Q & A WITH LEONARD J. KOHL, author of Bluto, Buster and The Blob: Conversations with Actors and Writers From Hollywood and Radio’s Golden Age!
Q: In looking over your interviews with movie celebrities and cartoon animators, I notice that you seem to be fascinated by the "Golden Days of Hollywood." Why is that?
A: I'm going to have to give you a LONG answer to that question! First of all, I'm a "Baby Boomer." (I was born around the "tail end" of that era in 1958). The "Baby Boom" Generation are people born from about the end of World War II (c. 1945) through to - I think - the middle 1960s. My dad had served in the tail end of the Korean War. Most of the "dads" of my neighbors had fought in World War II or Korea. A lot of the grandfathers in the neighborhood had fought in World War I. Just about everybody of my parents' age - or older - knew what life was like during the Great Depression and "on the Homefront" during World War II.
So, that era of the very late ‘20s, the '30s and '40s - roughly - was remote to me and yet strangely familiar. What made that era more "familiar" was the fact that there was a "Nostalgia" fad of the "popular culture" from - roughly – the very end of the '30s and into the '40s by the "Mass Media." There was supposed to be a "Generation Gap" between the youth (young adult and older) and the "Establishment" (people my parents' age or older) and in some cases - there WAS a problem communicating with each other. But strangely enough, at that time, young people embraced the movies, comic books, etc. of their parents’ generation. My brother Jerry and I would watch FLASH GORDON on Saturday afternoons on TV and often, younger football or other sports' assistant coaches who worked with my dad at our parish would be in our living room, watching - and enjoying - these old serials with us!
When I was growing up, you'd walk by store windows and see all kinds of posters, beach towels, tee-shirts, greeting cards, etc. with images of Chaplin, Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, W.C. Fields, The Marx Brothers, The Three Stooges, vintage Mickey Mouse, Humphrey Bogart, etc. on them. Likenesses of Bela Lugosi as "Dracula," Boris Karloff (as "The Frankenstein Monster") and Lon Chaney, Sr. (as "The Phantom of the Opera") and his son (the "Wolf Man" were on model kits, toys and games. Reprints of vintage comic strip collections, etc. were available - POPEYE, TERRY AND THE PIRATES, THE PHANTOM, etc. (Too expensive for me, sadly.) There were film festivals of W.C. Fields or Marx Brothers' films all over the country. When I was old enough to see them on my own, the "fad" had started to die out a little - but not entirely.
We had a movie theater on Clark St. in Chicago called The Adelphi Theater. They ran old movies like ROOM SERVICE (1938) with the Marx Bros. or they’d run Charlie Chaplin shorts (with sound added from the ‘30s) or the Robert Youngson film compilations like M-G-M’S BIG PARADE OF COMEDY or Jay Ward’s THE CRAZY WORLD OF LAUREL AND HARDY. The first time I saw MARCH OF THE WOODEN SOLDIERS (the re-issue of BABES IN TOYLAND with Laurel and Hardy) was at the Adelphi Theater. My friend Ted Okuda told me about a theater in downtown Chicago called The Clark Theater, that constantly showed old classic movies. I’m sure there were theaters like that all around the country. The re-release of ANIMAL CRACKERS (1930) when Universal got the rights to show it in the early ‘70s – was a big deal, and I saw that downtown when I was a kid.
The film department of the Art Institute of Chicago would run a festival of POPEYE cartoons, or a downtown theater would revive KING KONG, FANTASIA or SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS. Our Chicago WGN station ran FLASH GORDON serials for several years on Saturdays and later they would splice three chapters together on Sundays. WGN's Saturday night show - CREATURE FEATURES - ran the old Universal horror movies (mostly) from the '30s and '40s. The station also ran - for years - the older SHERLOCK HOLMES and CHARLIE CHAN films on Sunday afternoons. WGN also had a show called FAMILY CLASSICS where host Frazier Thomas would run great color and black-and-white movies based on classic literature or historical stories. On Sunday nights WGN would run a show called WHEN MOVIES WERE MOVIES and they would run classic old black-and-white movies. When I was much younger, TV stations on Saturday afternoons would run tons of old Westerns and my father was reliving his childhood with me. So, again, I grew up with all this stuff - a mixture of old and new movies, cartoons, TV shows - and so on. You didn’t have to seek it out, it was all around you to enjoy, or not!
