Tom Holland: The Hollywood Interview

Filmmaker Tom Holland.


TOM HOLLAND GOES BACK TO THE SANDBOX
ON THE 20TH ANNIVERSARY OF CHILD’S PLAY
By
Alex Simon

Tom Holland has seen the film business from virtually every angle: from actor, to writer, to director and producer, Holland’s career spans over 40 years. Born in Poughkeepsie, New York, Holland attended Northwestern University’s renowned theater program, then went to New York where he soon found himself an in-demand television actor, performing under the name Tom Fielding. The peak of his acting career came in the late ‘60s, with roles in Jacques Demy’s “The Model Shop” and Guy Green’s “A Walk in the Spring Rain,” with Anthony Quinn and Ingrid Bergman. After discovering that his true calling lay behind the camera, Holland began writing voraciously, getting his first produced credit in 1978 with the classic television chiller “The Initiation of Sarah.” This was followed by “The Beast Within” (1982), “Class of 1984” (1982) and “Psycho II” (1983), which bumped Tom Holland into an elite group of Hollywood screenwriters after it’s successful box office and critical reception, expertly recreating Alfred Hitchcock’s signature blend of macabre humor and full-throttle horror. It’s a signature that Tom Holland adopted as his own, and maintained in all his work since.

Holland made his directing debut with the hit “Fright Night” in 1986, from his original script, and followed that with the classic “Child’s Play,” which arrives on DVD September 9 in a 20th anniversary edition from MGM/Fox. A clever variation on the “living doll” horror story, “Child’s Play” opens with a vicious serial killer (Brad Dourif) dying in a shootout with police in a Chicago toy store. Before he expires, he wills his soul into that of a Good Guys doll that’s nearby. Later, a young boy named Andy (Alex Vincent)’s single mom (Catherine Hicks) buys him a coveted Good Guys doll for his birthday. Guess which one Andy winds up with? 20 years later, “Child’s Play” plays every bit as well as it did in 1988, even more so when one realizes how today’s horror films have been dumbed down into torture porn or watered-down PG-13 snoozefests.

Tom Holland sat down with us recently to discuss “Child’s Play,” and his remarkable career as one of the most unique voices in the genres of horror and suspense. Here’s what was said:

The first thing that struck me upon watching “Child’s Play” again is how well it holds up 20 years later. The animatronic effects still look very real, plus it mixes humor and horror as well as any film since "An American Werewolf in London."
Tom Holland: It’s interesting; I just did a Q & A with Diablo Cody (Oscar-winning screenwriter of “Juno”) at The New Beverly Cinema where they showed the film. I hadn’t seen it with an audience in years, and I found it very funny up until the third act, then I thought it got really dark and scary. But for 2/3 of it, I thought it was hilarious. (laughs) The biggest challenge in making the film was making Chucky. That was tough.

At the time, that technology was groundbreaking, right?
Yes, and the toughest part was how the doll manipulated the knife, and getting it to seem like the knife was actually being held in Chucky’s hand. What we wound up doing was making a tin foil knife, and taping it to his hand, so when he thrust the knife at people, it looked like he was really holding and manipulating it. There was nothing about him that had any tensile strength that could grip anything. I mean, we had a dozen puppeteers working him, spread out underneath the set, which was built about four feet off the ground. I divided up the features on the doll, so one guy did the mouth, one the legs, and so on. They all had TV monitors so they could see what the doll was doing in response to their movements. It was very complicated.

I noticed you pulled a Hitchcock a couple times in the film, also: it was your picture in the apartment as “dad” and you did the voice-over for the Chucky ad on TV.
Yes, I did. Good eye, and ear.

The 20th anniversary DVD of Child's Play.

Did you go into it knowing you wanted to do a mix of humor and horror?
Yeah, once we got the doll working, then I knew that we needed a blend. And the biggest laugh in the film, and it’s not an elegant laugh, is when the elderly couple walk out of the elevator and the woman looks back at Chucky and says “What an ugly doll,” and Chucky responds “Fuck you.” (laughs) It gets a huge laugh from the audience. But you could only do that if the doll was working.

You came to the film with a script already written, right?
Yeah, the original script was by Don Mancini, but you didn’t like anybody. What happened was, the little boy went to sleep and his alter ego, the doll, would wake up and kill people: his dentist, his teacher, so you didn’t like the little boy. There was no hero. The mother didn’t figure out what was going on, I think, until the very end. It was more like an elongated “Twilight Zone” episode. There was no real villain, either. Without a villain, you can’t have a hero, so I invented the character of the strangler, Charles Lee Ray.

