyllis Saw Me She Exploded"." "It's a role where he does play kind of an idiot, even though he's kind of good natured." "You alright, Franky?" "Dick is in no sense like that character in life." "He was much more like the character in "Rock All Night"." "Thought you believed that life was an obscure hobo, bumming a ride..." "I do believe in that, Walter, but I also believe in creative living." "He could play a comedy role and bring a depth to it, and a seriousness to it, that gave it an added dimension." "The artist is, all others are not." "That's most intriguing." "Are you an painter?" "His ambition is to be an artist." " What's it called?" " Dead Cat." "He takes the cat and he covers it with plaster and he shows it to people and they think it's a great sculpture." " Man, you are in!" " Oh, Walter..." "Then he has to do more and he kills a man." "So there's interesting levels of one killing for the sake of beauty and is that the right thing to do, is that fraudulent, is it not art?" "Yeah, you're a real artist now." "I think people do relate to Walter Paisley." "We've all been through that;" "trying to break in, trying to get started." "A canvas is a canvas or a painting." "A rock is a rock or a statue." "Like in all other parts of life and in social settings, there's a hierarchy." "People respond to hierarchy, whether its professional sports and you're the quarterback or in the this case, you're the poet or the artist who is the center of beatnik life in the coffee shop." "Bring me an Espresso, Walter." "Walter is on the fringe." "He's got no artistic talent, he's got nothing going for him and he can't get girls which is kind of a big motivating factor for him." "Crazy, what did he say?" " Didn't you hear him?" " No man, I'm too far out." ""Bucket of Blood" is a whoot." "It sort of takes, what would be a generic, drive-in picture and all of a sudden gives it an odd spin." "It's really a sophisticated, brilliant little satire for a low-budget, quickie, B-movie." "For some reason, Chuck Griffith's writing which could be very dark and funny at the same time, was the perfect match for Dick." "Chuck Griffith and I went out and had dinner and I said to Chuck:" ""Let's spend the night going from beatnik house, to beatnik coffee house and we will put together and outline from which you'll do the treatment."" "I don't want you to do anymore statues." "Do you understand?" " No more statues." " Why not?" "If you do the lead in the picture, you do the lead in the picture." "They're all pretty much the same." "But that's the one I like the best." "It really is I think his best performance and he's been known for it in sort of a cult way." "Watch, you little" " Did you call me Mr. Mushnik?" " No!" "I was calling John D. Rockefeller for to make a loan on my Rolls Royce!" "Oh, I'll tell you something." "But it's the first time I really saw Dick." "He was in a movie called "Bucket of Blood"." "And I knew Antony Carbone who was in it, we went to school together." "So naturally I went to see the movie and Dick was the star." "So, that's how I felt on the set." "Look, here I got a new customer." "When Dick stepped on the set, you just know that he's somebody special." " What can I do for you, sir?" " My name is Burston Fouch." "Excellent, I'm Gravis Mushnik." " Oh, that's a good one." " Whose gonna get my roses?" ""Little Shop of Horrors" went so fast nobody had time to have small talk really, cause you're running from scene to scene." "It was a two-day movie." "Feed me!" "We had to shoot it fast." "And a lot of times we would just have to ad lib because we'd lose ourselves, we didn't know where we were." ""Little Shop of Horrors" was the next picture after "Bucket of Blood"." "By the time Roger was getting ready to do "Little Shop of Horrors"," "I'd heard that he had Chuck Griffith writing a comedy for Dick Miller." "Now came "Little Shop of Horrors"." "I said: "What is this?" "This is the same character."" "Dick read it and decided that he didn't want to do it because it was similar to "Bucket of Blood"." "In those clays, there weren't any sequels." "I resented doing the part." "I said: "I don't wanna do this." "Give it to Jonathan Haze."" "I said: "Well, I'll do anything in it to be working."" " Are you crazy?" " You, you!" " Who, Who?" "So I felt that it was a good payback time by giving him a lead in this picture." "Dick was in scenes with me, cause I worked in the Flower Shop and he came in and ate the flowers." "Of course, what else?" "I said "Get me clean flowers."" "I think he got them from a funeral house or something, cause they tasted terrible." "You didn't mean it." "I did have to a certain extent a stock company, as much as you can." "Dick was one of my favorite actors." "I always thought he was a brilliant actor." "One of his best friends, Jonathan Haze, was among them as well." "Well, I mean I've heard that story." "All about stock companies and the Corman Acting School and all that stuff." "There wasn't any kind of any of that." "There was no stock company, there was no unified group of actors that were his group." "If you worked for him and he liked you, he'd use you again." "Except for Jackie and Jack Nicholson, we'd all worked together before." "Is this Doctor Forbes office?" "Dick's performance in "Bucket of Blood", was every bit as good as Jack Nicholson's in "Little Shop of Horrors"." "Oh my God, don't stop now!" "Hollywood is not based on talent, it's not based on anything other than being in the right place at the right time and having within you whatever that is that somebody wants." "It's all a matter of luck." ""Little Shop of Horrors" is interesting because, originally Roger wanted" "Dick to play the lead character and he felt, I've already done that, let Jonathan play it, give me something else to do." "In a way it seemed like a missed opportunity but maybe it sort of, in some peculiar way, confirmed his decision that being the star of the movie isn't necessarily always the best thing to be." "There wasn't a large pool of actors that were ready to work for Roger Corman." "He worked like lightening." "The only reason Roger did a second take, was if the camera fell over." "He did his best work in casting his pictures." "I think that when a newcomer coming along, did a good job for him, he'd say: "Lets use him again."" "In the name of the government of France" "I order you to open this door!" "You'll pardon young sir, I was up by devotion." "I did not hear you." "I'm sorry, sir." "But surely I made enough noise to awaken the dead." "I don't know what Jack really wanted to do at the beginning." " Yes, Baron?" " Cognac, for our guest." "Yes, Baron." "He was ill-suited for the part." "Right after that he did some other pictures he was marvelous in." "The legend goes that Roger wrapped "The Raven" three days early." "So he still had Karloff under contract and the sets were still standing." "So he just decided to shoot another movie right then and there." "Even as a kid I had no clue what that movie was about." "He really didn't have a script, so they would just scribble down a bunch of stuff." "You know, Roger would Boris walk across the room;" "change his jacket and walk back." "Karloff just walks through this movie in smoking jackets." ""Where do you want me, Roger?" "Three days is much, too much time."" "None of this was cutting together." "When Karloff did "The Terror"he said:" ""I never want to hear that man's name again."" "And I always thought that was funny because Vincent Price said:" ""I hear it all the time and don't have a problem with it, but Boris was kind of cranky."" "Plus he had guys like Monte Hellman and Francis Coppola and Jack Hill out shooting second unit stuff." "Allow me to show you something." "Well, one of the problems with the movie also was that, for a horror movie it didn't really have the