FILM: The Schlockmeister

AND …ACTION! Yvonne Craig, who starred in Mars and later played Batgirl, says Buchanan (above, circa 1992) was a “delight to work with.”

LARRY BUCHANAN HAD A STANDARD SPEECH he would give his five-person crew and small group of actors on the first day of shooting. “We’re not going to win an Oscar,” he’d say in his professorial voice, “so let’s have some fun.”

Buchanan died in December 2004 at 81, and, true to his word, he never won an Oscar. But the Dallas-raised director did have some fun, leaving behind a legacy of 29 pictures that are exceptionally bad. Indeed, in the obituaries that ran in a smattering of newspapers across the country, Buchanan, a self-proclaimed “schlockmeister,” was praised for such horrible movies as It’s Alive! and Mars Needs Women, in which Tommy Kirk and his fellow Martians invade Earth, searching for nubile women like Yvonne Craig who can help them repopulate the Red Planet.

His genius was doing it on the cheap. Buchanan wrote, directed, produced, and edited most of his films. He even photographed and acted in a few. He would block scenes just minutes before the camera rolled. He usually filmed in one take and used existing locations because he had no money for sets. A mansion in Frisco became a Southern plantation; Highland Park Village was a town in Italy; Fire Station No. 31 on Garland Road morphed into a German stronghold behind the front lines. Costumes featured rubber-suit monsters he would spray-paint for each film. It’s Alive! showcases the same not-so-scary beast as Creature of Destruction.

Buchanan also recycled actors who were beginning their careers or whom he caught at low points. Kirk was a child star in the Disney films Old Yeller and The Shaggy Dog, but he worked for Buchanan because he’d been blacklisted in Hollywood for being gay. Bill Thurman, a Buchanan staple, had a 30-year career as a character actor. (He played Coach Popper in The Last Picture Show.) Shirley Temple’s first husband, John Agar, was Buchanan’s one extravagance, making $1,500 a week. Some actors he discovered. Morgan Fairchild’s first film role came in Buchanan’s A Bullet for Pretty Boy, which starred ’50s teen idol Fabian as gangster “Pretty Boy” Floyd. If a person had a movie connection to Dallas in the 1960s, he or she worked with Buchanan.

“Mars Needs Women is a great travelogue of Dallas,” says Gordon K. Smith, a local cable-access host and bad-movie buff. “Of course, it’s supposed to take place in Houston. I mean, let’s not kid ourselves. These were community theater films. They’re fun to watch, but by the critical standards of good cinema, they’re awful.”

“The best one could say about his Z-grade productions is that the memorably titled Mars Needs Women was well-shot and Curse of the Swamp Creature helped the slumming John Agar pay his rent that month,” says Tony Timpone, editor of the horror-film fan magazine Fangoria. “Still, the fact that Buchanan kept plugging away and exposing grainy film stock without much inherent talent should inspire fledgling filmmakers to try the same thing—except harder.”

Given the time and money constraints under which he worked, some have even called Buchanan the “Roger Corman of Dallas.” But such a title unfairly magnifies Buchanan. His movies—horror remakes, blaxploitation films, stilted conspiratorial biopics about Marilyn Monroe and Lee Harvey Oswald—had little of Corman’s energy, style, or cleavage. Many, in fact, were torpid remakes, filled with stock footage and stolid actors. Some of the films are best-known now as fodder for comedians and memorable episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000. One, Zontar, The Thing From Venus, inspired a beloved episode of SCTV in which the cast battles evil space cabbages.

But to focus only on the alternately laughable and somnolent quality of his films ignores what makes Buchanan worthy of remembrance: his stubborn, bittersweet refusal to let his deficiencies—foremost, talent and money—keep him from doing what he loved. Buchanan’s friend Greg Goodsell says his buddy once said, “I never cared if they were any good or not. I just wanted to make movies.”

LARRY BUCHANAN WAS BORN MARCUS LARRY SEALE JR. in Lost Prairie, Texas, not far from Waco. His mother died before his first birthday. His father, a policeman, was killed during a bank robbery. So Buchanan was raised in Buckner Orphans Home in East Dallas (now Buckner Children’s Home). For a time, he thought he would be a minister, studying for a doctorate of divinity at Baylor University, but the lure of performing and his love of cinema were too great. As a teenager, he would program film festivals for the orphanage. He would bicycle downtown, borrow the prints from a local theater, and show them after dinner.

