The "Never Got Made" Files #83 - #85: A glut of Donald Glut, part 3

We pick up in the third part of our examination of unproduced Don Glut with another disparate trio of projects.  These run the gamut from television pilots to comic book adaptations.  And, naturally, there are some dinosaurs in there. Make sure to check out part one and part two for the full experience!

#83 - CAPTAIN JUSTICE (late 1960s)

This project is the oldest of all the ones we discussed.  As mentioned in part 1 of our coverage, Glut found himself in hot water during his time at USC for his love of comic books and superheroes.  So it is ironic that one of the earliest professional pieces he had looked at was a superhero script and that a fellow USC alum is the person who helped him shop it around.  “When I was going to USC film school, one of my classmates was Chris Lewis,” he explains.  “Chris was the son of Loretta Young, the actress, and Tom Lewis, who was the owner and creator of Family Theater.  Chris and I were good friends and we worked on student films together.  He suggested that I write a script and he could sell it because he was in touch with a lot of television people at the time.”

Glut’s predilection for comic books made the subject matter a natural choice, but a TV phenomenon also helped play a role in his choice.  “BATMAN was real big on TV at the time and superheroes were real big,” he reveals.  “So I wrote a script called CAPTAIN JUSTICE and it was a comedy.  It was really a take off on the old Republic ROCKET MEN serials than anything else.  It was very funny. Chris took it and thought it was great.  He said we came – he would always show me his fingers together like he was showing me an itsy bitsy inch – ‘that close’ to selling it.  It almost became a pilot for a television series, but it just never happened.”

#84 - DAGAR THE INVINCIBLE (mid-1970s)

Dagar (pronounced “day-gar”) the Invincible was one of several characters that Glut created for Western Publishing’s Gold Key line. Featured in a sword and sorcery series officially titled (deep breath) TALES OF SWORD AND SORCERY FEATURING DAGAR THE INVINCIBLE, Dagar found himself existing in a world of magical beasts and muscled barbarians over a four year, 19-issue run.  With sword-and-sandal movies having been a hot commodity worldwide, it seemed only natural to pursue this series as a film project.  “I was writing the comic book at the time,” Gluts remembers.  “The plan was that I would write it and my friend, the late Bob Greenberg, would direct it and Jim Danforth would do the special effects.”

For any Dagar fans curious about the unmade film’s plot, they need not go far as Glut was hoping to adapt the first four issues of the comic which told the character’s origin and initial quest for revenge.  While a script was never written, Glut did do a synopsis based on that opening comic quadrilogy.  “The whole quest was against the villain who was responsible for wiping out his whole family and his entire village,” Glut explains.  “It was this villain called Scorpio.  Dagar sets out after he becomes an adult.  He has a mentor like the guy in the KUNG FU (1972) television series.  He’s trained in the use of the sword and all of these weapons, so by the time he is an adult he is the best warrior around. He sets off and becomes a mercenary warrior, really on a quest to find Scorpio and kill him.  Through the four issues, he gets little clues at the end of each adventure.  He finds out the guy he killed might have worked for Scorpio, so he is back on the quest again.  By that last issue, he has the one-on-one confrontation with Scorpio.”

Danforth eventually dropped out of the project as he was hoping to begin his own writing-directing career.  But not before he did this preproduction painting, which echoes the cover of issue #3 of the comic series and still hangs in Glut’s house.

Jim Danforth art:

                                                    

Dagar #3

Glut even did a little dream casting while thinking about the project and felt he knew the perfect actor to portray his invincible warrior.  “I was talking to the actor Mike Henry, who had recently been playing Tarzan,” he recalls of his mental acting assignments.  “I used to run into him every now and then. I told him, ‘Hey, Mike, we’re doing DAGAR’ and I gave him a whole set of the comic books that had come out until that time.”

Following Danforth’s departure, Glut pressed on with the project and met with Western execs about purchasing the film rights to Dagar and other Gold Key characters.  “I finally did meet with the people from the New York office from Western Publishing,” Glut remembers.  “I wanted to get the rights to do a script and try to sell it for DAGAR THE INVINCIBLE, THE OCCULT FILES OF DR. SPEKTOR and TRAGG AND THE SKY GODS.  Those three comics I had created and was writing at the time.  And also TUROK, SON OF STONE, which I had no involvement in creatively.  We met and they were all gung ho; they were all ‘what a great idea, movies based on all these characters.’”

Regardless of interest on both ends, Glut was never able to secure the rights and the project ended before it really began.  Interestingly, if fans want to see what Dagar might have looked like, they need look no further than one of the genre’s all-time classics in CONAN THE BARBARIAN (1982).  “[CONAN director] John Milius was a good friend of mine,” Glut explains.  “I don’t think he read my comics, it was a total coincidence.  But the two stories are very, very similar.”

#85 - JOURNEY TO THE UNKNOWN LOST ISLAND…THAT TIME FORGOT (1980s/90s)

The final project we’re going to take a look at is one of the more interesting as it involves Don Glut’s passion for dinosaurs, but wasn’t a project he initially conceived.  “This was a project that was the idea of Tom Scherman,” Glut explains of this long-titled assignment.  “Scherman was a model builder.  He worked on FLESH GORDON (1974) and some major studio films too.  He was a genius at building models.  You could give him a bag that had ten paperclips, a tube of superglue, five poker chips, a hunk of plastic, and a propeller and say, ‘You have an hour, make this into a scale model of the Nautilus submarine’ and he would do it.”

