Toomas Losin: The characters in Angel are one of the important things that make the film work for me. I thought that they were all very well played. The actors were very well cast and, more importantly, the characters are believable. I'm not sure how casting works in the movies; as the director did you have final say over who was cast for each of the roles?
Robert O'Neil: Yeah, I did but it was a matter of getting name actors for the price that we could pay. So Sandy [Howard, executive producer] made a deal and got Cliff Gorman. I knew his work a little bit, not a lot, but you know he was a New York actor?
Right, I've seen a few of his movies.
Yeah, I liked him a lot. We originally had somebody else in mind — I can't remember who it was — for Mae, and then Dick Shawn came along and I jumped on that. Susan Tyrrell, they showed me some film and I saw how outrageous she was, and I said yeah, yeah, she's fine. I don't remember how we found Donna Wilkes but when she read I said "that's it".
I'm interested in how she acted in the movie, or how she was directed, because she had done a couple of movies and Hello Larry for TV but was the least experienced actor going into Angel, and her performance was probably the strongest of her career.
Oh yeah, she was so... everything was on the surface with her. Her emotions were barely skin deep and I learned about a relationship that she had that had gone sour and she was dealing with that and it was really easy to push the buttons with her. She was a total "in the moment" actress. She had a method background and knew how to use it. She was just terrific to work with. Then I wrote Avenging Angel for her but her agent was asking an outrageous price and pissed Sandy off and he wouldn't even talk to them, and I ended up having to use Betsy Russell in Avenging Angel.
Each time I watch Avenging Angel I become more and more conscious of Betsy Russell's performance and it just doesn't feel right.
She did not have the vulnerability that Donna has.
Yes, exactly.
That's what was missing, you know. So Avenging Angel was not the film Angel was, unfortunately.
Yes, I felt there were good parts about Avenging Angel. There were parts that clicked. There were parts that worked, but the cast didn't have that same individualism or charisma.
Right. Dick Shawn was gone and the only ones that I could get back were Rory and Susan Tyrrell. And little Steve [Steven M. Porter] who played Yoyo, we got him back.
In an expanded role.
Yeah.
Avenging Angel has Ossie Davis playing one of the charactors. He's a fairly big name actor, how did you end up getting him?
Oh, I don't know. Sandy made a deal with him and then we had him for like two days. That's how you do it. You collect all their scenes together and you shoot it in one or two days.
Yeah, I guess that would make it easier and cost effective.
Right, Right. You pay him and then he works a day or two days.
How involved was Sandy Howard with the production?
Very! In Angel he was involved from the conception of the script. We gave him a treatment. What I was doing was a script called Vice Squad, and I had a buddy called Joe Cala who I used to meet with every morning and I'd update him on what I was doing. I wrote the [Vice Squad] script in an office over the Tiffany Theatre on Sunset Blvd, and I used to take my dinner breaks around six o'clock or so. I'd be cruising down Sunset Blvd and right across the street from Hollywood High I saw this girl in a white T-shirt and Levi's and she had a pack of Marlboro cigaretts rolled up in her short sleeve white T-shirt, hitch-hiking.
I saw her about three times, and I mentioned it to Joe and described it to him and then we started making up a fantasy life for her. I figured her to be about 14 years old and after, I don't know three or four weeks of talking about that, Joe came back to breakfast one morning with a couple of pages written out and a storyline. I said there's enough for a treatment here. We developed a few more pages of it and I gave it to Sandy Howard, not really thinking he would be interested and this was very near Christmas and I remember I was in the dining room with my wife having breakfast and he called me and this is literally, quote, what he said, he said: I'm sitting on the crapper reading your treatment.
[laughs]
And I though to myself, please Sandy, don't tell me what you're going to do with it.
[laughs]
He said I love it and we're gonna do it. He said I can sell this over the phone, and he did. That's what he did. He sold the treatment, the idea, the concept, over the phone to New World. That's just when Roger Corman had just sold New World and this was the first picture that they were going to do.
I've heard of that, that Angel was the first film made after New World was sold.
At any rate that's how that picture got started. Then Joe and I camped out on Hollywood Blvd literally night after night after night and we wrote it to the locations. In other words, usually you get a script and you find the locations but we wrote this script to the locations.
That's an interesting way of doing it. That's magic.
Yeah.
I felt that Hollywood Blvd itself was like a character in the movie.
