{"id":1353,"date":"2012-02-09T13:54:26","date_gmt":"2012-02-09T19:54:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=1353"},"modified":"2012-02-09T13:54:26","modified_gmt":"2012-02-09T19:54:26","slug":"john-landis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=1353","title":{"rendered":"John Landis"},"content":{"rendered":"

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It almost seems unnecessary to provide an introduction, or summarize in some way, the career of John Landis. Let\u2019s just say, even if you don\u2019t realize it, you\u2019ve probably seen one of his films\u2014possibly even a few of them. Even my parents know who he is. His most famous films were made in the often overlooked post-movie brat period of American Cinema, the New New Hollywood, and mixed comedy and horror in ways that seem more influential now than their forbearers, who receive most of the credit. Because of their popular success, and their origins in trash comic books and dirty-seat monster movies, the films Landis made never received their proper critical respect.<\/p>\n

There is a genuine, out-in-the-open, love of cinema on display in every frame of his work that is hard to ignore, an infectious buzz behind the camera that makes you think this is a man who could do nothing else but be involved in the movies. It was a thrill to sit down with Landis, a few days before his mini-retrospective at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and talk about his early days on the studio lots, his phenomenal run of successful pictures, and a dirty joke about a critic.<\/p>\n

Craig Hubert Your films are steeped in a classical Hollywood tradition, with a lot of playing around with genres. When did you first become interested in film? What was the first film you saw?<\/p>\n

John Landis I\u2019ve said this so many times. When I was eight years old I saw a movie called The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), at the Crest Theater, which is still there on Westwood Boulevard. I had what\u2019s called suspension of disbelief. I went nuts. I was enchanted by it, and I went home and asked my mother who makes the movie, and she said, \u201cthe director.\u201d Which was surprising. So literally, from the time I was eight, I wanted to be a director. So I had an advantage, which was I knew what I wanted to do.<\/p>\n

CH Were you immediately a film buff?<\/p>\n

JL Absolutely, I was a maniac; and because I grew up in Los Angeles\u2014I was born in 1950\u2014in the 1960s I was able to seek out and meet almost all the great filmmakers.<\/p>\n

CH Many of the directors that started their careers around the same time as you grew up obsessed with the cinema. William Lustig told me he used to see six movies a day in New York when he was younger.<\/p>\n

JL Well, I used to go see a lot. When the grindhouse was going we used to go see\u2014I mean, I\u2019ve done six films a day, but I would see two a day.<\/p>\n

CH And you got a job as a mail boy at Fox while you were still pretty young. How did you end up there?<\/p>\n

JL Well it\u2019s long and involved, but basically I brought a class-action suit against the majors, because\u2014actually, I don\u2019t like how I got my job, because I kind of forced them. But I got a job in the mail room at Fox when I was seventeen, and I was very happy to be there. I was right near production\u2014in the year and a half I was there they shot all the Irwin Allen TV shows on the lot, so Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Lost in Space, The Time Tunnel; they shot Payton Place; The Green Hornet, so I knew Bruce Lee. But also, they were shooting Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Just a tremendous amount of production.<\/p>\n

CH And this was a time, I\u2019m assuming, when things were a little more relaxed and open at the studio. You could more easily approach people you saw on the lot.<\/p>\n

JL Sure. You know now when you see a movie, and they want to show a studio, you see show girls and monsters all around? It was just like that. It really was. It was great.<\/p>\n

CH What directors were around at the time you were there?<\/p>\n

JL Well, at Fox, there was George Cukor, who was doing a picture called Justine (1969). I met George Stevens. I met Robert Altman, who wasn\u2019t very nice. But also around town, I sought out William Wyler, Billy Wilder, Hal Roach! I was able to meet a tremendous amount of filmmakers. Later, I had a bungalow at Universal and so did Hitchcock. So I used to have lunch with Mr. Hitchcock.<\/p>\n

