mondo cinema and beyond 1960s — 1980s
nontheatrical film program in the United States at Berkeley, which showed about 600 different programs a year. So I ended up being the person who line produced it and directed it, opened the office.
So you were called on for your archival know-how, and your ability to lasso together sundry material… Aside from the archival material, what in the film was shot for it originally?
SR: Te most important original interview was that with Edmund Kemper, the Co-Ed Killer. Which we did at Vacaville [California, home of the California Medical Facility]. And that was really the most dramatic. I was always the person talking to whoever was being interviewed—I did the interview with [Los Angeles County Coroner Tomas] Noguchi, for example. I was always the person who was with the live camera, but it was Leonard really who put together the montages, the graphics. Tat was done with a different team. What we shot live was a lot of the cutaway footage, everything at the autopsy, all of the stuff at the Grand Canyon, all of the helicopter-to-helicopter stuff, all of the stuff with the LAPD, shooting stuff in Texas at the Texas tower and the site of the Houston killings. And then I hired a woman named Lynn Jackson, whose then-husband Larry Jackson had run the Orson Welles Teater in Cambridge, and she was very adept at getting on the phone with people and getting footage out of them. Sometimes it was a long process. Tere was a KKK rally that we really wanted to get, and I think it took probably four months. We were turned down a number of times, and then finally the last time they said “Yes.” Te other key player was Lee Percy, who later became a major editor of mainstream features, although the more interesting features. As a team, everybody worked together for about eighteen months. At one point, Mata had a major medical incident and had to go back to
neither/nor
Japan, and he was there for a while, and things really got slow at that point. We were trying to get it out as fast as we could, and for people like Lee, who had to work every day of the week and was working long hours, I simply hired somebody who did their laundry, gassed their car… we had a cook who cooked breakfast, lunch, and dinner for everybody working on the movie, and everybody just kept their noses to the grindstone.
We began in an office off of Wilshire Blvd. in West
L.A., just at the city border with Santa Monica. It was a block from where O.J.’s wife was killed, actually. One block away. Te corner of Bundy and Wilshire. We kind of lived there; we were all there usually about fourteen hours a day.
It must’ve been an incredibly heavy atmosphere, being locked up with that footage day in and day out.
SR: Te time I spent in the coroner’s office, getting to know the people there, gave me full access to all of their files and all of the evidence. I would, like, open a packet, and these bullets would drop into my hand, fragments of bullets. Tese were bullets that had passed through somebody. And there would be Polaroids of all the various kinds of gruesome suicides, homicides, some of them pretty famous. And it… To be honest, it put me under a cloud for about… I don’t think I got over it for about six months afterwards, after the film was done. It was tough.
It’s difficult to watch the footage, much less to live with it for that length of time.
SR: Yeah. But what I’ve tried to do was… My job was to shoot and gather the footage, and to administrate the making of the film. I really had a more analytic approach to murder and homicide, wanted to understand why people did things, what’s the difference between
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