Alex Winter is best known for starring alongside Keanu Reeves in two very successful Bill and Ted movies. But before that, he spent several years on the stage alongside thespians such as Yul Brynner before getting his break in the dreadful vampire ‘comedy’ The Lost Boys (Winter describes his role as “a wardrobe prop with fangs”). Since then, Winter has made a series for MTV, directed more pop promos for cult bands than Richard Stanley, wrote, starred in and co-directed the mutant human comedy ‘Freaked’, and has been responsible for several UK National Lottery TV ads(!). Rob Dyer met Alex in the London office of his production company and chatted about the more esoteric parts of his work and his love of comedy and cartoons…

You’ve done some work for Jim Thirwell’s band Foetus.
Yeah, Jim’s a good friend of mine. Yeah, I did his record cover which they totally screwed up.

You did the sleeve photography?
Yeah. The newest one (album), it’s called ‘Gash’, it’s just come out. He hasn’t done one in eight years I don’t think, and I did the video. The Foetus one is really fun. That video’s a lot of fun. It’s three minutes long and has 4,000 edits!

So how long did it take to edit?
Two days – it was incredible how fast we jammed that one out, once we got into the rhythm. But it’s a lot of single frame intercuts, so it’s sort of like being beat up in an alleyway [Laughs]. Yeah, Jim’s great and it was a lot of fun to do that vid.

I understand you’ve also worked with Tim Simenon of ‘Bomb the Bass’.
I dragged him all over the world actually. Yeah. I took him to Morocco and the jungle in Belize. It was great to work with Tim because of the type of band Bomb the Bass is. It’s not one of these ‘sell the band’ type of videos. So you can really do something interesting filmicly, because it’s not all about seeing someone with their shirt off in a garage pounding out the chords! For me, that’s what’s great about videos, is the cinematic experimenting you can do. There’s no other medium I can think of where you can go completely into your own head as a filmmaker and try things out. I haven’t had that kind of freedom since film school.

You directed some of the National Lottery TV adverts, which ones?
I did a bunch. My favourite National Lottery commercial I’ve done is a business man walking down an office corridor, he’s scratching his Instants card and doesn’t notice that he falls right down the stairs. He falls down an entire office lock, 40 flights of stairs – it’s really violent too! But he doesn’t pay any attention because he’s scratching his card. Then I did two Littlewoods pools ads. They were just 10 second numbers, incredibly fast – a bank manager polishing this guys shoes is one of them and the other was a silly bit of vaudeville business, but they’re all really kinetic, fast, blindly quick ads.

Do you think your affection for cartoons comes out in these?
Oh yeah, definitely. My general feeling towards anything is… [pauses], the kind of drama I like is extreme drama. The kind of comedy I like is extreme comedy. You know, I’m not going to truck off to see Boomerang or some boring Hollywood mainstream comedy. I like them to be pretty extreme. The old cartoons were amazing. They were so innovative, and the way they used rhythm and the way they paced their jokes was just so fantastic.

What about the old school of comedians?
Keaton’s my favourite and the Three Stooges definitely, especially in Freaked, there’s a lot of Stooges gags in that. I even like Abbott and Costello, which I know is a real no-no. Python, Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and all that stuff. Again, it was all these people who, on one level or another, were quite extreme.

What about Laurel and Hardy?
A lot of people are huge Laurel and Hardy fans, especially over here [in the UK]. I just haven’t seen many of them. It’s one of those things. I should just spend a day watching Laurel and Hardy movies. Pete Hewitt [director] kept talking about Laurel and Hardy all the time when we were making ‘Bill & Ted 2’ and I was like, “Pete, I’ve maybe seen one Laurel and Hardy!”. They made no impression on me at all when I was a little kid. I’ve got to check it out. I’m sure I’d like it. I’m not the biggest Chaplin fan because I always found Chaplin to be a bit melodramatic and I prefer to have more kinetic, dynamic energy to it. I always wanted a piano to fall on the old tramp [laughs].

There was a newspaper report which said that people were spending money on the national lottery rather than go to the cinema. So it could be said you are helping to bring down cinema attendances.
To be honest with you, as bad as movies are these days, I think I’m probably doing everybody a favour. If they don’t go trundling off to see ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’ and spend their money [on the lottery] instead then I’ve probably saved them from intense boredom. If anything, maybe that’s a call to the film industry to start making better films so people won’t do that!