CH This was a time when most of Hollywood thought of these filmmakers as coming to the end of their careers.<\/p>\n

JL All of them were working! Cukor made like six more movies after that.<\/p>\n

CH Into the 1980s.<\/p>\n

JL Yeah, and Wilder made movies after that. Even Hitchcock made a movie after that. So they were working.<\/p>\n

CH Were they more accessible?<\/p>\n

JL I don\u2019t know if they were more accessible. It was interesting, because at that time in the \u201960s and \u201970s, it was only the French and the British, people like Lindsay Anderson and Truffaut, who gave credence to any of these filmmakers. I remember George Stevens, I went up to him\u2014he was shooting this terrible movie, The Only Game in Town (1970)\u2014and said, \u201cMr. Stevens, you know, I\u2019m such an admirer.\u201d He was with his AD, I remember, and he was so taken aback that I was American, he said, \u201cName five of my movies.\u201d And I did, I rattled off Alice Adams (1935), Shane (1953), Giant (1956), you know. He was so impressed he took me to lunch.<\/p>\n

CH You hear stories about other guys around the same time, like Bogdanovich seeking out Hawkes.<\/p>\n

JL Bogdanovich is older than me, but he sought out all these guys. Hawkes is interesting because he was a pathological liar, and most of what he told you was just not true. But it didn\u2019t really matter because it was Howard Hawkes.<\/p>\n

CH From there, I know you entered production a little bit.<\/p>\n

JL Not a little bit, a lot. The first movie I worked on was Catch-22 (1970), but I was with the second unit and was in the belly of a B-25 in Mexico. It was a terrible job, and I left it after three or four weeks.<\/p>\n

CH You worked on some Westerns too, correct?<\/p>\n

JL Well, I went to Europe as a, well, they\u2019re now called production assistants, back then they were called gophers. I went to work on a movie called Kelly\u2019s Heroes (1970), which was shot in the former Yugoslavia.<\/p>\n

CH With Clint Eastwood?<\/p>\n

JL Yeah, a Brian Hutton picture. Don Sutherland, Don Rickles, Telly Savalas, Carroll O\u2019Connor, a big cast. And the Yugoslav army (laughs). We were playing World War II, blowing shit up. It was 1969, so it was right in the middle of the spaghetti boom, in Spain. So when I was finished I went with a guy named Jim O\u2019Rourke; we went to Madrid, then to Almeria. I lived in Almeria for over a year, and worked on fifty or sixty movies. A huge amount of movies\u2014Spanish, French, Italian, German, British, and American.<\/p>\n

CH I just read this book called Conversations with Clint where he talks a little about his time shooting Kelly\u2019s Heroes, and how he had to spend something like a year there.<\/p>\n

JL No, no. He was there, probably, eight months, and he was very unhappy.<\/p>\n

CH And quickly after that you made Schlock (1973)?<\/p>\n

JL Well, not that quickly. Two years later I made Schlock. I was in Europe almost two years, and then I came back and made Schlock in 1971.<\/p>\n

CH I\u2019m interested in this period, from when you made Schlock, with it\u2019s really low budget, through Kentucky Frietd Movie (1977), and arriving at Animal House (1978).<\/p>\n

JL Schlock was 1971, Kentucky Fried and Animal House were 1977. There was a long period of time where I worked on a lot of movies, doing stunts on movies like The Towering Inferno (1974). I worked on a shit-load of movies.<\/p>\n

CH So you were doing stunts?<\/p>\n

JL Yeah, I did stunts. I did whatever job they\u2019d give me. I did stunts in a lot of pictures. I did some stunts in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).<\/p>\n