“He wanted to do a take off on the movie UNKNOWN ISLAND (1948) and he thought I would be perfect to write the script.  We teamed up with Dave Stipes, who had a special effects house right near where both Tom and I live.  The three of us were going to produce this.  AIRPLANE (1980) was very popular at the time so I said, ‘Why don’t we do this like AIRPLANE?’”

Glut got to work on the script and fashioned a spoof of the age-old story of a group of explorers that inadvertently end up on an island inhabited by prehistoric beasts. Once again, plans were put into motion for the screenplay to become a picture. Adding to the effects talent behind the camera, Glut lined up good friend Roger Dicken to do the special effects.  And comic book artist Frank Brunner did some preproduction paintings and storyboards to help pitch the film.  The production had even gone so far as to cast certain actors.  “The guy playing ‘Jungle’ Sam, who was basically the Barton MacLane type character from UNKNOWN ISLAND, was Talmadge Scott.  He was one of the underwater zombies from SHOCK WAVES (1977) and did some movies with Fred Olen Ray,” Glut divulges of the preliminary casting.  “Joleen Lutz, who went on to become a regular on NIGHT COURT with Richard Moll, was playing the spoiled heiress who goes along on the trip.  Professor Richardson was going to be played by Ted Richards.  We had a jungle girl sexy type character whose name was Cave Girl, she was going to be played by a roommate I had at the time named Linda Golla.  And, of course, Bob Burns would have been this big giant gorilla with a horn coming out of the top of its head like the one in the first FLASH GORDON serial.”

JOURNEY... script page & storyboards

(click to enlarge)

Like TEENAGE MONSTER RUMBLE mentioned in our last entry, Glut couldn’t resist an in-joke gag that would be recognizable to genre fans the world over.  “I really wanted to use the famous lizard vs. alligator fight from ONE MILLION B.C. (1940) because everybody’s used it,” he reveals of his intention.  “So it would have been in black and white and there was one scene where the Professor is trying to make an excuse for the black and white scene behind them and says, ‘Oh, it is volcanic ash in our eyes.’  He tries shooting one of the dinosaurs and shoots a hole in the rear-projection screen.  Those were the kind of jokes we had.”

ONE MILLION B.C. (1940)

                                      

JOURNEY... art

Even with producer Robert Swanson again attached, the project was unable to find backing. “That would have cost a little bit more to do,” Glut says of the project.  It is something that was continually updated and pursued for a period of time though.  “The last draft was written right around when JURASSIC PARK (1993) came out as I had some JURASSIC PARK references in it,” Glut reveals.  Sadly, project originator Scherman passed away in 1995 due to lymphoma at the age of 54 and progress lulled after that.  However, with cinematic dinosaurs always in vogue and a fourth JURASSIC PARK threatening to rear its head in 2014, perhaps the project will receive a new lease on life.  In the right hands, it could be pretty darn funny I imagine.

THE END?

Hard to believe it has already been two weeks since we began our journey into the unproduced world of Don Glut.  Believe it or not, there are far more projects that he has written/developed than the ten we highlighted. Crazy titles such as MAN-LIZARD, STONE AGE AVENGER, DINOSAUR GIRL (with MAD’s Sergio Aragones), BLOOD JUSTICE, and SWEET NIGHTMARES (the last two being projects he still hopes to make).  “The ones I talked about were ones that actually had a good chance of getting made,” Glut concludes.  “Everybody has scripts stacked up in their filing cabinets, but these scripts had other people involved and interested in them.”

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Defective Detectives: DRAGON TRAP (2010)

Police procedural thrillers have been a staple in Scandinavia since 1965 with the first Martin Beck novel, "Roseanna" by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. Hennig Mankel, arguably the posterboy for Swedish police novels, freely admits that reading "Roseanna" in 1965 opened his eyes to a completely new approach to the mystery genre. From there the genre spread at a glacial pace, encompassing Scandinavia and The Netherlands. Only recently with the explosion of Stieg Larsson's much ballyhooed "Millennium Trilogy", publishers have started looking into translating more of these gritty, violent police novels into English. I am assuming this is the case in non-English speaking countries too, as there seem to be plenty of detective thrillers popping up here and there with a decidedly Nordic air about them.

Turkish cinema for most of us obscure movie lovers tends to be a steady diet of '70s and '80s Hollywood rip-offs and remakes, most often with the amazing Cüneyt Arkın. As fun as these films are, I figured there had to be more to the Turkish cinema scene than just the ADAM trilogy and its cousins... and there is. It seems that the Turks have embraced the Scandinavian police thriller just like we Americans did, but instead of doing the expected re-make (just like we Americans did), they decided to make their Scandinavian crime epic their own.