kind of scenes you really want for a horror movie." "So I added in a scene where the Jonathan Haze character is up on top of a cliff." "Somehow I got the role of a deaf mute!" "This falcon comes down out of the sky, flies into his face and tears his eyes out." "So Jack Nicholson grabs Dick." ""Alright!" "Tell me everything that's going on around here!"" "The Baron did return that night to find Eric with the Baroness and he did kill her." "And then Dick spends the next minute and a half or so, literally summarizing the entire plot up to that point, including things he could not possibly have known!" "But it got the audience up to speed and made the picture half-way sensible." "I like that picture." "I liked wearing all the weird costumes and being crazy." "And it was good working with Boris Karloff who was an old hero of mine." "My thrill of a lifetime, was working with Boris Karloff." "I think Karloff, Gable and Cagney were the three big giants that I met in this business." "The actors today, they're nice guys, but they're not giants." "As much film history as he's seen." "And given where he started with Jack Nicholson and that whole gang." "You would expect to see some bitterness or something in him, that a lot of the people around him went on to make it big." "And Dick is still playing the smaller roles." "Write your thoughts down here and he will read them to you." "Just by pressing them against his forehead." "Anything you want to write, anything at all." "How about my mother-in-laws will?" "He's a throwback to the studio system actors, you know?" "I knew about whatever he was doing at the time, but we were so involved in starting our relationship," "I didn't really get involved in knowing about his work." "I saw my husband in "War of the Satellites"." "I was in the movie theater with a fella I was dating." "I made one of those unforgivable, embarrassing, glib remarks at the time." "I said:" ""That guy could put his shoes under my bed, any time."" "When I was sixteen, I runned up in California." "And Dick came a little bit later and started working on his own career." "Then he met Elaine." "And he got outta my house." "Carla..." "I don't wanna make statues anymore." "I wanna get married." "To you." "I came here when I was seventeen-and-a-half." "Another actor introduced me to Dick in Schwab's." "I almost fell flat on my face." "That I was meeting this guy, that I had seen a couple of years earlier in a picture." "I met Dick in May 1959 and we got married the following October." "Five months." "It's a terribly good relationship." "Its shown over the years." "She was in show business at the time." "I'm trying to remember when I met Lainie." "I think I knew Lainie was in "The Graduate", before I met her." "I think Dick had told me, that that was her." "Well, what do you want to know about "The Graduate"?" "I mean I'm not Mike Nichols so I can't answer from his perspective." "He had seen something I did where I played a Voodoo Witch." "He asked his Production Coordinator, who that was and she looked and said:" ""Oh my God, that's my neighbor."" "And the next thing I know, she's knocking on my door saying "Mike Nichols wants you for The Graduate."" "Sit down." "That's how it happened, I asked Dick" ""Do you mind if I play a stripper?"" "It seems that I've gotten known for this itty bitty role I did in "The Graduate"." "Because for its time, I suppose it was rather racy." "But by today's standard, it's just another dancer." "This is a portrait that I did of Dick in 1966." "What inspired you to do it?" "Me!" "Who do you think?" "They love being with each other." "They love bickering with each other, they can have their own radio show." " What do you mean?" " I don't know what it is." "That's what the trouble is for fifty-five years or whatever." " What was our first argument?" " That's what I'm trying to argue about." "Of course I understand that these two would be together." "You didn't like what I made you for dinner." "I wouldn't even call it bickering, it's a sort of..." " Pork chops!" " Pork chops, alright." "No, it wasn't." "It's very funny in a sort of sitcom way." "She's never cooked anything since then." " And you deserve it!" " She has trouble boiling water." "She doesn't know what temperature it boils at." " What temperature does it?" " I don't know." "As all actors can tell you, it's not a gravy train all the way through." "The foibles of being an actor, you just don't get that much work." "The first film I actually worked on, was in fact "The Wild Angels", and that I believe was the first time that I saw Dick Miller." "Hey, what's the matter with you guys?" "You're supposed to work around here." "Cool it, I'm just talking to my buddy." " Yeah?" " Yeah." "What's with the Iron Cross, you one of those dumb angels?" "Their intimacies;" "a rape of decency!" "Defience of authority." "Not trusting people over thirty." "I think Roger responded to that, because even though he didn't hang out in the counter-culture really except for purposes of research." "I think he had some at least instinctive sympathy with the idea of mistrust of authority, which was something that he had very strongly." "Their emblems, those of the defeated." "The despised." "I didn't see it happening." "To me a job was a job." " Cash." "Cash, this is Paul." " How you doing?" "At that particular point, he was more playing the establishment roles and they were playing the anti-establishment roles." "I don't know whether it amused him, I don't know if interested him at all but he definitely wasn't part of of it, I never felt." "Listen, I'll tell you something now." "The pay in those clays was I think 300 or 350 dollars a week." "I remember telling my daughter once, we were talking about money and I said:" ""I got by on fifteen for the year!"" "And she said: "Fifteen thousand dollars is a lot of money."" ""Wait a second, wait a second, fifteen hundred dollars!"" "She said:" ""You made five pictures."" ""That's right."" "There just wasn't any money." "There were a couple of years when so little came into the house from Dick's acting and from me going to school." "I remember in those clays when I first went out to California," "Dick never wanted to leave the house." "I had a lot of agents." "They didn't do a thing for me." "And he wouldn't even wanted to go ten or fifteen minutes away, because he was afraid he'd miss a call." "When I got a call, I got a part." "Tell us Miss Campbell, did you ever dream of being a star in those days?" "I used to dream about getting away from Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire." "I remember, maybe forty years ago, thirty-five years ago he wasn't getting as many parts as he deserved." "Gene was the coroner of Orange County and he got him some interviews." "Dick resisted it in the worst way." "Eventually he said:" ""Alright, I'll go to the interviews."" "And they set up the interviews and Dick just never showed up." "I don't know whether I should laugh at that or not." "Dick is the type of person that does not want to do, what he doesn't want to do." "Not that he didn't do what he didn't want to do, but he knew what he did want to do." "And he wanted to be an actor." "And he didn't care if he was going through a dry spot or he wasn't getting called upon in those days, he was just going to wait it out and do what he wanted to do, cause he knew what was best for himself." "I know and it wasn't easy." "And it never is, I think." "I think the fact that he was liked by producers and directors helped though." "We couldn't afford vacations, the truth is." "The very first time we did anything that resembled a vacation was when he making "The Long Ride Home" and I came" "You've hurt yourself more than once on a picture, doing stunts." "I get hurt." "On "The Long Ride Home"," "I busted my tailbone early in the