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TRIVIA
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Herschell Gordon Lewis (1926 - ) Date of Birth: 15 June 1926 BIOGRAPHY Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in June 1926, Herschell Gordon Lewis grew up in Chicago, Illinois. He studied journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, graduating with a Master's degree and soon took up the post of professor of English at Mississippi State College. It was unusual for someone so young - he was still in his 20s - to be holding such a senior academic post at that time. But a life of academia was traded for one in the entertainment industry when Lewis took up the post of manager at WKY-TV in Oklahoma City. Although it was a way into the industry, the pay was poor and as soon as an opening appeared at an advertising agency run by a former university friend in Chicago (in 1953), Lewis gladly traded in radio management for a new career as a television director. Unfortunately, what Lewis didn't know was that the agency didn't actually have any clients in the TV industry and it quickly became clear that Lewis wasn't going to last long in the job. Rather than wait for the inevitable, Lewis started doing some part time work teaching graduate advertising courses at Roosevelt University. There were a few TV advertising gigs but not enough for Lewis to properly claim that directing was his career. Most of that work was shot at the studios of production company Alexander and Associates, where head man Martin Schmidhofer was looking for a new partner after the departure of founder Michael Alexander. Sensing a good opportunity, Lewis bought half interest in the business which was subsequently renamed Lewis and Martin Films. Lewis was charged with turning around the ailing company, but it wasn't easy. He supplemented his income by writing advertising copy for Morlock Advertising Company and took to the sound stages whenever a job appeared. Shmidhofer became an active member of The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and the increasing demands of his new position eventually caused a split in the partnership - Shmidhofer moved to Miami and Lewis bought out his shares, becoming the sole owner of the company. But what was he to do with it? The company still wasn't performing and Lewis was now left holding the baby alone. Inspired by a conversation with his friend Larry Kroll, Lewis realised that the only way he was going to make any money in this industry was to give up the advertising shorts and move into feature films. But for that he needed a producer. Elsewhere in Chicago, exploitation legend David F. Friedman was already making a name for himself as the producer of cheap but immensely popular films through the independent film distributing company he owned. Lewis decided to approach Friedman to see if he could help and the producer was impressed that Lewis had come to him with a complete package, including financing. The partnership of Lewis and Friedman began tentatively with The Prime Time (1960), the debut film for another young Northwestern University student, Karen Black (blink though and you'll miss her!). Living Venus followed that same year and was made without Friedman. Consequently, it's a much tamer product than you might imagine from a man of Friedman's fearsome reputation. Lewis and Friedman clearly hit it off however and they became full business partners, Lewis learning a great deal about the practicalities of the business from the already battle hardened Friedman. Their next film together was The Adventures of Lucky Pierre (1961), a comedy 'nudie' in the style popularised by former Playboy photographer Russ Meyer in The Immoral Mr Teas (1959). Allegedly written in just 6 hours, the film was shot in three days for just $7,500 with Lewis and Friedman doing just about every behind-the-camera job. It was the first success for the newly formed Lewis / Friedman partnership and led to a string of impossibly cheap and very profitable films, working for whichever distributors came up with the required budget - Friedman has claimed that they made as many as 30 sexploitation quickies but there appears to be little evidence that that number was ever made let alone survived. During this period, Lewis started to build his repertory company of actors, the first to come aboard being William Kerwin who would feature in almost all of these earlier productions. The problem with their success of course was that others were eying their style jealously and soon the grindhouse markets were flooded by ultra-cheap skin flicks. As the competitors began to eat into their profits, Lewis and Friedman started to look around to see what else they make money from. Having done well from sex, they decided to try violence... One night, Lewis was out on the road working on his latest film, Belle Bare and Beautiful (1963), when he settled down in front of a television in a motel room. He watched a gangster film and was dismayed at the lack of realism in the scenes of violence. Lewis eagerly outlined his new idea to Friedman - why not make a film that would push screen violence into whole new territories? No flinching, no looking away, no skimping on the blood... While staying at the Egyptian themed Suez Hotel in Miami, Lewis and Friedman began to develop the idea into the tale of a mad Egyptian caterer on the rampage as he plans to restage an ancient and extremely brutal ceremony. Thus was born Blood Feast (1963) and, for many, the whole gore genre. Although often hailed as the first gore film (Lewis later likened it to "a Walt Whitman poem - no good but the first of its