Yuku free message boards

... when it was slated to come out on DVD -- and then it never did!: Memories of Nightmare in Wax (1969)

A throwback to Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) and House of Wax (1953), the low-budget indie Nightmare in Wax was unique in its own small way, adding to the time-tested horror formula a motion picture industry background and a number of surreal flourishes. Many of the latter came courtesy of Cameron Mitchell, who starred as Paragon Studios makeup department head Vincent Rinard, horribly burned by his vindictive boss (Berry Kroeger at his ickiest); fire-scarred and wearing an eyepatch, Rinard goes from makeup man to operator of a Hollywood wax museum where, "coincidentally," the main attractions are astonishing lifelike figures of all the Paragon Studios stars who have recently started disappearing without a trace. Without credit, Mitchell also overhauled the script, deleting scenes, writing others (including a head-scratcher of an "It was all a dream...or was it?" ending) and suggesting additional weirdness which, he felt, "saved the picture."

Fans can decide whether Mitchell helped or harmed the picture now that it's new on DVD from Navarre Corporation, half of an "Exploitation Cinema Double Feature" with the same-year Blood of Dracula's Castle. In the following two interviews, the making of the movie is recalled by John "Bud" Cardos, who played the part of a police sergeant, worked behind the scenes, and stunt-doubled Mitchell in his fire scene; and Martin Varno, the movie's makeup man.

John "Bud" Cardos

The executive producer on Nightmare in Wax was Rex Carlton, who also wrote that picture. I knew Rex very well and I did a number of pictures with him. He was a quiet, nice guy, very gentle, easy to get along with. I do believe he was gay. But that didn't make any difference--he never made any passes [laughs]! He committed suicide later on. Another producer was a guy named Marty Cohen, who was involved in a picture called The Rebel Rousers [1970] which I also worked. In other words, how I got the Nightmare in Wax job was because I'd worked with all these guys before. I did a whole bunch of pictures [on that level] as production manager, first assistant director, I'd do parts in 'em, I did all the stuntwork...back in those days, that's what you did, you wore three or four hats. The job of the production manager (which was one of the jobs I did on Nightmare in Wax) is, you put everything together: You go out and you find the locations with the location guy, you hire all the crew, you work out a budget and a schedule with the director and the producer, you make sure that things are paid for, and you try to hold it on budget and on schedule all the time you're going through the show.

Cameron Mitchell, who played the madman with the eye patch, was a great guy, he really was. Look back over his career, he did a lot of big pictures. Cameron always treated me great, so we got along fine. Over the years until he passed away, we kept in contact a little bit; in fact, when I directed Act of Piracy [1988] in South Africa, I ran across Cameron a couple of times over there. He was great to work with.

Scott Brady [who played a police detective] and I also "went way back," we did four or five pictures together, Westerns and other stuff. Scott was another great guy. We not only worked together, we were also social buddies, he and I and Jim Davis and so on. Scott and I used to go out and have a few drinks now and then, but he was never like his brother [notorious Hollywood "wild man" Lawrence Tierney]. Scott and I were friends for a lot of years. Here again, Scott was, like Cameron, a pretty big actor [in his prime]. I can't say enough good about him, he was just an all-around good guy.

It was interesting, shooting Nightmare in Wax in the Movieland Wax Museum out near Buena Park. Part of it was shot there, but the wax museum workroom with the big tank was actually a sound stage. That's the only thing that I can remember we shot on a sound stage, the interior of the workroom; the rest of it was the real wax museum and then we shot in people's houses. In those days, just like now, you can go to a company that [arranges for] location shooting and they'll open a book and show you 500 houses.