CH What kind of stunts did you do?<\/p>\n

JL Well, there was falling off horses. But it depended.<\/p>\n

CH So how did you end up getting the job to direct Animal House?<\/p>\n

JL I got that job because of the script-girl on Kentucky Fried Movie, which was made in, I think, twenty-one days, really fast. We had half-a-million dollars. The script girl on that, Katherine Wooten, her boyfriend at the time was a junior-executive at Universal named Sean Daniel. They had the script that they had been developing. They sent it to everybody, people like Richard Lester, John Schlesinger, Mike Nichols\u2014all of them threw it back. There were issues with the script because it was very funny, but also very offensive. There were no good guys in it\u2014everyone was a pig, essentially. So they hired me originally to supervise a rewrite. Which I did.<\/p>\n

CH What kind of comedies did you grow up watching? Many of your comedies, Animal House maybe the most so, remind me of the Marx Brothers.<\/p>\n

JL Well, the Marx Brothers made their own college comedy, Horse Feathers (1932). So did Buster Keaton, and Jack Oakie made a lot of college comedies. There were a lot of people. It\u2019s been a tradition.<\/p>\n

CH I was thinking of the anti-authoritarian streak and the way their work always ends in chaos.<\/p>\n

JL That\u2019s interesting because the picture takes place the year Kennedy was shot, and Kennedy\u2019s alive when the movie takes place. It really ends with the beginning of the \u201960s, and it\u2019s correct to end in chaos. It\u2019s quite accurate. It ends in civil insurrection. Something that a contemporary audience doesn\u2019t even get is when the Dean says that they are all 1-A now, you know, that\u2019s a serious threat. It meant you were being killed; you were being sent to Vietnam. It\u2019s funny now how people watch it now out of context. Because it was a period picture, even in 1977, we were able to deal with many things like racism and sexism in a very frank, upfront manner because we were protected by the period.<\/p>\n

CH Are you surprised by how the film still resonates with kids?<\/p>\n

JL If you told me at the time, I would have went, \u201cHuh?\u201d Now I understand it. There\u2019s this period in most people\u2019s lives, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, when they are independent. They\u2019re either in the military or they\u2019re in school, acting as adults, but they\u2019re complete children. This sense of great freedom and exploration, I think the film captures that. That wild energy. But, you know, I\u2019m still amazed a lot of my pictures are still playing.<\/p>\n

CH Coming out of Animal House, which was very successful, were there suddenly a lot of options for you? Did you have a few different paths you could have followed as a director?<\/p>\n

JL I was offered films, but not that many. Films I didn\u2019t want to make. I was actually working on The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981); the movie they made was very different from the movie I was making. The movie I was making was extremely political. In fact, the only thing left over in the new movie is Henry Gibson\u2019s character, although very different, and Rick Baker\u2019s gorilla.<\/p>\n

CH The Blues Brothers seems like an odd choice to make for your next project.<\/p>\n

JL The Blues Brothers was a development deal, which the studio made with me, John, and Danny, to grease John and Danny and get them to be in Animal House. Lorne Michels wouldn\u2019t let Danny out of Saturday Night Live, so we didn\u2019t get him. Animal House was written\u2014Doug, Harold, and Chris, the writers, were all from the Lampoon, and there was this whole extraordinary group of talent. When the script was written, the character of Bluto was written for John Belushi, D-Day was written for Danny Aykroyd, and Boone was written for Chevy Chase. I very much wanted Belushi and Aykroyd. I didn\u2019t want Chevy, only because Chevy was the only star to come out of the first year of Saturday Night Live. I wanted unknowns, if I could get them.<\/p>\n

CH Watching The Blues Brothers again recently, it still strikes me as such an odd movie. There wasn\u2019t much there in the SNL sketch to start with.<\/p>\n

JL Well, it\u2019s not from SNL. That\u2019s what people don\u2019t understand. In fact, before that, we had a development deal for a movie about Jake and Elwood. These were characters they had created much earlier, years before Saturday Night Live, when they were both in Second City in Toronto.<\/p>\n