Yeah! It was. The life of Hollywood Blvd, you bet it was! It pulsed through the movie. That was the idea.
Did you ever read the Villiage Voice review?
No.
Well try to get a copy of it because the Village Voice review nailed what our concept was. They were the only ones that ever got it. I wanted Hollywood Blvd to be the Yellow Brick Road. Angel was Dorothy, and Kit Carson and Mae and Susan Tyrrell were the Cowardly Lion, etc. That was the idea. That was the concept when we came up with it. We fantasized Hollywood Blvd.
With that explanation I can see the parallel because the characters, they're very diverse, they're very distinct, just like the Wizard of Oz characters are. Each is a unique individual.
Yeah, and Village Voice were the only reviewers that ever got it.
I know where the exteriours of the apartment building were shot but I'm wondering about the interiours of the actual apartments.
What do you have for the exteriours?
It was an apartment building that was located on Las Palmas and...
Right. The interiour of that apartment was a set. We built the living room and the bedroom. The fight between [the killer and Mae] was in that bedroom.
So was this a set that was constructed in the apartment building?
No, it was constructed on a soundstage.
What do you remember about the police station?
It was in an industrial building that we rented somewhere. I can see the outdoors of it in my mind's eye but I can't remember where it was, but here in Los Angeles. It was an industrial building and we rented it and we redressed it.
The interiours and the exteriours of the police station, were those shot at the same physical location?
Yes, they were. Yeah, that was kind of a make-do situation. We got that location at the last minute and I learned that we only had, I don't know, four or five hours and we had to be out of there. Out of the inside at any rate. So I didn't have any chance to re-take anything, I mean I just shot it right off the hip.
Right, no margin for error in that situation.
None, none. No, that was not a happy day for me.
Yeah, I can imagine the pressure.
Yeah. Sandy did not want Billy to escape like that. He didn't believe it. He didn't believe that a guy could escape out of a police station. But, I told him, First Blood was just being released and I saw it. And I said yeah well this guy - y'now, nobody really knew Sly Stallone that much but I mean he'd done Rocky, I guess, but y'know he says "Aw, that's no good they won't buy that".
I guess it's all a matter of suspension of disbelief, right?
Yeah, that's what it is. Right, right.
I bought it.
Yeah, I did too. Yeah, Stallone sold it and, y'know, they took the time to sell it. I didn't... Sandy didn't give me the time to sell that. I just... Billy did his thing, shooting out the window and fell on the glass table and he was gone. Y'now.
Right. Well, it worked out well.
Yeah.
Was a lot of material for the movie dropped because of time constraints like that?
No, no, we shot the script. In fact there were a couple of extra scenes that were cut out but, you know, I don't know why. I don't know why the producer didn't want them in. Sandy made a mistake cutting them out; he realized it later.
What we saw on screen for Rory Calhoun's place was that it was in sort of a warehouse space where one corner was set up with his belongings.
That was a warehouse that was downtown. A loft. We built his living area in there. That's where [Kit] taught [Angel] how to shoot. We shot that in the loft. That was Rory's work, he went home with those pistols and practiced with them and repaired them and set them up and he really did that fast shooting that quickly. It was just amazing to do that with those old pistols. They were genuine .44 single-action Colts.
Oh wow, that's interesting to know.
I can tell you something else that was interesting. I was told that I couldn't use a dolly.
Oh really!
Ok, I could use a dolly but I could not lay any dolly track. It wasn't in the budget. They would not let me lay any dolly track, so none of that material was brought in the equipment truck. So what we did is we did a jerry-rig on a wheelchair. They've done wheelchairs before with a cameraman sitting in the wheelchair and holding a camera but we built a jerry-rig affair that suspended a little 400 foot magazine camera. An Arri camera suspended on bungee cords. So in effect what we had was a jerry-rigged steadycam. It was actually better than a dolly. All those tracking shots that you saw on Hollywood Blvd, on the pavement and everything, that was all done with that Mickey Mouse steadycam that we built on a big wheelchair.
Oh that's interesting. I guess that's what you have to sometimes.
Yeah, so I got more dolly shots on Angel than I did Avenging Angel. And in Avenging Angel he [Sandy Howard] gave me a dolly and dolly track.
[Chuckles]
How about the school counselor's office?
That was shot at the school. At the [Harvard-Westlake] School in Coldwater Canyon, and that office was shot in the school. Also, for your information, that was the very first scene shot. We just redressed the office, and when Sandy Howard saw that in the dailies he flipped! He knew he had a picture.