I do believe that that particular house with the pool that we used in Nightmare in Wax belonged to a friend of Rex Carlton. At that house, by the pool, was where I doubled Cameron Mitchell after Berry Kroeger threw the alcohol in his face and set him on fire. Back in those days, we didn't have all the protections that you got now. In those days, we [fire stunt guys] used to put on long underwear; and then we would wrap aluminum foil around; then we would put on a wetsuit or a running suit or a jogging suit over all that. Then we'd put on the wardrobe, and smear some rubber cement on the wardrobe, and give it a couple of squirts of lighter fluid. As soon as a spark hits it, it goes [laughs]! When it started getting too hot, you had to have a safety man there to put it out for you.

In the case of Nightmare in Wax, I controlled the heat by how long it took me to get to the pool. 'Cause I knew, once I got to the pool, the fire would be out [laughs]! It was primitive in those days compared to now; today they've got all kinds of liquid gels you put on yourself to stop the heat from getting to you, they've got all kinds of fire suits and so on. We didn't have that back then. Back then, the fire suits we had were the ones like, if your airplane crashed, the fire department guys would come wearing them. But, my God, if you wore one of those [in a movie], you'd look like some kind of monster!

The fire stunt in Nightmare in Wax was not that elaborate; just my head was on fire. Well, actually, my head was not on fire, the fire was on the back of my shoulders, but the way they shot it [from the back], it looks like my head was on fire. [Q: How did you protect hair and your ears?] Just by tuckin' my head down [laughs]. I tucked my head down and let the flames go up the back. I think I got a little singed, the back of my hair, but nothing that burned me.

Back then, on those little shows, if you wanted to work, you'd better know how to do more than one job; otherwise, your chances were few and far in between. I was pretty cocky back in those days as far as my talent. When I went to get a job as a production manager, I used to tell 'em, "Look, here's what I can do, this and this," and I told 'em, "If I don't save you money each week, you don't have to pay me." I could promote ice cubes to Eskimos, you know what I mean [laughs]?

Martin Varno

How I got the job on Nightmare in Wax was, I went out to an office off the Sunset Strip and interviewed for a fellow, one of the producers of the thing. He was a very nice little man, and he killed himself a few years later. Rex Carlton. He seemed to be fairly sharp, and he was very nice to me. I did several pictures for [Nightmare in Wax director] Bud Townsend, another nice guy. He was in that particular strata that was making that particular type of picture, and he made a lot of them, 'cause he was good at it.

The only real sour note on the thing was Cameron Mitchell. I will go on record as saying, I think that man was so mentally ill, so disturbed at the time, that he should have been committed. He was a complete jerk. I'm sure you've heard that before. He was probably real pissed-off that he wasn't doing big pictures at Fox any more. I had one incident where I really got pissed off: We were on location in somebody's private home up in the hills above the Valley side of the canyon, real nice place, and it was night and so we had it all lit and so on. It was the scene where Cameron's supposed to be at a Hollywood party and as he's lighting a cigarette, Berry Kroeger throws a glass of cognac (which was actually tea) in his face and it ignites and he goes crashing out of the house through a glass door and jumps into the pool. Of course, a stuntman [Bud Cardos] doubled for Cameron when he was burning and crashing through the sugar glass door and diving into the pool.

For the shot where Cameron was going to pop out of the water directly into camera and we see his burned and cut face for the first time, I spent a half-hour in the dining room of that house making his face up. I specialized in special effects makeup, and I did a real nice job. Well, the son of a bitch, I got him all made-up and he was standing next to me right next to the swimming pool and just before he went in, I mean, literally seconds before, he said, "Oh, no, no, no, this [makeup] won't do..." And he reached over, grabbed my bottle of Technicolor blood and splashed it all over his face. He poured about a pint of this stuff all over himself--it was a quart bottle, and he almost emptied it. Obliterating all the burns and bloody gashes and everything I'd done. When he came up out of the water, he looked like a great big red seal! That was the most overt of several incidents I had with him on that picture. He had the idea that he was like "the master," that he knew about everything, that he'd been in such wonderful pictures. He was very much in love with his work, and an incredible ham.