CH It\u2019s still a bizarre film.<\/p>\n

JL Oh yeah, it\u2019s nuts. One, I was coming off of a big hit, and two, it was sort of an accident: John and Danny performed on the show a couple times, to warm up the show, and then Steve Martin asked them to be his opening act at the Universal Amphitheater. So we put together this amazing band\u2014Steve Cropper, Matt \u2018Guitar\u2019 Murphy, all those guys\u2014and Atlantic recorded the concert, and that album, Briefcase Full of Blues, became this gigantic success. So suddenly, the studio looked and went, \u201cWait a minute, we have John Belushi, star of the biggest movie in the world right now, John and Danny, the stars of the biggest TV series in the world right now, and we have the hottest album in the world right now.\u201d So they literally said, \u201cCan you have the movie in theaters by August.\u201d It was like six months away, and I said, \u201cSure!\u201d There was no script, and Danny wrote this like eight-hundred page thing that was unshootable, so we had to cut it down.<\/p>\n

It was a unique situation. The movie\u2019s very flawed, but you know, you make movies for lots of reasons. Dan and John did something extraordinary, which was they exploited their own celebrity to focus attention on this great American music. It\u2019s hard for you to understand, but in 1977, 1978 really, it was all over. Motown was over. It was all disco, Abba, and the Bee-Gees. Black music was Chic. The studio just thought we were nuts. The studio, I don\u2019t think, ever really got it that it was a musical. (laughter) It\u2019s funny, people will say, \u201cHow did you get those great artists?\u201d Trust me, they were happy to be getting the job. The one who was actually doing very well at that time was Ray Charles, who was doing country and western music.<\/p>\n

CH At that point he had been doing that for a number of years.<\/p>\n

JL That was what he did when he couldn\u2019t sell rhythm-and-blues records\u2014brilliantly, by the way. To give you an idea of the times: when we made the movie, Universal, Decca Records, and MCA Records, refused the soundtrack album. They said, \u201cNobody is going to buy this.\u201d We got Atlantic Records\u2014even with their great success with the first album, Ahmet Ertegun (founder and former president of Atlantic) wouldn\u2019t put John Lee Hooker on the album. He\u2019s not on the soundtrack. I had a huge fight, and Ertegun told me, \u201cHe\u2019s too old and too black.\u201d So it was with great satisfaction, four years later, that John Lee had a platinum album.<\/p>\n

CH Did the classical Hollywood musical influence the film?<\/p>\n

JL Oh yeah. I was trying to do every kind of musical number. There\u2019s performance when they are performing on the stage. Aretha\u2019s number is classic American musical comedy, where they burst into song and further the plot.<\/p>\n

CH Also the James Brown scene in the church.<\/p>\n

JL Exactly. I was trying to do all this stuff. Also, the soundtrack, a lot of those Sam & Dave songs, John Lee Hooker\u2014I actually shot listening to the music. The driving stuff was composed to this stuff.<\/p>\n

CH Were you thinking of these songs when you reached the edit stage?<\/p>\n

JL Of course, that\u2019s what I was shooting to.<\/p>\n

CH I thought maybe we could talk a little about the influence of music because it is something runs through all your films.<\/p>\n

JL All movies have music.<\/p>\n

CH But music is certainly more prominent in your films: musicians star in your films; the Randy Newman songs in Three Amigos; the B.B. King score in Into the Night. All this stuff is up front. Obviously music is very important to you.<\/p>\n

JL Well, yeah. I was also lucky to have Elmer Bernstein score ten of my movies. He\u2019s brilliant. In fact, his score for Three Amigos is my favorite score of my movies because it\u2019s Elmer Bernstein satirizing Elmer Bernstein.<\/p>\n

CH Your next film was An American Werewolf in London, which I understand you wrote almost a decade before the film was made.<\/p>\n

JL I wrote that while I was working on Kelly\u2019s Heroes!<\/p>\n

CH I thought maybe we could talk about your twin interests in comedy and horror, and maybe we can discuss the book you wrote, Monsters in the Movies.<\/p>\n