He left for California in 1942 and worked in the prop department for 20th Century Fox, which led to bit parts in films. (The studio changed his name.) Buchanan later moved to New York, where he joined the Signal Corps Photographic Center and made military training films.

He met his wife Jane on the set of his first major film. He was third assistant director on The Marrying Kind, the George Cukor-directed 1952 movie starring Oscar winner Judy Holliday. Cukor put Buchanan in charge of rounding up the numerous extras. Cukor told Buchanan that he didn’t want to see the same extra twice in any movie. But Buchanan was so enamored of Jane that he made sure she was filmed every day; she changed her wardrobe, hair, and makeup each time to escape detection. His efforts were less inconspicuous than he imagined. After two weeks, Cukor finally turned to him on the set and said, “Larry, why don’t you just marry the girl?”

Buchanan took the suggestion, and his family eventually grew to include three sons and a daughter. They moved back to Dallas in the mid-1960s when he was offered steady work, and there he continued to ply his artless craft. He made a series of “personal films,” including Free, White and 21 and a pseudo-documentary about Dallas strippers called Naughty Dallas for $8,000. Jack Ruby tried to persuade him to shoot Naughty Dallas in his Carousel Club, but Buchanan thought the ceiling was too low to allow for good lighting. Buchanan swore that a young man who approached him in the club and asked him for a bit part was Lee Harvey Oswald.

Jeff Buchanan was excited when his father would work on a film, knowing he would get to skip school to be an extra. As he got older, the enthusiasm waned.

“Growing up, I was embarrassed by his films,” Jeff says. It wasn’t until later, when he’d made his own commercials and watched studios squander money to make sound effects he’d learned to mimic in his garage, that he appreciated his father’s unique gift. He remembers working on a commercial where the sound company wanted $50,000 for sound effects. Jeff was appalled. He dragged his crew to his house, and they completed the work for $160 in recording tape and pizza.

“I owe that to my dad,” Jeff says. “He always said, ’Don’t talk about it, do it.’ He never said die. There’s a certain beauty in that.”

Buchanan’s reputation for thrift and speed led to his contract with American International Pictures, which enlisted him to remake ’50s black-and-white horror films in color. He worked on these and other movies in Dallas until the late ’60s, when he took his family to California to work on his later films, most of which were well-meaning but overly earnest attempts to shed light on what he saw as dark conspiracies. He made two films about Marilyn Monroe, and his last film, which had been 30 years in the works and which he’d finally completed just weeks before he died, was called The Copper Scroll of Mary Magdalene. It examined the “lost years of Jesus.” Its working title: Rebel Jesus.

Buchanan focused his pride not on the end result but on the practical aspects of his career: he delivered what he was asked, he never went over budget, his crews loved him, and his films always made money even if they were judged as second-rate “ozoners,” as drive-in films were known.

For him, the joy was just in working. “I don’t know that I bring any great command of art to my pictures,” Buchanan wrote in his hard-to-find biography, It Came From Hunger!: Tales of a Cinema Schlockmeister. “But I love what I’m doing, and I believe that shows through in the least of my pictures.”

Although his Dallas-era films are today recognized as the best of the bad in the Buchanan canon, friends and family say he often pined to return. The night before he died of complications from a collapsed lung, he told Jeff he wanted to go back to Texas. He had more films he wanted to make. One would be a biography of Henry O. Flipper, the first black graduate from West Point. The other was a film he called Hurry, Sundown. The scene: a drive-in theater on its last night open. The plot: to celebrate its closing, the drive-in would have an all-night Larry Buchanan film festival. The surprise ending: a guest appearance by the real Larry Buchanan, who would rise before the screen at dawn to stirring applause.

Jeff told his father that he wanted to direct it. He’d hoped to have more than two weeks to shoot, more than a few thousand dollars to spend. Not that he needed either.

Eric Celeste is a senior editor for American Way magazine.