Incidentally, in the backyard of the house next door, another very low-budget picture was being shot. The house where we were shooting Nightmare in Wax belonged to somebody connected with our picture, and I assume that the house next door belonged to somebody who was connected with that picture. Between our shots, we'd be looking over the fence watching them shoot, and in the picture was a kid, maybe 17 years old, playing a psychopathic killer. Nobody knew who he was, he was an unknown, but everybody said, "Gee, that kid's pretty good!" because he could lay out a page and a half of dialogue in one take, and do it very nicely. Then, a few years later, somebody tapped him on the shoulder and asked, "How would you like to be 'John Boy' on The Waltons?" I'd see Richard Thomas every once in a while in our local market and I got to talking with him several times. He was a hell of a good actor, even [in 1966] when we saw him playing the insane teenager in whatever movie that was; I don't know that it ever got released.

For the burns on Cameron's face in Nightmare in Wax, I used mortician's wax. I also used mortician's wax on The Las Vegas Hillbillys [1966], a picture that starred a very nice guy by the name of Ferlin Husky. Ferlin had in his younger years gotten into a bar fight, because these Western singers do that a lot, it seems; it was a horrible bar fight where the other guy broke a bottle on the edge of the bar and went after Ferlin's face with it, and connected. Ferlin's nose... [pauses, groans] ... his nose was all kinds of scar tissue and cuts and pits. So we had to fill in all those holes with mortician's wax. And once we did, I would say that he looked pretty good; you can't really tell that his nose was pretty well chopped up.

Anyway, back to Nightmare in Wax and that psychotic man Cameron Mitchell. There was a scene where Cameron, who was supposed to be this great makeup man turned wax sculptor, was sitting at a table making up what was supposed to be a wax head. Carlton said to me, "Hey, can we use your makeup case in the scene?" My makeup case was a wooden fishing kit that I had bought and fixed up into a makeup case. I said, "Look, this is how I'm making my living now. Be careful with it, don't let him throw Technicolor blood all over it or something." So they started shooting the scene and there on the table was my makeup case, as if it were his, and on another part of the table were my different bottles of stuff and my brushes and sponges and things. When they started shooting, he began being "dramatic," he began being The Actor, and within the scene he got angry about something--and he decided to extemporize a little bit and surprise us all, and he slapped all the bottles off the table and also pushed my whole makeup case off the table onto the floor. Smashed God knows how much. Because he was "act-ing," and of course he didn't think, "Hey, this is somebody else's property." The prick. The moment they cut the camera, I yelled at Carlton, "God damn it, you're gonna pay for this!" and he said, "Yes we will! Oh, yes, everything! Just make a list of everything"--but I forgot to ask him to pay for everything. It wasn't a great deal, it was about 250 bucks, but at the time, that was a lot of money to me. I remember saying to somebody, "I'm gonna walk. Right now. I'm either gonna walk or I'm gonna kill this ****-****er." And somebody said, "Don't kill him, he hasn't finished the picture yet!" [Laughs] But after that, I never said a word to Cameron, and I didn't make him up any more after that. Let him make his own ****ing self up! I rebuilt the makeup case and I've still got it, but it's still loose, some sections of it, and one corner of it is still banged up.
And, oh, yeah, he pulled another thing too. The scenes in the wax museum workroom were actually shot on a stage at what is now KCET, which used to be the old Allied Artists studios over in East Hollywood. A small studio. There's a sequence where, in his mind, all his victims are coming to get him. Well, he didn't like the way I had made them up, so when I wasn't looking, he got a-hold of some greasepaint, different colors, and on the actors' faces he put big stripes of yellow, and blue, and red, and green. They now looked like clowns or something. I was really angry and I told Carlton, "**** it. That's it. I'm goin'. You wanna sue me?, go 'head and sue me. I'm judgment-proof!" I all but walked out on the last couple of days of the picture, 'cause I was really very unhappy. But he was the only person there that I disliked. Really, I didn't like him from the beginning, because he was such a ****ing ham.