picture." "Did some very, very fancy riding after that." "Roger had a deal at Columbia and was preparing to shoot a western, with Robert Towne re-writing the script." "This script was not "The Magnificent Seven"." "It soon turned out that there were some very serious people who thought they were doing Shakespeare." "The company broke into two camps." "There were The Union soldiers and The Rebs." "And that's why to this day I'm friends with Dick Miller." "We stayed in town that had as many churches as bars and there were about twenty shootings every weekend." "The experience was, how many things on a movie can be made difficult." "One of the things that may have been a sign early on, every day, there would be memos sent around from Columbia Production Department such things as the equipment that would be sent." "And Roger would study these lists very carefully and he would instruct me sometimes to strike things off." ""Two generators?"" ""I assume if they send a generator to location it's going to work."" "I remember all the suits came out and I said: "Whats going on?" and they said" ""He's getting chewed out up there."" "Roger wanted some freedom." "He didn't want to move thirty pieces of equipment to get the shot he wanted." "It was a new way to make a picture and frankly, I agreed with him." "The Columbia guys were worried that Roger, from his AIP, low budget, exploitation background was going to make a cheap looking movie." ""Don't go up there."" ""You're gonna pass these guys in the suits and they'll remember you."" "And all kinds of panic and I said: "Ah, that is bull."" "And I did pass a guy on the stairs." ""Are you on this picture?" I said: "Yeah, I think so."" "And we had the directorial change, the sudden and abrupt dismissal of Roger Corman." "Which I didn't support then and I still argue to this clay, he was going to make a better picture than we deserved." "He was bent on bringing in the movie on time and on budget, even under budget, and he simply assumed that they would like it if he did that." "He went off and did another picture." "Hello boys, something I can do for you?" "Yeah, you can shut up!" "He didn't miss a beat." "I was writing, I wasn't selling too much." "And at that point, becoming an actor, I just gave up the writing." "Not entirely, but I decided," "I'm concentrating on something else now." "I sold a couple of scripts." "I remember "Which Way to the Front?", with Jerry Lewis." "One of the sore spots of my career." "One of my first movie going experiences was being taken to see a movie called" ""Which Way to the Front?" with Jerry Lewis" "It might be actually Jerry Lewis' last studio picture." "You're right!" "It has a great plot an this really weird execution." "An acquaintance of mine who was an actor, he had worked for Jerry, I guess, and he bought my script." "And little by little I started hearing about it." "The studio bought it and all of a sudden they announced it and it was in the trades, and I saw my name's not on there." "And I took it to the guild and we had a hearing and I got my credit for it." "I love it!" "I love it!" "What they did was, they had a re-write on it and they changed the battle from the Pacific Islands to Germany." "I like to forgive Jerry Lewis only because I find like it's so watchable, even when it's a car crash it's really watchable." "It was funny for a Jerry Lewis picture." "It's a tough business and its full of hopes and dreams and disappointments." "I think Dick has gone through a lot and because of that, I don't think he allows himself to be totally accessible." "He had a couch and a Murphy Bed." "When we got married, we just kept all of that stuff, because I came from Canada, what did I have?" "He had his typewriter." "That was his main possession." "I was just staying alive, making movies." "I think I must have made four or five pictures before I realized I was a movie actor." "I'm still trying to sell scripts, wasn't selling." "He seems to have come out here to be a writer and sort of ignored it completely until for some reason around 1970." "Which he gets two writing credits." "He gets a writing credit on a western called" ""Four Rode Out" with Sue Lyon." "And he does that and the Jerry Lewis movie back-to-back." "Maybe working for Jerry Lewis makes you give it up completely." "It didn't really hit me until the first time that I was invited to Dick and Lainie's house." "And the two things that I discovered there were the photos of Dick with the big lions and the cats and I realized how much they loves animals." "And then there was this art." "That is kind of a strange little face." "What's this?" "Here's an interesting thing." " What have you got?" " It's a thing I made!" "They're all made about fifty years ago, really." " And did you draw a lot?" " I drew constantly." "I drew thousands of pictures." "These are the few that are left." "'The Family of Man'." "They seem sexual." "I believe all my pictures are sexual." "I just like life that way." "If I drew girls, they loved it when I drew them or else it was just strictly from my imagination." "Was there a particular part of the anatomy that you liked drawing?" "Well God, no!" "I guess as I got working as an actor, the need to draw disappeared." "I got a job once, "The Andersonville Trial"" "because I could draw." "Oh God, there." "That was the set." "Hello, I'm George C. Scott." "It's my happy job this evening to give you an improvisational introduction to "The Andersonville Trial"." "A play by Saul Levitt." "I asked George C. Scott, he was the director at the time," "I think it one of the first things he directed." "I asked him: "Were there many lines?" He said: "Not too many at all."" ""You're playing a court reporter."" "And I drew a picture of him, in about 2 seconds flat." "I said: "You mean, like this?" "Oh yeah, that's good."" "I remember when I was a kid." "A guy came over from Disney, to my mother." "Wanted to stick me in pictures." "I didn't know that," "I thought he was going to make me an animator." "I said: "Yeah, I wanna do that!"" "And then: "You're gonna be an actor." I said: "Nah, I don't wanna do that."" "Who knew..." "You want a portrait of yourself?" "He'll make it in Pen and Ink in ten minutes." "Dick and my father had a little bit of an interesting relationship." "If you ask Gene about the early childhood" ""Oh, it was perfectly fine!" It was perfectly fine, so." "He was a nice guy, but very much involved in his own life, his own affairs." "Both Dick and I would see him occasionally and go to lunch with him or something and that was really about it." "When I was about 17, 18 years old." "My father put me on an airplane with him and we were going to California and he said:" ""You're gonna meet some people who are gonna call me dad."" "And I met Dick and Gene." "My father had a drawer in his apartment." "And he had some pictures of Dick in a movie called "Rock All Night"" "where he was on the back of Variety." "And there was pictures of Gene in the Navy." "You know, these guys look so much like my father that even as a young kid, I said:" ""Something weird here." But you know, Brooklyn has its own vibe." "I knew about Bill from the very beginning." "I didn't know that Bill didn't know about me." "Well, I first saw Bill when I got out of the Navy and went home to see my mother and Dick." "And I went up to see my father and Bill was his child, sitting in a high chair." "But Dick will never admit it." "He doesn't have the most positive thoughts about my father." "My father." "Our relationship was, I just didn't see him that much." "Me?" "I was the perpetual bum." "He really didn't have any respect for show business whatsoever, his father." "He was born in Russia in the 1890s and he came during World War I." "I don't know if he was a Socialist, but times were different then." "My father was a