type"), it was really nothing of the sort - it had been beaten to the punch by the Japanese Jigoku (1960) but as that film was unheard of in the States, Blood Feast became the first splatter film widely seen by shocked viewers in the west. Shot in just two days, from a script that ran just 15 pages and on a budget of $24,500, Blood Feast was a runaway success despite the fact that it is, quite frankly, appalling. The effects are cheap and fake looking, the acting unspeakable and Lewis seems content to simply leave his camera running to capture whatever action might pass in front of the lens. But it was something that jaded exploitation audiences had never seen before - at least not quite like this. Audiences still reeling from the sexualised violence of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) simply weren't ready for the full on carnage of Blood Feast. Seasoned marketing experts like Lewis and Friedman didn't need much to sell a film and the new gore angle saw them working overtime - the film was a huge hit in the southern States and Lewis milked its notoriety for all it was worth, having ambulances stationed outside cinemas and sick bags handed out to nervous patrons queuing outside. A neat bit of spin from Lewis got the film banned in Sarasota, Florida - a fact that Lewis used to advantage by getting the national press on his side! Lewis has claimed that the outlay for Blood Feast was recouped from a run in a single cinema and when the film went on to a small nationwide release, the film was already well in profit. Moving quickly to capitalise on the genre they had created and were, for the moment at least, the sole exponents of, Lewis and Friedman (and their other partner, distributor Stan Kohlberg) planned to make a whole series of ultra violent, ultra cheap gore movies. Working with a positively princely sum of $65,000, they made Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964), the ghastly tale of a ghostly town of Southerners who return from the dead to slaughter some Yankee tourists 100 years after their town was wiped out during the Civil War. The Southern setting was largely dictated by the fact that Winter was drawing in over Chicago and Lewis and Friedman decided that they should head south to warmer climes to ensure that they could carry on making films uninterrupted by the weather. They wound up in St Cloud, a tiny town near Orlando, Florida a town now long gone, buried beneath The Magic Kingdom in Disney World! Two Thousand Maniacs! is a far better film than Blood Feast (not difficult really...) and remains Lewis' most consistently entertaining film. It repeated the success of its predecessor, racking up huge profits. On the back of its success, Kohlberg suggested that they form a permanent production company, something that Lewis and Friedman readily agreed to. The plan was to plough the profits from Blood Feast and Two Thousand Maniacs! into a new bank account and attract the attention of the Exchange National Bank of Chicago who they hoped would finance the company with a loan. Kohlberg looked after the business side of things while Lewis and Friedman moved on to their next film, Color Me Blood Red (1965), the insane tale of an artist who paints in the blood of the young women he stalks and murders. But things were about to start falling apart for Lewis - while he was directing the film, he began to worry that there was no sign of the expected loan from the Exchange National Bank and that Kohlberg was becoming increasingly elusive. When the film was finished, a suspicious Lewis visited the bank with Friedman and was astonished to hear that they had not been in any talks with Kohlberg at all. When they heard that Kohlberg was instead preparing to buy another cinema, Lewis and Friedman sued him and the profits from all three of their gore films were frozen. It was a crippling move for the partnership, leaving Friedman and Lewis almost penniless as their millions sat untouchable in a bank vault. It placed an intolerable strain on the partnership - Friedman became concerned that Lewis had taken his eye off the ball, losing touch with what was going on in the world of mid-60s exploitation film-making. Friedman felt that they should be trying harder to match what he saw as the increasingly sophisticated product of the other exploitation producers and directors emerging around them but Lewis was allegedly disinterested. Lewis has claimed that Friedman simply walked away from the partnership while he was working on their next film, Moonshine Mountain (1964). It's possible that no-one will ever know why the partnership really split, but after Color Me Blood Red, Lewis and Friedman went their separate ways. Lewis completed Moonshine Mountain without Friedman who went on to become one of the most prolific and best known of exploitation producers. Stung by the break up of the partnership, Lewis turned his attentions back to his advertising agency and seemed increasingly disinterested in his feature films. He abandoned gore and started making half-hearted children's films like Jimmy, the Boy Wonder (1966) and The Magic Land of Mother Goose (1967). The 'roughie' Alley Tramp (1966) is supposedly so appalling that everyone who worked on the film used pseudonyms (Lewis is credited as Georges Parades). Desperate for a cheap hit, he bought two unfinished films and re-edited them with newly shot footage to foist them off on an uncaring public as Monster a Go-Go and Sin, Suffer, and Repent (both originally shot in 1965). In 1967, Lewis returned to horror with the turgid vampire epic A Taste of Blood which looks good (there was obviously some money at work here) but