There were also film showings for – I guess we’d call them “hipsters” now – who thought it was cool to make fun of these older films, like the BATMAN serials in the ‘40s. That caused TV executives to make BATMAN and THE GREEN HORNET shows for the kids and adults liked them for the “camp” humor. I’ve read that back in the early ‘30s and ‘40s, it was fun to make fun of really ancient silent movies or stage melodramas from the turn of the last century like THE DRUNKARD, etc. So, there was all that stuff added to the mix, as well. We smaller kids took shows like BATMAN seriously, the adults and the “hipsters” could enjoy it on other levels – like the ROCKY AND BULLWINKLE cartoons, for example.
Chicago old-time radio show host Chuck Schaden, had a Saturday afternoon program called THOSE WERE THE DAYS where Chuck would play old radio broadcasts - comedy, mystery, adventure shows, etc. - and sometimes interview the people who were involved in them. I listened to those programs a lot - especially because they had "tie-ins" every so often with the movie stars who appeared in the old movies I liked watching. I vaguely recall listening as a “tiny tot” to a show called MONITOR on the radio - probably my dad's car radio - that had little bits of comedy by older comedians like "Bob and Ray" or by the people who played "Fibber McGee and Molly." Old-time radio was still going on when I was itsy-bitsy! (By the way, THOSE WERE THE DAYS is still on radio in the Chicagoland area, now hosted by Steve Darnall.)
Also, one other big factor for me was that my dad lived history. He had been a football coach and a history teacher at DePaul Academy - a Catholic high school now long gone - when I came along. I was a premature baby and so, my parents had huge medical bills to pay, so Dad had to find another job, but Dad always loved the history of just about anything - where his people came from, US history, world history - you name it. So, my brothers and I were all caught up - at least a little bit - in my dad's love of history! Why did we live the way we did? How were we different or similar to families from other towns and cities? How did people in other countries live? That kind of thing. Where did things we all enjoyed come from?
So, I loved the old cars, the movies, etc. from the era when my parents were young. I was fascinated by reruns of THE UNTOUCHABLES - with Robert Stack - but Mom thought the show was too violent for us kids to watch. So, I'd sneak over to my friends' house to watch them. One night, when my father made an "executive decision" on my behalf, he and I watched THE SCARFACE MOB (1959) the "movie" version of the two-part "pilot" for what would become THE UNTOUCHABLES. I was fascinated because as Dad watched the movie with me, he'd say, "That happened," or "I think they added some stuff that might not be true here," (but in my dad’s saltier language) etc. so that this became really ALIVE to me. Both my parents were born in 1931 and most of the story from the TV movie took place shortly before they were born, but I think that in late '31, Al Capone was finally convicted by the "Feds" for income tax evasion. So, it wasn't just history I was learning about. It became personal when I found out my parents lived through some of it, or my ancestors did. The history of things that happened between World War I and World War II.
Television was relatively a new thing to our generation. TV's had only been around for about 10 years by the time I was born and - in the early '50s or so - they were REALLY expensive, so my parents - and most of my neighbors - had TV sets for several years, that broadcast shows in black-and-white. There wasn't much of a difference - in my young eyes - to an old movie or a cartoon to something made more recently. Black-and-white movies, snapshots, images from copy machines, etc., were not "ancient" to us - they were normal.
So - to try to shorten up a long explanation - I grew up with all this "old stuff" from movie theater revivals and what was on TV and the great movies and cartoons I saw - it all stuck in my consciousness. I inherited my dad's love of history and so I wanted to know "how" and "why" these films and cartoons were made. When I was lucky enough to meet some of the people who acted in these films - or made them - I made a point to find out about these movies.
Q: So, when you were growing up, images in color were exotic or special?
A: Pretty much, so! I think it was pretty much inti the later ‘70s that family portraits done by professional photographers started to be done in color. Special magazines like LIFE had beautiful color photos in them. Post cards were in dazzling color. Comic books – except for the cheap publications – were in color. It’s not like color was not around, it was just expensive to reproduce. So, black-and-white images were a part of my life; it seemed normal! There were still movies being made in black-and-white when I was growing up. I think Hitchcock made PSYSCHO to cut down on the “gore” of blood, etc. to get it released in theaters? But, even though most film-makers had been making more movies in color by the middle ‘60s, some of the smaller studios still made them in black-and-white.
