12 February 9-15, 2023 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents SCHLOCK AND AWE! How B-movie maven Larry Buchanan built Dallas’ film community with rubber masks, plastic space suits and Mars Needs Women. BY DANNY GALLAGHER T he year 1967 was a stellar one for movies. The marquees that year lit up with titles such as The Grad- uate, The Producers, In the Heat of the Night, Cool Hand Luke, In Cold Blood and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. The year also saw the release of two films made in Dallas. They were shot around the same time and hit theaters within just a cou- ple of weeks of one another, and both laid the foundation of Dallas filmmaking. The first was Bonnie and Clyde, the Oscar-nominated drama from director Arthur Penn. The other was Mars Needs Women, di- rected by self-described “schlockmeister” Larry Buchanan (who would’ve turned 100 years old on Jan. 31 if not for his death in 2004) and starring fallen Disney idol Tommy Kirk and TV’s Batgirl, Yvonne Craig, in a bizarre story about aliens kid- napping Earth’s most attractive women to restore their planet’s population. Buchanan’s model of cheap and fast mov- iemaking produced the kind of films seen on drive-in screens, introduced by Saturday night horror hosts on UHF-TV stations or screened on the Satellite of Love for Joel and the bots on Mystery Science Theater 3000. They cemented Buchanan’s legacy as a mas- ter of rubber-monster movies. “You gotta have respect for anybody working with 35mm film or 16mm film and getting a film finished,” says Joe Bob Briggs, the famed drive-in movie critic of the Dallas Times Herald and host of Shudder’s late- night horror movie series The Last Drive-In. “It was the hardest thing in the world. Noth- ing like today where technically you can not only shoot a film with your iPhone but can also shoot a film with the stuff you can buy at Best Buy and make it look good. It’s a huge barrier of entry to the film business, and these guys broke down the barriers and ac- tually got films released.” Buchanan’s Azalea Films imprint, based in Dallas in the late 1960s, released a string of cheesy horror and sci-fi movies for American International Pictures (AIP) with titles such as Zontar: The Thing from Venus, Attack of the Eye Creatures, Curse of the Swamp Creature and It’s Alive!, which starred a fish humanoid with tennis balls for eyes and became his sig- nature film. These are also some of the pro- ductions that jumpstarted Dallas’ film scene. “I actually think that films like these and Lloyd Kaufman’s and Ed Wood’s and what they’ve done, filmmakers should be grateful for the work they’ve done,” says Tom Armer, Dallas’ film commissioner and director of cre- ative industries. “The inventors of indie filmmakers who went out on their own and made a film without a studio, they gave kids who wanted in the indus- try the hope that they didn’t have to live in Los Angeles or New York to make a film.” It’s Alive! M arcus Larry Seale Jr. — who’d change his name to Larry Bu- chanan when he became a contract player with 20th Century Fox — was born Jan. 31, 1923, in the East Texas town of Lost Prairie to Maude Dove Seale and Larry Seale, a peace officer and guitar player. His mother died from pneumonia when Bu- chanan was 9 months old, and not long after his father made the “gut-wrenching deci- sion” to put Larry, his four sisters and brother in the Buckner Orphans Home in Dallas, according to Buchanan’s 1996 auto- biography It Came from Hunger! The strict discipline of the Baptist or- phanage’s matrons took a mental toll on him, but Buchanan found solace in the weekly movie nights that inspired him to seek out his own film career. He hitchhiked to Hol- lywood in 1942 after high school to pursue his pas- sion, then moved to New York, where he found work as a model for magazine ads and in acting and mu- sic jobs. His good looks and Jumbo Martin Dreadnought guitar helped land him a role on NBC’s The Gabby Hayes Show. “The beginning of my life in film,” he wrote, came when he landed a job with the Army Signal Corps making training films for the military at the behest of his TV costar, Rod Steiger. He had his first leading role on- screen as an aw-shucks hillbilly Army private in a training film called Homer Goes Hygienic. The corps became Buchanan’s film school. He learned how to write, shoot, edit, act and score movies. It’s where he became friends with fellow aspiring filmmaker Stanley Ku- brick, who had just shot his first short film, the boxing documentary Day of the Fight. Buchanan decided to move his career from performing to filmmaking. He wrote and shot a short Western in San Angelo called The Cowboy with his brother Earl, using a 35mm military-grade camera. The Cowboy screened before the premiere of the film ver- sion of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman at the Vic- toria Theater on Broadway in 1951 and ran for nine weeks. He continued to work on other productions including as an assistant director on the 1952 romantic comedy The Marrying Kind, where he met his future wife, Jane, who worked as an extra. Inspired by The Cowboy’s success, Bu- chanan wrote and shot his first feature- length film, a Western called Apache Gold in 1952. He cast actor Jack Klugman as the film’s heavy and returned to Texas to shoot on either side of the Rio Grande, but the pro- duction ran out of money and the only screen time it saw was as stock footage for TV Western scenes. For two more years, Buchanan wrote and produced several off-Broadway productions and toured as an understudy and stage man- ager with the Broadway company for the Samuel and Bella Spewack comedy My Three Angels. In 1954, Jane gave birth to their first son, Barry. Becoming a father and vowing not to abandon his child like his fa- ther did, Buchanan’s shifted his priorities and soon accepted an offer to run the com- mercial and documentary departments for the massive Jamieson Film Co. of Dallas. “There are so many people who were touched by the [Jamieson] company includ- ing people who are still working actively in Dallas right now,” says Elizabeth Courtesy Jeff Buchanan ▼ Culture >> p14 Larry Buchanan found success as a filmmaker of B movies in the 1960s. Movie posters from a few of Buchanan’s famous works.
