Interview with Angus Scrimm (11/04/2007)




Before you read the interview, I want all to understand something upfront. This is probably the one of the least Phantasm-centric interviews you'll find on the Archives and truthfully, I conducted it that way on purpose. I knew that I was only going to get one shot to interview the Tall Man in a public space so I sure as hell wasn't going to waste the opportunity asking questions I knew the answers to.

Through countless interviews, numerous documentaries and multiple commentaries, Angus Scrimm has spoken volumes about this series. I wanted to pose questions to him that he might not have been asked before or at least in a right long time. Sometimes fans get so caught up in his Tall Man persona that they can forget of his many other accomplishments on stage and in journalism. Angus is a great man of many talents and I hope through this interview, you might be turned on to some of them. Having said that, I sincerely wish that you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed putting it together. Many thanks to Angus himself who endured nearly five months of planning and plotting to bring this interview to fruition.

DUSTIN: Thank you so much for agreeing to this, Angus. Is that your stage name or an alter-ego? What if William C. de Mille ever found out?

ANGUS: Stage name, alter ego, doppelganger, all of the above. It first came into being in my college years.  A fellow student Wally Richard told me William C. de Mille didn't like his USC students to do showcase theater off campus.  I occasionally acted at Frances Locker and Frances Douglas Cooper's long-established Callboard Theater in West Hollywood -- a very young Robert Mitchum had got his start there.  Actor Paul Brinegar ("Rawhide") helped create the sets for fun --- so I invented the name Angus Scrimm to cover my tracks and much much later of course, revived it for "Phantasm."  I'm sure if Papa de Mille had found me out, he'd have given me a stern look, followed by a chuckle, and that would have been the end of it.

DUSTIN: Speaking of the stage, you've done stage work in recent years with the acclaimed writer Ray Bradbury. Which do you find more rewarding, stage or screen work, and why?

ANGUS: Acting for me is a euphoric pursuit and I don't care where I do it as long as I'm in congenial company and am decently paid. Not to beg the question entirely though, stage work  puts you excitingly in the immediate presence of your audience, but film work has the potential of still pleasing audiences generations from now which is a marvelous prospect to contemplate. 

Regarding working with the Ray Bradbury Theater, Ray's director-of-choice Alan Hubbs called me in to act two vividly written roles in Ray's own adaptation of his novel about early Hollywood "Let's All Kill Constance."  John Blankenchip did the sets, the cast was a sensationally good one, and Ray as is his habit was enthusiastically on hand for many rehearsals and performances.  I thought it a taste of what it must have been like to be a Moscow Art player when Chekhov dropped in, or an Old Globe actor with Shakespeare present.  In films too it's a definite plus to have the writer on set and in many instances I've been lucky to work with directors who are also the writers.  Don Coscarelli has written everything I've ever done for him (On his Masters of Horror film, his brilliant co-writer Steve Romano also was present).  Other hyphenates have included J.J. Abrams, Curtis Hanson, Christopher Coppola, Jim Wynorski (whose co-writer R.J. Robertson often was around), and more recently James Felix McKenney, Larry Fessenden, Glenn McQuaid and Patrick Roddy.

DUSTIN: What do you use as your measure of success after all these years? The Grammy award, the Fangoria Chainsaw award or the worldwide recognition?

ANGUS: No, no, my Best Actor Oscar --- which through some unfortunate oversight I've yet to be nominated for.  The Grammy and the Chainsaw did buck me up greatly.  As for the worldwide recognition, I do get occasional fan mail from Europe, Asia, the Brits, as well as U.S. film enthusiasts, but I've yet to receive a single thumbs up from any of the Middle Eastern countries. 

DUSTIN: Speaking of worldwide recognition, are you often spotted in public? Maybe somewhere strange like in line at the DMV?

ANGUS: I probably shouldn't confess to this, but I groove on being recognized.  But it seldom happens, possibly because I rarely go anywhere dressed in a tight-fitting black suit and boots with two-inch lifts in them. And certainly not to the DMV!

DUSTIN: I recently asked Reggie about where he thought his character went to at the close of Phantasm: Oblivion. He said after you with a vengeance. This then begs the question, where do you think YOUR character went to?