I scribble a few notes about my dream. I was squatting on a hillside, having climbed through steep woodland, at the bottom of which I had left my son in the park. He was playing on the roundabout, in the care of some-one whom I could recall neither in the dream nor now during the note-scribbling. I watched the gliders taking off and landing on a raised airstrip across the valley. Each soared into the sky like an angel in splints, crested the thermals, dropped the winch-line and circled over the model town below.

My notes fail to cover the precise nature of the town and are very sketchy concerning the duration in dream time – hut, in writing the notes, new visions come, ideas for future dreams and undercurrents of old forgotten dreams which will otherwise never see the light of day.

The sky gradually filled with gliders, sunlight sparkling on their wings like loose stars on a clear night. I was strangely unhorrified to see two gliders collide and cartwheel down.

That was when I woke – or so the notes tell me. I am concerned about my son whom I apparently abandoned ill-attended in the park. My own real life children are now too old for such worries.

I look across at my wife who knits in front of the gas fire. But it is not my wife at all. I study my notes for clarification – for comfort – for some clue as to whether I am now embroiled in a new dream-without the prior warning of falling asleep. The woman masquerading as my wife seems to knit her own brain as it coils from the spindle of her revolving ear. The white glistening wormthread is clotted with headblood. The finished product of the extrusion flows over her lap and becomes the yellow grid of the gas fire,the blue flames of which flare ever upward along the wormthread. She smiles and says: `Time for bed’. I cannot remember the exact words, nor do the notes help, since they are merely marks on the paper in a language too sculptural for translation.

A paper aeroplane skims past my nose, obviously constructed and launched by the creature with the brain-knitting. She stares imbecilically with one smile on two quivering lips. The dart glided into the next dream, where he still squatted on the familiar hillside, and plummeted with a crumple to his feet. He picked it up and read the message: ‘Your son has a broken back – unless you hurry down.’

Some gliders still hung in the sky, hovering like silver dragons, so close he could actually see the dream aviators, smiling, waving – at him.

The distant airstrip bore the glistening groundling craft and, men as small as insects, careered hither and thither, busy rewinding the various winches into the shape of a childhood cat’s-cradle game. An arc of a new moon rose early above the activity.

He felt compelled to hurry down to the park – he had ignored the message on the origami dart for at least an hour of dream time.

But he woke before he could start down the wooded slope – which he was suddenly desperate to descend, since he dreaded that whom he most loved in the real world was in dire danger. The child who was the man.

The utter frustration of pulling out of a dream too early was like not pulling out of a dive early enough.

The sky was below; the ground above. He soared speedily towards a small child whose weight was being tested on a see-saw by a strange woman wearing what appeared, at this distance, to be a red felt hat. Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin.

`Fairie-tale Theater’ is the collective name given to a series of 50-minute films I produced by Shelley Duvall, inspired by the classic stories from the Brothers Grimm and others. The project was a long-standing interest of Duvall’s, who had been collecting illustrated volumes of the tales since she was a teenager. Some 20 episodes were made between 1982 and 1984, and their major strength was the high-profile actors attracted to the projects: from Robin Williams to Elliott Gould, virtually every one has a star or two headlining.

Sometimes, this doesn’t quite come off. Mary Steenburgen as tittle Red Riding Hood’ is at least a decade too old for the role — though having said that, Emmanuelle Beart recently took it on in a French TV adaptation. But when the casting does click, the effect is startling, leaving you to wonder why , no-one thought of it before. Pee-Wee Herman as Pinocchio? Vanessa Redgrave as an evil stepmother? Inspired stuff. The actors who come off best are those who tend towards the “over” end of the dramatic male, since fairy tales provide much scope for scenery-chewing in one form or another, with subtlety and understatement negative influences. This lifts the show way out of the humdrum, and there are some truly great performances.

With such, presumably expensive, stars, it’s surprising how often the show comes across as having the production values of a pomo flick. Most obviously, some of the optical effects would have been rejected by `Blake’s 7′, and ‘few boast cast-lists which stretch to double figures, The stories are also shot on video, and even the outdoor scenes are mostly filmed on sets, but this does generate a faintly surreal air which doesn’t seem out of place — the Japanese anthology film ‘Kwaidan’ adopted a similar approach for its ghost-stories.