That morning I had Sandy Howard and all of the New World executives standing around with their arms folded watching me, because, although I had directed several pictures before Angel: Wonder Women, Paco, and a couple of others, but those people didn't know me at all. I was being tested that morning. That first shot I was being tested.
Andy Davis and I did a picture together. We did Paco together in Colombia, so he and I knew each other very well, and in my mind I used to call him God because he created light where there wasn't any, and the lighting in Angel for a low budget picture is extraordinary.
Indeed! Especially the boulevard.
There's one mysterious location which only showed up for a couple of scenes here or there, and that was the Killer's apartment. We see him working out once or twice, or looking out the window.
That was some kind of a commercial office or place on Hollywood Blvd. That was another scene that Sandy Howard flipped over because I had him in that galvanized wash tub and I told Andy, I said "just give me all red light". Everything has got a red tint to it.
What he was doing was washing the blood off of his body. He's trying to scrub himself clean and it wasn't possible for him to do that.
Right, that was a beautiful use of colour in that scene.
That opening shot on Angel, where it's very early in the morning. That's a long-lens shot, that's a 1000 mm lens, and we shot it from this Japanese restaurant up above Franklin Blvd.
Yeah, the Yamashiro restaurant.
Yeah, part of that was shot there and then we went down to the highest point on [Hollywood Blvd] and shot the rest of that stuff there. And then that night we borrowed a friend's convertable, a cadillac convertible, put the top down, put the camera on the convertable and went way down to the east end of Hollywood Blvd around Western or something like that and cruised in that heavy, heavy traffic. That was incredibly heavy traffic with that 1000 mm lens picking up shots, and those shots are what we just intercut into the whole beginning of Angel.
I found the places where those long shots were shot from. It was a really cool feeling to stand at that point on Hollywood Blvd and see what it really looked like to the eye rather than what the long lens would show looking down the street. That's something that, I don't know, I got some sense of a reward out of seeing just where those had been shot from and how they had turned out on film.
Yeah, it was a challenge to do that. We shot that film in 20 days.
Yeah I heard that there was a short shooting schedule.
Yeah, virtually half of those 20 days was on Hollywood Blvd. and Hollywood Blvd was a zoo. The other problem we had with Hollywood Blvd was that, at night, we never realized this but the sidewalks roll up after 9:00 or 9:30 at night. You don't have that heavy traffic, the pedestrian traffic, so we had to use extras!
I think the traffic there is more or less what, business traffic or tourist traffic? Which is daytime hours.
At nighttime, 9 o'clock. Night is what we wanted because night was the look, it would look better. And I had to get everything between 6 o'clock and 9 o'clock because after 9'oclock all those iron gates closed up in front of the stores, and it changed the whole look!
Right I've noticed an increase in the like over the last twenty years I've noticed that there are more gates, more gratings, more of that sort of thing have shown up. Not sure why but that did prevent me from visiting some of the locations there. I could see where they were but I couldn't actually go there and visit them.
Yeah.
Like that alley behind Miceli's. It's got a gate on it now. That alley's blocked off.
Yeah, right. The foot chase down Hollywood Blvd. We used the north side of the street sometimes then we'd use the south side of the street sometimes, but for part of that foot chase we used Las Palmas, the other side [across from Miceli's] where the newspaper stand was, and the rest of that foot chase was on Hollywood Blvd.
I thought there was some masterful editing in parts of that chase sequence because there was a lamp standard that Donna Wilkes walked past three or four times and it shows up in the movie three or four times but you don't notice it unless you're looking for it.
Yeah, yeah. I've always thought that foot chases were more exciting because... I don't know if you've seen Wonder Women, but that long foot chase I had in Wonder Women, in Manila, is how I learned to do that.
I've not seen Wonder Women but it's on my list. [I've since seen the movie. Go rent it! It's less polished than Angel but more exuberant filmmaking]
Yeah, you might pick it up in a video store, called The Deadly and the Beautiful.
I noticed that at least one of the crowd scenes was shot with two cameras because both angles from the same take made it into the movie. Was it the rule to shoot a low-budget movie like this with two cameras?
I did it all through there. I did it all through. The difference was that we shot it with an Arri, an Arri 35mm that had a 400 foot mag, and so we were able to get through those.