ANGUS: I know exactly where -- straight to my dressing trailer to get the location's nighttime chill out of my bones and to pour the stiff whiskey Reggie expected me to hand him when he soon followed.

DUSTIN: You're no stranger to the convention circuit. What's your standard experience like?

ANGUS: Uproarious -- packed with warm, friendly people from the Tony Timpones and David Hagans to their most kindly and generously helpful staff people to the warmhearted, enthusiastic fans and concessioners.  And it's great to reunite with Elvira, Karen, Linnea, Brinke, Hodder, Savini, Todd, Berryman, Bradley, Hansen and all the other great genre gentlefolk.

DUSTIN: Do you enjoy playing roles in sharp contrast to the Tall Man? Bronco-buster Ted from 'The Off Season' and Preacher from 'Legend of the Phantom Rider' spring to mind as enjoyable examples.

ANGUS: I liked Ted.  He was a wonderful old bounder.  The Preacher was an interesting presence in the midst of all that carnage.  Both were cowboys.  I played them as a tribute to my dad who, as a Missouri farm boy knew his way around cows and horses, and loved Westerns beyond any other kind of movie.  And of course both films gave me the opportunity to work with some very special people both in front of and behind the cameras.

DUSTIN: As far as Westerns go, you were a schoolmate of 'The Wild Bunch' director Sam Peckinpah, weren't you?

ANGUS: USC's student body in the years immediately following World War II, sizzled with notables-to-be, many of them on the G.I. Bill:  future California politico Jesse Unruh, already politicking on campus, film and TV producer Dave Wolper, iconic humorist Art Buchwald,  actor-comedians Joe Flynn ("McHale's Navy") and Marvin Kaplan ("Mad, Mad World", etc.), TV actors Brad Johnson (Lofty in "Annie Oakley"), Mike Galloway ("The Blue Angels"), and Larry Harmon (the immortal Bozo the Clown).  novelist Joseph Heller ("Catch 22," etc.), novelist-journalist-educator Frederick Shroyer ("Wall Against the Night"), Broadway super-agent Bruce Savan, colorful producer Pierre Cosette, Oscar-nominated screenwriter Jack Lyman Gariss ("The Ten Commandments"), former child stars Scotty Beckett and Bernard Punsley (who was in med school), Beverly Hills foremost divorce lawyer-to-be Sorrell Trope, and endless distinguished names in other professions.  The Drama Department under the legendary William C. de Mille was a club house of convivial, gung ho talents ambitious to be the next generation of Hollywood and Broadway stars. 

Sam Peckinpah came to USC from Fresno to do graduate work when I was in my junior year and, amiable and witty, immediately fit right in.  He was already married (wife: Marie) and starting a family, as were several other ex-G.I.'s,  Sam directed a one-act play I'd written called "Pray for Me."  After he got his Masters, he took a job as resident director of the Huntington Park Civic Theater and asked me out  to act in his second or third production.  I played the lead Mortimer (not Jonathan)  in "Arsenic and Old Lace."  Getting to rehearsals and performances involved an hour's streetcar ride, but often Sam would drive me home and share with me his philosophies of life en route. I wish small personal recorders had existed then.  All I recall is Sam's urging of Christian Brothers' brandy as the drink of choice, and his recent discovery that playing the surging Love Death music from Richard Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde" greatly intensified the pleasures of sexual intercourse.  I think with fame and greater affluence Sam graduated from Christian Brothers to Courvoisier, but I'm not sure where he went from Wagner. 

In the early 50's Sam and Marie were living in a beachfront property in Malibu which got flooded by unusually high tides.  All Sam's USC pals threw a party to replace the Peckinpahs' sodden library -- I think my gift was "War and Peace."  Sam's career took off with "The Rifleman" TV series, whose pilot he created with Jack Gariss, and I didn't see him again till 1964 when he was in pre-production on "Major Dundee."  I was on the staff of Cinema magazine, and my then editor Jim Silke and I did an informal luncheon interview with Sam during which I gauchely asked far too many questions invoking the old days.  Sam was friendly but the interview did not go well and was never printed. I was present for the first "Major Dundee" sneak on Hollywood boulevard. Columbia's producers had seized the film away from Sam and recut it with disastrous results.  After the screening, I saw Sam across the theater lobby surrounded by Charlton Heston , Jim Coburn and other supporters, all in great agitation at the despoiling of the film.  It was not an auspicious moment to interject myself so I left the theater without greeting him, and our paths never crossed again. 