There’s little skimping on the icky bits, though TV constraints naturally preclude overt grue. The tales are straightforward, generally accurate to Grimm, have satisfactorily few Disney-style concessions and no gratuitous ‘Little Mermaid’ happy-endings. The best have tongue slightly in cheek, enough to keep adults interested without sacrificing child-like charm. Not all manage: some, such as ‘Sleeping Beauty’ are just too po-faced for their own good (prince Christopher Reeve could presumably now relate rather well to someone in a coma…). And at the other end? ‘Jack the Giant Killer’ with a Jewish giant. Oy-veh, and similar Yiddish exclamations…

Beauty and the Beast (Roger Vadim) – Mercifully free of dancing clocks and Tim Rice, instead this adaptation is obviously, and heavily, influenced by Jean Cocteau’s version. At first, it’s disconcerting to see Susan Sarandon as Beauty since from a 1996 viewpoint, she would not seem an obvious choice for the role, shall we say. But she certainly takes the right approach, giving the heroine both strength and vulnerability. The beast is Klaus Kinski, who plays it in Nosferatu mode – same fangs, just much more hair – which is still rather appropriate. Obviously set-bound, the look is subdued, though this may be deliberate, to give the actors full rein. While they are entirely satisfactory, the main problem is running time: condensing the story into the allotted time means large swathes are of necessity hacked out. This leaves, for example, Beauty’s sisters (one of whom is Anjelica Huston) all but superfluous. and the ending seems terribly rushed, failing to tie up loose ends at all. Not all fairy tales fit nicely into a 50-minute format.

The Boy Who Left Home to Find Out About the Shivers (Graeme Clifford) – Probably the best cast of the lot, with Christopher Lee, Vincent Price, David Warner and Frank Zappa (as a hunchback mute). Not a story I know, the title says it all: a boy wants to know what fear is like. He gets the chance when local king Vladimir (Lee) needs his castle cleared of ghosts, offering the usual kingdom/treasure/princess thing in exchange. [Trivia note: princess Dana Hill voiced Jerry in the abominable Tom and Jerry: the Movie!) Hero Peter MacNicol is sympathetic without being wimpy, somewhat like a young Billy Crystal, while Warner and Lee dead-pan admirably. Highlights include zombie bowling – skull for a ball, bones for pins – and a couple of nice twists at the end. Set designs are based on Durer and Albrecht, it plays She something Tim Burton might have knocked up, though perhaps more telling is that director Clifford was editor on Rocky Horror! Best line: “When I was a boy, all 1 wanted to do was think of naked Greek statues…”!

Hansel and Gretel (James Crawley) – How can a starving family afford to keep their offspring surgically well-scrubbed? Precisely what caused the death of the evil stepmother? And how is it connected with the new patio? Ok, forget the last one, but this barnstorming version features Joan Collins as both wicked witch acid a stepmother so evil she thinks nothing of stealing bread from her kids. The plot needs no resume and is all here: gingerbread house; tome-fed children, etc., etc. Definitely skirting round the boundaries of good taste, especially a Collins rant On witch mode) about the joys of eating young flesh..Needless to say, it all ends happily ever after, though as mentioned at the start too many open questions are left unanswered — expect a ‘Rough Justice’ documentary soon, proving that the wicked witch was innocent…

Little Red Riding Hood (Graeme Clifford) – Doo Bee Doo Doo… Malcolm McDowell’s casting as the wolf was presumably influenced by his then-recent appearance in ‘Cat People’ (at the risk of repeating myself, it’s the same fangs, just much more hair…), but is actually far closer to Clockwork Alex; any second you expect him to shout “Viddy well, my brothers” and leap on top of Granny. He doesn’t, though it is nice to see the wolf portrayed with some intelligence. The psycho-sexual aspects of the tale explored in ‘The Company of Wolves’ are also more present than anticipated, even if Mary Steenburgen plays Mu Hood as more Jewish princess than innocent teenager. Indeed, few characters are quite what you expect, with even Granny displaying an aggressive streak unusual for a senior citizen. It’s all most enjoyably warped.

