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A while back, I interviewed producer Andrew J. Fenady about TERROR IN THE WAX MUSEUM and ARNOLD; here's the ARNOLD part of the interview. (You'll see that I don't ask him about a lot of the people involved with ARNOLD; that's because he'd already talked about them in the WAX MUSEUM half of the interview.)

<< Q: Terror was a success, and next came Arnold.
Jameson Brewer kept telling me he had this idea, he had this idea, he had this idea [Arnold]. And I kept telling him, "Don't bother me now, I'll talk to you about it later on." But finally he got the chance to tell me what it was about, and I said [very dubiously], "Jesus Christ, Jameson, I don't know..."

Q: What turned you off?
I just didn't know about a girl marrying a corpse, whether that was going to be funny or whether it was going to be repugnant. But the more I thought about it, and the more I thought about getting a really sexy dame to star, and the more I thought about using Patric Knowles and some of the other people that we had used before in Terror, and adding a few more [oldtimers], I got excited. I went to Chuck Pratt and I said, "I want Jameson to write the script." In those days, a first draft cost maybe $12,000 or so. Well, we were swimming in money [laughs], so I was told to let him do whatever he wanted to do. So I got Jameson and I also brought in this guy John Fenton Murray, and they had an office down the hall from my office at BCP, and I kept hearing them laughing all day long! I would go in there and say, "Fellas, close the @+!%+$% door, will ya? You're drivin' me nuts!" Well, they finished it and, I have to tell you, I went to work on that script too--I put a lot of the dialogue in and a lot of the touches, like the cop's [Bernard Fox] bicycle which was always falling down.

Q: The script that Brewer and Murray wrote--it had funny stuff in it, but just not funny enough?
I just wanted to add some touches, that's all. So we did the script and, based on the success of Terror, BCP said, "Go ahead and shoot the damn thing." Feeling that it had to come across as humorous, Georg and I did everything we possibly could to make sure that audiences, instead of saying, "Oh, Jesus, that's horrible," would say, "God damn, that's funny!" In the reading-of-the-will scene, when the audio tape that Arnold made before his death was played and you heard his voice, that was funny, and it kept on being funny until the other characters start getting knocked off and it got pretty serious. I used all the old tricks like the living eye in the portrait, and it worked out great. Norman Stuart played the corpse of Arnold but that was not his voice, the voice was Murray Matheson. Norman was all right--and, boy, he could have been one of the Terror wax figures, he never moved, he never blinked, the son of a #%@%+! But his voice...he didn't have that genuine British accent that Murray did, so I brought Murray in. Norman looked like he could have had Murray's voice so it worked out fine.

Q: Talk about some of the oldtimers who acted in this one.
Farley Granger was a big star at one time, under contract to Goldwyn, and he was in some important pictures. He had done an episode of Hondo for me and I remembered him and I sent him the Arnold script and he came in and said, "Okay, when do we go to work?," so we got him. Roddy McDowall was one of the sweetest, nicest and most brilliant young people that you've ever met in your life. He designed the suit that he wore in the picture: When the costumer Oscar Rodriguez came in with a plaid kind of a thing, I said, "Roddy, what do you think?" and he said, "A.J., let's make it really different. Let's make it velvet, like the Beatles wear." He was absolutely right. I told the costumer, "Oscar my darling, you make Roddy one of those nice velvet suits. Talk to him about it, and let me see what you come up with." And that's what they came up with. I think that was one of the highlights of the picture, the scene where the suit shrank on Roddy until it crushed him. The suit was all wired up so that when we pulled the @+!%+$% wires, it would shrink.
Roddy was a real pro, as nice and cooperative as he could possibly be, just terrific. There's only one [stipulation] that he had: He said, "I hope you don’t mind my mentioning this, but I have a very, very long neck. Would you mind if I wore turtlenecks and things to hide my goose neck?" I said, "Pal, you can wear whatever the hell you want to wear around your neck!"

Q: You know whose scenes in Arnold I got the biggest kick out of? Ben Wright and Bernard Fox.
Those two guys were funnier than Laurel and Hardy. Their timing and their body English and their everything was just terrific. Now, you know who else was great in that? John McGiver. You want to hear the John McGiver story? I had never met him, but we sent him the script and told him the money, and he agreed to do it. So I took him over to the star's dressing room at Western Costume, and in his kinda-funny voice he said, "Mr. Fenady, you hired me for one day," and I said, "Yes sir. I'm really appreciative, the fact that you're doing it." He said, "Well, I like the part very much, but...there are 12 1/2 pages here. You don’t expect to shoot this in one day, do you?" And I said, "Yes, sir, we do. We can't afford to shoot it in two days!" He said, "Well, I'll do everything I can to help you."
His scene took place on a pub set, and during the lunch hour of the day that we were shooting it, he said, "Mr. Fenady, I'd like to speak to you for one second. I really think this is going well. I think your brother's doing a great job, and I just love doing this. And I want to tell you something: If we don’t finish my part today, don't put my name on the call sheet, but I'll be here first thing in the morning and work for as long as you want, at no charge." I said, "Mr. McGiver, God bless you. I appreciate your saying that. But I think we'll get the day's work." And we did. But, you know what?, I had never met or worked with the man before, and for him to say such a thing as that...that's pretty damn rare in this business. So that was John McGiver.