Berry Kroeger [as Max Black, head of Paragon Studios] was a pretty well-known actor at one point, he was the bad guy in a lot of major-studio pictures. He was always very nice, he was never rude or nasty, or threw my makeup case around or anything like that. Victoria Carroll [a go-go dancer-victim] was probably the dumbest woman I have ever met in my life. She was so incredibly dumb! Oh my God! The poor little thing, she didn't mean to be dumb, she was just born that way [laughs]! I think that they assigned a special woman to stick with her in case she had to go to the toilet, to remind her how to do it.

Then there was the guy who I reeeally liked--this man was Old Hollywood, or he was trying to be Old Hollywood, he was trying to recapture the days of glory, and he was a sweetheart. That was Scott Brady. Near the museum in Buena Park, there was a nice steak restaurant with a bar--a quality place. One night as we were wrapping up, four or five of us decided to go out for a drink, and somebody suggested, "Let's go down to so-and-so's," the steak restaurant. We did, and we walked in, and there was Scott, and half the crew guys were sitting there with him. And Scott was a little tight. Well, more than a little tight. A lot tight [laughs]! He was buying drinks for ev-er-y-bod-y in the bar, and their dinners--steaks, filet mignons. "Hey, come on over here, you guys, sit down, have dinner!" "But we just had dinner, Scott--thank you anyway!" "No, you gotta have dinner! Come on, sit down!" We finally talked him out of that, then we went to the bar and we each had a drink and so on. And the bartender said, "Oh, no, no, keep your money, Mr. Brady says it's going on his bill." Years later I went out with a girl who was a nurse at a special respiration hospital in Echo Park, a place for patients with heavy emphysema. It was her job to operate a machine which essentially vacuums out your lungs--it's better than drowning in your own juices. And Scott Brady, who'd been like a 40-pack-a-day smoker in his time, was a patient there in his final days, and that's what he died of, emphysema. That's a bad way to go. He was an awfully nice man. He was stoned most of the time when I knew him, but then again, so were many actors that I knew. Lon Chaney, Jr., I did a couple of pictures with him, and, man, I have seen him so drunk, he couldn't stand up. We had to practically poke a gobo stand up his ass to keep him perpendicular!

Nightmare in Wax was partly shot on location at the Movieland Wax Museum in Buena Park, a very nice place. We'd get there at, like, three in the afternoon and do some shooting of establishing shots while there were still tourists milling around. (That, by the way, is tremendously illegal, shooting real tourists walking around looking at things, not even knowing that they were being shot.) I think the place normally closed around eight o'clock, and then we'd have the place to ourselves and shoot 'til about midnight or so, without the tourists underfoot. Actually, the crowds were very, very nice, and delighted to see a real movie being shot. The tall fellow who played the wax museum tour guide in the movie [Hollis Morrison], dressed in an old Keystone Cop uniform, decided to pull the old gag--somebody had to pull it--of just standing there amidst the wax figures, perfectly still and perfectly silent. Tourists would walk up to him and say [whispering], "Boy, they really look real, don't they?," and then of course he'd jump and roar, and the people would practically pee all over themselves--in fact, one poor woman did. A tourist. It was very funny, but she was so embarrassed. I hope she didn't sue them!

So we did have some fun moments on that picture. It wasn't the worst that I ever did. They even gave me a screen credit...but they spelled my name wrong [laughs]!

I WANT to enjoy it, but the scene of him chasing the redhead around the museum for 20 minutes always sours my mood. Then there's that "WTF?" ending. I'm afraid it's on my lengthy "I don't GET it" list.

<< The late 60's objectified women in a very shagadelic way, robotizing them <<

MY LIVING DOLL, with Julie Newmar as a robot, should be coming to DVD soon -- but not the whole series. God knows what happened, but somehow the materials were destroyed, or scattered to the four winds, or ... I dunno. Attempts by the rights holders to find all the episodes has resulted in the location of less than half. HowEVER many they find, I'm itchin' to see them; I'm a Julie Newmar fan (who isn't?) and have never seen the show.