is unbearably tedious, lacking even the rough hewn charms of his earlier films. The script was apparently bought from writer Doc Stanford and Lewis simply filmed it as he found it, not bothering to inject the grim gallows humour that had at least made the 'Blood Trilogy' bearable. Something Weird (1968) was better but not by much but it at least marked the beginning of an upswing in his career. As the counterculture started to find its feet and the Summer of Love dawned, Lewis found a whole new set of values to exploit - wife swapping came under the Lewis microscope in Suburban Roulette (1968) and proved to be Lewis' most successful film in years. Back in the saddle at last, Lewis also made another gore film, the wonderfully titled The Gruesome Twosome (1967), his best horror film since Two Thousand Maniacs!, and cast Kentucky Fried Chicken's Colonel Sanders in the cheesy rock musical Blast-Off Girls (1967)!. The non-horror She Devils on Wheels (1968) is probably his best film of the period, one of the films that Lewis made with his new business partner Fred Sandy. The partnership had begun with The Gruesome Twosome and would continue on to The Wizard of Gore in 1970, another attempt to recapture some of the glories of years gone by. After a string of undistinguished 'nudies' and 'roughies', The Wizard of Gore saw Lewis giving his fans exactly what they wanted but he was disappointed by the film, feeling that it didn't live up to his high expectations of it. But it's a fun piece of blood-drenched nonsense with plenty of that sly Lewis humour on show again. Lewis had been branching out with his business ventures during this time - the advertising agency was still doing well and he had bought a cinema which he named The Blood Bank and which he promoted as a horror revival house. After a couple of comedies that harkened back to the moonshine silliness of Moonshine Mountain, This Stuff'll Kill Ya (1971) and Year of the Yahoo! (1972), Lewis made his last film for thirty years, the brilliantly titled The Gore Gore Girls (1972). Lewis bowed out as the gore film slipped gradually into the mainstream - the following year, The Exorcist showed audiences things that even Lewis could never have dreamt of and the line between exploitation and the mainstream was looking more blurred than ever. And that should really have been the end of Herschell Gordon Lewis. He probably expected himself to slip away into obscurity as his film making days were left behind. But a decade later, something happened that brought Lewis back into the edges of the limelight - the home video revolution. In a market that was eager for product - any product - home video gave a whole new lease of life to Lewis' films while he himself returned to the world of advertising and writing, penning several books on marketing. Lewis' films were released early to the home video market in the States and in the UK they were seen for the first time, some of them up to twenty years after they were first made. It gave Lewis a whole new army of fans and started the cult that would eventually culminate in him stepping behind the camera for the first time in 30 years with the belated sequel Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat (2002). Herschell Gordon Lewis will never be hailed as a great film-maker -
he's barely an adequate one - but the fact that he got there more-or-less
first and did it all with such gusto and good humour has made him a
firm favourite among splatter fans who hail him as the Godfather of
Gore. His following is strong enough for his best film, Two
Thousand Maniacs!, to get the remake treatment in 2005
with 2001
Maniacs. * = television 1961 1963 1964 Two
Thousand Maniacs! (director, script, director of photography,
music, song (Rebel Yell)) 1965 Monster a
Go-Go (producer (as Sheldon S. Seymour), script, additional
dialogue (as Sheldon Seymour), director (uncredited), production designer
(as Seymour Sheldon), performer (voice of radio announcer – uncredited)) 1966 1967 The
Magic Land of Mother Goose (director, director of photography) A Taste of
Blood (producer, director, performer (seaman - as Seymour
Sheldon)) 1968 The Psychic
(producer, director of photography) Something Weird (director, director of photography, performer (narrator (as Sheldon Seymour))) 1970 1972 1988 1996 The Blood Trilogy Outtakes (director) Psycho-lettes (acknowledgement (as H.G. Lewis)) 1998 2002 2003 Hunting for Herschell (performer (himself)) 2004 2005 1960 The Prime Time (producer, music, director (as Gordon
Weisenborn)) 1962 Nature's Playmates (director (as Lewis H. Gordon)) 1963 Boin-n-g (director) Goldilocks and the Three Bares (director (as Lewis
H. Gordon)) Scum of the Earth (director (as Lewis H. Gordon)) 1965 1966 1967 1968 Just for the Hell of It (director, song (Destruction
Inc)) She-Devils on Wheels (producer, director, song (Get Off the Road – uncredited)) Suburban Roulette (producer, script (as Sheldon Seymour), director) 1969 Linda and Abilene (director (as Lewis H. Gordon)) 1970 Stick It in Your Ear (producer) 1971 1972 Year of the Yahoo! (producer, director, music (as Sheldon Seymour)) 1973 REFERENCES MAGAZINES Chaplin vol.33 no.3 (no.234) (1991) pp.38-40; 46-50
(Sweden) Cineforum vol.31 no.304 (May 1991) pp.40-41 (Italy) Fangoria no.211 (April 2002) pp.22-26 (USA) Film Comment vol.22 no.4 (July / August 1986) pp.46-48
(USA) Filmfax: The Magazine of Unusual Film and Television no.28
(August / September 1991) pp.77-80 (USA) Image et Son no.327 (April 1978) p.22 (France) Skrien no.179 August / September (1991) p.60 (The
Netherlands)
Last Updated: 1 January, 2009
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