When Dracula Met Frankenstein

Sherman Fountain

When Dracula Met Frankenstein:
My Years Making Drive-In
Movies With Al Adamson
by Sam Sherman
Murania Press ISBN: 9798530794858

What a great book!

Just a quick shout out to something which will be a nice addition, I’m sure, to many a film enthusiast’s book shelves. You may remember when, a couple of years ago, Severin films put out a very pricey but, as it turned out, worth every penny boxed edition of 32 Al Adamson films, as part of a package to accompany the documentary movie Blood And Flesh - The Reel Life And Ghastly Death Of Al Adamson (which I reviewed here). Well, I went through that boxed edition of Adamson films and, though I found some titles to be terrible, I found others to be pretty good and sometimes beyond that but, whatever I thought about them (and I reviewed every one of them for this blog), going through that wonderful set reminded me of just how great an art form cinema could be and it revitalised my slowly waning interest in the medium.

Now, as I said, you can find my reviews of those on this blog and you can check for a title in the second ‘movie’ section of my site index (link at top left) or, if you want to go a more direct way, I also wrote an article specifically about the box, Al Adamson - The Masterpiece Collection, as a bookmark section, from which all my reviews are linked... and you can access that here.

As I waded into the set, two things bacame apparent and impressed me. One was that Adamson’s films were more often than not produced by Sam Sherman, who seemed a really sweet guy and came across in all the interviews as someone very knowledgable about the world of film, demonstrating a genuine love and affection for movies in general. He seemed like someone you would want to hang out with in a bar and buy drinks for so he won’t stop telling fascinating, illuminating stories about his decades in the business.

The other thing which came across to me was that, heck, I really needed to read a decent biography, or at least an enthusiastic book, on the films of Al Adamson and so I looked for one on Amazon and various online book stores but couldn’t find anything in print at the time. There was apparently one published in 1998 called Schlock-o-Rama: Films of Al Adamson but, yeah, good luck even finding a copy now, even at the ludicrous price I’m sure it would go for if anyone had a copy to sell. Well, that was a year ago so, imagine my surprise when I’d found out that, not only had a book which was much of what I wanted been published since I’d last looked but, it took the form of a memoir by Sam Sherman, about the films he’d produced with Adamson (and others) at Independent International Pictures.

When Dracula Met Frankenstein, subtitled My Years Making Drive-In Movies With Al Adamson, is a valuable, well written tome from somebody who’s about as no nonsense and as fair a person running a business as you can get. Going out of his way to help people along in the process of his career and championing the art form while still managing to make tonnes of money from... well, if you ask me... from some unlikely pictures. Sherman managed to make something out of both his own productions and others peoples (as I’ve talked about in some of my reviews of... let’s call them ‘rescued films’) and is a genuine success story, capturing various niche markets as and when required.

The various forewords to the book tell it all in terms of Sam’s character, with the people writing those intros singling him out as a nice, honest human being (which really comes across in both this book and various interviews on the Severin set, not to mention his little audio section on the Dracula VS Frankenstein soundtrack CD). And cinephiles will have a ball with many of the anecdotes on offer here.

The book is split into two sections. The first half being a look at his personal history with ‘the age of celluloid’ with tales of Al’s dad, cowboy star/director/producer Denver Dixon, how Sam himself got started on the road to producer by re-releasing an old 1930s Hollywood production of The Scarlet Letter in the 1960s, how he hired out equipment from the late great Kenneth Strickfadden (there’s a book about him I reviewed right here), how he worked with the infamous Hemisphere Pictures and so on. And really great stories I’d never heard before such as how he managed to generate income for the old Hammer films adaptation of the TV serial The Abominable Snowman (reviewed by me here) and, of course, how some of those Adamson flicks like Brain Of Blood and Nurse Sherri turned out like they did (and just why they did too... which was an eye opener). He even had famous artists like Neal Adams (who passed away last week) and Basil Gogos designing and painting promotional posters, sleeves and whatever else was needed to give a movie a first run lift or, often, a new lease of life when required. In fact, there’s a very interesting section which explains the early days of the sudden, burgeoning Home Video market and just how he was able to ‘more than stay afloat’ with some of his old titles.