Which combined the names of three of the most notorious killers of the 20th century: Charles Whitman (the University of Texas sniper), Lee Harvey Oswald, and James Earl Ray (assassin of Martin Luther King).
Yeah, that’s exactly what I did. Then once we had that, the pieces started to fall into place. I could go into more detail, but it would sound like I was slamming the other writers. In those days, everyone who worked on the script got credit. You had to have written something like 60% of the script if you were also the director to get credit as a writer. So I did get a writing credit, but I shared it with the two other guys who worked on the script. The WGA vote to change the rules regarding producer/directors getting writing credit just changed, to I think 30%, because now so many writers also direct and produce. They were getting screwed out of writing credit. The rule was originally put in to protect writers against the producers giving credit to their relatives, but writers have become much more powerful.

You know the legend about the meeting that Irving Thalberg, head of MGM in the ‘20s and ‘30s, called among all the heads of the major studios at that time about what to do with writers?
No, but I can only guess.

Thalberg, supposedly, said “We’re all in agreement that the writer is the most important part of the creative process, right?” They all agreed, to which Thalberg answered “It is our job to make sure they never figure that out.” (laughs) I believe it, and I still feel that it’s that way, to a large extent. I still feel that writing is more difficult than directing, because somebody has to face the blank page initially. It’s the initial creative act of getting something down out of nothing, and in this case that was Don Mancini, who deserves a huge chunk of the credit, at the very least. What happens with film is that the director is the authorial voice, for better or for worse. It’s their voice that gives the picture its final stamp.

Alex Vincent and "Chucky" in Child's Play.

You’ve always had a taste for blending humor and horror in all your work, as Hitchcock did, and you really proved that with your screenplay for “Psycho II,” which audiences and critics alike were ready to hate when it came out, but it wound up a critical and commercial success.
Yeah, I got to work on that with a great director named Richard Franklin, who was a brilliant guy that was unfortunately undervalued and is now no longer with us, due to prostate cancer. He died very young. Richard was probably the leading Hitchcock scholar to come out of USC. So when we did “Psycho II,” we ran every Hitchcock film and designed sequences that echoed Hitchcock. When I was writing that film for him, I got an education in Hitchcock probably unlike anybody else. So I don’t know how much subconsciously I absorbed in terms of designing suspense sequences. The rule of thumb was you tried to have three to five visual set pieces per picture. The sequence in “Child’s Play” that starts it off is where Dinah Manoff is reading the book, and in soft focus behind her, you see Chucky run by. By the way, that was Alex Vincent (who plays Andy)’s 4 year-old sister, dressed up in the doll costume, running across the archway. It was amazing serendipity that she happened to be on the set that day, because we kept trying to get the animatronic doll to do the movement, and we couldn’t do it. So anyway, the payoff comes when Dinah gets the hammer in the head, and goes back, and that’s a handheld camera on her face, going with her. You’ve also got the fingers across the counter top, and a few other shots. So it’s a montage sequence, that kicks off with her reading the book, and you see the doll run by.

So you came into “Child’s Play” with a Hitchcockian sensibility that you picked up from working on “Psycho II.” Yeah, and there are other touches like that, as well: Cathy Hicks finding the batteries, and realizing that Chucky has been powered by something else. (laughs) And that leads to the doll attacking her, another extended visual set piece. It’s one suspense moment that leads to another. It’s all deliberate.

I noticed on the 20th anniversary DVD, almost everyone involved with the film, cast and crew, is on the commentary track, and all the retrospective documentaries and featurettes yet you’re conspicuously absent. Why?
Simple: nobody asked me. You’ll probably find that they claim they did ask me, that they contacted my representatives and they never replied, but that’s not true. I could say more about this, but I think I’ll bow to discretion being the better part of valor! (laughs)

Were there any other influences you had in terms of your screenplay and direction?
Yeah, there was that great “Twilight Zone” episode with Telly Savalas and the doll, and the title of the episode escapes me, but it was really creepy. Then there was Dan Curtis’ “Trilogy of Terror,” written by Richard Matheson, where the final episode of the trilogy was about the African tribal doll that terrorizes Karen Black in her apartment, all shot from the doll’s point-of-view. Dan Curtis invented the Steadicam with that film, and it’s still one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever seen—hard to believe it was made for television.

You also did some contemporary research at the time in terms of popular toys.
I went to a toy store and found a My Buddy doll, which I used as the prototype for Chucky, whom I originally called Buddy, by the way. I changed it to Chucky after legal questions about rights came up.