JL Well, I love fantasy. I don\u2019t like the name horror; it\u2019s a bullshit thing, because it\u2019s easy to horrify somebody. There\u2019s no skill involved. Boris (Karloff) wanted to call them suspense movies. I love fantasy films, and I really like monsters. I\u2019m really fascinated by monsters because monsters are metaphors.<\/p>\n

CH Well the book does explode open this genre that people think is very narrow, opening up all the possibilities of what a monster movie can be.<\/p>\n

JL The book\u2019s about monsters, not about horror, so that includes science-fiction, fairy-tales. I have Tinker Bell in there!<\/p>\n

CH One of the great things about American Werewolf is how aware the main character is of what he is becoming. He even talks about The Wolf Man (1941).<\/p>\n

JL That\u2019s pop culture. Yeah, they\u2019re aware of other movies.<\/p>\n

CH Even today, the self-awareness is still striking.<\/p>\n

JL Tarantino gets a lot of credit for that, but Joe Dante and I were doing it long before Quentin.<\/p>\n

CH I read an article recently asking why people in zombie movies don\u2019t know what a zombie is.<\/p>\n

JL That\u2019s because it\u2019s silly. One of the reasons why American Werewolf is funny is because I was trying to do it as realistically as possible. Realistically, you do know about this stuff. That\u2019s a good point, you just reminded me\u2014do you remember the beginning of Night of the Living Dead (1968)? The guy says, \u201cThey\u2019re coming to get you, Barbra!\u201d He\u2019s imitating Karloff.<\/p>\n

CH That\u2019s right, I forgot about that. I wanted to ask you about this thing they\u2019re showing in the program called Coming Soon (1982).<\/p>\n

JL I\u2019m shocked they are showing it. That was the very first thing ever made specifically for home video. It\u2019s just a bunch of trailers and making-of\u2019s cut together.<\/p>\n

CH I saw bits and pieces of it, and I saw it has those classic Hitchcock trailers that he is featured in, where he walks through the set.<\/p>\n

JL The thing about trailers is they were an art form. No longer\u2014now it\u2019s all down to marketing. Also, the studios, many times, they would use alternate takes for the trailers. Did you know that? They used to use unprinted takes because they didn\u2019t want to fuck with the negative.<\/p>\n

CH Next for you was Trading Places (1983)\u2014your first time working with Eddie Murphy.<\/p>\n

JL That was a great script. In the 1930s, they made a bunch of what I guess you would social comedies.<\/p>\n

CH Preston Sturges.<\/p>\n

JL Right, Frank Capra, Leo McCarey, Howard Hawkes even. They were movies about class. People look at Trading Places, and they think it\u2019s about racism. Yeah, it\u2019s there, but it\u2019s really about class. It\u2019s The Prince and the Pauper. Just taking that premise and shooting it, making it contemporary\u2014and the only thing that makes it contemporary is language and nudity. Everything else about it could be from 1934.<\/p>\n

CH Now Into the Night (1985), which is also in the program, is one of your films that is not as well known.<\/p>\n

JL It was my first failure. Nobody went to see it.<\/p>\n

CH I think it\u2019s excellent, and I\u2019m glad they\u2019re showing it in this program. It has an interesting, offbeat tone, one that is hard to place.<\/p>\n

JL It\u2019s an odd film, like a history of \u201980s hair, I think.<\/p>\n

CH There are a ton of cameos in the film, a majority of them directors.<\/p>\n

JL Every movie I\u2019ve made has lots of directors and for some reason they noticed it in that movie. I\u2019m not sure why, but that was the first time everyone wrote about it. Animal House is the only movie I\u2019ve made that doesn\u2019t have a director in it, although a lot of those guys have become directors. I\u2019ve always had directors in my movies. You know, directing is a solitary job. I enjoy the cameos, it\u2019s just for fun, and it\u2019s not meant to be anything other than that.<\/p>\n

CH There\u2019s an interesting sense of community between directors\u2014I\u2019m not sure if it exists as much anymore\u2014and your films tend to celebrate that.<\/p>\n

