Making his directorial debut with "2001 Maniacs," a comedy-horror remake of the 1964 drive-in classic, Tim Sullivan sits down to talk about life, the biz, and 'The Great Sullivini'
BY: R. O'DONNELL
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What are monsters? The creepy crawlers under the bed or hiding in the closet? Is it a Frankenstein's monster, Dracula, or a sunburned Freddy Kruger? The Saturday night all-alone dread? Your job that throws the keys away, locks you in a dead-end spiral? The ex-spouse, the I.R.S., or the arachnids nesting in your cellar? Sure. They're all that stuff. Monsters are relative, for today we see them wearing political garb, monsters of subjugation, monsters waging war. We have media monsters, corporate monsters, and monsters of the church. There are monsters that are Zombie-fied, liquefied, and some that are your friends. With all these monsters roaming about it's surprising we want more. Can't get enough of the good old scare-your-goddamn-brains-out. And horror connoisseur Tim Sullivan understands this all too well.
"There were monsters in my home," Tim whispers.
"You mean as a kid? When you were growing-up?" I ask him, all concerned.
"Yeah."
He goes all quite for a while. I wonder where he's gone, wonder what he's thinking. He's walking inside his head, going toward his mental closet, and loosening rusty bolts. He wants to pull another monster out, so I could look at it up close.
Tim often sees the world as a sinister vaudeville show, an eerie tent revival inside a gloomy circle with multicolored freaks standing in the spotlight. He sees that with a puff of smoke and a "watch-me-pull-a-rabbit-out-of-my-hat". He also sees a happy ending, a wink at the audience amidst good old rock n' roll. Yeah... Tim Sullivan is the showman's showman. Hell, Tim Sullivan thinks he's a freak himself. But as he tells me over the phone in dramatic intonation, "Not all freaks are monsters too."
"I'm a guy," says Sullivan, "for better or for worse, that never apologizes for who I am. I'm the unruly "rebel" that's even tattooed those letters in Chinese across my arm. I'm protesting all the time-against conformity, the mundane."
Tim's still in post-production with his feature debut, 2001 Maniacs, starring Robert "Freddy Kruger" Englund. He's exhausted. The kind of tired that wears down the defenses so he's more honest than he should be.
"How's the edit going?"
"Right now it's a producer's cut. It's okay. Competent."
He goes all quite again, chewing on his brain. "I directed a sardonic horror show, heavy on the humor," Tim quips. "We created a vaudeville with broad acting, a sort of scary cartoon with blood and guts. Sometimes I think they simply didn't get it."
Let's go into the closet, a little deeper, rustle some more boxes, and find the stuff that builds an artist, peppers temperament and creative vision. The first box lands on the floor, bursts open.
"My dad didn't get me, never understood my passion for monster models, magic shows, horror magazines like Famous Monsters, Tales from the Crypt. He was an English teacher that was embarrassed that I liked splatter more than Shakespeare. He never understood that I had surrounded myself with monsters because, well, he was a monster too."
"In what way?" I asked.
"Dad was cruel... physically, mentally."
I sighed big-time. I understood.
"To deal with my father's unhappiness (he was the unpublished author)," Tim explains, "I embraced the darkness head on. Whenever he was on the attack, I retreated to my world of horror books. I felt safe with the make-believe monsters, the special effects. The more he punished me for that, the more he pushed me into their arms."
Tim's father died last year. He wasn't told, he had to read it in the papers.
"How was that?" I asked him.
"That was hard, very painful. I lost my dad and then my grandmother. My grandmother was everything my father wasn't... she embraced me, understood me all the way. Hell, she took me to my first concert."
I first met Tim four years ago, when he was just getting Maniacs off the ground. It was his dream, his passion from the get-go.
"It's happening, man, I'm directing my first feature film!" He yells, en route to the shoot, screaming in his cell phone. But that production was cut short, tires screeching to a halt.
"June 10th and we're on the set of Camp Crystal Lake of Friday The 13th fame, where we're filming the movie. I'm off doing make-up tests and I get this call, Hey, man, your set's on fire. Great. I was like a prizefighter that was told the fight had been postponed. We were all set to go, actors in costume, production meetings and then "poof"-a fire hits, the financier pulls out and you're back right where you started."