Set in a perpetually dark, rainy Istanbul, Inspector Celal - aka The Scorpion (popular Turkish actor Kenan Imirzalioglu) - is interviewing a man named Ensar (Nejat Isler) whose sister killed herself after being brutally raped by a psychotic serial rapist and pedophile with ties to the mob. Ensar swears revenge, even though Celal assures him that the police will take care of it. Sure enough Ensar heads straight into bloody vengeance, only to be stopped short by Celal who was tailing him. Ensar bolting from the scene of the gunfight without having killed his man, chip presumably still attached to shoulder. Flash forward...

After Cheif Abbas (director Ugur Yücel) beats the hell out of some small-time perps, Celal gets a confession out of a robbery suspect by pretending to snort coke and telling him that he is going to rape his wife and make him watch. Looks like things haven't progressed much since "Midnight Express". To give some contrast (or perhaps soften their characters), Cheif Abbas has a relationship with a nightclub singer who is clearly far too young and good looking for him, but pines of getting married to him when he retires from the force in a month. Wait, a cop who is retiring? Oh, things aren't going to go well, are they? Celal's outlet is painting, which seems fairly innocuous  except that they are rather grim expressionistic portrait paintings of the underbelly of society. Yes, in keeping with Scandinavian tradition, the inspector definitely has his share of issues.

A known peadophile working as a janitor at a local grade school under forged papers is found hanging from the school's flagpole, tortured and castrated. The penis is not found at the scene and the CSI types have found an organic fluid on the corpse... fluid that isn't human. While Abbas doesn't want to get involved in a case as he is retiring in a few short weeks, Celal manages to talk him into it, just in time for another body to be found. One of three rapists, released by the State under an amnesty program. Of course, if there's one butchered rapist, the other two should be following. Matter of fact the body count mounts up so fast in this film that at times it was hard to keep track of. Clearly writer Kubilay Tat wasn't going to have any of that single-murder kind of film. No, no, we get a regular supply of fresh killings with bizarre clues, red-herrings and crazy twists flying fast and furious with an intensity that rivals a Hollywood film. Is there one killer or two? Who is sending the DVDs of men being tortured, screaming out the locations where they will be buried? Is it someone from the military? Or could it be someone who has a bone to pick with the cops? And really, mightn't he be doing the people a favor by killing the nations scum?

In many ways DRAGON TRAP is the quintessential Swedish police thriller, many of the plot elements and themes (that I do not want to spoil here) are straight out of Scandinavia. On the other hand we have great bits of tense action dosed out at regular intervals, much like a Hollywood movie. Everything else is definitely Turkish. I think this sense of cinematic terroir is what really makes the film entertaining. The dialogue is rich and poetic in a way that Europeans prefer not to be. For example, when Abbas talks about his retirement he talks about the hardship of being a policeman: "Just at the moment of making love, you know the phone rings and you find yourself in front of a body. You run to the morgue soon after smelling your child. The scent of the murderer cannot survive in a clean home."
It actually reads a bit better in context, but that florid dialogue actually lends a lot of charisma to the film. I particularly like how everybody uses phrases of the "god willing" variety. "God willing, we will catch the killer." So basically, if he gets away, that is God's fault and has nothing to do with slipshod policework. Where do I get a job like that?

Usually a digital video camera is the kiss of death to an ambitious production. Nothing screams "cheap" and "amateur" like video and any attempt to overcome the format is going to have to take over twice the effort as it would if it were shot on film. Amazingly DRAGON TRAP does exactly this. At first I was turned off by the video image, but it didn't last long as Yücel takes that digital camera and delivers first class visuals. Rich, rain-soaked noir, majestic crane shots, prowling cameras, oblique angles, fish-eye lenses and some great location photography. Not to mention a bit of high-speed vehicular violence, all handled so well that at some point along the way, I actually forgot I was watching a video production. My one gripe is the scenes where they felt compelled to do the goddamn shakey-cam thing. Doing the hand-held shakey-cam is irritating on film, but when video producers think they are boosting their production values with this technique it becomes insufferable. Fortunately there are only a few of these scenes and the majority of the movie is excellently shot, including some of the hand-held work. For what it's worth, that's some high praise from coming from me.

I went searching for an example of modern non-ironic Turkish genre cinema and I came up with something that not only exceeded my expectations, but did an excellent job of reworking the Scandinavian police procedural into something more or less wholly Turkish. I guess you could nit-pick it all day for not being what you want it to be, for Celal's clumsy attempts at romance, for borrowing a bit of stylistic transitions from SE7EN (1995) and for leaving some plot holes and inconsistencies behind when they reveal the final twist. However, I think those are all minor quibbles compared to what the filmmakers do right. In spite of it's flaws, I found it highly entertaining and definitely a nice antithesis to the dreadfully over-dramatic BBC Wallander adaptations.

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The "Never Got Made" Files #80 - #82: A glut of Donald Glut, part 2

We certainly covered a wide range of territory in the first part of our overview on unproduced Don Glut screenplays as we ventured from cursed castles to self deprecating superheroes to a Japanese superhero battling mutant dinosaurs. Always fearful of disappointing our readers, the next entry proves to be even more diverse as Glut reveals details on projects that involve pirates and psychos and teenage monsters.  Oh, my!