Yeah, I did it every chance I got. I used two cameras every chance I got. Almost all scenes with Dick Shawn because I couldn't get him to do a scene the same way twice. With him it was like catching lightning in a bottle. I learned that the first day of shooting with him. So every time, most of the time, maybe not every time, but the majority of the time where he had dialogue we shot him with two cameras.
So was his dialogue largely improvised?
No, but he changed dialogue. He would change it, y'know. It wasn't improvised. It was written but he would ad-lib or he would change it or he would reverse lines. Things like that but I didn't want to stop it because he was so organic, he was so natural that it was always, always so real. So I said we'll work with what we got, once I learned to do that. So his scenes, any scene that he's in were shot with two sound cameras. Some of the acting scenes were shot with one sound camera and one MOS camera, y'know no sound camera.
Right.
I remember, he said something that it just wasn't easy for him to do that. Y'now, on the first day of shooting with him I learned that and then we solved it by using two cameras. We didn't have time to argue or didn't have time to do that many retakes. The easy way to do it was to shoot with two cameras.
There's a scene, or a whole sequence, I suppose, that might possibly have been cut. We start off one scene with Donna Wilkes sitting talking with Dick Shawn and Rory Calhoun about going to the morgue. To rescue Lana, or words to that effect.
Yeah, to get her body.
The movie then cuts to the police station where Cliff Gorman ends up lecturing them for trying to claim the body. Was there a sequence in there that was written and not filmed or was it filmed and then ended up cut?
I don't think so. No, we just used a cinematic short-cut there.
There was a sequence in the sequel which I though might have been a rewrite of that "missing" sequence. In Avenging Angel they go to the sanitarium where they rescue Kit.
Yeah, right.
It seems that that sequence was sort of written as if it could have been taken from where that cut was in Angel.
No, that was just the accident of the same two writers writing the same two screenplays. We just wanted to do crazy stuff in that sanitarium, some of it worked and some of it didn't.
Yeah.
I mean like the guy fishing in the tub. That kind of stuff.
Yes, in Avenging Angel some of the comedy was a little bit over the top...
Yeah.
...but in Angel I found that the comedic touch or the comedy relief dovetailed beautifully and it worked for the picture.
Yeah.
There's a funny sequence where Rory Calhoun is threatening a lawyer for trying to get him to go to a retirement home. Y'now he's got the six-gun out and he's basically threatening the lawyer, and Mae explains that the lawyer is the executer of his estate. That scene was telling me that Kit must have money somewhere, and so he doesn't really need to be on the street. It's not where he has to be, it's just that he's there because he likes it.
That's right.
That's the impression I took from that scene.
That's right. In the outline we wanted to use more stuff with Kit but Sandy held me back. I wanted to do more with Kit Carson, that's right.
One of the really interesting things is the ending of the movie. When I first saw it back in 1984 I saw it on pay-TV and I saw the edit which had the ending where Andrews becomes Angel's guardian and she ends up living with his parents.
Yeah.
What I thought after seeing that ending was that it was a nice ending to the movie, it closed some loose plot threads, or at least it was a nice closure to the movie.
Right. It was written as an epilogue and we shot it. I don't remember if it's in the feature release or not.
No.
But we did write is as an epilogue. The DVD doesn't have it?
It does not have it!
It ends in the alley right. They're walking out of the alley. Correct?
Out of the alley into the darkness and then we get the credits.
But in TV they were in a car driving. Right.
Driving in the car and then walking up to his parent's home.
I'd forgotten all about that.
Do you remember if that ending, was it all shot at the same time as the rest of the movie or was there some feedback where people weren't happy with the alley ending?
No, that was shot. There was no post-production done with... Well, I take that back. We did all of those opening credits and those really super-long lens and from Hollywood Blvd just west of La Brea where the hill is. We shot that and then we went down to Western and we were in a Cadillac convertible with the top down and it was Labour Day weekend. We cruised that street all night long taking those shots. That was the only - the film had been cut together then - that was the only post-production shooting that we ever did.
Oh, ok, so that stuff was shot at the end of the...
On Labour Day weekend. The rest of the movie was shot in four five-day weeks with two half-day Saturdays.
I was wondering about what the spread of the shooting had been like because when I looked at the movies that were playing at the many theatres that one can see on the boulevard, they were all released around July and August of 1983. I was wondering how tightly had the shooting been done.