JL Yeah, Mick Garris has these Masters of Horror dinners which are really fun. With Into the Night, I was given a script. The basic story was the same, everything else\u2014I rewrote it, that\u2019s one of the few movies I\u2019ll say, it had no words of the original writer in it. It\u2019s a serious story, but there are some really funny moments. The thing about the movie is the lead character is exhausted; he\u2019s been awake for a long time, so it becomes more and more surreal. Plus, he\u2019s sort-of drifting through it.<\/p>\n

CH Like a dream-state.<\/p>\n

JL It gets weirder and weirder. It\u2019s violent. Carl Perkins gets stabbed by David Bowie. David Bowie is really good in it.<\/p>\n

CH Speaking of weird, let\u2019s talk a little about Three Amigos (1986)<\/p>\n

JL Three Amigos, I\u2019m happy to say, comes out next month of a Blu-Ray that I just restored. It\u2019s gorgeous; it looks like three-strip Technicolor.<\/p>\n

CH How did you get involved with the film?<\/p>\n

JL I was sent the script by Steve Martin. He was one of producers, asked if I wanted to do this, and I asked for a few changes, and, yeah, I was very happy. I like that movie; I think it\u2019s really funny. Also, it gave me an opportunity to just be silly.<\/p>\n

CH It also gave you the opportunity to do a Western, in a way.<\/p>\n

JL Oh, I love Westerns. Walter Hill once said, \u201cIf they knew how much fun it is to make a Western, they wouldn\u2019t let us.\u201d It is, really, the most fun.<\/p>\n

CH It also has the elements of silent cinema.<\/p>\n

JL Oh yeah, they were wearing lead based makeup. We took it seriously. And we shot that on the\u2014have you ever been on the Universal Tour? Well, part of it you go through this little Mexican town. That\u2019s the oldest standing set in Hollywood. So we shot it on that silent set.<\/p>\n

CH And then Coming to America (1988) is a like an explosion, with these huge musical numbers and costumes.<\/p>\n

JL I was able to put that musical number in there because, like The Blues Brothers, Eddie was such a big star, the studio said, \u201cCan you have this in theaters by August?\u201d So that gives you a great deal of power, because you\u2019re just shooting. They\u2019re like, \u201cWhy is there this musical number?\u201d<\/p>\n

Again, you talk about why you make movies, and the thing with Coming to America was it\u2019s silly, it\u2019s a fairy tale. When Eddie pitched me the idea, it wasn\u2019t much of an idea, I realized this is going to be a black movie. I don\u2019t think anyone understands that there will be a couple of white people in it, but essentially it\u2019s an African American movie. But the color had nothing to do with the plot. The plot was purely this love story, fairy-tale, and I realized this is an opportunity to do something really important that nobody will notice. It was the first big Hollywood movie where the character\u2019s skin was not part of the plot\u2014Eddie plays the black guy in Beverly Hills Cop, he plays the black guy in Trading Places. Here, he just plays this guy. It was so successful; no one ever refers to that as an African American movie. Ever. Yet it has three speaking parts for white people. Every other speaking role is an African American.<\/p>\n

CH Many of your films, while commercially successful at the time of release, never got their proper respect from critics. Critical opinion has turned over the years toward your work, and I was wondering what that meant to you.<\/p>\n

JL What\u2019s amusing is that the same, literally the same guys, who shit on these pictures, now hold them up as classic examples. It\u2019s funny. The best critic story I have is a true story. When American Werewolf in London came out, Janet Maslin, the critic for the New York Times, reviewed it. You read, and think it\u2019s not bad, till you get to the end, the last paragraph, where she attacks me. So John Belushi calls me up and says, \u201cDid you read the New York Times?\u201d I said, \u201cYeah.\u201d And John says, \u201cDid you fuck her?!\u201d (laughter).<\/p>\n

http:\/\/bombsite.com by Craig Hubrt<\/p>\n