3/5/24
Newsletter #565
The Crack of Dawn
Recently two movie directors, both of whom I knew, both in about my league, and both younger than me, died – Jeff Burr and Anthony Hickox. I didn’t know Tony Hickox at all, I just met him on location in Moab, Utah, where he was directing Mr. Bruce Campbell in the motion picture horror film, Sundown: the Vampire in Retreat (1991), with (get this cast), Bruce Campbell, David Carradine, Maxwell Caufield, Deborah Foreman, M. Emmet Walsh, John Ireland, and Bert Remsen. Anyway, Tony was British, and very pleasant and nice to me. I should have asked him about his mother, Anne V. Coates, who won an Oscar for editing Lawrence of Arabia, but it wasn’t the time or place. I did say hello to John Ireland and told him he was terrific in Spartacus (1960).
But I knew Jeff Burr pretty well for a long time. He bailed out on L.A. soon after I did. We’d both had enough. Jeff had a full film career and made a lot of movies – more than me – but he got ensnared in directing horror sequels – Stepfather 2, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3, Pumpkinhead 2, Puppet Master 4 and 5. That’s a lot. Plus, he wrote and directed about a dozen other movies that weren’t horror sequels, but he was typecast (and Hollywood loves to typecast) – he was the guy who made the low-budget horror sequels, then he couldn’t get hired for anything else.
Jeff just moved on. He was perennially happy and optimistic, which isn’t a common attitude in Hollywood. Also, unlike almost everybody in the movie business, Jeff Burr knew his movies. Jeff had seen shit loads of movies – all of the important ones, plus much shit – and he remembered them. I can’t express to you what a pleasure it was to talk movies with him. And unlike me, he loved almost every movie he had ever seen, for some reason.
Jeff made two indie features that were unlike the other movies. These films were his statements of identity, if I may be so bold. These films were to prove that he was more than a horror sequel director. First there was Eddie Presely (1992), which wasn’t really his because it was based on another guy’s one-man show. Then twelve years later he wrote and directed Straight into Darkness (2004).
I’ve written about Eddie Presley before, somewhat derisively (Jeff was alive then, avidly read this newsletter, and was amused) and I think it now makes me look like an asshole, but anyway. Eddie Presley was originally a one-man, one-act play that Jeff adapted into a 34-page screenplay. He gave it to me, and my comment was, “It’s too long. Cut it in half.” Wielding the powerful influence that I do, Jeff took the opposite approach and made a 106-minute feature out of it. When he asked me what I thought, I quoted Burt Lancaster’s comment to young John Frankenheimer, “You set up a great shot.” And Jeff did. His shot selection and framing were often extremely inventive and beautiful. He burst out laughing because he was obviously being damned with faint praise – which he was – and he never let me live it down. He would often say, “At least I set up a good shot,” and I would correct him, saying, “No, you set up a great shot.”
He really put his heart and soul into a World War II movie that he wrote and directed called Straight into Darkness (2004). Alas, though nicely produced on a severely low budget, it wasn’t very good and went directly into the enormous shit heap of movies out there, where most of my movies reside. I think when nobody gave a shit about that film, that’s when Jeff’s will was broken. My will had been broken three years earlier with If I Had a Hammer and I’d eventually ended up back in Detroit. Jeff went back to his hometown of Dalton, Georgia. He always did have just a hint of a Georgia lilt in his voice, sort of like Scarlett O’Hara.
Jeff slightly looked up to me because I was older than him, had gotten to Hollywood before him, and had made it a notch higher up the directorial ladder by getting into the Director’s Guild, which he never did. In 2009 at a painfully low-budget horror convention in Kentucky, at a crucial, early point in my drinking, Jeff and I had a drink and he asked me about my upcoming projects. I told him that my plan for the future was to remain drunk for as long as I could. He wasn’t a drinker, but since I was drinking a rum and Coke while we were talking (he drank Kentucky bourbon), he seriously advised me – Jeff had spent time on location with Sam Peckinpah on several occasions, thus seeing what real drinking looked like firsthand – to get off rum and switch to vodka, if I was indeed truly serious in my ambition. I did as he suggested, and his advice probably saved me thousands of headaches.
After we had both returned to our hometowns, we stayed in touch for a while, but it faded away, as these things do. Then a couple of months ago, out of the clear blue, Jeff called. We talked on the phone for an hour, as we usually did. Like I said, Jeff really knew his movies. We could get deep into arcane movie shit. It was a brilliant, exhilarating conversation. We assured each other we’d stay in touch and that we’d talk soon. Two weeks later he died. What are you going to do? But he’s left me with his air of joyous, unbridled enthusiasm, and that’s a lot.
Spring rapidly approaches.
Great tribute. Jeff's stories in the behind-the-scenes documentary for the making of "From a Whisper to a Scream" are pretty wonderful, particularly all the trials and tribulations he went through to get Vincent Price to be in the movie.
Jeff was the nicest guy we never deserved. I miss him every day.