It was very tight. I shot the stuff on Hollywood Blvd, I don't remember whether it was seven, eight, nine nights, something like that. Remember I told you that we didn't know this until we started shooting but that Hollywood Blvd rolls the streets up like at nine o'clock, nine thirty.
Yup.
And so we, and it was shot in the summertime, so I had very little night time hours. It was a real problem, a real problem. And I had to create, with extras, the busy look of the scene and that kind of thing. Other times it worked great for the film-noir part of it where the streets were deserted.
Yeah, there's one beautiful sequence that has Angel, Mae, and Kit walking off into the background of the street.
Right, that's sort of a film-noir. Then it worked fine for me but the rest of the time, no. So it was a very tight schedule, it was just seven, eight, nine nights on Hollywood Blvd and then boom, boom, boom. So it was four five-day weeks, 18-hours a day, Monday through Friday, and two half-day Saturdays with no sound crew, just an MOS camera. They were pick up shots.
Right.
That was every other Saturday so that we could determine in those two weeks previously what was missing and grab them in some way.
Right, was the movie being edited together at the same time?
It wasn't edited then, the film wasn't really edited at that point but we had seen dailies so we could see that, well, there was a shot missing here and a shot missing there, that sort of thing.
The music used in the trailer doesn't sound like anything in the movie. The trailer's credits name Ken Lauber for music but the movie itself credits Craig Safan.
This again was Sandy. He chose the wrong guy for the music. I didn't want him, and he writes the music and some of it's laid in. I think it was used in the trailer and he realized the music sucked, so we hired Craig Safan and he did the music and it worked.
In Avenging Angel, Cliff Gorman's replacement didn't have anywhere near the impact that Cliff Gorman had.
No, he didn't. No, he didn't.
Did Gorman not want to do it?
I don't know. That was Sandy's doing. It was Sandy's doing that Donna didn't do the sequel and also that. Either Gorman wasn't available or he wanted too much money.
I didn't cast it. The guy that [replaced Gorman, Robert F. Lyons], I knew him and I recommended him, but Sandy's the one that hired him.
I see. Yeah, he didn't have the same sort of character, the same sort of presence...
No, I know.
...but it wasn't really a role that had much time in the movie. He was basically there to be killed.
He was killed in the shootout down in Chinatown, right.
When filming Avenging Angel was there more pressure to make it successful because the first movie was a success?
Yeah.
Was it a rushed production?
Yeah, it was rushed. It was a little bigger scale and the same money, so I had less money to spend, also less time. It was, if I remember correctly, Avenging Angel was three 6-day weeks. So I was cut off a couple of days.
Wow. Yeah, my assumption would have been that there would have been more time or more budget available for it.
And Peter Collister did not have the lighting capability that Andy Davis had.
What I noticed, yeah, about the first movie was that I liked the cinematography. I liked the lighting, it all seemed to work well, especially on the blvd.
Oh yeah, Peter didn't have that ability.
When I look at the sequel, I'm wondering why it is that it didn't work as well as the first one did when it's largely got the same creative team.
Yeah, it didn't have the total, the same set, it had the same... the writers and the director and that was it. And another thing, another problem, is that Sandy, when we were shooting Angel, he was in Africa.
Oh?
When we were shooting. He was in Africa when we were doing the post-production. So we were able to cut it together the way we wanted and he didn't come back in until the final mix, until the re-recording. In Avenging Angel he was sticking his nose in it all the time, every time I turned around I had to deal with him. But I don't want you to take it the wrong way, Sandy and I got along together great but you know he... if you could point out to him logically that something he wanted to do that wasn't right, he listened.
Ah! That's good.
You had to sway him logically, you couldn't just argue or scream or holler, or anything like that.
Right, it's good that he listened but it all takes time away from the production.
That's it.
One of the things I noticed a few weeks ago; I had a pleasant surprise when I looked at one of the web sites that has aerial photos of major cities. They'd done some photo updates which updated the photos of the school area. Much better lighting. So I was able to find a half-dozen or so school locations which I hadn't spotted earlier. The locations that I found were spread out all around the campus, is that the result of having access to the whole school to shoot there?
Yeah, we had pretty free access to it.
Hmm! I bet that came in handy. It gave you a whole lot of different locations to choose from.
Yeah, we did. In fact, our very first day of shooting, the first morning of shooting, was with Elaine Giftos. The scene between her and Angel in her office. That was the first shot filmed.