fighter, a little bit like Dick, you know?" "My father had a temper and he didn't suffer fools gladly and Dick doesn't suffer fools gladly." "Sometimes when people have a lot in common, there's certain more issues between them." "But God forbid, if Dick thought I was psychoanalysing him, he'd think I was completely crazy." "My father I know was very proud of Dick." "He really was very proud of Dick." "You know, if Dick came from the perfect family," "I don't know, maybe he would have been an accountant." "Though that's hard to believe, right?" "When Roger started New World Pictures, he sort of updated the exploitation formula that he first worked with at AIP in the 50s." "And this is now the 70s." "So now things were a little grittier, the screen was a little freer." "The marvel of all this is that, the young guys that Roger hired, they all were fans of the early Corman films." "They'd grown up on those films and now they were working for him." "Dick Miller had somehow fallen out of the Corman Universe." "He hadn't been in a Corman picture for about four years and he'd never been in a New World picture." "I think it was because Roger had stopped directing and so he wasn't casting." "I thought it was really wonderful, that the new young directors who came in recognized the guys who had been working with me and they continued working with them and Dick was probably the most important." "I first became very clearly aware of Dick Miller as a presence when I started making films with New World." "In fact I used to read a treatment or a script and say:" ""Wait, where's the Dick Miller part?"" "You know Dick is sort of a laid back guy in the sense that he never went out to seek work." "It either came to him or he didn't get work." "I went to film school with Jon, at NYU." "And I knew of Joe because Joe and Jon were very good friends." "Jon and I not only went to film school together, but we worked at a Rock n Roll theater together, along with Jonathan Kaplan." "And when Jonathan and Jon came out to L.A. to work for Roger Corman," "I came out eventually and lived in their houses for free and slept in their garage and all that kind of stuff you did when you were broke." "Jonathan cast Dick in, I guess it was "Night Call Nurses"." "Come and spend the night with The Night Call Nurses." "They nurse patients the way no doctor can." "From New World Pictures." "But essentially Jonathan got the first job and brought everyone else along." "When Jonathan Kaplan gave me the chance to write "Night Call Nurses" with Dan Opatashu," "I was thrilled, I mean that was the biggest break of my life." "And I said: "Do me a favor, hire Dick Miller."" ""I'll write him a part for the picture."" "I don't know how smart it is for a young lady to be hitchhiking alone at night." "When Dick walked in the room, it was like: "Oh!" "I know this guy."" "So when he came in to audition, he was a little put off." "I don't audition good." "He said: "I don't audition." "I read terribly." "I'm a terrible reader."" "I didn't know who Jonathan Kaplan was at the time." ""I'm gonna read this and you're gonna say to me when I'm done, that was terrible."" " Good director." " He was right!" "He can't audition." ""But, you got the part anyway."" "Everybody from the Corman camp, they said:" ""If Dick worked for Roger, he can work for us!"" "MY ass!" "Hey Gallager, kiss my jolly!" "Dick Miller became their good luck charm." "He's definitely a good luck charm, they used him in every movie they ever did." "If you're talking about, what I think you're talking about, I ain't gonna talk about it!" "They prayed and hoped that he would, once again, pull them through a crappy movie." "He has a Jimmy Cagney kind of rhythm to his delivery." "He had a gun." "He said he was going to shoot my ear off." "That ain't nice." "Sheriff." "Most good directors, the first thing they do is see what the actors are going to do." "Because they may do something that the director hadn't thought of." " He's dumb enough to get married." " Twice." "Well, you saw the first one." "I think Roger has a genuine affection for Dick, as much as he has an affection for anybody." "Especially, if Dick works for scale." "Then definitely the affection is there." "When I came out to Hollywood," "Jon Davison was the head of publicity for New World Pictures and he had raided the NYU group and brought them out to work for Roger." "And so Allan and I became the trailer department at New World Pictures." "They were just kind of wild men who came up with these crazy ideas." "Flying out of the sky and onto your lap." "They battle the flying feet of kung-fu killers!" "One of the first trailers that we did was for "Big Bad Mama"." "Angie Dickinson is" "Wilma gave her daughters everything." "Dick is in it and I thought, this is a kind of rough and tough gangster picture and Dick's got that kinda voice." "Maybe we should get him to do the narration?" "Working at New World Pictures was a lot of fun." "There was definitely structure, but it was very free wheeling because everybody was quite young and just getting started." "It was a very exciting time." "I met Dick Miller in Griffith Park in 1975." "I got a job from Jonathan Demme, "Crazy Mama"." "It was produced by Julie Corman." "He brought more than his performance which was always wonderful to look at." "I mean Dick Miller arrives in whatever scene." "And he brought a certain presence to the film." ""He's coming tomorrow, he's gonna work tomorrow!"" "And people who weren't even working that day would show up to see Dick Miller." "The main thing is the film." "You know, you're all there to make a good film." "Did you do good, were you articulate?" "Did you tell the story in a good way, is it new, did it extend the tradition?" "Every part counts." "You know, its like poetry, each thing adds up to the whole." "There were very few film schools in those clays, so for us this was our way of really learning our trade." "I realized that these first time directors, it was very important for them to have an actor on the set who was good and who they admired and that they could absolutely rely on." "I found myself not having to direct him a lot." "There was no need to do other takes." "He made the scenes work." "When he walked in, I started smiling." "I mean, here was a guy that I never met before, and yet I felt like I knew him for years." "When I really had more to do with Dick Miller, was when Roger hired him to write the script for "TNT Jackson"." "The thing was a stinker." "I think Roger and I had a slight argument." "Go into meet with Roger." "It just fell apart." ""Dick, this all just dialogue"" ""This is terrible!"" "I'll pay you hard cash for raw heroine any clay at those prices." "And I was supposed to do the lead in it." "When we wrote "dialogue, dialogue!", it was with the understanding that you may not need all of it." "But you may need some." "The re-write was about 90% of the picture." "The reader needs some dialogue sometimes to understand why TNT Jackson is kicking ass." "I don't know, I really literally don't know what happened after that meeting." "Except I know that, of course I did know that the script was re-written." "It was probably re-written on location or so." "He was a brilliant dialogue writer." "Absolutely brilliant, the humor and the timing." "It was that rhythm that he got." "I would call it, it was so working class, ordinary Joe American." "It was perfect!" "Why did you stop writing?" "I don't know." "OK, I have several scripts here." "This is..." ""rock'n'ROll Killer"," ""Help, there's a spy in my bed"," ""Rancho Bikini", "The Assassination"..." "Did you ever think you would go back?" "Yeah, continuously." "But each time I did, something else would come up." "Usually my projects, whatever they were, were always interfered with pictures." "They came first." "I