#80 - QUEEN CUTLASS (mid-1970s)

Before we start, take a good look at that art to the left. Okay, picked your jaw up off the floor?  Seriously, what red-blooded American kid wouldn’t want to see a movie based on that?  Hell, I still want to see it.  Yet despite a plethora of female pirates throughout history (Grace O’Malley, Mary Read, Anne Bonny, Lady Killigrew) and literature, the pirate film subgenre was predominantly male up into the mid-1970s. (Of course, the Italians couldn’t be stopped with titles like QUEEN OF THE PIRATES [1960] and TIGER OF THE SEVEN SEAS [1962].)  Glut was hoping to change that with the female pirate project QUEEN CUTLASS.

The venture originally started off in a completely different medium.  “It was originally going to be a comic book,” Glut reveals. “Rick Hoberg, an artist friend of mine, did some art for QUEEN CUTLASS.  He and I were very good friends and we were working at Marvel Comics and animation together. We got that to a company called Sanrio, which was a Japanese company that had established an office in Los Angeles.  They were going to do all kinds of things – graphic novels, comic books, you name it.”

When the property didn’t get picked up by that company Glut decided to rework it into a film treatment.  “Both Rick and I had a friend working over at 20th Century Fox who was in the story department,” he explains. “So we submitted the treatment that I had written to our friend at Fox.”

QUEEN CUTLASS script
(click to enlarge)

“QUEEN CUTLASS was kind of a combination pirate movie and sword-and-sorcery film,” Glut details.  “Something like THE 7th VOYAGE OF SINBAD (1958), but with pirates living in this world where magic existed.”  Indeed, Ray Harryhausen’s productions were still popular at the time the script was being written with THE GOLDEN VOYAGE OF SINBAD (1974) and SINBAD AND THE EYE OF THE TIGER (1977) finding gold at the box office.

The storyline revolved around a young girl named Aleta – which is the name of Hoberg’s wife in real life – being captured by a group of sea-faring scoundrels.  “She is a princess and there is a raid on the castle,” Glut explains.  “She gets captured by a group of pirates and grows up on a pirate ship and eventually becomes the Captain.  There is a quest and, of course, there is a villain – a sorcerer type – who was behind the whole thing. She eventually finds out what her heritage is.  It was very much like an Edgar Rice Burroughs-type of plot where they think she is a savage and at the end turns out to be a queen.”

Alas, regardless of how scantily clad the heroine was, the project never found its footing at Fox and was forced to walk the plank (ah, boo yourself).  In fact, Glut and friends proved to be a bit before their time as it would be two decades before a proper female pirate movie, CUTTHROAT ISLAND (1995), came from a major Hollywood company.  Despite that film’s legendary bombing at the box office, the pirate subgenre survived and female pirates successfully set sail in Disney’s PIRATES OF THE CARRIBEAN series. “Now, of course, pirates are very hot and fantasy is very hot,” Glut concludes, “but both Rick and I went on to do other things.”

#81 - CUTS (mid-1980s)

Leaping ahead a decade and into another genre, Glut remembered a horror project that he developed in the mid-1980s.  A confirmed classic horror film fan, Glut penned a screenplay that tackled the radical shift happening within the horror field with the emerging stalk-and-slash subgenre, creating an “old school vs. new school” showdown. “CUTS was a straight horror picture at the height of the slasher phase,” he explains. “It was basically about an old horror film actor who had vanished many years ago.  He comes out of retirement because he’s not happy with the way horror films have changed from the Boris Karloff and Vincent Price era to the FRIDAY THE 13th era.  The hero was a special effects artist who uses his gore effects to save the day.”

Sounding like a fun combination of THEATRE OF BLOOD (1973) meets F/X (1986), CUTS was written with specific people in mind for the lead roles.  For the thespian-gone-mad, Glut thought of a horror staple in Mr. Barnabas Collins himself.  “I wanted an older actor to play the Karloff/Price character,” he explains, “and approached Jonathan Frid, with whom I was in contact at the time. Jonathan, however, was at a point in his life where he wasn't particularly interested in acting in films of any kind, but particularly in horror, and politely declined.”

For the lead in the film's modern-era slasher, Glut thought of a friend whose casting would have been totally against type.  “I was very good friends with Richard Moll, who was then still with NIGHT COURT,” he reveals.  “He wanted to branch out and do some movies and he was a horror fan.  With hair, mustache and a beard, he looked very much like a very tall Vincent Price.  I could see him in that role.  So I tailored that character to being very tall and looking very classical in the sense of the old horror films.”

For the latex-slinging special effects hero, Glut also had a unique take on this lead role. “For the special effects guy, I thought of Tom Savini,” he discloses.  “Savini not only does those kinds of effects, but he’s also a good actor.  He was just the right age at the time.”  And the effects artist seemed receptive to the idea.  “I was stuck in Pittsburgh for a day and a night with nothing to do in a railroad station there, so I just decided to look up Tom Savini’s name in the phone book and he was listed.  So I called him and he invited me over to the house.  He was very nice to me.  During the course of the evening I mentioned the CUTS script and I gave it to him.  He said he was going to try and get some financing or get it to people.  Nothing ever became of that though.”