I vividly remember that my parents took my brother and I to a drive-in to see a re-release of Disney’s THE ABSENT MINDED PROFESSOR and THE SHAGGY DOG. We didn’t care that these films were a few years old and in black-and-white, they were great to see on a big screen! But, by then, it was a little unusual for us to see a movie in a theater or drive-in that wasn’t in color, but not that unusual. But by the ‘70s, color movies were standardized for the movie studios– it wasn’t as expensive to make them as it used to be and the studios started releasing their movies in cheaper color processes, which came to “bite them in the butt” years later. Mel Brooks, by the time he made YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN in 1977, had a heck of time getting the film released in black-and-white (he wanted the film to look like a ‘30s Universal FRANKENSTEIN film) – but, he finally did!
I remember when the first family in our neighborhood got a color TV set - man, they were expensive - and just about every kid in the area squeezed into their living room, shared bowls of popcorn to watch a fairly new Disney TV color movie called THE THREE LIVES OF THOMASINA (1963). "Uncle Walt" had the "inside track" on color television technology - RCA was a long-time sponsor of WALT DISNEY'S WONDERFUL WORLD OF COLOR - and Disney started broadcasting his shows in color and made more color live-action theatrical features, because he KNEW that eventually, families would be able to afford color TV sets, and he wanted to get in that field as soon as possible. Things in "color" were exotic and strange to me as I was growing up - on someone else’s color TV. Kids now don't seem to want to see things in black-and-white. Again, it was "normal" to see things without color! My dad finally broke down and got a color TV set, late in the ‘60s, but lots of things were still in black-and-white: TV shows, movies, etc. Somewhere in the middle to late ‘60s – I think – TV shows made the jump from black-and-white to color: GUNSMOKE, THE FUGITIVE, THE WILD, WILD WEST, etc. NBC had its colored “peacock” logo and new shows “In Living Color!” would be a big deal!
Q: How about silent movies? What did you think about seeing them when you were growing up?
A: Well, now those we considered OLD! Those were part of our grandparent’s generation. You’d have to talk to even older “Baby Boomers” than me, because so much of early TV programming were from very old films – silent shorts, cartoons, some feature films, etc. with newly added music and sound effects. A lot of those things started to disappear once TV distributors got their hands on newer product. But, TV programmers grabbed everything they could get to show on TV. Old foreign made films – everything! I think you know that the major movie studios considered TV as a threat and so, for many years, withheld TV broadcasters from running their films. Independent producers like Hal Roach or someone like William Boyd (who had a hunch about TV and bought up all the rights to the HOPALONG CASSIDY movies he had made) saw television as a great opportunity to make more money from their vintage film libraries. King Features Syndicate got the rights back from Universal for their FLASH GORDON serials, etc. – and so those made it to TV fairly early. Movie studios started to make deals with little companies like NTA (National Telefilm Associates) or AAP (Associated Artists Productions), etc. to get older films out on TV. Eventually, the big studios smelled money to be made and then everything – eventually – started showing up on TV.
I was too young to see the retrospectives that theater owners had of showing Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin or – maybe – some Herald Lloyd comedies, for example. Somehow, a number of years later, I missed the epic showing of Abel Gance’s NAPOLEON (1927) that I think was at one of our downtown theaters in Chicago. That, too, was shown all over the country, I believe! (I caught up with silent movie theater showings much later!) There was one show on our public TV channel – WTTW – that had a weekly show called THE TOY THAT GREW UP, hosted by a film historian by the name of Don Ferris, I think. Rather than satirize them, like FRACTURED FLICKERS did, Ferris put them into historical perspective. I liked that show a lot! I think before that there was a syndicated show called SILENTS, PLEASE! – that showed shortened silent movie features. One of our first independent “UHF” channels in Chicago – WFLD – ran Charlie Chaplin shorts – CHARLIE CHAPLIN THEATRE, THE ABBOTT AND COSTELLO TV show and then IT’S LAUREL AND HARDY TIME! – their sound shorts and features. So, you got a span of some 30 or 40 years of great comedy on a Saturday afternoon!