The second section of the book is a rundown of chapters devoted, alphabetically, to various films he’s been involved with (mostly but not limited to, working with Adamson) and, as you would expect, he has quite a few stories to tell of just what happened on those productions. Blazing Stewardesses which, I’m sorry Sam, I really didn’t like compared to their original The Naughty Stewardesses, certainly makes more sense now in terms of just why the heck it ended up being the film it is now, for sure. Also, the inside story on just what happened with the ending of Girls For Rent is kinda interesting.

There’s also more than a hint in the book that Sam is working on a second book of memoirs (which I’ll be first in line for if it’s publicised better than this one was... I need to know about it before I can buy it) of all the other things which he’s been involved with outside of IIP. Frankly, there’s an unexplained photograph of Sam in the book (it’s also loaded with plenty of photos relating to the various stories, if that’s your thing) where he’s standing with the one and only Larry ‘Buster’ Crabbe and, yeah, I really want to hear about that meeting, for sure.

As you can see, I had a real blast with When Dracula Met Frankenstein and I’m sure glad Sam’s still around to share his stories. This is another of those essential film books every cineaste shouldn’t be without, as far as I’m concerned. Perhaps Tom Weaver, a film historian whose name I tend to associate with his expert knowledge on the classic Universal horror movies of the 30s - 50s, says it best when he shares an anonymous quote that... “When an old man dies, a library burns down.” That’s a really nice way of putting things and I couldn’t agree more. When Dracula Meets Frankenstein is available now from Amazon and, as the saying goes, all reputable book stores and... I sure hope Sam gets his skates on writing that second book. I want to read it sooner, rather than later.

Double Life

Hold Miklós

Double Life -
The Autobiography
Of Miklós Rózsa
by Miklós Rózsa
The Baton Press ISBN: 0859361411

Miklós Rózsa is, or rather was, one of the great film music composers of Hollywood from the 1940s through to the 1980s. He was much loved by the studio system the older he got and, by the time he moved over to MGM studios and signed a contract with them, he was pretty much allowed the pick of most MGM scores he wanted... or at least that’s what I’ve heard in the past. Rózsa tells it slightly differently here in terms of receiving projects in a more hap hazard manner but, either way, his music is always brilliant and stands alone as great composition.

For me personally, while I love the scores I’ve heard by him over the years, I have to say that he’s not a composer whose style really changes as time goes by but, since the style of the movies most certainly did, he does seem to be better serving the needs of the films he wrote for on the scores he penned back in the 1940s, 50s, 60s and even some of 70s as opposed to, say, the late 70s and 80s. What I mean by that is that, while I love his later scores such as Time After Time and Last Embrace, these just look to me like 1980s films over-scored with 1940s style music. I know many would disagree with me (and one or two of the directors of these movies themselves would certainly disagree outright with that sentiment) but that’s just the way I see/hear it. That being said, he is a fantastic composer... who can forget his scores for great movies like Salvador Dali and Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound or William Wyler’s Ben Hur. 

Double Life, his autobiography, is something I’ve wanted to read for many years but I’ve only just gotten around to it, thanks to finding a very cheap, second hand copy at The Cinema Museum* for the princely sum of £3.50. In this, Rózsa at the very end of his career divides the chapters of his life first into locations and, when he finally gets to America due to having to finish Korda’s famous The Thief Of Baghdad in Hollywood, it’s split into tenures at studios and so on. I’d just assumed he’d named his autobiography after his famous score to Double indemnity but, in actual fact, it derives from a film he scored called Double Life and he uses it here as a metaphor for his own double life, by which he means the two kinds of musical artist he was. So, the scores he wrote for films for the studios versus the concertos, symphonies etc that he wrote purely as musical entitles in their own right, for concert performance. This book gives a healthy balance of both and, at one point when his contract with MGM was about to expire, details the lengths he went to in order to achieve a high standard of writing for both projects.