Despite having written the script with certain actors in mind, Glut was not attached to direct this one.  “CUTS was not going to be directed by me,” he explains, “but by a director friend named Joel Colman.  He had done some feature work, but he was mostly a TV commercial director.  He did hundreds of TV commercials.  One of the ones you may remember if you’re old enough was the [1980s commercial] where they blew up the Jack in the Box [fast food mascot] character.”

The script did come close to getting the green light in the hands of producer Robert Swanson, who had some even more interesting thoughts on casting.  “He was going to try to get Christopher Lee to play the part I had designed for Richard Moll,” Glut mentioned during our talk.  “I know Christopher Lee quite well so that would have been equally good for me.  Either one of those people could play that role. Swanson said he came close many times but he was just never able to get a deal [for the movie].”

CUTS opening

(click to enlarge)

#82 - TEENAGE MONSTER RUMBLE (late 1970s)

The final project we’ll take a look at is one that Glut has a special fondness for as it was born out of amateur moviemaking days.  Already a fan of the Universal monsters, Glut’s worldview was expanded even further with American International Pictures’ late 1950s teenage monster cycle.  In his teens at the time, Glut found the perfect conduit to connect his love of monsters with his teenage acting ensemble and a series of shorts soon developed featuring the Teenage Werewolf, Teenage Frankenstein, Teenage Vampire, Invisible Teen, and even a Teenage Apeman.  The culmination of these efforts was MONSTER RUMBLE (1961), a 34-minute dialogue free effort that allowed Glut to stage the battle between the Teenage Frankenstein and Teenage Werewolf creatures the he so desperately wanted to see in HOW TO MAKE A MONSTER (1958).

TEENAGE MONSTER RUMBLE was born in the 1970s as Glut set out to write a script that captured the 1950s and early 1960s nostalgia going on at the time.  Having donned a leather jacket and greaser hair as a teen (much to the dismay of his high school’s staff) Glut felt that the era of motorcycle boots and pomade was fertile territory for a return of the teenage monsters.  While mum on the plot particulars, Glut does let it be known that the script takes place in 1959 and revolves around a descendant of Dracula, fresh off the boat from Transylvania, cruising into a new high school and setting up a gang of monsters.  All the favorites – Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, the Wolfman, and even a zombie – appear in teenage form and get ready to rumble with a rival motorcycle gang down on the waterfront.  “It is rebels with claws,” Glut says.

TEENAGE MONSTER RUMBLE opening

(click to enlarge)

It is definitely a stroll into the past for Glut.  Most of the characters were written with folks he hung out with as influence and he even was hoping to shoot it at St. Benedict High School, his alma mater in Chicago.  “I wanted to shoot it in my actual high school in Chicago,” he reveals.  “When I wrote the script, the geography of what was going on in my mind was the geography of the high school.”

Horror high - St. Benedict High School:

As a labor of love, Glut also made deliberate plans to pay homage to the horror genre. He wrote a role specifically for celebrated horror host Zacherley.  He also hoped to incorporate the man who helped send the juice into Frankenstein’s monster in a little in-joke. “When I first wrote it, I was hoping I could get Ken Strickfaden as a guy who sold the lab equipment,” he reveals.  Additionally, he made room for a horror legend to reprise a famous role.  “I wanted to get John Carradine to play Dracula,” he explains. “He only appears as a ghost in front of a painting, so I could get around the fact that he was very visibly arthritic at the time.”

The project has encountered various amount of interest over the years.  Glut pitched it to producer Mark Borde, who expressed interest, and Joe Dante associate Miller Drake tried to get the film into the hands of Roger Corman’s New World Pictures.  While the project hasn’t happened yet, Glut did get a bit of it out to the public in an industry showcase production he directed in the 1980s.  “We had special effects and some pretty actresses who played the teenage girls,” he divulges.  “I had a guy who had kind of a 1950s look playing the teenage vampire.  We did a bat transformation including a puppet bat and a fog machine.  We had music playing in the background and I had a bunch of 1950s songs that fit in with the visuals.  It went great but the fog machine – the guy [working it] didn’t realize how powerful it was – and we literally flooded out the theater and everybody had to go outside for a half hour.”

TEENAGE MONSTER RUMBLE is a project that Glut still actively develops and he currently lists it on his film company’s website.  When asked which of the scripts we discussed he would want to do if given a green light, Glut chose this one without hesitation.  “I’d really like to do TEENAGE MONSTER RUMBLE,” he answers, “to me that would be a trip down memory lane.”

Check back next week for our third and final part where we talk barbarians, more superheroes and dinosaurs!

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The "Never Got Made" Files #76 - #79: A glut of Donald Glut, part 1

Chances are pretty high that if you’ve found your way to our little corner of the internet that you already know who Don Glut is.  If you don’t, it is certainly through no lack of effort on his end as it would be easier listing what he hasn’t done in the entertainment industry over what he has done. As a first generation Monster Kid, Glut was famous before getting out of his teens thanks to his amateur films (41 in all) that graced the pages of Forrest J. Ackerman’s FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND.  Glut soon parlayed his love for film into an education as he studied at the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television alongside such notables as George Lucas, John Milius, and Basil Poledouris (who even directed GLUT [1967], a student short starring Glut as “himself”).  While at USC, Glut drew the ire of certain staff for his love of – gasp – fantasy and comic books (if they could see the movie industry now) to the point he was threatened with expulsion.  Soured by that experience, he swiftly flew into his other love and was a member of the Michael Nesmith-produced, late 60s rock band The Penny Arkade.   At the same time, some of his earlier films were gaining a cult following on the underground movie circuit.