Q: Some of these interviews you conducted are now pretty old! Why did you wait so long to get them published?
A: Well, some of them WERE published around the time I wrote them - in shorter or in different forms. Some 40 years ago, I wrote a column on animated cartoons for the film collectors' newspaper, CLASSIC IMAGES called “Frame by Frame" that I took over from another writer. Later, I became a member of ASIFA/Central - the Midwest "chapter" of an international animated film society. I wrote a couple columns for their newsletter, which was also called "Frame by Frame" - strangely enough. Through writing about film animation for these publications, I got to meet cartoon animators like Gordon Sheehan and Shamus Culhane - and later, interview them. I thought I might be talented enough to become a cartoonist or an animator - so I was really interested in all this. I interviewed animator Jon McClenahan while he was working on the TINY TOON ADVENTURES and ANIMANIACS TV cartoon series for Steven Spielberg and Warner Bros. I thought that the ASIFA-Central editor of the newsletter - magazine would print all the material, but only some of it was used, for one issue. Now that these TV series have had a "cult following" for over the past some 25 years or so, I decided to preserve Jon McClenahan's interviews for animation history. He wasn't looking back at things that had happened decades ago, like Gordon Sheehan, Dave Tendlar and Shamus Culhane had done. Jon was telling me about things he was working on right then and there!
Some of the interviews I conducted with legendary old-time radio actor and announcer Jackson Beck by phone were printed up in THE OFFICIAL POPEYE FANCLUB NEWS-MAGAZINE, but I've since updated and revised those as well. Because medical issues made it impossible for Beck to become a military soldier during the War, he volunteered his services as a voice actor to the Armed Forces. So, there's a good amount of World War II history in his talks with me. Some of the interviews in these two books have never seen print, but even those that were published earlier have a lot of new material added to them. I thought they should all be preserved in book form as a part of film and American history.
Q: How about movie celebrities?
A: Well, my passion for old movies just didn't stop with studying cartoon animation. One of the first interviews I ever did was with actor Buster Crabbe when he appeared in Chicago for a benefit show in March of 1980. I have to thank my mother for that! When I was away at college, Mom mailed me a bunch of old movie related newspapers, catalogues and a flyer from Northwest Federal Savings and Loan that immediately caught my attention. It noted that actor Buster Crabbe would appear at the bank's small movie theater in Chicago. Mom sent me a note with it, saying that I probably had far too much work to do at school to go, but she wanted me to know about it. Strangely enough, I had recently gotten an issue of FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND and although I didn't read the "monster magazine" as fervently as I used to when I was younger, I bought this issue and saw in there that you could send a movie celebrity a birthday card or a "get well" card through the magazine. One of the movie celebrities they noted was Buster Crabbe. Well, that was enough for me - it was some kind of "sign" that I had to go and meet my childhood hero. So, I made a kind of "birthday" note and asked Buster if I could interview him for my college paper, STUFF. I wasn't sure if I would get a reply, but I did! Buster sent a short note and told me who I needed to contact, to set up the interview.
Next, I took a Greyhound bus from Rensselaer, Indiana to Chicago; then I called my parents up and told them that I was coming home for that particular weekend. Well, the morning I was going to do the interview with Buster was like a movie serial "cliffhanger." I still hadn't gotten clarification of where old-time radio host Chuck Schaden had his radio studio or what time I should get there. About an hour or so before Buster was going to do his interview with Chuck, we got the phone call to come over to Schaden's studio, which was in the back room of his "nostalgia" store - Metro Golden Memories - in a nearby suburb of Chicago - Morton Grove, Illinois. I think Buster was happy to have a college student to interview him, because he was all riled up over then President Carter's boycott of the 1980 Olympics; that was my first interview with a "movie star." A couple of years later, I published most of that interview with other material in a film newspaper called FILM COLLECTOR'S WORLD (later MOVIE COLLECTOR'S WORLD) where they actually paid writers by the word (and paid to use rare photos). It was a three-part article, and sadly, Buster Crabbe passed away while I was working on the third one. But, the point is, I loved watching those old FLASH GORDON serials every week on TV and so meeting "Flash Gordon" himself, was a "big deal" to me!
Q: How did you go about contacting these movie people? You mostly have lived in Chicago, right?