would think that there was more satisfaction and enjoyment to be had, if you were as good an actor as Dick Miller to do that." "Rather than sit and sweat by yourself and have your work torn up by other people." "Paul Bartel is a friend of mine and he made "Death Race 2000" which was a huge hit." "And he did this picture "Cannonball", which was based on a cross-country road race, made for an independent producer named Sam Gelfman and Run Run Shaw." " They're doing it again." " They're in for a surprise." "If they're racing anywhere, they're gonna race to the impound lot." "Get me the Highway Patrol!" "Paul was viciously unhappy." "He thought: "Oh God, I have to work with cars for the rest of my life."" "You're the outlaw racer!" "Geez, it's a real pleasure, Mr. Cannonball, a real pleasure." "Allan and I were pursuaded to appear as actors in the movie." "If Cannonball Buckman wins a Trans-American Grand Prix in our car, we're gonna be two heavy dudes." "Dick had a part as David Carradine's brother." "Hey Bennie, where you been?" "I thought you weren't gonna show up." "Are you kidding me?" "You think I'm gonna miss my kid brothers first big race after he got out?" "Dick is really good in this movie." "It's actually one of the best performances I think he ever gave." "This is important to me." "It's not just the money, my life is on the line." "And I was privileged to look at the dailies." "I was just really impressed with Dick, at how good he was in this part." "And I thought, you know, this guy doesn't get enough big parts." "Joe says to me:" ""You and I did a picture together."" "If you don't start with Roger I don't know where you end up?" "I thought Joe was either a production assistant or a producer, I wasn't quite clear." "And Dick was in that movie as well." "I think we may have met during the screening of it." "I'd say: "Hey, Dick!"" " I don't think he knew who I was frankly." "I think I may have known Allan when I was in New York." "We formed a very close working relationship to the point that we first got a chance to do a movie" "It was the trailer department's movie basically, "Hollywood Boulevard"" "which was made up of sequences from a zillion other pictures that we had done trailers for." "Hollywood Boulevard, the street where starlets are made." "On Monday, Candy came to Hollywood." "On Tuesday, she lost her blouse!" "On Thursday, she massacred three hundred rebel soldiers." "You know, there they were and they were the directors." "And we were told that they were a team and we were told that this was a spoof on a Corman movie." "I don't think they told Corman that." "You fucking fly!" "I kept seeing Dick Miller everywhere." "I saw him in "Big Bad Mama", in all the "Nurses" movies that he was in." "He was just a friend of Roger's who kept getting hired over and over again." "I guess I met him and worked with him on "Hollywood Boulevard"." "I may have met him in passing before that, but "Hollywood Boulevard", where he plays Walter Paisley, that's where I spent time with him." "It's a nudie picture with a two thousand dollar budget." "No script, a ten-hour shooting schedule and it opens in 22 cities at the end of the week." "You want it or don't ya?" "I was signed to do this part." "And the character was named something or the other and the guys said:" ""We change the name to Walter Paisley." I said: "That's the same name!"" "What did you want to talk to me about, Walter?" "I believe Joe Dante said:" ""Yeah, let's use it." "Inside gag."" "And that seemed to be a good idea." "It's not the same character." "People say that's the same character." "No, it's not the same character." "Just the name is the same." "So I think it was out of the Walter Paisley role that most of the affection these young film makers had for Dick Miller came." "You know, and we saw ourselves as giving a leg-up to the Walter Paisley's of the world." "They were so busy doing things that they'd never done before like you know, looking at sunlight, that they didn't pay any attention to me, and Paul and I have a habit of ad-libbing." " Your money or your life." " No, feeling, Mary, your money or your life." " Terrible, Mary." " Your money or your life!" " Magnificent!" "Wonderful!" " Eric, Eric!" "The first time I saw Dick Miller, was when we shot the big party scene which takes place at the end of "Hollywood Boulevard"." "You really handle that tray nice." "Thank you." "Actually, I'm not a waiter, I'm a robot." "I was a production assistant, this was my first legitimate Hollywood feature job." "So I saw Dick Miler in a scene with Robby The Robot." "500 a piece, be reasonable." "Say man, who you tryin' to jive?" "There was a period in the 70s where he was wearing a pink jacket all the time." "So clearly he's bringing his own clothing to the movie." ""It's the guy with the pink jacket!" But I don't know if that would really help." "Hi there." "I'm Joe Littman and welcome to Guess Word." "We had him for a clay." "His wardrobe was a sports jacket, a pink one that I guess he owned." "This is how he showed up." "Number 7, Karen, that's really very good for your first spin." "Hi Joe, ready for the question behind the Magic Hole Board?" "We certainly are." "This has been in about ten pictures." "Ancd there was a wit there." "There was an intrinsic wit." "And probably still is." "That says "Death Before Dishoner."" "Oh, I didn't have "Death Before Dishoner" put on it." "I figured, it's too much to pay." "Those Ramones are peculiar." "They're ugly, ugly, ugly people." " Did you ad-lib your line?" " Yes." "I had a long speech there." "About "Where are they" and something, I forget what it was." "But I looked at these guys and thought they're ugly people." "That's funny." "I'm sure he ad-Iibbed it." "And I was actually there the night they blew up the high school." "And Dick was there of course, and Mary Woronov and everybody." "That's probably the first time I met Dick, actually." "It was like 2:00 in the morning in South Central LA." "They gave me the uniform and said:" ""Leave your jacket off until we're ready to shoot."" "I said, why?" "They said: "You may get killed."" "Whenever there's a part that I can fit Dick in," "I try and find a place for him." "You know, "Piranha" was written by John Sayles and he was stuck in the role of Buck Gardner." "There were two pictures:" ""Rock'n'Roll High School" and "Piranha"." ""Rock'n'Roll High School" was a much more interesting subject I thought, but Allan had been living his whole life waiting to do this picture." "So he got that one and I got "Piranha"." "The fish story." " Excuse me, I'm on the phone." " But the piranhas." "I thought I told you not to even say that word!" " But the piranhas." " What about the Goddamn piranhas?" "They're eating the guests, sir." "And I just remember Dick playing this guy who's trying to run the whole show and the stupid piranhas come and start eating the guests and mess up all his plans." "I met Dick in Austin, Texas, when they were filming the big scene in "Piranha"." "Joe said: "You gotta watch this guy, he's just great."" "Look, I want all incoming calls switched directly to me." "I blew that." "I know it." "It stinks" "He's so fast and he's so furious and he's so delicious." "In a lot of his roles he has something like that, which is basically a straight part in a way." "But he understands the tone of the movie and so it ends up being very funny." "He doesn't have punch lines per se, but it ends up being a funny performance." "Schmuck." "Joe was a great mentor to me." "I noticed that both of us and some of our friends like Jon Davison, Allan Arkush, also loved genre pictures." "And Dick was right there." "Piranhas!" "Jeez." "Dick made the movies that we were watching that were driving us insane with delight." "Actually, all of these kids that came up with Roger Corman, when