So was the shooting at the school the first block of shooting, or the first couple of days, or did you have to go back repeatedly, or would that be wasteful?
No, we shot whatever we needed there for that day and then we were gone. But the very first shot that we did, on the schedule, was that scene in Elaine Giftos' office, that was the very first shot, and then we were there all day long. The classroom with the male teacher, and the hallways, y'know, all that stuff.
But I remember the very first time we rolled cameras was on the scene between her and Elaine.
Yeah from what I see in the movie it's very hard to tell where that was shot.
We moved around that campus and took what we could that was convenient at the time. I know that there was a schedule for it.
I know the first shot was that one and I think the last, but I'm not certain, I think the last shot that we did that day was on the football field, in the bleachers.
We got away with murder when did those semi-nude scenes in a boys school.
Right. Yeah, I was actually wondering about that sort of thing. I'm assuming that the school saw the script before giving permission so they must have known that those scenes are going to be in there.
Then they may not have read it. I don't remember how we got those, but we did.
[laughs]
Do you remember if there were any classes in session while filming was going on, or...
Yes, yes there were some. I don't remember to what degree, if it was summer school or what, but there were some, yes. Especially all those background students which we had. Yeah, cause I don't think we hired extras for that.
There must have been some extras for some of the student scenes, like the crowd scenes, because I saw a mixture of boys and girls.
Yeah, true.
At that time it was a school for boys so I figured there weren't going to be any girls on campus.
Right.
There's one sequence where there's a possible cameo, at least that's how it seems to me from the way the scene was shot. This is the sequence where Andrews is goint to follow Angel to the school, and it begins in front of the Roosevelt Hotel. It's framed so the Chinese Theatre's in the background and Donna comes walking along and boards the school bus.
Uh hm.
But as she's walking towards the bus there's a person in the foreground which looks a lot like Lon Chaney, Jr. Of course it couldn't be him because he had already died.
Yeah, no.
But from the way that shot was filmed, it felt to me like a cameo but I have no clue who the person is.
Just some extra we grabbed. Somebody off the street. It was just a transition. I don't remember the character you're talking about but it had to be, it had to be somebody off the street we grabbed. Somebody who signed a release.
The producers were real sensitive about that, and anything that we shot, we had interns, PA's, personal assistants, that as soon as the shot was ended they'd run after people that were in it with release pads. They'd pay him a couple of dollars or a dollar. If they didn't pay him, and they didn't sign, then I couldn't use the shot.
I bet in a place like Hollywood Blvd if you're shooting at a busy time of day...
Oh yeah, I've got two, three people chasing people.
So I guess the shooting up at the school was much more controlled then shooting down on Hollywood Blvd.
Oh yeah, yeah. Shooting on Hollywood Blvd is guerilla style of shooting. You hide the camera. They don't even know it's going on. [Otherwise] people look into the camera. They're not actors.
That's right.
You told me about the inspiration for Angel, about seeing this young hooker on the street a couple of times. I was reading some press materials which had parts of the story and some details that I wanted to check with you to see if someone was making them up or whether they are actually true. What I was reading said that the hooker actually called herself Angel.
That was another girl. That wasn't the girl that I saw. That was another girl. She showed up on the set. Once out on Hollywood Blvd. Said she was Angel.
Ah, I see.
And she was a different girl. She wasn't as young.
What I read also said that she showed up on the set and hung around for a while, but that was a different person?
Yeah, the girl I saw was like 13 or 14 years old dressed in a white T-shirt, blue jeans, Levi's, and a pack of cigarettes rolled up in her arm. Right across the street from Hollywood High and she was hitchhiking. So we don't know if she was a hooker or not. We don't know that, and I saw her maybe twice, maybe three times at the most.
So you never actually met her or talked to her?
No. No, never stopped. Just saw her on Sunset Blvd right across from Hollywood High.
The sequence that I think is the creepiest one is the one where near the beginning of the movie Angel is riding around in the car with the vice cop, but she knows he's a cop. What's really creepy about that sequence is that we never find out, the audience never finds out, if the cop is on or off duty. So, if he's off duty then is he actually in the habit of going around and picking up underage hookers?
No, we played it that he was on duty. He was out to bust somebody and she saw through it. That was the whole idea. So did Mae at the end when she pulls over, gets out and Mae sees her.
Yeah. I thought that maybe you were being tricky and writing something in there that's a little bit subversive.