Not for long however. Not Tim. Raw Nerve and Velvet Steamroller start the ball splattering again, and a year later, somewhere in Virginia, 2001 Maniacs is celluloid. It's in the can.
In the end, a sort of surrogate father expresses disappointment, takes over final edit. Tim retreats to Paris with his buddy Ray Manzarek of The Doors. They go there to place a wreath on Jim Morrison's grave,a tradition, and then The Doors of the 21st century (a revival with originals Manzarek and Krieger) will perform for a group of fans and friends at the Paris Opera house. But looking back, "big kid" Tim always touted that 2001 Maniacs wasn't the Citizen Kane of horror films. He knew exactly what he wanted, "a gory slapstick, man, a splatter theater," he recalls. "My pal, producer David Freidman, (She Freak, Blood Feast and the original Two Thousand Maniacs) always said that if you've got a gory pizza pie, just hit them with it, you don't show them making the pie, just hit 'em good. That's 'splatter' films." I agree of course.
Tim's agenda was simple, really: he wanted to pay homage to the granddaddy of horror films, Hershel Gordon Lewis, the demented mind behind the original 1964 splatter classics Blood Feast and Two Thousand Maniacs. The kind of films his father would've hated.
"This guy was thinking outside the box," Tim explains. "He listened to no one. You had your Gothic British teeny-bopper horror films by way of Hammer, but Hershel was self-financed, no studio heads, he controlled the bottom line and he went on to cut deals with drive-in theaters all across America. H.G. created the drive-in "B-horror" circuit... the splatter genre."
Tim's energy is thrilling. It's edgy and contagious, too. He pulls another box from the closet, shakes it, winks, and then dumps it on the floor.
"I was 'The Great Sullivini' as a kid," Tim tells me, laughing as he does. "I took magic classes, performed all over the neighborhood. It's inspired my filmmaking. Magic is misdirection, doing something with the right hand while doing another with your left, out of view. Horror films are the ultimate illusion. I went from Doug Henning to Tom Savini, card tricks to blood and guts."
"Cycles?"
"Yeah. It's all about cycles, everything coming around, everything returning to its origin, its roots. I was the 16-year-old kid sitting in the theater howling at John Landis' American Werewolf in London or screaming at Wes Craven's Nightmare On Elm Street, so as I got older the cycle came around and I found myself writing for Fangoria, working as a PA for John Landis on Coming to America, and reading scripts for New Line Cinema. I was working on Detroit Rock City when I met producer Chris Kobin, who later approached me about doing an H. G. Lewis remake-more cycles, man. I instantly thought of Two Thousand Maniacs, a sort of supernatural Brigadoon (that old 1950's musical about an Scottish town that comes back to life for a day every hundred years). Maniacs is one of my all-time favorite flicks. In casting, I thought of Robert Englund who I interviewed for Go Figure magazine and then later I met him while I was working as a script reader at New Line. We've been friends ever since. I sent him 2001 Maniacs and he said yes. And that was that, the cycle becomes whole." I want to rummage through the closet some more, but decide against it. He's been so honest and courageous.
"What's next?"
Now he's fan boy as he answers all excited, "I'm writing/directing another H.G. Lewis remake entitled She Freaks through my production company Blood Works (with producer pal Chris Tuffin). It's about a traveling sideshow of freaks headed by this beautifully scarred dominatrix. Sexy monster "She." We want to play it in drive-in theaters in concert with a rock n' roll band. Can you imagine that?"
"I'll be there," I told him.
"Yeah... should be cool."
He's in his head, he's gone. I count the minutes as he shuts the closet door, snaps the padlocks good. Then he breaks the silence, saying, "Yeah, my father is the monster of rejection. I hear his voice all the time, in studio heads, producers, monsters of a different breed: 'No, you're wrong. You can't do that. For get about it.' But I succeed in spite of them. I carry on."
"How's that?"
"I don't listen. They're monsters and only make-believe."
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