Back in the early \u201970s, a 21-year-old came to producer Jack L. Harris with his first feature film, made in 12 days. The novice director had worked on more than 70 movies but this was his own and he put his life savings, plus a borrowed $30,000, into it. Harris screened the film and liked it. But at 87 minutes, he deemed it too short and offered some story ideas. With $10,000 from Harris, an additional day\u2019s shooting and three new scenes added, Harris had a new property to shop: John Landis\u2019 \u201cSchlock.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cJack\u2019s a classic Hollywood type and one of the great movie mavericks,\u201d Landis says of Harris, who\u2019s being honored Feb. 4 with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. \u201cHe put \u2018Schlock\u2019 out but it wasn\u2019t until years later that I learned how much money it made.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was in Italy, showing \u2018Animal House,\u2019 when they told me that \u2018Schlock\u2019 had won the Asteroide d\u2019Oro award at the Trieste Science Fiction Film Festival. I\u2019ve won a lot of awards over the years, but that one is the only one I have on display because it\u2019s so meaningful to me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Harris, best known as the producer of \u201cThe Blob\u201d (1958), is an old-school movie mogul. The 95-year-old has marketed, distributed, produced, directed and written more movies than anyone has accurately tallied.<\/p>\n
But it was \u201cThe Blob,\u201d his moviemaking debut, that underscored the qualities that would mark Harris\u2019 career: gut instincts and hard-won experience that taught him how to give the public what it wants. The B-movie smash marked Steve McQueen\u2019s first starring role, as a teenager who battled an undulating, man-eating mass from a crashed asteroid. Harris persuaded a sleepy Christian-themed film company in Pennsylvania to put its trained technicians to work on the movie, which was shot in three weeks at a cost of $110,000. Composer Ralph Carmichael wrote the score and a young Burt Bacharach penned the theme.<\/p>\n
Harris landed a distribution deal with Paramount, opening for \u201cI Married a Monster From Outer Space.\u201d \u201cThe Blob\u201d grossed more than $3 million. It spawned a sequel (\u201cBeware! The Blob\u201d in \u201972), and a remake in \u201988. Harris has never revealed how the sticky red ooze was made, but that\u2019s part of the fun and lore of his colorful legacy, just like his Hitchcockian cameos in his own movies.<\/p>\n
Call him a B-movie maven, a huckster, an exploitation king or a schlockmeister, but Harris has made millions, and given work to countless film people. Many of them went on to greater glory, like Landis and five-time Oscar-winner and special effects creator Dennis Muren, whose first film credit, \u201cEquinox\u201d (1970), was a Harris production.<\/p>\n
Harris\u2019 entry into show business was dancing on the vaudeville stage as a child. After working as a theater usher, he ascended to movie publicity, before opening his own office. From there he moved into distribution, the bare-knuckles trade of promoting and supplying movies to theater owners, and then collecting on them. Before \u201cThe Blob,\u201d Harris had distributed over a thousand movies. Tired of selling poor-quality films, he had the know-how and vision to produce, direct or write his own, and then get the movies to their audiences.<\/p>\n
Larry Cohen was a prolific screenwriter who sought out Harris for a movie that he\u2019d already shot, a sardonic meditation on interracial sex that he called \u201cBone,\u201d with Yaphet Kotto and Joyce Van Patten. The movie had been shown but didn\u2019t do well. When Harris refashioned it into \u201cHousewife,\u201d \u201cthe blackest black comedy of the year,\u201d it latched onto the early \u201970s wave of blaxploitation movies.<\/p>\n
\u201cJack\u2019s a showman,\u201d Cohen says emphatically. \u201cHe was always independent, with only his instincts to guide him. He was a smaller scale version of L.B. Mayer or Samuel Goldwyn \u2014 he called all the shots.\u201d
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