No, the intention was that he was out to bust somebody and she saw through it. It was to show how sharp she was. How street smart she was.
The movie doesn't have as much sleaziness to it as I would have expected say if the movie had been made in the 1970's as, well, as a 1970's exploitation movie. That sort of thing.
Yeah, right.
Was it a deliberate decision to tone that down.
That was primarly me. The idea was that when New World got the delivered print they had a movie about a 14, 15 year old hooker who never took her clothes off and never went to bed with anybody. On screen, that is. Yeah.
It's something that's easier to sell.
Yeah, they didn't know what to do at first and then somebody came up with that brilliant line: High school honour student by day, Hollywood hooker by night
Yes, that's a brilliant tag line.
One of the trailers shows you walking along the Blvd next to Donna. Do you remember if that was actually planned for the trailer or was that something that just happened.
I don't know. I've never seen that.
Oh, one of the trailers, the second trailer, shows a brief clip of maybe two or three seconds where you're walking along Hollywood Blvd, Donna's right next to you dressed up for school. That's all that we see. It's just a three second clip for the trailer but I was wondering about it because you're in it.
I don't recall. I don't recall ever having seen that.
It's on the DVD.
Ok, I'll take a look at it and see. I don't recall seeing it. That was somebody who just stole a shot while I was talking to her, I guess. We didn't stage that. We didn't stage that for a trailer. Yeah, I don't recall ever having staged anything for a trailer. Somebody rolled a shot while we were talking or something.
I've often wondered how Donna would have acted the role if she had been in Avenging Angel. Were you able to do any rewriting after Betsy Russell was cast or was it that you just had to go with what you had?
No. Originally Joe and I wrote it with Donna in mind. Betsy was attached at the very last minute and then we just went forward with her and any changes that were made in the script were made as we were in pre-production and didn't have anything to do with that, with the fact that Betsy was playing the role.
I see.
She just slipped in and played it. All of the rewrites were done before she was cast.
I read an interesting story in some press materials about Angel. There was a local motorcycle gang that ended up getting hired as extras to ensure their cooperation. At least that's what the story says. Is that what happened?
Well, to some degree that's true. We used guys on motorcycles in the picture at the end. I mean Rory Calhoun was on the back of one of them.
Yeah, in fact I wanted to ask about that. Was that actually Rory Calhoun on the bike or was there a double for him?
No, no, that was Rory.
It was! Oh that's cool. Was that written for him? Did he want to do that? I'm wondering how that came about.
It was in the script and we did it. He got on the back of the bike without a problem. So I don't know how many of those guys we hired but, three or four of them were hired, but not for security. I mean, we didn't need them for that. We moved too quickly for that. We moved around too fast.
That story in the press materials sounded a little bit too good to me. It sounded too much like someone was writing it up for promotion.
Yeah, I don't know where it came from. Hell, it might have come from me because when I worked on a picture called Psych-Out with Dick Rush, and Jack Nicholson was in it and Bruce Dern. We were up in San Francisco and they did hire the Hell's Angels because they were part of the picture and they did hire them to keep things orderly because there were other motorcycle gangs around.
That's a movie I haven't seen but it's on my list to check out when I have some time.
Well, it's a good movie. It's a great movie.
It's got a good cast.
On the corner of Las Palmas and Hollywood there was a restaurant called George's. I remember seeing George's when I was down there once or twice in the 80's. The exteriour of George's was visible in Angel, and then Avenging Angel has some dialogue about how George doesn't own George's anymore. Do you remember anything about that restaurant?
No. What was important on Las Palmas was Miceli's, that alley, and the newspaper stand across from Miceli's.
That's a really interesting location, that intersection. There seems to be a lot of movies with scenes filmed there.
Yeah.
It's hard to see that alley right now because when I was down there two years ago [2006] they'd gated off the alley a little ways inside so you can't walk it anymore or see what it looks like.
Yeah, right. Yeah.
So I was wondering about George's because there's a line of dialogue about George not owning it. One of my thoughts was if it had ever been owned by someone named George or was that just a name?
I don't know.
I have a technical question for you. One of the scenes was shot in, or apparently was shot, in the motel bathroom where Angel finds the body of one of the murder victims. It's a static shot. The camera isn't moving, it's showing the victim lying in the bottom of the shower stall.
Yeah, what's her name?
Was it Lana or Crystal?
