14 February 9-15, 2023 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents Hansen, managing director of the Texas Ar- chive of the Moving Image. Buchanan agreed to take the job if the com- pany would let him make his own features. “His understanding when Jamieson hired him is that he was gonna continue to pursue his feature film projects and they said, ‘That’s fine,’” says Jeff Buchanan, a writer and Larry’s second son, who spent a lot of time on his dad’s sets and helping on film projects. “They tried to bait him with, ‘Oh, we’ll make a movie’ and we never did, but that’s what brought him to Dallas.” The Thing from Venus L arry Buchanan started his Dallas indie film career with a soft-porn flick called Venus in Furs, a movie financed by a nameless, Rolls Royce-driving Texas oil baron for his busty girlfriend, which became “my first real experience in guerrilla cinema,” Bu- chanan wrote in his autobiography. The success of other films such as The Naked Witch and Free, White and 21 spread the word that a filmmaker was in town who could turn an $8,000 investment into $80,000. He put together a crew who could do everything a big-budget crew could do, but faster. “I couldn’t let them down,” Bu- chanan wrote. “My dad very openly dreamed about building a film town out of Dallas, and all these people started coming on board,” Jeff Buchanan says. “‘We don’t need Hollywood, and we can do everything here.’ What he liked about it was the enthusiasm because in LA everyone is so jaded about films, but in Texas, people get excited.” Inspired by the nightclub life he encoun- tered in Dallas Buchanan wrote and made A Stripper Is Born, better known as Naughty Dal- las, in 1964. Headlines about conspiracies and crimes inspired productions such as 1964’s The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald and 1984’s Down on Us, which examined how the deaths of rock ‘n’ roll legends such as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison might have been murders or- chestrated by the government. He was the first to turn the life story of Marilyn Monroe into a film with 1976’s Goodbye, Norma Jean. “He was one of the great headline movie- makers where he takes whatever’s the latest headline and does the movie version of it,” Briggs says. “Obviously, a man of his time.” Buchanan’s films caught the attention of AIP founders James Nicholson and Samuel Arkoff. They struck a deal to make sci-fi and horror films for TV and drive-in theaters starting in 1967 with Attack of the Eye Crea- tures, a remake of Ed Cahn’s Invasion of the Saucer Men. These and a string of future films like Zontar: The Things From Venus, Curse of the Swamp Creature and It’s Alive! would be- come part of Buchanan’s iconic “Azalea Col- lection,” named for his Dallas film studio. “They used to just have these jam ses- sions at AIP in the morning and it was Ar- koff, my dad, Roger Corman, Jim Nicholson and they would just have sessions and throw out titles and that’s what they’re gonna pro- duce,” Jeff Buchanan says. “My dad told Sam, he just called him and said ‘Mars needs women.’ This was on a Friday morning. Sam said, ‘That’s great. Is that what I think it is?’ He said yes and Sam said, ‘Can you have it over by Monday morning?’” Creature of Destruction B uchanan had a steady stream of projects for his crew and a small film empire in Dallas, but his drive to create pushed him to do more than just recycle familiar film plots. “I had reached my pain threshold in the remaking of bad scripts, and I told the heads of AIP that, as a breather, I wanted to do my own script, Mars Needs Women,” Buchanan wrote. “Had they balked, I would have walked … but they loved the script.” Arkoff’s only condition was that he put ac- tor Tommy Kirk in the picture, which Bu- chanan did with a role as an alien named Dop. Kirk had found fame as a child actor in Walt Disney Pictures hits such as Old Yeller, The Absent Minded Professor and Swiss Family Robinson until Disney fired him after learning that Kirk was gay and was seeing a 15-year- old boy. Buchanan also cast Yvonne Craig as his sexy leading scientist, Dr. Marjorie Bolen. Craig, who attended high school in Dallas, would go on to play Barbara Gordon, aka Bat- girl, on ABC’s Batman. Kirk “would be a draw to at least bring an audience,” says Dallas film producer Don Stokes, whose father worked alongside Bu- chanan at Jamieson. “So the people who loved him with the Disney audience, those are people who would be willing to forgive him in this other thing. Then, fill it with other actors who are competent and good and maybe not as recognizable.” Mars Needs Women was filmed entirely in Dallas and would become Buchanan’s most recognizable film. “It’s relatively speaking the most pol- ished of those,” says Gordon K. Smith, a Dal- las film historian, teacher and writer for the Turner Classic Movies channel. “It’s sort of in big quotes a ‘sequel’ to Pajama Party, in which Tommy Kirk played a Martian with a different name. It’s probably the most widely seen of those.” It became one of the featured films in the 1982 comedy documentary It Came from Hol- lywood, mocked by Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Rad- ner and Cheech and Chong. The group MARRS sampled a vocal track of the film for the 1987 house music hit “Pump Up the Vol- ume.” It’s been referenced in songs by Frank Zappa, Rob Zombie and The Chemical Broth- ers. It’s been optioned for big budget remakes, a sequel and even as a Broadway musical. “Larry knew what he was doing, but he wasn’t ashamed of what he was doing,” Stokes says. “He was proud.” Down on Us B uchanan continued to make movies throughout the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, but the movies of his Azalea period followed him. Jeff Buchanan says he relished every review of every movie, good or bad. “The case in point is Goodbye, Norma Jean,” Jeff says. “When that came out, it made Playboy’s top 10 worst films of the year. I said, ‘Dad, doesn’t this bother you?’ He said, ‘Look at the other films. If Playboy knew how little money we made this for, they would’ve been embarrassed for putting it on here.’” He tried to shake his reputation as a B- movie monster maker after the 1969 release of It’s Alive!, a project Buchanan called “all anguish and no fun.” He pursued weightier projects like the crime drama A Bullet for Pretty Boy and 1971’s Strawberries Need Rain, an Ingmar Bergman-inspired tale about a young woman who makes a deal with death for one more day of sexual exploration. They all made money, but his B-movies followed him into every pitch meeting. “I wanted to redeem my father and pro- duce something where he could direct a small masterpiece,” Jeff Buchanan says. “We were working on a script I still very much love called Hurry Sundown. It’s like American Graffiti, but it’s the last night of a drive-in theater before it falls to the wreck- ing ball and they have an all-night marathon of Larry Buchanan films. “For all the crap he put out there, he was a very sensitive man, highly intelligent, had a phenomenal understanding of the history of film and always hoped to do important films and had a couple of scripts and tried to get them going, but his reputation always preceded him in every meeting. This is the guy who makes the schlock. He never got to redeem himself.” Buchanan’s reputation isn’t just what shows up on the screen at midnight movie marathons around the world. It’s reflected in the crews who work on big-budget commer- cial, TV and film projects, because Buchanan gave some of them their first to work in Dallas, whether it was playing a fish monster, working on set as a grip or, in many cases, both. “They used Larry’s movies as a stepping stone to bigger projects, and I think that’s a testament to Larry who provided those step- ping stones,” Stokes says. “I’m sure he wasn’t thinking in those terms. It was a mo- ment that helped a lot of people do what they wanted to do and what they wanted to achieve later in their lives.” Courtesy Jeff Buchanan The costumes and props in Buchanan’s films were quickly and comically constructed. Courtesy Jeff Buchanan Larry Buchanan works on a close-up shot. Culture from p12