Watching the film also made me long for the days of smart, R-rated horror films. Now you’ve got two choices in the genre: so-called “torture porn” which are all about being gross and rarely about being scary, and watered-down PG-13 so-called horror films, that are rarely scary.
That may be passing, actually. The last few entries into the torture porn genre really bombed at the box office. There’s this loop between Asia and here. If you look at a film like “Ichi: The Killer,” you see high levels of violent sadomasochism, and this is a film that’s ten years old, coming out of Asia, that predated torture porn here. “Audition,” also from Japan, was another film like that, so Asia really upped the ante with graphic violence in horror films. Then it moved to Europe with films like “Irreversible,” with Monica Bellucci, with that ten minute rape scene that was so disgusting I couldn’t watch the rest of the film. So then, it came to Europe and then it came here. America is late to the game now, following the rest of the world, whereas it used to be the other way around. In terms of the PG-13 horror films, the studios have lost the young males. They’re not watching TV anymore. They're playing video games and are on the Internet for entertainment, but they can still reach adolescent girls via TV, therefore they are doing PG-13 horror, slanted toward young women, like “The Grudge,” “The Eye,” and so on.

You got to work with one of the great D.P.s of all time, Bill Butler, on “Child’s Play.”
I love Bill. He’s still mean as ever! (laughs) I saw him at a party a few years ago, and he must’ve been close to 80, complaining he wasn’t working. “This goddamn business sucks! I’m not working!” (laughs) I hope I have that kind of fire in my belly when I’m his age. He was no spring chicken when we did Child’s Play, and he was ornery then, but brilliant. Great guy, great cameraman. On that note, I’ll tell you, the business is as bad as I’ve ever seen it. It’s harder than ever to break through, although every once in a while an original voice like Diablo Cody will break through. And she’s a truly lovely gal, the sort of person your mother would want you to marry. And unlike so many people in the business today, truly loves, appreciates and has a working knowledge of film. She wouldn’t have been running her own film festival at The New Beverly if she didn’t have that sensibility. But I can’t say enough good about Bill Butler. I think he’s up in Santa Barbara now.

Catherine Hicks in Child's Play.

How do you like to work with your D.P.?
I always look for the master shot first. Once you find your master, then you can do your coverage. But if you don’t find, and then shoot, your master first, you’re going to get fucked up. I don’t really look through the lens much anymore and I don’t like using a viewfinder. I can look at a scene, put it on its feet, and usually know where the master is. Sometimes the D.P. will have a better idea, although it’s usually the operator who has a better sense of it. Your D.P. is your lighting guy. That’s what you’re looking for there. Your operator is just as important, if not more important. Camera operating is an instinctual art. I find that today, since I’ve been working so much with digital, that most of what I do in terms of the look happens in post-production, not during the shoot. I don’t want to devalue D.P.s, but with the advent of digital, it’s making a lighting D.P. less important. You still have to get within the mid-lighting range when you shoot, but once we get to post now, I can do most of color correction in post and Telecine. I could talk about this all day, but I think the business is going through its most enormous changes in years because of digital.

The film spawned several sequels, none of which you were involved with.
And you know something? I did everything I could to kill that goddamned doll—I cut its head off, I burned it, I shot its heart out, so it wouldn’t be set up for a sequel at the end! (laughs) But, that’s Hollywood.

You weren’t involved with the “Fright Night” sequel, either.
No, and in those days, I don’t know what it’s like now, they never wanted to pay you for the sequel, because your price had gone up, so they would do it with a different director, different crew, and for less money, instead of getting the same people they had for the first one, which is where the magic happened. The grosses on the second one, it opened huge, and then died. And I like a lot of the people they used for the sequels of those films, but the deck was stacked against them most of the time going into it.

Actor Chris Sarandon and Holland on the set of Child's Play.

It’s like if you change the lead singer of a band.
Right, it’s not the same band. It’s always fascinating, because Hollywood has always done it that way, and it’s almost always turned out the same every time. Every successive sequel is done cheaper and cheaper, and turns out to be worse and worse, until the franchise is milked dry. Then twenty years later, they’ll do a remake, put a ton of money into it, and start the process all over again.

Let’s talk about your background. You grew up in upstate New York.
Yeah, my dad was a haberdasher, and my mom and I worked in the store with him. I was an only child, and dad eventually moved over into selling women’s wear, because the markup was higher. If you were a small mom and pop retailer, you worked six days a week.

Growing up in a small town, when did you realize you were an artist?
Oh God, I don’t know that I ever have. (laughs) I guess it all began when I got accepted at Northwestern and took theater classes. I tried, but just couldn’t get interested in the stage. I got hold of a 16mm camera from the film department, which was fledgling at that time, and shot a film that I obsessively shot forever. Milton Katselas got hold of the footage and tried to help me cut it together. God only knows what’s happened to that footage since, but that’s how it all started.

Then you were an actor through the ‘60s and early ‘70s (under the pseudonym Tom Fielding) in New York, and studied at The Actor’s Studio.
I left Northwestern, went to New York and became a soap star on “A Time for Us aka A Flame in the Wind,” which is no longer on the air.