Those are signs of a pretty prolific man, right?  Well, we haven’t even started. In the subsequent decades, Glut has maintained a steady career in writing.  He has written extensively for comic books, including creating the characters Dagar the Invincible and Dr. Spektor for Western Publishing’s Gold Key imprint; he has written for live-action television (SHAZAM and LAND OF THE LOST); he has written for over 30 animation programs, notably G.I. JOE, SPIDER-MAN, and TRANSFORMERS; he even ventured into the toy biz, co-creating the He-Man and the Masters of the Universe line; he has authored several children and adult fiction novels, including the best selling novelization of THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1980) and a 12-part Frankenstein series; he has also authored even more non-fiction books, including a respected series on dinosaurs (yet another love) and, most recently, the horror host examination SHOCK THEATRE CHICAGO STYLE; and, since 1996, he has written and directed 6 feature films and several documentaries with his company Frontline Films.  Whew!  Of course, we’ll always love him here for dinosaur consultant credit on CARNOSAUR (1993).

For someone that incredibly productive, you just know that they have more projects sitting on the shelf.  I initially contacted Mr. Glut (“Call me Don”) to talk about two unproduced films I had dug up information on.  Incredibly, between two phone sessions that lasted over a total of 3 hours, we ended up talking about nearly a dozen unrealized film projects.  Don was incredibly generous with his time, allowing me to tax his memory on some stuff that happened 40 years ago.  “With everything else they tax these days, one more won’t matter,” he said before we dove into the unproduced film history of Don Glut (with so many projects, we’ve opted to spread this series out over the month in three parts).

#76 - CASTLE OF GORE (early 1970s)

The first project I was hoping to unearth information about leapt forward from the pages of Fangoria.  Crawling comfortably into its fourth year, the magazine did a feature in 1982 in issue #17 on Herschell Gordon Lewis, whose 1960s gore features were gaining a new audience thanks to Wizard Home Video’s VHS releases.  A few issues later, Glut wrote in to inform editor “Uncle” Bob Martin about a project he had written for Lewis in the early 1970s. (Interestingly, the very next letter after Don’s was one from H.G. Lewis thanking Martin for the coverage.)

Okay, an anthology film called CASTLE OF GORE to be directed by The Godfather of Gore with segments centering on a werewolf, Jack the Ripper and voodoo?  This I have to know more about.

While past interviews have shown me that time has a way of fogging the sharpest of memories, this was definitely not the case here as Don exactly recalled the project from 40 years ago. The film’s birth showed Lewis’ penchant for pragmatism as it was born from the simple step of having a great location – a castle in the suburbs of Chicago (while Glut can’t remember the location, we’re pretty sure it was Givins’ Irish Castle, the only standing castle in the area). Don was friends with Ray Craig, then production manager on Lewis’ THE GORE GORE GIRLS (1972), and Craig spoke with Glut about possibly writing a script.  “Ray contacted me and said, ‘Herschell’s got this castle and he needs a script,’” Glut recalls.  “I went to Chicago for one of my visits because my family is from there and Ray set up a lunch with Herschell.  So I went down and we ate in a downtown restaurant.  When you see Herschell Lewis in person, he’s nothing like you might expect.  He looks like an executive out of MAD MEN.  He wore a suit and tie and his office was very much a business office.  And in the back he had all of these editing machines and posters and everything.  So we had lunch and I mentioned something about I’m really looking forward to be working on a horror picture and he said, ‘I don’t make horror movies.’  I said, ‘You don’t?’ And he said, ‘I make gore pictures.’  So the title became logical – there’s a castle, the film’s going to have a lot of gore in it, so it’s CASTLE OF GORE.  That’s how it all came to be.”

Armed with the set up, Glut returned to California and began pounding out pages on his manual typewriter.  The premise was that a Crypt Keeper-esque host named Morgan would tell the audience three horror tales with the common link being that all the stories took place in or around the castle during different time periods.  Glut stories were written with an eye toward dark comedy and parody, as evidenced by the segment titles.  “Each one of the separate titles was a take off on a current popular movie,” he explains.  “The Jack the Ripper was called S*L*A*S*H with asterisks between each letter like M*A*S*H (1970).  The voodoo story was called LOVE GORY with the tagline ‘love means never having to say you’re dead.’ And the last one was THEY SHOOT WEREWOLVES, DON’T THEY?”

CASTLE OF GORE script opening

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Like most monster fans from that era, Glut was definitely a fan of the pre-code horror comics of the 1950s.  As such, his stories reflected the surprise twist endings that the medium was famous for.  “The Jack the Ripper story the big surprise was that Jack the Ripper was actually a woman and the punch line was ‘I’m really Jacqueline the Ripper,’” he remembers.  “All I remember about the voodoo story was about a married couple who cheated on the other and one of them came back.  He came back from the dead and she tried chopping him up with an ax.  The story ended with the body parts crawling along the floor looking for the spouse.  And the werewolf movie was set in a period in some earlier century.  The werewolf was also a land baron and he was taking advantage all of the villagers and farmers.  And then he would kill them to add frosting to the cake.  At the end, he didn’t realize this whole populace was made up of ghouls.  The last scene when they were all at the table and there’s this werewolf with an apple in its mouth on the table.”