Q: The raven that hangs around the cemetery--any trouble working with it?
The raven was one of the best actors in the picture. So was the cat, that cat was great.

Q: And Stella Stevens?
I can't say enough good about Stella. She was the most sensual, sexy broad you’ve ever seen in your life. She was always on time, knew her lines, would do any damn thing. She was terrific. I worked with her many times after that.

Q: Was she actually nude in her shower scene?
Half-nude. You know which half, right? [Laughs] I tell you what, when we did the shower scene, everybody and his brother was down there on that set! But she didn't give a damn. Oh, hell, no, she was proud! Farley Granger, who was in the shower with her in that scene, was wearing a bathing suit.

Q: There was even a funny cameo for Victor Buono as the flustered minister who marries Stella Stevens to the corpse.
Victor was one of my favorite guys of all time. I gave him his first job: I used him on Confidential File when he was still a student down at San Diego, and I had used him a couple times since. When he came in to play the part of the minister in Arnold, he only worked one day. Of course, at Western Costume there was nothing that fit him [laughs], so I had Oscar Rodriguez make that suit for him. And I went up to him and I used the same line on him when we were finishing up his day's work: I said, "Victor, when you're finished and you walk out the door in that suit, you keep on walking, that belongs to you." He said, "Really?" and I said, "Well, what the hell am I gonna do with it? Make a tent out of it?" [Laughs] There was nobody else who could wear it!

Q: There's a great horror makeup on Shani Wallis when she puts the cold cream on her face and it turns out to be acid.
That was Jack Young again. A fine, fine man.

Q: That large cemetery set--did you have to build that from scratch?
You bet we did. We had Stan Jolley as the art director on Terror and he was very good, but for Arnold he was unavailable. Instead I got Monty Elliott, and he designed that set for a pittance. I thought it was just great. You'd think you were in [a real] cemetery! And there was the silhouette of the mansion in the distance...oh, he did an outstanding job. That set was one of the big stages at Paramount, the stage they'd shot The Buccaneer--both Buccaneers, DeMille's [1938] and Anthony Quinn's [1958]. They had the Battle of New Orleans and all that on that big, big stage.

Q: Whose idea was it for Arnold to have a theme song?
Well, I had written songs before. I wrote "Johnny Yuma" for The Rebel and I made more money from that, for Christ's sake, than any song I've ever written! The best song I ever wrote was "You Can't Ever Go Home Again" for Ride Beyond Vengeance [1966], and after that I wrote the lyrics for two songs in The Man With Bogart's Face. So I fully intended to write a song for Arnold and it turned out pretty good.

Q: Despite all the gore in Arnold--McDowall squashed to death and Shani Wallis' acid face--it got a GP.
We fought for the GP. In those days, you could go to the MPAA and fight for it, and I think I made a couple of little cuts here and there. GP was the rating we wanted and we got it. I also want to tell you that when we shot this picture, it was called Family Plot. But Chuck Pratt said to me, "Andy, look...I got a request to make and it's very important to me. The only successful pictures we made were called Willard and Ben. The lead character in this is called Arnold. Would you please change the title to Arnold?" He thought that the third time was gonna be a charm, too. This poor guy had given me everything, he really put his neck in a buzz saw for me because those guys down there at BCP, they didn't know from Terror in the Wax Museum but they went along with us. So we changed it to Arnold. But the title Family Plot didn’t go to waste because some unknown director, later on, used it for a picture of his [laughs]!

Q: But, other than the title, no interference from Pratt?
Chuck gave me evvverything that I wanted in this picture and did not interfere in the slightest. As a matter of fact, the only time he came down on the set was when Stella was bare-chested [laughs]!

Q: Was Arnold's budget about the same as Terror in the Wax Museum's?
They each cost about 650,000, give or take a few grand, and they both took 16 days, the same as the movies of the week that we did. No, I take that back, Arnold took 17 days to shoot, one day longer than Terror. See, for Terror we never left the Paramount lot but for Arnold we left one day [to shoot the mansion exteriors]. Just above Sunset Boulevard was a house owned by a fellow named Robert Maheu, Howard Hughes' right-hand man for years and years. I think we gave him a thousand bucks for the day. I used to throw those thousand dollar bills around like they were pennies [laughs]! So we might have spent a couple of extra dollars on Arnold. But we spent about the same on the cast, about $80,000 total on the cast each time. Milland was the heavyweight on Terror, and Stella on Arnold. I paid Roddy pretty good too, I think he got 20,000 bucks. In Arnold, I think that we held the mystery pretty damn good, you didn’t know what the hell was going on or who was the real culprit until we wanted you to know. <