It was conceived, shaped, filmed, edited, and released in a kind of mild doper’s haze, like a free-love happening that, on the third day, turns a little ugly. It’s the kind of answer you often get when inquiring about the production and tortured life of Chainsaw. “I think I was just hanging out and I got hungry.” “Man, I just can’t access it,” he says at last. I don’t remember who.” He takes a gulp of Dr Pepper.
Funhaus to catch a lover movie#
“Why did you steal the chicken?” I ask Tobe Hooper, now 61, as we sit in his Austin living room, surrounded by oversized movie posters (including one for the French release of Chainsaw) and next to a creepy robotic clown used in his 1981 film, The Funhouse. The film itself, involving five young people on a twisted drive through the country, is a strange, shifting experience-early audiences were horrified later audiences laughed newcomers to the movie were inevitably stricken with a vaguely uneasy feeling, as though the movie might have actually been made by a maniac-but the story behind the film is even stranger.
Funhaus to catch a lover code#
Yet the movie’s pure intensity, startling technique, and reputation as an outlaw film have brought praise from a group as diverse as Steven Spielberg, the Cannes Film Festival, Martin Scorsese (Travis Bickle watches it in Taxi Driver), the Museum of Modern Art in New York, almost every metal band of the past twenty years, and the Colombo crime family of Brooklyn, which gleefully ranked it right up there with Deep Throat as one of its major sources of income in the seventies.Ĭhainsaw was the first real “slasher” film, and it changed many things-the ratings code of the Motion Picture Association of America, the national debate on violence, the Texas Film Commission, the horror genre-but it remained a curiously isolated phenomenon. The result was The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a film whose very title has become America’s cultural shorthand for perversity, moral decline, and especially the corruption of children. Using $60,000 raised by an Austin politician, he filmed mostly in and around an old Victorian house in Round Rock with a crew that used exactly two vehicles-a Chevy van for the film equipment and a broken-down 1964 Dodge Travco motor home for the actors’ dressing rooms. Read Next: How ‘Leaving Cheyenne’ Became a Miserable MovieĪnd the chicken-stealing hippie? He ambled back to Austin and, even before Lovin’ Molly was released, completed the most financially successful film in the history of Texas, a film that is still shown in almost every country of the world and whose innovations have continued to influence the horror genre for the past thirty years. The interloper held a plastic plate with two barbecued chicken wings on it. Friedman walked over and blocked his way.
On a certain day, the production broke for lunch, and the movie’s proud papa, producer Steve Friedman, noticed a scruffy, long-haired hippie making his way through the food line. And each day a wagon train of private Winnebagos, Cinemobiles, catering trucks, and Greyhound buses would fan out around Bastrop for the filming of yet another McMurtry novel, Leaving Cheyenne. The prestige project settled in at the Chariot Inn, where Danner had a permanent sign on her door-“Quiet! Mother and Baby Sleeping”-to protect the weeks-old Gwyneth Paltrow. More than thirty years ago the collective might of Columbia Pictures descended on Austin with one of that studio’s blue-ribbon, A-team moviemaking armies: Blythe Danner, Anthony Perkins, Beau Bridges, a hot director named Sidney Lumet, an ingenue named Susan Sarandon, and the same producer who had already made small-town Texas a bankable commodity with the adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show.