The Nightingale (Ivan Parser) – Again, in this one the original story is basically unfamiliar, to I’m unable to comment on whether liberties have been taken. It’s about the Emperor of Cathay, who discovers that a clockwork nightingale (made in Japan — read into that what you will) is no substitute for the real thing. Given the setting, the cast are an odd mix of Western and Asian, led by Mick Jagger as the Emperor, who delivers a suitably dissolute performance. It appears to be more targeted at “mature viewers” with a bizarre nightmare sequence in which Death cornet for the Emperor, that as far as Jagger-tums go, appears to be straight out of the ‘Perforrnance’ book of weird. The production values are comparatively lavish, save the titular feathered critter which signally fails to be remotely convincing. This aside, it’s well told, providing dimension to a charming story, and on occasion is genuinely effective. The above are just a sample of the delights on offer, opposite is a list of the titles of which I’m personally aware. To follow up, Shelley Duvall also produced ‘Tall Tales Legends’, which concentrated on American folk-tales and history. The casts were just as impressive, for example Jamie Lee Curtis as Annie Oakley, in a story that features 1903 footage of Oakley shot by Thomas Edison. As kid-TV goes, just slightly better than the moronic Trev and Simon…

Shelley-ography

Very few series succeed in generating the sort of mass fan hysteria seen so quickly with regard to ‘The X Files’. Even ‘Star Trek’ took a relatively long while to build up a cult following, but within two seasons, Chris Carter’s baby acquired a horde of rabid, devoted fans, the “X-philes”, endlessly poring over fine details of the show, down to the colour of Dana Scully’s underwear. But is the show worth it? Frankly, no. It may be the best thing on American television, but that’s scarcely saying much. And while there have undeniably been memorable episodes (The Erlenmeyer Flask, E.B.E.), the vast majority are far more forgettable, with some pure dreck.

Let’s take a look at one such, possibly the worst to date, ‘3’, dealing with a group of modern-day vampires, which showcased some of the major weaknesses in the series. This was the first episode after Dana Scully’s abduction which, as any sad bastard will tell you, was caused by her pregnancy. The producers had to spend several shows trying to conceal it, with amusing, escalating desperation: first, baggy clothes; then, only close-ups; and finally, she had to remain stationary, her walk presumably too much of a waddle. This ludicrous farce eventually ended, though one can imagine Chris Carter’s anguished squeal as they wheeled her into the delivery room: “Come back, Gillian, we’ve still got five scenes to shoot!”. It’s understandable why they kept her on; the relationship between the two agents is the show’s strongest element. In ‘3’, and indeed most of the partner-less episodes, Mulder flails around like a landed fish, operating in a vacuum when no-one says “But surely there must be a rational explanation for all this”.

At least Mulder’s solo pursuits made a nice change [though the series’ heavy debt to ‘Kolchak’ was clear]. The series has been remarkable for sheer predictability, the majority of episodes follow a single form: Scully and Mulder investigate something; he comes up with a way-out theory, she doesn’t believe it, but he is inevitably shown to be right. With this hyper-natural ability to solve cases, you wonder why the FBI have him looking at Forteana. Give the man a week, he could probably catch every serial killer going. It would be nice, just once, to have a prosaic explanation. For instance, researchers estimate at least 95% of UFO’s are misidentifications of normal objects, so you think Mulder would stumble across J.Allen Hynek’s “swamp gas” now and again. The other series cliché is the final five minutes: the evidence will be lost, destroyed, stolen, bent, torn or mutilated, and Mulder has no proof of what happened. It strains credulity way past breaking point.

The vampire episode was a perfect example, albeit with a sceptical LA cop replacing Anderson’s sceptical FBI agent. The finale has the blood-suckers conveniently incinerated —  what a surprise. The only unexpected twist was that we didn’t get the near-compulsory torch-lit forest ramble, and the most entertainment was watching the struggle to make a small fragment of Canada look like Los Angeles. [In the earlier episode allegedly set at the Arecibo telescope, all the signs had ‘Puerto Rico’ at the bottom — a touchingly naive attempt to convince us it wasn’t just the same coniferous woodland with a tape of tropical insect noise added].