Luck, however, was not on Glut’s side with this project.  Following THE GORE GORE GIRLS, Lewis transitioned out of the film business and spent the next 30 years concentrating on his work in the advertising field.  “He seemed to like the script and he liked me,” Glut recalls of Lewis, “but he just never made the movie.  And I was going to say, I never got any money for it either.”  It was definitely a learning experience for the young screenwriter and it proved he could write a complete script.  Also, it provided great practice in the EC-ish style as Glut would soon be penning stories for the Warren Publishing horror triple terror of CREEPY, EERIE and VAMPIRELLA.

#77 & # 78 - RIPPED TO SHREDS / SUPERHEROES! (late 1970s)

The second film I was hoping to learn more about was an early slasher evocatively titled RIPPED TO SHREDS. Covered in an inch-tall blurb in Fangoria #15, the film project is something Glut was lined up to direct.  Hardly a memorable project for him, the back story on how he met producers Seymour and Mark Borde is more interesting.  “They were basically a releasing company but now they wanted to make their own movies,” Glut reveals.  “They were distributing a short film called FOOT FETISH, which was a stop-motion short film.  It was between two shoes and one falls in love with the other.  It was directed, written and produced by Randal Kleiser, who went on to direct GREASE (1978) and THE BLUE LAGOON (1980).  Randall was my roommate at the dormitory at USC (he also edited the aforementioned GLUT).  He was already moving onto bigger and better things at the time, so when he found out Seymour and his son Mark were looking for a director for RIPPED TO SHREDS, he had me call Mark.  So I went down there and met with them and they wanted me to direct it.”

Mark & Seymour Borde

Seymour Borde & Associates had been a film distributor for over 15 years and they were deciding to get in the film production business with their first production being SUMMER CAMP (1979) a T&A loaded comedy from director Chuck Vincent.  The script for the horror flick was written by one Paul Ross, who had previously written the late 70s supernatural-mentary JOURNEY INTO THE BEYOND (1977).  Glut couldn’t remember many details on the plot, but does recall the script’s cover featured letters dripping blood.  “I didn’t have any input on the writing,” he remembers.  “RIPPED TO SHREDS was a standard slasher movie.  I don’t remember what the plot was.  I think there was a lot of teenagers getting killed or something like that.  It ended actually with the girl being the hero, which was kind of a nice twist.”

The discussion of SHREDS is what really opened up the uncovering of other projects.  Glut’s time spent with the Bordes reveal another project they were hoping to attach him to.  The film in question was SUPERHEROES!  Described in Variety in late 1978 as “a spoof of a host of costumed comic characters,” this was another script by Paul Ross.  “It was a JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA/AVENGERS type of thing,” Glut explains of the second script. “SUPERHEROES! was a comedy and each one of them had some kind of problems.  I don’t remember it having a lot of action.  I remember it had a lot of scenes where the superheroes kind of sat around, told jokes and played off each other’s weaknesses.”

Box Office on SUPERHEROES!

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While the Bordes seemed intent on pressing forward with the FX heavy pictures, neither one came to fruition.  While the specifics may never be known as to why each one didn’t get made, Glut theorizes it was the more complex nature of the productions that kept producer Mark Borde from going forward.  “If he would have done the SUPERHEROES! movie, he would have had to do all of the special effects for the super powers.  And RIPPED TO SHREDS would have a lot of gore effects,” he explains.  “When he [later] did HOLLYWOOD HOT TUBS (1984), he called me up and said, ‘Guess what we did? We blew up a car today.’ I said, ‘A real car?’ and he said, ‘No, just a shell.  There was no engine in it.’ But he was real proud of that for the fact he went the extra nine yards to blow up a car.  That was a big deal for Mark.  If that was a big deal, maybe it was the idea that the special effects were too involved and too costly down the road.” Indeed, the Bordes did retreat from fantasy to nature’s best special effect as they produced more T&A films in the 80s such as LUNCH WAGON (1981).  “Fred Olen Ray said, ‘Breasts are the cheapest of all special effects,’” Glut sums it up.    
 

#79 - ULTRAMAN, HERO FROM THE STARS (1980/81)

This unmade project is by far one of the more fascinating from Glut’s history because it went a good ways into preproduction.  Tsuburaya Productions introduced the Ultraman character to Japanese audiences in 1966 and it proved to be an immediate sensation.  Over a decade later, sci-fi and superheroes were huge thanks to the worldwide success of STAR WARS (1977) and SUPERMAN (1978).  Tsuburaya had successfully re-launched Ultraman with THE ULTRAMAN, an animated series that debuted in 1979, and ULTRAMAN 80, a live-action series that premiered in April 1980.  The following month in May 1980, the company announced in Variety its intention to fund a $10,000,000 ULTRAMAN movie for Western audiences. The film, titled ULTRAMAN: THE JUPITER EFFECT, was to be written by Jeff Segal and to be filmed across the U.S. “including New York City, Washington, the Houston Space Center, San Francisco and the Grand Canyon” (article at bottom of the page).