Lana. Yeah, Lana.
What I thought was interesting about that scene was when it was finally printed the negative was flipped upside down so that it had a really interesting disorienting effect.
Yeah, correct.
So was that a deliberate decision to do that?
Yes. We wanted to distort it. There may have been other problems with what was on the edge of the negative, or something like that.
Ah, I see.
But I don't remember.
I was thinking about it because that was, I think, the bloodiest scene in the movie or at least it had a lot of impact...
Uh hmm.
...and I'm wondering if that was designed to somehow confuse the scene.
Yeah, part of that was. It was turned upside down but I think what motivated it was something on the negative. I don't remember.
Ok.
Y'now, something on the side of the negative or something like that. That we said, 'Ok, let's turn it upside down, it'll be more of a shock element anyway'. And it was a quick cut.
Yes, I agree that was a very effective thing to do with that. It certainly came out disorienting, kind of unreal.
As you know, one of the things I'm doing is trying to identify the filming locations. The poster has the two figures in the foreground and in the background it's got the buildings.
Yeah. That's the colour poster, right?
Yes
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The one that's in colour. I don't remember too much about that. I don't have that poster. The poster I have is the black and white one, which I love. The black and white one is the three main characters: Angel, Kit Carson, and Mae going down Hollywood Blvd and you just see their backs and she's skipping between them.
Right, yeah. That particular scene is one of the moments of the movie for me.
Yeah.
The dialogue that Donna had about talking about her character's father. That was one of the moments from the movie for me. But I didn't know that scene was done as a poster. I mean, I've seen it, but...
I thought it was a terrific poster but the marketing people went with the other one. I mean, they had that poster, the black and white one, printed in a couple of ads.
Right. That's how I've seen it. I have seen it in the form of an ad. I don't think I've seen in an actual poster, like a one-sheet or anything else.
I don't think it was made as a one sheet. Don Borchers had it blown up and gave it to me as a present. So I have like a 16x20 of it. I don't know if it was ever a poster.
I've read that Angel's budget was something like $3M
No, it was one million dollars. It was 20 days of shooting and 4 half-days of Saturdays. Four half-Saturdays. That was it. Oh yeah, and Andy and I went out and we got a guy to drive a Cadillac convertible that a friend of mine owned. We took the top down, rented a 1000 mm lens or a 2000 mm lens and on a Labour Day weekend we did that stuff that was on Hollywood Blvd. That was on Labour Day, otherwise it was 23 days and on Saturdays it was half-day with no sound, it was just a cameraman and me and the actors. And we just did drive-bys and pickups and that kind of stuff.
The principle photography, it was four five-day weeks, and it was a million bucks. We stayed on budget, we didn't go over budget. I think Avenging Angel, if I recall, I'm not certain if, I think it was one million one hundred thousand, but it was also a million dollar budget.
Yeah, I thought. I thought it did show a bit more of a budget.
Well, it doesn't matter now but at the time they didn't want anybody to know that, because it looked like a 3, 4, or 5 million dollar film.
Ah, so there's marketing involved!
Right, they didn't want anybody to know that only a million dollars was spent on that picture. No they touted it even higher sometimes than three million. I heard Sandy say one time, I think he told somebody that it was a $6M film. I don't remember. Yeah, something like that. Now it doesn't matter.
With budgets like that where does most of it go, is the biggest chunk for actors salaries, or what?
No, no, the biggest chunk of the budget on a low budget film goes below the line. Everybody else works for minimum.
Ok, so what sort of things are below the line?
Everything, everything with the exception of writing, directing, actors, and the producing staff. Everything else is below the line.
Ok, and that's where the bulk of the budget ends up going.
Oh sure. Yeah. On low budget films most of the money goes below the line. The cost to shoot the movie, and the cost to do the post-production and the technical.
You mentioned that Avenging Angel had much more of a rushed filming than Angel did. Did that lead to things like material having to be dropped from the script because there wasn't time to film it?
Oh, sometimes it was that way. If things got held up in production and I had to do a song and dance and shoot around it. Yeah, that happened in both of them, all the time.
Ah, I see.
The idea was to come in on schedule; on budget and on schedule.
Right, those are the priorites. They're more important.
Yeah, it's scheduled for 20 days of shooting and that was it. You got everything you could in 20 days, period.
Right.
At the end of the day if you don't have it all in the camera you had to figure out another way to get around that.