And it’s a book chock full of little sketches of people and situations as he journey’s through his life, mostly in chronological order with the odd flash-forward or flash-back to add an appropriate commentary about something else he’s talking about. So you have things like his chance encounter with a ‘growing in popularity’ Adolf Hitler in Paris and his disbelief at how the rest of the world were just not catching on to just where that was heading when, in the places he was passing through, it was being made pretty obvious that invasion and war would soon be coming. My favourite story here is when he gets to London in the 1930s and he immediately sees a newspaper headline reading, “Great Britain Under Attack”, which promptly scares him and gives him visions of having to flee our fair isle when he’s only just arrived. He hastily bought a copy of the newspaper and read it from cover to cover, expecting the worst (which was to come but... not before he was already living in Hollywood) and then found, finally, that the headline was talking about the cricket scores. This has got to be a good demonstration of just how ‘British’ our country is and I love this... it’s just so typical, even today, of my snoozy country’s mindset.

Rózsa made the decision to try and pursue a career in films because, although a very successful and critically recognised composer, you just couldn’t make any money from composing for the concert hall. A little anecdote he tells of his time in France is very pertinent to the sentiments I see expressed almost every week on Twitter in regards to working in the arts and it’s when he asked what a composition of his would pay out for him. He was told that... “In Paris, you do it for publicity!” His response? “Well publicity is fine but it is difficult to buy groceries with it.”

The book also tells of his friendship with the famous movie making family of the Kordas, of course and how he went with them to America to finish up on The Thief Of Baghdad and ended up staying there for over 40 years. It also details some of the political intrigue and things he was asked to do or, in some cases, ways in which he pulled the wool over certain studio staff’s eyes in order to get results. Such as the way he ousted Strauss as the composer for The Thief Of Baghdad and the way he fooled William Wyler to keep the music he’d written for the famous ‘rowing speed’ scene in Ben Hur by letting him reject it and then reintroducing it as it was later in exactly the same levels and mix which, he was told, was much better.

One of his pet hates, it seems, is the use of the term ‘main titles’. This is because, as he says, it harkens back to silent movies when the opening credits and titles weren’t the only titles (or inter-titles) throughout the film and are a completely meaningless thing today. Something I’d not thought of before but I’m happy to be educated by one of the best. Another thing I learned of was his absolute dislike of the click track on a film (which is a device used in Hollywood to help composers keep time with the events of a scene) and he only ever had to use one on the odd occasion for certain scenes. He declared it a mechanical device and, therefore, anti-musical.

In fact, my biggest surprise when reading this was that... Rózsa just wasn’t into films. He sought them out to try and put bread on the table and he liked some of them and had good words to say about a few of the projects he got involved in. Most of them, though, it seems he didn’t have a great deal of respect for, including many of the ones he personally scored but, similar to more or less the same sentiment I’ve heard expressed by Bernard Herrmann on one occasion, he never did anything but his musical best for them... so at least I can take comfort to the fact that he wasn’t ‘writing down’ for his pictures. Instead, he was doing what every other score composer does, I guess... try to elevate them and make them better.

Similarly, he doesn’t have a lot of good things to say about most of the Hollywood composers of the time although, he’s always quite discreet in that he often doesn’t name names. He does, however, mention some of his film composing friends who he did have a lot of respect for so... he talks about André Previn and there’s a very typical Bernard Herrmann story in there. He also says a lot of good things about the musical writing talent Frank Skinner, who is probably not best known for writing scores to A list pictures but, frankly, is another score composer I love and I was genuinely surprised that someone like Rózsa appreciated him so much.

So there you have it... Double Life is a charmingly written autobiography, which is nothing if not polite but also very witty and conjures up a man who wasn’t afraid to tell the odd studio executive off and who carved a niche writing some very distinctive periods of styles of film music in his career (Noir, Epic etc.). He seems somewhat shy about writing of his personal life in Hollywood and you won’t hear too much, if anything, of his wife and children and although he mentions the music from The Killers being ‘acquired’, shall we say, for the TV show Dragnet, he doesn’t mention his successful law suit against it or say much of anything about certain types of problems in his life. This is not a kiss and tell book... but it does give some idea of what it was like in different countries in certain decades and, at the very least, its invaluable for this stuff. I thought it was a great read and anyone interested in both film music and any other kind of musical composition could do a lot worse than get their hands on a copy of this book and read it cover to cover. I’m glad I did and I’m not even a musician.

*Details of further stalls, screenings and events can be found at the Cinema Museum’s website here.