they grew beyond that and when to the studio level, they gave Dick his third career." "Well, the thing most people don't know, certainly I didn't know when I started, was that there are this many of us and that many jobs." "Everyone one of those jobs is politically given." "You don't have a batting average, you can't walk in and say: "Look I bat three-fifty, put me in the line-up."" "No, no, no." "Somebody who likes you gotta say" ""Dick Miller is the right guy for this one." "Or Bob Forster." "We want him."" "We return now to Divorce Court." "Being sworn in is Jim Breen, testifying on the behalf of Walter Higgins." "Well, Walter and me used to be partners and friends for forty years now." "I think maybe I first became aware of Dick Miller at breakfast" "There was a breakfast place that I went to." "And Dick Miller, if he wasn't working, he was sitting there every single day." "We all met at this place about 10:30 in the morning." "We had a pretty good group of people." "Robert Forster, Dick and I." "Every day, he would eat the same thing." "It would either be a scoop of tuna with chopped up onions on it or egg salad." "Harry was a part of the group." "I know a lot of stories about him, I don't know if he's told any of these stories?" "There was a picture called "White Dog"." "They said Sam Fuller is gonna direct, and I said: "Gee, I'd like to get on that."" "Jon Davison was the producer." "He says: "You go down there, the guy's got a monkey for you."" ""He's your monkey, he's a nice little guy, weighs about thirty pounds."" ""In the event that he starts to bite you..."" "I said: "What?" He says: "No, no, it's not bad."" ""He'll just nibble on you." I ain't gonna work with no monkey that nibbles." "He says: "No, just listen to me, it works." "Bite the monkey."" "Up this road, on the right is the arena." "The monkey starts nibbling on me." "I said: "Stop it!" "Cut that out!" "Don't do that!" "Stop it!"" "The monkey looks up at me like that." "I got it whipped." "Leave it up to me, I know what I'm doing." ""Alright, get ready for the retakes." I said: "What retakes?"" "He says: "Look at you, the monkey peed all over you!"" "We get into it, I changed my clothes by the way." "All of a sudden the monkey is biting on my wrist, he's tearing me up." ""Will you do what I say, just bite the monkey."" ""We're gonna do this scene once more, go change your clothes."" "I said: "What?" "!" The monkey, you should pardon the expression, crapped on me!" "The monkey starts nibbling, the guys in the background going:" ""Bite the monkey!"" "And I bite the monkey on the neck." "We finished the scene, the monkey never laid a hand on me." "I go outside to find Jon Davison." ""You fixed me up good, I got a monkey that pees on me, that craps on me", and he says: "The legend lives."" "So, there's two things I learned about this business." "One:" "The legend which is me, lives." "And two:" "Whenever you think you know something, there's always somebody who knows a little bit more about it than you." "Bite the monkey." "Well, as the years went by and Dick took on this sort of iconic status, his mere presence sort of became self-referential." "And I think probably, the key person responsible for this is Joe Dante who put him in every one of his pictures." "Please, you gonna purchase, purchase." "Now leave 'em alone, you'll get 'em greasy." "The first clay on "The Howling" was when we did Dick's scene in the shop where he has the silver bullets." "And I just thought it was a magical scene." "Your classic werewolf can change shape any time it wants." "Whenever it takes a notion to 'em." "That's why they call 'em shape shifters." "I got a dozen books on it." "I love the book store scene because to me, this is like a packed scene." "How to survive a packed scene, that's a whole other issue." "He's the perfect person to own a store that sells curios and odd ball things, because he doesn't really believe any of it." "But he'll sell anything." "What am I, an idiot?" "I'm making a buck here, you want books, I got books." "I didn't write it specifically for Dick, but in Joe's mind it was a Dick Miller-type guy and I know I can get Dick." "They say he steals every scene." "The Manson people used to hang around here and shoplift." "Bunch of deadbeats." "So I think it's a good thing it was only one scene we had together." "I have no idea how much of the dialog is John Sayles or how much of it is embroidered by Dick." "You just know that no one can pack 3O seconds with as many words as he can." "I take Bank of America, American Express, Visa." "You gonna buy that or what?" "In the early 1980s, Joe Dante was a guy that we really looked up to." "And I think that during the 80s, particularly the Spielberg years where everything was sort of sweet and then Joe came in there particularly with "Gremlins"." "He just really took that archetype and really twisted it." "When I first saw "Gremlins", the movie," "Phoebe and I, I think we were both like "What did we just see?"" "You never know whats gonna hit and whats not, you never know whats gonna be a success in this business and whats not, what will have sustainability and a life after and all that sort of thing." "With "Gremlins", we knew." "All of "Gremlins" for me was madness." "We had a tremendous amount of technical challenges on stuff that I had never clone before." "The puppet part was really, really hard." "It was a nightmare working with these puppets." "Everything about it was insane." "Everything about it was wrong." "Just staring at these puppets, that was the most tedious, boring!" "Vile footage I have ever lived with." "On an hourly basis, I just kept questioning my sanity for taking the project in the first place." "If ever there was a movie that brought the "Wizard of Oz" vibe to a movie, it was "Gremlins"." "It was a Christmas movie." "It had a wicked witch." "Deposit it this to my account." "And there was Dick Miller." "There was someone who anchored the movie in our childhood nostalgia." "WW II" "When we made"Gremlins"," "I didn't know there were any difficulties at all making this." "See that plow?" "Fifteen years old, hasn't given me a days trouble in fifteen years." "You know Why?" "Kentucky Harvester." "I think I was brought in and they just said: "Hello, we'd love to have you in our picture."" "You have the thingy." "Jackie Joseph was my wife in so many things," "I thought I was married to her." "Knowing I was working with Dick," "I think these wonderful producers and director just thought wouldn't it be funny to work with those people from "Little Shop of Horrors"." "Murray, did you hear from the noodle factory?" "Sheila, the noodle factory is not gonna re-open." "I really like The Futtermans." "They're totally believable." "And limited as they are, I understand them." "Are you at all like Murray Futterman?" "No." "Murray Futterman is a man who makes mistakes." "Errors." "I'm perfect." "But he's a guy who's set in his ways." "Well, maybe." "I'm set in some ways." "What?" "See, the dog knows." "The critical reaction was surprisingly good." "I mean, it really put me on the map." "Suddenly I was like this person who made a movie that got pretty good reviews because it was weird and also made a lot of money." "So it was like, OK, put him on that list." "I stayed on that list until my next picture came out." "Then I went off that list." " Look out!" "Behind you!" " It came out of the screen!" "What I see in his films is this quality that I call density." "It's different from a lot of people's work." "One of the things about Joe Dante's movies that's pretty consistent is that his movies are all love letters to movies." "I don't know, somehow he just manages to capture the love of and the fun of these genre movies in a way that nobody else really can." "One of my favorite my favorite Dick Miller scenes in