Our vampire episode also demonstrated the tendency for the series to seek “inspiration” from classic SF/horror films; anyone who’s seen ‘Near Dark’ will have spotted bits of the film poking out. One vampire was even a Kiefer Sutherland look-alike! This fondness for homage is frequent, notably in ‘Ice’, with an alien life-form insidiously taking over a polar base, a cast member at a time, and no-one knows who is infected. Er, John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’? Right down to one victim being a dog, just without the stunning FX which made the movie so memorable. In comparison, The X Files were pallid, and toned-down for TV in every way.

Perhaps the poorest section in ‘3’ had Mulder discovering an ink stamp from a club on the skin of a dead vampire. He went along to the “wittily” named Club Tepes (as in Vlad Tepes, a.k.a. Vlad the Impaler, a.k.a. Dracula, hoho), where the music was nice ‘n’ quiet — mustn’t interfere with the dialogue — and at the same volume regardless of where he was in the establishment. Have these guys ever been to a night-club? Wheel on the tired Goth clichés, and lo, the first person Mulder talks to, happens to be the episode heroine. Having a character called “Spooky” apparently lets you get away with any ridiculous plot twist you want to foist on the audience.

This failure to get details right pervades whole episodes; one involving a malevolent computer provoked hoots of derision here for its wildly inaccurate portrayal of technology, harking back to bad 60’s thrillers. Makes you wonder just how much bull they spew with respect to the fields of parapsychology and UFO research. Basically, Carter and team can cook up anything they want to, and do — I imagine many viewers now think the New Jersey Devil looks like Daryl Hannah did in ‘Clan of the Cave Bear’, a cutely smudged wild-girl.

I admit the show has strengths. It’s nice to see paranoia and it’s adherents, portrayed in a good light, and labyrinthine, tenticular government has never been so well demonstrated. Plus the in-jokes are amusing [I’ve heard rumours that Duchovny and Carter are big porn fans…]. But — for the real paranoiacs — is the whole thing a PR exercise for the FBI? It’s not the first such whitewashing by a long way; from ‘The Untouchables’ on, the FBI have been the bastion of truth, justice and the American way. Compare and contrast how the CIA are portrayed in the media: inevitably, scummy and hateful. David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson follow the Kyle McLachlan tradition of cuddly, lovable FBI agents. No-one would have qualms about letting them into any aspect of their lives. The X Files works, very nicely thank you, as propaganda for a police state.  Bear that in mind next time you watch it.

Pleasant dreams. And remember, The Truth Is Not There…   

[The Smoking Man]

Washington, DC – twelve hours before a massive, extensively-planned drug raid was to take place, the D.C. Department of Public and Assisted Housing issued a press release praising its role in the raid. Officials thus had to call off the operation, rendering practically useless eight months’ planning, co-ordination among four law-enforcement agencies, and a large number of arrest and search warrants obtained by thousands of hours of investigation, surveillance, and undercover drug buys. (Washington Post, 23-3-95]

A jury in Pensacola, Florida, awarded nearly $600,000 to Pedro Duran, 56, in his lawsuit against the CSX company. Duran lost his left arm and suffered a broken back and leg when a CSX train hit him as he lay on the tracks, passed out from a round of drinking. According to trial testimony, an engineer spotted what he thought was a lump of trash on the tracks and sounded the whistle as a precaution for 54 seconds before the collision. However, the “lump of trash” — Duran — didn’t move. (Orlando Sentinel-AP, 1-5-95]

The Army issued the Bronze Star for “meritorious achievement” to seven soldiers of the 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment firing (mistakenly) on stranded U.S. troops during the Persian Gulf war. The Army had originally awarded three of the men medals “with valour,” but revoked that distinction after criticism by the General Accounting Office. The medal-winning soldiers killed one American and wounded another before realising their mistake. (St. Petersburg Times-Washington Post, 5-5-95; Greensboro News & Record-AP, 16-4-95]

Judge Philip Mangones in Keene, New Hampshire, declared unconstitutional a drug-producing search of the dormitory rooms of two Keene State College students. The students consented to the search, and more than six ounces of marijuana was found, but the judge said that the men were too stoned to know what they were doing when they consented. [Exeter News-Letter, 3-3-96)

[A tip of the hat to Chuck Shepherd and News of the Weird, for many of these stories — see the editorial for details on how to order it]