A: Yes. Recently I moved to a smaller town in northern Wisconsin. My wife and son were kind of fed up being in Chicago. Sadly, our old neighborhood wasn't as safe to live in as it once was. Anyway, I contacted a lot of these old-time movie celebrities and cartoon animators through contacts I made from various organizations I belonged to, or from film magazines or film collector's newspapers that I used to write for. Sometimes I feel like a private detective or some kind of film archeologist in finding people or tracking facts down! Sometimes, meeting someone like Buster Crabbe and talking to him was pure good luck!
When I was writing for different film magazines - like FILMFAX - I wrote a big article on actor Bela Lugosi's movie serials and I just couldn't stop writing about them. It got so long that my friend and mentor - the late George Turner - said I ought to write a book about these serials. The kids of these old horror movie actors - Bela Lugosi, Jr. and Sara Karloff Sparkman - and the grandson of Lon Chaney, Jr. - Ron Chaney - were working together to get the United States Postal Service to issue stamps honoring their famous parents (or grandfather) and I thought I could write a book on the movie serials that all these actors had made. I naively thought that I could finish the book in time to kind of "cash in" on all the "hoopla" with the stamps and other merchandise that was going to come out. No way! I had to go to the Library of Congress to see one of Boris Karloff's first serials - and one of his largest roles at the time in films - THE HOPE DIAMOND MYSTERY (1921). So many people who had appeared in - or made - these movie serials had passed on and so I had to try to contact sons, daughters, friends, etc. to research all this. It took a lot of time; much more than I thought it would!
FILMFAX publisher Mike Stein had earlier wanted to do a science fiction film anthology book - "Little Green Men from Outer Space" - or something like that. I told him that I was working on a large, almost book-length article on Buster Crabbe and FLASH GORDON (a huge re-working of the material that had appeared in MOVIE COLLECTOR'S WORLD) and he originally wanted to include it in his sci-fi movie anthology book. Later, he wanted to make it into a three-part series for FILMFAX. Then, Mike decided that multi-part articles wouldn't be as profitable and decided to condense my material into a single issue. I was glad I got a "cover story" (which is a story in itself), but I wasn't happy that less than a third of my material saw print.
Some of the interviews in this two-book set came out of tracking down people who had met either Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi or Lon Chaney, Jr. - like the late actor Russell Wade, or the son of movie director Ford Beebe, or former actress Kate Phillips. The things they told me were so interesting that I started asking them questions about their own careers. A lot of this material was edited out of the final version of my first book, SINISTER SERIALS OF BORIS KARLOFF, BELA LUGOSI AND LON CHANEY, JR. and some material that was later published - like a two-part interview with Kate Phillips in SCARLET STREET magazine had been edited a little, as well. In Kate Phillps' case, I found more information about her career after the magazine piece was published. Lucky for me, we were able to later talk about director Tod Browning and some other things after she had time to read David Skal's biography of Browning, etc. Skal's depiction of Tod Browning came from people who knew the often-reclusive former movie director later in life. Kate knew him in the early '40s as a neighbor, when his very fun-loving - but down to earth - wife Alice was still alive and Kate's memories brought out another side to Tod Browning. So, I was able to expand upon much of the material that originally found its way to publisher Richard Valley's SCARLET STREET magazine.
Q: I've heard that there were some problems with you and writer Tom Weaver over the publication of the Kate Phillips interviews that you both did?
Yeah, but that eventually all got straightened out. I knew that Tom had interviewed Kate before, but I did NOT know that he was putting a lot of his interviews into an upcoming article - or series of articles - for Tim Lucas' VIDEO WATCHDOG magazine. Richard Valley did, though! Tom was something of a "hated rival" to Richard Valley and he was always out to "get" him. I knew very little of this rivalry and I had met Tom at a couple of film conventions and we got along. Tom likes to be a "pot stirrer" though and he tried to get me into a heated discussion over the merits of THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939) with writer Bryan Senn - who to this day, dislikes that movie intensely! Well, Bryan - whom I had never met until then - and I got to be friends, even though our film tastes are not always the same.