This version didn’t get very far and soon Glut found himself in the cosmic world of Ultraman. Perched high atop the bestseller list for THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK novelization, Glut was recommended by a friend in Japan and quickly hired to pen the script.  “Tsuburaya Productions wanted to get into a bigger market,” he recalls, “so they wanted to make an American ULTRAMAN feature length movie that would play in theaters with a big budget and a completely American cast.  No references to Japan anywhere in it. They hired me and I wrote the first draft of the script, which they paid me very well for.”

 Illustration © 2012 by Alex Wald;
Ultraman © 1966, 2012 by Tsuburaya Prod. Co., Ltd.

Glut was given free reign on the screenplay and decided to work in familiar territory as he included dinosaurs as the villains.  And not just any old dinosaurs either.  “I based the script on the idea that at the end of Cretaceous period when the asteroid hit some dinosaurs managed to take refuge underground,” he explains of the script’s plot.  “There was one group of dinosaurs that escaped below the surface and over the years, while we were evolving on the surface, they were too into humanoid types of forms.  They had wings, scaly skin, claws, and fangs.  Every once and a while they would get out and be seen by somebody.  That’s what gave rise to the legend of devils and demons.”

“The movie opened with a church being demolished to put up a parking lot.  There is one part of the church that’s been taboo and nobody goes near it.  They break the wall down and they find chained to the wall the skeleton of this humanoid creature with bat-like wings, thinking they found the devil.  These creatures resent having to live underground and over the years they found eggs of the prehistoric creatures living at that time.  They’ve been preserving them and mutating them over the years.  So they basically then are going to take over the Earth using these three monsters.  One was a land-based creature, one was a water-based, and one was an aerial creature.  So you basically had Godzilla, Rodan and Manda – creatures like that.  Each one of them had some kind of kaiju-like power whether it was electro-vision or fiery breath.”

More dinosaur baddies:

Illustration © 2012 by Alex Wald;
Ultraman © 1966, 2012 by Tsuburaya Prod. Co., Ltd.  

Illustration © 2012 by Alex Wald;
Ultraman © 1966, 2012 by Tsuburaya Prod. Co., Ltd.  

Illustration © 2012 by Alex Wald;
Ultraman © 1966, 2012 by Tsuburaya Prod. Co., Ltd.  

As this triple threat tore up the globe, it appeared that an even bigger force than the regular old Ultraman was required to take care of business.  “With Earth’s major cities being destroyed by these three monsters, the Ultra-people in the M23 galaxy realize that they now need an ultra-Ultraman,” Glut details.  “So they call all the Ultraman characters that had been in all the old TV shows together and they transfer all of their powers into one character.  So he is like the mightiest of all, he can do everything all of them can do.  And he comes to Earth for lots of major battles and things.”

Script meetings were had and Glut even tried recruiting his old friend Roger Dicken, creator of the chestburster in ALIEN (1979), to do the FX. Comic book artist and kaiju fan Alex Wald also contributed some impressive preproduction designs for Ultraman and his various foes. While a clear vision existed for Glut, the same can’t be said for the Tsuburaya side as Glut amusingly recalls a meeting with Noboru Tsuburaya and his entourage.  “I went through my whole plot.  My whole plot was based on organic things,” he reveals.  “It was actual animals that had mutated based on dinosaurs that had actually lived. Sure, they had powers, but there was nothing supernatural.  And one of them said, ‘Can’t you throw in a giant robot from space?’ And I quickly explained to them why a giant robot from space would have nothing to do with the story.  All they could see is that it would be kind of cool having a giant robot knocking a building down.  So that is one of the things I had to fight for, to keep it my vision and not just a big hodgepodge of things.”

Illustration © 2012 by Alex Wald;
Ultraman © 1966, 2012 by Tsuburaya Prod. Co., Ltd.  

A language barrier also provided some funny moments for Glut. Naofumi Okamoto, the film’s line producer who went on to be good friends with Glut, was one of the few English speakers within the production staff.  Yet some of the American slang in Glut’s script caused confusion for him.  “I had one of the characters make a comment relating to jealousy,” Glut explains, “and he said something like, ‘Well, the green-eyed monster rears its ugly head again.’  So I got a call again late at night – ‘What’s this green-eyed monster?  We have the one the flies, we have the one on the water, and we have the one on land.  But none of them have green eyes.  Is there a fourth monster?’”

Despite enthusiasm on both ends of the Pacific, the American ULTRAMAN film never went into production.  While some might view this as another depressing setback, Glut was thrilled to have worked on the project.  “It was one of the most fun writing experiences in my life,” he discloses.  “If you can imagine actually sitting there and getting paid to conceive and write scenes where a giant superhero is fighting a giant monster in a major city.  It was really like a dream come true.”

Make sure to check out part 2 where we discuss teenage monsters rumbling, horror actors-turned-killers, and nude pirate babes!

Variety article on U.S. ULTRAMAN

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Many thanks to Mr. Glut for the interview.  And thanks also to Phantasmagoria Photography for the picture of Givins Irish Castle and Alex Wald for the ULTRAMAN art.

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