Was acting something you loved doing, or just a way to make a living until you could make your own film?
Honestly, it was a way to meet girls. (laughs) I never really liked acting that much, but I was a very good-looking kid, and everyone kept saying “You should be an actor,” and it seemed like the path of least resistance at the time. So I studied under Lee Strasberg, who’d lecture for six hours at a time, and I mean everyone was there: Bruce Dern, Shelley Winters…Jim Bridges became a friend. I started being an actor in the playwright’s wing, and started working with writer/directors like Jim. That’s where I finally put it together in my head that if you were a writer, that would lead to directing. Jim was writing an episode of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” at the time. Then I became friends with Stewart Stern (“Rebel Without a Cause”), who really helped teach me how to write. When I transitioned from acting to directing in the early ‘70s, Stewart was among the great screenwriters in Hollywood. Stewart is in his 80s now, still going strong, and still urging me to write more personal stories. I love him.

Then you went back to school at UCLA.
Yeah, I tried to go straight and got a BA in Political Science and a law degree. There was a period where I just wasn’t comfortable being an actor. It wasn’t enough, whatever that is, or I wasn’t good enough, and I thought I had to have something more solid in my life. I finished the first year of law school, and realized I’d made a horrific mistake, talk about being a fish out of water. But the first year is the hardest, so I figured I might as well finish up, and just kept writing while I got my JD. I passed the bar the first time I took it, but never practiced. But I’m very proud that I did that. It was a way of writing, and not feeing guilty about it, so when people asked me what I was doing I could say I was going to law school, or I was an attorney. With middle class values, my psyche could accept that. (laughs) Then I wound up getting my script optioned before I got my bar results. The script was called “The View from 30,” which I wrote at 29, and optioned to Dick Berg, who I later wrote “The Initiation of Sarah” for. So it does come around. I think I got about $1500 for the option, which wasn’t bad money back then. So I also figured since I made a little money from writing, I might as well pursue it and see. So I kept on writing.

As an actor, you were in Jacques Demy’s “The Model Shop.” What was that like?
Jacques was a very sweet, very gentle man. He was married to Agnes Varda, who’s still alive. Harrison Ford was originally cast by Jacques to be the lead in the film, and Columbia wouldn’t let Demy cast Harrison, so they cast Gary Lockwood instead. So Harrison was so angry about that, he was dropped from his contract by Columbia, and he left acting and went into a ten year stint as a carpenter before he got “Star Wars.”

You, Harrison and Ted Danson were sort of The Three Musketeers for a while, right?
Yeah, although Ted was a little younger than us. But Ted was in that group through the late ‘70s. Then Ted got “The Onion Field” and exploded out of that.

You acted with Anthony Quinn and Ingrid Bergman in “A Walk in the Spring Rain.”
Quinn was an interesting egomaniac. (laughs) He was very jealous when, during a scene in the film where I tried to rape Ingrid Bergman, I French-kissed her and she French-kissed me back! I didn’t understand it at the time, but apparently they’d had affair years earlier. I remember Ingrid Bergman telling me how wonderful Gary Cooper was, and how they’d ride back from the set together singing off-color, bawdy songs. She adored Hitchcock and Cary Grant. Wonderful lady, I can’t say enough good things about her. If she felt something, it read on her face instantly. Her talent was astounding. It was like a silent movie actor, the expressiveness of her face. And she was a beautiful, lusty woman. She cut quite a swath when she was young, and when I met her, she was still stunning, but just starting to look more matronly. So here I was, this small town kid, and had this incredible journey of ups and downs where I came across all these amazing, talented people.

And what’s the latest stop on that journey?
I’m doing a lot on the web now. I’ve got two original series I’ve developed: “5 or Die,” which is a horror series, and “Driven,” which is more suspense, more Hitchcock-influenced. I think the Internet is a place that’s wide open, in terms of creative possibilities, whereas I feel I’ve never seen the traditional movie business so starved creatively as it is now. And it’s hard to say whether that’s born out of my age, out of bitterness, or just out of a reality check (laughs), but I really think that the corporatization of Hollywood, which began with Coke buying Columbia back in the ‘80s, has taken things to where they are now.

The original theatrical trailer for Child's Play.

The truth is that the creative part of the Hollywood community really aren’t the ones with the power, particularly since the business has become more “corporate,” as you pointed out. This business is run by the studio execs, the managers, and the agents. How do you keep the faith in this kind of environment?
One of the things I’ve always been aware of is that nobody is going to remember those people, “the suits.” They might be the ones who walk away with the money, but they won’t leave any sort of real legacy. They might even be the ones with the power, but I think that’s fading, too. What I’ve also seen is that even as the creative people cycle up and down, more often than not, they come back, and have fourth, fifth or sixth runs. Whereas, you’ve got a huge turnover of executives that changes every five to ten years, and I couldn’t tell you what has become of them. So at the end of the day, I think the creative community has the last word.