Anyway, back to my story. I had done some writing for Richard's film magazine and it just so happened that my brother Matt and his family lived for a while in one of the few historic "mud houses" right near Rochester, New York. Matt decided to sell the property and asked me if I could come there and help him fix the place up a little. I had since found out that Kate Phillips was going to be a guest at an old-time Western film convention done by The Buck Jones Fan Club and this would be like "killing two birds with one stone" and so, I helped my brother's family to help sell their home and was then able to interview Kate Phillips as well.
When I got home, I took the cassette tapes of the interview with Kate and I was going to edit and transcribe them; then send the manuscript to the editor, Richard Valley. I called him up and Rich then asked if I could send him copies of the cassettes and a friend or two would transcribe and edit the interviews with Kate. I'd rather have more control over that, but he wanted to get the material ready as soon as possible. So, I sent him the copies and Rich said he'd get them transcribed and that I could look over the material before it was printed. I reluctantly agreed, as there was a lot of work to transcribe and edit that material, if I had to do it all myself. A lot of time went by. I realized I could have transcribed and edited the material into the articles myself by that time. I called Valley up and he said there were complications regarding scheduling some other articles, but I should not be worried about any delays - the material would be printed soon and he was sure I'd be pleased with it. More waiting. Then, on Richard Valley's website, came out a small article of "teaser" material highlighting my interviews with Kate and then, shortly after that, the two-issue interviews, the first just beating Tom Weaver's articles "to press" with Kate for VIDEO WATCHDOG! So, I began to get all these nasty e-mails from people I didn't even know - about what a "jerk" and horrible person I was! Eventually, as I said, it all got "smoothed over" between Tom and I. He and I have sent film material and info. back and forth to each other over the years. Recently, he was asked to do some "commentary tracks" for a possible Blu-Ray release of the FLASH GORDON serials for VCI Entertainment. Tom said he'd have to decline, but recommended me to take on the project!
Through contacts I had through the Official Popeye Fanclub, three friends of mine are the co-founders of The National Lum and Abner Society - Donald Pitchford, Tim Hollis and Sam Brown. I love old-time radio and I enjoyed the comedy of these characters - old storekeepers who ran a general store in Pine Ridge, Arkansas - I was allowed to spend a good amount of time interviewing Kate, as she was a guest at a few of their old-time radio conventions.
Kate had starred with the actors who played "Lum Edwards" and "Abner Peabody" - Chet Lauck and Norris "Tuffy" Goff - in one of the movies based on their radio shows (SO THIS IS WASHINGTON from 1943) and - as it turned out later - her parents knew Lauck's family, as well. So, Donnie, Tim and Sam let me "horn in" on some of the interviews they had with Kate and boy, did that help a lot in compiling the interviews for the book! So, various contacts I had made through the years, helped me a lot in contacting these people and getting interviews from them. I have to thank people like Ron Adams, who runs the MONSTER BASH vintage monster movie conventions and animated cartoon historian Jerry Beck for a lot of help over the years!
Q: Are you generally happy with the way the interviews turned out for the books? Do you have any regrets in not getting interviews you wanted?
A: Generally, I'm happy with what I was able to accomplish. I think I worked the hardest and longest on the interviews I did with Kate Phillips. She was a great story-teller, but due to her aging memory, I discovered that she didn't always have her facts straight - and so, I had to do a lot of research with other film and radio experts (like Frank Dello Stritto and Martin Grams, Jr.) to get her "facts" straight. When I’d talk to Kate, sometimes we’d go back to talking about various topics or people through a number of interviews, so I had a lot of editing to do to keep all her comments on say, the CHARLIE CHAN movies she made – and keep them carefully strung together. Buster Crabbe had "mis-remembered" some things about his career too, and I've tried to correct those - where I could.
I regret that I did not have the time and money to offer Ford Beebe, Jr. help when he was planning to do a biography of his career - mainly working at Walt Disney Studios from about the middle 1930s to shortly after the infamous strike in 1941. I was so anxious to get him to talk about his father's work in the serials for my book that I should have also talked to Ford, Jr. more about his time at Disney's. He had a lot of interesting things to say and I'm at least glad that I have gotten some of them down on paper for the book. Sometimes people like that, really need somebody to "get them going" on a project like what they want to do. Tom Weaver interviewed movie director William Witney at least once and Witney - possibly through Tom's help - got a book out about his early directing career - shortly before he passed away.