the Joe Dante oeuvre is his scene in "Explorers"." "Look man, I've been having dreams about this lately." "Yes, really." "The weird thing is," "I haven't had dreams like this since I was a kid." "You know, he's the helicopter pilot and when he discovers what the kids have done and you get the sense that this was a childhood dream of his that they have realized." "In all of his movies that center on young characters, there's always a feeling that the movie is also gratifying for an adult looking back and remembering that part of their own life." "No way Wednesday night;" "I'm on a league." "This seminar can change your life, Vic." "The man is a great healer." "And I'm a great bowler." "There was a lot of ad-libbing in "The Burbs"." "Joe would just let the camera keep running and when the actors finished their scripted lines, they would just kind of go." "It had a wonderful cast with Tom Hanks and Carrie Fischer and then the scene with Dick was just hilarious." "What the hell is wrong with these people?" "He has a right to know, Vic." "Don't start up with me!" "It was the type of scene where he could control the situation." "I think Joe Dante gave him a lot of leeway as to how he would go with it." "When I first met Dick, I really didn't know anything about him other than that he was an actor that Joe really loved to work with." "The irony is, for all the movies that we're together, we really only share the screen in "The Burbs" ." "Look, I don't Want to hear any of your bullshit either." "The question here is garbage, and who cleans up this mess!" "I was pretty reckless by that point." "I know that I smoked weed on the set." "I remember being in my trailer and I was friends with Sam Kinison, the comedian." "I'd open the door and there would just be weed bellowing out of it." "He was a smart ass kid." "What else could you do with those whose?" "Shut the fuck up kid, we're trying to do some acting." "I don't have a problem." "I'm good." "I'm fine, what are you talking about?" "It was shot during a writer's strike, so I decided that we would shoot it on the Universal backlot where it would be a little stylized and wouldn't look too real." "And that we could shoot in sequence." "And then if people wanted to improv, that it would be OK because we wouldn't be affecting the ending because we'd be doing it in sequence." "All of you, go to hell!" "It's odd, but that picture got the worst reviews of any picture I ever did." "Yet, I'd go to dentists offices and people would say" ""You made the The Burbs?" "Oh, I love that movie."" "They're playing this thing on Saturday, unless you people stop them." "Ask the people that run this theater." "Ask 'em why they're sailing this town's kids - your kids..." "I think my favorite Dick Miller role, of the movies I've worked on was in "Matinee"." "I'm Lawrence Woolsey, who are you fellas?" "We're from Citizens for Decent Entertainment, Mr. Woolsey." "He was teamed up with John Sayles." "I don't know, you'd have to ask Joe about this." "I think he was thinking that I'm 6 foot 4, and Dick's not." "And they played the two hucksters that have been hired covertly by Lawrence Woolsey to drum up controversy over Woolsey's movies." "Well, this was a movie that was close my heart in that I was the age of the kids in the movie when The Cuban Missile Crisis happened." "And if you weren't there, It's hard to explain to people how tense an atmosphere it was." "I think of all the things that are probably autobiographical for Joe that's the moment." "I can see Joe as a kid, watching these Corman movies, and going home and thumbing through his Famous Monsters of Filmland Magazines and figuring out "Oh wait a minute!" "This guy!"" "It may be, out of all the movies that Dick Miller's been in," "I think that may be the only time he actually played an actor." "I think if you look back at all directors and you look at their filmographies, you see the same actors popping up in all the movies." "And so I did end up with a somewhat" "Preston Sturges-Ingmar Bergman- John Ford-type group of people that appear incessantly in my movies." "Sometimes in smaller parts, sometimes in big parts." "The great thing about Dick is that he comes from this tradition where you can be memorable in one scene in a movie, or you can have the second or third lead." "Either one is OK." "It's always a pleasure to work with someone like that, editorially." "Because you don't have to look for choices to make something work." "He's just right there." "Lobby!" "Don't mess with Murray Futterman." "Many people who know Dick through Roger and who know Dick through Joe, call up and ask if Dick will be in their movies." " Hi, Walt." " Well, well, well," "Detective Ray Cameron, son of a gun." "Is that really you?" "Yeah, it's me alright, Walt." "How's about you?" "Hey, can't complain." "Cannot complain, Raymond." "I never considered anybody else." "I wrote this police armorer character and said, that's gonna be Dick Miller." "Flamethrower?" "Flamethrower!" "?" " Yeah!" " Flamethrower, Jesus." "I think it plays to a general audience, but it helps if you're a movie buff." "Most of the people who really love this movie and revisit it, particularly in the last couple of years, know who he is and instantly see him." "He generally gets a round of applause just for being in the Goddamn thing." "By the way, you gotta watch out for this baby" "Once you light the pilot, it goes out and it plays hard to get like a son of a bitch." "You looking for somethin'?" "Yeah, I wanted to use the phone." "We had a cop car." "We used to go out on weekends with the cop car, pull over crew members who were driving drunk." "Not because Dick wanted to be in character, but just because it was hilarious." "Having someone like that on set who you can ask questions to or they'll just give you a wink and say "try that"." "Because a lot of the time you don't want to let actors tell you how to direct." "Once you open that door, they're all over you with their suggestions." "Could you talk to us about some of the TV episodes that Dick has directed?" "You know, IMDb has it wrong." "He has not directed anything." "There was somebody with the same name who has." "He hasn't directed anything on an official basis, let me just put it that way." " I forgot the name." " It's dusty, Dick!" "You remember him?" " Do I?" " Yes." "I'm lucky I remember who you are." "Dick is a working actor." "That equalizes out to all of the films that you may say here or there are questionable choices." "Oh my God!" "He didn't like the way he died in "Evil Toons"." "He said it was very humiliating." "You clumsy son of a bitch!" "Look what ya did, I outta turn you into scrap metal for this." "Whenever any of these young directors reference nostalgia, they get Dick Miller." "And "Chopping Mall" is no different." "Thank you, have a nice day." "In the past few years we've been doing a few of the conventions." "Do you have fun going to these conventions?" " Sometimes." " Seeing your friends." "What friends?" "It's so funny because you have people coming with kids in strollers:" ""Remember, that's the guy that the Gremlins ran over with the snow plow!" "You wouldn't happen to know of a place around here where I can bed down for the night?" "Well, it just so happens I do." "That's one of my favorite parts, was "Demon Knight"." "I was extremely pleased when he was cast in that movie, because now was an opportunity to work yet with a different group of people." "You know, the character of Uncle Willy..." "I'm trying to figure who can I get to play this?" "Can we get Dick Miller?" "Jeryline," "You wouldn't hurt your old Uncle Willy now wouldya, baby?" "It was a movie that we did of "Tales From the Crypt"." "I think it was the first one that we did?" "We were all worried about it being a feature movie and if it would hold up and