Sam completed an all too short body of highly individualistic cinema before his tragic, much too early death, brought on, I am told, at least in part by personal excesses.  Just this past week or two, one writer named Sam the greatest filmmaker of all time.  That , of course, glibly dismisses Ford, Welles, Wyler, Wilder, Capra, Chaplin, Griffith, Bergman, Ray, Kurosawa, Fellini, and a host of other Masters, but Sam unarguably left an indelible mark on cinema.  I remember feeling shock and sadness when the media reported his death.  I remember the conversation soon afterward with our USC classmate Nancy Galloway who on occasion worked alongside Sam as his personal secretary in his filmmaking years, who simply said, "What a waste."

DUSTIN: I'd be filled with remorse if I didn't ask you about Phantasm V. Would you reprise the character again and what was your impression of last year's cast reading?

ANGUS: If I did the Tall Man once more, I think I'd like to make him darker and scarier again.  Seems to me he softened up a bit in the last episode  I'm quite happy though with the existing quartet of  films as a complete and final entity.  As for the table reading, mum's the word. It was supposed to be a secret.  I will say the script was almost pure Stephen Romano and it's always fascinating to read the words that emanate from that corruscatingly brilliant mind, especially  with Don Coscarelli's own shrewdly masterful input.   Always great too to be reunited with so many "Phantasm" series cohorts.  And Don's wife Shelley catered a lavish spread of tantalizing munchies of all kinds we nibbled at throughout the day.  Now, not another word.

DUSTIN: It was supposed to be a secret, eh? There are far too many secrets behind the scenes of Phantasm. Surely you could divulge one or two of them here for us now, couldn't you? Maybe one from years ago?

ANGUS: By now, Dustin, you've interviewed enough "Phantasm" folks to know how ingenuously transparent we all are.  If there were any secrets that should have remained confidential, they've all been gleefully blurted out by one or another of us long since.   The only secrets I own are personal ones buried deep within my own dark psyche and shall remain locked permanently away.

DUSTIN: Fair enough! I understand you've been busy recently with roles in a number of pictures. What can we expect to see you in soon?

ANGUS: I had the fun this past summer doing four projects back to back.  My tax preparer's son Shant Hamassian invited me to voice a leading character in a comic cartoon he created called "Spaceman on Earth."  Shant's previous film "The Slowww Zombie" was a live action riot  (screened in the short subjects division at Cannes), so I jumped at the chance.  In June I did back to back roles in New York in two films under Larry Fessenden's Glass Eye Pix aegis.  The first was Dr. Quint, purchaser of corpses, in Irish writer-director Glenn McQuaid's "I Sell the Dead," about graverobbing in late 19th Century Ireland which stars Fessenden, Dominic Monaghan and that powerful cinematic presence Ron Perlman.

The second was televangelist Michael Gabriel in "Satan Hates You," a combustibly original film from that unpredictable auteur James Felix McKenney for whose Monster Pants company I earlier did "The Off Season" and "Automatons" (the latter on Facets DVD as of January 29, '08).   In July the Arizona-based filmmaker Patrick Roddy, who is also a cinema prof at the U. of Arizona in Tucson, asked me to do a cameo in his feature "Red 71."  The role was a coroner.  Out of deference to preserving the Tall Man's image intact, as well as an ironclad determination to avoid typecasting, I have for years rejected all offers to play any sort of mortician in anybody else's film.  But Patrick's first feature "Mercy" blew me away, "Red 71" is a film noir about murder in a small. hot desert town, and the coroner is a deadpan, slapstick figure who is the story's only comic relief, so it was irresistible.  The lead is a young Chinese-American actor of striking screen presence reminiscent of Warner Oland, Victor Buono, or Laird Cregar whose name is Nathan Ginn.  Can't wait to see the finished films!