The most discouraging interview I did - and the shortest - was with movie director Joseph Lewis. Through my sources, I got his address and - as I just about always did - I wrote him a letter, giving him my credentials as a writer and asking him if I could interview him. Well, several weeks went by and so I called him up through the phone number I had found. What I didn't know was that Joe Lewis lived on two properties - his home and his beloved yacht. He must have been on his yacht when I tried to contact him and when I later contacted him by phone, he felt that I had somehow invaded his privacy and didn't want to have an interview with me at all. I found out that my friend and colleague - Dr. Gary Don Rhodes - wanted to interview Lewis on his film career and (of course) Bela Lugosi's INVISIBLE GHOST (1941). So, as Joe Lewis didn't like being interviewed by phone and Gary wanted to do some interviews around Hollywood anyway, I let Gary do the job. I still would have liked talking to Joe Lewis about favorite "Film Noir" films like GUN CRAZY and THE BIG COMBO - and especially his early film editing work at Mascot Pictures that I would want to use for my book - but, Dr. Rhodes put together a fine book on Joe Lewis ... so it all worked out okay!
You know, it's all about "being at the right place at the right time" with some of the people I've interviewed. I got to talk to Kate Phillips before her memory started to get real cloudy with facts. The same was true with voice actor Jackson Beck. I made sure to often send them rough "transcripts" of the earlier phone interviews they gave me - as a courtesy - and most of the time, they both were okay with seeing in print what they had told me, but it worked out pretty well that then they would both remember something they forgot to mention – that related to what I had asked each of them before – and I could add the information in later.
I tried to contact former film actor Russell Wade several times - first by letter and then by phone. Like my own father, Mr. Wade was recovering from a stroke. Wade's wife Jane was very kind to me and understanding, so she told me to keep trying to call her husband every so often, because she was sure he'd want to talk to me. So, I patiently kept trying to contact Russell Wade and one particular day, he was ready to talk to me - between a half hour and an hour over the phone - and I'm grateful that he gave me some of his time. He was thrilled to hear that the long unseen film, THE GHOST SHIP (1943) had been included in a laserdisc collection of Producer Val Lewton's "horror films" from the 1940s and wanted to get a copy!
Cartoon director Dave Tendlar was also not well when I interviewed him, but he wanted to talk to me. He knew that I was interested in film animation and that I had taken some classes with animator Gordon Sheehan, who had worked for him in "the good old days" at Fleischer and a short time at Famous Studios. I was smart in sending Tendlar ahead of time, two small articles I had written for the Popeye Fanclub on ALADDIN AND HIS WONDERFUL LAMP (1939) - which had been one of his favorite POPEYE cartoons he had directed - and his memory was pretty sharp there. I thought I was clever in playing excerpts of some of his cartoons over the phone with a tape recorder to help his memory, but many of those he couldn't hear properly and that just didn't work. If I had interviewed him several months earlier, I probably would have gotten a better interview with him, but I'm glad I got to talk to him at all!
I remember that a film historian by the name of Richard J. Anobile set out to interview Groucho Marx and people related to Groucho and his brothers, or people who worked with them - into a book, THE MARX BROS. SCRAPBOOK. I thought the book was great, despite the fact that Groucho would often swear or make what some would call "inappropriate" comments. Apparently, Richard Anobile thought that the aging Groucho's interviews with him were like "living history" and he decided not to go over some of Groucho's comments with him later - or with any family members. Groucho - I think, spurred on by his son Arthur and other family members - later sued Anobile over the book. It's a tough call in some cases when you interview an aging celebrity, especially if they feel free to talk about things that involve other people. Do you keep this material in your interview as is, or should you make sure it's accurate and what this particular person wants to have in print? When I talked to Harriet Pessis about her father - movie director Spencer Bennet - she would often think about what she had just told me and if it was an accurate and non-malicious statement about someone, or not.
With film special effects artist Linwood Dunn, he truly felt that his time was valuable - he was in his early '90s when I talked to him and he told me that all the things I wanted to know would be answered in a book he was working on with George Turner. He WAS willing to talk to me about working with his uncle - by marriage - film director Spencer Bennet. So, that was worthwhile to me - except that a lot of that information was then cut out of my SINISTER SERIALS book. That's one reason I wanted to get it in print, now. The thing that was really remarkable about Linwood Dunn was that he started in the film business by hand-cranking a movie camera on his uncle's silent movie serial productions. He got into film special effects and stayed there for decades - keeping abreast of constantly changing film technology. Dunn saw video disc technology eventually replacing film in cameras and video projection in theaters decades before it happened - and he was fascinated by the new technology of the internet!
