Movie Prop Collectors interviewed director, producer, and actor Joe Dante by phone  and he shared a very interesting, funny, and informative interview with us.

Instead of the typical bio that usually includes date of birth, shoe size, etc,  Movie Prop Collectors decided to include a brief intro to be a bit different.

*Joe’s first “official” directing job was with friend Jon Davison in 1968. Dante edited together a series of film clips and trailers into the 7 hour film called, The Movie Orgy, which was shown on college campuses.

*Dante was asked to move to California from his hometown of Parsippany, New Jersey in 1974 to work as a trailer and film editor for Roger Corman’s New World Pictures.

*In 1976 Roger Corman asked Dante to direct the film, Hollywood Boulevard, with co director, Allan Arkush.

*As time went by, Dante directed, wrote, produced, and had a few cameo’s in such films as the classic Gremlins, The Explorers, Gremlins 2, The Howling, It’s a Good Life, from Twilight Zone: The Movie, Innerspace, Small Soldiers, Piranha,Looney Tunes: Back in Action,  Homecoming, from Showtime’s , Masters of Horror, and many other film and television shows, including Police Squad, Amazing Stories, and CSI NY to name a few.

*Last year in 2009, Joe Dante’s  3D film, The Hole, a story about a family that moves to a home that has a mysterious bottomless hole in the basement, was named best 3-D film of the year at the Venice Film Festival.

Here is part 1 of the interview. Part 2 coming soon, with exclusive audio portions for Movie Prop Collectors forum members.

MPC:

I want to welcome the multi talented director, writer, producer, editor, and sometime actor Joe Dante to Movie Prop Collectors .

Joe Dante:

Thank you very much. You are being much too kind in describing me as a sometime actor, I am a “never” actor,(laughs). I’ve acted for people, but that is exactly the opposite of acting. Some people, can’t, shouldn’t be, in front of the camera, lol.

MPC:

It is kind of like the Hitchcock thing, putting yourself somewhere, in your films.

Joe Dante:

Well usually he didn’t give himself dialogue, which I think was a smart thing, (laughing).

MPC:

(Laughing along with Joe). Can you tell us about your first 1968 film, The Movie Orgy?

Joe Dante:

Yes it was a 7 hour movie. The way it started was  in the late 60’s there was a phenomenon called “camp”, which followed Susan Sontag’s article about it. It was basically old movies people found funny, partly because they were dated, and because of the sincerity in which they were made. It was really the Ed Wood approach. The old serials from 1943 had just been released, and its success led to the Batman resurgence. One of the reasons it was successful was that people would sit through all 3 or 4 hours of it, and watched every chapter and saw the outrageous cheats at the end of the chapters which you weren’t supposed to notice. So you came back week after week.

It became apparent to people that there was a goldmine in these old campy movies, and so we put together a serial at the College of Art (Philadelphia) called The Phantom Creeps with Bela Lugosi, and we interspersed it with commercials, and old tv shows. I was a film collector and I had a lot of pieces of film lying around, so we used that too, and showed it at NYU (New York University) very successfully. Then when on the road courtesy of Schlitz beer, we would go to college campuses and run this thing, and they would give out free beer, and Schlitzwould also give us 100 bucks. It eventually got whittled down from 7 hours to 5, then they asked us “can’t it be even shorter?”, so the final version I think was 3 hours. While I was working for Roger Corman not making any money, the only way I was really able to support myself was the movie.

MPC:

So that was not the way you met Roger Corman?

Joe Dante :

No, but it did allow me to learn the art of editing in 16 and 35mm film .

MPC:

Do you remember your first meeting with Roger Corman?

Joe Dante:

I remember very well my first  meeting with Roger Corman, who I  had been unsuccessfully trying to meet for a number of years. I would set up interviews and then he would not go to NY, and he couldn’t do the interview. We did correspond a bit, and I was able to get some of his movies released in 16mm in colleges, when I finally met him, I was working for him doing 35 mm trailers which I had no experience or reason to be doing. I had my reels for this movie I cut together for Caged Heat, and I didn’t have a car, so I took a bus and I got off at the wrong stop. I dropped the reel and it rolled down a manhole so I was late for my screening with Roger. The first thing he ever said to me was, “If  I were you young man I would try to be on time for these things “.  You  really don’t forget a moment like that, but luckily this pile of nonsense I had complied together was ok. He  must have seen worse so he gave me advice and sent me off and then I did the first trailer for him.

MPC:

How did you get to do Hollywood Boulevard?

Joe Dante:

Alan Arkush and I were the trailer department for New World Pictures. When we kept making noises about wanting to make a movie, Roger said to himself, well if I let these guys make a movie who’s gonna make the trailers? So he made a deal with us that we could make the movie in the daytime, if we did the trailers at night. We said to him it should only take 10 days and we would not be off schedule, and the other stipulation was that the picture had to be the cheapest movie that had been made at New World with only $60,000.

We realized right away that the $60,000 and 10 days, we weren’t going to be able to make anything anyone wanted to see because we couldn’t have any action in it. We hit upon the idea of making a movie about a movie company making movies like the ones New World made. Using stock footage from all their pictures as the action. That came at the tail end a series of pictures Roger was doing with girls. There were nurses, there were teachers, and this was to be the beginning of a new series with actresses. The original title was The Starlet, and it was a sex comedy basically set on a movie set. It was made very quickly, and most of the time we really didn’t know what we were doing. I would call “action” and while I was shooting Alan would set up a scene in another location, and I would call “cut”. He would shoot his scene, and by that time I would be ready to shoot my scene, and so we managed on a relay system to get the movie made.

MPC: Part 2 of the interview coming in May with bonus audio portions.

Joe talks about Gremlin’s Gremlins 2, his film The Hole, and more.

Bonus audio portions for Movie Prop Collectors forum members in the forum.