Dick was one of our performers." "It did very well." "I found myself in a situation to work with people whose work I grew up with." "Ernest Dickerson was very collaborative." "We worked very closely on the script." "We worked very closely on the casting." "I was next to him every clay, shot by shot." "Get that pussy off the table!" "The great secret it seems to me to the craft of acting, is to work and work with the best people that you can." "It was just a really good ensemble and they felt very much at ease with each other." "Whenever you kill an actor in a movie, you seem to kind of know them a little differently." "Yeah, he was a pain in the neck." "We tried to cut off his head, he wouldn't let us do it." "Oh man!" "So there was a lot of togetherness on the set, it was sort of like every scene involved the whole group running frightened by Billy Zane and company." "You fuckin ho dunk, po dunk, well-them-there mother fuckers!" "Holy shit!" "Hi, Uncle Willy." "Poor Uncle Willy." ""Demon Knight", those ladies, they didn't have any clothes on." "We shot seventeen or eighteen takes on that." "What else could Dick do?" "I mean, really?" "It was kinda like a dairy farm." "You know, he's always been Dick." "I think it is his personality." " Who is that?" " That's my wife." "Lainie!" "Lookin' at your picture!" "No matter what role he plays, who he is always comes out." "I was looking at his old school tats." "I was asking him about it and he talked about how he got them, he was a sailor and he was young." "And he looked at me and he said, really serious, with a twinkle but serious:" ""If I ever find out that you get a tattoo," "I'm gonna fucking kill you!" "Because what's cool at 20, is an embarrassment at 50."" "It is wisdom." "When I met Dick," "I thought I'd get a whole bunch of things from him, but I never really thought about wisdom." "You don't think about wisdom with actors necessarily." "You don't have any ID." "You don't have any money." "You're both dressed like clowns." "You figure it out." "By the time I was running "Deep Space"," "I thought OK, I really wanted something special." "We had this part of this camp guard who could have been played by a thirty-year old, tall muscular guy." "And I thought, no, no, no, this is the part for Dick." "Now sit down, shut up, fill out the forms and if you have any problems, don't come to me with them." "The guy carrying this big-ass futuristic rife, is not maybe your first thought for a Dick Miller role." "But he plays it." "You know, you never question it." "And I wish that more people had cast him in that kind of thing, because he just had chops to do a wider range of parts." "Dick used to go to "Theodore's" for breakfast." "Quentin Tarantino comes in, he told Dick what a fan he was of his and low and behold, the next clay our phone rings at home and they're calling for "Pulp Fiction"." "He played Monster Joe." "Monster Joe was a guy who had a junkyard." "But that's what he did and that whole scene cut out." "Tell you what." "If you ever need it," "I'll dispose of a body part for free." "How about an upgrade?" ""Pulp Fiction" got me a little bugged." "If you make enough pictures, you're gonna hit the stops in the road." "Not that he hadn't been cut out of things before." "In an actor's life, I can't tell you how many times the averages is that somebody is that somebody gets cut out of something that they've shot." "But, this was a big deal for him." "I could take out an ad in the Yellow Pages." "Nah, I gotta run that past my account." ""Cutaways" was a short that is directed by a lady named Agnieszka Kurant." "She is actually an artist and a sculptor." "But she wrote and directed this short about people who were cut out of movies." "Abe Vigoda who was in "The Conversation"." "And Dick, with "Pulp Fiction"." "So, her premise in using these people, is they meet somewhere again in the Netherworld" "and it's really quite interesting." "You know, I didn't know what to expect." "It has been a long time since "Pulp Fiction" came out." "And all of a sudden, when the director yells "Action", all of the years peel off of Dick and there he is again." "That's one of the great about Dick is that he loves, loves being an actor." "If you're lucky enough, and I say this about what I do to a certain extent, but if you can have a job, or do something, that's you're so committed to, that you love so much," "I think that really is the most important thing in life." "There were so many years we would have loved to have a vacation." "We never could put the money together to have a vacation." "We didn't even really have a honeymoon until he went to do "The Long Ride Home"." "And when I showed up, we called that our honeymoon." "Since then, things have changed." "And we've gone to Hawaii a number of times." "He's always so committed to being an actor, he's just so focused on being an actor." "I wouldn't say it's an important part of his life," "I would say being an actor, I guess." "Elaine and being an actor is his whole life." "And I think the two of them have gotten along absolutely famously." "I know that he regards her very highly and I know she loves him," "I don't have any doubts about that." "Because, although I was really not in show business myself," "I worked in the film studios and getting to know some of the people who were there all the time," "I'm proud of the fact that he made it." "Every role is special." "He just looks at each role, that there is nothing else and it doesn't matter if the picture is a big picture, or if the picture is a small picture, whatever it is, and I think that's his secret" "because he gives everything, his all." "I think, one of the words he uses a lot that..." "I understand why he uses it but personally, it's like a little bit of a knife to me." "It goes: "Oh yeah, that was a nice little part."" ""That was a nice little part." That's what he says a lot." "And I hate the 'little' of it, you know?" "Dick did an "ER"." "I don't know if you saw that clip, that's one of his best too." "Mr. Ackerman, can't take you outside to smoke marihuana." "I'm probably not able to inhale anyway." ""Now this thing, they're not gonna cut." "This is gonna be on the air, right?"" "I said: "Yes, it's gonna be." "You're damn right it's gonna be on the air."" ""Because she's in it!" "Yeah, because she's in it"" "If you're on screen for a very short period of time, you don't have a lot of time to establish a character or any quirks, so you work in slightly bolder strokes." "I think that's one of the things that a good day player, a good character does." "No matter what size of the part, they embody the character so much, you feel like when the camera leaves that shop or wherever you encountered that character, the character is still there doing business." "And you could have stayed and that would have been an interesting person to hang around with." "I've always been delighted when guys who started with me move on and I'm proud of what Dick has done." "We love going on cruises and traveling." "We like to see new places." "We like to meet new people." "We really love to meet up again with old friends that we haven't seen for a long time." "We'll go anywhere to dance, especially, if its got good music." "How do you like that?" "Like what?" "Those boating things." "I could do that." "Dick is one of my treasured friends and colleagues." "I would think that my work over the years wouldn't have been quite as much fun, for me or for the people who watch it, if Dick wasn't involved." "That's it, that's the end of the picture." "Unfortunately, I think it's my last one," "I really do, I'm tired." "It's time to retire." " Dick, you got a phone call." " Just a second." "And I've had it." "I don't think I'll do anymore, that's the end of it." "I'm through, really." "Hello?" "Yeah, I'm available."