I felt almost the same way when talking to director Ed Bernds - that, like Linwood Dunn, Bernds had said just about all that he wanted to say - to other interviewers like Ted Okuda, Ed Watts, Tom Weaver, and so on. I felt like I was taking up his time, going over things he had talked to others about before. Now, I realize that he was willing to talk to me and I might have touched on things he hadn't mentioned or given a full account of. So, for Linwood Dunn and Ed Bernds, I would have liked to have done those interviews either earlier or in a different way!
As a journalist (of sorts) and a movie historian, it's not always easy to stick to strict ethical guidelines when talking to old movie celebrities, directors, animators, etc. when doing an interview. I've always tried to get their permission to talk to them first and then - when possible - to have them look over transcripts of these interviews before they are published. Luckily, no one that I interviewed was mean-spirited or gossipy, so that helped me a lot. I didn't have to make hard decisions on whether to use an interesting story, if it might possibly harm someone's reputation. Generally, the people I talked to were happy to see what they had said in print. I like to accurately transcribe what the various interviewers have told me - in their own words. Some writers - like Ted Okuda - feel that they ought to "clean up" someone's speech a bit when it's going to be printed and by "cleaning up" I mean that you take out all the "ahhh's" or "I think so's" or whatever to make it more readable. Maybe even slightly rewrite their speech, so that they get right to the point. I try to do as little of that as possible. Tom Weaver has a great gift of summarizing some of the speech he gets from the people he interviews, so that the reader can "hone in" on interesting facts about the making of THE ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN MARVEL or some other film or incident. I'm not as gifted an editor as Ted is, or as good of a writer as Tom is, so I personal material - unless the person wants it kept in - and putting the things we talk about into subjects or chronological order, as best I can. Then, if some facts are missing or inaccurate, I'll insert that missing or (hopefully) correct information in "bracketed" form. I try to make the "finished product" as easy to read as I can.
Q: What would you like to work on next?
Well, I don't like to admit it, but I've been working a very LONG time (on and off) - with my co-author Kristin Dewey - on a history of the radio show, CHANDU THE MAGICIAN. We both are huge fans of old-movie actor Bela Lugosi. Lugosi played the villain "Roxor" in the 1932 feature film based on the CHANDU radio show and two years later, he played the hero, "Frank 'Chandu' Chandler" in a movie serial. Kristin and I started thinking that we should write a book about the radio show and films. While we started working hard on the book, Kristin was able to contact famed author Ray Bradbury through his daughter, Alexandria. Before Ray Bradbury had passed away, he wrote a "Foreword" for our book, so I want to keep plugging away at this project. Time and funding became too much for us to go through all the previous unknown research - scripts, etc. - at the Library of Congress - that old-time radio historian Karl Schadow had discovered. Then came the Covid-19 pandemic, which locked just about everything down. The book is in pretty "rough shape," but I'm hoping that Kristin and I can work with Karl Schadow soon and get it all completed. The now late Raymond Morgan, Jr. - son of one of CHANDU THE MAGICIAN's co-creators - helped us out a lot as we got started. So, I'm obligated to both "Rays" - Bradbury and Morgan, Jr. - to finish the book they would be proud of!
Q: Any parting thoughts?
A: Sure! I put these two books together for two reasons. I was kind of forced into retirement and later, when the Covid-19 scared the heck out of people around the world, I suddenly had a lot of time on my hands. I started straightening out my filing cabinets and boxes of archives into some kind of approachable order. Then I looked at two small boxes filled with cassette tapes of interviews I had done over the past 30 to 40 years. I thought that these interviews might have a lot of historical value to them - to old movie and radio fans and to fans of American history. So, as part of an "apology" to publisher Ben Ohmart - because of all the delays on the CHANDU project - and the strong feeling I got that a lot of this "history" I had information about, should be preserved and made available to the public. I hope I've done both of these things and that everybody will enjoy these books! - Leonard Kohl